[lbo-talk] RE: Chomsky/sports

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Thu Oct 30 07:06:26 PST 2003


On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 10:54 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:


> O.K. Tautologies often do make good jokes

Where's the tautology? You represented me as saying "people like X because they like X." What I said was that people watch sports because it's fun for them.

Actually, "people like X because they like X" is not, strictly speaking, a tautology. That would be something like, "People who like X are people who like X," i.e., "All A's are A's." "People like X because they like X" is a statement of the form "A because A," for which I don't know any technical term (probably there is one), but which I would call a "vacuous causal statement." (Actually, believers in God would not consider it vacuous; God is precisely the causa sui.)

My statement was of the form "A because B," where A is "sports fans watch sports" and B is "watching sports is fun for sports fans." No logical mistakes there, as far as I can see. Of course, it is a vapid statement of common sense, but I don't see that anything more sophisticated than that is required here. Of course, students of psychology might be interested in investigating just what makes watching sports fun for certain people, but that would be psychology, not political theory.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax



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