Must We Play to Win? A Reply to Morgan

Abstract

This paper offers a brief reply to William Morgan’s critique of my review of Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions (2009). Morgan’s principal critique is that I am wrong to think that the constitutive rules of games do not determine their aims and values. In particular, with regards to chess, Morgan argues that the rules of chess determine that the aim of playing chess is to win the game. I defend my position that one can play the game of chess without the aim of winning - e.g. one can aim to play beautifully, and not, as Morgan suggests, only to win beautifully. More broadly, I argue for an account of games that is sensitive to the gap between playing and the game’s constitutive rules. Ultimately, the argument points to the descriptive priority for the social sciences of the concept of ‘play’ over the concept of games understood as ‘rule-governed domains’.