ABSTRACT Bernard Suits and other formalists endorse both the logical incompatibility thesis and the view that rule-breakings resulting in penalties can be a legitimate part of a game. This is what Fred D’Agostino calls ‘the problem of penalties’. In this paper, I reject both Suits’ and D’Agostino’s responses to the problem and argue instead that the solution is to abandon Suits’ view that the constitutive rules of all games are alike. Whereas the logical incompatibility thesis applies to games in which players’ actions are perfectly controlled, it does not apply to sports. This insight not only justifies the rejection of formalism as a theory about the nature of sport but it also helps explain the greater normative complexity of sports, which in turn leads to the idea that in sports ‘cheating’ should be interpreted as a genus.
Rules in games and sports: why a solution to the problem of penalties leads to the rejection of formalism as a useful theory about the nature of sport
Published 2020 in Journal of the Philosophy of Sport
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
2020
- Venue
Journal of the Philosophy of Sport
- Publication date
2020-01-02
- Fields of study
Philosophy, Computer Science
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar
CITATION MAP
EXTRACTION MAP
CLAIMS
CONCEPTS
- cheating
Rule-violating conduct in sport that the paper treats as a category requiring finer internal distinctions.
- constitutive rules of games
The rules that define what counts as playing a game and structure permissible actions within it.
Aliases: constitutive rules
- d'agostino
Fred D'Agostino, whose response to the penalties problem is also discussed and rejected.
Aliases: Fred D’Agostino, Fred D'Agostino
- formalism
The view that games and sports are explained primarily through their formal rules and rule-governed structure.
- games with perfectly controlled actions
Games in which players' actions are assumed to be fully under their control, making the action-rule relation especially tight.
Aliases: games in which players’ actions are perfectly controlled
- genus
A higher-level classification used here to group several distinct kinds of cheating in sport.
- logical incompatibility thesis
The view that certain actions are logically incompatible with the constitutive rules of a game.
- normative complexity of sports
The layered set of evaluative and rule-based considerations that make sports normatively more complicated than ordinary games.
- problem of penalties
The issue of how rule-breakings that incur penalties can still count as legitimate parts of a game.
Aliases: the problem of penalties
- sports
Athletic competitions discussed here as a domain with more complex normative structure than games in general.
Aliases: sport
- suits
Bernard Suits, the formalist philosopher whose account of games and rules is under discussion.
Aliases: Bernard Suits
REFERENCES
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CITED BY
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