Kill the Ump Analogy!

Jacob Stump's umpire analogy, which he has employed here in comments and also in the article just discussed here, is mortally flawed. Angry baseball fans sometimes shout, "Kill the ump!" My tendencies are not so violent--but we can kill the umpire analogy, at least.

He says we can and should model our approach to knowledge after the third umpire in his joke, who says, "There's balls and strikes, and they ain't nothing until I call them!" Well, he's right, but not in the way he thinks he is. He thinks this illustrates how each of us construct reality according to idiosyncratic and limited perspectives, and that none of us can get to a real reality because of that. That's not what we learn from the third ump.

Baseball is a game. It is a human invention. Its rules are quite properly subject to convention. One of them has to do with balls and strikes. A strike is defined on the one hand as a pitch that passes through a very precisely, objectively defined zone over home plate. But at least until recently, there was no way to determine that other than by human judgment. Thus, by convention properly chosen, a strike was agreed to be a pitch that was deemed by an umpire to have passed through that zone. Practically speaking (and probably also in the rule books, I don't know for sure) the umpire's decision is part of the definition of a strike. That's an objective definition that can be objectively applied. Umpires' decisions in a game are final, but the quality of their judgments are regularly assessed, and only those who are reliably good at it make it to the major leagues. They are judged by objective standards in that sense. An umpire who regularly treats balls and strikes according to his own judgment, and whose judgment fails to match objective reality a large proportion of the time, is not an umpire for long.

Further: Jacob presents us the umpire analogy to illustrate how we all construct our own reality. But once an umpire has called a ball or a strike, that pitch is a ball or a strike. The batter can't construct his own reality about it. The pitcher can't. The fans can't. There is an objective reality that stays in the record books and baseball's voluminous statistics, forever unchangeable. One person has constructed a reality because by the rules of this human invention of a game he has been given that right. After that, reality is not open to anybody else's construction.

Other items of knowledge are not based on human invention and convention. An umpire can call a ball or a strike because we agree that a ball or strike is defined as "that which an umpire deems to be a ball or a strike." Whether Jesus Christ actually lived or died is not a matter of convention, or of human definition of reality. There is no umpire who has been assigned the role of calling Jesus, "You're out of there!" If Jesus is dead, the umpire can't fudge that and let him take his base anyway. If Jesus is alive, no umpire can call back the home run and say he actually missed the pitch.

To summarize: the umpire analogy is fatally flawed in that:

1. It doesn't at all illustrate every person's access to constructing their reality; quite the contrary in fact.
2. Even to the extent that it illustrates that one person can "construct" reality, that ability is only given by human convention, an objective definition of a ball or a strike that includes that person's judgment within the definition.

Posted: Mon - September 3, 2007 at 10:00 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Kill the Ump Analogy!

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson