Games in progress 3

[Being a paper by me about games, work in progress that I'm posting in instalments. The first instalment is here, and the second here - NG]

Strategy (b) - some of them are, strictly, games. Suits also devotes a considerable amount of space to explaining why at least one type of children’s game - a type exemplified by 'Tree and Girl' and by 'Staircase' - do fall within his definition of games, at least when considered in more sophisticated versions: the type in question being games of make-believe or role-playing. He subsumes these under the model of an impersonation game, and the key point of his argument is that this type of game fits his definition because in impersonation the players deprive themselves of the most efficient means of doing what they set out to do. They deprive themselves because they play without a script. Suits writes:

[U]se of a script by players of make-believe games would be a more efficient - less risky - means for keeping a dramatic action going than is the invention of dramatic responses on the spot, which is what the game requires. (p. 125)

Now, it should be said that this remark comes after 30 pages in which some quite subtle and refined examples of role-playing or impersonation games have been discussed, and it is arguable that with respect to those examples what Suits says has some force. I'm not altogether sure even of that, but in any case - and this I am sure of - what he says has no force with respect to the role-playing, make-believe games of very young children; and these are precisely the games his definition needs to fit, or also needs to fit, if it is to deal satisfactorily with a very large class of what are standardly called games.

The claim that children unable yet to read with facility, or to read at all, would play games of make-believe more efficiently with a script doesn't withstand a moment's scrutiny, and therefore the claim that games all involve the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles, the use of less efficient means than those that are available in principle, is not substantiated in this case. The same applies to the story-telling game I described - 'Caractacus Potts'. The players could, I suppose, simply read from an amusing book, but while that might meet the objective of making them laugh, it wouldn't meet their objective of cooperatively creating their own story for the enjoyment of it. For this purpose, it's not clear that there are any more efficient means. The same applies, I think, to 'The Suits Game'.

Is there a persuasive way of excluding such activities from the category 'games' that is not the result of the disputed definition (Suits's definition) itself? Note, first, that I am not committed by any philosophical principle to denying that there could be a definition of the kind he aims for (involving the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions). There are concepts that can be so defined, the concept of a triangle being one; and there are things in the world, like giraffes and other natural species, or capital cities, or Wednesdays in July, where we don't need to resort to the notion of family resemblance in order to say what they are. Note, also, that Bernard Suits says in the preface to The Grasshopper, that he for his part isn't committed to a principle of universal definability:

It seems altogether more reasonable to begin with the hypothesis that some things are definable and some are not... (p. 22)

Yet when Skepticus proposes a counter-definition to Suits's own, to cover the role-playing games that his definition arguably does not, Suits has Grasshopper demur as follows:

[I]f there are two radically different kinds of game - role-governed and goal-governed - then we would have to give up our attempt to formulate a single definition of games. (p. 91)

But not wanting to give up on that enterprise cannot count, by itself, as a good enough reason for persisting with it when it appears to be failing. That would be question-begging - excluding by simple fiat those games that look unsuitable (sic).

Interpretative charity here should prompt us to understand Grasshopper as meaning, not that a single, unified definition must be found at all costs (for we know now that Suits is not committed to the possibility of one always being findable), but only that the search for a single, unified definition is worth the effort. But, the requirement of charity notwithstanding, it looks to me as if begging the question is what Suits is in fact doing. In an essay written after The Grasshopper was published, and which appears as an appendix to the new edition of the book, he writes as if there is an objective truth about what games are such that his definition could fit this truth even against our linguistic usages, which have misled us. Suits writes:

[T]he question whether all things called games have something in common is very different from the question whether all things that are games have something in common. If, obviously, some of the things called games are called games metaphorically or carelessly or arbitrarily or stupidly, then there will predictably be nothing importantly common to all of them. (p. 162)

That appears to me to imply something like the following: we already know what games are, being guided to them, as to the species giraffe, by their shared properties; Suits's definition simply draws the boundary that is already there, and uses of the word 'game' to apply to other activities beyond the boundary have become 'metaphorical', 'careless', 'arbitrary' or 'stupid'. But another perspective on the same thing would be to say that his definition picks out from within the activities called games a subset, stipulates that only members of this subset are truly games and then disparages usages to the contrary with some bad-sounding words.

It is worth observing that what Suits is doing in doing that, so far from discomfiting Wittgenstein, was perfectly well understood by him:

What... counts as a game...? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn... We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Philosophical Investigations, p 33 e)

And:

If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. (p. 36 e)

In any event, how can it be that games, a social activity that did not pre-exist us, the human beings who create them and call them 'games', are indentifiable as a reality independently of our linguistic usages - such that one could say with Suits that there are things which are games as distinct from things that are merely called games? Games are not a natural kind. They are not like giraffes or planets or water, which would be what they are whatever we called them, or if we ceased to be and so could not speak of them at all.

(I interject, at this point, a caution to anyone who might want to infer from my defence of Wittgenstein on this specific question - the meaning of the word 'game' - that I have some more general commitment to anti-foundationalism. I do not. My philosophical commitments are, in fact, the opposite. But thinking - as I do think - that there are objective realities beyond language and that not everything is constituted by discourse, in no way obliges me to believe that the meanings of words we use for procedures or institutions created by ourselves must always be specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. As we have seen, Bernard Suits himself does not believe this. The dispute about the meaning of the word 'game', consequently, has no general implication with respect to wider debates about anti-foundationalism and essentialism.)

Here's a thought experiment. An academic appointments committee dealing with a very large pile of job applications has agreed to draw up its shortlist from applicants who appear, from their application forms, CVs and references, to satisfy three or more of four requirements, a, b, c and d. (Say: some publications; some teaching experience; an expertise in theories of justice; an expertise in some immediately adjacent area.) An applicant who has fewer than three of the relevant characterisitics doesn't make the cut. But anyone who does make the cut goes on to the longlist, this to be shortened in due course into a shortlist.

By an emergent usage in the committee, such an applicant is called a threeper. (Collectively they might be referred to as threeple.)

I don't think it would make sense in this situation for a member of the committee to try and put his or her colleagues right by saying that in fact those whom they were calling threepers did not coincide with the group of applicants who were threepers; that some amongst the former were being called threepers carelessly or stupidly; that in reality, the threepers were the applicants with the two characteristics a and c (some publications and an expertise in theories of justice) and irrespective of whether they met the two other requirements. This wouldn't make sense even in the circumstance that the dissident member of the committee had identified the two most important qualifications for the job. He or she would, in that case, have a good reason for trying to reorient the committee's deliberations so as to shape its longlist in a more effective way. But they wouldn't thereby have hit upon the true meaning, or correct definition, of the word 'threeper'.

This seems to me analogous with the state of affairs regarding the meaning of the word 'games', though it is more formalized.

[The next and last instalment is here.]