It is my personal opinion that MMA's open challenges constitute the "fruitless search" Aristotle spoke of, and that the TMA arguement that not all practitioners have been beaten constitutes an appeal to ignorance (ie "you don't know who is best, you have never faced Grandmaster Z").
I don't know if that helps or not. I hope it does.
Well, I think it does, in the sense that it crystalizes the core of your argument in terms of a familar paradigm, and as it happens, I'm not at all sure you
can interpret MMA's challenge to be a fruitless search. Aristotle's argument, so far as I can tell, is really an appeal to a kind of probablistic decision-making, a heuristic, not a strictly formal, way to choose between two possible states of affairs. It works like this: suppose we are playing a version of the nursery-level card game War, where each player turns over a card and the higher card allows the holder to take the lower card and add it to the latter's deck, and suppose we a playing a game in which ten thousand packs have been shuffled together. After playing for an hour or two, it dawns on the players that no aces have surfaced. They keep playing, but two hours after that pass, and still no aces have turned up. As time goes on, the normal statistical likelihood of finding an ace in a game of this kind where all the packs are normal becomes so overwhelming that the players begin to doubt the presence of any aces in any of the shuffled packs used in the game. Five hours later, still no aces. At this point, only an extraordinarily unlikely shuffling outcome could account for the fact that no aces have surfaced. Does this mean that we have a
proof that no aces have surfaced? No. But we've played long enough that the statistics require an absurdly unlikely outcome to give rise to the fact that in eight hours, no aces have surfaced—on the assumption that the decks were normal. But if they were aceless to start with, then virtually nothing bizarre or grotesquely improbable has occurred. We don't have a forced result from a logical proof, but rather an empirically grounded inference increasingly strongly supported by the increasingly improbable shuffling accident which had to have happened to keep even a single ace from showing up after eight hours of play.
Your application of the `fruitless search' model takes the MMA challenge to be something like the game of War with thousands of decks that I described. But that's the problem—you have no reason to believe that what has occurred is a fruitless search of the assembled ranks of TMAists, from the bottom of the skill heap to the top. In order to invoke Aristotle's fruitless search model
in the first place, you have to assume that an actual search has indeed been under way, that the pool of TMAists being `assessed' by the sheer existence of MMA competitions is a significant and representative fraction of TMAists. But you can't just go ahead and assume that! That's an empirical question, and you need to provided evidence to back it up before you can claim that there's justification for the fruitless search. And I think there's some excellent reason to believe that such an assumption isn't justified.
Take TKD for example. My impression is that there are really two cohorts within TKD: those whose vision of the art coincides with Olympic sparring rules and ring competition success, with high spinning kicks and low hands, and those whose vision involves imposing armbars on obnoxious assailants and forcing their necks low enough that a hard knife-hand can be delivered to their throats, with a low sidekick to the side of one of their knees to blow out the joint and end the divergence of opinion right there. You won't get the first group to participate in MMA competition, because all their training is going in a totally different direction, with different scoring, rules and anything else you can think of. The second group—to which I myself belong—won't participate either, because they/we aren't interested in any kind of ring sport competition. We want to be prepared for unpredictable, hostile and pathologically violent would-be assailants whose loss, if it came to that, the world probably wouldn't mourn all that much. Training to fight a skilled and dedicated BJJ grappler, whose profile is probably as far from the assailant I just described as can be imagined, would be a waste of training time for us. So we're not waiting on line for our shot at the Shamrocks or Gracies or their inheritors. The thing is, we don't have an emotional stake in proving a point about MMA vs. TMA under MMA ring conditions. Our emotional stake is much more vested in knowing that we can impose at will any level of damage on a violent attacker whose strategy or tactics we have no way of knowing at the start of the fight.
This is why I don't think you can invoke the `fruitless search' argument along the lines I've sketched it above: because—if I'm right about my fellow TMAists—most TMA fighters
do not care what happens in MMA sport competition and will not be in the contestant pool.
opcorn:
