In addition to the Quote Of The Day, I am now also going to have the following Poorly Written Prose award. (Likely with the same consistency as the Quote Of the Day is given out now.)
But while researching the relationships of 120 women, Susan Shapiro Barash, author of “A Passion for More: Wives Reveal the Affairs That Make or Break Their Marriages,” found that females who end up being adulterous were no more prone to lying or cheating on their spouses than anyone else.
(The original article from which this example of poor writing is excerpted is available here for those interested in context.)
It would seem that either this discovery is false or misstated. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read this sentence as equivalent to the following sentence, which seems extremely suspect: “Susan Shapiro Barash found that females who end up lying or cheating on their spouses were no more prone to lying or cheating on their spouses than those who didn’t lie or cheat on their spouses.”
Now, if that restatement is correct, how in the world can it be true? Am I just being dense here or is this sentence the utter nonsense it appears? The only meanings I can even imagine this sentence was supposed to have are either “it is as likely that a woman who has cheated once will cheat again as it is that woman who has never cheated will cheat for the first time,” (which could be true — and deeply depressing) or “there were no characteristic traits found in women that cheat that were not also possessed by women who don’t cheat.” Ironically, I suspect that the second meaning was intended, though the article soon after presents a quiz to help you predict if you will cheat.
It seems that in this broken sentence we have a perfect example of what I think of as the possibility problem: we can only state that things are possible using examples from the past or a priori theoretical reasoning and can only state that things are not possible using a priori theoretical reasoning. This, though, removes the vast majority of possibilities because they have never yet occured and cannot be convincingly be defended using a priori reasoning.
The possibility problem intrigues me particularly because of its relationship with arguments for free will. Belief in free will essentially boils down (after we have boiled off all of the irrelevant traditional coverings) to the statement, “in situation X, I could have done Y, though I did Z because I choose it over Y.” This choice, of questionable meaning and even more questionable real applicability, certainly depends on the possibility of Y. But if Y never happened, why do we believe it possible? Here we enter into a vastly more complicated world because the plausibility of Y’s possibility — that is, the extent to which we should be disposed to believe that Y could have occured — depends on the situation, X, and the person supposedly doing Y or Z. For instance, “while sitting at home yesterday at noon, I could have played The Sound of Silence on guitar, though I did not because I decided not to,” is utter nonsense if the speaker did not already know how to play the song on guitar or even play the guitar at all. But this example is not the sort of thing that interests us because it is not one of the battlelines of free will. No one is confused here.
Consider, instead, a sentence like “last year, I could have stopped taking heroin, but I didn’t because I still enjoyed it.” This sentence describes a possibility we should really consider questionable. Arguing by analogy that others have given up heroin is not a convincing proof that any given individual can do it. Furthermore, it is not clear that the second part of the sentence is meaningful. It asserts an efficacy to the decisions of an individual that is not simply a given.
In addition, there are yet more issues to consider: particularly, the issue of possibility within groups based on the examples of some members of that group. For instance, most of us would feel that a statement like “anyone can learn to write music as well as Mozart” is not true, though we have no conclusive proof of this. Here, the example of a single individual does not seem to outweigh the examples of countless other individuals who have written music without Mozart’s skill. In contrast, if I say that I have invented a new type of keybaord and that anyone can learn to type on it as quickly as I do could well be true.
So, really, we have all these problems with possibility in addition to our original problem with it: whether we choose actions in a way that is not predetermined.
What does this mean? This means that if a given moment were repeated exactly (by some magical reversal of time) different outcomes could have occured. We will clearly never have this experiment performed in our lives, though. So we never have past examples and always argue for free will from this dubious a priori reasoning about our abilities.