2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

G AMES AND STRUCTURES
ically limiting the freedom of choice of the individual(s) rather than its constitutive aspect
that makes possible the operation of a rational agent. It almost seems as if the rules of the
games belonged to a diverse, superior order of rationality than the strategy that the players
will follow. However, this claim must be understood in the historical context: in 1952, when
the essay was written, French philosophy was completely dominated by the Sartrean, exis-
tentialist brand of humanism, with its accent on the unlimited freedom of the individual fac-
ing death as the only possibility to live an authentic life. Not only it is not difficult to read
Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis on the rule vs. the individual (the “subject”) as a well-aimed dig at
existentialist philosophy, but it is exactly how it was being read. Lévi-Strauss’s interpreta-
tion tries instead to undermine the very opposition between the rules of a game and the free-
dom of the player (an opposition that, as we have seen, make little sense within a game-
theoretic framework) by doing away with the notion of freedom altogether. He will then be
able to recover the active character of a rule by transposing it to a different logical (and on-
tological) level, a level where there are no subjects left to embody a presumptive freedom.
But I am anticipating part of a discussion that can only be conducted in precise terms after
a deeper analysis of the concept of game that is supposed to bear it. We have already seen
some concept of game at work, and this particular interpretation may or may not prove con-
sistent with them, and in particular with the idea of game as thematized by game-theory. To
get an answer, we will have to see how Lévi-Strauss’s explanations of social facts fare with
respect to the concepts we have seen above.
The theoretical work necessary to confirm Lévi-Strauss’s claim, therefore, will follow
a direction that is exactly the opposite to that followed with Artificial Intelligence. In AI’s
case, I wanted to show the “essentiality” of its relationship with games and could take for
granted as relevant, to a certain extent, its analysis of the concept. In Lévi-Strauss’s case,
instead, the goal is to show that his very general claims on the relevance of games to struc-
turalism are in fact true, despite the lack of specific work on games. My strategy, then, will
be to explore the essential features of the crucial concept of structure and to compare it to
Artificial Intelligence’s “search-spaces” to show their similarities and differences. I will
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