Abstract
This paper introduces a persistence puzzle involving two sports clubs with a somewhat intertwined history. As one might assume, the implications of the puzzle go far beyond a mere plea for a precise metaphysical analysis of certain perplexing quandaries regarding sports clubs and represents a challenge for our everyday understanding of social groups. To overcome the supposed impediment to the puzzle, as a starting point, I will accept the assumption that these entities are both social groups and abstract artifacts and will further argue that they are temporal abstract objects. Since temporal objects are in time, it will be determined that the cause of the conundrum is the seeming inability to correctly account for the I-relation between the temporal parts, and I will elaborate on why such an explanation is required. Ultimately, I’ll introduce the notion of I-shifting, which will explain how temporal abstract objects persist through time and consequently solve the puzzle.
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Notes
When I started this research, I wasn’t familiar with Faller’s contribution, but coincidently some of my examples might seem similar to his, although our main points differ considerably.
A sports franchise (a term generally used in North America) is often considered synonymous with an entire sports team, which includes everything from the club’s name to territorial rights in professional sports leagues. However, the Cleveland Browns case shows that the term ‘franchise’ can refer exclusively to the team’s operating organization.
The importance of the I-relation will be discussed in Sect. 4.
The Hornets played in Oklahoma City during the 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 seasons (NBA 2019: 127) due to Hurricane Katrina, and in that period were known as New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets. In order to not create additional confusion, I won't make a distinction between the New Orleans Hornets and the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets, and will treat the former as equivalent to the 2002–2013 Hornets, including the two aforementioned seasons.
For example, The Sacramento Kings are considered a one-time NBA champions, having won the title in 1951 as the Rochester Royals (NBA 2019: 136–37). The club changed its home city and name several times (Rochester Seagrams, Rochester Eber Seagrams, Rochester Pros, Cincinnati Royals, Kansas City-Omaha Kings, Kansas City Kings) while retaining self-identity.
To some it may seem that this case doesn’t add anything to the Oilers/Texans example in Faller (2021), but, apart from similarities regarding the moving and ‘rebranding’ of the team, the Oilers/Texans case does not raise any persistence problem because the Tennessee Titans and Houston Oilers are clearly the same team with the same franchise, and the Houston Texans was founded as a new team with a new franchise and is therefore unproblematically a different team.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for valuable help in formulating the puzzle.
As was the case with the Browns, the separation of the franchise and the team shouldn’t be seen as problematic.
Having said this, I don’t ignore the already mentioned fact that the truthfulness of a statement can depend on the time when it was uttered. Michael Jordan could have been an owner of a sports club (just as there was a time when he wasn’t the owner) and, later on, for any given reason, could have decided to sell the club or just denounce his ownership.
Following the implications of the Negation Way, the standard view seems to be that abstract objects are causally inert. However, authors like Julian Dodd and David Friedell dispute this claim, arguing that abstract objects such as movies and musical compositions (Dodd 2007) or novels, as well as other abstract artifacts (Friedell 2020), are both abstract and causal.
Some might consider Torino F.C.C. as the oldest football club in Italy, since it was founded back in 1887. But since Torino F.C.C. first merged with Nobili Torino in 1900 to form Internazionale Torino and later dissolved, we could only say that it was the oldest football club in Italy. Therefore, Genoa C.F.C., being the oldest active football club in Italy founded in 1893, seems like an only suitable candidate for the right answer.
I think it is safe to assume that there aren’t any fans alive who were born before this time, even if we want to count them as contingent extensions.
Although the connection between today’s stadium and the one from 1911 seems to be only nominal (since they bear no ties except the location and continuum of the same legacy), this, apparently, raises the question of abstract influx on physical objects, which is in itself an interesting problem, but I won’t deal with it in this paper.
It is true that there were some other physical extensions of the club in 1897, but clearly they were not necessary for its persistence, since the club continued to exist without them.
For now I am focusing only on physical extensions, which doesn’t mean that I deny the possibility of the existence of contingent abstract extensions. However, even if there are such entities (we will see that this is the case in Sect. 5) and they are as old as the club, it still doesn’t threaten my point about the abstract nature of the club.
Unless we count the death of the fans as a discontinuation of their support for the club; in that case, every one of them stops cheering for the club at a certain moment.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
The second feature is also a key factor in distinguishing between two different types of groups: sports teams and the franchise. Unlike sports teams, the franchise has no sporting goal, at least not one which would not be in line with a particular economic interest (without further consideration of what that interest might be). Gimbel, Rasmussen, & Stern also believe that, in addition to sports teams and the franchise (they use the term ‘organization’), there is a third type of group associated with organized sports—the community—which refers to the “people who support the team” (Gimbel, Rasmussen, & Stern 2020: 10).
