Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory

Notes

Notes Preface 1. Which, of course, you’re not holding now as I write this. Furthermore, I’m not writing this now as you’re holding it. Nevertheless, you (in the future) know ex actly what I (in the past) mean. 2. My own inclination is to treat grammar not as an object but as a cloud of so cial practices that we use to coordinate our behavior. My intent in this book is to lay the foundations for this approach. Chapter 1 1. We paid $5.00 a day, which was considered a generous wage for the 1960s. As of 2005, the average daily wage for a worker in a maquiladora (one of the as sembly plants that have sprung up along the border) was $5.00 to $6.00 a day, according to the New York State Labor Religion Coalition. Currently, a domestic worker can get $18.00 to $23.00 a day, according to an article in the Frontera NorteSur online. The minimum wage in Juárez is still 52 pesos a day, about $5.20, although with bonuses one can get up to 125 pesos, according to MESA, the Movement for a Solidarity Economy in the Americas. 2. The following example owes a great deal to Lila Gleitman. I am, of course, coopting the example for my own purposes, so you shouldn’t blame her for any of my conclusions. 3. We’ll return to the problem of Claude in chapter 9; su‰ce it to say that I’ve played a trick by making you aware of Claude’s peculiar biography. The real question is how we would come to categorize tigers and other natural (and artifi cial) things. Chapter 2 1. Real proof theory would look much more mathematical than what I’ve shown in (10), but since this isn’t a book about proof theory, I just want to convey an idea of how it works. 2. Much less, human intelligence. Perhaps one could grant that the computer sim ulation was genuine intelligence, but an intelligence that di¤ered somehow from human intelligence. Chapter 3 1. There is only one di¤erence: On Earth, water is made up of H20, while on Twin Earth it is made up of a chemically distinct compound XYZ, which amaz ingly looks, tastes, and works just like water. 2. The force of a word might diminish from overuse. It’s not clear that this pro cess is analogous to monetary inflation. Chapter 4 1. I should note that cooperation receives a very special interpretation in game theory. A game is cooperative when one of the player’s choices is constrained by a binding agreement, like a contract. I do not use cooperation in that sense here; rather, I use it to mean something likes its ordinary sense of harmonized, collabo rative behavior. 2. In honor of Satyajit Ray’s 1968 film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, distributed as The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha. 3. See a transcript at hhttp://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/authenticity .htmli. 4. Game theory mavens will recognize this game as the battle of the sexes game or the Bach or Stravinsky? game familiar from introductory game theory texts. 5. Albert W. Tucker is credited with giving the game its prisoner’s dilemma inter pretation and name. 6. Unless, of course, one of them is driving an SUV! 7. There is a problem with Tit for Tat strategies: Tit for Tat will cycle between cooperate and defect if it plays another Tit for Tat like strategy that played defect once. This last strategy might be one that experiments with an occasional defec tion. A more robust strategy might try to find a way out. 8. Notice that both players presumably prefer the Pareto dominant payo¤; they can get the preferred outcome if each player has the certainty or assurance that the other player will choose the best outcome. For this reason, this class of games is often called assurance games. 9. Or worse. ‘‘The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smok ing gun to be a mushroom cloud,’’ said the National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, to justify the invasion of Iraq (interview, September 8, 2002; see hhttp:// transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0209/08/le.00.htmli). It would seem that our political leaders still hold the dark view informed by Prisoner’s Dilemma. 330...