Chapter 1
Introduction: A Moose, a Turtle, and a Princess
Morris, the moose, meets a cow. “You’re a funny-looking moose,” he says.
“I’m a cow,” the cow protests; “I’m no moose.”
Morris persists. “You have four legs and a tail and things on your head,” he points out quite correctly. “you’re a moose,” he concludes.
“But I say MOO,” the cow objects.
Morris is unimpressed. “I can say MOO, too,” he boasts.
The cow is not stumped. “I give milk to people,” she says; “moose don’t do that.”
Morris remains unimpressed. “So,” he says, “you’re a moose who gives milk to people.”
The cow then plays her trump card. “My mother is a cow,” she points out.
Morris is unfazed. “She must be a moose,” he rejoins coolly, “because you’re a moose.”
“What can I say?” pleads the cow.
“Say that you’re a moose,” replies Morris..
Morris and the cow look for a thrid party to adjudicate their dispute. They spot a deer.
“What am I?” the cow asks the deer.
“You have four legs and a tail and things on your head; you must be a deer,” says the deer.
“She’s a moose, like me!” shouts Morris.
“You’re no moose,” retorts the deer; “you’re a deer, too.”
The three go off together to find another judge. They come to a horse, who greets them with “Hello, you horses,” and then adds, “What are those funny things on your heads?”
Before the four of them seek yet another judge of their identities, they stop to drink from a cool stream. Looking at the reflection of himself in the stream, Morris decides that he is much better looking than the others, so much better looking, in fact, that the others can’t be moose after all. The deer sees his relection in the stream and decides that he is so much better looking than the others that they can’t be deer. In the end, the moose, the cow, the deer, and the horse all recognize each other for what they are: a moose, a cow, a deer, and a horse.
* * *
I remember reading Morris the Moosei to our first child, and later to her younger sister and brother. The first copy I bought, which we still have a half century later, is printed on cheap paper with black-and-white drawings.
Recently I bought the latest edition of Morris the Mooseii. It is an “I can read book” decked out with drawings in full color and a bad pun for a new ending. (On the last page Morris is now made to admit, “I made a MOOSEtake!” Ugh!) But otherwise the plot is the same.
What made this book a favorite in our family, even in its simple, black-and-white format, and even without the bad pun for an ending? And why am I now using it to begin my discussion of philosophical children’s stories?
With the skill of a poet the author, Bernard Wiseman, teases us into reflection on our animal classification system and the animal species it is meant to capture. His choice of a moose as the main character in his story is inspired. For one thing, a moose is strikingly marked with those “things on its head.” Moreover, most of the book’s readers, even the adults among us, are likely to be a little shaky about what exactly a moose is, and how a moose is related to a cow and a deer, but especially, perhaps, how a moose is realted to an elk, a caribou, and a reindeer. A parent or teacher may be quizzed by a curious child on what the difference is between a moose and a reindeer. Asked that question, most of us would be left mumbling something about how a moose has bigger, “clunkier,” antlers, or something of the sort. But, even if that is right, why should having bigger, clunkier, antlers make an animal anything more than a clunky-antlered reindeer? Most of us couldn’t say.
Still, I am not suggesting that Morris the Moose be considered a good introduction to the classification of animals – what is called “taxonomy.” I am suggesting instead that it is a good, first sample of a philosophical children’s story. Why?
When Morris comments to the deer, at the very beginning of the story, “You’re a funny-looking moose,” he makes two natural moves in one. First, he does something akin to anthropomorphizing; he assumes, without further thought, that the deer is the same kind of being he is. But, second, he assumes that obfious differences between him and the animal in front of him point up deficiencies in that animal. He is a “funny-looking” moose.
A second thing to note about this story is that what these animals are primarily interested in with respect to each other is not what philosophers would call their “accidental features,” that is, whether this one has brown hair, whereas that one has white hair and black spots; or whether this one has blue eyes and that one brown eyes. What they are primarily interested in is their essential nature, their kind.
It was Aristotle (384-22 BCE) who gave us the animal classification system we still use today.To be sure, Linnaeus (1707-78) and other have modified the system somewhat. But what we use to classify animals and plants is still, basically, Aristotle’s system.
It was also Aristotle who taught us to think of an animal’s essence or nature as that a stable cluster of features that normally gets passed on in reproduction to all offspring. My essential nature, on this view, is something I have in common with all other human beings. Differences between me and other human beings, such as height, intelligence, and skin color, are accidential features and do not make me a different kind of being from someone with a different hight, a different level of intelligence, or a different skin color.
