Don't put an ax in my head
I've been thinking about Dylan's suggestion in class on Thursday that "don't put an ax in another player's head" was a rule of the board-game Monopoly. I was skeptical about this to begin with, and have decided to spell out my skepticism a bit here on the blog as we continue to grapple with what Wittgenstein means by a "language-game" (and, heading into next week, whether Lyotard means the same thing by this term).
What do we mean by "the rules of Monopoly?" Those things formally written down in the instruction manual that comes with the game seem insufficient, since those strictures presume the ongoing presence of other practices (like "counting" and "reading"). The instructions that come in the box are thus in a sense subordinate to other social activities, and supervene on them.
At the same time, however, those formal strictures demarcate "the game of Monopoly" from other games (such as euchre, poker, or parcheesi). Most valid moves in euchre are simply nonsensical in Monopoly, because "ordering up a card" or "following suit" are literally meaningless in that context. You can't castle in Monopoly either -- but not because there's a formal stricture against doing so. There's a difference between not castling in Monopoly and refusing to follow the instructions on the Community Chest card that you've just drawn; the latter seems more like a "violation of the rules" than the former, even though neither are permitted by the strictures written down in the instruction manual.
"Don't put an ax in your opponent's head" seems closer to the former than it does to the latter. Nowhere in the instruction manual does it say "attempted homicide is not permitted in this game," and if a particularly incensed player did in fact try the ax strategy, it would be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of Monopoly -- although it would not be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of the civil order (presuming that we live in a society in which attempted homicide is illegal).
Where this leads me is to a distinction between the formal specification of the rules of a (language-)game and the tacit procedures that govern that (language-)game. Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it, is that no formal specification of the rules ever exhausts the tacit procedures in play; one cannot bring an entire form of life into a set of logically consistent and coherent statements. This might be more possible in some situations than it is in others, since some social situations are effectively closed systems of transaction that can be more or less exhaustively described in formal terms. Monopoly is a pretty open-ended situation, since it both clearly depends on other language-games and self-presents as "a game," i.e. as a small subset of social action rather than a totalizing set of procedures for living.
Hence: "don't put an ax in your opponent's head" is not a formal rule of Monopoly, although it is a formal rule of living in most contemporary liberal societies.
What do we do with something like "don't adhere to the letter of the convention on human rights while violating its spirit in numerous ways'?
[Posted with ecto]
What do we mean by "the rules of Monopoly?" Those things formally written down in the instruction manual that comes with the game seem insufficient, since those strictures presume the ongoing presence of other practices (like "counting" and "reading"). The instructions that come in the box are thus in a sense subordinate to other social activities, and supervene on them.
At the same time, however, those formal strictures demarcate "the game of Monopoly" from other games (such as euchre, poker, or parcheesi). Most valid moves in euchre are simply nonsensical in Monopoly, because "ordering up a card" or "following suit" are literally meaningless in that context. You can't castle in Monopoly either -- but not because there's a formal stricture against doing so. There's a difference between not castling in Monopoly and refusing to follow the instructions on the Community Chest card that you've just drawn; the latter seems more like a "violation of the rules" than the former, even though neither are permitted by the strictures written down in the instruction manual.
"Don't put an ax in your opponent's head" seems closer to the former than it does to the latter. Nowhere in the instruction manual does it say "attempted homicide is not permitted in this game," and if a particularly incensed player did in fact try the ax strategy, it would be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of Monopoly -- although it would not be odd to penalize him for violating the rules of the civil order (presuming that we live in a society in which attempted homicide is illegal).
Where this leads me is to a distinction between the formal specification of the rules of a (language-)game and the tacit procedures that govern that (language-)game. Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it, is that no formal specification of the rules ever exhausts the tacit procedures in play; one cannot bring an entire form of life into a set of logically consistent and coherent statements. This might be more possible in some situations than it is in others, since some social situations are effectively closed systems of transaction that can be more or less exhaustively described in formal terms. Monopoly is a pretty open-ended situation, since it both clearly depends on other language-games and self-presents as "a game," i.e. as a small subset of social action rather than a totalizing set of procedures for living.
Hence: "don't put an ax in your opponent's head" is not a formal rule of Monopoly, although it is a formal rule of living in most contemporary liberal societies.
What do we do with something like "don't adhere to the letter of the convention on human rights while violating its spirit in numerous ways'?
