Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Abstract

A radical reformulation is proposed for explaining paradigm fragmentation. The broader topography of academic activities is conceptualized according to an academic game-theoretic analogue (GTA). According to this analogue, scholarly and academic activities reflect a competitive field of play and of plays. Criteria such as attention, compensation, awards, publications, tenure, and mobility become the scarce valued resources distributed in the game based on the plays that players enact. In an effort to reveal the heuristic potential of the theoretical analogy, these threads are traced across a broad array of humanistic and scientific theories and scholarship, including connections among Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Lyotard.