language games

A language, and its usage / context expressed as a game. We understand the former by seeing it through the lens of the latter.

Term following Language-games (Wittgenstein, Waismann).

Questions that can be asked:

• wherefore this language construct and not any other?

  • if there are reasons to prefer, then there are reasons to disprefer. We might get back Sapir-Whorf in a collective sence, here. Related: aggregating collective negations needs roundabout mechanisms like tabooing.

• How do we arrive at agreement on a given usage?

  • Coordination games. I recall cite:chennew2009 has an interesting discussion of coordination in bimodal incentive distributions.

• How is the language creation process best encoded?