In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on to point out that it’s “highly unlikely that this fact contributes much in way of meeting people from very different social networks.”
Rather than bringing us back into the substance of this disagreement, I want to go off about something entirely different. As you’ll soon see, I’m far out of my depths on this one.
Call the claim as formulated by John Q, that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia,” “PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE.”
PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is under my skin. Let me try to explain why.
First, PERFERCLY PLAUSIBLE may be true. That would be interesting, just on the substance.
Second, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE could be true even if the thing it claims to be plausible is false, and it could be false even if the thing it claims to be plausible is true. That is, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE can be true (false) even if it’s false (true) that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia. That’s because PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is (I think) a claim about what it would be epistemically reasonable to believe if you had some information on which to infer the relative quantities of US golfers and Australians,[1] but not enough information for deducing the fact being claimed to be perfectly plausible.
Third, and weirdly: In the context of the post, the truth (or otherwise) of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE strikes me as more interesting than the truth (or otherwise) of the claim being forwarded as perfectly plausible, that is, that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians. When I read John Q writing that it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians, I thought, “wow, that’s fascinating,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If John Q had instead just checked and affirmed Matt’s supposition, writing that the number of US golfers does indeed exceed the number of Australians, I’d have thought “that’s wild, Americans and their golf, amIright?” It’s the plausibility of the claim, and not its (plausible) truth, that fascinates me. This isn’t exactly paradoxical: PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE forwards a different claim than the claim it asserts to be plausible, so it’s no great shock that in some contexts it could be more interesting. You might be surprised to be more interested in PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE if you thought it was just a vaguer version of the claim that US golfers exceed Australians. But it’s not that. It tells us something (so far imprecise) about what inferences it would be reasonable to draw on the basis of a (so far imprecise) body of knowledge. It tells us that we shouldn’t be surprised to hear someone who knows their stuff but hasn’t looked up the details telling us that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians.[2]
Philosophers use the language of “perfectly plausible” all the time, and it’s generally used to lubricate a certain kind of argumentative move. It indicates that there’s some variable that we could inquire into, but that the argument being advanced (probably despite appearances) doesn’t ultimately stand or fall on the outcome of that inquiry. So, if I’m defending a moral principle of equal opportunity, I might say “but it’s perfectly plausible that free will is an illusion, so we should consider what this principle would tell us if that perfectly plausible thing were indeed true and ask whether the thing it would tell us on that condition is a palatable thing for such a principle to tell us.” (I would say that because some people seem to think, wrongly, that equal opportunity only makes sense if free will is real.) This is what John Q is doing in PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. He’s saying to Matt, “you may well be right about the relative numbers of Australians and US golfers. My point stands either way.” It doesn’t matter to John Q’s argument whether the number of Australians exceeds US golfers; what matters is that it plausibly could be true, and it wouldn’t matter if it were.
I think what I’m hung up on here is this: I think the most typical uses of “perfectly plausible” in philosophy apply it to claims whose truth status is difficult to discern or difficult to make a part of the common ground for the argument, e.g. normative claims or claims about free will. The thing John Q asserts as plausible is a descriptive fact, and one we could relatively easily learn the truth status of. Yet even in these circumstances, I think, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is a more interesting claim than “Australians < US golfers.” Contrast this case with the illusion of free will. If I knew free will was an illusion (and if that fact could easily be brought into common ground), there would be no point in asserting the fact as plausible. I’d say instead, “we know free will is an illusion, so let’s see if the implications of my principle, given that that’s so, are acceptable.” What is the difference between this case and PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE? Supposing Australians < US golfers, what is it that John Q conveys, intentionally or not, by writing PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE over “Australians < US golfers”? Or, why do I care more about whether this comparison is plausible than whether it’s true?
Maybe we could translate PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE into a claim with no epistemic language, such as “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark.” But I don’t really think that would preserve the meaning of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. One reason I have for doubting it is that the whole time this has been under my skin, I haven’t figured out how to (dis)confirm PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. In contrast, I could quite easily learn the two quantities and see if I think they’re in the same ballpark. And, if the two numbers are in the same ballpark, then “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark” is true (and its denial false), even if anyone who knows their stuff should have been surprised to learn that fact. But, as I said, the truth of Perfectly Plausible just doesn’t turn on whether the number of golfers in the US exceeds or is in the same ballpark as the number of Australians.
