In Other Shoes

Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence

K E N D A L L L .   WA LTO N

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walton, Kendall L., 1939-
[Essays. Selections]
In other shoes : music, metaphor, empathy, existence / Kendall L. Walton.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–19–509871–6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–509872–3
(pbk. : alk. paper)  1.  Aesthetics.  2.  Music—Philosophy and
aesthetics.  3. Art—Philosophy.  I. Title.
BH39.W327 2015
781.1’7—dc23
2014021506

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 5

“It’s Only a Game!”

Sports as Fiction

It’s official. Contrary to what college football fans might believe, the
earth will rotate as normal and not stop for today’s Michigan-Colorado
game. You can’t blame people for feeling that way, though. After all, this
is the first Game of the Season for 1997.
—Tim Robinson, “Michigan-Colorado Your Best Bet,”
Ann Arbor News, September 13, 1997
[The Florida Gators and the Ohio State Buckeyes] have developed a
healthy hatred for each other in record time.
—Lee Jenkins, “At Ohio State, Basketball Team
Hopes To Do What Football Team Could Not,”
New York Times, April 2, 2007
Baseball is make-believe, it’s fantasy, not real life.
—Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers,
quoted in the Ann Arbor News, May 10, 1993

Sarah’s Dad is reading a scary story to her. She shows inordinate distress, so he
reassures her: “It’s just a story.” A group of children are playing tag. Sam bursts
into tears when he is tagged. “Don’t worry,” his Mom says, “it’s only a game”.1
Sports and competitive games of many kinds—from tag to chess to base-
ball—are often occasions for make-believe. To participate either as a competitor
or as a spectator is frequently to engage in pretense. The activities of playing

1
Thanks to audiences for talks in which I included various of the ideas presented in this paper, and
to Patrick Maynard, Aaron Meskin, Nils-Hennes Stear, Paul A. Taylor, and Eric Walton. A portion of
a version of this essay appeared in French translation as part of “Le Sport comme fiction: Quand
fiction et realité coïncident (presque),” in Les Arts visuels, le web et la fiction, ed. Bernard Guelton
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2009). Translated by Bernard Guelton.
The discussion in this essay intersects with observations about competitive games, from a differ-
ent perspective, in my “How Marvelous: Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value,” in Walton, Marvelous
Images: On Values and the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially pp. 6–9.

75
76 In Other Shoes

and watching games have this in common with appreciating works of fiction and
participating in children’s make-believe activities, although the make-believe in
sports, masked by real interests and concerns, is less obvious than it is in the
other cases. What is most interesting about tag and chess and baseball, however,
are the ways in which the make-believe they involve differs from other varieties.
Make-believe is more prevalent and more blatant in some kinds of cases
than in others, and some people—competitors or fans or observers—are more
inclined than others to engage in pretense. Let’s look first at spectators of staged
sports events, baseball fans, for instance.

In watching a stage play you root for the hero and boo the villain. You “care about”
characters you like and wish them well. Spectators feel badly when Romeo and
Juliet come to their tragic ends; some even shed tears. Likewise, sports fans root
for the home team, or for a team or player they “like.” Fans of the Boston Red Sox
or the New York Yankees cheer their victories and bemoan their losses. Alumni
follow the fortunes of their schools’ athletic teams.
Romeo and Juliet don’t exist, and the spectator knows they don’t. How,
then, can she care about them? This is a puzzle.2 Sports events do not present
an equally pointed puzzle. The Red Sox and the Yankees exist and they really do
win and lose baseball games. They are there to be cared about, and people do,
sometimes, really care whether they win or lose.
There is a lot to explain about sports, however. Why should people care about
the Yankees or the Red Sox? Their fortunes on the field have no obvious bear-
ing on the welfare of most fans. Why does it matter whether the home team
wins or loses? Life will go on afterwards just as it did before, regardless. But the
spectators, some of them, scream their hearts out during the game, as though it
is a matter of life and death. Some people pick which teams or players to “like,”
which ones to root for, more or less arbitrarily, on whims—because they find the
team logo or uniforms attractive; because a player’s name is the same as that of
an old flame, whatever. They may choose to root for the side their friends root
for, or decide to root against their friends’ favorites, setting up a friendly rivalry. 3

