Abstract
The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies on Rawls’s distinction between types (“blueprints”, as Rawls called them) of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case.
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Notes
I’ll use ‘rule’ and ‘norm’ interchangeably. As I use these terms, rules are just what “flat-out” imperatives – typically conditional ones: do Q! (if P) – signify, to echo Williamson’s (1996, 246) usage for the case of assertion: the specific force that is indicated in default, literal uses of imperative phrases, cf. García-Carpintero (2021a). “Flat-out” directives are those uttered by someone presumed to have the required authority to make a command, as when I say ‘Eat!’ to my daughter, and in contrast with ‘Take it!’ said to give advice, ‘Come in’ to give permission or ‘Keep well!’ to express good will. Against recent theorizing (Hanks 2015), I think of what the schematic P and Q stand for above as force-neutral contents, which I take to be just properties of verifying conditions or situations (Richard 2013). Kaufman (2012) argues that a directive that p is synonymous with an assertion that the addressee should/must make it the case that p. On standard Kratzerian contextualist modal semantics, the obligation is conditional on implicit or explicit features that select accessible worlds and order them. This is implausible (Charlow 2018, 82; Roberts 2018, 331); but I do take directives to entail on illocutionary grounds Kaufman’s assertoric counterparts (Charlow 2014), and I’ll avail myself of this throughout the paper. There are important distinctions to be made among rules or prescriptions in this wide sense (objective vs subjective, general vs particular, cp. Brennan et al. 2013, Reiland, 2020); see below, §3.
Conte (1988, 251–2) provides a fuller history of the distinction.
In brief, my reasons are these. Rules in the “practice” sense define practices, says Rawls (1955, 25). This is a “technical” notion for a normative category, “any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure”, like “games and rituals, trials and parliaments”, ibid., 3. Practices are actually instantiated kinds: “Blue-prints for a practice do not make a practice. That there is a practice entails that there are instances of people having been engaged and now being engaged in it”, ibid., 26. Commitment to real, actually instantiated normative kinds fits Rawls’s moral realism at the time (Russell 2004, 144).
Similar characterizations can be found in the literature: according to formalism, “games are a product of their constitutive rules … these rules jointly create and define the game” (Kretchmar 2015, 11); “the essential nature of a game is its rule-set and … proper play involves obeying the rules” (Nguyen 2017, 9). Discussing the specific case of sports, Devine et al. (2020, §2.1) characterize instead formalism as the view that a game is “constituted solely by written rules … just the set of written rules that govern it”, my emphasis. But this only identifies a straw man who, in Rawls’ terms above, fn. 3, identifies games with blueprints for games. It doesn’t even fit the arch-formalist Suits (1978, 54–5), for a central element in his characterization is that players have the “lusory attitude”; this is his very influential rendering of what anti-formalists call the “ethos” of games – in my own account below, §3, the practical grounds for the enforcement, or acceptance, of specific kinds defined by constitutive rules.
Recent discussion of these issues mostly stems from the deservedly influential work of Kit Fine; cf. Correia (2017) for a good account and further references. Although this is not my own view, fictionalists about common sense ontology might take my resort to the ideology of kinds with real definitions as a merely expository ladder to be ultimately kicked out.
They are “Platonic” essences, in the (fitting in this context, see below) terminology of Newman & Knobe (2019), as opposed to “causal” essences like that of water. I thus assume the “generalized essentialism” they argue for.
Thanks to Aidan Gray for pointing out this feature of the proposal; see also fn. 33.
Cf. Geras (2009), Ellis (2011) and Berman (2013) for replies to Suits. Unlike him, I only aim to vindicate formalism for species-like “lower taxa” – in our context, specific games or specific speech acts. I am doubtful that the view can be defended for genus-like “higher taxa” like games in general, or assertion understood as a genus encompassing guesses, conjectures, putting forward propositions for their consideration, and so on, cp. Ridge (2019). See fn. 29.
Like others in the literature, Nguyen’s characterization in fn. 4 above exhibits this ambiguity, because it is compatible with both relative to how one reads ‘proper’.
This earlier terminology thus nicely fits Newman & Knobe’s (2019), see fn. 6.
