The purpose of this effort is to explore the problem of explanation in the human and social sciences using the game of cricket as the model for the exercise. The idea was to improve on the most common approach to the explanation of human action by the two dominant psychological schools - behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Both of them seemed to me to represent “reduction versus existence”, which was the working title for the project at the time it started.
Problem: How do we account for the sequence of events in a game of cricket?
1. One answer is that it is all determined by the laws of physics.
This runs into the great debate between determinism and indeterminism, which is very technical and hard to call although the balance seems to have shifted to indeterminism in the last 100 years. I am inclined to reject determinism on the grounds that in psychology and society we have emergent entities that cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. A statement of this argument occurs in Popper’s Objective Knowledge (1973), especially the essay “On Clouds and Clocks” which presents a theory of evolution and language to account for human freedom and creativity, within a kind of plastic control exerted by the laws of nature.
We can agree to disagree on the issue of determinism because the outcome of that debate does not resolve the problem of accounting for other influences in cricket like the rules of the game, customs and traditions about the way the game is played and the plans and stretegies of the players.
We may accept that the laws of physics regulate some aspects of the game such as the trajectory of the ball after it leaves the bat. But this is no way to explain the course of the game.
2. What about the rules of the game?
They obviously have some regulative effect, with two limitations.
a) The control exerted may be described as “plastic” rather than “cast iron” because the rules can be broken (or not fully known or understood) and umpires can make mistakes even when they are doing their best.
b) The rules account for certain features of the game but they do not determine the course of events any more than the laws of physics do. To approach our objective we have to consider the really interesting features of the game, the strategy and tactics employed (at least by slow bowlers).
Two subsidiary sets of problems arise in connection with the rules:
a) Historical; where did they come from and how did they evolve?
b) Social/political; why are they obeyed (mostly), whose purposes do they serve, etc?
These will be left aside for the moment. As for the history, it is not clear that much knowledge of history is required to understand the current rules of the game. As for observing the rules, the need for special sanctions would only seem to arise under very unusual conditions - one can envisage a police officer being called to remove a stubborn batsman who defies the umpire but I do not know of it happening.
On the topic of the purposes served - mostly they simply serve the purposes of people who choose to play cricket. Under some circumstances the rules may be changed for nationalistic reasons to suit the interests of a country with a lot of fast bowlers or a lot of slow bowlers or whatever (this would mean “getting the numbers” on some International Board of Control). But this intrusion of politics or ideology does not upset the model that I am building, which will account for these intrusions.
Customs and traditions
Cricket is replete with customs and traditions in addition to the written rules of the game. These customs and traditions exert an influence on the way people play the game (consider the different approaches adopted by the English, the early West Indians and the Australians), they are plastic and they are highly variable between historical periods, places and even individual teams (even individual players). They have a different status from the written rules but no account of the game would be complete without paying attention to the role they play to influence the decisions and actions of players, crowds, umpires and other administrators.
3. We now move to another level of analysis to consider the strategy and tactics of the game.
These things cannot be reduced to psychology (much less to physics) and they cannot be explained by the rules of the game (though they do take the rules into account).
Reformulated problem: How to account for strategy and tactics?
These things relate to a situation that can be more or less objectively be described as the “state of the game”, which may be crudely expressed as the score (numbers can be employed here that ought to delight empiricists) though a better description will include things like the state of the wicket, who is still to come in and whether medium/fast bowler Connell is having a good day.
But strategy and tactics are not determined by the state of the game, however fully this is specified because they are a response to the situation, mediated by aims of a higher nature. Here we introduce aims and intentions at various levels. These aims and intentions will be restricted by the rules of the game and modified in various interesting ways by the customs and traditions in place at the time.
The high level aim may be to win the series (or to avoid losing the series, which is an important difference).
A lower level aim may be to win this game (or to avoid losing it).
A still lower level aim may be to bat first and score 400 runs.
…and so on, down to the level of the bowler who as he runs in plans to bowl a slower ball, just outside off stump (an intention that of course may not be realised).
Our problem has now shifted to accounting for aims and intentions, and, more important than accounting for them, to account for changing aims and intentions. Attempts to account for these things by tracing them to their source or basis notoriously lead to a historical or psychological regress depending on whether you opt for a social or individual explanation. (This is where my analysis broke down at first). Shifting to the question of change may be more fruitful; to paraphrase Marx, the point is to change aims and intentions, not to account for them.
Aims and intentions can be regarded as ideas; the kernel of the objective theory is that they can have a form of objective or real existence in addition to their existence in people’s minds. This is of course a lunatic heresy by the standards of any decent materialist theory of mind and by all properly scientific reductionist theories of the universe. Be that as it may, the theory of the objective mind and the objective contents of thought has a lot going for it in solving problems including the problem of strategy and tactics in cricket.
Reverting to the concrete; at any moment in the game the rival captains have the option of playing for a win or a draw (or, less likely, a loss but this could be rational under some circumstances, for example if one captain has been bribed or if the game is unimportant and a quick finish will allow more time in the pub.) Depending on the choice of aim (which can be revised as the game proceeds) certain consequences will follow in the way of instructions to batsmen, field placings and the like.
According to the theory of the objective mind, a change in aim is not just a change of mind (though mental events are involved), it can be a rational response to arguments and appraisal or re-appraisal of the situation. These arguments and apraisals use theories to predict the likely outcomes of various options. The use of arguments and theories to evaluate critically alternative plans introduces new dimensions to decision-making and social change generally. Considerations of logic and relevance of arguments and truth and relevance of theories arise, and also the morality and consistency of aims.
To cut a long story short, human consciousness (a function of the brain) enables us to form intentions, to grasp abstract ideas and to use language to describe and argue the merits of competing ideas, whether aims, theories, or policies. These ideas, in their objective form (spoken or written) have some kind of autonomy even though they were produced by people in the first instance. They can also have profound effects upon the world though to do this they have to act through the agency of individual people who assimilate them (often in funny ways).
The autonomy, or partial autonomy of these ideas in their spoken or written form eliminates the need for a full historical or psychological explanation of ideas. This enables us to get a grip on some aspects of social change (and social order) that create endless problems for social theorists who usually end up in a historical or psychological regress through trying to account for ideas using subjective theories of knowledge.
