Not Lectures on Theory [LONG!]

[clehrich]

Hi Markus,

Until Ron suddenly catches on and comes down on me like a ton of bricks, my current plan is to post these occasional rambles and such, and respond to comments, so long as I actually have something serious and theoretical to say, or (even better) people start challenging back and we can split to sub-threads.  I will be going away mid-May, and at that time will go into very intermittent contact with the Forge until September (I'm sort of like a vampire on an annual coffin cycle).  During the summer, I'll try to collate my notes together to say something lengthy, coherent, and focused, then submit it as an article.

In the meantime, the more questions or challenges I get, the more stimulus there is for me to keep at this.  I'm very surprised, but thrilled, to see how many positive responses there are already.  Here's hoping I don't screw it up next big post....

Thanks for the kind words.  It's really Ron who might carp about the etiquette, not me, and on such a small matter I don't think he's very likely to do so.  He really only cares about etiquette when it causes problems; the rest of the time rule-bending is dandy so long as the conversation goes on positively.

Chris Lehrich

P.S.  I feel like I'm writing a column here, but it's great because I don't have an editor or schedule so I can do what I want as long as I don't break the Forge's rather flexible rules.  My current expectation is that the next piece is going to be something about sacred space and space-delineation.  Other things I plan are (1) something on textuality that tries to make Derrida's formulation useful for RPG's, and (2) something about authority structures and Illusionism.  But who knows!

[Jason Lee]

Hey Chris,  I think I'm starting to get the difference between abduction and induction.  I'd like to test it.  I haven't finished reading this whole thread (I'm doing it very slowly, to insure I absorb it all), but I want to spit this out before it slips away.

I'm not exactly a genius at evolutionary theory, but I'd like to use it as an example, because it'll put things in context for me.

*****

Let's see... I'm sure this is floating around on the internet for me to cut and paste... Yep, ok (I've trimmed out the expanded descriptions):

Darwin's Explanatory Model of Evolution by Natural Selection

Observation 1:
Organisms have great potential fertility.

Observation 2:
Natural species populations normally remain constant in size, except for minor fluctuations.

Observation 3:
Natural resources are limited.

Inference 1 (Inferred from Observations 1, 2 & 3):
There exists a continuing struggle for existence among members of a population of a given species.

Observation 4:
All populations show variation.

Observation 5:
Some variation is heritable.

Inference 2 (Inferred from Inference 1 and Observations 4 & 5):
There is differential survival and reproduction among varying organisms in a population of a given species, favoring advantageous traits.

Inference 3 (Inferred from Inference 2):
Over many generations, differential survival and reproduction generates new adaptation and new species.

*****

Ok, exam time.

Each inference is an Induction.  Because the theory of natural selection is induced it cannot be proven in the mathematical sense, hence it cannot be a fact, even though the induction is so plausible as to be relatively irrefutable.

Though, if we had started with an inference, then sought out observations to support it, that would be Abduction (which Darwin may well have done for all I know).  

Right or wrong?

(If I'm right, I might just hit myself in the head.  I would then consider Deduction and Induction to be logical, and Abduction to be intuitive, but those labels are simply reflective of my personal perceptions as opposed to any sort of technical definitions.)

[Rob Carriere]

Chris,
Combined feedback time. I like both your theory thread and this one[1]. Please keep'em coming! The practical aspects are great, but I also definitely enjoy a good theory `for its own sake'.

I am _definitely_ going to do something with your separation and aggregation stuff. Sessions fizzling because they never managed to get properly started and nobody quite knew what to do about that are an annoyance and this may just be what the doctor ordered...

Off the topic for the Forge, but seeing the study of ritual as a ritual... Wow! Shades of Goedel. Hope this will be as fruitful a train of thought as that was.

SR
--
[1] EDIT: obviously the silly fool who wrote this post was confused as to what thread he was reading. Oh well.

[Doctor Xero]

Good choices of theorists, Chris.  I've taught some of them in my classes, so I recognize their value.  I know you weren't attempting a definitive listing, but I would also have included Ferdinand Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and John R. Searle, Erving Goffman,  Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and James J. Gibson.  I also think some narrative theorists would have been useful, although my memory is blanking on the names of some key ones.

The works of the scholars you mentioned and the ones I've mentioned contributed considerably to my thoughts and to my approach to relationships to notional structures as explicated in my VoINT and VoIND threads; in fact, they're the sources for my choice of the term "interaction".  The fact that you mention them surprises me since you had seemed uncomfortable with my choice of terminology yet cite some of my sources.

I wonder how theoretical or abstract we can be on The Forge and remain within the parameters of the overall forum purposes.  I could comfortably go on about these topics for millennia!  I regret that midterm season seriously curtails my participation in this thread!

Doctor Xero

[clehrich]

Inference 1 (Inferred from Observations 1, 2 & 3):
There exists a continuing struggle for existence among members of a population of a given species. ...
Inference 2 (Inferred from Inference 1 and Observations 4 & 5):
There is differential survival and reproduction among varying organisms in a population of a given species, favoring advantageous traits.

Inference 3 (Inferred from Inference 2):
Over many generations, differential survival and reproduction generates new adaptation and new species.
....Though, if we had started with an inference, then sought out observations to support it, that would be Abduction (which Darwin may well have done for all I know).

I'd read Inferences 1 and 2 as Inductions, producing rules from observations.  Inference 3, producing a general case from a rule, I'd read as abductive.

Your remark about intuition hits the nail on the head, actually.  C.S. Peirce, the great American pragmatist who invented this terminology, was interested precisely in how we make guesses, and why we are so often right.  On the face of it, it seems as though we make wild guesses all the time, and it seems strange that we're ever right.  So he worked out this notion of abduction, and its means of evidentiary support, to explain how we guess -- what intuition is, in short.

Now on the Darwin thing, the trick is that he makes an abduction at the end.  So how do you support that, given that it's at some level guesswork?  Well, the thing is that you have a number of known rules of heredity, breeding, and so forth, rules that are importantly not dependent upon the abduction itself.  Based on the abducted case (natural selection) and these various rules, you can make deductive predictions.  That is, you can say, "Given all that, I should be able to find the following sort of evidence (in fossil records and Galapagos and so forth)," because the Case (natural selection) + Rule (other rules of heredity, etc.) ought to have produced those results (Deduction).  You then go look for the evidence, previously unsuspected or thought quite bizarre and irrelevant.  When you find the evidence predicted by your abducted case, this strongly suggests that your abduction was correct.

Here's another example from the sciences (pardon me if I get the details a little confused -- it's been a while).  You have all sorts of weird data about light, energy, mass, and whatnot.  You have a large number of induced rules.  Then Einstein makes a genius abduction: energy = mass (e=mc^2).  And from that, Special and then General relativity.

Now that's such a strange result that it requires evidence, but the problem is that it's an abduction.  So what somebody did, I forget who, was to play with the equations and think about solar eclipses, and he realizes that if Einstein's theory is right (abducted case), and we take other known equations (rules), then when we observe a solar eclipse we should be able to see a very slight shift in the position of the stars around the sun, because the light will be bent by the gravity of the sun.  Nobody had ever seen this, and all we know is that the abduction plus previously known rules predicts this.  So we go out somewhere in Africa and actually look for this bizarre result.  And we find that the light does indeed bend exactly as we had expected.  Doesn't prove Einstein right, but it sure makes his theory seem strong.