I originally had provided as examples of regulative rules for chess the strategic advice for novices that one finds in internet: Open with a center pawn! Don’t Move A Piece Twice Before Move 10! However, a referee objected that regulative rules are “the type of edicts that a ruling body would come up with, not strategic advice”. I cannot see why; such rules fit perfectly well the intuitive characterization offered by Searle in the quotations at the start and other writers mentioned there. Thus, Kaplan (2021, §4) correctly mentions them as examples of Rawls’ (1955) norms on the “summary” conception – which, as said, is just his term for regulative rules. But given that other colleagues somehow agree with the referee, I replaced them with the one in the text, suggested by Iñigo Valero, cf. also Reiland 2020, 145. It has the problem that it is actually FIDE rule 6.2.3. I think it can be considered regulative, because intuitively the same game would be played if a bluetooth device activated the clock when the player makes the move; and it doesn’t apply to internet chess, which again intuitively is the same game. It may well be a borderline case of the regulative vs. constitutive distinction, which I grant is indeterminate as many other nonetheless real ones, e.g. male vs. female. If the reader has doubts, however, please substitute instead the strategic advice cases, or (closer to Searle’s examples) a politeness rule of chess, say, Shake your opponent’s hand before the match!
Hindriks (2009, 272), Hindriks & Guala (2014, 472), Guala & Hindriks (2015, 188–9), Guala (2016, 58–9), Marsili (2019, §2), McCamon (2014, 138), and Reiland (2020, 142, fn. 9) all assume the linguistic characterization of the distinction in their discussions – to which I am otherwise sympathetic, see fn. 41. Our disagreement is this: they assume a (flawed) theoretical account of the constitutive vs. regulative distinction (Searle’s “count as” account of constitutive rules); hence, by rejecting it as one should, they also wrongly reject the significance of the distinction. I assume instead a pretheoretical account in terms of exemplars and an intuitive gloss, and then I offer a different theoretical proposal, FN, which (I claim) vindicates it. The full package I offer – kinds defined by constitutive rules, enforced by social norms – is similar to theirs, so in that respect we are fundamentally in agreement. But our disagreement is not merely terminological. First, their inferential path is methodologically flawed; leaving aside Searle’s misguided characterization, the constitutive-regulative distinction is intuitively in good standing. Second, on my account kinds constituted by rules are straightforwardly normative.
Searle begrudgingly admits as much: casting the rule in the “X counts as Y in context C” mold “is not intended as a formal criterion for distinguishing constitutive and regulative rules. Any regulative rule could be twisted into this form, e.g., ‘Non-wearing of ties at dinner counts as wrong officer behavior’.” But he goes on to argue in support of the “counts-as” characterization, that “here the noun phrase following ‘counts as’ is used as a term of appraisal not of specification. Where the rule naturally can be phrased in this form and where the Y term is a specification, the rule is likely to be constitutive” (Searle 1969, 36). (Note again the hedges ‘naturally’ and ‘likely’.) But the noun phrase ‘an assertion that p’ is a “specification” in (5) and (6); for (I take it) the “specification” sense of the “count as” locution is just its use to state a definition. And it is easy to turn (1) into a partial definition of a rule-constituted activity, in the way Searle envisages here for rules of etiquette – which he (wrongly, in my view, see fn. 27) takes to be merely regulative of the relevant activity. Of course, it would be wrong to take (1) as a partial definition of the actually enacted practice of chess. This establishes that the constitutive-regulative distinction can only be vindicated for particular practices.
Formalism as understood here is thus an ontological view. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Williamson is committed to its details; perhaps he doesn’t understand “definition in terms of constitutive rules” the way I am assuming. In a quotation I provided above he says that “Constitutive rules do not lay down necessary conditions for performing the constituted act”; on my view they do, if the defining conditions properly include normative vocabulary. (But I take it that Williamson is just rejecting that they do given Fd; i.e., he is reiterating that what I am calling “defining conditions” are not necessary for performance of the defined act.) Thanks to Samuele Chilovi and Matthew Kramer.
It is also in this sense, I take it, that Newman & Knobe (2019) talk of “Platonic essences” in their defense of the generalized essentialism I am assuming here, see fn. 6 above.
As a follow up to fn. 14, note that if rules of etiquette like the one in Searle’s example quoted there are put in this way, as a definition of ‘officer behavior’ (or ‘polite behavior’), the Y condition would “naturally” count as a “specification”; see also fn. 27.
