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ABSTRACT
A central theme in the philosophy of sport literature is the definability of games. According to Thomas Hurka, and others, the argument presented by Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper (1978) refutes Wittgenstein’s claim that there is no aspect common to all games. We challenge Suits’s understanding of Wittgenstein’s views about definition, showing that Wittgenstein is not anti-definitional. Instead, we argue, Wittgenstein is against thinking that all definitions must be essentialist. We also argue that Suits fails to find a feature common to all games. We conclude, then, that Suits has failed to refute Wittgenstein’s views on the definability of games.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. There has been surprisingly little discussion of Hurka’s claim in the philosophy of sport literature and philosophy in general. McGinn (Citation2012) makes the same claim that Hurka makes, without mentioning Hurka by name. Lass (Citation2017) talks about Wittgenstein’s view of definitions, partly in relation to Suits, as an occasion to argue for the ‘pragmatic argumentative’ view of what a definition is. Lass makes no attempt, however, to decide whether Suits’s definition refutes Wittgenstein. Lass argues that apparently conflicting definitions may not actually be in conflict once the purpose of each definition is identified and understood.
2. We are not altogether sure if Suits intended his book to be a direct attack on Wittgenstein, nor yet that that would be a fair interpretation of what he wrote. In any event, it has been taken this way. Suits, himself, lends some support to the idea that he thinks that he has refuted Wittgenstein when, in the Preface, he accuses Wittgenstein of seeing ‘very little’ because he (i.e. Wittgenstein) ‘had decided beforehand’ that games are ‘indefinable’ (Suits Citation1978, x). Yet Wittgenstein is not mentioned in the body of Suits’s book, and Suits nowhere claims to have refuted Wittgenstein.
3. See endnote # 10, below, on the differences between ‘game’ and ‘game-playing’.
4. Unless otherwise indicated, the numbers following Wittgenstein quotations refer to the numbered passages in the Philosophical Investigations.
5. The term translated ‘defined’ is the German ‘erklaren’, so Anscombe’s interpolation of ‘defined’ may well have been misleading.
6. One philosopher he certainly has in mind is what we now call the early Wittgenstein: that is his primary opponent. It is the views about language and meaning that he developed in the Tractatus (Citation1961) (which Russell shared to some degree) that are being challenged here. ‘Four years ago, I had occasion to re-read my first book and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast and against the background of my old way of thinking’ (Preface to PI). In other words, his target here is, in the first instance, his own earlier philosophy.
7. In this connection, we think of TEGWAR from Bang the Drum Slowly—a card game that members of the New York Mammoths play to draw in suckers. ‘TEGWAR’ means ‘The Exciting Games without Any Rules’. See, also, Kreider (Citation2011) for a discussion on whether cheating in a game is still playing that same game. We note that Suits has anticipated the objection that there can be a game without any rules and argued against it in Chapter 6. Suits argues that a game could not be sustained—and would quickly turn to chaos—if it was understood that no player had to follow any rule. This might be true, we argue, for very competitive, organized games, but not for all games. Wittgenstein’s examples could be of people playing a game more for fun or comradery rather than winning or losing, playfully making up or changing the rules as they go along.
8. John Wisdom was Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, 1952–1968. Wisdom was an early interpreter and defender of the later Wittgenstein, even before the 1953 publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
9. We say ‘if’ because, again, it is not clear to us that we can ascribe such an aim to Suits. More likely, the idea that he has refuted Wittgenstein is advanced by Hurka (and others). So our quarrel is with Hurka rather than Suits.
10. See Carlson (Citation2011) for a discussion of important differences between ‘games’ and ‘game-playing’. See also Schneider (Citation2001) who argues that the concept of ‘play’ is of a different category than games (or sports) and should not be part of the discussion as to what a game or sport is. Our approach in this paper does not rely on the idea that there are in fact big differences between ‘playing a game’ and ‘game’ but rather to notice that they are potentially different concepts and then to infer what Suits would say about the definition of ‘game’ from his account of ‘game-playing’.
11. Schneider and Butcher (Citation1997) criticize Suits’s idea that ‘the “specific state of affairs” towards which the activity is directed (the “goal” of the game)’ can be described as a ‘pre-lusory goal’ in all games, using chess as their main example (38). We agree with their critique and later argue that Ring Around the Rosie, to name another example, does not appear to have a goal that is independent of the game. Much of The Grasshopper is taken up with the attempt to defend the view that all games have a prelusory goal. We find the effort belabored, not convincing, and bordering at times on the nonsensical. For example, we think it sounds odd to say that a golfer is using a club to put the ball into the hole, instead of using his or her hands, or that the high-jumper is jumping instead of using a ladder.
12. Suits is arguing, we believe, that (1) ‘achieving a specific state of affairs’ (i.e., achieving the ‘prelusory goal’—a goal able to be conceived of independent from the game-rules), (2) ‘rules prohibiting more efficient means rather than less’ and (3) ‘the choosing of such rules just because they make the activity possible’ (i.e. ‘the lusory attitude’) are necessary conditions (and together form a sufficient condition) for ‘playing a game’. We are arguing that (1) and (3) need (2) for their explication whereas (2), and (2) alone, seems to be able to stand on its own two feet. If one wanted to say that (1) and (3) are also common to all games, they would anyway have to bring (2) along as well, making the claim more difficult to defend than if just ‘rules prohibiting the most efficient means’ were put forward as the thing in common.