My answer, very roughly, is that she is caught up in a game of make-believe in which she imag-
2

ines that they exist; her experience is one of imaginatively following their fortunes, imaginatively
hoping for the best while fearing the worst, and grieving, in imagination, when the worst comes to
pass. These imaginings accompany and interact with often intense emotional affect. (Cf. “Fearing
Fictions” and “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime,” this volume.)
3
Reasons for rooting for one side or another need not be reasons for thinking it would be bet-
ter that it win, or even reasons for preferring it to win. And one might grasp at even feeble reasons,
excuses, for choosing which to root for, thinking that the event will be more fun if one has a favorite.
 Spor ts a s Fic tion 77

Yet they may let themselves be carried away during the game, as though genuine
and substantial values or self-interest is at stake.
Are fans irrational? Do they believe, falsely but sincerely, that it really is a matter
of life and death? Have they lost their minds? This hypothesis is no more attractive
than the idea that readers of a story lose their senses, temporarily, and believe in
goblins or hobbits or magic rings. Many sports fans, like many readers of stories,
are otherwise sensible people who know what matters and what doesn’t. Some
will tell you, if you take them aside and break the spell of the game, that it doesn’t
really matter a whit who wins, or not much anyway, allowing that they don’t and
didn’t really care as much as they seemed to. Many forget the game quickly after it
is over, much too quickly for people who care as much as they seem to care during
the game—for people whose hearts leap to their throats as they spring to their feet
to watch a long fly ball that may or may not be caught before it clears the fence.4
It is hard to resist comparing the avid sports fan to the playgoer who sheds bitter
and voluminous tears over the tragic fate of Romeo and Juliet, and twenty minutes
later has a jolly good time with her friends at an espresso bar. The fan imagines
that the outcome matters immensely and imagines caring immensely—while (in
many cases) realizing that it doesn’t actually matter much, if at all. She is caught up
in the world of the game, as the spectator at the theater is caught up in the story.
Afterwards, like the playgoer, she steps outside of the make-believe and goes back
to living her life as though nothing much had happened—even if the home team
suffered a devastating and humiliating defeat. It’s just a story; it’s just a game.

It isn’t always just a game, however; sometimes it is not a game at all. There
remains the fact that, unlike Romeo and Juliet, teams and players exist and really

The choice may itself give one a reason to want it to win, however; we take pleasure in wins by the
team or player we happen to be rooting for.
4
Nils Stear reminded me that we sometimes quickly forget news reports of disasters in far off
places, even if our concern for the victims is entirely genuine and deeply felt. This kind of case seems
to me very different from typical instances in which fans get over sports “disasters” quickly. The news-
paper reader is concerned for others, for the misfortunes of strangers with whom he has little connec-
tion. The sports fan’s concern (actual or pretended) is selective, directed toward the players or teams
she roots for; she is likely to be unmoved by others who suffer equally horrible defeats in competitive
games. And her attitude may not be especially one of (actual or pretended) sympathy or pity, even
for the objects of her rooting; her experience is more like suffering a misfortune herself or as part of
a group to which she belongs. (She might bemoan the fact that “we lost miserably,” identifying with
her favored team.)
On putting down a newspaper, it is not hard to put out of mind the far off strangers whose suf-
fering one nevertheless cares about. It is not so easy to forget one’s own misfortunes or misfortunes
closer to home—unless they are to some extent only pretended.
78 In Other Shoes