According to Huizinga (1949, 11), the spoilsport “trespasses against the rules or ignores them” so that he “shatters the play-world itself”. Nguyen (2019, 64) surprisingly claims that “one cannot be a spoilsport at chess”, but Suits’ illustrative example shows that to be wrong. We’ll come back to spoilsports in §3 below.
This seems to be Suits (1978, 52) line of defense for FD.
Reiland appears to hold a similar view: “Many rules of games are such that they can’t be broken at all while continuing the game” (2020, 145). But perhaps (ibid., 147, 154) he holds the view defended here: against Fd, all rules can be broken while continuing the game, if ‘can’ expresses metaphysical possibility; but some are such that they cannot be broken without revealing the agent to be a spoilsport, and hence creating an Austinian misfire, cf. fn. 35.
If we just appeal to the sort of unspecific rule that Kaluziński (2018b, 116) proffers for the case of soccer in the quotation above, we will not be able to distinguish, say, American Football, rugby and Australian footy, which must be different games defined by constitutive rules if the regulative-constitutive distinction is to be vindicated.
Maitra (2018, 72) offers some elaboration: “an intentional and sufficiently marked failure to conform to a constitutive rule” is a sufficient condition for flagrance. She declines to provide necessary conditions; but she insists that “flagrant failures to conform to a constitutive rule governing an act are incompatible with performing that act” (ibid).
The usual example is the rule of not fouling your adversary, which is flagrantly violated at the end of basketball games in the hope of quickly regaining possession of the ball (cf. also Goldberg 2015, 25). Still more implausibly, Ludwig (2017, 122) claims that even when one intentionally tries to violate the rules of a game but fails to do so, unwittingly obeying them, the game is not being played. This is not language, but philosophy itself going on holidays.
Kripke-Putnam accounts of natural kinds should allow for, say, liquids with impurities to count as water – cf. Gómez-Torrente (2019, ch. 5) for a recent perceptive discussion. Adam Sennet suggested that, similarly, Fd might allow for some tolerance in what counts as castling, or in general a game of chess. But the question is what such tolerance amounts to. Unlike impure water, games whose rules are abused intuitively involve normative failures in properly achieving the values for which they are meant. This will be the central topic of the next section.
Some writers take reasons as the normative primitive. I myself favor reductions of reasons to good bases for coming to form attitudes, or to act (Gregory 2016, Way 2017), and I take instead the fittingness of attitudes and (mental) acts as primitive, cf. Thomson (2008), McHugh and Way (2016), Howard (2019).
Cf. McPherson (2011, 232) on chess vs. schmess, and Kaplan (2021, fn. 10) for more references. García-Carpintero (2019) deploys the distinction to establish that Williamson’s (1996, 239) argument that kinds defined by constitutive rules cannot be conventional is uncompelling. For Williamson overlooks the point that only normative kinds that are in force are truly normative, i.e., give reasons to act; and it is by convention that they come to be so. Williamson’s anti-conventionalist argument is sound for rule-constituted blueprints, but it suggests that the assertion conventionalism defended by philosophers like Austin or Dummett was intended for such entities, which is uncharitable. Also, the paper treats mere blueprints as if they were normative, i.e., as if they really posed obligations and permissions on agents.
Searle (2015) claims that clearly conventional practices, like driving on the right or rules of etiquette, are not rule-constituted kinds or “institutions”; cf. also Kaluziński (2019) on “trivial” vs. “genuine” constitutive rules. Searle doesn’t provide any good reason for this; he just says that they don’t “generate deontologies in the way of institutions like private property” (ibid., 511). There is a difference between the related deontologies, but it is compatible with all these practices being defined by rules. According to García-Carpintero (2019), this is the difference between institutions put in force by social norms that are conventions (driving on the right, etiquette) and those that are rather what Lewis (1969) calls social contracts, like property. Games, which Searle considers “deontology-generating institutions”, belong in the first group. Southwood (2019) and Kaplan (2021) make a compelling case for the genuine normativity of convention-enforced norms (like those constitutive of games, I take it), and Woods (2018) argues that they provide normative reasons.
