Games, Rules, and Practices

Abstract

We present and defend a view labeled “practiceism” which provides a solution to the incompatibility problems. The classic incompatibility problem is inconsistency of:

1.	Someone who intentionally violates the rules of a game is not playing the game.
2.	In many cases, players intentionally violate the rules as part of playing the game (e.g. fouling to stop the clock in basketball).

The problem has a normative counterpart:

1’.	In normal cases, it is wrong for a player to intentionally violate the rules of the game.
2’.	In many normal cases, it is not wrong for a player to intentionally violate the rules of the game (e.g. fouling to stop the clock in basketball).

According to both formalism and informalism, the rules of the game include the formal rules of the game. Both traditional positions avoid the incompatibility problems by rejecting 1 and 1'. Practiceism rejects 2 and 2’: it maintains that the rules are the rules manifested in playing the game, not the formal rules.

Practiceism presents two theses: (a) the real rules of the game are the rules players follow: the practice determines the rules, and not vice versa. (b) the (first order) rules of a game determine what is legitimate within the game.

Keywords:

• Rules
• incompatibilty
• games
• cheating
• formalism
• informalism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank an the anonymous referee of this journal for comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. This is not trivial. The moral significance of the distinction between intended and foreseen consequences of actions has come under heavy criticism in recent years (see Scanlon 2008), and this pertains to the moral problem. For a discussion of the relevance of intentions in morally classifying fouls, see Ber-Eli, Eylon, Horowitz (2016).

The incompatibility problem is presented without restricting it to intentional violations in, e.g. Suits (1978). The idea that there is a specific moral problem (e.g. in cheating) which concerns intentional violations can be seen in e.g. Farleigh (1975, 2003), Simon (2005) and Berman (2015), in particular Section 5. Lehman (1981) highlights the claim that cheating is incompatible with playing the game, which might suggest a conflation of the problems, or a view akin to the one we outline above.

2. For reasons we cannot explore here, we believe that this relation between the problems is crucial in resolving the moral problem without assuming the often criticized moral difference between intended and foreseen consequences.

3. Suarez’s contribution to the philosophical literature is not confined to this incident. See Martinovska and Perry (2015).

4. Informalism is neutral regarding the nature of justification of meta-norms (i.e. regarding views such as (deep) conventionalism (Morgan 2012) or Broad Internalism (Russell 1999; Simon 2007)). Morgan (2012) argues that D’Agosino’s position (which he labels ‘shallow conventionalism’) fails as a normative theory, and proposes turning to ‘deep conventions’. However, both shallow and deep conventionalism concur that meta-norms—i.e. conventions—are required (e.g. to resolve the incompatibility problem).

5. To the best of our knowledge, the issue of priority has not been sufficiently explored in the literature. The tacit assumption of the rules’ priority in traditional formalism can be discerned in presentations of the position (e.g. Morgan’s quoted above or Suits’s, as well as debates about Platonism). We do not go into interpretive historical issues here, since our interest lies in the theoretical aspect of the question.

6. It is not assumed that norms are always adhered to, only that they are typically adhered to, and that the reactions to supposed violations ultimately disclose the content of agreements.

7. ‘Participants’ is to be understood broadly to include organizers, spectators, other teams in a league, etc. And indeed in some cases it is not clear—and it is debatable—what the binding norms of a game are.

8. There are exceptions with respect to diving. See below.

9. This analogy was suggested to us by an anonymous referee for this journal. The divergence between actual and prescribed language use is of course something official institutions must grapple with. Thus Zuckermann (2008) discusses the changes over time in the policy of The Academy of the Hebrew language which he labels ‘Realistic Presciptivism’.

10. We thank David Papaineau for raising this concern.

11. This is the custom in football. Of course this is a contingent matter and contrast with cases in Russell (1999).

12. This is not necessarily the case in all refereed matches. For example in youth leagues referees might enforce the norm (thus inculcating the players into the practice).

13. One such example is the match between Docanster and Bury in 2015. See https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/aug/08/doncaster-allow-bury-to-walk-in-equaliser-league-one.

14. Thus, if one the players who scored is also competing for being the season’s top scorer, it is reasonable and fair not to count the goal scored in this match.

15. Note that a similar question arises with different dialects or idiolects of the same language, regardless of whether a system of officially sanctioned rules exists.

For a discussion of the conceptual significance of recognizing that different ways of playing the game stem from different conceptions of it, see Eylon (2001).