One important limitation of the current renditions of interpretivism is that its emphasis on the moral dimension of sport has overlooked the aesthetic dimension lying at the core of this account of sport. The interpretivist’s failure to acknowledge and consider the aesthetic implicitly distances this realm from the moral. Marcia Muelder Eaton calls this distancing the separatist mistake. This paper argues that interpretivism presupposes not only moral but also aesthetic principles and values. What it sets out to demonstrate is that (...) interpretivism is an integralist, or nonseparatist, account of sport, one in which ethical and aesthetic values are not exclusive. Making explicit and specifying interpretivism’s combined moral-aesthetic approach to sport not only helps to better distinguish the whole range of values that make up sport as well as their interconnection but also encourages sportspeople to pursue more coherent sport and, thus, more enriching lives. (shrink)

This article considers how professional knowledge should be assessed. It is maintained that the assessment of professional know-how raises distinctive issues from the assessment of know-how more generally. Intellectualist arguments which suggest that someone's giving an account of how to F should suffice for attributing to them knowledge of how to F are set out. The arguments fail to show that there is no necessary distinction between two kinds of know-how, namely the ability to F and knowing that w is (...) a way to F, such that the latter is more fundamental. The consequences of this failure for our understanding of professional assessment are then considered. The issue of the assessment of tacit knowledge is then addressed. It is concluded that there is no context-dependent codifiable or articulable propositional knowledge of how to F which could be substituted for being able to F and that therefore tacit knowledge can only be assessed in performance. The parallel with Gettier cases is reviewed and it is concluded that the provenance of accounts of and justifications for the attribution of know-how are not matters of indifference to its assessment. Finally, the question of evaluability or what Ryle would have called the applicability of intelligence epithets is discussed in relation to its relevance to our procedures for assessing practical knowledge. Once again, it is concluded that excellent performance is necessary to attribute excellence in know-how. However, the ability to give an account of how and why an agent would do something in hypothetical circumstances is also very important for the assessment of professional knowledge. (shrink)

It is popularly believed within sport's practice communities that a contest fails if the competitor who performs most skilfully in it does not win. The belief is rarely acknowledged explicitly, and therefore deserves to be considered ideological in a sense. In this paper I challenge that belief. For conceptual reasons, I confine the discussion to the purposive sports, e.g. football and tennis. The concept of skill is approached by articulation of a set of platitudes about skill in the purposive sports. (...) The first is the conceptual wedge between skill and success. The second is the distinction between skill and other performance-relevant qualities such as courage, strength and luck. The third is the fact that skill deficits can be compensated by sufficient amounts of the other performance relevant qualities. The fourth is the dispositional and dynamic character of skill. The relation between skill and final objectives in the purposive sports means that (i) qualities such as nerve and courage can trump the more skilful performance; and (ii) poor execution of a narrow range of skills can result in the competitive failure of the more skilful performance. There is no viable ideal of sport that would ground regret about the realisation of the immediately preceding possibilities. The inclination towards such regret might be partly motivated by the wish to take a gratifying view of ourselves. An end to this response, and a more inclusive, less hierarchical conception of sport skills, is worth recommending. (shrink)