do fare well and ill in competition. So we can genuinely care about them, and
sometimes we do; sometimes it really matters. It usually matters to the competi-
tors; the salaries and careers of professionals are on the line, and so are the egos
of amateurs. Spectators also may care about the competitors’ welfare, especially
if they are friends or classmates. And one might expect that a winning home
team will shake loose large alumni donations to the fund that supplies one’s
scholarship.
But these grounds for caring are often blatantly insufficient to account for
the intensity of spectators’ reactions during the game. And considerations such
as the prospect of alumni contributions are likely not to be on one’s mind while
one is caught up in the game; they are likely not to be reasons one tells oneself
for “wanting” the home team to win. Superimposed on a modest genuine inter-
est in the outcome, there is, frequently, a pretense of much greater concern, and
of concern that is not, in one’s pretense, of the kind one actually has. It is typi-
cally indeterminate in the pretense what kind of concern this is, why it matters
who wins and why one cares; it is fictional just that it matters a lot and that one
cares a lot. In games of tag, there is a pretense that being “IT” is undesirable, but
there is no answer to the question what, in the pretense, is undesirable about
being “IT.” This is another respect in which sports and competitive games differ
from literary and other fictions. We can give reasons why, fictionally, Romeo and
Juliet don’t deserve their fate and why we care. 5
A spectator’s actual interest in the outcome of a sports event and the interest
she fictionally has in it, when both are present, do not merely coexist; usually
they interact, reinforcing one another in various ways. The spectator is likely to
experience sensations of excitement, pleasure, and disappointment, as the game
proceeds, because of her genuine concern, quite apart from any make-believe
(although her participation in the make-believe also plays a role in generating
such sensations). These sensations can then serve as props in the make-believe.6
She imagines them to be sensations of excitement concerning something that
matters greatly, and in (probably unspecified) ways different from the ways it
actually matters.7 Fans who place bets on the outcome make it really matter

5
Drastically indeterminate fictions are not unique to sports and games. They are especially
important in music and in some poetry and visual art. Cf. my “What Is Abstract about the Art of
Music?” and “Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?” (both in this volume). Some
games, Monopoly, for instance, do involve more specific sorts of make-believe. It is fictional, in a game
of Monopoly, that the participants’ financial well-being is at stake.
6
As reflexive props. See my Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational
Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), §3.6, pp. 210–213.
7
Compare: a dreamer imagines the sound of his alarm clock to be the sound of a school bell, or
Rodney, pretending to be driving a stage coach, imagines his actual swelling sensations to be swell-
ings of pride in his responsibility for getting a coach to its destination. Cf. “Pictures and Hobby
Horses: Make-Believe Beyond Childhood,” in Walton, Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts, 73–74.
 Spor ts a s Fic tion 79

to them more than it would otherwise, and they probably let themselves in
for more thrills and chills, or more intense ones, which then figure in their
make-believe in the manner I described. Betting can be just business, like play-
ing the stock market; one hopes to make a profit. But it can also be a way of
enhancing make-believe, a way of making the make-believe more “realistic” (in
one sense). If the bet is a large one, it may be true as well as fictional that the out-
come matters greatly to the fan, although he may imagine that it matters in a way
that is not simply financial (even if there is no specific way in which it matters,
in his imagination). His attitude may not be simply that of a cold businessman.
Our make-believe involvement with a sports event may itself give us a reason
for genuinely wanting our favored team to win. We look forward to the plea-
sure of experiencing, in imagination, a victory of the “good guys” over the “bad
guys”—whether or not we have a special interest in the egos or salaries of the
competitors on one side or expect a windfall in alumni donations. Playgoers and
readers of stories sometimes take a similar pleasure in the fictional victory of
good over bad.

But tragic works of fiction have their appeal as well—and now we come to an
especially striking difference between sports fictions and those of theater and
other arts. Tragedies can be deeply moving, even satisfying, if not exactly plea-
surable. So we sometimes want the bad guys to win, i.e. we want the work to have
a tragic ending—even while we are, fictionally, rooting for the good guys. We
may be pleased, to be displeased in the world of our pretense.8 This is rarely our
attitude concerning sports. I doubt that fans are often moved by their favorite
team’s losses in anything much like the way people are moved by the deaths of
Juliet and Romeo. The vaunted “Paradox of Tragedy” seems not to have much
of an analogue in sports. Some of us are fair weather fans. We tolerate a few fail-
ures by our favorite teams or players, but after a few more we either change the
object of our affection, find someone else to root for, or simply lose interest. It is
convenient to be able to tell ourselves that it doesn’t really matter who wins and
forget about the whole thing, or to simply step out of the make-believe, when we
are denied the pleasure of experiencing, in imagination, victories of the side we
favor. People do sometimes, in some moods, decline to experience tragic works
of fiction, preferring fictions with happy endings. But for many of us, loyalty to
fictional characters and willingness to feel with them empathetically, through
thin as well as thick, far exceeds our willingness to stand by sports heroes.
(A  representational work of art, a theatrical play, for instance, that portrays a

