It is not clear what the precise force and implications are
of the sports pundit’s qualifier ‘for me’ (hereafter: ‘FOR ME’).
It is extremely common in most forms of
pundit-discourse but there is no agreed single account of its force.
This is a brief introduction to some of the principal
philosophical options.
Consider the following examples:
1. ‘Rio,
for me, is a world class defender.’
2. ‘For me,
that’s a yellow card at worst.’
3. ‘That
was never a foul, for me.’
Note that in natural language the ‘for me’ qualifier can be
placed within, before, or after the clause it governs. We can nevertheless clarify the three
examples as follows:
4. (FOR ME)
Rio is a world class defender.
5. (FOR ME)
That’s a yellow card at worst.
6. (FOR ME)
That was never a foul.
A popular line of analysis notes that in many—perhaps the
majority of—cases FOR ME is used in evaluative claims. This analysis then offers a deflationary reading
such that FOR ME is either simply redundant or else simply marks what comes
next as being an evaluative claim. FOR
ME in that case makes no independent contribution to the meaning of the clause.
Further, some interpreters take FOR ME to be a marker of the
expressivist nature of such claims. This
is more plausible in some cases than others.
For example, it is at least prima
facie plausible that there is no fact of the matter whether Rio Ferdinand
is a world class defender. In that case
it is sensible to understand §6 above as having the force: ‘Hooray for Rio
Ferdinand’s defensive skill and ability!’
FOR ME, in this case, is an explicit marker of the fact that the clause
it governs is not truth-apt. [1]
Other interpreters find this unsatisfactory since it would
render the many hours of TV punditry in reality no more than a group of men in
bad suits shouting ‘Boo!’ and ‘Hooray!’ to one another. (This is known as the ‘TalkSPORT’ objection.) Attempts to modify the view, such that
punditry expressions may nevertheless stand to one another in familiar logical
relations, ‘Quasi-Punditry’, remain controversial. [2]
Alternatively, if FOR ME claims do have a truth value then
there are further differences of opinion over how best to account for
them. For example, one view begins with
the observation that FOR ME claims are almost always offered in contexts of
dissent. So, Ԥ6 (FOR ME) That was never
a foul’ is most likely to be uttered on the occasion of an official having
decided that an offence has occurred.
Assuming something like FIFA-positivism, the official’s blowing his whistle
and indicating a foul is just what it is for a foul to have been
committed. So §6 is false. The view that all such FOR ME locutions are
in fact false is sometimes called the ‘Error Theory’ of punditry or,
alternatively, ‘Shearerism’.
A more extravagant line, associated with some rather extreme
general accounts of punditry, begins from the premise of Pundit Infallibility [3]. Given Pundit Infallibility, if the pundit
utters §1 then it must be true (despite appearances) that Rio Ferdinand is
indeed a world-class defender. But what
if another pundit, sitting at the same time on the same sofa, should then utter
§7 ‘No, for me, he has lost a yard of pace and won’t any more cut it at the
highest level’? We might initially think
that §1 and §7 cannot both be true; but this is just what Pundit Infallibility
requires. In this situation, the FOR ME
qualifier relativises the claim to the respective pundit. So FOR LINEKER Rio is a world-class defender
and FOR LAWRENSON Rio is not a world-class defender. Some critics worry about the plausibility of
this analysis since (1) it again threatens to make it impossible for there to
be genuine agreement or disagreement between pundits; (2) in cases such as §3
above it seems odd to think in any sense that, granted a foul was in fact
awarded, it can be true that there was no foul, FOR WHOMEVER. In response to (1) some critics simply accept
this consequence. In response to (2)
some less parsimonious critics posit that there is in fact some private world
for each pundit such that they can remain infallible. In this case FOR LAWRENSON… has roughly the
force of IN LAWRENSON’S WORLD…
[1] This view is most
commonly ascribed to a line of thought inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment
pundit, Alan Hansen.
[2] Quasi-punditry is
often associated with pundits connected with Blackburn Rovers, a club where, it is
sometimes said, it is possible to ‘have one’s half-time pie and eat it’.
[3] Historically, this view can probably be traced back to
the ancient pundit Jimmy Hill and his claim that ‘The pundit is the measure of
all things: of fouls that are that they are fouls, of offsides that are
not that they are not offsides’. The interpretation
of this claim is, of course, also rather controversial.
