[lit-ideas] Re: Back to Popper (and further back to Hume)
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:04:54 -0800
On Nov 23, 2006, at 10:52 AM, Simon Ward wrote:
Given that everybody knows the urban myth about there only being white
swans until black ones are discovered (I recently answered a pub quiz
question on this basis though I won't bore you with my reasoning),
given all that, it stands to reason that the third box must contain a
black swan. Otherwise the philosophical question wouldn't make any
sense.
If, on the other hand, the question was being posed prior to the
discovery of Australia (a hint to the answer to the pub quizz
question...no not a hint, the answer), if we were in the sixteenth
century say, then it would be impossible (or as near as dammit) for
there to be a black swan in the third box. Given that we know about
Australia and black swans, and given that we know the guff about white
and black swans, and given that this is about philosophy, I think that
the probability that there is a black swan in the box is 'probably'
close to 100 per cent.
Can I open it yet?
Before Geary beats me to the punch--oh, he's already *in* the
punch?--let me mention the possibility that this is not, in fact, a
question that need be addressed by logic but by what Edward de Bono
called "lateral thinking." Years ago de Bono gave a lecture I half
attended. Among the few things I recall from that lecture was an
example. When asked "How do you get to Wales in a mini," some people
will hear, "How do you get to Wales in a mini" and others, "How do you
get two whales in a mini?" It was de Bono's contention that most
people would hear the latter possibility first and thus struggle to
find an answer. Those who think laterally will offer simple advice,
"Head down the M4 and cross the Severn Bridge."
That was the solution that occurred to me, so as a fully qualified
lateral thinker I offer a solution to the Popperian's puzzle. In the
third box we find some kind of mysterious absence. That is the nature
of the third box, to function as a kind of negative space that defines
the other two boxes. And in a gyne-hostile literary climate what is
the most negative act we can imagine? To rob someone of authorship, to
take away the rightful reward for creativity, to re-masculate an author
by privileging the claims of an upstart swan. By this route we arrive
quite easily at the answer to the puzzle. The third box contains Mary
Sidney, the subject of , "The Sweet Swan of Avon," a book that restores
authorship of "Shakespeare's plays" to the woman who, in fact, wrote
them.
Guests are here. Time to return to normal discourse, or maybe find a
better form of blither.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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