Language games of reciprocity

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 (2008) 365–377

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Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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Language games of reciprocity

Bart J. Wilson ∗

Economic Science Institute, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 23 January 2007Received in revised form 30 May 2008Accepted 2 June 2008Available online 13 June 2008

JEL classification:B4C9

Keywords:Semantics of economicsRhetoric of economicsExperimental economicsReciprocity

a b s t r a c t

This paper attempts to explicate the meaning of reciprocate in economics. I first show usinginnate universal concepts that the definition of reciprocate appears to be circular. This circu-larity problem vanishes, however, when the context of the interaction is introduced as theinextricable link between the act of reciprocating and the intention to reciprocate. ApplyingWittgenstein’s concept of a language game, I also discuss the claim that social preferenceshave no agency. Rather, it is an individual’s observable action that constitutes agency in reci-procity. My thesis is that social preferences emanate from the actions of social individualsand not vice versa.

© 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are allmixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now,an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action(Wittgenstein, 1967, §567).

1. Introduction

Humans have an amazing natural propensity to engage in personal, social interactions that achieve cooperative outcomes.What is the question then that we wish to answer when we try to construct our understanding of the ubiquitous reciprocationthat we observe in others and ourselves?

The starting point for the standard method of inquiry is to specify a set of game-theoretic assumptions. Thus, if we canidentify the set of individuals interacting with each other, if we can specify the complete set of possible decisions that theseindividuals can make and the sequence in which they occur, if we can assign the knowledge that these individuals possessthroughout the interaction, and finally, if we can predicate the preferences that these individuals have over all possibleoutcomes resulting from the interaction, the only question to ask is, “What reciprocal outcome obtains?” It is a matter of themathematical propositions that state the equilibrium or individual decision behavior that supports a reciprocal outcome.

As a science, the standard method of inquiry then prescribes that we confront this model and its predicted outcomes withdata from the laboratory and/or the field. In doing so, we implement to the best of our abilities, auxiliary hypotheses and all,

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366 B.J. Wilson / Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 (2008) 365–377

the assumptions of the model (Smith, 2002). The question then becomes, “Do people reciprocate as our model predicts?” Byrandomly assigning subjects to different experimental conditions, we seek to uncover a treatment cause for the effects weobserve on outcomes. If our observations fail to verify our model’s predictions, we revisit the original set of assumptions,modify them accordingly, and repeat (Camerer, 1997, 2003).

However there are implicit assumptions embedded in this process that merit examination. As part of our method, weassume that the predicated preferences precede and hence explain the observed actions, or more succinctly, preferencesare the cause and actions the effect. This assumption is supported by a second implicit assumption, namely that what thetheorist, econometrician, and experimenter articulate as to the information conditions of the individuals are in sum andtotal the knowledge of the individuals. That is, if we assume there is no tacit, social knowledge, we have a clean function:the inner preferences of individuals are inputs and their outer actions the separable predicted output.

This paradigm unfortunately muddles our understanding of reciprocal actions, resulting in multiple conceptions of whatis “reciprocity”. For example, Rabin (1993) and Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004) model reciprocity by incorporatingperceptions of others’ intentions into the utility function. Levine (1998), Fehr and Schmidt (1999), and Bolton and Ockenfels(2000) construct models that incorporate other-regarding preferences into the utility function, and Charness and Rabin(2002), Falk and Fischbacher (2006), and Cox et al. (2007) model both intentions and other-regarding preferences.

Another thread of research discriminates between notions of “strong” and “weak” reciprocity (see, inter alia, Fehrand Fischbacher, 2003; Fehr et al., 2002; Gintis, 2000; Gintis et al., 2003). Gintis et al. (p. 153) define strong reciprocityas “a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation, at a per-sonal cost, even when it is implausible to expect those costs will be repaid”. As a predisposition, strong reciprocity ismodeled by specifying preferences that generate cooperative and retaliatory behavior. In contrast, the concept of weakreciprocity rests on purely self-regarding individuals who respond to kindness with kindness to sustain more profitableoutcomes for themselves in the future. Weak reciprocity is modeled as games of reputation and repeated interaction.Thus, these two models of reciprocal actions are distinguished by the preferences that are assumed; strong reciprocityassumes interdependent, other-regarding preferences, and weak reciprocity assumes purely independent, self-regardingpreferences.1

The following brief summary of definitions and descriptions of reciprocity from several research programs illustrate themany different meanings of reciprocity used in economics. In Fehr and Gachter (2000, p. 159, their emphasis),

Reciprocity means that in response to friendly actions, people are frequently much nicer and much more cooperativethan predicted by the self-interest model; conversely, in response to hostile actions they are frequently much morenasty and even brutal. . .People repay gifts and take revenge even in interactions with complete strangers and even ifit is costly for them and yields neither present nor future material rewards.

Similarly, Fehr and Fischbacher (2002, C2–3) define a

reciprocal individual [as one who] responds to actions that are perceived to be kind in a kind manner, and to actionsthat are perceived to be hostile in a hostile manner. . .It is important to emphasize that reciprocity is not driven bythe expectation of future material benefit. It is, therefore, fundamentally different from “cooperative” or “retaliatory”behaviour in repeated interactions.

In contrast, Trivers (1971) offers an early contribution by introducing the concept of “reciprocal altruism”—the self-interested trading of favors or one person providing a benefit to another with the expectation of future reciprocation.Hoffman et al. (1998, p. 338) agree in principle with this definition but disagree with the name of the concept. They describereciprocity as

I share my meat with you when I am lucky at the hunt, and you share yours with me when you are lucky. Althoughthis is commonly referred to as reciprocal altruism, we prefer to call it reciprocity. I am not altruistic if my action isbased on my expectation of your reciprocation.

Later, they write (p. 341) that the “norm” of reciprocity

implies that if one individual offers a share to another individual, the second individual is expected to reciprocate withina reasonable time. We distinguish negative reciprocity—the use of punishment strategies to retaliate against behav-ior that is deemed inappropriate—and positive reciprocity—the use of strategies that initiate or reward appropriatebehavior.

Motivated by their experimental design, McCabe et al. (2003, p. 269) “describe” positive reciprocity

as the costly behavior of a second mover that rewards a first mover based on both the gains from exchange to thesecond mover as well as the second mover’s beliefs about the intentions motivating the action of the first mover.

