Maverick Philosopher

The Pinocchio 'Paradox'

This curious bagatelle is wending its way through the World Wide Web.  The cartoon is supposed to be paradoxical in some way.  The reader who brought it to my attention writes, "A friend and myself actually debated this at length over lunch, and I argued that at best it is a performative inconsistency.  I'm sure you have a more nuanced opinion on this silly meme!"   

Well, let's see.  The salient feature of Pinocchio is that his nose grows whenever he tells a lie.  From this one guesses that the paradox has something to do with lying.  Now a lie is not the same as a false statement; it is a false statement made with the intention to deceive  by someone who knows the truth.  (Or so I will assume for the space of this post.)  If this is what a lie is, then one cannot lie about matters that are not objectively the case and known to be such.  Suppose I predict that tomorrow morning, at 6 AM, my blood pressure will be 125/75, but my prediction turns out false: my blood pressure the next morning is 135/85.  No one who heard my prediction could claim that I lied when I made it even if I had the intention of deceiving my hearers.  For although I made (what turned out to be) a false statement with the intention to deceive, I had no way of knowing exactly what my blood pressure would be the next day. 

Similarly with 'My nose will grow now.'  This  sentence does not express an intention on Pinocchio's part to bring about a nose lengthening by the power of his will since presumably he never has such an intention.  The sentence is a future tense sentence which predicts what is about to happen.  'Now' does not refer to the time of utterance, but to a time right after it.  (If you argue that the presence of 'now' renders the sentence present tense, then the sentence is incoherent, and the 'paradox' cannot get off the ground.) 

It follows that Pinocchio cannot be lying.  Assuming the Law of Excluded Middle and Bivalence, what he says is either true or false.  Either way, no paradox arises that I can see.

But suppose Pinnochio utters the present tense sentence, 'My nose grows now' or 'My nose is growing now.'  Does this issue in paradox?

If  Pinocchio says 'My nose  grows now,' he is either lying or not.   If he is lying, then he is making a false statement, which implies that his nose does not grow now.  If he is not lying, then his statement is either true or false, which implies that either his nose does grow now or his nose does not grow now.  Therefore, either his nose does not grow now or his nose does grow now.  But that is wholly unproblematic. 

Therefore I fail to find any paradox here if a paradox is either a logical consistency or a performative inconsistency. 

What am I missing?  There is a 2010 Analysis article under this rubric.  But I don't have access to it at the moment, and I'm not sure the topic is exactly the same.

On Exaggeration

Why do people exaggerate in serious contexts? The logically prior question is: What is exaggeration, and how does it differ from lying, bullshitting, and metaphorical uses of language? A physician in a radio broadcast the other morning said, "You can't be too thin, too rich, or have too low a cholesterol level."

Note first that the medico was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched this serious point in a sentence which is plainly false. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about cholesterol is true, he was not lying. He was not bullshitting either since he was not trying to misrepresent himself as knowing something he does not know or more than he knows.

Exaggeration bears some resemblance to metaphor. If I say, 'Sally is a block of ice,' I speak metaphorically or figuratively. What I say is literally false. But by saying it, I manage to convey to the listener some such proposition as that Sally is unemotional and (perhaps) sexually unresponsive. And when the sawbones exaggerated, though he said something literally false, he managed to convey to his audience the true proposition that total cholesterol levels for most of us need reducing.

But I wouldn't want to say that the good doctor was speaking metaphorically. I am merely pointing to a similarity between metaphor and exaggeration. The similarity may consist in the coming apart of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. In both examples, the sentence meaning is that of a falsehood. The speaker, however, using those literally false sentences means something different from what the words 'by themselves' mean, and manages to convey truths to his hearers.

So I suggest that to understand exaggeration we need to understand metaphor so that we can delimit the former from the latter. But what exactly is metaphor? That's a tough one.   Here I catalog three specimens of exaggeration by well-known philosophers.

The Tendency to Exaggerate

Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. Three examples from sober philosophers.

Martin Buber, who is certainly no Frenchman, writes that “a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words...” (I and Thou, p. 59) His point is that a melody cannot be reduced to its individual notes, nor a verse to its constituent words. But he expresses this truth in a way that makes it absurdly false. A melody without tones would be no melody at all. The litterateur exaggerates for literary effect, but Buber is no mere litterateur. So what is going on?

For a second example, consider Martin Heidegger. Somewhere in Sein und Zeit he writes that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden. The human being is never present-at-hand. This is obviously false in that the human being has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone. What he is driving at is the truth -- or at least the plausibility -- that the human being enjoys a special mode of Being, Existenz, that is radically unlike the Vorhandenheit of the mere thing in nature and the Zuhandenheit of the tool. So why doesn’t he speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, without exaggerating?

And then there is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, according to J. N. Findlay, “took every wrong turn a philosopher can take.” (Personal communication) Wittgenstein’s fideism involves such absurd exaggerations as that religions imply no theoretical views. But when a Christian, reciting the Nicene creed, says “I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth...” he commits himself thereby to the metaphysical view that heaven and earth have a certain ontological status, namely, that of being creatures.

Of course, the Christian is doing more than this: his ‘I believe’ expresses trust in God as a person and not mere belief that certain propositions are true. But to deny that there is any propositional content to his belief would be ludicrous. And yet that appears to be what Wittgenstein is doing.

Bullshitting and Lying

What is it to bullshit?  Perhaps the best way to understand bullshitting is by comparing it to lying. So what is it to lie? The first thing to understand is that a lie is not the same as a false statement. Suppose I make a statement about something but my statement turns out to be false. It does not follow that I have lied. Suppose a latter-day Rip van Winkle wakes up from a long nap and, asked about the Dodgers, says, "They are a baseball team from Brooklyn." Has our man lied? Not at all. He simply hasn't kept up with 'recent' developments.

For a statement to count as a lie two conditions must be satisfied: (a) the statement must be false; (b) the statement must be made with the intention to deceive. These conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. But what if someone states what he believes to be false with the intention to deceive, but it turns out that what he states is true? Isn't that also a lie? Not by the definition I just gave. So it looks as if we are in the presence of two concepts of lying. The concept just defined is the narrower and more usual concept. The other, broader concept, results by the deletion of condition (a).