Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [42]
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