And what are we doing when we grade something.
We are obsessed with grades. When a new V17 boulder is proposed, we marvel in awe at the number, collectively deciding that it must be an achievement nothing short of the zenith of physical human potential. But despite a lot of comparing and transposing of between different grading systems, very little is spoken about what the thing actually being compared is.
At the most basic level, a grade is a given rating of difficulty for climb within an established hierarchical framework. Article over right? Don’t chalk up and pull on just yet. You see, this general definition, while correct, doesn’t tell us anything about what a grade entails. Let me explain.
Why it's complex
When we say that a climb is x difficulty, we are assigning a property to it. But what are we actually doing when assigning that property?
Are we recognising some inherent quality presant within the climb?
Are we trying to find where our experience of climbing it fits into where most people would agree ?
Are we simply contextualising it within our own climbing journey?
Surely it’s not that complicated, right? But let’s not forget that climbing is complicated! It's more bizarre that to me that such a complex set of movements can be synthesised down into one neat little number. So what exactly is that number actually telling us about that piece of rock?
Subjective vs Objective
Two broad distinctions to start the conversation would be to explore the following possibilities:
Grades reflect an objective and mind-independent characteristic of a climb.
Grades reflect the subjective judgement of the climber who experiences the climb.
Let's look at the first one. For more on the second, read my post on [insert post title].
For a thing to be objective, it must by definition exist externally to our minds. So a rock must be a certain difficulty by virtue of all of its features, since it is those that dictate its difficulty. Just as we can’t change the physical properties of a piece of rock without changing its grade, it stands to reason that we cannot change it's grade without changing the rock.
The objective defition would then be:
The grade is a representaion of a rock's features as they relate to it being climb.
This makes some sense if we think about how we talk. We often exclaim"I have done my first v8!" in the same way we might talk about earning above a certain threshold or lifting a certain weight in the gym.
If a climb already possesses a certain difficulty, it does so in spite of anyone having ever climbed it. We also talk about there being a “V18” somewhere out there that is waiting to be discovered and projected by the world elite. If a climb is downgraded, it is simply because we were mistaken about its true grade. And likewise, if people actively disagree with a grade, either one or both of them are wrong.
A problem for objectivity
But this doesn’t reflect the whole reality. The distinction between each grade within any given grading scale is a wholly contrived phenomena.
What is to say for example, that between each font grade we could not keep adding pluses to create finer distinctions between difficulties? If some 7b climbs are “sandbagged” and others are “soft”, we could theoretically create a 7b+++ for the 7b climb which is the closest to 7c without actually being so. This would surelty only stand to make our grading more accurate.
But could that same climb, in some alternative reality grading scale, be 7c-? What would be the difference? The perceived difficulties a climb must conform to the grading systems we have, and not the other way around.
In comes the problem. Grading a climb can be hard, but not primarily because gauging its difficulty is that hard, but more because the difficulty lies in trying to slot it into a preconceived system. And we don’t have a choice.
A completely new grading system would have no frame of reference climbs, no benchmarks, and ultimately would have to rely on other grading systems for equivalence in order to be understood and used.
If I declare a new grading system right now that orders difficulty in the alphabetical sequence of all main characters in Breaking Bad, even if that’s your favourite show and you can bizarrely drum up what that list might look like in your head, it tells you nothing about how what you have just climbed is a Hank Schrader of a Jesse Pinkman. (Stay tuned for up-coming post - "It's-all-bad man - why most beginners get stuck around v5").
If we follow this, then we get an updated defition:
Grades are not features of the rock, but instead a scale we have invented to rate the experience of climbing a rock through comparison to other experiences of climbing rocks.
If a climb's categorizability within a grade rests on its being compared to other climbs, then we cannot say that its grade is independent of our minds. It is by definition dependant on our judgement of it in relation to other pieces of rock.
What does this mean?
Imagine lining up every boulder in the world on a continent-length field and ordering them in terms of difficulty. Now imagine trying to group them. That part, the grouping part, that is what we are doing when we grade something. The grade tells us how difficult something is, but only relative to other things (usually in the immediate proximity).
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