Peter and I have a post up at The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination. This is shortened version of our paper that we presented at the APA in Portland a few weeks ago.
Peter is a lifelong Eagles fan. Shawn is a diehard Patriots fan. We separately watched Super Bowl LII and, to put it mildly, felt wild swings of emotion. But…why? It was only a game. Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards go about their day as if nothing much happened. If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger?
Walton (2015) thinks this puzzle of sports fandom parallels the paradox of fiction.
“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” (p. 77).
Walton himself and other authors (Wildman 2019, Moore 2019) who have tried to explain this aspect of sports fandom have applied Walton’s theory in a quite limited way. These three Waltonians have an impoverished view of sports make-believe and sports fandom. There’s a better way to apply the Waltonian theory to sports.
Read the rest here: https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/4/6/explaining-fandom
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The Sports Ethicist 