“I could have holed that putt”

I just missed an important putt. I had been putting well all day and this was only a 14 footer. I had holed a 17 footer on the previous hole. There is no question of my ability to sink puts out to 14 feet with some reasonable probability of success. But of course not every time. In fact, if I can regularly sink three out of four at that distance, I’m doing well. So I missed this one. What needs to be explained? Human abilities and skills are inherently fallible.

Let’s assume I’m not just whining about my failure but trying to critique it. I replay the put in head looking for something I did wrong. I recall that my grip didn’t feel quite right. My right hand was too high, and when my right hand is high, I tend to push the ball to the right, which is what I did. For some reason I didn’t stop and correct my grip, but tried to compensate with my shoulder. “There’s my mistake! That shoulder trick almost never works.” OK, then, diagnose complete. Conclusion: “I could have holed that put.” That is to say, there was an identifiable and fixable cause of my error. To be specific, “I could have holed it if I had stopped and fixed my grip.”

Moore’s claim is that utterances of “I could have done X” are inherently iffy. Does this case support it? It might seem so, but we must pay careful attention to what the speaker is saying. With an utterance of “I could have holed it” he alleges only that there was some definite and fixable cause of his failure. He does not specifically say what he believes that cause was. In this case, as we saw, he’s decided that it was his failure to hold the putter properly. He could go on to say “I could have succeeded by holding the putter corrrectly”, or equivalently, “I could have succeeded if I’d held the putter correctly.” But this further claim, please note, is a more specific than the simple “I could have done it.” That last is not a disguised or truncated form of the conditional. Moore’s account does not hold up.