Reading Smith Through the Conceptual Lenses of Game Theory : a Reconstruction of Smith’s Way of Thinking, Inspired by His Lectures on Rhetoric and Languages

Game theory is a branch of social sciences that formalizes decision-making in situations where two or more individuals or groups interact, possibly having conflicting interests. In Ortmann & Walraevens (2022) we have reconstructed Smith’s ways of thinking about the social world by analyzing his early work on rhetoric and languages. We document that Smith had an astute understanding of interactive decision-making in all walks of life and of the role persuasion plays in it. Game theory is a natural way to capture this understanding and we showed that Smith used, from the LBRL over the TMS to the WN, what we called reasoning routines that map tightly into eductive and evolutive game theory. The present manuscript is a primer of sorts on our book and the insights that we establish through it. We argue that understanding Smith’s reasoning routines, or conceptual lenses, is a major step towards understanding the deep structure of his oeuvre, and for that matter his universal teachings