In the case of the King versus Alice, why not get some numbers here? To prove Alice’s height, we need only measure her and report the result in a number and a unit of extent. In this case, the unit of extent will probably be feet, and the number will probably be four. That height (four feet) would be considerably smaller than 5,280 feet (one mile), proving the king wrong.
Direct measurement is one form of verification. Verification is nice. Verification leads to truth because it is a procedure designed to confirm or deny a stated view of reality. As such, verification is at the heart of scientific inquiry and the reason for experiments. Verification was at the heart of the dispute between Iraq and the United Nations. Iraq said it had no nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction. But Iraq did not fully submit to inspections to prove it. The failure to fully submit led to suspicion that Iraq was hiding something, which led to war.
If the King of Hearts permitted the measurement of Alice, he would be proved a liar. Without measurement to know the reality situation for sure, we have to rely on probabilities. The probabilities are that the King of Hearts is wrong. It would be unheard of to have anyone a mile high. The king knows that. So does Alice. But getting official recognition of the fact is another question. For years, suffragettes claimed that the Decp. 320laration of Independence indicated that women must have the right to vote, otherwise they were taxed without representation. The suffragettes claimed that the Declaration of Independence clearly states that government must derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Since women were governed without having a voice in the government, the government was proven wrong by its own admission. It took many years and many long battles, frequent imprisonments of women and so forth before that simple fact was recognized by the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
This misstatement of fact, the problem of Alice’s height, was of course caused by the king himself. He had just written rule forty-two and made it so excessive he thereby gave himself away. In the secret workings of his unconscious mind, he wrote a rule that is so blatantly absurd that its irrational origin became obvious.
“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.[49]
Denying the obvious, stonewalling, as in the Watergate fiasco, does no good because truth will out. If a person a mile high is absurd, then a person two miles high is twice as absurd. The Queen is wrong, twice wrong. She is wrong to support someone who is obviously wrong, and she is wrong about the fact under discussion.
“Well, I sha’n’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.”[50]
Good for Alice!
Is it possible that, in some way or other, Alice has been “improved” by her adventures? Is it possible that the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, and the rest of them have been working out her redemption? She seems moral, honest, and, at this point, just—especially in contrast with those around her, who appear to be immoral, dishonest, and unjust.
Not only has Alice become moral, honest, and just, but also she has become fiercely logical, subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, and merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits. She is now indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. She fearlessly contradicts the King!
Alice looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. She sees herself a p. 321 child, a little girl, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable emblems of power and control, yet she bears herself proudly, as unmoved as if she were lord of the universe and as unmovable as if she were the immovable object of classical logistics.
Callie, my two-year-old granddaughter, often behaves the same way. “(I don’t care what you say.) The moon is following us.” “(I don’t care what you say.) It looks like steam and it is steam.” “No nap! I don’t want to get out of the pool. I want to play more.” “I am angry at Mommy and Daddy because they put me in time-out.” Good for Callie. And good for Alice. Callie and Alice are thinking as individuals and are thinking well.
Though all that is true about Alice (and Callie), various internal evidences still make me suspect Alice of having a “past”—of having been naughty, of being naughty the way Callie is naughty sometimes. With Alice and Callie, as with us all, there is room for improvement. Later on, we see in the Looking Glass book that Alice improves and has even developed a kind of (primitive) social conscience:
“I like the Walrus best, said Alice: “because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee.[51]
Wow! That reply is a more delicious indictment of sentimentalism than was ever made.
“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.
“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.
The King turned pale.[52]
As well he should. Alice caught the King in a lie. And the moral of that is: People in power do make up rules to support themselves and friends. In the literature of the Western world, rule forty-two has become the emblem of arbitrary rules and regulations. As a kind of inside joke, Douglas Adams considered forty-two the secret of the universe. If you understood forty-two, you understood life.
Although arbitrary behavior is common enough, it is not reasonable and it is not right because it is not based on a promotion of the general welfare. The King of Hearts, the poor fellow, like so many of our present leaders, is over his head. The King, like some of our past p. 322 presidents (Clinton and Nixon), has lied to the public and therefore has lost face.
Next, we have the discussion of the written evidence against the Knave. Identify the errors in the King’s thinking as they occur.
“What’s in it?” said the Queen.
“I haven’t opened it yet,” said the White Rabbit; “but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to—somebody.”
