Why most of your watches are technically jewellery
On dummy watches, Frankenwatches, clowns in palaces, and the philosophy of asking what a watch is
SDC reader and fellow Substacker, the lost spring bar (TLSB), recently took a comment of mine from a thread on his page and ran with it. He originally asked whether I’d wear a watch where the movement had been replaced with a block of intricately engraved gold; I said yes, with conditions, and then he wrote a fun essay to assert that the resulting object is no longer a watch at all.
In my original response, I said I would wear such an object ‘if I loved how it looked’, and I would treat it as a piece of wrist jewellery rather than as a watch. I also said I would never wear it as a daily watch, because I do use wristwatches to tell the time. So I guess we never actually debated whether the thing ‘is a watch’ at all… but regardless, his essay stumbles into a much bigger problem in philosophy than dummy watches deserve. Which means we must go into the rabbit hole...
Estimated reading time: ~9 minutes
Clowns and palaces
There is an old (I believe Turkish1) proverb that if a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king; the palace becomes a circus. Which is to say, intent is what defines the category of the object. A person living out of their car has not magicked their car into a house. A person living on a boat at a marina has, and we even have a word for it, a ‘houseboat’. The difference is that in the second case, the boat has been deliberately fitted with plumbing and electricity, and it is now used in a way that earns the new label. In the first case, the dude is just sleeping in the back seat because life isn’t working out too well.
If I take a pair of trousers and wrap them around my head, I can call this a turban. Maybe it will sort of look like a turban, too. But they are still trousers. The question of whether they stay trousers or have transmuted into trendy headwear depends mostly on what I am doing with them, why, and whether anyone in the wider world will accept my re-labelling. Most of the time, the answer is no, you weirdo, those are trousers and you have them on your head. But if it’s Taylor Swift doing the same conversion, maybe it sticks?
I’m reminded of The Lorax, a children’s book written by Dr. Seuss and published in 1971. This Once-ler guy invents something absurd called a ‘thneed’ and it seems objectively stupid… but then it catches on and his thneed business is so successful that it leads to the extinction of all the truffula trees which were used to create the thneeds. Absolutely epic book - the movie is less good, but here’s the scene when he first proposes this is something for everyone:
I fully appreciate that this is not at all analogous given the Once-ler isn’t re-labelling something that already exists. This is about inventing a new category that nobody asked for. But the point I was thinking of making was that what something ‘is’ depends in part on whether the world agrees to call it that.
Anyway… when I say I would happily wear a movement-less object I love, I am not trying to redefine what a watch is. I am simply qualifying its use. The same lump of metal might be a ‘watch’ in one context, a ‘piece of wrist jewellery’ in another, and a ‘paperweight’ in a third. What it is can depend on what it is doing, or even what it is meant to do.
Qualifiers are not a small thing
Here, I think TLSB and I agree, even though we may at first appear to be on opposite sides of the table. He works through several thought experiments and reaches some loose conclusions. A working watch is a watch. A watch that has run out of power reserve and sits in a drawer is also a watch. A watch that needs a service and tells the wrong time is a watch. A watch that has rusted into oblivion at the bottom of a lake is, in his words, ‘less of a watch’, in the way a corpse might retain the shape of a person without being alive. A dummy watch with no movement at all, he says, is not a watch.
I think this is broadly correct, but the labels themselves are doing all the work here. None of these objects are just ‘a watch’. They are, to be precise, a working watch, a wound-down watch, a broken watch, a rusted, irreparable watch and a dummy watch. This is a big deal, don’t you think?
Let’s expand the scope and take a non-watch example. Imagine you are organising a 100m race at a club meet, and someone drops out at the last minute. So you put out some ads online, and someone calls you. ‘I am actually a professional 100m athlete,’ a stranger tells you on the phone. Great! So you slot them in to the roster. Then on the day, they turn up for the race, and it turns out they are a Paralympic 100m athlete but your race is not a Paralympic event. Without the ‘Paralympic’ qualifier this is a wild category error. Given a ‘100m athlete’ and a ‘100m Paralympic athlete’, both people are indeed athletes, and they both cover 100m as fast as they can. The ‘Paralympic’ qualifier is the entire difference.
My point is, ‘broken watch’ and ‘watch’ have exactly the same relationship. Both are watches in some loose sense, but the qualifier tells you more about the object. You cannot trust a broken watch to tell you the time, but you can still trust it to be a watch in your drawer. A dummy watch is also a watch in some loose sense. The ‘dummy’ qualifier tells you that timekeeping as a function has been disabled or removed, and that what is left is the shape, the design, the aesthetic and maybe even the social signal which one might otherwise find in a working watch.
Which - to my earlier point - makes it ‘a piece of wrist jewellery shaped like a watch, worn on occasion in the place of what you would otherwise wear as a watch’.
On the ‘ability-to-tell-time’ as a valid test
TLSB proposes that what makes something ‘a watch’ is its potential to tell the time. The rusted watch at the bottom of the lake is still a watch (albeit, a ‘lesser’ watch) because, once upon a time, it could. But a dummy watch is not a watch because it never could and never will.
I am not sure this test holds.
If you sink a watch to the bottom of the ocean and leave it for fifty years until the movement has fully oxidised away and the ceramic case has been crushed, you have an object that can never be restored. Its potential to tell the time is the same as a granite rock’s potential to tell the time. Under TLSB’s own test, this should disqualify it from being a watch. But he thinks it still is, because of what it was. Which suggests the test is not really about future potential at all. It feels like it’s more about origin and intent at the moment of manufacture.
To be fair to TLSB, he never explicitly endorsed this - I am inferring it from how he treats the rusted watch in his essay. He could just as easily say the rusted watch was a watch until it became unrecoverable, and is now a former watch. That’s a defensible position too. But it’s a different test from the one he applies to the dummy watch, and that inconsistency is what I want to poke at.
Where does that leave us? Well, an object is a watch if it was designed and built with the intention of telling the time, regardless of whether it ever did, ever can, or ever will. A dummy watch, manufactured by Rolex specifically as a dummy for window display, also fits this definition. It was designed and built with the intention of being a watch, just one that never had to work. The case, the proportions, the crown, the dial, all engineered as if to tell the time, so the omission (or disabling) of the movement was a budget and supply decision - and definitely not a philosophical one.
So if the test is about origin and intent, the dummy watch must pass. If the test is about whether it ever told the time, the rusted watch fails. TLSB can have one test or the other, but not both.