Dr. Seuss and Philosophy
Page 10
My point is that people sometimes do things as extreme as Sam does, if we don’t take the green eggs and ham too literally. What the story teaches is not just trite sayings about perseverance, but rather it shows us something about the structure of learning and knowing about the world. C’s problem is precisely that he is too numb and too comfortable. He lacks doubt where it ought to exist, and Sam isn’t going to let that situation deteriorate any further. I might also add that C’s sitting and reading his newspaper while Sam whizzes by astride a variety of animals taps a psychology every child knows. My father and probably yours too would rather have read his paper than be drawn into a world filled with the nonsense of my imagination, my green eggs and ham. I admire Sam because he finally succeeds in drawing the contrarian out of the world of belief and into the world of doubt, which is the world every child is obliged to inhabit until the habits we acquire render our doubts inert. Thus, I suggest, Sam is your inner child, or at least the shadow of your doubts (if you have a Freudian bent).
Just Don’t Make a Habit of It
That brings us to the crux of the matter, which is getting rid of an uneasy mind, irritated by genuine doubts. The struggle is very real and never to be taken lightly. You will never come to a place where you are truly comfortable with genuine doubt. What happens instead is that we find ways of avoiding doubt so that we can feel satisfied. The magic of habit is what makes this possible. By doing something over and over, you can ease your doubts. But some habits arise because they help us solve problems, while we acquire others precisely because we can’t find solutions and we want substitutes for thinking. I said earlier that thinking is a substitute for action, but it’s really a two-way street, because action, especially habitual action, can also be a substitute for thinking. (Remember whatever you may be addicted to when you ponder this, even if it’s just crossword puzzles.)
Peirce said: “And what, then, is belief? We have seen that it has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; Second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.”2 What the curmudgeon is saying is that every belief you have is really a habit of your thinking—remember that thinking is a kind of action. The reason you have the habit is that it eased some doubt in the past. Now that’s pretty amazing when you consider it. I believe lots of stuff, personally, and so do you. Every single one of those beliefs is a habit of thinking I acquired because of a doubt I had. Some of those doubts would be pretty hard to discover now, I’ll bet.
For example, I believe baseball is better than football. I like both, but I can’t ever remember thinking otherwise. I can now guess that maybe somebody once asked me which I liked better, and to solve the problem of the question, I simply chose, and for the sake of consistency I adopted it as a rule. But no, it’s deeper than that, which is to say, I really believe baseball is better than football and I can give you a hundred reasons. We become more interesting to ourselves when we begin looking at our beliefs as the solutions to our past problems, and it also tends to help us recognize that if not for our past experiences, our firmly held beliefs might be other than they are. We do not, according to pragmatists, develop habits of thinking or action that we don’t need at all.
So there you sit, a bundle of beliefs. And the whole story of your life, all the problems you’ve faced, are embedded right there in your habits of thinking and acting. And there sits C, and he’s more than just a little bit unwilling to try the green eggs and ham, isn’t he? Stepping away from our admiration for Sam’s persistence and the lengths to which he will go to solve the problem he has taken on, we now are free to wonder, why on earth does C drive Sam to such lengths just to maintain his self-imposed rule of action—and here we are finally making some serious progress. We know, we all just know, that C has never tried green eggs and ham and that he has no good reason to adopt as his rule that he doesn’t like them. That is not the real reason he won’t eat the free breakfast. So what is the real reason? The only clue we have is that he did not wish to be disturbed from his reading and decided to meet the disturbance with noncooperation. His rule of action (“I will not eat them because I do not like them”) is arbitrary, momentary, and simply contrarian. It starts as a whim and then becomes a habit as he digs his heels in. Sometimes we say things without thinking and our answers are neither stable nor exactly true, but we become invested in them and cannot easily let them go. To do so brings back not only the original doubt but now also self-doubt, as we try to understand why we behaved as badly as we did. C is just plain avoiding all that complexity.
