The Football of Logic

An analogy is made between two rather different domains, namely: logic, and football (or soccer). Starting from a comparative table between the two activities, an alternative explanation of logic is given in terms of players, ball, goal, and the like. Our main thesis is that, just as the task of logic is preserving truth from premises to the conclusion, footballers strive to keep the ball as far as possible until the opposite goal. Assuming this analogy may help think about logic in the same way as in dialogical logic, but it should also present truth-values in an alternative sense of speech-acts occurring in a dialogue. The relativity of truth-values is focused by this way, thereby leading to an additional way of logical pluralism. Keywords: assertion, denial, football, game, goal, logic, possession, speechacts, truth-values, strategy, tactics. 1. Introduction: Logic of Football vs Football of Logic Football (or the American “soccer”) is not a serious thing, like logic. Or it should not be so, for those who see nothing in it but a distraction for the masses. Now such a game may be taken seriously, even if its usual depiction in terms of star salaries and hooliganism reduces this sport to a desperate feature of entertainment society. Game-theorists do know that games may be taken seriously. As a matter of fact, it can be said about football what the social constructivist Robert Cox claimed about states in the area of international relations, i.e., that they are what is done with them. What is or can be done with football, from a serious point of view? Our answer is: an explanatory model of logic, from a game-theoretical perspective. There are at least two reasons not to proceed in this way. On the one hand, such an approach to logic already exists under the heading of Lorenzen and Lorenz’s dialogical logic [4], or Hintikka’s Game-Theoretical Semantics [3]. So why bother with a provocative introduction of football in the very serious area of logic? On the other hand, philosophers who are reluctant to chiasms should note that there may be a “logic of football” in the sense of a set of recursive rules explaining how football proceeds, but not the converse. No serious sense should be given to an alleged “football of logic”, accordingly, if such an expression assigns an explanatory role of football to logic but not the contrary one.
And yet, the next sections are meant to show to what extent the game of football may throw some light on the game of logic. Or, at the least, that they can be compared with each other with no prominent role for either. A first