the majority of the times i've heard of 'games' in an inquisitive discussion, it has been in the context of devaluing the validity of a problem or a situation. this is not to say that these problems don't exist at some level, but that they are usually confined to problems that arise in the applications of the rules of the game; rules that were arbitrarily or accidentally chosen. in this context, life could be a 'game', as could dating (hence the term "players"), politics, and many other aspects of life. i'm not saying i agree with any of these, but they deserve a further look.
these examples might lend themselves more to this type of analysis because it seems, because of sociological norms, that there are a certain set of accepted actions in social interactions that could be analogous to 'rules' and in order to be successful in these 'games' one has to take advantage of the knowledge one has of these rules to either play by them to the best of one's abilities or to chose to disregard them for strategic purposes.
even though i've never taken any meta-ethics classes, it seems that some people think that ethical norms are really just games as well. because of the added human element of ethics and my personal ambivalence of what's right and wrong in certain extreme cases, i don't completely throw this idea out either (but on a personal note, it might be because i don't have very strong ideas about this kind of thing). is it okay to kill 20 to save 400? is our national security more important than our individual rights? at times, i think there should be some sort of utilitarian answer to these questions, yet of course there are some conflicting intuitions within myself.
but i think the conceptual tool of 'games' fails to account for what i believe to be real problems in metaphysics and epistemology. wittgenstein's second attempt to annihilate philosophy (after his first attempt in the tractatus with logical atomism) was with the concept of language games in his investigations. his way of solving philosophical problems--problems such as, say, what is knowledge, what is existence--is to access them as problems only arising in the application of the rules of language. so something could count as knowledge iff it resembles other applications of the family term "knowledge" sufficiently. in effect, this specific strategy would make many of the problems philosophers face problems only philosophers of langauge (or maybe linguists or maybe members of an academic english/lit departments) should face.
i think this is misguided for a couple of reasons: first of all, it would just put a lot of people out of work if completely accepted. that or lots of people would move to english departments and call it a day. [see: richard rorty]. but on a serious note, some of these problems can't be solved by linguistic analysis. furthermore, these problematic situations can't be fully explained by linguistic analysis either. eg take problems of epistemology. ppl like wittgenstein and some of his followers like rorty just want to get rid of the entire enterprise. but surely knowledge has some problems:
- what counts as knowledge?
- what is belief?
- what is justification?
- how does one account for evidence?
- is there a causal element in justification?
- is knowledge based on foundations or cohesion or both or neither?
- what is truth?
- gettier?
so here i used epistemology as a counter-example to a wittgensteinian "everything is a game" strategy of analyzing philosophical problems. but i think you can also provide real (here i mean real as in more than just linguistic) problems in metaphysics, although i'm not gonna provide an argument here. nevertheless, the strategy of games is helpful in understanding some things, especially activities arising from human social interaction.
ok, this has gone on long enough, and i probably didn't tie in a lot of loose ends in this post... but i'm gonna leave it like that. feel free to school me if you want :D
1 comment:
I often hear people discount something's value as being merely a game. I said the same thing about logic in a post of mine. I think one meaning of the word is that this thing has no value outside of evaluating and playing by rules of the game. After you close up Monopoly, the consequences of the game aren't too important (at least to those who think of it as merely a "game"). On the other hand, one may take seriously relationships, or chess for that matter. In a sense, when one says that something is not just a game, it means that it holds value beyond merely as applications of rules to solve problems. Therefore ethics may be seen as more than a game; it has rules that, ostensibly, should be followed, but it also has bearing on our life. If one says, eg, math is just a game, it means that there is no intrinsic (tentatively used) point to it.
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