Chapter 10
How Can That Be?
- How is it possible for a June bug to fly?
- How can it be that the world had a beginning?
- How can we know that there are absolutely no one-word sentences?
Each of these “How-can-that-be?” questions expresses a significant perplexity. For that reason I shall call them “Perplexity Questions,” or “P-Questions,” for short. No response to a P-Question will be entirely satisfying unless the perplexity it expresses is dealt with. Dealing with the relevant perplexity may include supplying some missing information or correcting a mistaken assumption. But it may also include doing a little philosophy. To be sure, not all P-Questions especially philosophical. Many are not philosophical at all. But many are quite philosophical. In fact, the perplexity that some of them express is primarily philosophical. And in other cases the perplexity is at least partly philosophical. Let’s begin with the question, ‘How can it be that June bugs fly?’
When I was a child, I was utterly fascinated with June bugs. Their slow and lumbering flight made them seem comical to me, as if they were cargo planes that had been severely overloaded. I think I was rather cruel to them – if one can be cruel to a June bug. I remember that my friends and I would tie strings to their legs to see if they could still take off with the extra weight of the string. As it turned out, some could fly trailing even long bits of string, which made them look even more comical. Today I still feel some guilt about have done those “experiments” on June bugs.
I became re-interested in the flight of June bugs when, some years later, I read somewhere that nobody really knows how it is possible for June bugs to fly. That report squared with my impression that these bugs are always over the recommended weight limit for their size and wingspread. But the thought that June bugs might be so much over the recommended weight limit that they defy the principles of aerodynamics every time they take flight gave me a special pleasure!
Recently I spent some hours in the “insect flight” section of my university’s library of the biological sciences. I wanted to see what progress scientists had made on the question of June-bug flight. Although I didn’t actually find a direct answer to my question, I did find an engrossing book entitled, “The Evolution of Insect Flight.” The following quotation appears as a sort of epigram to Part I of that book. This quote is identified only as “Inscription on a laboratory door”:
According to the laws of contemporary aerodynamics the cockchafer shouldn’t fly[,] but it flies. If we could manage to determine [the] aerodynamics of flight of the cockchafer we’d either find imperfection in the contemporary theory of insect flight or discover that the cockchafer possesses some unknown way of generating high lift.i
Since, as I later learned, the cockchafer is actually the May bug, this quotation seemed to come within a month of answering my question about June bug flight! More seriously, my best efforts to understand some of the rather technical discussion in this delightful book suggest that the May bug and the June bug are among a rather large variety of insects with respect to which our current understanding of aerodynamics is insufficient to explain how it is that they succeed in flying.
The June-bug question, I should say, is a purely scientific P-Question. So far as I can see, it raises no philosophically interesting issue at all. We ask, “How can it be that June bugs fly?” because we lack sufficient understanding of the aerodynamics of insect flight, or because we lack sufficient understanding of the biology of June bugs, or both. Philosophical reflection will not help us deal with this perplexity. A better grasp of aerodynamics or of the biology of June bugs is what we need to deal with this perplexity.
Still, even though the June-bug question is not a philosophical one, it is a thoroughly interesting question. I can imagine getting intrigued by it – especially when I’m told that learned scientists do not know how to answer it. If I had gotten sufficiently intrigued by it as a child – as might well have happened — I might have gone on to become a famous entomologist (or, more likely, a not very famous one).
I turn now to a P-Question that is certainly philosophical, but also, I think, scientific. It is raised in an anecdote I quote, without ever really discussing it properly, at the end of Chapter 2 of my first book on philosophy and children, Philosophy and the Young Child:ii
At lunch, the children talked about “the beginning of the world”. Dan [six years, one month] insists, whatever may be suggested as “the beginning”, there must always have been “something before that”. He said, “You see, you might say that first of all there was a stone, and everything came from that—but” (with great emphasis), “where did the stone come from?” There were two or three variants on this theme. Then Jane [eleven years], from her superior store of knowledge, said, “Well, I have read that the earth was a piece of the sun, and that the moon was a piece of the earth”. Dan, with an air of eagerly pouncing on a fallacy, “Ah! But where did the sun come from?” Tommy [five years, four months] who had listened to all this very quietly, now said with a quiet smile, “I know where the sun came from!” The others said eagerly, “Do you, Tommy? Where? Tell us”. He smiled still more broadly, and said, “Shan’t tell you!” to the vast delight of the others, who thoroughly appreciated the joke.