On the one hand, I know just what John Q was doing with this construction. On the other hand, I can’t make precise to my own satisfaction what PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE means in this context, and why I should find PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE (and its truth status) so much more interesting than the claim that PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE asserts to be plausible. Is there something simple that I’m missing? In what other kinds of cases might we be more interested in a claim’s plausibility than its truth? Is it about when we have reason to be concerned about what people might be in a position reasonably to infer, true or not?
Suppose the US is embarrassed to find that it is plausible that US golfers exceed Australians. Should they look into the numbers and then be reassured if they learn that it’s plausible yet false? Or should they be alarmed by, and take action against, the mere fact that it’s plausible? (Only half joking here.)
[1] I know that “the number of Australians” must be different than the “population of Australia” but I think I’ll write this more clearly if I use them interchangeably, and the difference won’t matter to the question I have.
[2] Does it also tell us that we should be surprised to hear someone who knows their stuff but hasn’t looked up the details contradicting the claim? I’m not sure, but I doubt it.
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
MisterMr 08.05.26 at 2:24 pm
Suppose that “perfectly plausible” just means “I personally believe this is possible”; then you can’t find any way to disprove my claim, unless you have mindreading abilities, because the claim is about my personal subjective beliefs, not about reality.
While the truth status of “perfectly plausible” is quite automatically true (unless I’m lying for some reasons on my beliefs), this kind of conversational move is not really about the truth, it is a move that means “I will not attack your argument here, I will attack your argument there instead”, it is not really about truth value, it is a conversational move closer to say “hello” or calling someone names (which might have truth value but usually that isn’t the point).
Bob Michaelson 08.05.26 at 2:47 pm
I don’t know if John Q’s remark was intended to get into the epistemological weeds or not, but my (very possibly incorrect) interpretation of it was as an answer to a Fermi question, or Fermi problem – Fermi used to ask students to come up with the answer to a question that seemingly they didn’t have enough information to address, as a way of teaching them order-of-magnitude calculations. For example, “how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” or “how many hairs are on your head?” You would know to a decent approximation how many people live in Chicago, and then make reasonable guesses of how many households are in Chicago, and what fraction of households had pianos, and how many tuners would be needed to keep the resulting total number of pianos in tune. It turns out that it is possible to make order-of-magnitude, i.e. good enough, estimates to such questions.
In the case of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE, it is generally known that the U.S. population is roughly 340,000,000, and the population of Australia could be guessed – or known, by Australians – to be roughly under 30,000,000. It is a reasonable guess that at least 1/10 of people in the U.S. are in some sense “golfers”, which implies that PP is true.
BTW, I checked claims by golf organizations in the U.S. and Australia, and it is estimated by them that there are about 47 million golfers in the U.S. (about 14% of the U.S. population), and about 3.8 million golfers in Australia (about 13% of Australian population).
Chris M. 08.05.26 at 4:27 pm
I love this post.
Perhaps the postulate “perfectly plausible” promises possibility? Reading this post, I immediately thought of fiction, where “perfectly plausible” is the block and tackle that suspends disbelief. Maybe that’s why “perfectly plausible” feels so much more alluring than whatever the quoditian truth is — it promises a story, in away.
David O'Brien 08.05.26 at 5:50 pm
“Maybe we could translate PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE into a claim with no epistemic language … But I don’t really think that would preserve the meaning of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE.”
Another consideration against translating it in that way is that asserting
‘Not-X, but it’s perfectly plausible that X’
strikes me as absurd in a Moore’s-paradox-esque way (at least when ‘perfectly plausible that’ is indexed to that speaker, at that time, etc.). But if we translated ‘perfectly plausible that’ in the way you don’t like, I think we’d lose the Moorean absurdity of the assertion.
Adam Swift 08.05.26 at 6:27 pm
Great post. It could be perfectly plausible (there’s a lot of them and boy do those Americans love their golf) while being nowhere near true. It’s a bit disappointing to learn that it probably is true.
How does the perfectly bit come into the story? Suppose JQ had said ‘highly plausible’ or simply ‘plausible’. To my ear/eye, ‘highly plausible’ would have suggested a higher degree of plausibility than ‘perfectly plausible’, as would even ‘plausible’ on its own. My sense is that, rather than suggesting anything about the degree of plausibility, the ‘perfectly’ serves the rhetorical purpose of emphasizing the prima facie surprisingness of the claim. Is that right?
engels 08.05.26 at 6:54 pm
I didn’t follow all of us but imho an assertibility condition for a statement being plausible is that its truth value hasn’t been determined. Cambridge defines it as “seeming likely to be true, or able to be believed” which seems right and fits this (a “reasonable hearer” test might make it more concrete).
