Cleveland (long!)

[Laurence Horn]

Barry Popik writes,

>CLEVELAND
>
>     Cleveland jokes are beginning again.  The football Cleveland Browns are
>0-3, and Jay Leno is warming up.
>     The Cleveland Browns are not really the real Cleveland Browns.  The
>Baltimore Colts became the Indianapolis Colts.  The Cleveland Browns then
>became the Baltimore Ravens.  The current Browns are an expansion team with
>the old name.

Barry is right on the history, but arguably wrong on the metaphysics.  When
the Washington (baseball) Senators moved to Minnesota to become the Twins
and a new expansion team was granted to Washington (in 1961, if memory
serves) and dubbed the Senators, the new team could have been described as
"an expansion team with the old team", essentially an instance of homonymy.
The same thing has happened on other occasions, e.g. with the Baltimore
Orioles.  But the Cleveland case is different, at least if the definitional
intentions of the National Football League are relevant.  The current team
is new by roster, ownership, etc.--it's a new FRANCHISE--but it's defined
as THE SAME TEAM as the former ("real") Cleveland Browns, as far as records
go and other traditions (whence the boring helmets and uniforms, for one
thing); this was agreed to by Art Modell (the owner of the Baltimore
Ravens/nés Browns).  Essentially, we are dealing here with a
chronologically discontinuous constituent, sort of like the way Park Avenue
is spatially interrupted by Grand Central and then picks up again on the
other side.  Of course it could be argued that the NFL has simply agreed to
pretend that the current Browns are instances of the same spatiotemporal
entity as the old Browns.  Philosophically, this is an interesting issue,
but I'll spare you my thoughts on the issue of whether the Browns case
constitutes  a well-formed causal chain and the implications of this
question for the Kripkean theory of names.

Larry