Fixing a Belief
Peirce says there are exactly four ways we can arrive at our beliefs—our habits of thinking and acting that ease doubt. Each one has a name. There is the Method of Authority, which is to say that when I am confronted with a doubt, I can do whatever I am told to do by those in authority and then I don’t have to think it through for myself, and if the problem isn’t solved, then it isn’t my fault and I can at least avoid self-doubt. You probably have a lot of beliefs that are like this. I know I do. Sometimes if I do what I am told, the problem goes away, but I have to admit that genuine doubt remains, for me at least. A good example is computers, which I don’t fully understand. Something goes haywire and the blasted thing won’t work, and then the tech support people say “do this, then this, then that,” and I do, and it works, but the only rule of action I really learned is “do whatever tech support says.” I don’t know why the solution worked and I don’t know how to vary the solution when the problem comes up again, and this causes me doubt of a very genuine sort. What if, next time, there is no tech support? It’s similar in all sorts of situations in life. We can’t have all the beliefs we need, and we will always have some based on the Method of Authority, but the trick is not to fall into the habit of believing this is a stable method for addressing doubt. It is a stopgap until you can learn for yourself what needs to be learned.
Sam and C do not have an issue like this. Whatever is going on with C, he isn’t saying to Sam “I read somewhere that green eggs and ham are bad for your stomach,” or “the king says we shall not eat these.” Maybe somewhere in C’s childhood there was a traumatic encounter with chickens and pigs and his mother said he must avoid such beasts, and his rule is “always obey your mother,” but I seriously doubt this. C seems not to be handicapped in his habits of thinking by an unhealthy use of authority.
The second method of settling our doubts is called the A Priori Method, and it is less common than the Method of Authority. What it means is that we invent abstract reasons for our beliefs that have no clear relationship to our actual experience, and we connect those reasons together to form justifications and arguments for why the thing that has placed us in doubt must be thought about one way rather than others. My favorite example of this is the reasoning used by the Monty Python troop to prove that a certain woman is a witch. You may remember it: some peasants and their lord are in dialogue. What do you do with witches? Burn them. And why do they burn? Because they are made of wood. And how can we tell if she is made of wood? If she weighs the same as a duck, because both float in water. And they weigh her with a duck, and she does weigh the same, and interestingly, she is in fact a witch. So even though every principle is absurd, every inference silly, they solve the problem. They aren’t even wrong in their final conclusion (not to endorse witch burning by any means), but the point is that they used a priori (that just means “prior to experience”) reasoning to do it. You can settle your beliefs that way if you like, but the chances of wise rules of action coming from such a process are small. And you won’t be able to discover your own mistakes, either. And as with the last method, if you do get it right, you won’t know why, and so you really just got lucky.
C’s problem with Sam is not due to a priori reasoning. He surely has some kind of bad habit settling his beliefs, but this isn’t it. He gives us no reasons at all for his refusal
to try what is offered. He doesn’t say “Well, if it weighs the same as a duck . . . then, I’ll try it.” But most people do have some beliefs based on a priori reasoning, and I’m sure C is no exception. It may be that he believes that it is better to be consistent in what you say than to be flexible or adventurous or even cooperative. Being consistent requires that he give the same answer to the same (or similar) questions, and no amount of variation in what Sam offers is important enough to supersede the rule of consistency. That would be the A Priori Method. But it doesn’t seem to me that this is how C thinks about the matter.
Yet, before I move on to the next method of settling our beliefs, I can’t resist pointing out something about Green Eggs and Ham that only philosophers would really love—and many philosophers do love Dr. Seuss, and many want to count him as a philosopher. One thing Sam does in the course of trying C’s resolve is to use what philosophers call “modal” arguments. Sam does not say “do you” or “will you” in the book, but “would you” and “could you” all the way through—even though C switches back and forth between saying he does not actually like them (indicative mood) and saying that he would not or could not (subjunctive) like them under various circumstances (none of which has very much to do with whether we might like the taste of something, although I admit that eating with a goat could curb my appetite).