As it was only important to emphasize the significance of the club’s abstract essence and to clarify what I mean by their constituents, I will not problematize the question of whether the distributed internal decision structure and the sporting goal are the sole components that make up the club’s abstract essence.
Some might suggest that logos and demographic makeup shouldn’t be considered as just physical entities, but once again, this doesn’t threaten our argumentation, since the point is that extensions are contingent and not that extensions must be concrete.
This kind of reasoning applies not only to sports clubs but all entities which are generally considered to be social groups. The abstract essence of some particular group might be different, but it always plays a crucial role.
An entire club can be instantly uninstantiated at some point in time t1, only to be instantly re-instantiated at some later point in time t2, without any of its contingent extensions at t1 being causally related to its contingent extensions at t2.
Another potential problem for the argument from Relativity is that Juvshik assumes the B-theory of time. B-theory considers all ‘times’ to be equally real, and is generally considered to imply four-dimensionalism (wherein time cannot be separated from the three spatial dimensions). This, without further defense of B-theory, appears to be fertile ground for circular argumentation, because claiming the validity of arguments like the argument from Relativity while assuming B-theory is the same as defending the B-theory on the basis of the assumption that the argument from Relativity is valid.
Like numbers, geometrical figures, and universals.
One important thing to notice here is that the same type of temporal relation that holds between two or more temporal abstract objects could also hold between them and non-abstract objects.
As Theodore Sider explains, “the puzzle is that although the later persons L1 and L2 are distinct, the earlier person E seems to be the same person as L1 and also as L2 (for surely E would have been one of the later persons if the other had never existed, and surely the mere presence of one later person cannot destroy E’s ability to survive as the other)” (Sider 2018: 134).
Which can be broken down into (1) memory connections; (2) psycho-behavioral connections involving acts that carry out previous intentions; and (3) the continuation of beliefs, desires, and other mental states. (Yi 2010: 192).
I should mention that I actually consider this position problematic unless we are willing to embrace exdurantism, since it could be argued, like in Patrone (2017), that Parfit's metaphysics necessarily implies the acceptance of this position. But exdurantism is problematic in its own right, which means that this synthesis only currently circumvents the problem.
Here I implicitly embrace the generally accepted view that objects have a self-identity (cf. Spinelli 2021).
David Lewis defines I-relation as “the relation that holds between the several stages of a single continuant person” (Lewis 1983: 59), and we can reversely define a person as “a maximal aggregate of I-related person-stages” (Gustafsson 2019: 2308). But since I am ‘bringing’ this view into the domain of abstracta, we will not consider person-stages, rather we will focus on the so-called self-stages of such objects.
It is worth noting that Lewis thinks that I-relation is not transitive since both “the I-relation and the R-relation cannot be discriminated in respect of the formal property of transitivity” (Brueckner 1993: 6). But he claims this in order to prove that “the I-relation is the R-relation” (Lewis 1983: 59), and as we have already seen, the R-relation plays no role in explaining the continuity and the persistence of abstract objects.
I prefer this crude technical term when we are no longer in the discourse of everyday talk about sports clubs.
It is important to note that this is heavily context dependent. In other words, which particular spatial position can be considered distinct depends on the particular entity. I do not claim that all physically separate positions are necessarily disconnected.
It should be noted that this viewpoint might appear to be in tension with Ritchie’s position, as presented in Sect. 3. However, contrary to what would seem at first, this is not necessarily the case. Although nodes, together with edges, play a crucial role in the structural organization, they “are defined only in terms of structural or functional relations” (Ritchie 2013: 269), which need not exclude the possibility of their alteration.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this issue to my attention.
The structure itself could also possibly be flexible. The flexibility enables the social group to continue realizing the same structure at different points in time, even if the structure is significantly altered, which means that “different kinds of groups can endure quite different changes in a structure and remain the same group” (Berber & Đorđević 2021: 135). But this may only apply to groups where abstract features are minimalized, i.e. groups with a variable structure. For more about the Dilemma of the structure flexibility see Berber & Đorđević (2021).
These are not the only features Richie introduces, but I have not listed the rest here as they are not relevant to this research. For more on this topic, see Ritchie (2013).
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Đorđević, S. Hornets, pelicans, bobcats, and identity: the problem of persistence of temporal abstract objects. Philos Stud 180, 1373–1393 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01938-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01938-2