دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی ورزش، ساختن باور، نگرش های فرار - وایلی 2017

abstract

The outcomes of sports and competitive games excite intense emotions in many people, even when those same people acknowledge that those outcomes are of trifling importance. I call this incongruity between the judged importance of the outcome and the intense reactions it provokes the Puzzle of Sport. The puzzle can be usefully compared to another puzzle in aesthetics: the Paradox of Fiction, which asks how it is we become emotionally caught up with events and characters we know to be unreal. In this article, I examine the prospects of understanding our engagement with competitive games on the model of our engagement with works of fiction, thus enabling analogous explanations for both puzzles. I show that there are significant problems with such an approach and offer an alternative, mobilizing ideas from David Velleman and Thomas Nagel, that appeals to the volatility of our motivational attitudes.

I began by teasing out the claim (smb) that participating in sport, whether as player or spectator, involves make-believe. I showed how smb relates to a loosely analogous solution to the so-called Paradox of Fiction before identifying difficulties for the view. The first two suggest that arguments for smb overgeneralize. First, our apparently odd attitudes to competitive game outcomes are continuous with those toward more ordinary events that do not plausibly involve make-believe. Second, our ability to recover from tragic competitive game outcomes is not markedly different from our ability to recover from ordinary tragedies. Third, a prima facie plausible defence of smb appealing to representational content in many games is unpersuasive. Fourth, the “facts” at the fictional worlds competitive games would instantiate on smb would not explain participants’ caring attitudes or else would involve what I call “illegitimate” make-believe. Lastly, competitive games require an authenticity from their players that other make-believe games do not.