8
Cf. my Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 193–194, 258–259.
80 In Other Shoes

team or player losing sports events may be a tragedy and may be appreciated as
such. Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s poem, Casey at the Bat is at least a mini-tragedy.)
In theatrical tragedies, it is partly because the good guy, the tragic hero whom
we “root for,” comes to grief that the work is moving. We may appreciate sports
events partly independently of the outcome; a game in which our favored side
loses can be enjoyable. But we don’t appreciate it because our side lost.
Part of the reason for the absence of an interest in sports tragedies is probably
the indeterminacy I mentioned. What makes tragedy moving is not just the fact
that, fictionally, bad things happen, but also the fact that they happen for such
and such reasons, because the tragic hero has such and such flaws despite being
basically good, and faces circumstances of certain kinds. There is no answer,
typically, to the question of why, fictionally, the competitors in a “tragic” sports
event do or do not deserve the fate they receive, or to other questions concern-
ing the circumstances surrounding the disaster.
Indeed, there is probably no answer in the sports event itself as to what fates any
of the “characters” deserve; there are no ready-made good guys and bad guys in
sports. In the case of theater and other works of art, a controlling author or artist
typically decides who are the good guys and who the bad guys (and who are the
ambiguous ones), and manipulates us into rooting for the former and against the
latter. But sports fans are free to choose for themselves; each has his or her own
personal heroes and villains. To root for Iago and revel in Desdemona’s death is
to misunderstand Shakespeare’s play. But you are not getting anything wrong
if you root for the Tigers instead of the Blue Jays, or the Blue Jays instead of
the Tigers. If your choice suffers miserably in the competition, you may regard
the event as something of a tragedy (though probably without appreciating it
as such), but for other fans it will have a wonderful happy ending. Tragedy in
sports is in the eyes of the beholding fan. (Make-believe games such as Cops and
Robbers are like sports in this respect.)
Sports events do not generally have anything like a controlling author or artist at
all. They are not anyone’s creation in the way that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s,
and they do not qualify as works in the sense that theatrical productions and
other works of art do. In some ways they are more like natural objects (the Grand
Canyon, Niagara Falls) than works of art, despite being products of human activ-
ity. Many sports events are not meant for audiences at all (dominoes in the park,
tag, pickup basketball). But even in the case of spectator sports like professional
baseball games and track meets, no one arranges the events of the game to best
advantage for appreciation—at least no one is supposed to. The participants play
to win, not to put on a good show. (Professional wrestling is a bizarre exception.)
The resulting spectacle is largely a by-product of their competitive actions.
Some sports events do turn out to be “good shows” and others do not.
There are great games and sorry ones; ugly games and ones that are remarkable,
 Spor ts a s Fic tion 81

wonderful, memorable, if not beautiful. But the quality of the game—the game
as a whole, as opposed to the play of individual teams or competitors—is
something of an accident, not something that anyone can take direct credit for.
A close score helps to make a game good or great; so do multiple lead changes,
and a result that is deemed an upset. But the competitors try to produce these
circumstances only insofar as doing so serves their interest in winning. They will
be eager to make the game close when they are behind, but once in the lead they
aim for the opposite result—the pleasure of the fans, the opposing ones at least,
be damned.

In the bottom of the twelfth inning of the sixth game of the 1975 world
series, probably the greatest baseball game ever played, Carlton Fisk . . .
hit a long ball toward left field in Fenway Park. It seemed to curve foul,
but Fisk gyrated his body, put some English on the air space between
home plate and the arching ball, and bent its trajectory right into the
left field foul pole—thus winning the game as he jigged around the
bases.9

Fisk’s ambition was not to create a great game, for the amazement of the specta-
tors and the wonderment of sports historians. Arguably it would have counted
as even closer than it was and even greater had it gone to a 13th inning. And Fisk
was not aiming for the foul pole.
On one occasion, as I was preparing a version of this essay to give as a talk,
I was more or less following on the Internet a Detroit Tigers versus Minnesota
Twins baseball game. The Tigers, whom I more or less root for, were leading by
11–0 after the fourth inning, and 17–1 after the 7th. The final score was 18–1.
Was I pleased? Well, it was a really awful baseball game, as a game. It bored me
(so I  wasn’t much distracted from my preparation for the talk). Do I  fault the
Tiger players and manager for winning so big and so boringly? Do I wish they had
deliberately made the score close, so the game would be exciting? Of course not.
Spectator sports are not quite show business, even if spectators pick up the
tab. This, of course, is the way we want it, even when our interest in who wins is
partly or largely make-believe.