1 In a recent overview of preferences and reciprocity, Sobel (2005) refers to strong and weak reciprocity as intrinsic and instrumental reciprocity,respectively.

B.J. Wilson / Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 68 (2008) 365–377 367

Finally, in a summary article, Sobel (2005, p. 392) succinctly refers to reciprocity as a

tendency to respond to perceived kindness with kindness and perceived meanness with meanness and to expect thisbehavior from others.

From these passages, it is obvious that there is a multiplicity of meanings for reciprocity. In anticipation of the next section,I offer the following summary observations.

(1) Common to all of them, reciprocity includes an action that follows on the heel of another action.(2) If the anteceding action is “friendly”, “kind”, or worthy of “reward”, then the succeeding action is a reciprocating action

if it is also “nice”, “cooperative”, “kind”, or a “costly” “reward”.(3) However, if the anteceding action is “hostile”, “inappropriate”, or “mean”, then the succeeding action is a reciprocating

action if it is “nasty and even brutal”, “hostile”, “punishing” or “mean”. Notice all the different flavors of adjectivesemployed here and in (2).

(4) Prior to taking the action, most of the quotations explicitly describe the reciprocating individual as “perceiving”, “deem-ing”, or assessing the “beliefs about the intentions”. In other words, as part of the reciprocating act the individual thinksabout the anteceding action.

(5) Sometimes reciprocity is defined in terms of actions alone, others by motivation, and still others by both.(6) To some reciprocity involves expectations of future benefits, and to others it does not.

I contend that distinguishing reciprocal actions by the form of the preferences (intentional, outcome-based, interdepen-dent, or independent) stems from a multiplicity of meanings in language about what is meant by reciprocity. This paperattempts to clarify the notion of what is meant by reciprocity with the aid of an alternative tool, Ludwig Wittgenstein’sSprachspiel, or “language game”. Unlike the usage of the word “game” in economics, which has been formally defined sincevon Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game in Philosophical Investigations (1953) ispurposively amorphous.2 This paper employs his reference to a language game as the multiplicity of language practices inour ordinary language.3

This brings me to the question that I wish to address, namely, “What does it mean for person b to reciprocate person afor having taken action z?” The aim of this paper is not to argue against theories of reciprocal actions, but rather my purposeis to elucidate the source of the different meanings of reciprocity: language. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2discusses the multiplicity of meaning in language and how it relates to understanding reciprocity and the method by whichwe attempt to develop that understanding in economics. Section 3 then introduces the concept of semantic primitives (see,e.g., Wierzbicka, 1996) and shows that the definition of reciprocate is circular. Section 4 discusses how this circularity problemvanishes with an appeal to sociality, the mark of human interaction.

Section 5 then explores the implications of Section 4 with a discussion of a Wittgensteinian claim that inner preferencesin themselves have no agency. Instead, it is an individual’s observable action, embedded in a pattern of social custom, thatconstitutes agency in reciprocity. Hence, I will not explain my answer to what it means to reciprocate by invoking social (orother-regarding) preferences because reciprocal actions do not emanate from preferences. Rather, my thesis is that socialpreferences emanate from the actions of social individuals. Finally, Section 6 concludes with a summary and the implicationsfor future research.

2. Reciprocity and a multiplicity of meanings in language

To illustrate first the multiplicity of meanings in our language, consider the following two questions: “Why did the manleave his wife?” and “Why did the tile fall from the roof?” Notice that these two questions are seemingly similar in form. Bothquestions may start by asking “Why did. . .?”, but this similar form masks a deeper difference. In asking the first question,we expect as an answer a reason for the action that the man is taking. This differs not inconsequentially from the expectedanswer to the second question, for presumably the tile does not have a reason to fall off the house; there was a cause to theevent. The first question begs an answer that entails agency and a rationalizing explanation; the second does not entail anyagency, only a causal explanation. To determine the difference between a reason and a cause, Wittgenstein asks, “What is thedifference between cause and motive?—How is the motive discovered and how the cause?” (1953, II, p. 191, his emphasis).Reasons are justifications for doing something, the motive, the intention. There is a thought, conscious or unconscious, thatsupports the reason for an action. Causes, on the other hand, are observations on nonsocial phenomena, phenomena that aresubject to a cause and effect relationship and discovered through the scientific method of theory, experiment, observation,and replication. To put the difference another way, we do not expect people to know what biologically causes their behavior(though such biological causes are exactly what the new field of neuroeconomics seeks to uncover), but we do expect peopleto have reasons for their actions, though we do not necessarily presuppose that they are articulable. As Wittgenstein writes

2 See Monk (2005) and Sluga and Stern (1996) for accessible introductions and guides to reading Wittgenstein.3 Wittgenstein also refers to a language game as a model of primitive language, as a game that children play in the process of learning language, and as

the whole of any ordinary language.


“What people accept as a justification—shews how they think and live” (1953,§325). In other words, reasons are a justificatoryappeal to the external social world that others may or may not agree with. As in a court of law, only through actions do wediscover a motive; it is a process of judging and justifying these actions. To be really justified means that someone else agreeswith the reason for the action; feeling justified is not being justified. Hence, we need to unpack the information complexembedded in our language if we are to design and implement meaningful and constructively informative experiments thatinvolve “reciprocity”.4

Now consider as an example the actions of two participants of the two-stage experiment in Berg et al. (1995). In this earlylaboratory experiment on reciprocity, a subject in room A decides in the first stage how much of a $10 show-up payment tosend anonymously to a subject in room B. This room B subject then receives triple of the amount that was sent to him. In thesecond stage, the subject in room B decides how much, if any, of the tripled amount to send back to the subject in room A.Both subjects participate just once and are told this, and through an elaborate set of double blind protocols, no one knows,not even the experimenters, what action any individual took. The question is why a second mover sends back $15 of the $30that he or she received from the first mover.5 And herein lies one language game. Is the answer to this question a cause foran event or a reason that an individual acted?

In applying the experimental method to the study of human social behavior, we may be tempted through our language tohypothesize the observed reciprocal action as a phenomenon in a cause and effect relationship; for example, we may say that“the reciprocity of the second mover causes cooperation,” assuming that reciprocity is an agent of cooperation. Reciprocity,however, does not “do” anything, just as a tile does not do anything. People “do” things. The notion that reciprocity doessomething stems from conflating our language of the scientific method with the reason why people take actions. On theconcluding page of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein summarizes it well when he writes that “The existence of theexperimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem andmethod pass one another by” (1953, p. 197).