“It must have been that,” said the King, “unless it was written to nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.”[53]
This is the null class (a set with no members) problem again. From medieval times to the present, philosophers have debated the existence or nonexistence of nobody, nowhere, nothing, and the like. Does nothing exist, or is it nothing? Treating a null class as though it were an existing thing is a rich source of Carrollian logical nonsense. We saw the March Hare offer nonexistent wine; the King of Hearts thinks it unusual to write letters to nobody; Alice wants to know where the candle flame goes when it goes out; the Gryphon tells Alice, “They never executes nobody”; and we subsequently encounter the unexecuted Nobody walking along the road; and so forth.
The confusions engendered about nothing have a long and honorable history in literature. Recall that Ulysses deceived the one-eyed Polyphemus by calling himself Noman. When Polyphemus cried out, “Noman is killing me!” no one took this to mean that someone was actually attacking him.
So what is Lewis Carroll’s position on the null set problem? Carroll is a nominalist. Nominalists think that some terms exist as mere necessities of thought or convenience of language. Nominalists think such terms do not have an external real existence. There is a name, that’s true, but more importantly, there is the thing itself. Sometimes the name is just there to fill in the blank, to indicate the absence of a real thing, and to denote that absence. The most elementary principle of semantics is that agreement about the use of signs rather than the signs themselves enables us to communicate. Thus, nobody exists in name only. The thing itself is no person and is not real. Nobody has a general reality that corresponds to it. Nobody is only a way, a short cut, for saying no person. Nobody is just a shorthand way of saying there is no real person under discussion. The White King (in the statements below) admits the nonexp. 323istence of nobody when he contrasts Nobody, whom he can’t see but whom he thinks Alice sees, to a real person whom he can’t see either.
By the same token, nothing means no thing and nowhere means no where. Therefore, nothing has no existence. Nothing merely d
esignates nonexistence. Nowhere designates no existence in any place or no place that is existent. An understanding of this concept would have prevented the White King’s confusion, which is caused by his confounding what a thing is called with what a thing is.
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody. And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people by this light.”[54]
Notice Nobody’s reification is confirmed by the capital N when the king refers to him. When Alice does the talking, nobody is a nobody with a small n. Later (or is it earlier, for time is reversed in the looking glass?), the King asks the messenger:
“Who did you pass on the road?”
“Nobody,” said the messenger.[55]
(Here, we don’t know if the messenger is reifying nobody or not. The capital N might be there simply because the sentence needs to start with a capital.)
“Quite right,” said the King. “This young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.”
“I do my best,” the Messenger said in a sullen tone. “I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do!”
“He ca’n’t do that,” said the King, “or else he’d have been here first.”[56]
Note the apparent contradiction: Can nobody walk both slower and faster than the messenger? Also note the contextual change. The King is talking about Nobody as if he were a real person, and the messenger is talking about nobody as if he were the absence of a real person. Hence the confusion and the fun. The difficulty is partly the result of one of Lewis Carroll’s favorite devices in entertaining children, the play on words and exposition of the failings and difficulties of language.
By the way, nobody should conclude that the honorable author of p. 324 this book is denigrating the concept of the null class. Quite the contrary. I have an inordinate respect for nobody, since I know that I am a nobody.
And the concept of nothing has applications: the Hindu discovery of nothing, symbolized by the zero (0), enables any grade school child to make calculations that our ancient Greek and Roman ancestors could do only on an abacus.
The null class, 0, is defined by negating any defining form of the class one (1). So it follows that the universe class and the null class are each other’s complements. Every element that is not included in “everything” is “nothing.” Nothing includes all the interesting characters in AAW as well as square circles, secular churches, married bachelors, and anything else that doesn’t exist.
“Who is it directed [addressed] to?” said one of the jurymen.
“It isn’t directed at all,” said the White Rabbit: “in fact, there’s nothing written on the outside.” He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added “It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.”
“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.[57]
Note the two jurymen have decided to have a go at getting some real evidence. They want to know who the letter is addressed to and they want to know whether the Knave wrote it. Both might bear an important relationship to the significance and weight that should be attached to the letter. It turns out the letter is not a letter at all but a poem that only by contorted analysis can possibly relate to the theft of the tarts, much less to the prisoner, the Knave of Hearts.
“No, they’re not,” said the White Rabbit, “and that’s the queerest thing about it.” (The jury all looked puzzled.)
“He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,” said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)[58]
Here, the King assumes a fact not in evidence. Whether the Knave forged the handwriting of another would have to be proven by evidence that is relevant and adequate. So far, that assertion is certainly not proven; it is merely an assertion, the King’s assertion, that of a proven liar. The other fault, which is common enough, is that the King is too quick to arrive at unwarranted conclusions. The desire to decide things quickly is incompatible with the detailed and full evaluation of comp. 325plex situations. We saw the same kind of rush to judgment in the year 2000 presidential election. People claimed the country was in danger, or undergoing some kind of unnecessary angst, because the election results were equivocal. Due diligence and due process are more important in deciding the true result of an election than is speed.