Fricker (2017, 388) provides a detailed explanation similar to mine; even closer to my proposals here, she shows that both a convention or a social or a moral norm, and a constitutive rule, might well underwrite the very same actually instantiated practice. These points can be presented in Epstein’s (2015, ch. 6–7) ideology. Constitutive rules provide real definitions for the kinds they individuate, and hence they must be grounded (Correia 2017); in Epstein’s terms, there must be corresponding “framing principles”. Social norms provide what he calls anchors for kinds that are in force. Note that the external “norms” that explain why practices defined by constitutive norms are in force need not be more than regularities in the behavior of the relevant community, sanctioned by rewards and punishment; this is in fact the way both Lewis and Bicchieri think of them, cf. Hédoin (2015), Guala (2016, ch. 5–6), and see Brennan et al. (2013, ch. 2–4) and Southwood (2019) for a non-reductive alternative that I am sympathetic to.
Suits’ full definition is this: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favor of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]” (Suits 1978, 54–5). I don’t think we can extract from this an acceptable definition of ‘game’, cf. the papers mentioned in fn. 8. In brief: if the notion of “prelusory goal” is diluted so that the account doesn’t undergenerate (excluding singing games like ring-a-ring o’ roses, make-believe games like cops and robbers, or games of luck like rock, paper, scissors), then it will overgenerate. In fact, as Suits (1978, 58) himself admits, the goals of games (checkmate in chess) can only be properly defined inside the “institutions” that those games constitute. Suits’ tour de force is valuable because it suggests a nice characterization of prototypical competitive games, and a crucial explanation for the acceptance of their defining rules that applies to all in Suits’ notion of the lusory attitude, “the acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by it can occur” (1978, 54) … on account, I’d add, of the “autotelic”, final value we get from it.
García-Carpintero (forthcoming) elaborates on these suggestions. These are, for our case, the “deep conventions” that Marmor (2009) discusses – although, as García-Carpintero (2019) argues, they don’t need to be conventions, and are not so in the case of assertion and promises. Such “conventions” (Bichieri’s or Brennat et al. social norms, really, cf. Hédoin 2015) also account for the difference between chess and the similar-looking ritual that Schwyzer’s (1969) Ruritanian thought experiment imagines.
This multiple form of polysemy in fact affects all kind-designating terms, cf. Tobia, Newman, & Knobe, (2019) – as in fact Putnam had already noted for the case of ‘water’. Cf. Ridge (2020) for a similar view, already envisaged by Williamson (1996, 239–40). It is in the causal-historical sense of ‘game’ that kids in the street without proper equipment, goals or referee play “the same game” of soccer as professionals do.
See also Simon’s, Morgan’s and Russell’s recent reviews in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Sports, M. McNamee and W. Morgan (eds).
Objecting to the “generalized essentialism” I share with Newman & Knobe (2019) on which there are kinds with normative essences, Aidan Gray mentioned an alleged asymmetry. Once we agree that the evidence establishes that being H2O explains the manifest features of water, we take the question what water is to be settled; saying yes, but still, why is water H2O? sounds confused. But the same doesn’t seem to apply in the case of assertion and constitutive rules (cf. Cappelen 2011). Let us suppose that meaning to be taken at one’s word is the manifest feature of flat-out assertion: meaning to impart information just on the basis of our saying so, thereby assuming that one believes what one says, and that one expects the audience to come to believe so. Let’s suppose further that the evidence (conversational patterns, experiments, what have you) shows that being beholden to the Knowledge Norm best explains those features. Still, there appears to remain room for asking, yes, but still, why is asserting being beholden to that constitutive norm? In response, I point out first that debates over the years about the Kripke-Putnam view on ‘water’ (cf. Gómez-Torrent (2019, ch. 5)) belie Gray’s asymmetry. Second, the double normativity I am attributing to (language) games explains whatever is left. There are internal, defining constitutive norms, and external social norms that explain their being in force. If a norm defines assertion, there is still the question why we have an institution defined by it.
Thanks to Peter Graham for pressing the question; as said, Fricker (2017) tackles it, and offers a pluralist account for language games compatible with my suggestions here.
