Ossorio: "Baseball players have no disagreements about the rules of the game they’re playing. Human beings have great disagreements about the game we’re playing, e.g. we’re really organisms. Why the disparity?"

What do you think?

Audience: Will you read that again?

Ossorio: "Baseball players have no disagreements about the rules of the game they’re playing." By the way, they do but not much. "Human beings have great disagreements about the game they’re playing, e.g. the issue we’re really organisms. Why the disparity?"

Audience: Well, for one thing there are lots of cultures.

Ossorio: Lots of cultures.

Audience: I think we’re a lot more complicated.

Ossorio: Yeah, in a word, human life is much more complicated than baseball. There’s a lot more substance to it, a lot more depth. [laughter] It has more substance, more depth, a hell of a lot more systematic possibilities.

Audience: If you bring it down to checkers and tic-tac-toe, it gets simpler. Are there...

Ossorio: And by the way, remember the disagreements are simply another example of the working of those systematic possibilities. It’s not as though that’s an exception. That’s just another set of possibilities within the game.

Audience: And even if they’re having disagreements, there’s a great deal of common ground prior to that that they do agree on.

Ossorio: Remember you have to share concepts in order to either agree or disagree about facts.

Audience: So they might disagree about whether or not the guy’s safe, but they share the concept of "safe" or "out".

Ossorio: I can’t think of any interesting answer other than that. They’re simply... they’re just not comparable.

Audience: What I was wondering, Pete, if there is a game that might approximate the human condition game.

Ossorio: No. That’s one of the reasons you can’t really do this in terms of rules. If it were a game, if it were a lot like a game, I think you’d be able to do it in terms of the rules and literally just write the rules of the game.

But if you think of the nature of the four components of the Person Concept -- behavior, language, reality, and individual person -- and you look at how you articulate those -- one with a parametric analysis, another with a parametric analysis, another with a calculational system, and a third with a combination -- you say, "What’s the net possibilities of all of those?"

It does not come out like a simple set of rules. Even one thing like baseball that does have a set of rules -- look how many different possibilities there are. And once you put together something that has these disparate pieces, and the logic is disparate, and some of them are calculational systems that give you infinite products, others you have essentially infinite ways of having human characteristics (that is, the number of possible Person Characteristics is essentially infinite), then you’re dealing with a very broad range of things.

Audience: What strikes me is that, I guess in baseball, baseball players never misinterpret the rules.

Ossorio: If you’ve ever seen a sandlot baseball game, what you’ll find out is that when they’re learning not by having learned the rules first, there is disagreement. There are negotiations.

Audience: And you can change the rules of the game, too.

Ossorio: And they can change the rules.

Audience: You can’t change them.

Ossorio: Changing the rules is simply one of the possibilities for people.

Audience: [inaudible]

Audience: Metaphorically, there’s a bent to talk about it as a rule-following approach in contrast to?

Ossorio: The contrast is to law-like.

Audience: Law-like?

Ossorio: Law-like. And it falls on the rule-following side. Rules, games, etc. have a very strong heuristic value because they are essentially the same kind of thing. But if you go for the real thing and not just heuristics, I think I gave you some arguments for why you have to do it in terms of concepts.

And what that gives you is a tremendous set of systematic possibilities, and the key is that they are systematic possibilities. And the key is to represent them as systematic. Everybody knows that human life has unbounded possibilities. But if all you can do is throw up your arms and say, "Gee. There’s no limit.", that isn’t going to get you very far. If you can formulate the rules that generate all those possibilities, you’ve got a much more powerful handle on it. You also make it all more intelligible.

Audience: A lot more what?

Ossorio: Intelligible. By the way, one of the things that I left out: Remember that I said that between persons, it’s generally I and Thou? Now think of the baseball example. One of the things you can say is that not only is one baseball player not inherently mysterious to another baseball player. Every baseball player has a fellow feeling for every other baseball player. They are fellow baseball players.

Well, transport that notion into the arena of persons. Every person has a fellow feeling for another person. And that’s the essence of I and Thou.

Audience: Pete, the other thing is that in a baseball game, there is no move of declaring what the rules are.

Ossorio: No, not as part of baseball.

Audience: That’s right. In the context of a game, the rules are already there, and there is no move of declaring what a rule is and what the rules of the game are. They are already there a priori. Where I guess in the human condition one of our moves is to discuss our rules and to talk about what our rules are.

Ossorio: Yeah, but that doesn’t change the rules.

Audience: I understand that...

Ossorio: That’s just another move in the game.

Audience: But that’s a factor that generates the confusion and disagreements among humans.

Ossorio: Yeah, but there are all kinds of other things that generate disagreements, too. That’s not special I don’t think in that respect. It’s simply that in this game one of the things you can do is argue about the game. You can discuss the game. You can try to formulate the rules of the game. If you think you’ve got them, you can change them. But all of that is within the set of possibilities that were already there.

Audience: I guess I’m confused. What are you saying about rules for humans, for people?

Ossorio: Nothing. [laughter]

Audience: No wonder I was getting confused.

Ossorio: Remember I keep saying, "You can’t really do it in terms of rules."

Audience: You’re saying it’s law-like, though.

Ossorio: No. That’s what it’s not. A rule-following thing contrasts to law-like things. Physics is law-like -- theoretical [physics]. People are not that.

Audience: But what about things like customs?

Ossorio: They’re not law-like.

Audience: No. But in terms of rules of interaction, they’re some that one would say decent, civilized people follow. Certain customs, not exactly rules, but norms and customs. If one of us stood up here and said "I can’t stand you, and I think you’re a jerk" in front of everyone, we’d all think that was a breach of something -- etiquette. There are some things that we do expect people to go along with.

Ossorio: Yeah, but [change tape].

Audience: But there are still customs to be followed, and in general, we expect people to follow them.

Ossorio: That’s right. But that doesn’t make them inevitable. People break the rules routinely.

Audience: And in a baseball game, too.

Ossorio: Yeah. And then they’re not playing baseball.

Audience: I wish I could get away with breaking the rules in a baseball game.

Ossorio: That’s right. What could be more human? [laughter]