Aristotle realized that it is no easy matter to distinguish those features that yield a different species from those features that mark variation within a species. We are much more conscious of the difficulties today, partly because we, unlike Aristotle, suppose that a new species may evolve from chance variations in individual organisms. Still, even if population biologists today would rather talk about gene pools than species, most of us, most of the time, continue to think about human beings and other animals in reference to Aristotle’s classification scheme.
Like us, Aristote also thought of artifacts, and their classification, in analogy to natural species. A tricycle, we are inclined to suppose, is not just a bicycle with an extra wheel; it is, instead, a different kind, a different “species,” of self-propelled vehicle. And a motorcycle is not just a bicycle with an engine, but, again, another kind of two-wheeled vehicle.
One philosophical question that Morris the Moose raises is whether the moose, the deer, the cow, and the horse are real kinds, as opposed to merely conventional kinds or, as philosophers like to say, merely “nominal” kinds. Aristotle was impressed by how stable the biological species are. Think of songbirds. Every year cardinals and bluejays and housefinches (among a large number of other species) come to our birdfeeder just beyond the kitchen window. Every year male cardinals mate with female cardinals, male bluejays with female bluejays, and male housefinches with female housefinches. Soon we see baby cardinals, bluejays and housefinches, immature birds that will grow up to look exactly like their parents. It is hard not to think of the reproduction of kinds of songbirds the way Aristotle did, as parents (he thought it was the father) passing on the cardinal form, or species, to the offspring, or the bluejay form or the housefinch form, to the respective offspring.
Does a bird or animal of one species ever mate with a bird or animal of another species? Well, we know, and Aristotle knew, that a horse may mate with a donkey and the the produce will be something different from each parent, namely, a mule. But mules, as Aristotle also knew, tend to be sterile, as if to demonstrate that the natural offspring of a horse is another horse, and the natural offspring of a donkey is another donkey.iii These reflections tend to suggest that biological kinds are real, and not merely conventional.iv
One thing that makes the choice of a moose so instructive in Morris the Moose is that biologists consider a moose a kind of deer. So when the deer in the story said to Morris, “You’re no moose, your’re a deer too,” what he should have said is “You are a moose and you’re a deer, too.” But one couldn’t know that for sure without doing a little biology.
What about artifacts? Are there any real kinds among them, or are all kinds merely conventional?
It is quite plausible to say that kinds among artifacts are merely conventional. But we shouldn’t be too smug about saying that. Consider the question about whether a motorcycle is a bicycle with an engine, or whether a bicycle is a motorcycle without the motor. What we should note here, I think, is that motorcycles did indeed evolve from pedaled bicycles. Indeed, it is still possible to get bicycles with a small motor that can be engaged to make it easier for the cyclist to get up hills.
Having noted that motorcycles evolved from bicycles, and not the other way around, we should also note that motorcycle design has moved far, far away from its bicycle heritage. A standard motorcycle today is quite unsuitable to be pedaled, even if the engine could be removed from it to leave pedaling as a last resort. Since motorcycles, like bicycles, are a human invention, there is something conventional about their nature. But, since motorcycle design as evolved in such a sophisticated way, it also seems appropriate to say that human society has, in the motorcycle, developed a distinctive kind of vehicle that is, indeed, a real kind of vehicle.
Similar lines of thought might be pursued with respect to chairs and stools, say, or walking sticks and unbrellas.
* * *
Here is another favorite of mine.
Albert is a trutle, who complains that he has a toothache. Albert’s father is quite unsympathetic. “That’s impossible,” he says; “it is impossible for anyone in our family to have a toothache.”
Albert’s father does point to his own toothless mouth to underline his point. But what, exactly, can he show Albert this way? He can’t show that it is impossible for a turtle to have teeth. He can’t even point to the toothlessness of his mouth, toothlessness not being something one can point to. But he can at least hope that Albert will see that there are no teeth there and be reminded that there are none in Albert’s mouth either.
It might have been good for Albert’s father to say something like this: “To have a toothache you need to have a tooth, and turtle’s don’t have teeth.” To make Albert’s situation even clearer, his father could have added that Albert can have a tailache, since he has a tail, but he doesn’t have the right sort of equipment to have a toothache.
In fact, of course, it isn’t really enough just to have a tooth for one to be able to have a toothache. The tooth I have could be under my pillow, or in a safe-keeping box. One can’t have an ache in x unless x is a part of one’s very own body. Even more rigorously, for y to be able to have an ache in x at a particular time, t, x must be an integral part of y’s body at t.
Or is that last claim really satisfactory? Descartes was impressed by the fact that amputees sometimes report having aches and pains in their amputated limbs. This sort of thing is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of the “phantom limb.” Descartes seems to have known about it because soldiers he had heard about, who had had a leg amputated, would wake up after the amputation and, not realizing that the leg was gone, complain of having a pain in it.
