The paradox of entertainment wrestling: four solutions Author's name (parents' draft). Terence Rajivan Edward (now Doctor) Dialogue on names (fictional): "Now why do you want a name?" So that my works can be identified – that is one reason. "You need a number really." Author's name (my first draft). 0161__Rajivan Abstract. This paper further discusses a paradox I have earlier identified: the paradox of entertainment wrestling. The paradox poses the question of why people continue to watch wrestling after they know that it is fake. I identify four solutions to this paradox, one of which is the Fodorian modularity solution already identified and one of which is a Nozickian solution. A left-liberal solution is also presented, drawing upon the work of John Rawls, and finally a Moorean solution is outlined, named after one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, namely G.E. Moore. Note: I depart from the standard structure of a philosophy essay/paper: of specifying a position and an order of discussion early on. (This is another Helen Beebee-like essay, I think, though there are some silly remarks in parentheses. Feel free to ignore) Draft version: version 3 (1 June 2026 "mostly" added; version 2 2nd September 2025, version 1 on August 19th 2025) V.2. PDFs at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWTPO-23.pdf And: https://www.academia.edu/143756683/The_paradox_of_entertainment_wrestling_four_solutions And: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395233623_The_paradox_of_entertainment_wrestling_four_solutions Should the customary poem be located here Or should there instead be a spear? I once saw commentary on an English football match, or soccer as it is called in North America. Not all the players were English and one of the foreign players, an attacking player, did something which the commentator regarded as especially astute: he took two steps back at a certain point, which most players in that position would not do apparently. ("EVERYONE WOULD"?) This taking two steps back seems a good idea. Maybe I should try it, at least metaphorically. Let us change sports, I suppose, to an activity which some would call sport while others would deny it the very name, or description to be precise. Nowadays it is called entertainment wrestling. It is sometimes described as soap opera for men. But this seems to proceed too swiftly. There is a paradox and this description, or something like it, is a solution. What is the paradox? Wrestling is an Olympic sport, but there is a kind of wrestling that ordinary critics call fake wrestling, although it involves real physical contact and I believe it involves real injuries: entertainment wrestling. There is a referee and a match takes place, paradigmatically between two wrestlers, but sometimes more are involved. But it is not like a match as "we" conceive it. The opponents practice beforehand, the result is often agreed upon, and acting techniques are used so as to give an impression of extreme blows to the body. The paradox I have in mind is: people continue to watch after knowing all this. Various commentators seem to move rather swiftly ahead to a solution: saying that it is soap opera for men. Take two steps back and appreciate the paradox first. ("O, what a clever person you are!") The paradox can be presented as starting from these three propositions. (a) Audiences will only continue to watch "entertainment wrestling" if they know that it is not fake. (b) Audiences know that "entertainment wrestling" is fake. (c) Audiences continue to watch it. It seems that at least one of these propositions must be abandoned. In this paper, I wish to identify four solutions, the first of which I have sketched before and here present in a little more detail. The modularity solution Modularity theory is about how various mental processing systems are limited in the information available to them, compared to the total information in the mind as a whole. Consider the system which must determine what exactly one is looking at. What caused this sensory stimulation of the eyes, say? ("O, you are always talking about the eyes." I'm not. "Anyway, what about the other sense modalities? My favourite sense is smell!") A Fodorian solution to the paradox is that the system which determines what exactly one is looking at has no access to the information that wrestling is fake, as people say: the moves involved are plotted beforehand, unlike in genuine sport, and a winner is generally agreed on beforehand too. Thus the visual experience of the viewer is the same as prior to acquiring this information. It is not like with those duck-rabbit pictures: Jastrow's duck-rabbit, often called Wittgenstein's though. There is a change in visual experience from seeing it as a duck to seeing it as a rabbit. But there is no change in visual experience from seeing it as fake to seeing it as real, or not for the ordinary viewer. (Perhaps there is for the viewer who concentrates on a number of details, for example the exact movement of the punch and how it lands – "A punch like that cannot cause much pain. It started fast but then slowed down so much.") On the Fodorian solution, the continuity in visual experience explains why the ordinary fan can continue to enjoy entertainment wrestling after it has been revealed to be fake. It is called Fodorian because Jerry Fodor appealed to the fact that illusions do not go away to argue that the cognitive system which determines what we are looking at does not have access to this information: the information that what is observed is illusory. The visual cognitive system is informationally-encapsulated! (A classical thesis: "I blinded myself, because my visual experience did not change with what I knew!"