Happy New Year !

The self-fulfilling prophecy and the sciences of man.

In my blog one week ago I presented the example of the global warming deniers – or the “climate deniers” as they are often called – as an instance of the Pinocchio paradox. It’s a pragmatic instance of a pragmatic paradox. However, in a sense, global warming denying (namely that it has been caused by the behaviour of men) can also be seen as an instance of a self-defeating prophecy. You’ll know that a self-defeating prophecy is a prophecy that prevents itself from happening. For example, your daughter spends a lot of time on playing football, so you warns her: “If you go on in this way and don’t spend more time on preparing your exam, you’ll not pass it.” It makes your daughter think about it and from then on she gives more time to her study and doesn’t go so often to her club anymore, and she passes her exam. What climate deniers do is a bit like this, but then the other way round: They have been warned that, if they go on ignoring the effect of their behaviour on global warming, the global warming that they denied will happen. So the reverse of what they say that will happen, will happen. It’s a pragmatic reversal of a pragmatic prophecy, which is quite paradoxical. But that’s how things often happen.

Once we talk about the self-defeating prophecy, it’s only one step to the self-fulfilling prophecy, the phenomenon that a prophecy becomes true just because it has been made. In my example it can also happen that your daughter realizes that she must make a choice. She is a good football player and she sees already a career as a professional before her eyes. Or she can opt for an academic career. She decides to choose for a sports career. As a consequence she doesn’t pass her exam. By her decision, your daughter makes that the prophecy comes true.

When I thought of examples of the self-fulfilling prophecy, immediately Oedipus popped up in my mind. It wasn’t a really original idea, for a bit browsing on the Internet learned me that the Oedipus myth is often mentioned as an instance of this prophecy. In case you don’t know it, here it is, very briefly (which I copied from the Wikipedia for practical reasons): Warned that his child would one day kill him, Laius abandoned his newborn son Oedipus to die, but Oedipus was found and raised by others, and thus in ignorance of his true origins. When he grew up, Oedipus was warned that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Believing his foster parents were his real parents, he left his home and travelled to Greece, eventually reaching the city where his biological parents lived. There, he got into a fight with a stranger, his real father, killed him and married his widow, Oedipus’ real mother. Never try to escape your fate, is what the Greek want to say here. In this blog the relevance of this story is how Oedipus fulfilled a prophecy that he tried to escape just by his behaviour.

Because of this Greek myth, Karl R. Popper called the self-fulfilling prophecy the “Oedipus effect”, a term which he introduces in The Poverty of Historicism (although he had used the idea already in The Open Society and its Enemies). In his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest he says about it (pp. 121-2 in my 1980 edition): “One of the ideas I had discussed in The Poverty was the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted. I had called this the ‘Oedipus effect’, because the oracle played a most important role in the sequence of events which led to the fulfilment of its prophecy. … For a time I thought that the existence of the Oedipus effect distinguished the social from the natural sciences. But in biology, too—even in molecular biology—expectations often play a role in bringing about what has been expected.” It’s a pity that Popper doesn’t say which cases in biology he had in mind, for the essence of the distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences is not simply in the way as Popper interprets the self-fulfilling prophecy. As far as I can remember, Karl-Otto Apel has made this clear, but I couldn’t find the passage where he does, but this is how I see it. In the “Oedipus interpretation” of the self-fulfilling prophecy it is so that Oedipus knows about the prophecy and just by his try to escape it, it is fulfilled. But actually it is not Oedipus himself who fulfils the prophecy, but that the prophecy comes true happens to him. Not knowing that his foster parents were not his real parents, he could not intentionally realize or prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy. However, in my example of the father who warns his daughter that she’ll not pass her exam, if she goes on to spend so much time on playing football, the daughter has a real choice and she takes a conscious decision. This conscious decision makes the case of the daughter different from Oedipus’ case. It’s true that Oedipus consciously left his foster parents, consciously killed a stranger and consciously married the stranger’s widow, but he didn’t consciously kill his father and consciously marry his mother, for had he known who they really were, he wouldn’t have killed the stranger and married his widow. So, it’s not the Oedipus effect, and the self-fulfilling prophecy in general, that distinguishes the social from the natural sciences, but it is the possibility to influence predicted effects in a conscious way that makes the social sciences different from the natural sciences. And this phenomenon doesn’t make only the social sciences different from the natural sciences but it holds for all sciences of man.

