THEORY OF GAMES, 1944

Salikoko Mufwene mufw at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU
Wed Apr 11 15:28:14 UTC 2001


At 08:42 AM 4/11/2001 -0400, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated 4/10/01 6:42:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>markklan at PLANETC.COM writes:
>
><< "Professor X presented his radical new theory of games yesterday
> afternoon.  Did you attend the workshop?"
>
> "Yes.  I found his new theory of games intriguing, but I don't think he did
> a good job of showing how it reconciles with received game theory."
> *******
>
> In the second quote,  you could not use the terms "theory of games"
> and "game theory" interchangeably, because "game theory" always
> refers to a body of literature (in my experience), but "theory of games" is
> a more flexible term when appropriately modified. >>
>
>It is possible to create an example in the other direction, such as:
>
>"When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (sp?) (then Lew Alcindor) was in high school, the
>coach of an opposing team decided to use his own game theory: there is no
>such thing as a one-man basketball team.  So he instructed his players to
>ignore Alcindor and guard the other four opposing players.  This game theory
>worked, with Alcindor's team losing 63-60, Alcindor himself scoring 57
>points."
>
>Here "theory of games" cannot be substituted, because the coach's theory was
>about a specific game (singular).  However, one could substitute "theory of
>how to play a game" or "theory of basketball".
>
>In both your and my examples we have a need for a nonce expression to
>designate some individual's hypothesis, and in each case we made an ad hoc
>use of an established expression to describe an idea that is not part of the
>corpus made famous by von Neumann and Morgenstern and known sometimes as
>"game theory" and sometimes as "theory of games."
>
>Let me contrive another one.  I have a list of words that I wish to check
>against the OED.  Every time I find a match between one of the words and the
>OED, I scribble a note on an index card and, to keep the cards from getting
>scattered, toss the index card into a cardboard box by my side.  Hence I have
>by my side a box of matches.
>
>The point is that I find your example to be not incorrect but not really
>relevant.
>
     I am shocked by your conclusion. All these examples show that Noun1 +
Noun2 constructions and Noun2 + of + Noun1 constructions often have
overlapping, non-coextensive meanings. Thomas Paikeday's original solution to
derive Noun1 + Noun2 constructions from Noun2 + of + Noun1 constructions (at
least the way I interpreted it) is inadequate. The examples are very relevant
because variants need not be derived one from the other.

Sali.


**********************************************************
Salikoko S. Mufwene                        s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                      773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
**********************************************************
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