What you said earlier is that, "The difference between game theory and instrumentalism is that game theory explains why things succeed, and instrumentalism explains why choices are made."

It was that word "succeed" that sounded normative to me.

But game theory for you is more like memetics, which is instrumentalism plus direct evolution of strategies. At any rate, it's an explanation of how strategies "succeed" in the evolutionary sense: they survive competition and are best adapted to the situation.

That kind of reductive explanation does seem to compete with psychology, philosophy, and so on, which is why you need to dismiss the nonreductive explanations as overblown.

The question for me would be whether strategies can take on exaptations, including functions that aren't explained in terms of natural selection. Can strategies complexify, producing an emergent order of regularities such as psychological and social ones, in which case philosophy and even religion, for example, wouldn't be complete wastes of time?