Plato meets game theory: How Schelling points explain the power of great books

The great books aren’t just classics — they’re cultural Schelling points that give our minds a place to meet up in the world of ideas.

This week, Daniel Greco, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, joins us to discuss how great books serve as meeting places for navigating the world of ideas. This essay was adapted with permission from Daniel Greco and Matt Wansley’s Substack, Greco and Wansley.

Credit: Roger Fenton / Adobe Stock / Jacob Hege / Big Think

By Daniel Greco

Some idealists set out to build a new community from scratch. They saw themselves as unusually clear-headed and logical — people determined to build a society based on reason rather than on the accidents of tradition. If there was a better way to do something, they wanted to find it.

At first, the experiment went smoothly. They shared work, rotated responsibilities, and debated policy late into the night. But before long, they started to complain about English. It’s irrational, they said. Silent letters everywhere, no phonetic consistency, spelling rules that dissolve the moment you learn them. Why do “though,” “through,” and “tough” all look the same but sound nothing alike? And the idioms! Why should “kick the bucket” mean “die”? Surely a truly rational society can do better, they thought.

So when the first children in the commune were born, factions emerged around which language the next generation should speak.

• One faction rallied around constructed languages — Esperanto, or perhaps Lojban. Why cling to a broken tool when we could use one optimized for ease of learning and communication efficiency?

• Another faction pushed for Mandarin. It was already the most widely spoken language on Earth. If children should be prepared for the future, shouldn’t they learn the tongue of global commerce and power?

• A third championed Latin. They saw it as venerable, orderly, and the foundation of much of Europe’s culture. They argued that it would provide an excellent foundation for learning other languages, should the children choose to. To them, it seemed both rational and dignified to return to such a source.

Each group had understandable, albeit very different reasons for their respective positions. But precisely because nobody could win the argument, no consensus was reached. Ultimately, each family in the society made their own decisions about linguistic education, and the children grew up exposed to various different languages at home, but none of them was universal in the commune. What did they fall back on? English — the one language they all still sort of shared.

But it wasn’t the English their parents spoke. Having received little to no English education, they spoke a stripped-down, halting version. They used fewer words, the grammar was rough, their range of expression narrower. The common language survived, but thinner and weaker than before.

The commune set out to improve on English and ended up with something worse: a diminished, half-forgotten version of the very thing they were trying to replace.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563) (Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum / Wikimedia Commons)

Questioning the Canon

One of the courses I’m teaching this semester at Yale is the philosophy strand of our great books sequence (in addition to philosophy, the students taking the sequence study literature, history, and political thought). It’s a wonderful class to teach, in part because it selects for particularly enthusiastic/masochistic students. To take it is to opt in to huge amounts of reading and writing. They also have to apply for the program, though my sneaking suspicion is that we keep the application process in place not so much as a filter, but because without it, there would be less interest in the program. Yale students are a bit like Groucho Marx. They don’t want to belong to any clubs that would have them as members without some sort of selection process.

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But since I have to do the readings too, my thoughts turn to the old question of Canon. Why do we still read Plato, Aristotle, and Kant? In this article, I want to address two very different sorts of skeptical characters. The first is the technical, scientific-minded skeptic. Maybe a bit like the characters in our parable. Here’s his speech:

If philosophy is really about truth-seeking, as you often say, why is the pedagogical approach so different from the approach in those disciplines that are best at generating reliable knowledge, namely, the natural sciences? Of course, Isaac Newton was a genius, but budding physicists don’t read Newton; they read contemporary textbooks that present his ideas — not all of them, we leave out the alchemy — in a maximally accessible form that provides a sound foundation for further learning.

Even if Plato has some good ideas — which I’m not sure of but I’ll grant for the sake of argument — there’s no chance we couldn’t express them more compactly and clearly than he did. The fact that you still read Plato’s own works, rather than textbooks that distill whatever intellectual value his works had, tells me what you do is more like cultish hero-worship than genuine intellectual inquiry.

The second critic is happy with reading historical works, but objects that our focus is too narrow:

If you’re really interested in reading the best philosophy, why do you read so many European men? There were extremely rich philosophical traditions in the non-Western world that your great books classes completely ignore. And even within the Western world, there are lots of neglected female authors who don’t show up on your syllabi. The chance that the best philosophical works in history would be so culturally and demographically skewed is basically nil — more likely, you’re just reading books that have made their way into the Canon through accidents of history, helped along by racism, imperialism, and sexism, rather than because they’re uniquely deserving of their exalted status.

Some people would want to give full-throated replies to these objections. While I’m not Catholic, I have friends who are, and I can imagine a speech like the following:

The reason we should read roughly the books we already do in great books courses is that Aquinas basically got everything right. But to understand Aquinas, you really need to read Aristotle (who was half right, which is better than almost anyone else except Aquinas). But Aristotle won’t make much sense to you without seeing how he’s responding to Plato …

And it’s not just Catholics who can give speeches like this. I have a close colleague who I imagine would say something pretty similar about Spinoza. I know others who think the history of philosophy basically culminated with Kant. Plenty of contemporary philosophers will be able to give unapologetic, full-throated defenses of the Canon if they think some figures in the Canon are largely correct, and the rest is essential for understanding them. This is a natural pairing with declinist narratives — it’s not just that some Canonical figure got things right, but that we’ve collectively intellectually regressed since then, so later statements of similar views tend to be worse than the original. Alasdair MacIntyre tells a story along these lines.

