New APPS

If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat.

Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and game masters to figure out and play. After the game hits a kind of popularity threshold the only way to make new money on it is to produce expansions with new character classes and rule-based mechanics. To get people to pay the money, there has to be some sort of ludological advantage to using the new characters and mechanics. So if you just stay with the old set, at a minimum your characters will be underpowered.

But each expansion makes the game more complicated, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes borderline unplayable for everyone (except for the Simpsons Comic Book Guy who loves this kind of thing). And it gets so slow. Where you could have had twenty combats a night in the unexpanded version, now you can only complete two, and you spent long increments of time thumbing through various books figuring out the proper algorithm for how the dragon-spawn Barbarian's grappling ability works during attacks of opportunity when the opponent is half submerged in water.

Since the industry needs non-Simpsons Comic Book Guys to remain viable, a new edition* is then released, and the process starts all over again.

The reason I would have liked to put an essay about this in our book is that I think that analytic philosophy is pretty similar. For a theory to get over, it has to: (1) generate enough counterexamples to provoke a healthy literature, and (2) be such that it can be amended in not crazy ways to deal with the examples. But when this process iterates enough times, the theory can become so complicated that the only reason nobody can counter-exemplify it is because it no longer really fits inside a person's head. At this point, something analogous to the release of a new edition must happen.

My impression is that classical S knows that P Gettierology was in this position by the early 90s. The going theories were so Byzantine that nobody could really work with them. I think that no-luck/modal epistemology was the new edition. Maybe with Williamsonoma/Pritchardology we're in a third edition now. I don't know.

The literature around supervenience bloated in the same way. Perhaps work on grounding/basing is the new edition?

Did realism/anti-realism succumb to rules bloat? If so, is there a new edition answering to the same issues?

Sometimes when a game succumbs to rules bloat, the exhaustion is so complete that no new edition replaces it. Perhaps this happened with the theory of meaning brouhaha.

I don't intend this to be a criticism of analytic philosophy. . . But I do think we don't worry enough about the possibility that reality is such that any true theory of something like knowledge is going to be so bloated that human beings couldn't really make sense of it. Was that what Plato was getting at by having Socrates always fail to arrive at a definition? I don't know. I do think that if analytic philosophy has any faults, it's the pervasiveness of a kind of methodological pragmatism that systematically precludes creative, deep thinking about these possibilities.** A recent post by Eric Schliesser on modal Williamsonoma touches on this concern in an interesting and helpful way.

Probably the difference between analytic and continental metaphysics lies right here. Analytic metaphysicians tend to follow Lewis in striving for a theory that maximizes the kinds of theoretical virtues that Quine assured us were maximized by scientific theories (simplicity, elegance, wideness of scope, etc.). Continental metaphysicians often try to provide an account of what reality might be like if those virtues were in fact not a good guide to truth (this comes from one strain of Nietzsche). The metaphysician asks what reality must be like for some phenomena to exist in the way it does. Continental metaphysicians are willing to paradoxically ask this very question when the phenomena in question is the impossibility of doing metaphysics. In this manner they remain somewhat true to French phenomenology's distrust of metaphysics** while still hearkening back to the speculative moves characteristic of German Idealists.

I'm not making a brief for or against either approach. Since we have absolutely no idea whether or not pragmatic guidelines for theory revision are in fact truth tracking, it seems clear to me that both approaches are necessary.

[*I would go so far as to argue that one cannot provide an ontology of editions without a full account of rules bloat by which to individuate the different editions.

**Nothing is wrong with transcendental epistemology. But Hegel is right with his critique (in the Introduction to the Phenomenology) of the idea that there is any epistemic advantage to limiting philosophy  to transcendental epistemology. Moreover, with Schelling we should affirm that the transcendental subject itself is a thing in the world. So transcendental epistemology/phenomenology is properly understood as a branch of metaphysics.]