Since I am having withdrawl symptoms now that there are no World Cup games to watch, I figured I would write something about it. In case you missed the final yesterday, Italy beat France in penalty kicks--and if you did miss it, I will try to suppress my reactive attitudes towards you since I realize it is irrational for me to care so much about other people's lack of interest in soccer (sidenote for another post--doesn't it seem like most of our second-order desires are really about other people's first-order desires?).
Anyway, here are two events from the game that raise some relevant questions (which people may or may not feel like addressing, but this blog has been too quiet all summer!):
1) Compare French star Zidane's made free kick, which hit the crossbar and bounced in a foot over the line with Trezeguet's missed free kick in the shootout, which hit the crossbar and bounced on the line (losing the game for the French). A micro-difference in initial conditions that had a huge effect on the game and hence (most of) the world. When people say, as millions surely did in one form or another, "He [Zidane] got lucky--he could have missed that" or "He [Trezeguet] could have (or should have) made that", do many (any) of these people have beliefs about that statement (or event) that commit them to the claim that determinism is false? If they believe indeterminism is required for these events to have happened otherwise, is it indeterminism in the agent or outside the agent or either, or is it anything like agent-causation? Do they think that these events are different in some important way from, say, a dog jumping and just missing a frisbee ("She could have caught that") or, say, a lottery turning out a certain way? If engaged in Socratic dialogue, would they be willing to use "backtracking counterfactuals" on the dog and lottery case in a way that they would not with the human case (e.g., the dog would have caught it only if certain conditions had been different and those conditions would have been different only if...)?
2) Now compare Zidane's header in overtime that was barely saved by the Italian keeper Buffon with the Zidane's "header" into the chest of Materazzi a few minutes later--the latter has become the story of the game, driving people (like me) to compulsively wonder what could possibly have led Zidane to trash his legacy and perhaps the game (he got thrown out of his last international performance)--what could Materazzi have said to set him off? When we perform actions we control partially but far from perfectly (and without much conscious consideration) like the header during the course of the game, do people think of those actions in terms of free will and if so, in the same terms as actions people perform that at least seem to allow for some foresight, like his deliberate attack (see the film to see what you think about how much control he had)? Why do people think (want to think) the header is controlled less than the attack on another person? While the missed header is at least as important to fans (it would have likely won the game) than the attack, why is he not blamed for the former as much as the latter (I suspect even by people who think he had as much or as little control over both)? It's amazing how much we want to apply a principle of charity in this case--people want to know what Materazzi said because they can't believe Zidane would do such a foolish thing without sufficient provocation (reports are that perhaps he called him a terrorist, though I suspect it had something to do with his momma). For that matter, why is it that in the case of other foolish and seemingly irrational acts, like suicide terrorism, people are so much less interested in applying their theory of mind modules to figure out what drives the behavior and so much less to just say it's evil (is there a boundary past which we give up trying to explain or simply cannot explain certain actions)?
Anyway, my own suspicion for most of these questions is that people don't have any theory or implicit beliefs or intuitions that would commit them to particular views about these philosophical questions, and as such few philosophical theories would conflict with their views (or seem counter-intuitive or revisionary). But I have mainly been thinking about the questions, not the answers.
Well, thanks for indulging my attempt to transition back from soccer to philosophy.
Recent Comments