The philosophical and technical analysis of this book has been updated and entirely rewritten, but while the analysis based on RINOWN is new, much of the other material is based on four published papers. We are grateful to the editors and the publishers of the following pieces to allow us to reproduce material from them. These papers are:
In terms of the existing literature on sports, our focus has been very narrow, and since this is not primarily a scholarly book we will mention only a few works here in case readers want to pursue matters. This is in spite of the fact that there is a Journal of the Philosophy of Sport from which we have benefited. Items on sports that bear on the narrow topics discussed here and that have crossed our desk while preparing this book include the following:
While no arguments such as ours for the use of TV replays have been put forward before as far as we know, nor any comprehensive schema such as is found in table 7.2, we do know (as of February 2015) that certain Dutch football authorities are trying to get permission to trial TV replays and we have heard rumors that the English FA would also like to try them. Media reports on trials in the Dutch league can be found in the Amsterdam Herald (2014), the National (2015), and World Football Insider (2015). We hope that the analysis outlined in this book will add weight to these efforts.
Other works we found useful include the piece by Hoult (2013), who explains how Hot Spot was ready to admit its problems. We remarked in chapter 4 that track-estimator technology could do much more than estimate tracks; it could also be used to build an archive of information about how bowlers bowl, where batters strike the ball, and so forth—potentially a fascinating source of current and historical information. We remarked that this kind of thing would also be useful in tennis, and we find that it is—but that there can be a downside. Newspapers and other media outlets are ready to pay for this kind of aggregate information, and one consequence is that access to the raw data is now closely guarded. More about the use of aggregate tennis data can be found (as of February 2016), by Googling “the Australian Hawk-Eye data could serve up maps.” Once more, we want to stress that we are not against the use of this kind of technology, just uses that present it as perfectly accurate.
What is, perhaps, the unique flavor of this book arises out of the disciplinary background of the first two-named authors. This is the field of science studies or science and technology studies. While professionals still argue violently about what the subject is and where it should be going, we take its special qualities to be the way it combines the disciplines drawn on here in a new kind of understanding of the role of science and technology in contemporary life. In this case the disciplines that had to be pulled together—and are all too rarely pulled together—are sociology, philosophy, a detailed understanding of how science works day to day, with, in this case, some ability to apply scientific thinking, and an understanding of how technology works in the real world. We think that it is this combination that defines science and technology studies.
An accessible and widely selling book by one of the authors that looks unusually closely at the practice of science is The Golem: What You Should Know about Science (Collins and Pinch 1993/1998). A more technical and philosophical work is Collins’s (1992) Changing Order.
This book is mainly about sports, but it is also about more than that: it is about the public understanding of science and even about scientists’ understanding of science. When we first wrote about Hawk-Eye, we discovered that even some very senior scientists were not aware of what we had pointed out. The trouble is that, in the phrase set out in Changing Order, in science as in love, “distance lends enchantment.” That is, when scientists are not dealing with the very narrow specialism in which they are experts, they tend to fall back, like the rest of the public, into believing what they are told. Of course, they “get it” as soon as the matter is drawn to their attention—which is not necessarily true of the public—but that they don’t always get it for themselves is still a surprise.
One of the things that needs constant reinforcement both in the case of professionals and the public is that models are not reality. The field of artificial intelligence has suffered for decades from this kind of elision even though it was pointed out by one of the field’s heroes, Terry Winograd, as long ago as the 1980s. Winograd had built a brilliantly successful program called SHRDLU that could move things around in a world of colored blocks in response to spoken instructions. This was a breakthrough. But after Winograd had become famous, he realized that what he said he had invented was not really what he had invented at all. This was because the world in which the computer moved things was a virtual world—an imaginary world constructed by the computer; the computer could do marvelous things, but only in this—as Winograd called it—“microworld.” It took Winograd’s ability to stand back from what he had done and his readiness to criticize himself to see and explain to his artificial intelligence colleagues that a microworld is not a real world. He pointed out that success in one did not mean success in the other; things might not happen the same way in the real world because of all the extra contextual factors that are found there—and, indeed, they did not happen in the same way. That is the crucial distinction we are living through again with the track estimators. (Winograd and Flores 1987 is the source for Winograd’s conversion.)
The idea that new technologies can redefine what counts among the public as a solution to a problem is much discussed in the sociology of technology. We draw on this when we discuss the way the bails in cricket redefine the notion of “striking the wicket” as “breaking the wicket” and when we consider how track estimators might come to redefine “in” and “out” in tennis. Key sources are: