TV ads are very interesting, but I could see those while watching something slightly more highbrow than Super 12s and the tournament. So I’d like a sports example that actually tells us something about philosophy. I don’t know if this eventually works out, but here’s a try at something.

We’ve all heard ironic cheers – cheers given in exchange for something the crowd actually supports, but which are exaggerated because the target of the cheers has not been worthy of much support recently. (The background is that I just heard the Highbury crowd ironically cheer the ref for finally awarding a free kick after previously deciding that homicide in the penalty area was not worth of a penalty.)

Now, we can sort of make sense of irony or exaggeration (or both, as in this case) when it is applied to contentful things like assertions. But can we really make sense of purely expressive acts, as cheers are usually taken to be, being ironic or exaggerated? If not, then we have to say that cheers are contentful. And if that’s true, it’s very hard to defend non-cognitivist theories in other areas. If saying “Murder is wrong” expresses “Boo! Murder!”, but booing murder itself is a partially assertoric act, then in some sense the cognitivists have already won.

Of course, if cheers have content, then it should be sometimes _semantically_ acceptable to respond “That’s true” or “That’s false” in response to a cheer. This does not seem like it is ever acceptable. But maybe there’s a pragmatic reason for that.