3. Semantic primes of reciprocate

The study of semantic primes is a search for simple expressions that are indefinable in themselves and to which seman-tically more complex words can be decomposed. These semantic primes are presumed to be innate human concepts thatare common to all languages and that make communication across languages possible. Combining a lexicon of ordinary,intuitively intelligible elements with a set of grammatical principles can serve as a means for elucidating amorphous con-cepts. Such an analysis seems to be particularly apposite, given the difficulty that appears to bedevil us in understandingreciprocity. Wierzbicka (1996, p. 233) summarizes my goal then in applying this analysis here:

The semantic structure of an ordinary human sentence is about as simple and as “shallow” as the structure of a galaxyor the structure of an atom. Looking into the meaning of a single word, let alone a single sentence, can give one the samefeeling of dizziness that can come from thinking about the distances between galaxies or about the impenetrable emptyspaces hidden in a single atom. . .But no reasons, not even “theoretically interesting” ones, can absolve us from theeffort of trying to explore the meanings of words to find out what unconscious principles determine the boundariesof their use. We have to try to pin down the elusive and culture-specific configurations of elements encapsulatedin everyday concepts, and to face the formidable complexity of meanings which ordinary people appear to juggleeffortlessly in everyday discourse.

Language games arise from the deep “unconscious principles” of what we mean when we use words. We often glossover this in our ordinary conversations, and sometimes, from personal experience, we are completely oblivious. This isunderstandable considering the cognitive costs associated with pinpointing, by conscious awareness, the nuances of everyword in everyday conversation. We could not function if we were constantly analyzing every word we use, but as Wierzbickasays, this does not absolve us from trying.

I will focus my analysis on the verb reciprocate as opposed to the noun reciprocity as my aim is to explain the actions ofindividuals rather than the nominalization of such actions.6 Table 1 lists the primes in my analysis of reciprocate, and theentire list of current semantic primes is provided in a table in the Appendix A.7 Goddard and Wierzbicka (1994) report

4 A referee asks, “but can’t I ask what ‘caused’ a man to leave his wife, and what is the ‘reason’ for the tile’s falling from the roof? What ‘caused’ him toleave was her string of affairs; the ‘reason’ for the tile’s falling was the lack of care of the workmen in cementing the tile.” It is precisely this multiplicity ofuses that I wish to explicate. The idea is to “put the question marks deep enough down” (Wittgenstein, 1977, p. 62, his emphasis). When we ask the questionregarding the man and why he left his wife, we are looking for an answer that entails agency, a justification, and we will judge the answer. We may or maynot agree with his reasons for his leaving his wife, but because we are asking the question of a person, we are looking for an answer that entails agency.That is how I am using “reason” here. The way I am using “cause” does not involve any agency or justification. It may be that workmen did a shoddy job,but when we ask why the tile fell off the house, we will not be judging the answer as to whether or not we agree with the tile for why it fell from the house.The tile has no agency.

5 The first mover leaves the experiment with $15 and second mover with $25, which is a Pareto improvement upon the $10 each receives for showing up.6 This is not a trivial point but rather a language game as Section 5 discusses more fully. One multiple use of language is the strong tendency towards

nominalizing the action of verbs, which in turn, are then referred to as objects or “things” in the same way that such nouns as “chairs” and “houses” arereferred to as existent objects.

7 The interested economist will note that the core of economic exchange is contained in 6 of the 60 primes: YOU, I, SOMETHING, WANT, HAVE, and MOVE.


Table 1Semantic primes in reciprocate

Substantives I, PEOPLE, SOMEONE, SOMETHINGDeterminer THISEvaluators GOOD, BADMental predicates THINK, FEEL, WANTAction DOTime AFTERInterclausal linker BECAUSESimilarity LIKE

that these 14 primes have been tested across a wide range of language families and hence are considered to be wellestablished.

Consider two of these primes: THINK and DO. The interested reader is directed to Wierzbicka (1996) and Goddard andWierzbicka (2002) for a thorough discussion of these and other semantic primes. One clue that a concept may be a semanticprime is the circularity with which traditional dictionaries define a set of terms. As an example, Wierzbicka (1996, p. 48)reports the definitions of to think, thought, and cogitation from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

to think: to have a thought;thought: the act or process of thinking; cogitation;cogitation: 1. thoughtful consideration; 2. a serious thought.

Circular definitions, however, are not sufficient to classify a concept as a semantic prime. Linguists also rely on a combi-nation of research on cross-linguistic comparisons and language acquisition to designate such primitive concepts as THINK,WANT, and FEEL (along with KNOW) as innate components of how the mind works (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1994).

The semantic prime DO captures the significant role that the concept of “action” plays in regularized human activity andour ordinary discourse. Human activity is about DO-ing. One piece of evidence that DO is a semantic prime is that Clark(1983) reports that it appears very early in children’s speech.

Let a and b denote two individuals, z denote the anteceding action that a took, and ε ∈ {GOOD, BAD} denote the evaluationof z. I submit the following decomposition for reciprocate:

b reciprocated a [for zε].(a) SOMEONE (a) DID SOMETHING ε [zε] TO SOMEONE (b)(b) BECAUSE OF THIS, b FELT SOMETHING ε(c) AFTER THIS, b THOUGHT SOMETHING LIKE THIS(d) THIS PERSON (a) DID SOMETHING ε [zε] TO ME(e) BECAUSE OF THIS, I WANT TO DO SOMETHING ε TO THIS PERSON (a)(f) b THOUGHT ABOUT IT(g) AFTER THIS, b DID SOMETHING ε TO a BECAUSE OF THIS

This decomposition of reciprocate follows the form of one that Wierzbicka (1996) offers for revenge with two small,delineating differences. First, it superscripts z by ε to distinguish a GOOD versus a BAD anteceding action. (Obviously, revengeonly involves BAD anteceding and succeeding actions.) Second, in (f) this decomposition drops the time duration prime ofFOR A LONG TIME from “b THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR A LONG TIME” (p. 285). The prime, A LONG TIME, captures the plottingnature involved with intending to take revenge, which is not encapsulated in the ordinary use of reciprocate.8

The first component of the decomposition specifies the action that precedes the action of reciprocating. Reciprocatingis a response to a previous action, a feature of all of the uses of reciprocate discussed in the previous section. Component(b) registers the natural and arguably involuntary impulse that agent b experiences a GOOD or BAD feeling as a result of a’saction. Notice that this component is only implied in definitions in the literature. Several definitions utilize perceive, whichindirectly refers to this aspect of reciprocate. However, perceive also involves becoming aware or achieving an understandingof the anteceding action zε such as the thinking of (c) and (d). Hence, perceive glosses over what distinguishes (b) from (c) and(d).9 As the emotional trigger that sets in motion all that follows, (b) is a necessary connection to the remaining components.Consider how the definition would read if not-(b) were the case. If b did not feel GOOD as a result of the anteceding action(which is not equivalent to feeling BAD), why, as part of the meaning of reciprocate, would b even think about the antecedingaction and furthermore then desire to do something GOOD to a?