The reason this little difference in the use of subjunctive mood appeals to philosophers is that the standards of good reasoning are very different when we are discussing what is possible as distinct from what is actually true. It is very difficult to prove that something is impossible, but proving that something is not actually true is fairly easy. Peirce says that scientific knowledge grows by showing what is actually false. But showing what isn’t even possible requires almost godlike knowledge. It is better, pragmatists say, to keep an open mind about what is possible, since plenty of things that were called impossible at some time actually came to pass later. For a pragmatist, none of what C is saying is very convincing because he is making all kinds of pronouncements about what isn’t even possible, and the things he says are not possible are really quite possible. So in a way, C does use the A Priori Method of settling his beliefs about what is possible, and maybe Sam is a pragmatist and really knows he can’t lose this argument because C is overcommitted, logically speaking, having claimed far more than he can ever prove.
The third method for settling beliefs is what Peirce calls the Method of Tenacity. Here what we do is simply repeat the same formulas and rules of action no matter what variations we are met with. As with the first two methods, this one works pretty well, as long as your aim is to remove doubt. Many, many people live most of their lives relying on the Method of Tenacity to relieve them of their doubts. But it is unwise. The doubt may go away, but it doesn’t have to. It can persist and recur, and every time it does, we have made no progress in solving it because we haven’t really even thought through the problem in its own right. Tenaciously clinging to whatever we happen to believe already, especially in the presence of important variations in our circumstances, will lead us to grief sooner or later.
Obviously this is C’s main problem. He has no idea whether he likes green eggs and ham, and neither does Sam, and frankly, neither do you. Or I. Or anyone else. C is repeating a formula and just negating every qualification and variation so that his formula stands out. Negating all the variations is what makes him a contrarian, but the reason he will never learn anything this way is because his negations are not motivated by genuine doubt, they are only a means of avoiding the onset of any and all doubt. And that is what the Method of Tenacity does. It preempts genuine doubt by pretending to furnish a satisfied mind in advance of the actual problem. Dr. Seuss and you and I have all encountered people like this, and we have struggled with the same tendency in ourselves. By the time you reach thirty-five or forty, it begins to get difficult not to give in to tenacity. There is a difference between holding on to what you really learned in your life and being tenacious about it, and the difference is whether a person is open to genuine doubt.
And that raises an interesting question. Do you think C ought to doubt whether he will like green eggs and ham? I mean, is it important enough to warrant serious consideration? Maybe he has had yellow eggs and pink ham before, didn’t like them, and is generalizing appropriately. He doesn’t say so, of course, and so he appears to be just a tenacious type, but life is short and there isn’t any reason to try every little thing. For example, I am not going skydiving. I don’t have a very good reason, I admit. It just doesn’t interest me. On the other hand, I won’t say “I do not like it,” or, even more broadly, “I would not like it if . . . what, with a fox?” And that is where C makes his mistake. If he wants to avoid the Method of Tenacity, the right answer to Sam is, “Look, I haven’t tried them, maybe I’d like them, maybe not, but I am not interested either way in finding out.” Here one admits to being incurious, but that is probably better than being discovered to be tenacious.
I Stand Corrected
By now you might well wonder whether we can ever develop healthy habits of thinking about the doubts that rob us of our ease of mind. Peirce and the pragmatists say we can always do better than we’ve done so far, but there is a trick to staying on the right road—Peirce calls it the “road of inquiry.” The bottom line is this. To stay on a healthy road you need to be in a position to discover your own mistakes and to correct them when you find them. The trouble with the first three methods is that even though they often succeed in solving certain kinds of problems, the main thing we know is that our doubts disappear. We don’t know why, and we don’t necessarily know what to do when new problems occur. We cross our fingers and try what worked before.
