2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE SUPPLEMENT
We now have an answer for the first two questions: we have seen that Artificial Intel-
ligence and Structuralism can indeed be understood as non-philosophy and that their
projects depend on a particular interpretation of Spiel as game. We have also seen that this
concept of game receives a fine theoretical articulation in two very similar, but not identi-
cal, theoretical objects—search-spaces in the former case and structures in the latter—that
are crucially related to their overall goals.
It is now time to move to the second part of the proposed program and try to answer
the last two questions: first, how—that is, in which sense and for whom—do search-spaces
and structures bring non-philosophy to an end? Second: do they succeed in the task?
Both conceptions fail, I will argue, and for very interesting reasons. The described
structures run into troubles at two levels: as a theory of Spiel and as a non-philosophy of
mind (or esprit). Since the root of the trouble is the same, the choice of which side to ana-
lyze is actually indifferent, since either will bring us to the other one.
I will then start from the inability of the structure as described to provide a theory of
the (individual or collective) mind. The failures have to do not so much with the particular
disciplines in question but with the inability of the proposed conceptions of game to suc-
cessfully force the multifariousness of Spiel into one of its poles. Thus, the time spent will
not be spent in vain, insofar as we will learn something, and hopefully something impor-
tant, about game, Spiel, and the end.
2. The supplement
In the previous chapter, I have emphasized that search-spaces and structures are totally
closed, in the sense that every operation performed on their elements can only produce an-
other element of the set (another chess-position, another mytheme, etc.). Search-spaces and
structures, to put it a little differently, must be totally self-contained in order to perform
their theoretical, and especially their philosophical tasks. It is very important to discuss in
some detail this concept of closure, because the assessment of AI’s—and, respectively,
Structuralism’s— (non-)philosophical success depends on it. In particular, we need to un-
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