The next components of (c)–(e) provide the thoughts that support b’s response to a GOOD or BAD action. Part (d) is arecognition that a specific individual is responsible for the anteceding action, and (e) is the desire to respond in kind to this

8 Reciprocating can involve short unconscious thinking, but it could also involve some general duration longer than A SHORT TIME as in laboratoryexperiment. With a choice between, A LONG TIME and A SHORT TIME, the latter better captures the essence of the duration of thought in reciprocating,though I believe an unspecified amount of time is more general. Regardless, this choice does not affect the subsequent analysis.

9 By decomposing the word into its constituent primes, such subtle and perhaps unconscious nuances of meaning become evident.


individual. This is what the “perceiving” and “deeming” refer to in the representative definitions from the literature. Parts (d)and (e) add two critical elements to the meaning of reciprocate. First, the reciprocating action is a directed action, and second,b must be aware of the individual to whom he would target his response. The notion of responding in kind is clearly part ofall definitions of reciprocity, but what is downplayed in practice is that this desire to respond in kind is the result of thinkingabout what a has done, or (e). For illustrative purposes, recall the first part of Sobel’s succinct definition—“a tendency torespond to perceived kindness with kindness”. Notice that it only involves the response to the anteceding act. There is nodesire to act as part of the actual reciprocating act. At best the desire to act is implied. Several papers mentioned above buildthis desire into utility functions, but note that this desire appears AFTER the emotional trigger of feeling GOOD or BAD forsomething having been done for b. It is not an ever-present element of a utility function, a feature that is implied by suchmodels.

Part (f) is the intentionality of the act of reciprocating, or what Bloor (1997) calls the conscientiousness condition. Tointend to bring about the desired action specified in (e) means that b has the act of reciprocating in his mind. The individualmust intend to carry out the reciprocating act itself because the action must be GOOD if the anteceding action is GOOD, orBAD if the anteceding action is BAD. Responding to a GOOD action with a BAD one or vice versa is not a reciprocal action byanyone’s usage. Also, b may want to do something good to a, but unless b has the intention to bring about that action, b willnot be reciprocating. It is possible for (a)–(e) to hold (i.e., b may want to do something good for a), but because of thinkingabout it in (f), b may not actually follow through with (g) by DOING SOMETHING GOOD or BAD to a. In that case, b is notreciprocating because it is not the agent’s intention to do so. Note also that a reciprocating act is “costly” and thus one thatthe individual must surely think about. As the experimental literature on reciprocity makes clear, a reciprocating act is notthe same as an act of naked self-interest. With an intention to act in (f), b has the reasons in his mind for the action that hecarries out in (g).

To summarize, this definition of reciprocate includes the first four observations of the working definitions in the literature,plus several additional (and rather important, I believe) elements in a succinct scenario of semantic primes.10 Most notablythis definition includes the intention to reciprocate in a semantically primitive form. The sixth observation from section I,that reciprocity involves expectations of future benefits, is an element of the reciprocity that is under debate. Notice thatthis definition makes no explicit reference to expectations of future material benefits. This definition in semantic primes, Ibelieve, captures all the elements of the ordinary usage of reciprocate.

This is a second language game of reciprocity. Save the exception noted above, (f) exactly follows the form in Wierzbicka.But what is the “it” that she is referring to in “b thought about it”? The “it” is reciprocate. That is, in the process of carefullydecomposing “b reciprocated a. . .” into its constituent semantic primes, I include in its meaning “b thought about (b) recipro-cating a”. Hence, (f) initiates a circularity in what it means for b to reciprocate. To define b thinking about reciprocating a meansexplaining the content contained in (f), but, as the previous paragraph clearly indicates, that can only be done by definingreciprocate, which is right where I started in the first place. Hence, we appear to be caught in a circle: reciprocating impliesthinking about reciprocating, or in other words, the act of reciprocating implies the intention to reciprocate. To circumventthis circular meaning of reciprocate, the next section makes a Wittgensteinian appeal to context.

4. Context: how to “shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle”11

In coining the term “language game”, Wittgenstein utilizes the word “language” because he is concerned about howphilosophers employ the word “meaning,” summarized in his oft-cited quotation that “the meaning of a word is its use inthe language” (1953, §43). The “Spiel” portion of the term encompasses more than the familiar elements of a “game” in gametheory, as exemplified by one of his many references to chess:

a move in chess doesn’t consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board—nor yet in one’sthoughts and feelings as one makes the move: but in the circumstances that we call “playing a game of chess”, “solvinga chess problem”, and so on (1953, §33, my emphasis).

To Wittgenstein, a Spiel is more than the set of strategies that agents can take, the specific strategies employed in equi-librium, and the beliefs that support the equilibrium play. A game is also more than just the feeling, thinking, and wantinginvolved with playing a game of chess.12 It is a linking of the two. But what is that link between the observable action andthe unobservable mental contents of intention? The external “circumstances” of the situation. Continuing with the chessexample:

10 The definitions in previous section use a variety of ornate adjectives to describe the anteceding and succeeding actions. With the two simple primesof GOOD or BAD we accomplish all that is necessary to convey the meaning of reciprocate (that is, both the anteceding and succeeding have the sameevaluating prime) and avoid the potentially muddling differences associated with a variety of different words. For example, “mean” differs from “hostile”in that the former covers everything from stinginess and petty selfishness to cruel and malicious behavior, whereas the latter invokes the arguably muchstronger notions of enmity and enemies that are not typically associated with (negative) reciprocity. An interlocutor might counter, “But what adjectiveswe use to describe the anteceding and succeeding actions is irrelevant and precisely why we formally model them as a generic parameter ˛(·).” As Section 4discusses further, this is a compound language game, a mental content treated as an all-purpose object ˛(·) that further takes on a multiplicity of meanings.

11 Wittgenstein (1953, §309).12 As an aside, this quotation from Wittgenstein refers to two of three mental predicates in our decomposition.


There is no doubt that I now want to play chess, but chess is the game it is in virtue of all its rules (and so on). . .[W]hatkind of super-strong connexion exists between the act of intending and the thing intended?. . .Well, in the list of rulesof the game, in the teaching of it, in the day-to-day practice of playing (1953, §197).

The link between the action and its intention is just not the rules of the game, as in a game-theoretic model, but it isalso in the experiential knowledge that individuals bring with them and also that they discover when engaging in socialinteractions.13 What is the “day-to-day practice” of reciprocating? It’s reciprocator b having been a reciprocated ˛ at someother time by perhaps some other ˇ. More concretely, the “teaching” of reciprocating is the parental guidance we receiveas children and our experiences with reciprocating from childhood playgrounds, high school basketball games, undergrad-uate parties, graduate school assignments of proofs, co-authoring papers, department meetings, and so on. Experimentaleconomists attempt to control for the complexity and depth in ordinary social interactions with anonymity and with whatare hoped to be neutrally posed descriptions of each person’s task, but this does not mean that such instructions have induceda tabula rasa upon which we observe human action. A person’s mind still draws upon the biological and social developmentof our brain, basing current perception on an associative relationship between one’s past experience in related conditionswith external stimuli (Hayek, 1952; Smith, 2003).

In terms of the schema in Section 3, where are the “circumstances”? The answer is in the inner intention to reciprocate.Wittgenstein writes:

An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chessdid not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess (1953, §337).

The external circumstances associated with one’s past experience in related conditions are what place the act of recip-rocating before the mind, and this is what I mean by intention. We desire to do something good after somebody has donesomething good to us because that is part of our day-to-day customs and informal institutions. The external circumstancesindicate the practices that we follow as part of our regularized human interactions, and one of those social practices is doingsomething good to someone after she has done something good to us.14

If we assume that there are no circumstances on which to think you are reciprocating, there is nothing to think aboutas in (f), and hence you are not reciprocating. The circumstantial link between the act of reciprocating and its intention isinextricable. Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is skeptical, however, that external circumstances are necessary to intention:

[Wittgenstein’s interlocutor:] “But it is just the queer thing about intention, about the mental process, that the existenceof a custom, of a technique, is not necessary to it. That, for example, it is imaginable that two people should play chessin a world in which otherwise no games existed; and even that they should begin a game of chess—and then beinterrupted.”

[Wittgenstein:] But isn’t chess defined by its rules? And how are these rules present in the mind of the person who isintending to play chess? (1953, §205, Wittgenstein’s emphasis)

Imagine that b and a live in a world in which b reciprocated a for having done something good to b and that there areno external circumstances associated with b intending to reciprocate a. In this world, a did something good to b. Because ofthis, b felt good and then thought to himself, “Hmmm. Person a did something good to me, and because of this, I want to dosomething good to a.” Person b then thought about it. Because of this feeling good, this wanting to do something good to a,and some thinking, b then went out and did something good to a.

Why did b feel good after a did something good to b? Was it just happenstance such that what a did for b, could havemade b feel bad?15 Emphatically, no. Something was before a’s mind such that a expected b to feel good by doing somethinggood to b. Otherwise, what b did in the succeeding action could not be meaningfully called reciprocate. However, from wherewould this knowledge on the part of a come? More importantly, as b then thought about his feeling good, from where wouldb’s knowledge come that he knew that a knew that he would feel good? The answers to these latter two questions can onlyplausibly lie in the external circumstances of the social world of b and a, but we began this imagining of such a world byassuming that there are no external circumstances associated with b’s intention to reciprocate a.

Likewise, why did b want to do something good to a because a had done something good to him? Was it again justhappenstance that b wanted to do something good to a? No. As b thought about his wanting to do something good toa, at a minimum, his mind drew upon something from the external social world that did not negate his wanting to dosomething good to a. Furthermore, there was something that b knew such that he wanted to do something good to a. Theexternal circumstances of a social world place b’s local knowledge before b’s intending mind as he thinks about wanting todo something good to a.

13 Perhaps this what Reinhard Selten is referring to when he quipped: “Game theory is for proving theorems, not for playing games” (quoted in Goereeand Holt, 2001).

14 When a 5-year-old asks his mother why the two of them are taking tomatoes over to their neighbor Mrs. Rasmussen, how might she answer? “BecauseMrs. Rasmussen gave us a loaf of bread last week.” In other words that’s the neighborly thing to do, the customary social practice of rural western Wisconsincirca, 1975.

15 That is, the question is asking for a reason for acting, not for a cause of an event.


In light of (f), this exercise could continue by asking the counterfactual or the “What is not?” of each component from(a) through (e). Doing so would reveal that all of the components exude a reason that references an external social context.In sum, social circumstances are the source of an individual’s local knowledge of the situation, an inherent component ofintending to reciprocate, and the way out of the seemingly circular problem of understanding the meaning of reciprocate.

5. The agency of reciprocate

If reciprocating implies the intention to reciprocate, then we may be tempted to apply some agency to the intention. Inbringing these observations to the foreground, we may be inclined by our use of natural language to refer to the mentalprocess of thinking about reciprocating as an object so that the intention to reciprocate becomes a “thing corresponding to asubstantive” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 5). This manifests itself in modeling by formally attributing to preferences this intentionto reciprocate. Because the intention to reciprocate involves a presumption of a change in the welfare of others, this “thing”is then called a “social preference”. The word “social” stands in contrast to the longstanding historical precedent of assigningso-called “self-regarding preferences” to individuals in our models.16 These social preferences then gain agency throughlanguage via the generation of game-theoretic (or simply utility-maximizing) predictions of reciprocal outcomes. Socialpreferences, however, are not objects; social preferences to reciprocate are a mental process concerning objects, nothingmore but also nothing less.