Cf. Gilbert 2006, 223–34, Woods 2018, 216–8. Ciomaga (2013) imagines a thought experiment that allegedly would show how a “sport without normativity” is possible. Two measures are implemented: first, “perfect enforcement of rules, to guarantee that no violation of the rules goes undetected”; second, “an increase in penalties that make sure that the cost of breaking a rule will never be offset by any possible advantages gained” (ibid., 23–4). Perhaps online games approach that possibility, Reiland (2020, 145). However, in the first place it is doubtful that such reforms would always secure adequate “lusory means”: they would dispose of games like basketball (allowing no-contact, according to their rules). Second and more importantly, such amendments secure at most that the rules are not actually breached; far from abolishing normative constitutive rules, they manifestly presuppose them. For surely one can still break the rules at online chess through a programming glitch, or cheat by hacking the program.
Woods (2018, 218) says: “Chess norms apply when playing chess. We needn’t comply with such norms unless we’re engaged in the activity they govern and we need not so engage”. Reiland (2020, 151–3) suggest a similar view, on which the rules of chess are only in force when playing chess. I find it natural to think that, once the relevant community has agreed on them, the rules are in force by default; but the rules and the facts that make them to be in place have provisos for when token games start and finish, and hence for when one is to be guided by them (cf. Ridge 2019, 77–8 for what I take to be a similar view, and further references in the main text). These are the conditions relevant for my account of misfires. As far as I can tell, nothing hinges on whether one describes things my way, or the way Reiland and Woods prefer.
As Kreider convincingly shows, this doesn’t require players to know the rules; many players do not know all of the rules of the games they play, and some may not know any. Cp. in contrast Kaluziński (2018b, 120); (2019, 6); Reiland (2020, 144, 150). Cf. Ridge (2019, 78 ff.) for a detailed account, which takes into consideration the point that in the case of games with multiple players the relevant commitments must be shared.
The same applies to at least some triflers – those who conform to the rules of chess but “whose moves, though all legal, are not directed to achieving checkmate” (Suits 1978, 58), perhaps because they take themselves to be performing a different activity.
Cf. Neale (2016, 275–8) for discussion and further references.
I take it that Reiland’s (2020, 154) account is along similar lines.
In the literature I am familiar with, only Pagin (1987, ch. 3), Glüer & Pagin (1999) and writers who refer to them (Reiland 2020, Kaluziński 2018b) emphasize this crucial aspect of any adequate account of constitutive rules. (Glüer & Pagin reject the approach, on account of the issue of guidance – how the alleged rules can explain the behavior of agents (ibid. 223–4); for the case of language-games, I agree on this with Williamson (1996, 201, 241), cf. also Fricker (2017, 399–400, 408, 410).) As mentioned, the issue is also prominent in Fricker’s (2017) account, close to my proposals, although she doesn’t explicitly engage with the debate targeted here. Hindriks (2009), Hédoin (2015), Hindriks & Guala (2014), Guala & Hindriks (2015) and Guala (2016) offer a plausible general account of the enforcement of constitutive norms in terms of equilibria – behavioral patterns or regularities. However, like anti-formalists in the case of games, they present their view as an alternative to rule-constitution; I agree with Searle (2015) that this is unmotivated, although not with his reasons, see fn. 13. Reiland (2020, 142 fn. 9) also misses the point that FN is a version of formalism, although our final accounts are also similar.
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Funding
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project PID2020-119588GB-I00; by the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2018, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Discussions with Ivan Milić, Neri Marsili, and François Recanati convinced me of the importance of critically engaging Searlian formalism. A version of the paper was presented at the conferences Assertion and its Norms that Maryam Ibrahimi and François Recanati put together in Paris, at PLM 5, St. Andrews, and talks at the LOGOS Seminar, the Moral Sciences Club, Cambridge, and Social Metaphysics in Barcelona. I thank Maryam and François very much for their stimulus, and the audiences there for comments and suggestions. Thanks to Aarón Álvarez, Samuele Chilovi, Filippo Contesi, Josep Corbí, Alfonso García, Kathrin Glüer, Richard Holton, Maryam Ibrahimi, Bartosz Kaluziński, Max Kölbel, Matthew Kramer, Rae Langton, Dan López de Sa, Neri Marsili, Eliot Michaelson, Ivan Milić, Peter Pagin, Indrek Reiland, Mike Ridge, Adam Sennet, Enrico Terrone, Iñigo Valero, and Wojtek Żełaniec for helpful discussion, and to Michael Maudsley for his grammatical revision.
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García-Carpintero, M. How to Understand Rule-Constituted Kinds. Rev.Phil.Psych. 13, 7–27 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00576-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00576-z