You can never actually prove it, of course.  But as Karl Popper pointed out, you can't actually prove an induction either.  There's a sort of asymptotic approach to certainty, but not certainty.  Suppose I buy a bag of navy beans.  The bag is labeled "Navy beans."  The beans I can see in the bag are all white.  But I don't actually know that every bean in that bag is white unless I test every single one.  It's just really, really likely.  Similarly, I know that gravity is about 9.8m/s^2 (rule), and on that basis I can design a zillion experiments where I feed in the distance and calculate how long it will take an object to fall (deduction).  And let's suppose it works 100% of the time, for a zillion tests.  Do I know it's true?  No.  But I'm approaching certainty asymptotically.  I'm now so sure that I might as well know it for certain.  There's just always the chance that just once, the deduction will come out wrong.

This is actually what scientists hope for, of course.  They hope that by constantly making very slight changes to the Case (experiment), and making calculations from the Rule, they will Deduce a Result that won't come out right.  Every time it does come out right, they've added a teeny bit to the certainty of the Rule.  But if it comes out wrong, and they're really confident about the Rule, then it suggests that something about that particular sort of Case reveals a complication of the Rule.  And that's how you get new science.

---

In the context of RPG's, the previous proposal was that we constantly make Abductions on the basis of various Result data, trying to infer what the SIS is as a Case.  The difference from the sciences is that we don't really care about inferring Rules -- we don't do Induction, because it's not helpful to work out a new set of Rules, because we're not that interested in predicting the results of controlled experiments.  Instead, we want to make sure that the Case (SIS) is as precisely accurate as possible, so that we can infer or insert new data and have it not clash.

Interestingly, this means that every time we do something within an RPG that affects the SIS (almost anything we do, certainly IC), we're accomplishing one of two things -- or both.

1. Confirm and strengthen the SIS
2. Challenge the SIS

Since we can never have any certainty about the SIS anyway, these two tend to collapse into each other from the perspective of an observer, i.e. another player.  From my perspective, it matters which happens, because I want my character to succeed (or whatever) by playing on the structures of the SIS; I don't want to be smacked down for going against the SIS.  From everyone else's perspective, either result provides data that clarifies the SIS.

That logical result would tend to suggest that SIS clarity is best supported by players who aren't doing anything.  But this seems at odds with experience.  So what's wrong?

Again, Peirce.  He'd suggest, I think, that the difference is risk.  In essence, the more one's hypotheses (abductions) are on the line, the more that is risked, the more convincing we tend to find a positive result.  There's no logical difference, but logically no number of positive results can ever prove the abduction correct anyway.  So it's a question of what we find convincing.  And if we make the abduction, and we propose the test, and we put our necks on the block to do it, it is we who are most convinced.

You see this, again, with science.  This is one of the reasons, in fact, for the need for peer review even when you discount deliberate fraud.  Since we're always working with hypotheses and conclusions that are a little bit murky, it's always possible for the person proposing the hypothesis and test to get overly convinced by it because it's his and he's risking something.  I don't know all that much about it, but it sounds like the Cold Fusion thing was like this: the abduction was so strong (i.e. counter to expectation), the risks so high, the potential rewards so great, that the scientists allowed themselves to become overly convinced by their own abduction.  What was needed was for other scientists to repeat the experiments and design new ones to test and counter-test the abduction.

In RPG's, this means that the player whose abduction is actually on the line, i.e. whose character is risking something, is the most likely to find a positive result rewarding and clarifying of the SIS.  The other players do find valuable data in it, but are less convinced -- others' clarifications are less authoritative for them.

This has an interesting potential result for Illusionism and strong-GM play.  By putting all real narrative control in the GM's hands, you make abductive action riskier.  That is, there is a greater real chance of having a failure, of having the result you infer from your abducted SIS blocked by the GM.  By raising the risk, you produce two results:

1. Players are less likely to go strongly against the obvious deductions
2. Players are more likely to find the SIS convincing as a total experience

Therefore strong-GM play tends to support Illusionism and Immersion.  If you want those things, a strong GM control of narrative may be useful.  On the other hand, you are less likely to get flexibility and wide variance in player/character action, and if you want that, you may want to distribute control of narration.