This is a language game: the assumption that a sign expressed in language points directly to some existent object.17 Withanother reference to chess, Wittgenstein anticipates the objection and then answers it:

How should we counter him if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner process?—We shouldsay that when we want to know if he can play chess we aren’t interested in anything that goes on inside him.—And if hereplies that this is in fact just what we are interested in, that is, we are interested in whether he can play chess—thenwe shall have to draw his attention to the criteria which would demonstrate his capacity, and on the other hand tothe criteria for the ‘inner states’. Even if someone had a particular capacity only when, and only as long as, he had aparticular feeling, the feeling would not be the capacity. (1953, II, p. 155)

Notice how Wittgenstein reveals the language game at work. The skeptic is concerned with the mental process of “knowinghow to play chess,” treating it as an object of interest. Wittgenstein responds that the germane point is the actual playingof chess, or what is socially observable. The mental process itself is not of interest because it is only before the mind ofperson playing chess, and no one else can know all that is before the mind of another person. If the skeptic pushes furtherby repositioning the argument to say that the inner process of “whether he can play chess” is indeed the pertinent question,then the response is, “What criteria can the skeptic offer that distinguishes his actual capacity to play chess from his innerstate of knowing how to play chess?” The only criteria are the social observables of actually playing chess. There is nothingobservable to serve as external criteria for “knowing how to play chess” that is not already the same criteria for the socialpractice of actually playing chess.

Consider a paraphrase of this in the relevant terms of reciprocate and the mental process of intending to reciprocate. Ifsomeone hypostatizes the inner process of intending to reciprocate, the response is that the relevant question of interest isobserving if an individual reciprocates and not anything before the mind of the person as part of intending to reciprocate. Asdiscussed above reciprocating implies intending to reciprocate, but that does not mean that we can be separately concernedwith the intention to reciprocate because the two are linked inextricably by the external circumstances of the situation. Ifthe skeptic replies that we indeed are precisely interested in whether he intends to reciprocate, then the question is whatobservable criteria distinguish the act of reciprocating from the mental process of intending to reciprocate. External criteriaare critical because intending to reciprocate is not, nor does not imply, reciprocating, for as Wittgenstein succinctly states, “An‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (1953, §580). But what outward criteria exist for the thinking before themind of a reciprocating individual? As mentioned above, there is nothing observable to serve as criteria for whether someoneintends to reciprocate, because the mental contents involved with intention, whatever they may be, are only before the mind ofthe intending. The only observable is the act of reciprocating, and so the agency of reciprocate is in the “b DOING SOMETHINGε to a (BECAUSE OF THIS)”. Without external criteria, inner preferences for intending to reciprocate have no agency.

Now if I put it concisely by saying that an inner preference for intending to reciprocate is not an object and that the agencyis in the human action, this can be misunderstood or distorted into a false behaviorist contention that reciprocate is onlythe human action and nothing else. While what I mean is that even though the feelings, desires, thoughts and contextualknowledge of intending to reciprocate are indeed part and parcel of reciprocating, they are not identical with the act ofreciprocating itself. Reciprocate is the (g) that is the result of (a) through (f). A recapitulation of what I ascribe an intention toreciprocate to be is what Wittgenstein correspondingly précises pain to be: “It is not a something, but not a nothing either. . .We

16 In contrast to other social sciences, McCloskey (2006) discusses how economists have focused on the “profane P” variables of “preference, profit, andprudence”.

17 Wittgenstein puts it this way: “The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it asthough it were an object co-existing with the sign” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 5, his emphasis).


have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here” (1953, §304, his emphasis).18 The only reason we wantthe feelings, desires, and thoughts of intending to reciprocate to be some thing, such as an ˛(·) in a utility function, is that weare committed to a specious view of economic science that in turn stems from a language game, one that asserts that to everymeaningful component of human action there must correspond some parameterizable object.19 We have a problem withinthe logic of game theory and utility maximization if that which we wish to explain about reciprocal actions is mechanisticallyan unobservable part of the explanatory premises.

My thesis then is that reciprocal actions do not emanate from social preferences; rather, social preferences emanatefrom the actions of social individuals. The social context of external actions fosters “social preferences”, preferences that aremanifestly cognizable only to an individual upon the introspection of his own mind. This personal introspection, however,easily overlooks that one’s own actions are but a piece of a pattern comprised of the actions of many social individuals, apattern of which the individual may not nor need not even be conscious (as that is not part of the agent’s specific purposeat the time) but is surely the product of our sociality. If the social practice of reciprocating did not exist, I could not intend toplay a game of reciprocity (in the laboratory or in everyday life).

Consider this thesis in the context of Wittgenstein’s discussion on gifts:

Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money?—My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand canwrite a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt.—But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift.When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: Well, and what of it? (1953, §268).

The word “give” itself contains the external social meaning that manifests itself internally as a social preference.Wittgenstein demonstrates this by using “give” in a sense where gift and giving do not mean anything. When we innocentlyfirst read the opening question, we confusingly use “give” to mean equivalently the physical transfer that we observe whenmy right hand puts a coin in my left hand. Wittgenstein then asks if there are social characteristics of giving, beyond thephysical movement of the coin, that emanate to the individual by virtue of being part of the social community. A gift isgiven to mean something, to the giver and to the receiver. As Bloor also discusses, something is not meaningfully called agift without the giver and receiver mentally sharing the concept of gift as applied to a specific situation, and they cannothave that without bringing to the mind the whole social practice of gift giving. Hence, the social preferences exhibited ingift giving emanate from the social actions of gift giving in regularized human interactions, for how else can the giver andthe receiver share the concept of a gift?20

Being the product of a social practice is the sense in which I mean that our social preferences emanate from the actions ofsocial individuals. This does not preclude a feedback loop in which social preferences, expressed as an action at a particularmoment and conditioned on the current social practice, foster reciprocal actions in the longer term as the social customcontinues to be practiced. As quoted above, “an intention is embedded. . .in human customs and institutions” (my emphasis).Our actions and intentions are interwoven into a pattern of social practice, but the observable line of consequence is throughexternal contextualized actions, not internal social preferences. For example, by instruction and example, a parent’s socialpreference fosters reciprocal actions in a child, but again, the child cannot observe the parent’s social preference; the childcan only observe the expression of the social preference as an external action within a social context.21

18 Three sections later Wittgenstein anticipates his interlocutor’s criticism of being a behaviorist: “‘Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’tyou at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?’—If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction” (1953, §307,his emphasis).

