Mariners fandom, as seen through logical positivism
Second in a series of high-faluting articles that came out of discussions about how to cope with being a Mariner fan. You can blame Jeff for encouraging this kind of content.
True fandom is grounded not in the unquestioning belief in a team and the infallibility of everything it does. The meaning of our fandom is built on
verifiable facts, stacked one on top of another. Each fact must be verifiable, and so the fan must be both scientific and suspicious. Emotional ties are neither true or false, but meaningless.
A fan might acknowledge that Edgar Martinez is an outstanding hitter, deserving of induction into the Hall of Fame, based on his accomplishments. But an argument that he is a clutch hitter would be discarded, as that’s not a clearly verifiable claim.
However, first-person observations of specific events are evidence and can be treasured. I can describe seeing an Edgar Martinez double down the line and use that at-bat as an example of his outstanding ability.
It is through this path that much of our following for a team is built. For the experiences we’ve been through establish a long list of things that have made watching the team worthwhile. If nothing else, you can argue from this standpoint that being a fan has been rewarding by providing you with notable experiences that enriched your life.
Unfortunately, this is frequently weighed against the burden of provability, and the reasoning required by this approach. If a great team turns for the worse, bungles their success and is run incompetently, a logical positivist will be one of the first to see this, as they will be constantly weighing the actual results of the team on the field, unswayed by past years.
This unsentimental fandom provides a particularly strange and oft-scorned viewpoint: I’m a Mariner fan because of these things I’ve seen, but my fandom is waning as they continue to lose, and I suspect my time and money might bring better returns if invested elsewhere.
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It is fortunate for me that logical positivism fails as a philosophical platform in large part due to the fact that it is undercut by it’s own burden of provability. There are not verifiable facts that can prove the statement of logical positivism itself.
Tis fortunate because if the logical positivism of fandom were true, I’d be compelled to be an A’s fan. ;=)
Yeah yeah, see Godel’s incompleteness theorem. No philosophical system is self-provable. That’s not really the point.
Sorry, I thought we were making jokes.
I see no evidence of that.
(ba-da-boom! thank you, I’ll be here all week)
I (heart) logical positism. Like that’s news.
Derek – you’re obviously referring to Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem, but isn’t that itself trivial? Even if a philosophical system proved itself consistent, wouldn’t that leave the possibility that the system was inconsistent, and simply wrong about its own proof? Since inconsistent systems prove everything, that must include proofs of their own consistency.
Apparently I can’t spell positivism, though.
Gawd people…get girl friends!
My wife would probably have some objections to that course, but thanks for the suggestion.
I actually have a degree in this crap. BA Philosophy, University of Calgary, 1998.
Oh, you’re going to love the next one, then.
this is different than being positively logical, right?
#10: As seen through Ayn Rand’s eyes?
Just wait until the one on poststructuralism. Hang onto your semiotic hats, people, we’re in for a bumpy ride.
A hat can’t be semiotic, Jeff. It can only occupy a semiotic role as prescribed by your cultural expectations.
But the hat is both sign and signifier, and our rendering of the hat-object as other de-structs the hat into new roles and functions, creating potential lines of flight. For the hat. Or something.
jeez. and I thought we who majored in English were both prolix and pedantic 🙂
Derek – you’re obviously referring to Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem, but isn’t that itself trivial? Even if a philosophical system proved itself consistent, wouldn’t that leave the possibility that the system was inconsistent, and simply wrong about its own proof? Since inconsistent systems prove everything, that must include proofs of their own consistency.
The second theorem states that mathematical systems cannot prove their own consistency- the first is the one where Gödel shows that sufficiently powerful mathematical systems are either incomplete (in that they include undecidable propositions) or inconsistent.
I’ve always preferred the nonstandard extension (“My negation has a proof in this logical system”) to the standard extension (“I am not provable in this logical system”), but I’m a sick bastard…
A future idea for an article is applying Quantum Uncertainty to Joel Pineiro.
On any given pitching day, Pineiro can either suck or be decent. When does the suckiness waveform collapse?
Traditionalists would say that this doesn’t happen until Pineiro can be observed to have sucked, so he is in an indeterminate state until Hargrove pulls him out of the game.
But if Hargrove is the observer and thus the one that collapses the wave function, perhaps there are actually two Pineiros – one good and one bad – and Hargrove, by replacing him with Matt Thornton, forces a choice on which Pineiro actually pitched the game.
Just wait until the one on poststructuralism.
Me, I’m waiting for the one on nihilism, but it’ll never happen.
If we put Pineiro into Schroedinger’s box, would he be….
12 – Mariners fandom, as seen through Objectivism. Now that would be a controversial read.
I think I’d most prefer the Scepticism piece, though. Or Logical Atomism.
Or dadaisugrhoertbhr’tyu56i53 tk gi350=35o6 [p3ktrg
By replacing Piniero with Thornton, doesn’t Hargrove render the question of which Pineiro pitched moot, as we’re going to lose anyway?
It’s an Ignostic (yes, I spelled that right) position. Since the answer to the question of Piniero’s performance, whichever it is, has no measurable consequences, does it matter?
A hat can’t be semiotic, Jeff. It can only occupy a semiotic role as prescribed by your cultural expectations.
Couldn’t a hat that flled such a role be described as a “semiotic hat”?
There’s a difference between a hat being semiotic and being described as semiotic. But now we’re mixing in ontology.
I always get my ontology wrapped up in my epistemology. Like chocolate and peanut butter.
Also, “semiotic hat” would be a good name for a band.
I wrap everything in epistemology. Leads to wonderfully defensible positions on just about everything.
Sometimes I feel as if I am the dumbest person to read this blog, perhaps that is why I am replacement level.
Evan, you obviously reject Everett’s Many Worlds theory. I embrace it. Joel Piniero is a perennial Cy Young winner, just not in our world. In our world, he has unfortunately brought superpositioning from the the world of quantum mechanics into the molecular world, allowing batters multiple opportunities to make contact.
a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an epistemology?
Wow. Baseball fanatic philosophy majors. I feel like going to the attic and digging out that box from college that contains certain smoking implements that involve water.
Question for philosophers: If Jeff Cirillo regularly cashes checks written to him by the Mariners, does that in fact make him a ‘baseball player’.
I say we stick with political treatises. “These are times that try men’s souls…”
Wow I doubt I could decode what you are trying to say sober…. Drunk, I have much less confidence in my reasoning ablilities. I am going to google “logical positivism” and respond later.
#29, you are not the dumbest. At best you are in a tie with me. I couldn’t even parse some of the sentences let alone understand what was being said. I did laugh a lot however.
David
Just be glad that I don’t chime in with math jokes
Again, just wait until poststructuralism, where much of the point is being sure the reader can’t parse the sentences.
I also started as a philosophy major before moving on to journalism (kept it as a minor after the switch). We covered really out-there stuff like Paul Ricoeur, though. My final essay in that course involved applying Ricoeur’s theories to my favorite book at the time, Shoeless Joe. Gotta love Concordia University. Go Stingers!
Still waiting for DZ’s seminal essay: “Mariners Kant Win!”
Or “Hegel-ing Over Budget Figures.”
I would guess that an argument for “Intelligent Design” is out of the question, since we’re dealing with Bavasi here!
Here’s a joke for all you closet philo majors:
Rene Descartes walks into a deli, orders a ham and cheese on rye.
The counterman says, “You want mustard with that?”
Descartes says: “I think NOT…”
… and he disappears