Just a thought.

Chris Lehrich

[clehrich]

I know you weren't attempting a definitive listing, but I would also have included Ferdinand Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and John R. Searle, Erving Goffman,  Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and James J. Gibson.  I also think some narrative theorists would have been useful, although my memory is blanking on the names of some key ones.

As you say, I haven't attempted a definitive listing.  The only one here I'd recommend to the novice reader, without some particular purpose in mind, is Austin, whose How to Do Things With Words is quite readable.  I happen to think he's also quite wrong, albeit interesting, and the application of his approach in ritual (Stanley Tambiah) was deeply wrongheaded, which to my mind suggests some problems with Austin (and Searle).  

I find Foucault unhelpful for most things, but I have the disadvantage there of being an early modernist to a significant degree, and Foucault, however interesting a theorist, is a really terrible historian -- his The Order of Things [Les mots et les choses] is pretty disgraceful as a piece of bad history, based on faulty sources and not knowing what the hell one is talking about.  It's made Foucault very unpopular in early modern history (see Paolo Rossi's introduction to the second edition of his Clavis Universalis, now translated by Stephen Clucas as Logic and the Art of Memory).

Chris Lehrich

[Jason Lee]

Chris,

Awesome, I think I finally got it (attempting to apply the knowledge will determine if I have).  My confusion appears to have been a matter of scale.  I was thing deduction/induction/abduction were a specific type of reasoning (logic, personal definition: drawing conclusion from fact), instead of reasoning in general.

Thanks ever so much for taking the time.

*****

This has an interesting potential result for Illusionism and strong-GM play. By putting all real narrative control in the GM's hands, you make abductive action riskier. That is, there is a greater real chance of having a failure, of having the result you infer from your abducted SIS blocked by the GM. By raising the risk, you produce two results:

1. Players are less likely to go strongly against the obvious deductions
2. Players are more likely to find the SIS convincing as a total experience

Therefore strong-GM play tends to support Illusionism and Immersion. If you want those things, a strong GM control of narrative may be useful. On the other hand, you are less likely to get flexibility and wide variance in player/character action, and if you want that, you may want to distribute control of narration.

Fascinating.  That's sort of a proof for what we've already known about GM control.

*****

This is essentially the philosophical study of interpretation. Hermeneutics has the disadvantage for us that it is primarily focused on textuality in particular, but the idea of the hermeneutic circle is one that could very profitably be applied to RPG's. In short, you have 4 objects: the reader (player), the reader's self-projection (in immersive actor-stance, the character), the world in front of the text (the shared imaginative space), and the text itself (notes, rules, system, etc.). The reader, through the self-projection, enters the world in front of the text and attempts thereby to make inferences about the text itself; the self-projection then returns to the reader for reflection, as it has changed by the experience and will need to be re-integrated, changing both reader and projection in the process. Then you go and do it again.

This explains a phenomenon I've been observing.  That is, that players who have trouble understanding where someone else is coming from also have trouble understanding genre.  The reader's projection (not the character in this case) takes its context (attitudes, background, etc), from the reader in whole, as opposed to inferring them from the text.  Which means, upon the projection's return to the reader it's frame of reference has not changed, so the full meaning of the text is not integrated.  

It may be sort of 'duh' to say players with less empathy have trouble with tone/feel, but it helps explain why to me.

[Jason Lee]

A note on Separation -> Ritual time.

In our group, after everybody is seated, we go around the circle and do the "in-character exercise".  Which is, that everybody says something in-character (doesn't matter what about), until we've went through all of the characters.

It's been surprisingly effective at reducing "ramp-up time" (slow, kind of disconnected play at the beginning of the session).  The ritual theory explains why.

[Itse]

Doctor Xero:

I wonder how theoretical or abstract we can be on The Forge and remain within the parameters of the overall forum purposes.

The way I see it, for the purposes of the forum, people have to try and turn theory into practise. It's safe to say this is happening. All is well.