19 This statement is far from denying that the tool of utility maximization has a useful function to perform in the theorizing of economic science. Theusefulness of utility maximization, however, is supported by the important contributions of revealed preference theory. Afriat (1967) shows that a sufficientcondition for utility maximization is that the data on prices and consumption bundles satisfy the generalized axiom of revealed preference. Unlike personal,social interactions, the only inputs to this system are observables: prices and consumption bundles. One hypothesis is that price systems arise so thatparticipants do not need to know what is before the mind of any individual. The interaction is simpler in that intention is not a part of market exchange;markets rely only on what individuals do and don’t do.

20 A referee ripostes, “This idea that social preferences emanate from the actions of social individuals appears to me to be wrong. Social preferences emergefrom private preferences plus the individual’s choice of a particular frame (social context) that applies to the strategic interaction they are involved in.” Buthow does an individual apply a “particular frame” to this particular experimental task or for that matter, to situations naturally occurring in life? By relyingon his or her sociality, a sociality that emanates to this person by virtue of having in the past participated in and observed the actions of social individuals.It is from the practice of being social that an individual develops his social preferences, just as it is from the practice of gift giving that we appear to exhibitsocial preferences in giving gifts.One reason to reject this thesis swiftly and brusquely is that it runs counter to a method that we believe in. By method, I mean our practice in economics ofpostulating preferences at the beginning “as the primeval cause for the phenomena we study” (Smith, 1985, p. 267), and by believe in, I mean to regard astrue beyond doubt. But could this unexamined method be what is constraining how we think about reciprocity? “The difficult thing here. . .is to recognizethe ground that lies before us as the ground” (Wittgenstein, 1983, p. 333). Game theory and utility maximization are the ground in economics, but inscientific inquiry our methods are not beyond question. We routinely question laboratory methods in experiments.

21 A referee raises a deep epistemological question about whether, for an individual, social preferences beget social preferences. My thesis is that reciprocalactions lead to social preferences, but even accepting that thesis, what about the reverse direction? Can’t these purely private social preferences also lead toreciprocal actions? Another form of this question is, “What is the relationship between the rules of reciprocal behavior that social practice tacitly prescribesand an individual’s application of such rules to a particular instance?” In analyzing the semantics of fair in economics, Wilson (2008) argues that an individualcannot apply a rule of fairness privately because one must share the practice with another for applying the rule to have any meaning. The same argumentholds for a rule of reciprocal behavior. The application of a reciprocal rule is customary within regularized social interactions, and because the applicationis shared within a community, one’s social preferences cannot privately lead to reciprocal actions. Thus, there is still a sense in which a social preferenceemanates from the community’s actions.


As an example of one of the many features of the social context before our mind as a gift giver, consider the expectationsof receiving a gift in the future. Gifts are not given with the expectation that one will be returned. However, among peoplewho interact with each other on a regular basis, there is an expectation of something being returned sometime in the future.If we continually give gifts to friends and even family members who do not ever return a favor in one form or another, wewill answer the question, “Well, and what of it?”, much differently than if my left hand never subsequently places a coin inmy right hand.

Let us now apply this thesis to reciprocate and observations from the Berg et al. (1995) investment game. When the personin room A (a) sends his $10 to the person in room B (b), the question is what social context this brings to the mind of b whenhe sends back $15. The background against which we observe this individual action is the “whole hurly-burly of humanactions.” From the sociality that forms his background, b understands that there is a reason for why a sent his $10 to b; a istrusting b to return something to him. Thus, despite the one shot, double anonymous nature of this interaction, the socialconcept of trust that a placed in b may still be before b’s mind. As part of invoking this concept of trust, something else maybe before b’s mind, the social practice of honoring that trust with reciprocation, which a, from previous social interactionswith other people, furthermore expects to be before b’s mind. In other words, there is something operating beyond the baregame theory, the whole hurly-burly of human life. In general, cooperative outcomes are the product of human agreement, tacitor otherwise, on the social context of the interaction.

Notice how this thesis also points to why a different person in room B (ˇ) may send back nothing to a room A person(˛) who sent $10. If the second mover ˇ does not share the view that the investment game experiment is a social situationinvolving trust on the part of ˛ (say, due to the sterile experiment instructions and implementation), then receiving $10from ˛ may not bring to ˇ’s mind the social practice of honoring ˛’s trust by reciprocating, or perhaps ˇ does recognize ˛’saction as one of trust, but the double anonymity of the circumstances do not place the concept of reciprocating before hismind because ˇ does not WANT to do something good to ˛ when he is the only person who knows what he does (or moreprecisely in this case, what he does not do when he keeps the entire $30).22 In both cases, ˇ does not reciprocate, and wedo not observe a cooperative outcome because there is a lack of agreement between ˛ and ˇ on the social context of theexperimental interaction.23

Because non-cooperative actions correspond to those predicted by the default benchmark of a Nash equilibrium, littleattention, if any, is given as to the reasons why experimental subjects actually take Nash-consistent actions. It is merelyassumed that they are playing according to the game-theoretic predictions. The distinctly non-positivist question to ask is,“Could someone take a Nash-prescribed action for a reason other than those assumed in a Nash equilibrium?” While it mayseem that all the interesting action is in the observed cooperative deviations from Nash play, what is not cooperative is just asrelevant to understanding the meaning of cooperative actions as the cooperative actions themselves.24 A person reciprocatesor does not reciprocate for a reason, and other people will agree or not agree with that reason. The question is, why in aparticular experiment do some people reciprocate and others do not? If one answers that different people have differentsocial preferences, this just begs the question as to what it is about the context that these people rely on to instantiate thesesocial preferences.25

Just as reciprocal actions do not emanate from social references, self-regarding actions do not stem from selfish prefer-ences. An individual acquires his cognitive cues about selfish preferences from the context of the social interaction. Hence, itis not a matter of social versus selfish preferences or other-regarding versus self-regarding preferences, but rather a questionabout the tradeoffs among many potential actions that are necessarily mediated by the social circumstances of the interaction.The circumstances of sociality are a deep and unifying connection between the cooperative and non-cooperative actions thatwe observe.

