Programa Nacional de Rendición de Cuentas, Transparencia y Combate a la Corrupción 2008-2012

I’ve just argued that a social practice consists of certain activities and agreement, and that the agreement could be maintained by rules or by some other mechanism. However, previously I suggested that activities-plus-rules can’t be the whole picture for non-game practices, because rule-guided activities are simply too broad to individuate some of our social practices from one another. This is why it sometimes seems that childhood pretend play is literally fictional on Walton’s account, rather than being an analogous practice involving games of make-believe. At the same time, however, Walton suggests that many practices, including religious and scientific practices, could involve games of make- believe.183 Surely religion and science are not fictional, yet they would have the right activity guided by principles of generation. If principles are in place to secure agreement,

181 _{Though it should be noted that Walton seemed to be saying that cognitive similarities or shared} dispositions would contribute to an understanding of the principles that underpin agreement. Principles would still be doing the work on Walton’s view.

182 _{Lamarque, “Wittgenstein, Literature, and the Idea of a Practice,” 384. Emphasis added.} 183 _{Walton, Mimesis, 7.}

then the same counterexamples must apply against my activities-plus-agreement view. What we need is a view of practices that can account for multiple practices sharing activities and agreement (perhaps via principles) without thereby being identical. I suggest that practices are partly individuated by their aims – their functions or goals. With aims, we can further distinguish between paradigmatic game practices like baseball or chess from ones like language, law, and fiction. Along with having clear and explicit constitutive rules, paradigmatic games also have what I will call fixed internal aims. These are not only characteristic of games but also constitutive of games – a particular game’s aim is necessary for that game to be the game that it is. By contrast, the social practices of interest to us have fixed external aims. Such aims are constitutive, and therefore necessary, for particular practices.

Let’s begin with the game case. The aim is easy to identify. In baseball, the aim is to get more players to home base by the end of the 9th inning than the opposing team. In chess, the aim is to trap your opponent’s king such that no future move could save the piece from being captured. I refer to these aims as internal not due to any vague notion that they happen ‘in’ the game but because achieving the aim is only worthwhile in the game – the goal has game-value only. Without the practice of baseball, there is no value in more players wearing one color running over a bag on a field more times than players wearing the other color. The game provides the reason or justification for its own aim; thus, the aim is internal.184

184 _{The distinction between what is internal and external to a practice goes back at least to Rawls, when he}

distinguishes between summary and practice rules partly on this basis. To question a summary rule within a practice is perfectly sensible. Suppose it’s a summary rule that when an umpire calls you out, you’re out, based on many cases of umpires having sharp eyes and good judgement. But suppose that a manager disagrees that his player has struck out. If the manager asked the umpire why his player was out, the umpire would not answer “Because I called him out.” He would answer with a practice rule: “He’s out because that was his third strike.” The manager could question him further in one of two ways. One question could be “Why was that the third strike?” To this the umpire could respond with another practice rule, such as “The pitch was within the strike zone,” or “The player swung at the pitch and missed.” All the foregoing questions make sense to ask internally to the practice. But if the manager questioned the umpire further by asking why three strikes are an out, there is no further justification to be given other than “those are the rules.” Unlike the previous questions, asking this one makes sense only if one doesn’t understand the game or is proposing a change to the rules.

The aims in paradigmatic games are also fixed, in the sense that they cannot be changed while the game remains the same. We must be careful here to distinguish between the aim of the game and the aim of individual players. Someone may play a genuine game of chess, follow all the rules, but play with the goal of having their king check-mated in the fewest possible moves. While strange, this player’s goal in playing would not disqualify that game from counting as a game of chess. The aim is constitutive of the game-type

chess, not each of its instances. If we imagine a game with the same activities and the same

constitutive rules of chess but in which the aim was to be the first player to have landed a piece on each square of the board, this game would not be chess. At most, it would be based on chess.

I am by no means the first to suggest that aims are a feature of games. Again, taking Lamarque as an authority on Wittgenstein, he says that “what Wittgenstein wants most from the games analogy is the basic idea of an activity with a broadly conceived

‘point.’”185 _{He mentions Wittgenstein’s example in Philosophical Grammar of a game in} which someone throws a ball in the air and catches it. Lamarque picks out catching the ball as the point, which would be the fixed internal aim in my terminology. On my view, if there was a game that also involved throwing the ball up in the air and catching it, but the point was to throw it as high as possible, then it would be a different game.

It’s interesting to note that Lamarque mentions points of games in the wider context of Wittgenstein and rules of games. Wittgenstein allows for the observed variability in rules, from the complex but explicit rules of chess to the “minimal normative conditions marking success or failure” that apply in the ball-throwing game.186 _{Lamarque conceives of the} point in this game as the standard of success, presumably marked as such by the rules. This opens my view to a possible objection: that what I call fixed internal aims are not

necessary to games in addition to rules or agreement because they are themselves defined by the rules. That is, what I’m calling an aim could actually be just another constitutive

185 _{Lamarque, “Wittgenstein, Literature, and the Idea of a Practice,” 380.} 186 _Ibid.

rule of the ‘counts as’ variety. In the baseball case, the rule would be something like “Getting the most players to home base counts as a win.”

