spoon-business: RFJ 33

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(NB: I did not set out to write a book-length opinion; however, the 
enormous complexity of this issue seemed, IMHO, to necessitate it.)

The statement for RFJ 33 is as follows:

It is possible for a Player to not follow the Rules.

This strikes me as very possibly the single most important issue the Courts 
have yet been asked to decide. The relevant Rule for deciding this matter 
is R101/0, quoted here:

"All game entities must always abide by all the Rules then in effect, in 
the form in which they are then in effect. This Rule takes precedence over 
all other Rules."

That the Rules are binding on Players is not ambiguous. What is unclear is 
what sort of Rules we have. Are they Laws or laws---i.e., do they define 
what is possible, similar to physical laws, or merely what is permissible, 
as statutory laws? This is a metaphysical question, and an odd one at that, 
since it deals with the nature of the conceptual space we have constructed 
rather than the nature of the world itself. Moreover, rarely does an 
opportunity to do applied metaphysics present itself outside of the 
philosophy of science. But I digress.

Put another way, what is at state here is whether actions which violate the 
Rules are impossible, or merely illegal. As noted, the Rules provide no 
explicit statements about the matter at hand. What about indirect evidence?

"Players" could take "actions" (bot used advisedly here, not in the 
technical sense) that would violate certain existing Rules. E.g., R354/0 is 
one such Rule. R354/0, inter alia, prohibits the further distribution of 
secret Party documents by Players who have seen them as a result of having 
been Judges. There should be no doubt that a person who has been sent such 
information would thereafter be capable of posting it to one of the game 
mailing lists. Taking this to be the act of a Player argues for Rules that 
are laws, not Laws. Further support for such a view is provided by R350/0. 
It requires certain undoubtedly physical actions, which though not 
impossible, could certainly fail to be performed. If our Rules were Laws, 
nothing they mandate could fail to occur.

The picture is not so clear as that, however, and there are a number of 
factors which muddy the waters a bit, e.g., one might suppose Rules which 
it is possible to violate would include penalties for flaunting them. An 
inspection of the Rules reveals that the vast majority do not include 
penalties, nor do they even hint that violating them might be possible. 
Moreover, it may be argued---plausibly, I think---that Rules which do 
specify penalties, e.g., R325/1 on Bankruptcy, do so in such a way that 
incurring the penalty does not constitute a violation of the Rule, but 
rather is perfectly in accord with its provisions.

If, in fact, the Rules are Laws, that R101 is amendable by a majority vote 
(or at all, for that matter!) is problematic. E.g., we could amend R101 
such that is unambiguously claimed our Rules to be laws, not Laws. That is 
to say, a contingent event---the outcome of voting, which is itself 
determined by a number of other contingent events---could cause the force 
of our Rules to change from necessary to contingent. This is bizarre. In 
the language of modal logic, our game world is one in which things which 
are necessary are not necessarily necessary. (For those familiar with modal 
logic, this would mean that the modal system of our game world is neither 
S4 nor S5. Hmmm.) Now, a question arises as to whether this is a correct 
characterization of R101---that R101, or more generally, _some Rule_ 
actually, or potentially serves as the anchor for the metaphysics of our 
game world, and whether as a consequence of the malleability of our 
Ruleset, that our metaphysics is malleable as well.

Sources external to the Game seem to regard game rules as statutory. On 
reading the appendix on Nomic in Suber's _The Paradox of Self-Amendment_, 
one gets the impression that Suber views the rules as statutory rather than 
necessary; however, this is unsurprising as he devised Nomic for the 
purpose of exploring such laws. One of the annotations to Agora's R101/1, 
part of which is comparable to our R101/0, seems to indicate that in their 
game, the rules are statutory, noting that by CFJ 1132, "A Player failing 
to perform a duty required by the Rules within a reasonable time may be in 
violation of the Rules..."---an impossible state if the Rules placed 
necessary constraints on action.

Consider the negation of the statment: ~PEx(Px & Vxr) This is equivalent to 
NAx(~Px v ~Vxr). That is, "It is necessary that for any x, either x is not 
a Player or x does not violate the Rules." Note the lack of causal 
implication, e.g., that violating the Rules would cause one to cease being 
a Player. If, for instance, a chess player moves a knight forward one space 
along a rank or file, it is not that e has ceased to be a chess player, but 
rather that e is no longer playing chess. Such an observation is only 
possible, however, because the rules of chess are unambiguous---there could 
be no disagreements about what a constitutes a legal move. In our Game, and 
Nomics in general, this is not the case. What is legal is mediated by our 
(varying) interpretations of the rules. Nomic is fundamentally a language 
game. Thus, while it is possible to violate the rules---and it will become 
increasingly so as their complexity grows---we need not recognize such 
violations as permissible moves. It is the very purpose of the courts is to 
reverse them.

On these grounds, I rule TRUE.

-- 
J.