“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave, “I didn’t write it, and they ca’n’t prove that I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”[59]
Ho, ho, ho. That is pretty funny. It reminds me of the fairytale about Reynard the fox. When it was announced that a chicken had been stolen, Reynard screamed, “Don’t look at me. I didn’t eat the chicken!”
Who said he did? Why is he being defensive? And how does he know, if, in fact, he didn’t eat the chicken, that the chicken had been eaten? The only thing that had been announced was that the chicken had been stolen.
If the Knave didn’t write the note, how did he know it wasn’t signed? Furthermore, the absence of a signature is neither here nor there. It certainly doesn’t prove the Knave didn’t write it. And it doesn’t prove he did write it, either. The Knave sounds defensive. He would have to explain how he knew the poem was not signed. If his explanation were not relevant and adequate, the jury would be correct to assume the Knave did write the poem.
“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.”
There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.[60]
Here the King’s argument is reasonable but off the point. The question is whether the Knave wrote the poem. And if the Knave did write the poem, so what? How does it relate to the case in point? The King would have done well to question the Knave on how the Knave knew the poem was not signed. Instead, the King launches a general discussion about anonymous notes, which, in general, do mean mischief and do reflect adversely on the character of the writer. Whether this anonymous note means mischief and reflects adversely on the character of the writer must be determined by an evaluation of the particulars of the note itself. My analysis indicates that the poem in this note, like the p. 326 Lobster Quadrille of chapter 10, the Hatter’s rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, little bat!/How I wonder what you’re at,” as well as the “Jabberwocky” of Looking Glass, is pure, unmitigated nonsense—placed here at our disposal for pure, unmitigated fun.
“That proves his guilt, of course,” said the Queen: “so, off with—”
“It doesn’t prove anything of the sort!” said Alice. “Why, you don’t even know what they’re about!”
. . . “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”[61]
That last statement by the Queen epitomizes the major problem in this final chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As I see it, that problem is that the King and Queen, not having read my book on clear thinking, both obsessed with their power and position, do not know how to evaluate evidence for relevance or adequacy. As a result, none of the evidence presented has anything whatsoever to do with the crime of stealing the tarts. Even if it did, it would have been inadequate to convict the Knave. None of the evidence implicates the Knave in any direct way. Even Alice, a seven-and-one-half-year-old little girl, has figured that out.
Another view, and one I believe is correct, is that it is now time, at age seven and a half, for a little girl like Alice to begin questioning the adult world’s organization, thinking, customs, ethics, and procedures. Each generation does that. Each generation has to, for each generation must work out its own salvation.
Alice is growing up, and as a maturing human, she is beginning to assume the set of thinking so necessary for the forward progress of our race: critical inquiry. Alice has reached the end of her hero’s journey, from innocence to experience, from preconscious acceptance t
o conscious questioning. In telling off the King and Queen, Alice becomes child-as-judge. And as judge, in the fierceness of her now-independent thought, she dismisses them all as a meaningless pack of cards. Alice—child heroine—asserts in the face of a primitive, threatening universe the reasonableness of her own (and the Knave of Hearts’) right to exist and actively to rebel against the social order that sentences to death (“off with her head”) all those who demur from its mad decrees. Alice concludes that grown-up stupidity is imposing. That grown-up culture is nothing but ridiculous bombast and, to quote her directly, “stuff and nonsense.”
This raises the same question raised in Kafka’s Castle: Why do we adults accept all those useless rules with so much conviction? Why do p. 327 we, with such acquiescence, follow moronic governments and politicians? Why do we obey the rule forty-twos of our time?
But notice that Alice’s fury was ignited by the King’s attempt to exclude her from the court (that is, from the company of adults). Children don’t like that, especially when it means going to bed early or not being privy to family secrets. There’s where children draw the line and react accordingly, often with a temper tantrum like Alice’s.
But on a higher plain, let’s not forget that the creatures she has met, the whole dream, are Alice’s. Those things reflect the psychology of herself, for she is the dreamer. They are Alice’s personality transmuted, but they reflect the words and attitudes of her teachers, family, and pets as they appear to her, a little girl. The verisimilitude comes from the full understanding of the reactions of a child’s mind to academic training, particularly to instruction in logic and mathematics, where often the work was too hard and the books—unlike this one that you have in your hand—too difficult to understand.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 39