2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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actually two independent lives, as Haugeland has put it: a syntactic life in which they are
shuffled around according to formal rules, and a semantic life in which they have a content
because an external interpretation has come into play. 15 It might be worth noting that de
Saussure was far from believing this. In fact, he likened, in a well-known image, form and
content to the two sides of the same sheet of paper (i.e. the same substance): it is impossible
to cut the one without cutting also the other. According to another structuralist, Algirdas
Greimas (who follows closely Hjelmslev here), the formal systems described by logic, al-
gebra and chess can perform such a neat separation between form and content only because
they are essentially missing the level of content (“le plain du contenu”). Hence, they are not
languages at all since “the semantic interpretation that might be given will reproduce the
same articulations (of the expressive level) and it will be interpreted according to the same
rules as the interpreted form.” 16
If it is indeed doubtful, I think, that mathematics and chess lack content, as Greimas
asserts here, he seems to be right in claiming that, under the formalistic interpretation, there
is no content left worth the name. The content lies outside the formal structure and it is
linked to it, in a arbitrary way, by a chosen function.
But what is distinctive of game and play is not the absence of a content; rather, their
peculiarity is that their content is given on the inside, so to speak, by means of the rules and
appears throughout the confrontation that the rules rule. A game is not content-less and
therefore purely “formal,” it is rather self-enclosed in the sense that it does not need any-
thing external to it in order to find its meaning. This is true for football as for chess, and
this is why football played on a video arcade is not the same game as football played on a
field, as well as chess played on a mono-dimensional chessboard is not the same game as
chess. They are different games, in principle no better and no worse, but the fact that AI’s
rendition of games is not able to discriminate between them indicates that the structures ex-
15. See John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence...., 100. The two principles above are a close rephrasing of
his principles of symbolic systems as found at p.90
16. See Algirdas J.Greimas and Julien Courtès, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage
(Paris: Hachette, 1979) 193.