Matt 08.05.26 at 8:38 pm
I think I’d originally said it there were “plausibly” more golfers in the US than there are Australians (to which John said in relply that it was “perfectly plausible”). (*) My own meaning of “plausible” was somewhat like that suggested by engels above – I looked briefly at a few sources, and they gave somewhat different numbers (no doubt in part based on how one counts “golfers” – many more people own golf clubs than play regularly, for example) but all of them were at least close to the population of Australia, and most were over it. I didn’t care enough to try to figure out what the most reasonable asnswer or measure was, but think that those claims make it “plausibly the case” that it’s true. It seems pretty straight-forward in usage to me.
(*) I don’t get the golf hate. I personally do not enjoy golf at all, and I’ve tried it enough times – maybe two dozen? – to know that I don’t enjoy it and am very unlikely to come to enjoy it. I can sometimes appreciate seeing a good golf shot on TV, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched even the final round of a televised golf tournament. I find it mostly dull. But, as a good liberal I’m happy to let people like what they like, and lots of people I know like it a lot. (As noted, it’s perfectly plausible that it’s as liked by Australians as by Americans, and it’s liked by lots of other peoples, too, so it’s not an “American” thing.) It does use a lot of water, and it would be good to make those who play internalize those costs, but that’s a distinct issue. Otherwise, it seems like a strange sort of snobbery to me. I also don’t think John Q is correct on his claim about people coming together here, but I’d decided that that dispute wasn’t going to be solved, so decided to give it up there.
D. S. Battistoli 08.05.26 at 10:46 pm
Agreed with the above commenters that this is a rold-gold of a post. It gives me good-old-time vibes.
I think one way to read “perfectly plausible” that fits with Gina’s claim that it gets “under my skin” and the context of John’s comment is that it is a natural-language marker of what sentential logic calls a subderivation: an additional postulate that gets added in the course of solving a proof, but which gets “discharged,” that is, obviated, on the way to the final conclusion.
The circumstances where this can be most ennerving are when Allan and Betty are talking, and Allan treats Q as a conclusion of postulates P &c., while Betty says Q is “perfectly plausible,” because the conclusion to which they are really working is R, because {reasons}. If Allan desires to privilege Q over R, he’d find himself checkmated as long as Betty’s reasoning is sound, because the better he demonstrates Q, the more confident she will be in R.
D. S. Battistoli 08.05.26 at 11:00 pm
(Oh, and the natural corollary to the end of my last comment: even if Allan subsequently abandons Q for S, the fact that Q has already been asserted as an assumption still proves R, leaving Betty “right” and Allan frustrated). Naturally all this only holds for proofs with the side-constraint that only one conclusion of the set {Q, R, S} may be accepted.
J-D 08.05.26 at 11:49 pm
When I think about what’s plausible in this case, I think about things like this:
Is it? How widely known is this information? How widely known is it even in the United States?
Could it? How many people would be able to guess what the population of Australia is, even roughly? How many people even in Australia would know this?
Is it? How many people–even in the US–would have a reasonable basis for guessing the proportion of the US population which plays golf?
For example–
–I have no basis for guessing the population of Chicago, or the average household size there, or the fraction of households that has pianos, or how long it take to tune a piano or how often it needs to be done.
oldster 08.06.26 at 12:37 am
I think that the propositions for which “perfectly plausible” clearly fails are those that no one in their right mind could believe. In other words, the set of propositions s.t. PP(p) and the set of propositions s.t. NRM(p) share no common members. That may be useful for helping us to see that PP really can be falsified, and frequently is.
But I doubt those two sets exhaust the universe of propositions (even propositions small enough to be humanly entertainable). Between them is a large grey area of I Find it Highly implausible (p), accompanied by Surely You’re Not Trying to Claim (p), as well as I’d Take That Bet (~p).
Gina Schouten 08.06.26 at 1:58 pm
I’m glad some of you enjoyed this one, and I’m enjoying the comments right back. I’m very taken by the possible explanation Chris M. gives for why (to me at least) ‘“perfectly plausible” feels so much more alluring than whatever the quotidian truth is.’
David: Yes, great point!
