Sunday 30 August 2015

Superstition brings bad luck


My post this morning about praying to Mary to make it stop hail and thereby inadvertently implore her to make it hail (Hail, Mary!) made me think of a great bit of wit in one of Tom Heremans' columns for De Standaard:
"Zijn mensen op hun hoofd gevallen? Weten ze dan niet dat bijgeloof ongeluk brengt?" (Tom Heremans, De Standaard Weekblad, 9 mei 2015)
 'Have people lost their minds? Don't they know superstition brings bad luck?'
It's a perfect case of a sentence that bites itself in the tail. It's a self-referential utterance, but one in which the author isn't (or feigns not to be) aware of it. The (second) utterance is about superstition but it is also couched in the stereotypical sentence frame which we associate with superstition: "X brings bad luck". The humour resides in the fact that the author pretends to be superior to superstitious folks but is no better than them. What's more, if it were the case that "superstition brings bad luck", he would ironically bring bad luck upon himself by saying and believing this.

I wonder whether this isn't some remote variant of the Liar paradox, with "S is true" and "S is false" substituted for by "you believe in S" and "you don't believe in S":

- If you believe that "Superstition brings bad luck" (i.e., if you agree that this sentence is true), you are the sort of person who does not want to give in to superstitious fears and you won't accept any general fearmongering delivered in the form "X brings bad luck".
- But if you don't believe that "Superstition brings bad luck" (i.e., if you don't agree that this sentence is true), you are the sort of person who's better safe than sorry, who avoids the sight of black cats and walking under ladders, and who may want to believe people who warn you that "Superstition brings bad luck".

So, the paradox here can be formulated in its purest form as follows: you don't believe statement S when you believe it and you believe it when you don't believe it.

Update: I'm no longer sure Hereman's "Don't they know superstition brings bad luck" is a case of self-reference. I'll have to make sure I find out sooner or later, but rather sooner than later, what exactly is meant by self-reference. Does it just apply to sentences of the form This sentence is/contains/... ?

No comments:

Post a Comment