The Moves
The Moves
How the player moves
The moves are what drive the game. Whatever the player has settled about what exists, how he knows and what to do forms a system. It has basic components, the few things everything else is made of or explained by, and relations between them. A system holds as long as it can explain what we meet. When problems remain that it cannot solve, the player moves.
A move is not a small repair inside a system. It happens at the foundation, and there are four kinds.
The four moves
| Move | What changes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Move 1: A missing component | A new basic part is added | Aristotle’s potential |
| Move 2: A missing relation | A link is found between existing parts | Newton’s gravity |
| Move 3: Changing the relations | The same parts are connected differently | Ghazali on cause and effect |
| Move 4: A new system | Parts and relations are rebuilt together | Descartes · Hume |
The lines between them can blur, and one player often makes more than one move.
When to move
As The Game says, a player follows the previous arrangement until the rest surprises him. Then he has two ways to answer. He can adjust, keeping what still plays well: he adds a component (Move 1), finds a relation (Move 2), or connects the parts differently (Move 3). Or he can restart, and reach a completely new arrangement (Move 4).
Each move is played on a piece. A player can adjust his epistemology, his metaphysics or his ethics, and because the pieces stand in order, a change in one sends ripples through the ones after it.
Reading the previous matches this way
- Socrates builds no system. He shows that the existing beliefs of Athens cannot answer their own questions, which is what sets the game going.
- Plato builds the first great system: Forms and copies, and then a third kind, the receptacle.
- Aristotle changes the relations, bringing the forms into things, and adds a component, potential.
- Ghazali changes the relations, replacing necessary causes with God’s habit.
- Descartes builds a new system on the thinking self, and leaves a relation missing between mind and body.
Others who described these moves
The four moves are this guide’s own way of dividing the change. Others have described the same moves in other words:
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): most work goes on inside an accepted framework, a paradigm, until unsolved problems pile up and a revolution replaces the framework.
- Imre Lakatos (1970s): every research programme has a hard core and a protective belt of supporting assumptions. Real change reaches the core.
- Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind (1990): the deepest creativity is transformational, changing the rules of a conceptual space rather than exploring within it.
- Jean Piaget: we either fit something new into the schemes we have, or change the schemes to fit it.
- Hegel: thought moves through contradiction, and a new whole takes up and goes beyond the positions that clashed.
Built by Umair Malik while studying Iqbal · Your Commentator