Suppose I tell you there is a dragon living in my garage.
Naturally, you ask to see it.
Fair enough.
I open the garage door.
Inside are some cardboard boxes, a bicycle I have been meaning to repair since approximately the late Pleistocene, a lawnmower, several objects whose original purpose has been lost to history, and absolutely no visible dragon.
“Ah,” I say. “Of course you can’t see it. The dragon is invisible. Should have mentioned that.”
Right.
You think about this for a moment and suggest scattering flour over the floor. If the dragon is there, surely it will leave footprints.
“No. It floats above the ground.”
Very well.
You suggest bringing in an infrared camera. Dragons are creatures traditionally associated with fire, so it ought to give off some heat.
“This one doesn’t.”
“Well,” you say, “perhaps we could spray a fine mist of paint into the garage and reveal its outline?”
“Nooo. The paint passes straight through it.”
Every test you propose is followed by a new property of the dragon explaining why that particular test cannot possibly work.
“I see that you are still skeptical,” I say, disappointed.
The next day I bring twenty people to the garage. Some of them are your friends and family.
“Look,” I tell you. “All of these people believe the dragon is real. Do you believe me now?”
One of them looks genuinely puzzled by your hesitation.
“Millions of people believe in dragons like this,” she says. “Do you seriously think all those people could be wrong?”
A respected older member of the community steps forward.
“My belief in the dragon has given my life meaning,” they tell you sincerely.
Another person explains that the dragon helped her through the most difficult period of her life.
Someone else tells you that his grandmother believed in the dragon, and she was the kindest person he ever knew.
A fourth informs you that some extremely clever philosophers have also believed in dragons.
“Could we perhaps devise some kind of test to make sure...?” you say.
There is a small silence.
“You still don’t believe us?” someone asks.
Then a member of your own family, obviously embarrassed by you and hurt by your stubbornness, asks:
“Why are you the only one who cannot accept what everyone else believes is there?”
You mumble that you do not doubt anyone’s sincerity, but twenty people repeating a claim do not necessarily constitute twenty independent pieces of evidence.
Twenty people independently seeing a dragon would certainly be interesting. But if the twenty people learned about the dragon from the same tradition, heard the same stories, rely on one another’s testimony, and none of them can actually detect the dragon either, then their agreement is not twenty independent observations. It may simply be the same claim echoed twenty times over.
You say that their belief in the dragon may comfort them, inspire them, make them kinder, give structure to their lives, connect them to their parents and grandparents, or provide an answer to the rather unsettling business of finding oneself briefly alive in an enormous universe without an instruction manual.
All of that is interesting, and some of it is certainly beautiful.
But sincerity, comfort, tradition, intelligence, and a room full of people agreeing with one another are not enough to establish that the dragon is actually there.
So you return, somewhat tediously, to the original question:
“What observation could distinguish between these two possibilities?
1) There is an invisible, floating, heatless, intangible dragon in the garage.
or
2) There is actually no dragon in the garage.”
You continue, unabated:
“Because if no conceivable observation could distinguish one possibility from the other, and every failed attempt to detect the dragon can simply be accommodated by inventing another property of the dragon, then we have reached a peculiar situation. The claim has been constructed so that nothing we observe can count against it. There is no longer any obvious way to test whether it is true.”
By now nobody is particularly happy with you.
You have, after all, been invited to contemplate the remarkable properties of a dragon, and somehow you have managed to turn a beautiful evening into a boring seminar on epistemology. Boo to you.
You notice that everyone is now rather uncomfortable with your presence.
You think that, in the end, perhaps you have not learned very much about dragons, but you have certainly learned quite a lot about human beings.
You have dinner alone that evening. The others may have escaped your incessant questioning, but the questions, annoyingly, have followed you home.
* No dragons were harmed while writing this piece.
* Carl Sagan's "The Dragon in My Garage" is a famous thought experiment from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World that illustrates the burden of proof and why untestable claims are meaningless.
No comments:
Post a Comment