[r-t] What people think they have rung

[Chris02]

Don Morrison wrote:
> I think it all comes back to the recurring issue of whether
> those actually ringing know what they've rung, or if those
> with the tidy formalism into which they're trying to fit it
> know better. Does the dog wag its tail, or the tail wag the
> dog?

It seems to me that relying entirely on what people think they are ringing
is a slippery slope. If two ringers learn a method in different ways and
then ring it together in a peal, can they claim that they rang different
methods?

For instance when I was first learning Plain Bob Minor my tutor explained
places and how to work out the next dodge by where you passed the treble.
One of the old boys told me these places were nonsense, all he did was on
the way out count the number of bells before the treble, pass that number of
bells after the treble and then take a step back. I struggled with both
these ways and only cracked it when someone else told me a third way which
was the order of the dodges as a circle of work. A few years I tried out
each of these three techniques and found I could ring the method using any
of them, but my thinking was different in each case. If I rang a peal and
used each technique in turn for the extents, could I claim to have rung
three methods?

Chris Adams