This anecdote comes from a very wise book by Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth in Young Children,iii which is an account of a school Isaacs and her husband directed in Cambridge, England, shortly after the First World War. As we learn from this book, Susan Isaacs fostered in her school great respect for inquiry, including the full discussion of P-Questions. The question the kids themselves were pursuing in the passage above was ‘How can it be that the world had a beginning?’
Several readers of my book, Philosophy and the Young Child, have asked me about this anecdote. Some apparently could not figure out exactly what was supposed to make Tommy’s claim that he knew where the sun came from, but was not going to tell, a joke. Since reflecting on Dan’s argument and Tommy’s joke may help us think about using classical philosophy texts to do philosophy with schoolkids, it may be useful here to discuss this anecdote briefly.
Dan’s reasoning suggests that there can be no such thing as a beginning to the world. If we say that the world began as a stone, or as the sun, we can always ask where that stone came from, or where the sun came from. Implicit in Dan’s reasoning is the Aristotelian principle that everything that comes into existence comes into being from something, plus the assumption that neither a stone nor the sun, nor anything they came from is an eternal object. If we accept that Aristotelian principle, there can have been no such thing as the absolute beginning of the universe, that is a beginning from nothing.
The Middle Ages saw much controversy about whether the world is eternal or not. A major source of this controversy was the apparent conflict between what the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis tells us about the creation of the world, and the conclusion of certain earlier philosophers, especially Aristotle, that the world is eternal.
Most medieval theologians took Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) to mean that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing), that is, without using any pre-existing material to create it. According to Dan (and Aristotle!) things like stones and the sun, if they ever do come into existence at all, come into existence from something else. According to this way of thinking, it is incoherent to suppose that something comes from nothing. And so the answer to the P-Question, ‘How can it be that the world had a beginning?’ is simply ‘It can’t be.’
Today it is not only traditionalists among religious believers who have to cope with the conceptual problem of an absolute beginning to the universe; scientist who accept the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe face a closely related challenge. It seems that we can ask of the Big Bang, as we can ask of Dan’s stone, “Where did that come from?” And, of course, if we answer that the Big Bang came from something else – not, presumably a stone, but from some previous state or entity – we can also ask of that, what it came from, and so on ad infinitum.
Here Tommy enters the discussion with his little joke. Tommy seems to interpret the threat of an infinite regress of things coming into existence from previously existing things as something that might be stopped by appealing to a secret origin. But saying that what the sun came from is a secret doesn’t seem to deal with Dan’s line of reasoning. Suppose that Tommy is right and whatever it is that the sun came from is a secret. Let’s call the secret source of the sun, “Sigma.” Now we can ask Dan’s question. What did Sigma come from?
To suggest that we might evade the regress of things always coming from other things by appealing to a secret source seems to be a conceptual joke. Presumably Tommy didn’t think of himself as making a conceptual joke. But the older kids in Susan Isaacs’s school seem to have thought that it was some kind of joke to suppose we could stop the regress of saying that each thing comes from some other thing by insisting simply that the source of a given entity is a secret.
So how can it be that the universe ever came into existence? One possible response is to say this: The universe didn’t ever come into existence. Rather, in one form or another,
- The universe has always existed.
That seems to have been Dan’s idea. It was certainly Aristotle’s idea.
Here is another possible response:
- The universe came into existence when a relatively formless body of material took on the form of a universe.
Of course, Dan might respond to (2) by saying that, if the universe as we know it came from, say, a jumble of atoms, then the universe was just a jumble of atoms before it took on the form we recognize as the universe.
Here is another possibility. One might say this:
- The universe came into existence when something happened for which we can, in principle, give no scientific explanation.
That scientifically unexplainable first event could have been the Big Bang. Here is Stephen Hawking on the Big Bang as a scientifically unexplainable event:
Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined.iv
Another way to think of the origin of the universe as a scientifically unexplainable event is to think of it as an act of Divine creation from nothing, ex nihilo. Stephen Hawking, in the book from which the quotation above comes, considers ways of combining the Big Bang and the Divine creation possibilities.