(Btw,the idea of RPG as Ritual and it's significance is also discussed in Martin Ericssons article "Play to Love" in Beyond Role and Play.)

[clehrich]

Well, time for another little theory rant before this thread gets too old to revive.

Something that's come up recently  in Tomas's thread on choice is the issue of practice, specifically the position of the human actor between freedom and constraint.  Here's a very brief sketch of "practice theory", which emphasizes precisely this distinction.

Practice

The social world is made up of an extraordinary number of intertwined structures, slowly shifting over time as people use them in different ways and for different purposes.  Everything from language to basic orientations, social relations and personal goals, is made up of such structures.

This is the social theory of knowledge, which really begins with Durkheim.  The old fight was between the a priorists, e.g. Kant and his followers, and the empiricists, e.g. Hume and his various types of followers-up.  Durkheim proposed the encounter with "savage" tribes as a way to challenge both views and propose a social theory.

Very simplistically, the a priorists argued that most major categories of human knowledge arose from inherent, hard-wired, a priori structures of the mind.  The problem posed by "savages" is this: if it's hard-wired, how come there are so many radically different views of things like time, space, and so forth?

Similarly simplistically, the empiricists argued that major categories arose from contact with empirical reality; that is, you encounter real things and you come up with your ideas in reaction.  The problem posed by "savages" is this: if it's all empirical reaction, how come people agree about so much?

In short, Durkheim argued that the a priorists and the empiricists had proposed radical alternatives, but that real people live in between.  They have categorical notions sort of semi-embedded, and they encounter real things and think about them, but most of all and most importantly, they are told what to think by their cultures.  If this seems obvious, that's because Durkheim was so devastatingly important: he was pretty much the first to argue this perspective effectively, and one of the engineers of the "culture" concept.

So given that, we see that there are a bunch of structures in place in our heads, arising primarily from social cues.  Whenever one acts,[1] one therefore manipulates structures already in place.  Such manipulation is generally strategic, in the sense that it aims to accomplish something not already true.  This is dependent on such structures already being in place, because without them it is impossible to predict the outcome of behavior.

Let's take a concrete (if a bit silly) example.  Consider the recent fashion among young women of wearing midriff-revealing shirts, low-rider pants, and high-riding thong underpants, such that the thong can be seen above the waist.

Now when a young woman gets up in the morning, she can opt to dress like this.  Why would she do so?

To look sexy
To piss off more conservative people
To fit in with a desired crowd
To show off her body
To show that she feels sexy
To show that she feels free about her body[/list:u]And all of these might be true, simultaneously, or only some, or possibly others.

Now in a loose, simple sense, showing off your underpants has something to do with sex.  If a rather conservative person were to characterize the style, he or she might call it "slutty," meaning that in some sense it implies the young woman's sexual availability.

But of course, this reading cannot be taken strongly.  If a viewer decides on the basis of a woman's clothing choices that she is sexually available, that viewer may well be over-interpreting the symbol; to put it bluntly, "I could tell from her clothes that she wanted it" is no excuse for rape.  So what does the symbol really mean?

Well, it clearly plays on the notion of sexual availability, as well as lots of other issues, like in-crowds, pop stars, female bodies more generally, and so forth.  When a woman chooses to dress like this, she necessarily plays on all of that.

The trick is, she doesn't have to be conscious of any of this.  And if she is conscious of any or all of it, that changes nothing.  Consciousness has nothing to do with it.

So what's this got to do with freedom and constraint?

Let's imagine that the same young woman goes for a job interview at a relatively conservative place.  If she chooses to wear a conservative suit, what does that mean?  Well, for her, it is a choice to indicate various things, including some directly in opposition to her choice on Saturday night to wear a thong and low-riders.
I can conform to your sense of the appropriate
I am not a radical
I will not make my sexuality part of this workplace
You will not make my sexuality part of this workplace[/list:u]And lots of others.  The point, though, is that she

chooses her dress based on what she wants to say with it.