As noted above, the semantic decomposition of reciprocate in Section 3 does not include any explicit reference to expecta-tions of future material benefits, but as it is obvious by this point, the solution to the seeming circularity of what reciprocatemeans indicates that there is no categorical resolution to this unsettled point. In fact, it cannot be settled as to whetherexpectations of future benefits play a role in whether b reciprocates a now; it depends upon the agent’s local knowledgeof the social circumstances.26 Certainty on this point is not a feasible, nor germane objective. Because local knowledge of

22 That is, the extreme social distance does not invoke component (e) in ˇ.23 Non-cooperative actions can also be the product of agreement on context, but they can also indicate disagreements. The former is beyond the scope of

this paper, and the latter, as the next paragraph points out, is indeed relevant to understanding cooperative actions.24 This is the value of (rational-choice) game theory to understanding cooperation resulting from a reciprocal act. Game theory is a construction of the

conditions abstracted from reality that do not support cooperation. As Hayek (1973, p. 17) says, “Fruitful social science must be largely a study of what isnot: a construction of hypothetical models of possible worlds which might exist if some of the alterable conditions were made different”.

25 Until the advent of experimental economics, an unexamined assumption of a competitive market was that agents behaved as price-takers. An experi-mental economist would say that this just begged the question as to where the price comes from. Experimental economics reintroduced the explicit rulesof market institutions to the microeconomic system (Smith, 1982). As experimental research on extensive form games quickly revealed, the institution iscomprised not only of the explicit rules imposed by the experimenter, but also of the implicit rules of norms, customs, and dispositions that the participantsbring with them to the laboratory as part of their cultural and autobiographical history. Unfortunately, norms, customs, and dispositions, as internal rules,are not directly observable as external market institutions are and hence cannot be specified (or controlled) in the same way that bidding mechanisms arespecifiable in a laboratory experiment. Nevertheless, implicit rules are still part of the institution in a microeconomic system and not the environment, asmodeling them as social preferences assumes.

26 Perhaps this is another reason why there are different working definitions of reciprocity.


social circumstances is hyper-dimensional, the best we can hope to observe are lower-dimensional projections of the generalcontextual principles that mediate when future reciprocation does or does not play a role in supporting current reciprocalactions.

6. Concluding remarks

Language is the rich, prime vehicle that we have to convey the mental contents of what one person knows to anotherperson’s mind, but the multiplicity of language practices, or what Wittgenstein calls language games, can generate misun-derstandings. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the meaning of reciprocate in personal, social interactions that achievecooperative outcomes. My conclusion is that understanding reciprocation boils down to a problem of knowledge. What atheorist, experimenter, or econometrician knows about reciprocate from a model, experiment, or naturally generated dataset is not the same as what ordinary people know about reciprocate as they go about their everyday lives, and our scientificmethod of inquiry needs to reflect that. An experimenter’s cause for an event in the laboratory or field may be a subject’sreason for acting in an experiment, but we should take care not to conflate the two in constructing what we have learnedfrom such enquiries.

By decomposing the meaning of reciprocate into its most basic and intuitively intelligible elements, we discover that theonly way to define the act of reciprocating is with its implication, the intention to reciprocate. Hence, we appear to havea circular account of what it means to reciprocate. We cannot explain reciprocating without explaining the intention toreciprocate, but then we need to explain reciprocating to explain its intention. This circularity disappears, however, whenwe consider an individual’s local knowledge on the circumstances of time and place, which serves as the link betweenthe act of reciprocating and its intention. The process of sociality that is a mark of human activity leaves imprints onthe individual in the form of articulable and unarticulable local knowledge, and these imprints are what make recipro-cation, the inextricable combination of its action and intent, meaningful in supporting cooperation. Because the contextof a situation, naturally occurring or induced in the laboratory, is only before the mind of the reciprocating individual,there is no way to recover a separate utilitarian parameter of intention from what we externally observe as an act ofreciprocation.

The futility, however, of using experimental data to measure some intention parameter in a constructivist utility functiondoes not mean that we cannot develop a deeper understanding about reciprocal actions from laboratory experiments. Thenontrivial task of future research is to transmute the analysis of semantic primitives into formalized theories of humanbehavior and into clever experimental designs that explicate the general principles of how context and sociality impactreciprocation in human activity.27 Reciprocal actions “have meaning in the stream of life” (Wittgenstein, 1996, §913), sorather than looking inward to a utility function by specifying a parameter as part of the explanatory premises of thatwhich we wish to explain, the Wittgensteinian “motto here is always: Take a wider look around” (1983, II, p. 6). Theprescription for the problem of understanding reciprocal actions is a theoretical approach that begins with acute discer-nations on regularized human activity qua axiom, drawn at any moment from the flowing stream of life, which are thenorganized as elements of wider, pervasive social orders.28 Economic experiments are one means to vary circumstancessystematically and replicably to trace out the implicit rules that are interwoven into the “tapestry of life” (Wittgenstein,1953, p. 174).

Burnham et al. (2000) provide an example of how a small change in context can impact actions in an extensive form trustgame. They find that when subjects are described as “partners” versus “opponents”, second mover “partners” reciprocatemore than twice as much as second mover “opponents”. Future research can also explore the semantic primitives of themany other behavioral terms and anomalies that we use to ascribe meaning to observed behavior. Our use of language andmeaning also penetrates our mathematical formalism, so it may be valuable to examine this in future work. In short, we candevelop the semantics of economics.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Deirdre McCloskey and Vernon Smith for their encouragement to pursue these ideas. I also thankfour anonymous referees, the Editor, Doug Davis, Cary Deck, Erik Kimbrough, Rob Kurzban, Deirdre McCloskey, Dave Porter,Vernon Smith, Joseph Tao-yi Wang, and attendees at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association fortheir helpful comments and conversations that have improved the paper.

27 Hoffman et al. (1994, 1996), Cherry et al. (2002), Oxoby and Spraggon (2008), and Schurter and Wilson (2008) report how different contexts and levelsof anonymity affect actions in ultimatum bargaining and dictator games. Harrison and List (2004) survey the literature on how the context may diverselyaffect the actions of field and laboratory subject pools.

28 In Greek theoria means “to view or behold” and theoros means “spectator”.


Appendix A. Semantic Primes in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2002)

Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODYDeterminers: THIS, THE SAME, OTHERQuantifiers: ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCHEvaluators: GOOD, BADDescriptors: BIG, SMALLIntensifier: VERYMental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEARSpeech: SAY, WORDS, TRUEActions, events, movement, contact: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCHExistence and possession: THERE IS / EXIST, HAVELife and death: LIVE, DIETime: WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENTSpace: WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW; FAR, NEAR; SIDE, INSIDE; TOUCHING“Logical” concepts: NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IFAugmentor: MORETaxonomy, partonomy: KIND OF, PART OFSimilarity: LIKE

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Language games of reciprocity