Formalism Conventionalized

ABSTRACT

I argue that Bernard Suits’ definition of game playing, suitably extended with David Lewis’ account of coordinating conventions, is robust enough to withstand some common objections made against it. By adding this Lewisian account of how conventions function to pick out and adapt the rules of the game, I try to make good on D’Agostino’s comment that formalism can be salvaged by an account of the ethos of games, although not in the way that he himself does.

KEYWORDS:

• Suits
• game
• rule
• convention
• formalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Quinn makes the same point against Rawls’ version of formalism with his Argument from Offenses (1975, 81).

2. http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/05/07/5-other-times-the-patriots-cheated/ last accessed 29 April 2018.

3. Kretchmar (2015) defends a stratified version of formalism that he claims avoids D’Agostino’s objection. However, it also deliberately gives up on the Incompatibility Thesis, which I want to retain. This is one reason I do not adopt his solution.

4. These criteria can be reformulated as a matter of degree to fit the real world and less than ideal acceptance.

5. Marmor’s view of the ‘official’ rules is in fact more complex than this. He says that when the rules of a game are codified, then they become institutional, and cease to be conventions. Thus, whether the official, codified rules are conventional depends on the institutional status of the game:

The rules followed in chess tournaments are those that have been codified by the relevant institutions (You may wonder, then, why have I used the example of chess as a conventional practice if it is no longer conventional, at least since 1929. The answer is that I think that chess is still a conventional game when played by amateurs who care little about official tournament, and just play the game, roughly, as conventions determine it. I suspect that this is now true about most sports; they are practiced in two spheres, as it were—an official, institutional sphere, that regulates official leagues and tournaments, and an unofficial, amateur, non-institutional sphere, by and large still conventional.) (Marmor 2009, 50–51)

My view is that even if the official rules have become codified and thus lost their conventionality, nevertheless the interpretation and scope of these rules will be at least partly conventional.

6. She told me that though it was much harder for her as a tall adult to hide behind the elementary students, that on the other hand the elementary students tended to be less observant of blatant rule-breaking, at least in the beginning.

7. Indeed this is the main thesis of Marmor’s book (though about law and language rather than about games). These Marmorian deep conventions are not to be confused with Morgan’s deep conventions (Morgan 2012).

8. Also see Ciomaga (2012) for a similar kind of defense of conventionalism.

9. And I certainly do not mean to endorse any kind of Kantian move whereby this kind of conventional hypothetical ought could be transformed into a categorical ought by some process of universalization.

10. This objection was suggested by an anonymous referee for this journal.