So if that's some sort of freedom, the free manipulation of existing structures, where does constraint enter?  Well, in order to employ a symbol effectively, you have to conform to existing structures.  Total nudity would actively challenge the existing structures, but would also land the woman in jail, indicating that her radical challenge is simply not read as such—it's just read as abnormal.

When we employ structures, to sum up simply, we both produce and reproduce structures.  That is, every time a woman wears a thong and low-riders, she helps to make that fashion acceptable to the mainstream viewer.  At the same time, she reinforces the point that women's fashion is about women's sexuality and, possibly, women's availability.  There's no escape from that circle.  But within it, there is considerable room for play, for manipulation, for strategic use of symbols to say what you want.

---

In an RPG context, the application is I think obvious.  Structures are handed to us, most obviously in everything from social agreements to rules systems to setting to whatever.  We permit ourselves only a limited range of movement.  At the same time, every manipulation of any structure within that system necessarily changes its meaning, however slightly; over time, a longstanding game may conform entirely to the rules system and yet be entirely personalized to the group because of a kind of social memory of practice.

So what is "railroading," then?  By this reading, it is the delimitation of how certain structures may be used in a manner determined primarily by authority structures.  To put that in English, it's what happens when the GM alone (usually) determines how certain structures may be manipulated, without the consent and agreement of the players, and the willingness to police conformity.  Using the dress-code example, it's the school principal announcing that low-riders with thongs may not be worn because that style is inappropriate for a school setting.  The important point is that "railroading" is non-consensual, and thus requires policing.  Interestingly, it also tends to provoke counter-measures to the degree that the players accept such railroading as in principle acceptable but in this particular instance annoying; thus strong railroading can produce a tendency to have the players hare off after the most trivial clues precisely because it's so obvious that this is not what they are "supposed" to do.

---

I could ramble on interminably about practice, but I'll just make one further point.  As noted before, a few posts back, one of the practice points about ritual is that ritual is not in fact discontinuous with the rest of human life.  What Bell calls "ritualization" is the process of asserting that certain modes of practice are discontinuous, in deliberate tension with the fact that practice is inherently continuous.  Thus it is a deliberate imposition of a strong constraint, for some purpose, with some authority.

In the RPG context, this fits quite well: we see this every time someone says, "You have to speak in character when you play," just to take an overly-strong example.  We have here an overt authoritative statement about how a mode of practice is to be expressed discontinuously with other modes.  A less extreme one would be, "You can't just talk about your favorite TV show; either play or buzz off."  The issue here is not whether such ritualization is reasonable or appropriate; Bell's theory suggests that it is neither – it is merely human.  Instead, it invites us to analyze the hows and the whys of our ritualization, the ways in which we delimit special modes of activity as distinct and discrete, and what effect this produces on the practices within that so-delimited space.  One interesting one would be that it appears many cultures assert that time within ritualized space may be homogenous, in fact identical, in the sense that every instance of time within sacred space may be deemed equivalent sacred time: all Masses may be the Last Supper in actual fact, for example.  We seem to have a variant of this in the campaign: all time and space within game-space is contiguous; even if it's been two weeks since we last played, and we have moved from Phil's house to Bob's game store, it's the same space and the same time as last time.

---

Anyway, just some thoughts that somebody out there might, hypothetically, find interesting.  I've given references for all this stuff before: Bourdieu and Bell are most important here, though bear in mind that Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice is a nightmarish read.  Marshall Sahlins's The Islands of History is worth a look as well, though he's not always explicit about what he's doing.

[1] I'm avoiding the hairy problem of thought/action, and calling it all action.  It has been pointed out (by Bell and others) that this distinction is nonfunctional, so when I say "action" you should not think of it as distinct from thought – thought is a kind of action.  If you prefer "behave" for "act", feel free to swap the terms. Return