The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are
what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always
fair, just and patient. We also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the
smallest allowance for ignorance.
I’ve traditionally gone with: the board is the space of/for potentially-live hypotheses/arguments/considerations, pieces are facts/observations/common-knowledge-arguments, moves are new arguments, the rules are the rules of epistemology. This lets you bring in other metaphors: ideally your pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments) should be overprotected (supported by other facts/common-knowledge-arguments); you should watch out for zwichenzugs (arguments that redeem other arguments that it would otherwise be justified to ignore); tactics/combinations (good arguments or combinations of arguments) flow from strategy/positioning (taking care in advance to marshal your arguments); controlling the center (the key factual issues/hypotheses at stake) is important; tactics (good arguments) often require the coordination of functionally diverse pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments), and so on.
The subskills that I use to play chess overlap a lot with the subskills I use to discover truth. E.g., the subskill of thinking “if I move here, then he moves there, then I move there, then he moves there, …” and thinking through the best possible arguments at each point rather than just giving up or assuming he’ll do something I’d find useful, i.e. avoiding motivated stopping and motivated continuation, is a subskill I use constantly and find very important. I constantly see people only thinking one or two moves (arguments) ahead, and in the absence of objective feedback this leads to them repeatedly being overconfident in bad moves (bad arguments) that only seem good if you’re not very experienced at chess (argumentation in the epistemic sense).
Oh, a rationality quote: Bill Hartson: “Chess doesn’t make sane people crazy; it keeps crazy people sane.”
And Bobby Fischer: “My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don’t take these things into consideration.”
-Thomas Huxley
I’ve traditionally gone with: the board is the space of/for potentially-live hypotheses/arguments/considerations, pieces are facts/observations/common-knowledge-arguments, moves are new arguments, the rules are the rules of epistemology. This lets you bring in other metaphors: ideally your pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments) should be overprotected (supported by other facts/common-knowledge-arguments); you should watch out for zwichenzugs (arguments that redeem other arguments that it would otherwise be justified to ignore); tactics/combinations (good arguments or combinations of arguments) flow from strategy/positioning (taking care in advance to marshal your arguments); controlling the center (the key factual issues/hypotheses at stake) is important; tactics (good arguments) often require the coordination of functionally diverse pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments), and so on.
The subskills that I use to play chess overlap a lot with the subskills I use to discover truth. E.g., the subskill of thinking “if I move here, then he moves there, then I move there, then he moves there, …” and thinking through the best possible arguments at each point rather than just giving up or assuming he’ll do something I’d find useful, i.e. avoiding motivated stopping and motivated continuation, is a subskill I use constantly and find very important. I constantly see people only thinking one or two moves (arguments) ahead, and in the absence of objective feedback this leads to them repeatedly being overconfident in bad moves (bad arguments) that only seem good if you’re not very experienced at chess (argumentation in the epistemic sense).
Oh, a rationality quote: Bill Hartson: “Chess doesn’t make sane people crazy; it keeps crazy people sane.”
And Bobby Fischer: “My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don’t take these things into consideration.”