[lit-ideas] Grice's Bridge, Dummett's Tarot
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:21:10 -0500 (EST)
They call it a card-playing machine, but it's not.
---
Bridge and Tarot: was: Grice and Dummet
Below some commentary on McEvoy, even...
Grice was a professional bridge player -- as the long obituary in "The
(London) Times" testifies -- "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer".
There is a complex reference to bridge in WoW:v (via Stampe). Dummett liked
cards too:
From
_http://www.eprints.lse.ac.uk/552_ (http://www.eprints.lse.ac.uk/552)
-- begin quoted text. Note Dummett's Sicilian name-dropping: a charm.
---
Q: We want to talk a little bit about a passion, or a pleasure—your
interest in tarot cards.
Dummett:
Well, my interest in the first place was in the games -- it more than
any other kind of card game -- the history of the cards is a tool to the
history of the games. Well, you want to ask me why I’m interested. I don’t
think anyone should be interested in the subject who doesn’t enjoy playing
cards, because this is an enormous family of very interesting and often very
intricate games. I’ll give two examples. In Bologna, they play a game with
the local form of the Tarot pack. It’s for four fixed partners, as in
Bridge, and the greater part of the scores at the end of the hand comes from
the multitude of different combinations of cards that you and your partner
have in the tricks that they’ve won. So, it’s not like Bridge where you’re
just concentrating on making so many tricks. Two-thirds of the cards in the
pack can contribute to these combinations, and so you’re trying to win
such combinations, and prevent your opponents from getting them. So,
almost every single card matters. All right, that’s one fascinating form of
the
game. In Bologna, they play with 62 cards. In Hungary, they play with only
42. You have 22 fixed trumps and only 5 cards per plain suit. Through very
strict rules governing the
bidding, you can often tell a great deal about what cards people have in
their hands. And, the thing is, you get a certain score. You have partners,
but the partners are not fixed. They’re determined by the declarer. The
successful declarer calls a card, which he doesn’t have in his hand, and the
player who has that card becomes his partner, but he doesn’t say so. And so,
until that card is played, you don’t know for sure who is whose partner.
Besides the score you get for winning the game, there are also scores for
all sorts of feats you can get in play like winning the last trick with the
smallest trump, winning the two top trumps and the bottom trump and so on.
The most valuable is winning the second highest trump with the highest
trump. Now, sometimes it’s worth not winning the game in order to make one of
these feats. You’ll score more that way. So, again, when you start,
it’s not certain what the objective of the declarer and his unknown
partner is going to be. Well, that’s another example of a really fascinating
game. I got interested in all this in a very odd way. We were on holiday in
France. We bought a tarot pack. There were rules of the game with the pack. We
started playing with our family. We thought it was a very good game. When
I was back in England, I came across an Austrian pack with rules and this
was an obviously related, but a very different game. So, I wrote to various
people asking if they could tell me how the game was played in other
countries. I wrote to experts on card games. None of them could tell me. So, I
started trying to find out for myself, and it gradually grew into a serious
piece of research. Trying to discover the history. I mean, there are written
rules of games from the seventeenth century onwards, but before that, there
are just some literary allusions. So, it really becomes a piece of serious
detective work, and that’s part of the fascination. I’ll give you an
example of a puzzle. I know a lot of people who are collectors of playing
cards. In the 1930s—this is quite a
short time ago -- there was a kind of tarot pack. My collector had the
wrapping and it was written in French, "Tarot `a soixante treize cartes’, or
possibly ‘septante trois cartes’. It was just like an ordinary Austrian
pack, so that the suits had 8 cards in each suit, but instead of 21 numbered
trumps it had 40 numbered trumps. Now, it’s still a total mystery, it’s
mystery I’d love to solve. In some French-speaking parts of Europe they played
this game. I mean, these packs have not been made since the 1930s. We wrote
to the manufacturer and they had a record of making these packs, but not
where they were sold. So, I still don’t know who played it or why. So there
are all sorts of problems of this kind. So, I enjoy playing. I enjoy
meeting people who play. That’s a very good way to meet people, and I’ve done
a
lot of this in Sicily. In Sicily, the game only survives in four scattered
towns, in each of which it’s become a local tradition . . .