I don’t think fixed internal aims can be reduced to constitutive rules in this way. The constitutive rules of games do not tell us what we ought to do without the aid of an aim. For example, one constitutive rule of baseball is that hitting a ball that’s caught by the

other team before it bounces counts as an out and another is that a batter making it to home base counts as a run. These rules don’t tell you that an out has negative game-value

and a run has positive game-value. An additional constitutive rule of the form getting the

most runs counts as a win does not fulfill the same function as an aim. This is because a

‘win’ is not an action or a concept specified by the game. ‘To win’ is a pre-existing action that is not logically dependent on the rules of game, and therefore it can’t be the kind of thing that’s defined by ‘counts as’ constitutive rules. We only understand winning as something to be desired because the concept gets its meaning from outside the game – to win is just to achieve the aim. Constitutive rules do not assign value to the actions or concepts they specify; they can only get their value in virtue of the game’s aim, and the aim does not take the same form as a constitutive rule.

By contrast, social practices like language, law, literature, and fiction necessarily have

fixed external aims. If the fixed internal aims of games are like goals, then the fixed

external aims of these social practices are more like functions – what the practice achieves for its community of practitioners. The value of the aim is not confined to the practice; rather, the practice as a whole contributes something valuable to the community. Morawetz distinguished practices like language and law from games like baseball and chess along similar lines. For Morawetz, practices like language and law can be conceived as tools.187 He identifies language as a tool for communication and law as a tool for securing order. On my view, communication is the fixed external aim of language and securing order (or perhaps justice or something similar) is the fixed external aim of law. For this class of social practice, the fixed external aim is necessary to it – language would not be language if the aim were not communication, no matter how similar the activities involved.

I should make a few clarifications. The first is that the fixed external aim of a practice is not to be confused with the range of uses of a practice. For instance, a person may use (or abuse) the practice of law, the aim of which is to maintain social order or justice, to sow chaos, start wars, gain wealth for himself, and so on. It could even be the practice of a whole network of monarchs to use the law this way. But this would not change the aim of legal practice. Nor does the failure of legal practice to achieve its aim provide evidence that social order is not its aim; after all, we could not conceive of its failure without knowing that legal practice as a concept requires that it aims for order or justice.

The second is that by contrasting the necessity of fixed internal aims to games with that of fixed external aims to other social practices, I am not denying that games have external aims or that more complex social practices have internal aims. Such aims may be difficult to identify, inconsistent or varying according to circumstances, or simply not there. However, they may also be readily identifiable. Whether identifiable or not, external aims for games and internal aims for these other social practices are not constitutive of the practices. They can change without changing the practice, and so I call them fluid rather than fixed. It is characteristic of games that they have fixed internal aims and fluid external aims, while it is characteristic of practices like language and fiction that they have fixed external aims and fluid internal aims.

We can see this by reflecting on baseball. When we test out a few different possibilities for an external aim, each test reveals that the game in question is still baseball. Perhaps the external aim is entertainment. This is not difficult to imagine, since there is another practice built around baseball that arguably has this aim – Major League Baseball, or MLB. MLB is more complex than the game itself, with its own rules regarding trade deadlines, playoffs, and player statistics. It’s not a stretch to suppose that baseball as a game occupying a central place in the larger practice of MLB has entertainment as a clearly identifiable external aim. Now we can imagine a world in which the element of spectatorship is eliminated, and baseball is only played for exercise; its clearly identifiable external aim is physical fitness. The game is still baseball, still identical to the game in MLB with a different external aim. The external aim is just not necessary to the concept of

baseball. We could run a similar thought experiment with chess or any other paradigmatic game practice. The point is not that games contribute nothing to their community of practitioners but rather that what they contribute is not necessary for the practice’s being what it is.

We can perform this procedure for other social practices and see that while their external aims are fixed, their internal aims are fluid, if they can be recognized at all. Take a simplified legal practice. It consists of the essential activities of law, such as defining the right kinds of roles and offices, making decisions about what counts as a crime, codifying what is to be done in response to crimes, and so on. It also has the necessary external aim of securing order or justice. It’s not a stretch to suppose that an internal aim of our actual legal system is to punish crimes that have been committed. But it’s not difficult to imagine a legal practice with an internal aim of preventing crimes from happening. Perhaps an internal aim of language is to create grammatical sentences, but we can imagine a language practice for which the internal aim is to create sentences with the fewest possible words. For many social practices, potential internal aims are difficult to conjure up, I suspect because they simply aren’t a necessary feature – they aren’t what we care about when we talk about social practices of this type. If we want to know what a social practice like language or fiction is, we need to know what activities it consists in and what its fixed external aim is.