Adam: That’s interesting. I also have the intuition that the difference between the “perfectly” and the “highly” in this context is rhetorical, and I find it plausible (ha) that it signals the prima facie surprisingness in Matt’s usage, but to my ear in John Q’s takeover of it, the “perfectly” is doing a different rhetorical something. It says “you may well be right, but so what,” whereas a “highly plausible” would have said “I bet that’s actually right, but so what.” Maybe?
Adam Swift 08.06.26 at 2:59 pm
@Gina Ah, I’d somehow missed the interlocutionary context. With that in the picture, I agree.
engels 08.06.26 at 3:45 pm
I think golf got sucked into the cultural wars, rightly or wrongly. Trump surely didn’t help its image but coming from outside London where its middle class but definitely not “elite” I always found the outrage a bit puzzling (one of the London left’s obsessions is turning golf courses into housing estates, or maybe re-wilding them, I can’t remember which: granted there are a fair few in and around the M25). I think in the dim and distant 90s the Beastie Boys trolled people by dressing up as golfers?
nonrenormalizable 08.06.26 at 5:06 pm
To perhaps repeat your post in a less eloquent way, this reminds me of the standard internet argument pattern where person A makes a claim based on some evidence, person B shows that the evidence provided is incorrect and could imply an opposing claim, and person A says “Ah well, the fact that it could easily have been true means that my argument for the original claim still holds”.
More broadly, your description of “Perfectly Plausible” falls under what I think of as the “Common Sense” category of language containing unaddressed subjective priors (or if I were to engage in some cod-philosophy, perhaps they are claims to synthetic (a priori?) knowledge by the speaker). What is plausible to one person may not necessarily be plausible to another, based on their own priors and judgement.
As some commenters above have suggested, this makes it a conversational move akin to a shibboleth. An appeal to “Perfectly Plausible”, like one to “Common Sense” (though not as harmful), is a sort of verification that neither of us knows/agrees the proposition is unknowable, but we both share roughly similar priors on if it is true. If such an appeal is rejected — you think the proposition isn’t “Perfectly Plausible”, it is absurd and ridiculous — then what is conveyed is that the interlocutors have little experience and viewpoint in common, and an argument must either proceed another way, or is unlikely to be fruitful.
D. S. Battistoli 08.06.26 at 5:11 pm
Incidentally, with regard to my points @8 & @9</a, if I am correct that “perfectly plausible” is a phrase marking a formal-logic move rather than an epistemic marker, then Gina’s problem with “I haven’t figured out how to (dis)confirm PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE” falls away.
But, if we treat “perfectly plausible” as an epistemic marker, then it risks becoming a mystery phrase or even a strange bit of legerdemain in the hands of people who usually claim never to play Ricky Jay, or at best a phrase that means different things to different people (though the variety of responses to this thread suggest that the latter should not be ruled out).
In any event, you would disconfirm a formalist “perfectly plausible” by demonstrating (in the terms of my thought experiment @8) that Q is an argument which cannot be discharged on the way from P &c. to R.
We can see this in John Q’s original comment. He establishes a logical sequence from the number of total measured ultimate frisbee players, through the number of players of ultimate frisbee in organized communities, to the conclusion of Bowling Alone. Then, he says that it is “perfectly plausible” that Matt’s prior assumption about total measured golf players is true. This situates the golf case as a logical parallel to the ultimate frisbee one. If you wanted to “disconfirm” John’s argument, it wouldn’t be by interrogating the meaning of “perfectly” or “plausible” alone or in conjunction; it would be by establishing a mathematical function linking golf hobbyists, golf community members, and a Robert Putnam conclusion that was logically distinct from the one he set up for ultimate frisbee.
Here, “perfectly plausible” is not a claim that is lexically analyzable either in isolation or in relation to its subordinate clause, introduced by “that”; “perfectly plausible” is the natural-language version of the sideways-T insert in a formal proof table, a marker of the commencement of a subderivation.
bekabot 08.06.26 at 6:31 pm
What I mean when I say “perfectly plausible” or employ an analogous phrase is “there is no law of physics which militates against this” or “it’s okay to talk about this because there’s nothing about this universe which renders it impossible.” Also “there may be something about this universe which renders this impossible but it’s nothing we can find out just by looking, at least in the non-specialist short term, so it’s okay to talk about it in the meantime.” However, I don’t know what other people mean when they use it.
John Q 08.06.26 at 8:15 pm
Gina’s characterisation of the way I’ve used “perfectly plausible” is spot-on.