In a way, (3) is a little like Tommy’s “secret.” Stephen Hawking, or some other cosmogonist,v might be able to say why we can’t explain the origin of the Big Bang. That is, they might be able to explain why our science cannot account for it. For that reason it may, in a certain way, remain a “secret.” Alternatively, a theologian might just say that God’s ability to create the world out of nothing is a holy mystery, which is also a little bit like a secret that cannot be revealed to any human being.
We began this chapter by considering a P-Question that is scientific, and not philosophical, namely the question about how it can be that the June bug flies. We then turned to an P-Question that is both philosophical and scientific, namely, how can it be that the universe had a beginning. Let’s consider next an P question that is undoubtedly philosophical and pretty clearly not scientific in the usual way, though it might be said to belong to the “science” of linguistics.
As a child, I liked to challenge authority, especially the authority of my teachers Perhaps I developed that questioning temperament because my older brother was thought to be so good at everything he did. He played the piano beautifully from age five. He had perfect pitch. In school he was always the teacher’s pet. When I came along, I was always introduced as his brother. If I tried to meet his standard, I would probably fail. But I could always question that standard!
I think I was in the third grade when my teacher told us that every sentence has both a subject and a predicate. So, she went on, there can be no such thing as a one-word sentence; we would need to have at least two words to make up a sentence.
I immediately began trying to think of counterexamples. I put myself to sleep at night by trying to think of one-word sentences. The first possible counterexamples that came to my mind were imperatives. The next day in school I tried out my counterexamples on my teacher. ‘Stop!’ ‘Eat!’ ‘Quit!’ Weren’t those one-word sentences, I asked my teacher, triumphantly.
“No,” my teacher responded calmly. “The subject of imperatives,” she explained, “is often left understood.” “‘Stop!’’ she went on, “means ‘You stop!’ and ‘Quit!’ means ‘You quit!’”
I can remember thinking that this response was a cheat. ‘Stop!’ I said to myself, is a complete sentence. My teacher says it means ‘You stop!’ just so that she can go on saying that every sentence has at least two words in it.
The next night, going to sleep, I tried to think of other counterexamples. The following day asked my teacher: “What about when we answer the roll by saying, ‘Here!’ or ‘Present!’ Aren’t those one-word sentences.”
My teacher had a ready response for these apparent counterexamples as well. “No,” she explained, “not really; you see ‘Present!’ means ‘I am present! And ‘Here!’ means ‘I am here!’”
I remember thinking that this contest was quite unfair. Each time I thought of a one-word sentence my teacher would tell me that what it meant was a two or three-word sentence. But even if a one-word sentence means the same thing as a two-word sentence, that hardly shows that there are no one-word sentences.
In the next grade, if I remember correctly, we talked about “complete sentences.” Now the claim became, every complete sentence has at least two words. But why, I wanted to know, is ‘You eat!’ or ‘I am present’ a complete sentence, whereas ‘Eat!’ and ‘Present!’ are not? No teacher ever explained that, except to say that a complete sentence must have a subject and a predicate.
How can it be that we know in advance, without having the check all the candidates for sentences that people have uttered and written since the beginning of language use, that every complete sentence must have both a subject and a predicate? There are certainly what look like many one-word sentences out there. How can it be that we know in advance that not a single one of them is a complete sentence?
One might try suggesting that ‘complete’ in ‘complete sentence’ just means ‘sentence having both a subject and a predicate.’ But that would make the claim tautologous. Moreover, you certainly won’t find ‘having both a subject and a predicate’ as one of the meanings of ‘complete’ in the dictionary.
Plato, in his dialogue, Sophist,vi points out that we don’t say anything true or false if we just give a list of things. Suppose I say, “Horse, dog, cow.” Or suppose I say, “Susan, Larry, Darlene.” In neither case have I said anything true or false – unless, of course, my list is taken to be an answer to some question. ‘Horse, dog, [and] cow’ might be an answer to the question, ‘What kinds of animal do you have on your farm?’ and ‘Susan, Larry, [and] Darlene’ might be taken to be the answer to the question, ‘Which kids are sitting on the back row?’