The Pinocchio paradox

You’ll certainly have heard of the Liar paradox: “All Cretans are liars”, Epimenides – himself a Cretan – said. But this utterance contains a contradiction, for if the sentence is true, Epimenides does not lie, while he says he does. And if he lies, it’s just a confirmation of the statement, so not a lie. Since the days of Epimenides (who lived circa 600 BC) philosophers have discussed a lot about the Liar paradox and developed several variants. Do you know the Pinocchio variant?

Once the logician Peter Eldridge-Smith explained the Liar paradox to his children and asked whether they knew a version of their own, so he tells us in a paper with his daughter Veronique as co-author. Veronique replied: “Pinocchio says ‘My nose will be growing’.” I assume that you’ll know the story of Pinocchio, whose nose grows every time he tells a lie. Since the use of the future tense makes the statement a bit complicated, the father changed it into “Pinocchio says ‘My nose is growing’.” And here we have the Pinocchio paradox. As Peter Eldridge-Smith explains: “So, Pinocchio’s nose is growing iff it is not growing. It is clearly a version of the Liar [paradox].” However, there is an important difference between the original Liar paradox and the Pinocchio paradox. The former is semantic: It is about what the speaker (Epimenides in my example) says and the meaning of his (or her) words. But in what way ever we interpret “my nose is growing”, it is not semantic for it is not about the meaning of words. “My nose is growing” is a statement about a fact, which may be the case or may not be the case. Therefore, we could call this paradox pragmatic (in distinction to a semantic paradox). Anyway, it is a real paradox, for if Pinocchio says that his nose grows and he speaks the truth, it will not grow. But if his nose doesn’t grow, when Pinocchio utters this sentence, the sentence is false and so Pinocchio lies and his nose must grow. Voilà.

After a discussion about some logical implications of the Pinocchio paradox, Peter Eldridge-Smith writes against the end of his paper: “The Pinocchio paradox raises a purely logical issue for any metalanguagehierarchy solution, strict or liberal. The Pinocchio scenario is not going to arise in our world, ...” (the italics are mine). Is it true? Without a doubt, there are no Pinocchios in this world: There is nobody whose nose will grow if and because s/he tells a lie. Nevertheless, Pinocchio scenarios do exist. One of the main political issues in present politics is the fact of the global warming. It’s a theme on local levels, national levels, regional levels and globally. All scientific data make clear that it is not a mere opinion that the world gradually becomes warmer and that man is the main cause of this global warming. It is a fact. Therefore, the statement “Man is the main cause of the present global warming” (the “global warming statement” for short) is true. But alas, there are always people who deny what is clearly true, and so there are still many people who deny the global warming statement, and these people happen to be still quite influential. Let me call them “global warming deniers”. If these global warming deniers will determine global policy, they will take no measures to stop the man-caused global warming and the earth will keep warming up. However, if those who endorse the global warming statement will gain the upper hand and will determine global policy, they’ll take all kinds of measures that will stop the global warming and then the earth will not warm up any longer. Briefly: If those who deny the global warming statement win, there’ll be a global warming caused by man; if those who endorse the global warming statement win, there’ll be no such global warming. This is clearly a version of the Pinocchio paradox. However, I don’t doubt that there are more realistic instances of this paradox, for this world is full of lies.

Source

Peter Eldridge-Smith, Veronique Eldridge-Smith, “The Pinocchio paradox”, in: Analysis, Volume 70, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 212–215.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers! 

Don't forget to read my next blog on the Pinocchio Paradox.

Sadness

I think that most readers of this blog don’t know that I am interested in the First World War (1914-1918). I’ll not tell here how this came about but the result is that many years ago I begun to take photos of monuments and sites related to this war, which I upload to a special section of my website (you’ll find them here: http://www.bijdeweg.nl/WO1-Inleiding.htm; the explaining texts are in Dutch, but just follow the links). In the meantime my website contains about 800 such photos. However, this is only a fraction of what can be photographed of this war. So now and then I travel to the battle fields of the Westfront in Northern France and Belgium – or elsewhere – in order to take new pictures for my website. Or I take pictures of those countless monuments behind the former frontlines, which you find everywhere in Europe (and outside Europe as well). Last month my wife and I made again such a trip. This time we went to the battle fields of the First Battle of the Marne (September 1914) and the Second Battle of the Marne (May-August 1918), northeast of Paris not far from Reims. We travelled around there, looked for and looked at the monuments and visited many war cemeteries as well (it’s unbelievable how many war cemeteries there are along the former Westfront and how many soldiers died there). And I took many photos, of course. However, for me, such a visit to battle fields is not an emotionally neutral affair. Since I always try to imagine how it must have been there in those days of the war, I see the many wounded lying and dying in the fields and the trenches. I see the many many dead everywhere on the ground. So one week being there is long enough for me, for it makes me very sad.

