Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [43]
The reason this little difference in the use of subjunctive mood appeals to philosophers is that the standards of good reasoning are very different when we are discussing what is possible as distinct from what is actually true. It is very difficult to prove that something is impossible, but proving that something is not actually true is fairly easy. Peirce says that scientific knowledge grows by showing what is actually false. But showing what isn’t even possible requires almost godlike knowledge. It is better, pragmatists say, to keep an open mind about what is possible, since plenty of things that were called impossible at some time actually came to pass later. For a pragmatist, none of what C is saying is very convincing because he is making all kinds of pronouncements about what isn’t even possible, and the things he says are not possible are really quite possible. So in a way, C does use the A Priori Method of settling his beliefs about what is possible, and maybe Sam is a pragmatist and really knows he can’t lose this argument because C is overcommitted, logically speaking, having claimed far more than he can ever prove.
The third method for settling beliefs is what Peirce calls the Method of Tenacity. Here what we do is simply repeat the same formulas and rules of action no matter what variations we are met with. As with the first two methods, this one works pretty well, as long as your aim is to remove doubt. Many, many people live most of their lives relying on the Method of Tenacity to relieve them of their doubts. But it is unwise. The doubt may go away, but it doesn’t have to. It can persist and recur, and every time it does, we have made no progress in solving it because we haven’t really even thought through the problem in its own right. Tenaciously clinging to whatever we happen to believe already, especially in the presence of important variations in our circumstances, will lead us to grief sooner or later.
Obviously this is C’s main problem. He has no idea whether he likes green eggs and ham, and neither does Sam, and frankly, neither do you. Or I. Or anyone else. C is repeating a formula and just negating every qualification and variation so that his formula stands out. Negating all the variations is what makes him a contrarian, but the reason he will never learn anything this way is because his negations are not motivated by genuine doubt, they are only a means of avoiding the onset of any and all doubt. And that is what the Method of Tenacity does. It preempts genuine doubt by pretending to furnish a satisfied mind in advance of the actual problem. Dr. Seuss and you and I have all encountered people like this, and we have struggled with the same tendency in ourselves. By the time you reach thirty-five or forty, it begins to get difficult not to give in to tenacity. There is a difference between holding on to what you really learned in your life and being tenacious about it, and the difference is whether a person is open to genuine doubt.
And that raises an interesting question. Do you think C ought to doubt whether he will like green eggs and ham? I mean, is it important enough to warrant serious consideration? Maybe he has had yellow eggs and pink ham before, didn’t like them, and is generalizing appropriately. He doesn’t say so, of course, and so he appears to be just a tenacious type, but life is short and there isn’t any reason to try every little thing. For example, I am not going skydiving. I don’t have a very good reason, I admit. It just doesn’t interest me. On the other hand, I won’t say “I do not like it,” or, even more broadly, “I would not like it if . . . what, with a fox?” And that is where C makes his mistake. If he wants to avoid the Method of Tenacity, the right answer to Sam is, “Look, I haven’t tried them, maybe I’d like them, maybe not, but I am not interested either way in finding out.” Here one admits to being incurious, but that is probably better than being discovered to be tenacious.
I Stand Corrected
By now you might well wonder whether