Click here to read Shaffer's elegant notes on the Theory of Types. Ruses, Lyotard tells us, are important in paralogy. Lyotard, himself, seems to take us in different directions. For example, on p.16 of Just Gaming, he writes that a ruse is bound up with the will to power. On the other hand, footnote p.43 of the same book, he talks of negotiations in the same breath as he talks about ruses.
Negotiations are hadly deceptive.
I like that term, but I was also taken by the notion of a tack which, as Graeme Kane explained to us, is a boating maneuver. The colleague laughed. But, then, Lynn Hoffman gave us concrete examples of collaborated with clients in creating ruses. When I was learning how to do strategic therapy, I was told to ask people to fight on purpose one night that week. If they did, they usually found that the fight would go differently than usual, or they wouldn't fight at all.