A Game on the Edge: An attempt to unravel the Gordian Knot of tafl games (original) (raw)
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Fair Play: An Etymological, Semantic and Historical Study
In tro duc ti on Alt ho ugh fa ir play is a con cept re la ted to the or ga ni sa ti on of so ci al rela ti ons -and the le vel at which they ta ke pla ce -in all are as of the li fe of the com mu nity, its his to ri cal de ve lop ment shows a si mi la rity to that of sport, with which it is al most al ways as so ci ated -per haps be ca use it is in this are a that it is most so ught af ter. Both 's por t' and 'fa ir pla y' are concepts that ha ve, over ti me, co me to sum up in one or two words a who le ran ge of hu man ac ti ons and forms of be ha vi our that had long be en in exis ten ce when the se terms we re coi ned, and both ha ve en te red ot her lan gu ages as di rect bor ro wings from Eng lish (be ca use they wo uld lo se somet hing of the ir ran ge of mea nings in trans la ti on -and the sco pe of those mea nings is cons tantly wi de ning), ha ving re ta ined the ir ori gi nal English morp ho logy. Thus, 's por t' and 'fa ir pla y' ha ve be co me two mu tu ally in se pa rab le con cepts that de fi ne the re la ti ons hip bet we en pe op le and sport -the first de fi ning the ac ti vity it self, and the se cond the et hi cal valu es as so ci ated with it.
Language, Games, and Evolution: An Introduction
2000
Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in
AN INVITATION TO LANGUAGE AND GAMES
Language—a Game? That language may be compared to games, and hence to strategic and rational interactions, is an ancient idea. As a metaphysical thought, the opposition of chora and kosmos in Plato’s philosophy is the contest and play between the distracted and the ordered, the changing and the permanent. As a metaphor for argumentation, Aristotle’s Topics and its later incarnations, such as the scholastic Ars Obligatoria, are set up as dialogical duels. ...
Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2016
Wittgenstein did not claim that the ordinary language concept ‘game’ cannot be defined: he claimed that there are multiple definitions that can be adopted for special purposes, but no single definition applicable to all games. I will defend this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s position by showing its compatibility with a pragmatic argumentative view of definitions, and how this view accounts for the diversity of disagreeing game definitions in definitional disputes.
Language, games and language games
Journal of Socio-Economics, 2002
How do social values come about and gain legitimacy? Starting from the premise that discourses of social analysis affect the ways in which social norms develop and proliferate, this article models the evolution of professional codes and dialects using Wittgenstein's idea of a language game. A language game is formalized as a repeated game of tacit coordination played among participants with informational asymmetries. The informational asymmetries model the different meanings that people assign to the same word used in a conversation. A language is formalized as a code that emerges as a result of repeated interactions in a language game. The paper argues that certain codes-such as those based on the real number system-lead to more reliable strategies in language games. The result is used to argue that professional dialects based on axiomatizable codes-such as physics, mathematics and economicsare less likely to experience fragmentation into intra-disciplinary 'sects,' camps and incommensurable paradigms than are professional dialects that are not based on an axiomatizable code-such as sociology, psychology, organization studies, and strategic management studies. The idea of a language game is extended to explore ways in which certain disciplines can establish cognitive jurisdiction over particular phenomena, starting from a particular set of codes, and thereby claim 'cognitive monopolies.' A rudimentary theory of the market for ideas is advanced.
Making Sense of Abstract Board Games: Toward a Cross-Ludic Theory
Games and Culture, 2020
The frequent absence of culturally specific, figurative, or decorative markings in abstract board games has challenged theorizations that assume a meaningful representation in the study of games. In accepting this challenge, this article theorizes the historical phenomenon of abstract board games whose nonrepresentational board design and formal rules have transmitted with little change over millennia and across vast expanse. A theoretical framework is outlined for understanding abstract board games-a modular ontology of abstract board games and a typology of player meaning-making in abstract board games. It is argued that the reproducibility and transferability of abstract board games as self-sufficient and reliable formal systems that players share independently from culturally specific meanings and materials may contribute to their dispersal. It is in this interaction between the cross-cultural/ reliable and local/variable semantic structures of abstract board games that game studies from a historical or archaeological perspective may meet literary and social science perspectives.
Philosophical Books, 1981
language discourse, but offer a formalism that departs radically from ordinary English usage (pp. 233-46), and departs in a way that seems open to the criticism levelled by Burge against the Relational approach, viz. that the analysis requires that we credit English speakers with explicit beliefs that there is no good reason beyond the proffered formalism to think they have. In other papers, vague reference to "the logico-linguistic problem" and appeals to "fitting with a grammar and explaining the inferences that we make'' frustrate evaluative efforts while suggesting concealed metaphysical or methodological principles. This is nevertheless a fine collection for use by sophisticated students and researchers in philosophy and linguistics. HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND RITA NOLAN STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT STONY BROOK Game-Theoretical Semantics. Edited by ESA SAARINEN.
"Constitutive Rules: Games, Language, and Assertion"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2020
Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises the question what it is to perform rule-constituted actions (e. g. play, speak, assert) and the question what makes constitutive rules distinctive such that only they make possible the performance of new actions (e. g. playing). In this paper I will criticize Searle's answers to these questions. However, my main aim is to develop a better view, explain how it works in the case of each of games, language, and assertion and illustrate its appeal by showing how it enables rule-based views of these things to respond to various objections.