Categorical Shortcomings: Application, Adjudication, and Contextual Descriptions of Game Rules

Abstract

In the final extra time minutes of the 2010 World Cup quarterfinal match between Uruguay and Ghana, Uruguay’s star striker Luis Suarez deliberately batted the ball with his hand off of his own team’s goal line. The referee quickly detected his action, penalizing Suarez with a red card for deliberately handling the ball and rewarding Ghana with a penalty kick. Given that he had no other way to stop the ball and with only seconds remaining, his decision appeared—despite the odds—to be a calculated one. Had Suarez not stopped the ball, Uruguay’s World Cup run was over. Even with the impending penalty kick, Uruguay’s chances of winning were slim but not impossible. Yet when Ghana’s Asamoah Gyan failed to convert the subsequent penalty kick, Suarez’s “deal with the devil” turned into either an act of strategic brilliance or the mischievous manipulation of a loophole in soccer rules. Suarez’s actions raise questions about games and their rules. He openly violated the rules and willingly accepted his punishment, yet he also broke the rules in order to deny Ghana a fair and earned victory. So his case indicates a larger problem—what to make of this type of egregious but strategic rule breaking. To better understand the appropriateness of Suarez’s actions, one needs to understand the more fundamental relationship between games and their rules. And it is here that, despite much effort, the field of sport philosophy is still without a satisfactory paradigm that explains game rules. The existing paradigm focuses mainly on a categorical distinction developed by John Searle between constitutive rules that make the convention possible by determining relationships where none existed before, and regulative rules that identify relevant existing relationships and regulate behavior. This constitutive/ regulative categorical distinction has a number of clear uses. It can help us understand the need for rules to define practices like sports. It also indicates that some connection exists between sports and potentially incompatible rule violations. But it still remains unclear whether the constitutive/regulative distinction adequately provides a rough account of game rules or even if it sufficiently explains the relationship between games and their rules. More importantly, can such an account of game rules actually help us to evaluate a player’s behavior in relation to a game’s