13. Suits clearly believes the less contentious claim that all games have rules of some sort or other. He says that ‘games require obedience to rules (Suits Citation1978, 32)’ and that ‘games are rule-governed activities (35)’. He claims in ‘Tricky Triad: Games, Play, and Sport (Suits Citation1988)’ that ‘rules are the crux of games (5)’ and ‘In games, rules…are the crux of the matter (6)’.
14. The dictionaries we consulted were Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Citation2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (2002)), the Oxford English Dictionary (Citation1989), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Citation1981), Webster’s New World College Dictionary (Citation2006), and The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Citation2001).
15. See endnote 13. above.
16. We understand Wittgenstein’s view (which is reflected in the dictionaries that we consulted) to be that rules play an essential role regarding many games, but not necessarily all games.
17. Descriptions of all the games mentioned in this article can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traditional_children%27s_games#C. The game Telephone, which we mention below, is listed there as Chinese Whispers.
18. For example, both the online Oxford English Dictionary and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary refer to as it as a ‘singing game’.
19. McGinn (Citation2012, 28) makes the point that Suits’s definition is not attempting to capture ‘common usage’ of the word ‘game’, but ‘the essence’ of ‘games’. But this begs the question. Following Wittgenstein, we are questioning whether every word or concept has an ‘essence’, if what is meant by ‘essence’ is a common feature or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
20. Both Suits and ourselves are referring to the very simple, original game of Cops and Robbers. There is now on the market a sophisticated version of the game.
21. Meier (Citation1988) provides a precise and comprehensive history of Suits’s positions regarding the relationship between games and sports. While Suits has modified his position, he still considers all refereed sports to be games. (Meier goes further: for him, all sports are games.) We do not agree that racing, high-jumping and competitive swimming are games, even though it can be argued that they meet Suits’s conditions for ‘games’. Yet we are questioning whether Suits has in fact provided necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘games’. We therefore see no reason, in this case, to depart from the way the word ‘game’ is normally used. We acknowledge that Athletics (i.e., track and field) and competitive swimming events fall under the umbrella of the ‘Olympic Games’, but we do not think that that is reason enough to consider them ‘games’. The Olympic Games include a wide range of activities, not all of which can be called games: viz., the marathon. On this last point, Suits (Citation1988) would agree: he does not consider judged (as opposed to refereed) sports like diving and gymnastics to be games, even though they are in the Olympics.
22. Wittgenstein writes: ‘My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense’ (#464).
23. The analogy between jumping over instead of using a ladder and walking in the park instead of flying to Mars targets the questionable, and perhaps funny, use of the word ‘instead’, and is not intended to compare walking or flying to a game.
24. See endnote 13, above.
25. There is a difference in practice between a simple description of a game and the rules of a simple game. If a parent were trying to teach their child how to play catch, and the child just kept holding on the ball and not throwing it back, the parent would realize that the child does not yet understand how to play the game and reiterate part of the description (‘Throw the ball back’). But we simply cannot conceive of situation where a parent would use rule-talk—even if they were frustrated over the fact that the child is not understanding how to play catch. Thus, there appears to be a difference between simple descriptions of a game and rules.
26. A reviewer of this article suggested that perhaps the very name of the game, Catch, already expresses the rules that makes the game possible. Two of the rules might be: (1) each person must attempt to throw a ball, or similar object, to another person who is playing the game in such a way that it is possible for that other person to catch it; and (2) each person must attempt to catch the ball, or similar object, when it is thrown at them. The objector is likely making the case that rules like (1) and (2) above are rules that constitute the game, making the game possible. According to Suits, constitutive rules ‘set out all the conditions that must be met in playing the game’ (Suits Citation1978, 37); in other words, constitutive rules are rules that make the game possible. Suits distinguishes such rules from rules ‘rules of skill’ and rules that govern in-game violations (often referred to in the literature as ‘regulative rules’) (38). The alleged rules of catch, however, appear to us to be after-the-fact constructions of what is very much a natural and spontaneous activity, namely, throwing a ball back and forth. The alleged rules have neither constitutive (nor regulative) force: they are not needed to identify cheating, for example, because there is no cheating in a simple game of catch; and they are not needed to ‘set out all the conditions that must be met in playing the game’ because the game is so simple and basic. Because rules have no role to play in catch (i.e. situations do not come up where a rule would have to be invoked), because rule-talk is non-existent when playing the game, and because any proposed rule would be, in our view, only an after-the-fact generalization of what the players are doing, we do not agree that name ‘Catch’, implicitly expresses the rules of the game.
27. We want to thank Lucien Lamoureux (Brescia College, at The University of Western Ontario) for the time he took to read this section of the paper and for his valuable suggestions. And we wish to thank Paul Gaffney for his support and patience.