To say something true or false, Plato has the “Eleatic Stranger” point out in the dialogue, Sophist, you need to pick out at least one subject and say something about that subject, for example, that it exists,vii or that it is red or round or wise or wet, or whatever. Declarative sentences do that. We use them to make statements. Questions concern whether something is true of some subject or subjects. Imperatives order at least one subject to make something true of her (or him or it). And so on. To make sense of the idea of a complete sentence, we need to talk about truth and falsity and what it is to say something true or false. That is a wonderfully rich and very philosophical topic.
I suspect that none of my elementary-school teachers had ever read Plato’s Sophist. But I wish one of them had been willing to reflect with me a bit on my question, ‘How can it be that we know in advance that every sentence [or better: every complete sentence] has both a subject and a predicate?’ Even if the teacher or the class had not been able to come with an entirely satisfactory answer to that question, it would have been fun trying to answer it. And the effort would have shown me and my question a little respect. Maybe I didn’t deserve the respect. But I still think my question did.
Let’s see now how the chapters of this book have focused, without my having had to say so, on P-Questions. Let’s begin with Chapter 2, on Friendship. The passage I used from Plato’s Lysis to instigate discussions of friendship raises the issue of whether you can be my friend even if you don’t like me. So a relevant P-Questions could be put this way:
(P2) [How] can it be that you are my friend if you don’t even like me?
I put the ‘How’ in brackets because, as the kids in my classes in Hamburg and Lübeck decided (echoing, as it happens, what Socrates and his young friends decided in the Lysis), the answer to this question is really ‘It can’t be.’ No matter how much I like you, and no matter how much we hang out together, once I find out that you don’t like me, I have to say that you are really not my friend. In fact, what I will have to say is something like this: “All this time I thought you were my friend, by I guess I was wrong.”
This question and the answer to it certainly belong to a theoretical consideration of what friendship is. But they are not just theoretically interesting, they are also existentially important, as most any first-grader will be able to testify. I have a privileged position in determining whether or not I like you. That isn’t to say that I am immediately clear about whether I like you or not. I may need to think about the question a bit. But my vantage-point on whether I like you is privileged in a way that my vantage point on whether you like me is not. Even though we hang out together much of the time, I might one day be completely surprised by the diary entry that reveals the dreadful information that you don’t really like me, perhaps that you have never liked me, but hung out with me to make some third party jealous!
Thus the truth that friendship is in this way a “two-way street” is an important fact about the nature of friendship. It is part of the vulnerability of friendship. It is something we need to be aware of whether we are eight or eighty.
The P-Question that goes with Chapter 3 on the Ring of Gyges this:
(P3) [How] can it be that we ever do things that we do not think are in our own
interest?
We often seem to be constrained by morality in what we do. Instead of doing the self-interested thing, we do the moral thing. But the story of the Ring of Gyges is supposed to get us to see that, even when our actions seems to be constrained by morality, they are really constrained by self-interest. If we restrain our impulse to steal, it is only because we fear being caught or found out and punished or ostracized. But if we had the Ring of Gyges, Plato’s character, Glaucon, assures us, we would show no more respect for morality than Gyges does in the story. If we had the Ring of Gyges, we would steal and rape and murder. If without the ring, we decide not to do those bad things, it is just from a fear of being caught and punished.
Part of the discussion in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hobart, Tasmania, suggests that sometimes people, ordinary people, really want to do good things. The story of the Ring of Gyges is an insufficient basis on which to conclude that we would never do morally good things except for the fear of being caught doing bad things. We may still want to ask the P-Question, ‘How can that be?’ The kids I talked to in Australia seemed to think it had to do with character formation. That is certainly an idea worth pursue.
Chapter 4, on Happiness, took up the suggestion, from Plato’s Gorgias, that total happiness is enjoying something so much that you don’t want to do anything else. Can that be right. How could it be anything else. That is,
(P4) How can it be that enjoying oneself so much that one doesn’t want to do
anything else is not total happiness?
One kid in the Northampton class pointed out that you could be completely content at a given moment just doodling at your school desk. You could be enjoying that so much that, at the moment you don’t want to do anything else. But that should hardly count as happiness, certainly not total happiness. The class did not come to any conclusion about what total happiness might be, if there is such a thing, but they required that we take a longer-term view before we considered ourselves in position to say that someone was totally happy.