On the hate for golf, even in Australia it’s the most class-coded of sports (apart from yachting, and arguably Rugby Union). Not just expensive to play, but a sharp division between public courses and private clubs, and the role of caddies (mostly displaced by golf carts, but still part of the history). This seems to be even more true in the US, where “country club Republican” is a standard political description. That was the thinking behind my dismissal of its relevance to the discussion.
MisterMr 08.06.26 at 10:24 pm
@J-D 10
“Is it? How widely known is this information? How widely known is it even in the United States?”
You are treating “X is plausible” as a statement about X, and grammatically it is, but in reality it is a statement about the speaker beliefs about X, so the question “how widely known is this information” is irrelevant IMHO.
I think a lot of people in this thread are making this error of treating “X is plausible” as a statement about X
JPL 08.07.26 at 12:41 am
One little data point: unserious arguments or explanations offered in bad faith or post hoc are often called “merely plausible”, i.e., as clearing a very low bar.
Also, I would recommend numbering the examples and referring to them by the number. So: 1) It’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.
2) The number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.
(2) is a factual claim with a determinable answer. (1) is a claim involving the modality of the proposition expressed as (2): whether or not, lacking knowledge of the truth or falsity of (2), the inequality described is possible, which has a “more or less” answer. The question is, why is (2) a plausible assumption, what is it that makes (2) a plausible assumption? Is it simply a response to lack of knowledge, even a ball-park figure, of the truth or falsity of (2)? Does (1) express simply that the truth/falsity of the claim (2) is “not ruled out”? It seems you also want to say, “the truth or falsity of John’s claim is independent of the question of the truth or falsity of (2)”. ‘plausible’ is an informal expression, not a part of the system of logical terms with precise definitions, sort of like ‘likely’ or expressions of level of confidence (e.g., “highly probable”). Is it a case of “interesting if it were true, but irrelevant to (my) argument”? What is the significance of that fact (2)? What is the significance of the fact that (perhaps “nevertheless”) (2) seems plausible to many people? Etc.
Raven 08.07.26 at 5:18 am
I just asked my info AI, which answered:
“As of 11 July 2026, Australia’s population is estimated at 27,994,737 people.” [and] “There are approximately 25 million golfers who played on a golf course in the United States. This represents about 8% of the total U.S. population.”
IOW, more Australians than US golfers (taken at broadest meaning).
Of course it’s “perfectly plausible” that AI’s data might be mistaken on one or both points, so this might remain unsettled.
And even if the factual issue were indeed settled, you could still argue forever about the plausibility matter, so… onward.
engels 08.07.26 at 8:30 am
the most class-coded of sports (apart from yachting, and arguably Rugby Union
Skiing? Hunting? Polo?
There’s a council-run golf course down the road from me that’s less than £10 to play on I think.
John Q 08.08.26 at 12:28 am
Engels @22.
Polo is pretty much non-existent in Australia I think. Kerry Packer used to play and a search suggests it still happens in country towns, but I don’t know much about it.
Skiing as.a recreation isn’t strongly class-coded. A trip to the snow is viewed a bit like English people going to Blackpool. There are some private lodges, but they aren’t culturally salient.
Hunting (shooting ducks, wild pigs and kangaroos) is highly class-coded, as working class. Foxes are vermin and treated as such, killed as cheaply as possible, with no element of sport.
I already mentioned the public course vs private club distinction.
Jimmy P 08.08.26 at 3:54 am
Long time reader, first time commenter. It seems to me that what makes PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE interesting is that it’s introducing a new claim about what it is reasonable to believe – but it isn’t entirely clear who it’s making this claim about.
Is it the speaker (see MisterMr @1)? Anyone “in their right mind” (Oldster @11)? Or something in between: readers of Crooked Timber? Americans? Australians? Golfers?
I read J-D’s comment @10 as surfacing this challenge, i.e., what’s plausible to you might not be to me. If my reading is correct, then MisterMr @19 is incorrect when he says that J-D is treating “X is plausible” as a statement about “X,” when really it’s about the speaker’s belief’s. Maybe it’s not about X or the speaker’s beliefs – maybe it’s about some other set of people, and what they know, or could know, or assume to know.
All of which to say; PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is doing a ton of work and eliding a lot of detail. Which, of course, is precisely what it’s intended to do – we could talk all day about golfers, or about what Americans or Australians know about golf. Or we could just all agree to look the other way and move on.
Neat little trick, that.