But the last method is different. Peirce calls it the Method of Science, and by that he means that we formulate the problem carefully in light of the way it has actually inspired doubt in us. This requires very careful thinking about the problems and critical examination of the difference between what is and what is not really in doubt. The Method of Science requires that our hypotheses answer closely to what is genuinely in doubt, and an hypothesis should propose a course of action that will settle belief, but even if successful, it will not be regarded as knowledge. Genuine scientific knowledge is about what was carefully and experimentally tried but which failed to settle belief. How contrarian is that?
The bad news is that if Peirce is right, C still doesn’t really know if he likes green eggs and ham, he only knows that eating them settled the doubts in the one context he encountered. Wouldn’t it have been funny if, after all that, he tried them and didn’t like them? In that case, he would actually know more, since the hypothesis offered by Sam, that C would like them, would now be one we could safely treat as having been tried and found insufficient in at least one case. This we could file away for future purposes, and both Sam and C could agree that C doesn’t yet like green eggs and ham, but future trials may need to be undertaken to confirm the result. After all, they haven’t yet been tried on a plane to Spain.
CHAPTER SIX
McElligot’s Pool:
Epistemology (with Fish!)
Ron Novy
If I wait long enough, if I’m patient and cool,
Who knows what I’ll catch in McElligot’s Pool. (Pool)
People believe all sorts of things: that dogfish chase catfish, that coffee tastes better than beer, that over one million people live in Chicago, that no more than nine angels can balance on the head of a pin, that . . . you get the idea. There are really no rules governing what we can believe. However, some of our beliefs are not merely things we believe but are also things we know. What is it that must be added to a belief for it to be knowledge? For example, I could believe that catfish are chased by dogfish, but I cannot know this if for no other reason than that such bewhiskered and floppy-eared creatures don’t exist!1 On the other hand, I can know that there are over one million Chicagoans; there is, for instance, a reliable cen
sus upon which to base my belief. Figuring out what justifies beliefs—and how it is done—underlies much of our investigation into the nature of knowledge.
So, here’s the story: a farmer comes across a boy named Marco fishing in McElligot’s Pool and tells him: “You’re sort of a fool! / You’ll never catch fish / In McElligot’s Pool!” (Pool). Worse still, the boy is told that the pool is far too small to catch fish and that the locals use it as a trash receptacle. Ever the optimist, Marco replies: “Cause you never can tell / What goes on down below! / This pool might be bigger / Than you or I know!” (Pool).
Marco considers the possibility that his little pond is connected to the sea by a great underground river that flows under the highway and under the town. Then, in Seussian rhyme, he begins to list all the sorts of extraordinary fish (plus one gristly lobster and fifty spouting whales) that he might catch in McElligot’s Pool: “I might catch a thin fish, / I might catch a stout fish. / I might catch a short / Or a long, long drawn-out fish!” (Pool). But why should Marco believe what the farmer calls “foolishness”? And should we even care, since Marco’s belief that there are fish in the pool doesn’t seem to harm anyone?
Marco doesn’t merely believe there may be fish to be caught, he acts on that belief. As a carefree youth, little more than a sunburn and boredom is riding on the truth or falsity of his belief. But, we can certainly imagine things differently. Say that Marco hopes to catch his dinner in McElligot’s Pool. Now, it matters if his belief that the pool is inhabited is true, for without good reason to expect to find catchable fish there, he’d be wasting his time and going to bed hungry.
Given that many of our decisions impact the lives of others, it seems important to not merely have correct answers to any particular question but to have good reasons for them. Doctors Galen, Zira, and Zaius may each diagnose that the farmer is suffering from a migraine, but to determine that the headache is due to dehydration—rather than to a brain tumor or demonic possession—leads to a very different treatment and different quality of life for the sufferer. As a practical matter, this difference requires that beliefs be investigated and justified as our chances of performing right actions (in this case, treating the actual cause of the migraine) increases as mere belief is replaced with knowledge.