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A natural complaint about this approach is that actual candidate laws and actual inferences in science rarely if ever take those forms. Philosophical proposals about laws and induction are frustrating, because disputes surrounding them turn in some occult but inextricable ways on the toy representation.
They are cast like sentences and figures of inference in Aristotelean logic, and so bring with them a the whole scholastic sideshow. This is odd, because the the logical empiricists were acutely aware of the limitations of the old logic.
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In this post, I consider the game Puerto Rico as a counterexample to Bernard Suits' definition of game. This, finally, is the example that got me started blogging on the subject in the first place. For previous posts, see here, here, and here.
In the last couple of posts, I've been considering Suits' requirement that a game have a prelusory goal - an objective that can be specified independently of the rules of the game.
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Here is more about Bernard Suits' Grasshopper. It picks up where the post on RPGs and the post on Suit's definition of 'game' left off.
Recall that Suits defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." As such, playing a game involves (1) pursuing a goal (2) while accepting constraints on what means can be used to attain it (3) such that the constraints are partly constitutive of the activity.
The first part of the this formula is what he calls the prelusory goal. It is essential that the goal can be characterized independently of the game itself, since the game is constituted in part by constraints on how players may achieve the goal. If the goal itself depends on the game, then the definition ends up being circular.
Last time I discussed the example of poker. Although Greg points out (in the comments) that my attempt to specify the prelusory goal of poker leaves out a lot, I think the details could be filled in without reference to the constitutive rules of poker.
In this post, I want to consider the game of chess. The goal is to put your opponent's king in checkmate. The way that the pieces move, the fact that players alternate moves, and so on are the constraints on how that goal may be achieved.
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The following post about homeostatic property clusters (HPCs) is pretty long, so I've split it into several sections. Here's the very short version: Ereshefsky and Matthen argue that the HPC approach to natural kinds fetishizes similarity and is undone by polymorphism. I argue that it's not, and that the HPC approach is really about looking for causal structure.
[crossposted at It's Only a Theory]
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I had meant to quickly write a follow up to my previous post on Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, but my the ideas proved to be more tangled in the writing than they were in the thinking. Matt has pressed for the actual definition, so I should actually get to it even if I don't have anything definitive to say.
Suits defines a game in this way:*
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 favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. [p. 41, brackets in the original]
It is easiest to see how this works with a sport like basketball. Read More...
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