Q: Which towns -- can I ask?
Dummett:
Oh, you know Sicily? Calatafimi, Mineo (do you know Mineo? It’s a small
town south-west of Catania), Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (near Messina) and
Tortorici, inland. In about 1900 you could still play it all over the island.
But now, if you ask anyone in Palermo, no one has heard of it. Just in these
four places. I mean, they play
differently but the substrate of the basic rules are the same. And it’s
different from any other tarot game played elsewhere. So, I enjoy that part
of it: going and meeting people who play, and they teach me the game. So, it
became a sort of passion. The fortune telling and occult part of it has
never been my principal interest, but I wrote a chapter, in the first book l
wrote on tarot, on the occult use of the tarot for fortune-telling, taking
it up to about 1920. I had to do some work for that. But then I thought, it’
s a chapter which no one interested in that subject will ever see, and no
one interested in card games would take any notice of.
So, I thought of extracting it and finding someone to bring it up to date,
and publish the result as a book. Then Donald Laycock, an Australian
anthropologist,
sent me an article that he’d written on modern occultist tarot packs. So I
wrote to him, suggesting he should collaborate with me and bring the
history down to the present. And he agreed. But while I was in California I
received a pathetic letter from him saying, 'I have contracted a form of
leukaemia and can no longer work'. Very soon after writing it, he died. I
obtained a new collaborator, Ronald Decker, and we enlisted a third, French,
collaborator, Thierry Depaulis. It was going to be a single book bringing the
history down to the present, but it turned into two, because it got too long.
So, I went on with the second volume in collaboration with Ronald Decker,
who did the largest part of the work. And even then we only reached 1970.
Q: S, the two books were, the first was A Wicked Pack Of Cards and the
second
was called?
Dummett:
"A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970." 1970 was when there was a great
explosion. Before that people were content to choose just one occultist
tarot pack
out of the few that existed. Now all these different occultist packs were
being produced: witches’ tarot and feminist tarot, native American tarot,
Basque tarot, Japanese tarot -- tarots from every culture that had never had
anything to do with it, and people started collecting occultist tarots.
Q: And completed a third book.
Dummett:
"Ah, that is about the game of tarot! Or, rather the many games. The
largest part of it consists of detailed rules of the different games, as played
now or in the
past. This is essentially bringing up to date my The Game of Tarot of
1980; so much has been discovered, not only by me, since then. So this new
book
is just called A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack; it’s in two
volumes, because it’s an enormous family of games. It is historical as well
as covering games played at the present day.
Q: Is it published?
M. Dummett:
It was published, yes. I’m sorry I haven’t got a copy of it here. Anyway,
only real enthusiasts would buy that book!
Q: I must say it’s extremely refreshing to hear that the former Wykeham
Professor
of Logic and one of the foremost practitioners in philosophy of
mathematics and
logic has actually been co-authoring with Ronald Decker, who is, I think,
curator of the
playing-card museum at the American Playing Card Company in Cincinnati,
Ohio. It’s
an absolutely fascinating part of your life. Do you still play tarot?
Dummett:
Well, the trouble is, we used to have a little club in Oxford which I
founded years ago. Now, it’s disintegrated. I mean: some of them left
Oxford; some of them died. So, I don’t have that anymore. All I have is a
computer programme for playing French tarot. Well, it’s not so much fun as
playing with real people, of course. But I sometimes beat those three little
men
in the computer!
end quoted text
---
Re: Dummetiana
In a message dated 1/14/2012 10:05:16 A.M. UTC-02,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in "Turing, Grice, Wittgenstein --
Functionalism":
Here we are right back at the metaphysical question of whether we need, in
the human case, to account for the' processing' in terms of some World 2
(in P's terminology), whereas in the case of the computer the 'process' is
entirely to be understood in terms of some World 1.
---
O. T. O. H., we may view Functionalism as attempting to provide a
'reduction', as it were, of world 2 (psyche) to world 1 (sensory input,
behavioural
output). There _are_ problems with that. "He raised his arm", for example,
as Grice notes, echoing, somewhat Witters, is imbued with 'psychological'
jargon.