Matt 08.08.26 at 9:44 am
I’m not sure about polo as such, but Polocross (a varient of polo and lacross) is modestly popular in Australia (my wife has worked with people who play it both in Victoria and Queensland.) It’s pretty expensive to play, as you need at least 3-4 horses, and the better people have many more than that, and horses are expensive. See here for Queensland: https://polocrosse.com.au/
More generally, the “Olympic” equestrian sports (dressage, show jumping, eventing) are much more upper class than golf, because a competition level horse starts at around $80K Australian, and goes up quickly, even leaving aside boarding, training, other gear, travel, etc. They are not sports that are very widely popular, of course, though because my wife is an rider and an equine enthusiast, I’ve been to lots of shows. (We could not possibly afford a horse – not even remotely – though if I didn’t find it miserably personally I could easily golf as much as I wanted.)
engels 08.08.26 at 9:52 am
Polo is pretty much non-existent in Australia
I was hoping there was an Aussie rules version with kangaroos… damn.
I think one thing golf has in its favour is it predates capitalism by several centuries and it’s rules were codified relatively early so seems less of a capitalist and imperialist instrument than rugby, cricket, football, etc.
Btw I think in context “perfectly plausible” is roughly equivalent to “doubtless plausible” or “indeed plausible,” where “indeed” etc acknowledges agreement with the interlocutor without changing the meaning of the adjective.
Matt 08.08.26 at 10:05 am
(I was miss-remembering on the people my wife worked for: in Victoria the guy did both polo and Polo cross, but in Queensland just polo. The QLD polo association is here: https://www.queenslandpolo.com.au/) Unsurprisingly, it’s located mostly in very wealthy areas with large horse properties, because it’s a sport that you need a lot of horses, trained all the time, to play.
If you go to a show jumping or dressage event, it will be a mix of very wealthy people, and people who do “work to ride” stuff, who will likely never own a horse, or get the training needed to actually compete.
On golf, at least in the US, the split isn’t primarily between public and private courses, though there are “municiple” courses in some places. There are lots of private courses where you can pay to play a round. (And, “members” often bring their friends – they even extend across lines of wealth, as I know, because all the other male members of my family play golf.) There are “exclusive” clubs, but they make up a pretty small part of the total. In the Gold Coast I regularly drive by private clubs that offer single-game options or short-term memberships. They are not public, but also not “exclusive” in any serious sense, though of course there are such places.
engels 08.09.26 at 7:37 pm
Context for my “round of golf for a tenner” factoid:
Fans of richest PL clubs pay £74 per match as ticket revenue soars
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articles/c2lrxyw4p02o
CJColucci 08.10.26 at 4:45 pm
I’ve usually heard the “perfectly plausible” usage to describe some contingent fact that may or may not be true and may or may not be interesting, but either way doesn’t run afoul of our understanding of how the world works. Take two different pseudo-scientific endeavors: cryptozoology and astrology. There’s no good evidence that Bigfoot exists and plenty of evidence that it doesn’t. There’s no reason Bigfoot couldn’t exist given our current understanding of how the world works; it just doesn’t. But if it did exist it would just be an odd and unexpected fact about the world. Astrology, by contrast, doesn’t fit into our current understanding of how the world works. There are reasons, within that understanding, that astrology can’t work. If we found, however, that astrology did work, we’d have to revise our general understanding of the universe.
Bigfoot might be called “perfectly plausible.”Astrology couldn’t.
nonrenormalizable 08.12.26 at 2:36 pm
It is quite interesting the extent to which some purportedly left-wing people will go to justify some hobby of theirs as being in the long tradition of the proletariat, whereas activities they don’t appreciate are distastefully bourgeois … Golf may predate capitalism in the same manner that feudalism predates capitalism.
It’s alright to enjoy it (though in an increasingly water-stressed environment, perhaps not), but let’s not pretend that that miners and factory workers would hit the front 9 at the end of a shift, or have a boozy foursome at 3 o’clock on Saturdays — though perhaps it’s “perfectly plausible” that they would.
engels 08.12.26 at 7:47 pm
Golf may predate capitalism in the same manner that feudalism predates capitalism.
Yes, I think that’s it: it’s more aristocratic than bourgeois or—shudders—PMC (which is what football/“soccer” is at this point). I’m not trying to defend it, I’m pretty anti-sport in general, just think the hate is a bit obsessive and irrational and I suspect it mainly comes from the PMC left, like most culture war stuff (they’re 100% right about SUVs for the record).