Teasing thoughts

Elisabeth and Erika

Sometimes my blogs may be quite complicated. At least that’s the impression that I get from what others tell me when they have read them. Sometimes my blogs, or rather their conclusions, have also a wider meaning than what you read in the blog itself. So, I finished my blog “What is true” last month (Jan 30, 2017) with the statement: “What we see and say is not always as it appears to us”. It was the upshot of a blog in which I attacked the idea that a statement cannot be true and false at the same time, and I had an epistemological or logical context in my mind, when I wrote it. Nevertheless, the conclusion can also be given a more general application, and if you forget the original context for a moment, you can see it also as a reference to what people often – or if I were cynical, I would say “usually” – do: People try to appear better than they are. We have many words and expressions for it, like a wolf in sheep’s clothes, hypocrisy, flattery, and so on. Now that you have got the hint, I think that it’s not difficult to mention other cases. This not to say that keeping up appearances and related phenomena must be seen only negative, for the world would be full of conflicts, if we always presented ourselves towards others as we really are and if we would always directly and immediately say what we think. Often it is better to control and restrain ourselves. However, when we would go too far in that, the world could become full of false ideology if not corruption, and appearance would become reality. In other words, we would live in a fake world, to take a word that is often used these days. But isn’t just this what is exposed by carnival, when it criticizes persons in office and old and new habits and customs? And if my blogs would help you a bit to think critically, it would be very nice. As Montesquieu said in his Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws, Book 14, ch. XX): “My business is not to make people read, but to make them think.”

In order to break stiff thoughts it is not always necessary to use complicated argumentations. Sometimes simple cases will do, too. Take for instance this logical enigma, which I found in a book with a collection of philosophical puzzles, brought together by Roy Sorensen. (In case you want to solve the problem yourself, I’ll give the solution after the Reference, so stop reading on then, when you are there). I quote (p. 17):

“Elisabeth was born fifteen minutes before her sister Erika. The two were identical and had the same mother. Yet Elisabeth and Erika were not twins.” How to explain this?

It’s just a simple example, but breaking your fixed thoughts is an important source of creativity and a condition for understanding people with other habits and customs that originally seemed to be strange to you, if not weird.

Reference

Roy Sorensen, A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities. A Collection of Puzzles, Oddities, Riddles and Dilemmas. London: Profile Books, 2017

Solution: Elisabeth was one member of a set of identical triplets.