Grice considers various levels of psycho-physical correlations, since, as
Palma suggested, there is a multiple realisability at stage: the world 1 is
one: the hardware; the world 2 is various: the software.
---- But allow me to bring back Dummett to the picture. In that interview I
was quoting from, there is a final (almost) segment about Materialism,
which may relate. It is quoted in the ps.
It starts with his views on religion, and proceeds to deal with 'identity'
thesis in mind-body reduction, and brings in card-playing machines into the
picture. I have entitled this "Dummettiana", not to aggravate McEvoy, but
because Dummett has become the centre, as it were. Feel free to bring back
the old title.
Cheers,
Speranza
---
From
eprints.lse.ac.uk/552
Q: I just wanted to hear from you this rather refreshingly different pres
entation
of your religion.
Dummett:
Well, I mean, there wasn’t a tension between my work against racism and
philosophy, they’re both very much connected in my own feeling with my
religion. I think that it’s a duty to help the poor and oppressed if you can,
and
that springs very
much from, or I mean is a consequence of, a Christian view of the world.
But you’re not asking me about that so much as generally. In philosophy, I
think the duty of someone who has a religious belief as I have is to seek
the truth. I mean, I know that people say that people with a religious belief
adopt philosophical ideas because they think they know the answer already
and it gives them grounds. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never done any
work in philosophy with a view to supporting my religious beliefs. I think the
duty of the philosopher is simply to follow where the argument leads, if
it appears to lead in a direction against his beliefs, he just has to leave
it there and say ‘there must be an answer to this’ or ‘I must have gone
wrong somewhere, I don’t know where’. I agree that, particularly in America,
it’s not just atheism, it’s straightforward materialism that has become
almost axiomatic among analytic philosophers. That used not to be the case
here. I remember years ago there was a series of Wolfson lectures (lectures
sponsored by Wolfson College); there were six. Quine and Davidson were
among the lecturers, so there are two
atheists for you. As it happened, all the other four were Catholics. There
were myself, Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe and Dagfinn Føllesdal (It’s
not generally known that he’s a Catholic, but he is). So, we had four
Catholics and two atheists."
It used not to be the case here that religious belief was so rare among
philosophers-- there are still one or two like myself -- but I don’t know
whether that’s the increasing influence of American philosophy or just chance.
I do think that in philosophy -- well, I believe in metaphysics (I haven’t
done much work in metaphysics, and I think a great deal of metaphysics is
basically the philosophy of physics), that metaphysics is concerned with
clarifying our conception of the universe in which we live. Whereas a lot of
other philosophy is concerned with clarifying theories about ourselves,
about intention, about emotion and so on. So, I think that philosophy needs to
be pursued by . . . I mean if you declare yourself as an atheist or a
materialist, you’re just as much giving the conclusion in advance, in fact
rather more than if you declare your adherence to a religious faith.
Q: It seems somehow that the mind-body distinction in philosophy of mind
and
consciousness studies has been a sort of bogeyman. The reduction programme
to single
state materialism would leave no room for the spiritual sphere, that’s on
one side. There’s
also another tension, the explosion of Marxism, again for different
reasons, sending one
off on the atheistic path. I wondered if you agree that neither of those
two things really
touches the concepts of metaphysics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of
mathematics,
logic and the technicalities of the subject.
Dummett:
Well, I agree, they are irrelevant. I think all this concentration on the
notion of consciousness is because it seems the last obstacle to oppose to
a materialist reduction of reality, I think that’s a kind of inheritance
from Cartesian dualism. Questions like, ‘What is consciousness for?', What is
the point of there being such a thing as consciousness?' -- I think those
are ridiculous questions. I think they are questions which come from a kind
of dualism in the first instance. They want everything. They want to
arrive at Monism, but they can’t quite get there.
...
Q: Do you still play tarot?
Dummett:
Well, the trouble is, we used to have a little club in Oxford which I
founded years ago. Now, it’s disintegrated. I mean: some of them left
Oxford; some of them died. So, I don’t have that anymore. All I have is a
computer programme for playing French tarot. Well, it’s not so much fun as
playing with real people, of course. But I sometimes beat those three little
men
in the computer!
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