A Ludological Perspective on Argument

This introductory paper explores a new perspective on argumentation that draws upon the resources of ludology – the critical and academic of study of games qua games. In the Philosophical Investigations, one of the later Wittgenstein’s more mysterious suggestions is that if one understands how games work, then one would be able to understand how natural language works. Similarly, it will be argued that if we look to how games function as games, we will be able to understand how the ‘argument-game’ functions. The epistemic importance of rhetorical argumentation rather than analytic demonstration becomes apparent if we consider ‘argument’ as the communicative interaction in which arguers attempt to improve the cognitive attitudes of a real or potential audience. The activity of arguing is crafted – but not scripted – by the formal aspects of a complex system of interacting elements that give rise to an emergent field of ‘possibility-space’ in which arguments take place. In recognizing how we indirectly craft second-order fields through our first-order design choices, we gain a new perspective and a new set of tools with which to reflect upon the relation between bias, fairness and objectivity in argumentation. Keywords: argumentation theory, language-game, ludology, philosophy, rhetori