Now I am home again and I “must” write my weekly blog. Thinking of my trip to the Westfront, I thought that it would be a good idea to write about emotions, and especially about sadness. So I looked up Aristotle says about emotions. I found that in the Nicomachean Ethics he calls them “feelings accompanied by pleasure or pain” and that he also says “By emotions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hatred, longing, emulation, and pity”. (1105b21) In his Rhetorica he even gives a list of fourteen emotions. Next I took Spinoza’s Ethics from my bookcase, where I read that for him sadness (or pain) is one of the basic emotions. It signifies “a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection.” (Part III, prop. XI, note). Or should it be better to write about emotions and sadness by discussing Martha Nussbaum’s book Upheavals of thought? It’s another option. But would these words really capture what emotion is and especially what sadness is? Then I realized that often a picture says more than 643 words (the number of words in this blog). Actually, pictures can better express what emotions are than words can do. So this time you get a pictorial blog. Look at the emotional photo here on the top of this blog, look at the face of this soldier carrying his dead comrade, and you know what sadness is. (click on the photo, in order to see it better; use the escape button – not the backspace – in order to return to this blog).

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Description of the monument

Monument for the 42th US Division (the Rainbow Division), situated 8 km south of Fère-en-Tardenois in the Aisne department in France. It represents a sergeant from the 167e regiment from Alabama who carries a comrade fallen during an attack on a nearby farm, 25-26 July 1918. The bronzed statue has been made by Britannique James Buttler and it has been inaugurated on 12 November 2011.

10,000 views !

It’s unbelievable: One of my blogs got 10,000 views! My blog “I act, therefore I am” passed this magic limit today. Do you want to read it, too? Here it is:

http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-act-therefore-i-am.html

Enjoy it!

Alternative knowledge

What do we know? It’s an intriguing question, also for philosophers. Once I discussed this case: My wife and I are driving home on a Friday afternoon and stop at the bank to deposit our paychecks. However, there was a long queue in front of the counter, so I said: “I’ll do it tomorrow. I know that the bank will be open.” But my wife says: “Maybe the bank won’t be open on Saturday. Maybe it has changed its opening hours.” Should I check it? If I am in a hurry and can deposit my paychecks also on Monday, in case the bank happens to be closed tomorrow, I’ll not check it. If it is important to deposit my paychecks before the weekend, I’ll do. In other words: What I know depends on the context. (for a full explanation see my blog dated 12 December 2011: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-do-we-know.html)

Contextuality can affect what you think you know. Possible alternatives are another condition that can affect it, as Fred Dretske has made clear in his article “Epistemic Operators”. To illustrate this he discusses a “silly” example, as he calls it, although it is no more silly than many other philosophical examples. In short, it is this:

“You take your son to the zoo, see several zebras, and, when questioned by your son, tell him they are zebras. Do you know they are zebras? Well, most of us would have little hesitation saying that we did know this. We know what zebras look like, and, besides, this is the city zoo and the animals are in a pen clearly marked ‘Zebras.’ Yet, something’s being a zebra implies that it is not a mule and, in particular, not a mule cleverly disguised by the zoo authorities to look like a zebra. Do you know that these animals are not mules cleverly disguised by the zoo authorities to look like zebras?” (p. 39)

Probably you’ll answer this question with “Yes”, for you simply don’t find the idea that the “zebra” is a mule in disguise reasonable. If Dretske hadn’t asked this question, it wouldn’t simply have come to your mind that the zebra might be a mule in disguise. And why should the zoo authorities deceive you? And is it really possible to disguise a mule that way that you’ll not notice it? Etc. In other words, what you believe to be true in this case, depends on what you think what the plausible alternatives are. You “know” that the animal in the zoo is a zebra, for what else would it be? (or so you think). But you don’t have checked it. So even if the animal is a zebra, actually you don’t know. For, as Dretske says, “the question here is not whether [the] alternative is plausible, not whether it is more or less plausible than that there are real zebras in the pen, but whether you know that this alternative hypothesis is false.” (ibid., italics Dretske) Nevertheless, we think that we know, or as Dretske says a few lines hereafter: “[W]e simply admit that we do not know that some ... contrasting ‘skeptical alternatives’ are not the case, but refuse to admit that we do not know what we originally said we knew.” (ibid., italics Dretske)

