New APPS

By: Samir Chopra

Many philosophers refer to the game of cricket in their writings. Reading one of these references never fails to give me—a lifelong cricket fan—a little start of pleasure. Many years ago, as I began my graduate studies in philosophy in New York City, I stumbled upon JL Austin while reading on speech acts for my philosophy of language class. I was delighted to note that Austin, in his discussion of performative utterances, provided the now-classic example of a cricket umpire saying "Out". I was a lonely graduate student then, and reading about cricket, even if only in the context of an academic discussion, was a small reprieve from that loneliness. I was happy to think that perhaps some of my fellow graduate students would want clarification about the example, which, of course, I would be only too happy to provide. (They didn't. They understood the example well enough from baseball: "steeerrrikkke! You're out!").

But I digress. When I re-read Sense and Sensibilia I discovered another couple of references to cricket in Austin's responses to sense-data theory. This discovery prompted me to start a rather self-indulgent project to collect cricket references in the philosophical literature. I suspect they will all come from English and Australian analytic philosophers (I'm not optimistic about German continental types including references to cricket in their works).  

Here are two examples from JL Austin's Sense and Sensibilia. First, an excerpt from Chapter VII, page 64 (Oxford University Press reprint of 1962 edition):

The other immensely important point to grasp is that 'real' is not a normal word at all, but highly exceptional; exceptional in this respect that unlike 'yellow', or 'horse', or 'walk' it does not have one single specifiable, always-the-same meaning. (Even Aristotle saw through this idea.) Nor does it have a large number of different meanings–it is not ambiguous, even 'systematically'. Now words of this sort have been responsible for a great deal of perplexity. Consider the expressions 'cricket ball', 'cricket bat', 'cricket pavilion', 'cricket weather'. If someone did not know about cricket and were obsessed with the use of such 'normal' words as 'yellow', he might gaze at the ball, the bat, the building, the weather, trying to detect the 'common quality' which (he assumes) is attributed to these things by the prefix 'cricket'. But no such quality meets his eye; and so perhaps he concludes that 'cricket' must designate a non-natural quality, a quality not to be detected in any ordinary way but by intuition. If this story strikes you as too absurd, remember what philosophers have said about the word 'good'; and reflect that many philosophers, failing to detect any ordinary quality common to real ducks, real cream and real progress, have decided that Reality must be an a prioriconcept apprehended by Reason alone.

Then, Chapter X, page 129: 

What are we to make, then, of the idea that sentences about sense-data are as such precise, while sentences about 'material things' are intrinsically vague? The second part of this doctrine is intelligible in a way. What Ayer seems to have in mind is that being a cricket-ball, for instance, does not entail being looked at rather than felt, looked at in any special light or from any particular distance or angle, felt with the hand rather than the foot, &c…This of course is perfectly true; and the only comment required is it constitutes no ground at all for saying that 'That is a cricket-ball' is vague. Why should we say that it is vague 'in its application to phenomena'? The expression is surely not meant to 'apply to phenomena'. It is meant to identify a particular kind of ball–a kind which is, in fact, quite precisely defined–and this it does perfectly satisfactorily. What would the speaker make of a request to be more precise? Incidentally, as has been pointed out before, it would be a mistake to assume that greater precision is always an improvement; for it is, in general, more dificult to be more precise; and the more precise a vocabulary is, the less easily adaptable it is to the demands of novel situations.

My good friend John Sutton pointed me to this line by Bertrand Russell (From Leonard B Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago UP 1956, p.39. Meyer  points to Russell's Selected Papers, Modern Library, NY, Random House, p.358.):  

Understanding language is…like understanding cricket: it is a matter of habits acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others.

 In “On Being Conservative”, Michael Oakeshott writes in the last paragraph:  

When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands – unless it be a cricket bat.

 Finally, for a little change of pace (no pun intended), here is a poem by the Australian poet John Forbes (now sadly departed): 

HERE'S YOUR PIPE, PROFESSOR RORTY

His own worst enemy
bowled vicious bouncers down the pitch
but he ducked beneath
the whizzing leather,
not hating himself completely yet.
The grass was green
& the sky intermittently blue
between the two, indolent allegorical figures
lounged around the pavilion —
for them each day was like a gauge
you could tolerate no finer setting on
& when the sweat inside their gloves
made the batsmen slip
you heard clear, cogent voices
excited by a redefinition of grip,
floating in the air.

 If you know of any cricket references in the philosophical literature, please do send them along. 

http://www.johnsutton.net/