There is a great deal of variety, more than I have indicated so far, in the atti-
tudes and behavior of participants in and spectators of competitive games.

Stephen Jay Gould, “The Virtues of Nakedness,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 15
9

(October 11, 1990), p. 3.

82 In Other Shoes

Let’s look more closely at participants, at the competitors themselves. Some,

we noted—professional athletes, bettors—are likely to care immensely
about outcomes, leaving little or no room for make-believe (only, perhaps,
for make-believe about one’s reasons for caring, if even that). The attitudes of
participants in casual contests with family or friends—a pleasant evening of
Chinese checkers or Scrabble or croquet or ping pong—are often very differ-
ent. So also, sometimes, is a “gentlemanly” round of golf with business associ-
ates. A person may try hard to win in such instances, wanting perhaps to show
one’s determination and show off one’s skill or just enjoying the challenge,
yet hardly be disappointed if she loses. A croquet player jokingly lambastes
a friendly competitor for blasting her ball to the boonies. (“What did I  do
to deserve this?” “And I just took you and your friends on a camping trip!”
“Just for that, no ice cream for you tonight!”). A Scrabble player rails at a rival
across the table (“You rat!”) for (inadvertently!) filling a space on the board
where she wanted to play, pretending to express venom that she doesn’t feel.
An impassioned “Darn!” might express either fully genuine dismay, or dis-
may partly pretended. A limiting case: a parent, playing tag or hide-and-seek
or a board game with a young child, deliberately, explicitly, consciously pre-
tends to be trying hard to win and win big, while actually making sure that
the child comes out ahead. The pretense might fool the child; but then again
it might not. Often, I  expect, the parent’s pretense is obvious to the child,
and the parent expects it to be; the two knowingly play at engaging in serious
competition.
Joking can be partial. The reaction of a croquet victim may be only half in
jest, half pretended. But like the sports writer’s implication that the earth might
have stopped rotating for a football game (cf. the epigraph above), blatant exag-
geration betrays pretense and makes it obvious, and is probably intended to do
so. Friendly competitors play at engaging in serious, high stakes competitions,
while engaging genuinely in less serious, lower stakes competition.
Sometimes, no doubt, friends and family are not even half joking. A child may
be thoroughly heartbroken, genuinely upset, when her brother knocks her cro-
quet ball into the bushes. It may be appropriate then to tell her, remind her, “It’s
only a game,” encouraging her to adopt a make-believe stance and to recognize
others’ make-believe. I don’t doubt that some adults care a lot about winning,
really care, even in competitions with friends and family in otherwise casual cir-
cumstances. Some of us are more seriously competitive than others.
It will not always be obvious whether and to what extent a competitor or
spectator engages in make-believe. Pretense is often not signaled by exagger-
ated shows of competitiveness like those of the croquet and Scrabble players
or clearly manifested in other ways. And we must, of course, leave room for
tacit, implicit pretense, pretense that may not be evident even to the pretender
 Spor ts a s Fic tion 83

herself.10 Perhaps in some instances there is no fact of the matter about whether
a person is engaging in pretense. In any case, many of us often do, to one extent
or another, engage in make-believe as we observe or participate in competitive
games, make-believe that is similar in some respects to that of children’s games
and theater, for instance, but intriguingly different in others.

10
Philosophers and psychologists generally agree, with support from empirical studies, that
desires, intentions, beliefs, attitudes can be tacit or implicit, unrecognized and unacknowledged by
the person who possesses them. Some theorists assume—strangely, without argument—that this is
not true of imaginings or pretendings or engagings in make-believe. See, e.g., Peter Lamarque and
Stein Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 47. First person
testimony about any of these mental states or activities can be overridden by inferences to the best
explanation. For a sampling of relevant empirical studies see John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand,
“The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist, Vol. 54, No. 7 (1999):  462–479;
Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports
on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (May 1977):  231–259; and Timothy
D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002). See also Brock, Stuart, “The Phenomenological Objection to Fictionalism,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2013): 1–19.