ABSTRACT
By reconsidering some previously published ideas concerning the place of individual action, this chapter explores key themes for the place of intention in the study of sport, contextualising some of those ideas, and defending a conception of such action that stops short of methodological individualism. A quite general normativity implicit in human decisions is stressed (they can be right or wrong, as well as happening or failing to happen) as depending on a nexus of rules and human practices, rather than requiring super-human agents (with perhaps class the most widely considered). Thus, such investigations, unlike those of natural science, acknowledge that ‘[e]rror and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition’ (Frege 1984: 351). Hence, to confront the human world, as we must to investigate sporting practices in their contexts, requires recognising the activities of agents, whose actions are suitably investigated with just those ‘human world’ methods, such a critical ethnography and oral history, implicit – or sometimes explicit – in the previous instantiations of the so-called ‘Brighton Interpretation’.