?) I am not sure whether the Fodorian solution works or not. At present I find insufficient evidence to believe Fodor's modularity theory of perceptual experience (see Edward 2011). The Nozickian solution Recall the second proposition that forms part of the inconsistent triad that is the paradox: (b) Audiences know that "entertainment wrestling" is fake. But what exactly is it to know? Robert Nozick's famous tracking conditions definition of to know says that a person (referred to as the subject) knows a given proposition if and only if the following conditions are met: (1) The proposition believed is true. (2) The subject believes the proposition. (3) If the proposition were false, the subject would not believe the proposition. (4) If the proposition were true, the subject would believe it. In the case of our paradox, the relevant proposition is that entertainment wrestling is fake. To more or less repeat, interactions between opponents, including wrestling moves, are plotted beforehand and the outcome is often decided on beforehand. But do viewers meet condition (3) for knowing that entertainment wrestling is fake? Let us suppose that they learn that it is mostly fake, but one inserts some real matches into entertainment wrestling. Is the viewer sure to spot these and declare these matches unfake or are they not? The latter case means condition (3) is not meant and it is plausible that it is not. ("Hey, are you ignoring Kripke's fake barn cases"?) The left-liberal solution The left-liberal solution is closely related to the claim that wrestling is soap opera for men. The American entertainment wrestling business, or the one run by Vince McMahon, is closely associated with the Republican political party and has probably received much scholarly attention in recent years because the public face of the Republican party has become like something out of wrestling. But there is a left-liberal valuation of entertainment wrestling. The characters that figure in it are like characters found in the provinces of North America, or some of them are anyway, and probably throughout the Anglosaxon countries. One does not need a complex novel to understand them; these cartoonish wrestlers correspond to the personas of people one actually meets. Wrestling thereby aids social justice. The newcomer to a town who has watched this stuff is less prone to being fooled, because they have this body of information about characters. We can provide some further detail for this solution by referring to John Rawls's concept of fair equality of opportunity (1999). Fair equality of opportunity goes beyond mere formal equality of opportunity, in which all capable citizens have the right to apply for a certain job. With fair equality of opportunity, individuals who are equally capable of doing a job stand an equal chance of getting it, should they apply. The information provided by entertainment wrestling is an equalizing force, because newcomers will be less lost in interviews. "I too know this character and what their preferences are." For example, um, one knows that a Hulk Hogan type generally does NOT like intricate little things. The Moorean solution? The Moorean solution takes the paradox to be reducible to Moore's paradox, or a small subset of instances of it. Moore paradoxical statements are statements of the form "P but I don't believe that P," where P stands for some proposition or other. For example, "It is raining but I don't believe that it is raining." Similarly, the wrestling paradox above is reducible to "Entertainment wrestling is fake but I don't believe that it is fake." The plan with this solution is to offer a general solution to Moore paradoxical statements and then apply it to these statements. But I am not sure how this works in detail. Appendix 1 (cartoon chat) You know these Warner Brother cartoons with the small dog (Spike) jumping around the big dog (Chester). Instead a small dog with a big dog jumping around it in a comparable way? No! Appendix 2 (immigrant experience) Sometimes I think of life as an immigrant in a country as like being in a video game with a number of levels and baddies to overcome, though I am probably a terrible baddie to overcome in some people's games. I wonder: have my parents seen some level or other that I have seen, or something comparable in their own professions: behold the things within it! I don't always know, but I am confident they have encountered people who say or in thinly veiled way say, "F*** off!" in response to a reasonable proposal. References n.a. n.d. Moore's paradox. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_paradox Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2011. Theory-laden experience and illusions. Ethos 4 (2): 58-67. Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWTEA-2.pdf Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. On "the" paradox of entertainment wrestling: a Fodorian solution, Pennsylvania? Available at academia.edu Fodor, Jerry. 1984. Observation Reconsidered. Philosophy of Science 51: 23-43. Available at: http://j.dokic.free.fr/rs/Fodor_1984.pdf Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1999 (revised edition). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Available at: https://giuseppecapograssi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rawls99.pdf Sophocles (translated by I. Johnston). 2004. Oedipus the King. Accessed from: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/sophocles/oedipustheking.htm Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968 (third edition, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54889e73e4b0a2c1f9891289/t/564b61a4e4b04eca59c4d232/1447780772744/Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.pdf