Constitutive Rules of Artificial Games and Natural Conventions of Ordinary Behavior

Abstract

Drawing on Rawls’s distinction between the summary and the practice concepts of rules, Searle suggested to distinguish between constitutive and regulative rules. This distinction has become popular and is accepted by many contemporary philosophers as the basis for discussing the essence of games, language, social and cultural norms in general. On the other hand, some authors criticize this distinction as either unjustified in general or inapplicable for explaining certain types of norms. The three most frequently discussed issues in this context today are the validity of the initial distinction between rule types, the soundness of the analogy between sports games and speech acts, and the possibility of understanding constitutive rules as conventions. In the debates, the rules of games are usually understood as if they constituted the game completely and before their introduction the game did not exist. Moreover, most authors discuss the issue of rules as if there were no difference between implicit and explicit rules. At the same time, the most difficult problem is to explain the normative force of the rules. If the rules are understood as what is collectively accepted by the vast majority of the population—and that is what most authors suggest, the problem remains of explaining why this happens. Building on the ideas of Millikan, the present suggests that some of so called constitutive rules can be understood as natural conventions. One should distinguish, on the one hand, the rules of artificial games and, on the other hand, the conventional foundations of natural games and other areas of behavior, which for the time being are not codified and are understood by each player in their own way. The rationale for normativity could be due precisely to the fact that there are natural conventions that have been tested by time and rooted in tradition.