What we think to know depends on the alternatives we judge relevant. That’s why this approach of knowledge is called the “Relevant Alternatives Theory”. But since at first sight non-relevant or left out alternatives might be true, it may always happen that we don’t know what we know, even if we belief that our knowledge is justified.

Sources

- Dretske, Fred, “Epistemic Operators”, in his Perception, Knowledge and Belief. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000; pp. 38-40. You can find it also here: https://people.ucsc.edu/~farkas/sclp/papers/Epistemic_Operators.pdf

Standing on the shoulders of giants: Montaigne and Descartes

We all stand on the shoulders of others. In my blog last week, we have seen how Wittgenstein has been influenced by Spinoza, albeit only a little bit. However, with the exception of a short remark in his personal diary Wittgenstein doesn’t mention Spinoza in his work, just as he mentions hardly any other name in his writings. As for this he should have patterned himself on Montaigne, one of the first modern philosophers. Montaigne’s Essays are full of quotes. He mentions always the authors who stimulated him to develop his ideas. For a big part his Essays are a debate of Montaigne with his predecessors and we see how Montaigne grows by it.

On the other hand, Montaigne had and still has an impact on thinkers after him. Especially during the first years after his death he had, but actually his influence extends till this day. Christophe Bardyn – the most important shoulder for this blog – writes in his splendid Montaigne biography that the Essays were widely read in the seventeenth century, even to that extent that one could promote the reading of one’s own work just by referring to Montaigne (a trick that is still applied: Write how your book relates to other important works, and the chance that it will be read increases). Two of his most important readers in those days were Blaise Pascal and René Descartes. A few years ago I have written already about the influence of Montaigne on Pascal (see my blog dated 23 December 2013), although Pascal called the Essays a “foolish project”, since it was not done to write about yourself, he said. Anyway, the impact of Montaigne on Pascal is explicit. On the other hand, as Bardyn notes, the indebtedness of Descartes to Montaigne is inconspicuous and not properly expressed, although it is decisive. It’s mainly indirect. For example, actually the whole Discourse on the Method is an application of Montaigne’s idea of doubt on the foundations of the knowledge of his time, but Descartes doesn’t mention Montaigne’s name in this grounding work. By using passages and ideas from the Essays without crediting the source, today Descartes would risk being accused of plagiarism. Even more, Descartes’s indebtedness to Montaigne if not his plagiarism starts already in the first sentence of the Discourse, where he writes:

“Good sense is the best shared-out thing in the world; for everyone thinks he has such a good supply of it that he doesn’t want more, even if he is extremely hard to please about other things.” It seems to be an original if not brilliant intro for what would become one of the most influential philosophical works in history, but Montaigne had written already before him:

“’Tis commonly said that the justest portion Nature has given us of her favours is that of sense; for there is no one who is not contented with his share: is it not reason? whoever should see beyond that, would see beyond his sight.” (Essays, book II, 17).

It is as if Descartes wanted to profit by Montaigne’s popularity without mentioning his name. Or he wanted to appear more original than he really was. But when Descartes would have mentioned his sources, nobody would have detracted even a little bit from his achievements.

We all stand on the shoulders of others, or as Isaac Newton said it: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In other words, everything we do we couldn’t have been done without what our predecessors had done before us. By speaking of “giants” and not simply of “others” Newton implicitly acknowledged that his predecessors were greater than himself. And isn’t it so that making a start is often more difficult than to continue? Descartes was a giant because he made many important (re)starts in philosophy and science. Paying tribute to his gigantic predecessors would have made him even taller.

Shoulders

- Bardyn, Christophe, Montaigne. La splendeur de la liberté. Paris: Flammarion, 2015; pp. 467-8 (my main shoulder for this blog)

- Descartes, René de, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking

Truth in the Sciences. 2007. On https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf

- Montaigne. Michel de, Essays. Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2015. On https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html#book2.17

- Phillips, John, “Montaigne and Descartes”. On https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/mondes.htm

- Wikipedia