Test, Competition and Betterness. Another Tricky Triad

Abstract

Bernard Suits famously labelled games, play and sport as a tricky triad which he discussed philosophically. The aim of this paper is to elaborate another interesting conceptual trio related to sports: namely test, competition, and betterness. My elaboration is based on a distinction between structural and psychological level of sport and related activities. I am interested in how the structural level contributes to our understanding of test, competition, and betterness. However, the structural and psychological level are not necessarily fully independent, and my analysis includes also discussion about the psychological level. I will utilise R. Scott Kretchmar’s view of test and contest in my analysis, although I partly deviate from his thoughts. I mainly follow Kretchmar when I suggest that a test refers to the challenge of completing a task when there is enough but not too much uncertainty about whether one can complete the task. In addition, I claim that a competition is a framework that enables betterness to exist. By betterness, I mean the hierarchical order of units that are being compared. Finally, I describe conceptual dependencies between the concepts of test, competition, and betterness.