“a parody parodying a parody”

... is an accurate summary of the following post by someone pretending to be Richie Benaud on Twitter: “These parody accounts are a nuisance and damaging the game I love. RB.”

The post title is a quotation from an article about the sporadically amusing, and now defunct, fake Kevin Pietersen Twitter account. There seems to be a lot of this sort of parody about, some of it really well-crafted.

This post is as good as itself

A post on the Guardian sports blog contains two new types of tautology.

In work on tautologies, in philosophy/semantics/pragmatics, it's normal to give examples like 'War is war', 'Boys will be boys', 'If it rains, it rains', and 'Either he'll come or he won't'. It's also normal to point out that tautologies can have these forms:

Equative: e is e; an e is an e
Conditional: If P then P
Disjunctive: Either P or not P

It's not so easy to think of tautologies that have forms not on this short list (of course with a bit of propositional logic you can come up with as many tautological forms as you like, but what we're after here are sentences that someone might actually produce).

The new examples are after the jump.

Cricket, pragmatics and denial

The Guardian has run a story about allegations against members of the Pakistan cricket team that they took money to bowl no-balls – with the headline, ‘Pakistan captain Salman Butt denies any wrongdoing over ‘spot-fixing’’.

What Salman Butt actually said when asked about the allegations (transcript) (video) included: “These are just allegations and anybody can stand out and say anything about you, doesn’t make them true,” and “There’s nothing that I have seen that involves me”. This is not denial of the allegations. It can’t be, because the truth of these statements (and the rest of what he said) is compatible with the truth of what is alleged. (‘involves’ is a vague word and Butt himself isn’t in the News of the World’s videos and, not being a bowler, did not bowl any of the three no-balls at issue).

The Guardian has taken Butt to have implicated denial, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think he was measuring his words carefully so as not to commit himself. Bloggers have understood this.

What should the headline have been? Pakistan captain Salman Butt fails to deny ‘spot-fixing’’. That was the news story.


I’m not going to comment on the Pakistan manager’s interesting claim in the same press conference that, “No allegations are true till they proved either way,” beyond saying that some heavy-duty pragmatics is involved in getting to an interpretation that makes any kind of sense. Either that or he’s into some pretty serious relativism about truth...