Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

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More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

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Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

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There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

Miscellaneous fortune-cookies on the subject of Causality

For our essays touching upon Causality, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/causality

Herewith  some random quotes  from recent reading;  there is no time (no time!  the Reaper  knocking at the door) to integrate these into their proper places in the proper posts.

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A welcome bridge between the notion of ‘cause’ (which many of us will associate with homework from physics class) and that of ‘explanation’ (philosophy):

When an explanation is successful, we ‘feel the key  turn in the lock’, in the happy phrase of C.S. Peirce.  There are many different kinds of explanations, and each one involves a different sense of ‘cause’.

-- Jim Holt, Why does the World Exist? (2012), p. 9

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Not only does unpredictability  not entail  inexplicability,  but its presence is compatible with the truth of determinism in a strong version.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  100

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Ultimate cause:

This book cannot contribute to the discussion concerning whether the roots of this individualism are to be found in ideological or social and economic factors.  Wherever the prime mover may be found, what is indisputable is that, when a more individualist society does not eventually emerge, it manifests itself at all these levels.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 14

Re Wittgenstein’s philosophical change of heart after the Tractatus:

Precisely why he reached this conclusion  remains something of a mystery.  I feel I can guess his motives, but not his reasons.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 14

This isn’t really a por qué/para qué distinction:  the motives Gellner has in mind  could well be partly unconscious.    He is rather talking about psychology versus philosophy, emotion versus cognition.

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Proximate cause:

Ich will zugeben, daß es eine ganze Klasse von Träumen gibt, zu denen die Anregung vorwiegend aus den Resten des Tageslebens stammt.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900)

Here, the notion ‘trigger’ is closely tied to a broader causal-background.

Where there are weak bonds  and an alarming danger appears, such as a fire in a theatre, the danger itself is the provocative cause of the disorderly and selfish turmoil.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 339

In Fallujah, the tripwire for the cascade of resentments  had been a killing.  Many killings.

-- Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (2005)

His plural afterthought ruins the choice of word: a tripwire is instantaneous, not incremental.

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This domination of Moscow over the Comintern is much more the result than the cause of the evolution of commnism outside Russia.

-- Franz Borkenau, World Communism [a re-issue of The Communist International (1938)], p. 416

Religion is primarily a theory of causes, and only incidentally a scheme of conduct.

-- H. L. Mencken

The accuracy of this becomes plain in cases of primitive superstition, where supernatural causes abound, but without moral implications.  (Cf. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.)

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Re WWI:

The European system was the main cause of the war.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961).

This is as far as possible from any Anregung/trigger sense of ‘cause’.

In dem Drama “Der Blaue Boll”  kommt es Barlach darauf an, » das Werden als dunkle Gewalt, schaltend und gestaltend  im Hintergrund der Vorgänge  « sichtbar zu machen.

-- P. Pörtner, Vorwort zu: Deutsches Theater des Expressionismus (ca. 1961), p. 21

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Look carefully at what it can ever mean to speak of genes exerting an influence on a nervous system.  All that genes can really influence directly  is protein synthesis.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2^nd edn. 1989), p. 240

Point taken, you concede, bored.  But two pages later, this piquant conclusion:  “We can legitimately speak of fluke genes as influencing snail bodies, in just the same sense as snail genes influence snail bodies.”   The general perspective here is in line with the stepping-back involved in Dawkins’ notion of the “extended phenotype”:   here we have a kind of extended genotype.

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With an overtone of the deliberate or Providential, especially odd in this case:

The introduction of the mongoose  saw to the extermination of the flightless birds.

-- Richard Fortey, Earth (2004), p. 37