[Posted with ecto]
posted by ProfPTJ at 9:30 AM
2 Comments:
I'm not satisfied that you have adequately explained how, if Monopoly must inherit the formal rules of its social context, we are then to distinguish between the language games which permit Monopoly, 'the language game of modern life', and 'the language game of all games'. What sets Monopoly apart from ice hockey or Russian Roulette? Why are some tacit rules active in the background and others not? Different games clearly inherit different parts of the context, and how are we to explain this? You say it would be odd to penalize someone for violating the rules of Monopoly in the case where he or she killed their opponent, but in this regard I believe you are missing two obvious points: firstly, it would be EVEN MORE odd if the game were to continue after that point, and secondly, multiple repercussions to a complex, multi-level transgression are already well established in our common sense of the social contract - one need only examine composite criminal charges such as 'fetal homocide' or 'assault with a deadly weapon' (as opposed to common assault) to see these stacked responses to stacked crimes in effect.
As regards Lyotardian and Wittgensteinian conceptions of language games: because my Blog post is going to focus more specifically on PoMo than on the Lyotard-Wittgenstein nexus, I present here a link which gives more detail on this:
http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/lyotard.html
I rather enjoy Lyotard's concept of the differand, especially in terms of the incompatible language games of scientific and faith-based inquiry (and yes, Jacob, I know what you have to say about that :-)), although the author cited above would tend to disagree with whether Lyotard's view or Wittgenstein's should be what we prefer. He also makes the valid point that games CAN share language. Various games support the concept of the 'bluff', for instance, or the chess-style sacrifice of an unimportant element (a pawn) to ensure some kind of tactical advantage.
I think that the problem here involves the notion of "tacit rules" and whether games have to "inherit" these tacit rules from the wider situation in which they are embedded. If we regard the delineation of a language-game -- or any other kind of a game -- as a sort of process of ideal-typification, then no specification of "the rules" actually contains all of the social practices that are necessary to sustain normal play. I take this to be among Wittgenstein's most crucial points: that the formal rules, any set of formal rules, is necessarily incomplete to the extent that it presupposes other practices and activities that are not themselves rules. If they were rules, and if every game contained all of the rules necessary to sustain itself, then there would be no need for training -- the rules would simply be self-executing, as it were.
There is a difference between saying that playing the game of Monopoly depends (causally) on the absence of opponents putting axes into one another's heads, and saying that "don't put an ax in your opponent's head" is a rule of Monopoly. Games depend on a background of social practices, but those social practices aren't themselves rules -- at least not when we're analyzing a specific game.
Yes, it would be odd if the game were to continue after an ax were placed in the head of one of the players. But I'd submit that the oddity here would be of a qualitatively different sort than the oddity displayed by a violation of the rules of Monopoly, such as setting the dice to the number I wanted rather than rolling them, or moving my marker to Broadway on the first move so that I could purchase it. While the latter are violations of the rules of Monopoly, the former is a violation -- perhaps -- of the game of "civilized game-playing behavior."
(And designating it as such for the purpose of the analysis doesn't contradict my earlier point since above we were only referring to the game of Monopoly. Terming something a "game" and analyzing it in those terms is an analytical act, not a descriptive representation of what the thing in question "really is." Wittgenstein never says that the things he analyzes "really are" langauge-games, and I'm not sure that I even know what such a phrase would mean in a Wittgensteinian context.)
Yes, multi-level transgression are common, but that just proves my point: the transgression can only be "multi-level" to the extent that we have different levels/domains/games to violate. Your two legal examples are misleading, I think, in that "fetal homocide" isn't a multi-level transgression but a specification of "homocide" and "assault with a deadly weapon" is a specification of "assault"; both of your examples are nested and hierarchical, so they involve games and logically subordinate games rather than two separate (but perhaps causally linked) games. "Fetal homocide" presupposes "homocide" in way that Monopoly does not presuppose "don't put an ax in your opponent's head"; the former relationship is logical while the latter relationship is (permissively) causal.
Certainly there are "bluffs" in different contexts -- that's part of the tissue of resemblances among language-games that Wittgenstein does so much to illuminate. But a family resemblance isn't the same thing as an identity, and the sacrifice of a pawn in chess is only analogically "the same" as a sacrifice of an unimportant strategic element in another context.
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