Suppose now that, while I am unconscious, my last remaining tooth is extracted and, when I wake up, I report having an awful toothache. Is it false that I then have a toothache, since I no longer have a tooth. But if that is right, what is the ache that I have, a jawache? That doesn’t seem right. I have had jawaches, and they are different. “It’s just in your head,” someone may say. But, of course, it’s not a headache. Nor is it a brainache!
Albert’s grandmother is the only character in the storyv who is even sympathetic with Albert. To her he explains that his “toothache” is on his left toe (where he has been bitten by something with teeth). Albert’s explanation makes it easy to sympathize with him, but hard to avoid the conclusion that he really doesn’t know what a toothache is.
How does one learn what a toothache is? By having one?And how does one first know that it is a toothache one has?
Doesn’t it go this way? I come to learn that I have various anatomical parts, including teeth. Once I know a little about my own anatomy, I immediately know where I hurt without having to lear how to tell. Then, so long as I know I have a tooth, I am in position to recognize that an ache or pain I have is in my tooth.
That story is rather puzzling, though. How is it that I acquire, without training, a certain expertise in locating the pains I have? Are some people better at locating their pains than others? Could one have a special gift for correct pain-location?
Suppose my dentist tells me there is nothing wrong with the tooth in which I seem to have a pain. Can my dentist tell that I really don’t have a pain there? Perhaps what my dentist will say (it is what a dentist said to someone I know) is that, my tooth being sound, what I have is a simulated toothache. Is a simulated toothache something Albert could have had?
Then there is the ache in the phantom tooth. And, if one can have an ache in a tooth one no longer has, why not in a tooth one never had?
In the story, Albert’s grandmother takes a handkerchief from her purse and wraps it around Albert’s toe. I suspect that similar care might help with a simulated toothache, or an ache in a phantom tooth. In any case, it seems to have been just what Albert needed.
For many philosophers a pain is the most obvious example of what they call a “private mental particular.” A pain is thought to be private insofar as only the person who has it can experience it. If I could hook up my nervous system to yours, we might think that I could feel your pains. Yet is seems that the best description of such a situation, if we can imagine it, would be that I get a pain, my own pain, whenever you do. So a pain, it seems, is always in that way private to the person who has it.
The apparent privacy of pains is one thing that makes them philosophically problematic. How can I ever be sure that what I call “a toothache” is something other people have. Conversely, how can I ever know that what other people call a toothache is something I have. I have heard people say that they never, or perhaps almost never, have headaches. Can that be true? Or do they have headaches, but fail to recognize them for what they are? And how can we know? Can we know?
Albert’s Toothache brings out in delightfully whimsical ways some of the aspects of having a toothache that are puzzling and problematic. One can only hope that a teacher or parent who reads or discusses this winning story with a child will be sensitive to the reflections that it can awaken and will be open to discussing with the child some of the issues that toothaches pose.
* * *
I think the first children’s story I myself connected in any serious way to philosophy was James Thurber’s Many Moons. I became familiar with the stdory when a librarian friend of my family gave a copy to our older daughter, Sarah, when she was about four or five years old. The illustrator of a beautiful edition of the book, Louis Slobodkin, visited the library in Minneapolis where our friend worked and aautographed copies of the book. On the copy he autographed for Sarah he, plaaced over his inscription fifteen or twenty small moon-shaed figures, in fact, figures of the moon in different phases.
I enjoyed reading the story to Sarah, and later, to her younger sister, Becca. But it was while I was reading it to our son, John, some six or seven years later that I began to appreciate its philosophical importance. That must have been about 1971, when John was four years old.
We had moved from Minneapolis to Amherst, Massachusetts, where I taught, and still teach, at the University of Massachusetts. It was the time of what was called, rather patronizingly, “student unrest.” We occasionally emptied lecture rooms on account of bomb threats. Like my students, I allowed myself to be bussed to Washington to protest the Vietnam War. In fact, Sarah, by then a teenager, went with me on one of the overnight bus trips to Washington to demonstrate against the war.
In that period I foung that some of my students, sometimes the brightest of them, began to become suspicious of philosophy. They shared with me the suspicion that philosophy was an “establishment” plot to take their minds off the war.
I could see that, from the outside, this suspiciou might have some plausibility. Although a few of my students came to the university having already had a philosophy course in high school, most of them were encountering philosophy for the first time in their lives. This fact made philosophy very different from math or history or biology, which they had become acquainted with in secondary school, if not even in primary school. It was natural to ask why philosophy should have found a home in colleges and universities, but not primary school and not usually in secondary school either. The idea of an establishment plot to take the minds of students off issues of life and death had a certain plausibility.