I want to acknowledge this sort of view, but it’s not mine. I feel the pull of the objections, especially the former. My intellectual instincts are what some would pejoratively call “scientistic.” I think the ancients and early moderns were missing too much scientific knowledge — and good philosophy is too closely integrated with science — to think any of them were basically right in most of their big picture views. So I want to give a kind of concessive reply, one that grants the main points the objectors are making and still resists replacing Canonical philosophical texts with contemporary textbooks or radically expanding the Canon.¹ And as is a recurring theme in my thinking, I want to do so by drawing on some concepts from economics.

Coordination games and Schelling points

Schelling points are features of (some) coordination games, so to understand what Schelling points are, we first need to understand coordination games. And while they have a technical definition, I tend to think the concept is best understood by starting with examples.

Consider the problem of which side of the road to drive on. In some places, cars drive on the left. In others, they drive on the right. Either convention works fine. It’s far more important that drivers coordinate — that everybody drives on the same side of the road — than how they coordinate. Language is the ultimate coordination game. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. That is to say, it doesn’t matter whether we refer to roses with the word rose or something else. What matters is that we coordinate on some shared word, so that I can use that word to get you to think about roses. With driving, I only know of two stable, workable patterns of coordination. With language, there are at least as many solutions to the coordination game of communication as there are spoken languages and clearly far more; there are lots of merely hypothetical languages that no actual community speaks, but which could in principle work just fine.

Coordination isn’t always easy. Thomas Schelling — writing long before cell phones and text messages — imagined an example where traveling companions in an unfamiliar city get separated. Let’s say it’s Paris. They face a coordination game in that they want to end up in the same place to continue their trip together, and they care far more about meeting each other than they do about where they meet. How might they find each other? He thought they would likely pick some unusually salient location — the Eiffel Tower, perhaps?²

The general idea is that when it’s more important that we coordinate our choices than it is what we choose, we’ll often do well to pick options that we know the people we’re trying to coordinate with are likely to be thinking of.³ Such choices — solutions to coordination games that we’ll naturally converge on when we can’t explicitly talk things out — are called “Schelling points.”

One crucial feature of Schelling points, for my purposes at least, is that they don’t need to be optimal. To stick with the example of Paris, if the place we get separated is not all that close to the Eiffel Tower, an optimal solution to our coordination problem would be somewhere else; maybe halfway between us, or the nearest bistro that we can both comfortably walk to. Still, because we can’t explicitly talk things out, searching for the optimal solution to our coordination problem is unwise. It’s unlikely we’ll both find it, and we might disagree on what it is (maybe you prioritize a short walking distance, while I’d really like a bite to eat). We’re better off sticking with the Schelling point.

Great books as meeting places for ideas

I hope the point of my title is clear now. There are at least some similarities between the choice of what to read and coordination games. I admit the analogy isn’t perfect. If I want to curl up with a fun mystery novel on vacation, I might not care if anybody else has read what I’m reading. I’m just aiming for private enjoyment. That’s not a coordination game. But for other books — especially works of philosophy — part of why we read is to share a kind of common language for discussing ideas. And to the extent that this is so, it’s more important that we read the same books — or at least, that there be substantial overlap in what we read—than it is that we read the best books.

Look around and you’ll find lots of examples illustrating the point. The story of the Tower of Babel is at least as old as Genesis, but because I can assume that you, reader, have heard the story, I can quickly and efficiently convey various associations by alluding to it. If I were designing a society from the ground up, including its mythology, would I include the Tower of Babel as one of the shared myths? I have no idea. The question is beside the point, though. I’m not designing a society from the ground up; I exist within a society that already has a stock of tropes, and the best I can do to communicate my thoughts is to draw on the images and touchstones I know we’re likely to share.

In a Substack post on free speech, I framed my discussion as a response to an argument from John Stuart Mill. Why? Because contemporary debates about free speech are heavily indebted to Mill, and I judged that the best way to convey my own perspective was to emphasize points of contrast between it and a broadly familiar one. Even in decidedly middlebrow publications like Slate, a few years ago you could find people drawing on a concept from Plato — the Noble Lie — to criticize COVID policy.

One last example: The familiar Econ 101 distinction between positive and normative analysis has its roots in Hume’s famous discussion of the is/ought gap, and it’s easy to find invocations of that distinction all over the place in contemporary discussions aimed at a broad audience. A few years ago, Tom Rachman wrote in the pages of The Atlantic about the difficulties facing contemporary journalists under the heading “America’s Is/Ought Problem.” If you try to explain to a middle schooler the — putative? — difference between news reporting and opinion reporting, you might have an easier time of it if you remember your Hume. Allusions and references to the Canon are all around us, and reading the Canon puts us in a better position to interpret and communicate with other people who have also done so.

Let’s return to the objections. Why not teach via textbooks? In the more technical areas of philosophy — logic, especially — there’s enough agreement about what are the core ideas students should know that instruction does largely proceed via textbook. While there are many logic textbooks — just like there are many introductory chemistry textbooks — because there’s enough agreement about what needs to go into them, they’re close enough to be interchangeable. In my role as director of undergraduate studies for the philosophy major, I’m happy to accept transfer credits in logic from other universities, even if their class uses a different text.

But when it comes to the greats of the history of philosophy, my strong guess is that if we tried to distill their ideas into textbooks and teach exclusively from those, there would be enough disagreement over just what the textbooks should look like — different textbooks would place substantially different emphasis on different ideas — that we’d end up essentially having failed to coordinate. I don’t put this forward as an ironclad rule. I very much like the idea behind utilitarianism.net, and I have assigned sections from it in less historically oriented courses. But I’m also happy that our great books sequence has students reading John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. I think it’s a strictly worse presentation of the utilitarian worldview than utilitarianism.net. I’m confident that students who’ve read Mill will have a common language for discussing (aspects of) ethics with the countless other people who read Mill at some point or other, whereas I worry that if I completely switched to utilitarianism.net, the world wouldn’t switch with me. I’d effectively be abandoning a valuable Schelling point.

What about the multicultural critique? I fully concede that there’s lots of historical contingency in which books made it into the Canon. In an alternative universe where India was the conqueror and Britain the colonized, I can easily imagine the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna occupying a central role in the Canon, and tweedy Occidentalist scholars making the case that the obscure Scottish philosopher David Hume actually had some interesting ideas that are a bit like Nagarjuna’s if you squint, and there’s a strong case for reading him alongside the Madhyamakas. I’m not at all sure that, intellectually speaking, we’d be any worse off in that world. We’d have different Schelling points, but they might not be inferior. Or let’s grant for the sake of argument that women such as Margaret Cavendish, Ann Conway, and Mary Astel did excellent philosophy, and the fact that their works haven’t occupied places in the Canon comparable to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Locke is largely a function of historical and ongoing sexism.

That’s only a reason to significantly expand the Canon if the aim is to read the best books. If we think of syllabus construction as a coordination game, then this is a mistake. Of the “non-Canonical” philosophers named in the previous paragraph, I bet almost none of you had heard of any of them. If you have heard of all of them, you’re almost certainly an academic philosopher involved in or at least deeply familiar with the New Narratives project in the history of philosophy, which is not many people. That’s just to say we’re very far from a world where all of these figures have entered the Canon and can serve as a source of shared reference points for public discussion. The fact that there are so many ways we could take the multicultural critique on board means that trying to do so in a robust way would in practice lead to fragmentation. Instead of a larger Canon, we’d just have less of one — fewer overlap between different great books classes because each instructor has tried to expand the Canon in different directions. We’ll be a bit like the second generation in the rationalist commune.

Does this mean the Canon must be etched in stone, never to change for all history? Not exactly. But I do think it means the Canon should change very slowly. The great books sequence at Yale was founded in 1947. My strong guess is that back then, they read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, and I can attest that we still read them today. But I also imagine that there have been some changes on the margins. From year to year, we’ll add or subtract a text. If the students howl too much about Hegel, we might try out a different German Idealist the next year. (Fichte?) If enough people across the country or world decide to add the same text to similar courses year after year, I see no reason why such a text couldn’t enter the Canon as a new junior member. But I wouldn’t expect it to happen often.

When coordination games are played with a large number of players who differ in their views about where the optimal coordination points are, and who are too diffuse to engage in effective collective deliberation, we abandon Schelling points at our peril. We’re more likely to fail to achieve the value of coordination than we are to move to a better equilibrium.

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Author’s Notes:

1) To be clear, this isn’t the only reply that I think works, and I think there’s much more to be said for great books courses. But most of that stuff would be utterly familiar, and I’ve tried to focus on questions where I think I can add value.

2) In Schelling’s own example, the city was New York, and the location was underneath the giant clock in Grand Central Station. Honestly, the example doesn’t really resonate with me, and I grew up in New York in the 1990s. When I first heard about his discussion, that spot didn’t particularly jump out at me as an obvious one. Perhaps Grand Central Station once loomed larger in the collective imagination than it does now.

3) Strictly speaking, it’s not enough to know they’ll be likely to think of the option — they also need to know that you’ll be likely to think of the option. For example, suppose I happen to know that my traveling companion loves the Arc de Triomphe, and that it’s actually more salient to her than the Eiffel Tower. If that’s my own private knowledge, it won’t be a Schelling point. Rather, she must know that I know this about her, and I must know that she knows that I know this about her, and …. Turns out, Schelling points must be common knowledge, in the technical sense, for them to serve as adequate solutions to coordination games. If you listen to the same podcasts I do, you’ll probably have heard Stephen Pinker discussing this idea quite a lot in the last few weeks.

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