The annual edition of American Fencing showed up in the mail last week, and during Turkey Day I read it. Most of it was ho-hum, but I was shocked when I read the article by noted fencer and referee Jeff Bukantz, Can Referees Determine Intent? As it is print-only, apparently, I’ll summarize: he polled several high level referees, most with high level fencing experience, as to whether or not referees should pay attention to what they think is on the fencer’s mind, or simply interpret the actions. He found several referees who not only think divining the intent of a fencer is important, someone actually said, “Basically a referee needs to have historical knowledge of a fencer’s catalogue of actions.”
I’ll stop here to mention what some may think is important, but is really incidental – my experience as a referee. In short, I’m not in the same league as these refs. I’ve refereed, in order of difficulty, at Youth Enrichment League, high school (and, to be clear, this is Midwest high school, not Coastal high schools, which are considered much better than Midwest), and MN DIV events (and, for the latter, not in several years). I attended a referee seminar 20 or so years ago, but I declined taking the academic tests or the practicum, because, quite frankly, while I’m part of the fencing community because I enjoy ruining someone else’s day, I far prefer to do it on the strip with a saber in hand, rather than on the side of a strip screwing up a call.
I’m also, at best, a mediocre foil & sabre. (Recent illness hasn’t helped matters.)
But all this doesn’t matter.
To continue my thought, keeping a catalogue on the fencers you are going to referee is NUTS!
Look, the human brain is a weird and wonderful organ, but it’s nowhere near perfect. Among its many faults (or, perhaps, advantages, depending on how different functioning might impact the survival potential of the human organism) is the fact that information it picks up from the environment and from other sectors of the brain, even that which is not consciously detected and may or may not be true, can influence the judgment of that brain. We know this is true and even quite strong through the undeniable existence of the placebo and nocebo effects, and the fact that study participants in pharmaceutical tests will actually pick up on whether or not they’re getting the authentic drugs or the sugar pills when the administrators happen to know what is being handed out, without being told, resulting in the gold standard for such tests being double-blinded tests, wherein the administrators interacting with the patients also don’t know who is getting which.
Is a referee supposed to be using their prior knowledge of the two fencers on the strip before them? I suppose that depends on your definition of a referee. My definition is fairly basic – a referee is an entity, acting in a non-biased manner, that evaluates the actions of the fencers in the context of the rules of engagement for the bout in order to determine who has scored a valid touch on the valid target area of their opponents. This is a good first hack at a definition.
The key is not being biased. If I have a referee who studies the fencers they’ll referee, keeps a book on them, there’s an inevitable bias built into that study. Not that of friendship or teammates, but that of expectation. The observation that Fencer A has a propensity for inviting an attack, parrying, and flicking to the shoulder, while Fencer B prefers simple single feint attacks that he occasionally chokes on[1] will easily be read as an implicit bias that Fencer A should win all of her bouts with Fencer B. Our referee may loudly proclaim that he won’t let that knowledge bias his calls. Our referee will truly believe it.
Don’t trust him, though. Studies of the brain and how knowledge of this sort can influence judgment have been executed in the field of psychology, and show that unconscious bias can occur. In my early days of referee, I had to fight with that influence, and no doubt I compromised a touch or two as I learned to ignore who was fencing while trying to interpret the actions.
And that’s the sad thing here: we’re talking about the actions that actually take place on the strip. Divining intent, while critical for a coach who’s evaluating the tactical decisions made by their fencer vs their implementation, shouldn’t be needed by the referee. Why?
Historically, fencing, be it Olympic style or the more informal and heavy duty styles such as broadsword, doesn’t derive from an abstract game of some sort in which intent plays a part of a final score. It’s practice for life and death on the dueling grounds and in pre-modern gun warfare. That’s how it started out, and that history continues to influence and justify the existence of fencing as a sport, so evaluating our refereeing needs to take that into account, because otherwise the sport continues to mutate away from its original forms. Frankly, intent in the mind of a fencer doesn’t count for shit if they don’t execute on that intent properly. If I initiate an attack, hesitate, withdraw my arm, and get smacked in the chest, then that’s my opponent’s touch – or me on the ground with a sword through me, if we were on a battleground. My intent to use a double feint isn’t important if I don’t execute it.
To complete the argument, the rule book covers all this as a simple perceptual matter. Is the point threatening target? Is the elbow straightening? Has the attack finished without a touch? Was the parry truly effective? There are various amounts of interpretation of the rules, but divining intent is merely a complicating factor which throws a fog over the real problem the referee faces with each engagement:
Who executed a valid attack on the valid target?
But there’s a bit more reality, as discovered by science, that I need to throw in here, and it’s this: human perception is mostly a myth. It’s a fallacy to say that humans see reality! The truth is that we see and hear little bits, and then our brain constructs a narrative with which to interpret what is happening. This is a survival characteristic that evolved to tell us to run like the wind when the bushes seem to rustle, because if we had to process every element of reality in order to decide if that’s a lion or just the wind behind the bush, well, we’d be a meal long before we reproduced. Our brains, for all their fantastic capabilities, are too slow when faced with that much information.
But this shortcut doesn’t guarantee that narrative is right. Better to expend energy needlessly than to get eaten up, no?
When I go out to referee, I consciously try to remove these filters from my eyes and my brain. I try to just see what’s really going on and take the time to process that raw data from reality. I don’t want my filters making up a story for me based on minimal information.
Additionally, as a referee I have no interest in who’s on the strip. I’d have names removed from uniforms, if I could. This should be a disinterested exercise in evaluation of the actions of two fencers, at that moment, regardless of their histories, their state of minds, or much else, in the context of the rules.
Intent? That’s communicated through their attack implementations and results. Keeping some sort of book in order to have an educated guess on intent just seems like an invitation to biased refereeing to me.