I certainly expected that some of my students would not take to philosophy. What I had not expected was a suspicion that philosophy was a contrived subject used to manipulate the mind of students. How could I counter that suspicion?
One night, when I was reading Many Moons to John at his bedtime, it occurred to me that here was a children’s story about perceptual illusion and that I would be lecturing the next day on perceptual illusion to my class, Philosophy 100, “An Introduction to Philosophy.” Some of my students would already be familiar with Thurber’s story, I reasoning. Even those who were unfamiliar might be intrigued by the idea of a university lecture beginning with a children’s story. My aim would be to awaken in my students’ mind a memory of having thought about perceptual illusion as a child. If I could awaken such a memory, I might be able to convince them that they had already thought about some of the philosophical issues that illusion poses – moreover, already thought about them as children. I would then try to cast the lecture as an attempt to think more carefully and more rigorously about some issues that children naturally think about. My larger message was that philosophy is a human activity that is quite naturally engaged in by people of all ages, that doing philosophy is, in fact, as natural as playing games or making music.
I didn’t mention in my lecture the “establishment plot” thesis. But, of course, my idea was that, if I could convince at least some of my students that they had already become engaged in philosophical thinking, doing philosophy might not seem like such an alien or artificial activity.
Many Moonsvi is the story of Princess Lenore, not yet eleven years old, who falls ill of a surfeit of raspberry tarts. The King promises his daughter anything her heart desires and the Princess announces that what she wants is the moon. “If I can have the moon,” she says simply, “I will be well again.”
The King summons the Lord High Chamberlain and demands that he get the moon for the Princess “tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”
The Lord High Chamberlain makes a wonderfully eccentric and whimsical speech that ends with the admission that, alas! he cannot get the moon for the Princess. “Blue poodles, yes; the moon, no.”
On hearing this, the King flies into a rage and then tells the Lord High Chamberlain to send the Royal Wizard to the throne room. When the Wizard arrives, the King demands that he get the moon for the Princess Lenore.
The Royal Wizard makes an equally eccentric speech to cover up his inability to gobey the royal order. “Nobody can get the moon,” explains the Wizard, when the Kings presses further; “it is 150,000 mines away , and it is made of green cheese, and it is twice as big as this palace.”
At that the King flies into another rage and sends for the Royal Mathematician. At the end of his speech, the Royal Mathematician announces that the moon is 300,000 miles away. He adds: “It is round and flat like a coin, only it is made of asbestos, and it is half the size of this kingdom. Furthermore, it is pasted on the sky. Nobody can get the moon.”
The King flies into yet another rage and then rings for the Court Jester. In his desolation the King tells the Jester about Princess Lenore’s deteriorating condition and the inability of his courtiers to help out. “There is nothing you can do for me,” he says mournfully, “except play on your lute, something sad.”
The Court Jester ask how big, and how far away, the King’s courtiers says the moon is and the King tells him. The Jester strums on his lute for a while and then tells the King this:
They are all wise men, and they must all be right. If they are all right, then the moon must be just as large and as far away as each person thinks it is. The thing to do is to find out how big the Princess Lenore things it is, and how far away.
With this thought the Court Jester creeps softly into the little girls room.
“Have you brought the moon to me?” asks the Princess Lenore.
“Not yet,” admits the Jester, “but I will get it for you.” He then asks the little girl how big she thinks the moon is, and how far away.
“It’s just a little smaller than my thumbnail,’ the girl answers, “for when I hold my thumbnail up at the moon, it just covers it.” She adds that the moon is not as high as the big tree outside my windown, since it gets caught in the top branches.
The Court Jester immediately goes to the Royal Goldsmith and has him make a tiny round golden moon, just a little smaller than Princess Lenore’s thumbnail. The Court Jester takes the moon to the Princess, who is overjoyed. The next day she is well again and goes out into the garden to play.
Unfortunately the King’s worries are not over. He is now afraid that the Princess will see the moon in the sky again that night and realize that she doesn’t have the moon on a golden chain around her neck after all. “We must hide the moon,” exclaims the King.
The King’s courtiers suggest making dark glasses for the Princess, or covering the palace with a tent, or setting off fireworks so that the moon cannot be seen. The King finds drawbacks to each of these plans and again falls into a rage.
Again the Court Jester offers help. He returns to the Princess’s room and asks, mournfully, “Tell me Princess Lenore, how can the moon be shining in the sky when it is hanging on the golden chain around your neck?’
