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Constitutive Rules: Games, Language, and Assertion

Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. For example, on Bernard Suits’s influential view, games are constituted by sets of lusory rules which permit only inefficient ways to perform certain actions (Suits 1967, 1978). Similarly, on John Searle’s and William Alston’s views, languages are constituted by sets of semantic rules which permit uses of expressions in certain conditions (Alston 1999, Searle 1969, for discussion see Harnish 2005). Finally, on Tim Williamson’s influential view assertion is constituted by a pragmatic rule which permits saying that p only if one knows that p (Williamson 1996, 2000, for critical discussion see Cappelen 2011, Maitra 2011, MacFarlane 2011, Pagin 2011, 2016; for a recent defense, see Goldberg 2015: Ch. 1). Lots of other philosophers of course disagree that games, and even more so, languages and speech acts, are constituted by rules. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises two questions: