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Introduction to Games: Unifying Logic, Language, and Philosophy

Profile image of Ahti PietarinenAhti Pietarinen

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the unifying methodologies over what have been perceived as pretty disparate logical ‘systems’, or else merely an assortment of formal and mathematical ‘approaches’ to philosophical inquiry. This development has largely been fueled by an increasing dissatisfaction to what has earlier been taken to be a straightforward outcome of ‘logical pluralism’ or ‘methodological diversity’. ...

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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.

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Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the unifying methodologies over what have been perceived as pretty disparate logical 'systems', or else merely an assortment of formal and mathematical 'approaches' to philosophical inquiry. This development has largely been fueled by an increasing dissatisfaction to what has earlier been taken to be a straightforward outcome of 'logical pluralism' or 'methodological diversity'. These phrases appear to reflect the everyday chaos of our academic pursuits rather than any genuine attempt to clarify the general principles underlying the miscellaneous ways in which logic appears to us. But the situation is changing. Unity among plurality is emerging in contemporary studies in logical philosophy and neighbouring disciplines. This is a necessary follow-up to the intensive research into the intricacies of logical systems and methodologies performed over the recent years. The present book suggests one such peculiar but very unrestrained methodological perspective over the field of logic and its applications in mathematics, language or computation: games. An allegory for opposition, cooperation and coordination, games are also concrete objects of formal study. As a metaphor for argumentation Aristotle's Topics and its reincarnations such as the scholastic Ars Obligatoria are set up as dialogical duels (Pietarinen, 2003a). Logics exploiting this idea resurface in the 20th century attempts to clarify the concepts of argument and proof. The game metaphor has retained its strength in contemporary theories of computation (Pietarinen, 2003b, Japaridze, this volume), in which computation is recast in terms of the symbiosis between the Computing System ('Myself') and its Environment ('Nature'). In mathematics, the benefits of doing so were noted decades ago by Stanislaw Ulam (1960) , who wrote how amusing it is "to consider how one can 'gamize'

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Games comprise a widely used method in a broad intellectual realm(including, but not limited to, philosophy, logic, mathematics,cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computation, linguistics,physics, economics). Each discipline advocates its own methodology and a unified understanding is lacking. A number of game theories in formal studies are critically surveyed. Games as explanations for logic is assessed, and the relevance of a conceptual analysis of games to cognition discussed. It is suggested that the evolution plays an important part in the game-theoretic concept of meaning.

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What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical sub disciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life.

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