Philosophy

What is the role of games in philosophy? I mean both games in general, and specific games, like Chess or Go.

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Games have a variety of roles in philosophy that I won't be able to discuss adequately in a brief answer. However, I'll try to give you some useful examples. Lewis Carroll, who was a logician as well as being the inventor of _Alice in Wonderland_, used chess pieces as characters in his fiction. Just as famously, Wittgenstein drew an analogy between language use and the playing of a game. This analogy was aimed in part at resisting the ancient tradition of thinking of language as primarily a vehicle for describing the world. Instead, Wittgenstein was in effect urging, language is primarily a social activity, and describing the world is just one of many of the games in which that social activity partakes. (I wish I knew of a case in which the game Go made a serious appearance in philosophy, but alas I do not.)

Also, the *theory* of games, that is, the field of mathematics known as game theory, has been influential in fields such as ethics, the philosophy of language and more recently the philosophy of biology. That theory treats "players" as aiming to maximize payoffs in response to both the state of the world and the actions taken by other players. This approach has been used to shed light on how some sort of social contract might have developed without being instituted by a ruling body. (Brian Skyrms' book, _Evolution of the Social Contract_ might be helpful here.) Others have used game theory to shed light on how conventionally meaningful language might have arisen among agents who don't already have a language. (David Lewis' _Convention_ is useful here.) Finally game theory has been generalized so that the "players" are not individual rational agents but rather whole species, and the result has shed light on how different species occupy distinctive parts of their biological niche. The approach has been used to explain aspects of animal communication as well. (Maynard Smith and Harper's, _Animal Signals_ might be helpful here.)

Boudewijn de Bruin has a review article in the journal _Topoi_ that covers some of these topics in more depth:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r51g7t87x420v241/

Mitch Green

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