The nature of rhetorics

A crucial aspect of  mapping the questions that we had thought up in class was to question the underlying assumptions about the questions. This was not at all easy, given that I had to take on the perspective of the person who was writing the question. Indeed, if one were to think of this intersubjective stance from a particular frame, one can argue that I was playing with ideas; taking on the role of abstract peers and questioning their worldviews. This then led me to ponder about the Sutton-Smith's (2001) rhetorics and the assumptions embedded in each category. He characterizes play rhetorics as those that include “broad symbolic systems - political, religious, social, and educational” (2001, p. 9). Here, rhetoric highlights  various discourses, narratives and values that members of a particular discipline align themselves to. Rhetorics are thus drawn from larger sociocultural systems that individuals are a part of. These rhetorics are therefore ideological ways of thinking about play which he separates from more scientific or personal rhetorics. At the core of a rhetoric is also ontological and epistemological assumptions. For instance, what kind of stance do developmental or animal theories adopt? A person who assumes a constructivist stance could think of the mind as paramount and therefore focus on imaginary play as more salient construct than say physical play. Questioning and understanding our assumptions about the nature of play is therefore integral to defining play. Of course the term definition itself may have different ontologies. For instance, does a definition need to have set properties? Or is it dialectical? Or is it contextual?

An act of play therefore contains several assumptions of what play is; both to the organism playing and to the observer. This is an age-old debate about the nature of knowledge (epistemology). Do we try to know knowledge from a third person perspective, or do we try to capture it from the emic perspective? What forms of knowledge is valid? Are subjective states a useful way in determining play? Or are we looking for general characteristics? For me, play is necessarily intersubjectively derived. If one has to define play, it has to be a consensus that participants agree to before, during or even after the fact. This is however, not entirely easy to ascertain, particularly if we as researchers have to glean such information from participants (sometimes, it's not feasible). In playing a video game with other people for instance, the assumption is that everyone engaging in the activity is actually playing. This assumes that play is a continuous state, but is it always so? If one breaks away from the play (like when my cats distract me), is it still play? There are ways to ascertain this from a third person perspective such as drawing some general observable characteristics but it may be unclear unless the researcher engages in conversation with the participants. The frame that participants bring to these contexts are paramount in understanding what play means to them inasmuch as the observed characteristics. This then raises multiple questions for me (more of them!), questions that can only be answered empirically given the worldview and theoretical perspective that I adopt in relation to what play is.