The Princess looks at the Jester and laughs. “That’s easy, silly,” she says; “when I lose a tooth, a new one grows in its place, and when the unicorn loses his horn in the forest, a new one grows in the middle of his forehead.” She adds, “It is the same way with the moon.”
The Jester tucks the covers around the Princess, who goes to sleep.
* * *
The moon is the most mysterious of the heavenly bodies. In the zombie-like way most of us adults go through life, we have lost all sense of its mystery. We need to talk to our children and learn from them how to see the moon with fresh eyes.
Philosophers like to try to think about what we know as somehow based on the data of our sense experience, plus reasoning about those data, and justified extrapolation from them. So forget the fact that there is a big, long article on the moon in your home encyclopedia. Forget those video clips of the Mars Lander. Just look for the moon for the next month or two. What could you figure out about the moon, just from boserving it regularly and extrapolating from those observations?
If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I could probably figure out only very little. For starters, there are the different phases that need to be observed carefully and then figured out. Sometimes a very new moon does in fact look like the illuminated edge of a dark ball, what the poets have called, “the new moon with the old moon in its arms.” But usually the moon in its non-full phases looks more like a wedge, or sliver, or deformed disk. It might take several tries at illuminating a grapefruit at night with a flashlight from various angles to convince me that those phases of the moon are all sightings of a round object.
Of course, I’m jumping ahead of the least sophisticated observations when I talk about phases and suggest that it is obvious these might just be partial illuminations of the moon. Some early thinkers did not realize that the moon’s light is merely reflected light. There is nothing one can observe in looking at the moon that makes this clear. But, if we try thinking of the moon as emitting its own self-generated light, we will need a somewhat more complicated story to account for the phases. I suppose the most natural idea might be that only one side of the moon is burning and the moon is slowing revolving on its own axis, as well as rotating around the earth.
Even retracing our assumptions back to the point of not knowing whether moonlight is only reflected or self-generated will not take us as far back as we might want to try going. An earlier task might just be linking up all those sightings as sightings of a single heavenly object. This might be particularly unobvious in the case of daytime sightings. In the daytime the moon often fits the Royal Mathematician’s description of being simply “pasted on the sky.”
One of my most memorably moon-sightings is from a summer’s evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was about sunset and the weather was unbearably hot and humid. I was taking a stroll along the Charles River at the edge of the MIT campus. Sailboats crowded the basin and across the water I could see Beacon Hill, with the golden dome of the State House gleaming in the last rays of the sun. Just above Beacon Hill was the most wonderful paper moon I can remember having seen. Being just barely above the skyline, it looked much bigger in diameter than it would later look, high in the sky. But because it came at sunset and the atmosphere was just right, it looked like a giant paper plate.
The fact that the moon tends to look much bigger around when it appears just at the horizon than it does high in the sky is called “moon illusion.” I suspect there have been more different attempts to explain the moon illusion than there have beeen attempts to account for any other perceptual illusion. Yet no single explanation has found universal favor. Seeing a good moon illusion is a thrilling experience for me. One of my favorite sighting locations is the top of the hill where I live. If the moonrise is oriented just right, the moon looms up between the banks of trees on each side of the road almost as if it were the giant observer, and not the object of observation.
One can, of course, think of various ways to justify the assumption that these various sightings are sightings of a single, spherical heavenly body. But it would take quite a bit of thought to do so. Particularly vexing is the project of justifying the belief that the object retains a constant size and , even though its distance from the earth does vary somewhat – enough to yield the exciting phenomenon of the exceptionally bright “harvestd moon” – the “wobble’ is relatively slight.
James Thurber plays in his story on obversational indeterminacy of the size of the moon. It is that observational indeterminacy that allows the Princess, quite plausibly, to think of the moon she sees as no bigger than her thumbnail. The size of the moon is observationally indeterminate because its distance away from us is also observationally indeterminate. Thus a sphere high in the sky that is one hundred feet in diameter has the same apparent size as a sphere of twice the diameter that is also twice as far away. The sphere wouldn’t seem to the observer to be any particular size unless it also seemed to the observer to be some particular distance away.
Who cares? Why does it matter, anyway? Isn’t all the information already in some encyclopedia article, or on the net?
Of course there is much, much more solid information about the moon available in a good science library than almost is prepared to try to digest. But the independent inquirer is not someone who just collects, even important facts. The independent inquirer asks, “How can that be?” The answer to a ‘How-can-that-be?’ question may be a scientific answer. Or it may be an answer that draws on psychology, or economics, or some other intellectual discipline. But it may also be, in whole or in part, a philosophical answer.