In Chapter 5 we took up the idea of parts of the self. Plato, in the Republic, motivates a division of the self by calling our attention to the fact that sometimes we are motivationally conflicted: for example, we want very much to eat another brownie (not Plato’s example!) and we want very much not to. How can that be? That is,
(P5) How can it be that I sometimes want very much to do something and at the
same time want very much not to do it, unless it is part of me that wants to do it
and another part of me that wants not to?
The kids in the classes I discussed this idea of dividing oneself into parts, for example, a rational part and an appetitive part, natural enough. But an important segment of each class refused to accept it. They pointed out that one can be want to do two or more incompatible good things, or two or more incompatible greedy things. For those cases the “parts of the self” solution would be of no help. In the end the kids in one class in particular put the brain in charge of the self and made it take responsibility for what to do about internal motivational conflict.
Chapter 6 took up issues concerning the nature of time. The P-Question here was Augustine’s famous query,
(P6) How can it be that time exists, when all that is ever present to be long or
short in an instant of no duration at all?
One kid pointed out that it would not even be possible to ask a question if time didn’t exist. So the other kids started thinking about the way in which the past and the future exist, thus making room for the coherence of the idea that time exists.
In Chapter 7 we took up the topic of Space and an argument from Lucretius for the spatial infinity of the universe. The P-Question was
(P7) [How] can it be that we know the universe is infinite?
The kids in a class in Amherst and Australia found ways around Lucretius’s indirect proof of the spatial infinity of the universe. So maybe what we have to say in this case is that we don’t know whether the universe is infinite. An intriguing suggestion from the class in Australia was that there might, for all we know, be multiple spatially finite universes, each with its own gravity-like constraints, and, for that reason, each inaccessible to the others.
In Chapter 8 we turned to a famous philosophical paradox – Zeno’s Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. The P-Question is
(P8) How can it be that Achilles catches up with the tortoise.
It seems obvious that Achilles, a proverbially fast runner will be able to catch up with the tortoise, a proverbially slow one. But when the task is conceived as one of having to complete an infinite series of ever smaller tasks, it may be hard to understand how something we take for granted can prove to be so perplexing. One kid in the class I discussed (P8) with suggested her own reason for thinking that Achilles cannot succeed in doing what he can so obviously do: we might not be able to say in, for example the decimal system, exactly when Achilles draws even with the tortoise. Another kid suggested specifying a point at which Achilles will have outdistanced the tortoise and then arguing, backwards, that, since Achilles can outdistance the tortoise, he must be able to catch up with it.
In Chapter 9 we turned to Plato’s “Euthyphro Problem.” Translated into monotheistic terms, the P-Questions are these:
(P9a) [How] can it be that something is holy simply because God approves it and
yet there be no possibility that God’s approval is arbitrary?
(P9b) [How] can it be that God approves whatever He approves simply because it
is really holy and yet God’s power not be in any way limited?
The kids in the class I discussed the Euthyphro Problem with re-invented the classic solutions to this problem. But they also made up some original resolutions of their own. One attractive move was to understand God to be the author or creator of the holy and then understand Him to conform to his own standard of holiness.
* * *
You could say that my mission in this book is primarily to encourage respect for P-Questions among teachers in elementary schools. It is true, of course, that I have had hardly anything to say about those P-Questions that are wholly scientific, such as the June-bug question. I do think that they deserve respect as well. They motivate science and scientists. But my subject here has been philosophy. And so it is the P-Questions that are partly or wholly philosophical that I have chosen for discussion.
You may still wonder why I have gone back to Plato and other classical philosophers to find the P-Questions I have discussed with kids. One obvious explanation is that ancient and medieval philosophy are my own academic specialties. But I also have what is, I think, a deeper reason. Doing Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Augustine, and other classic philosophers with kids is, I believe, an ideal way to connect them (and their teachers!) to one of the richest and most important veins of reflective thought in our Western cultural heritage. The latest findings of science and psychology can be very important for deepening our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. But doing some Plato can provide a reflective context in which the latest findings of science and psychology take on a richer and fuller meaning.