A random thought just occurred to me.
Optimism is seeing the world as better as it is, right? And pessimism is seeing the world as worse than it is.
Thus, someone saying 'I am an optimist' or 'I am a pessimist' is contradicting himself.
See, if he is saying he is an optimist, this means that he believes that he sees the world as better than it is. But that would mean he thinks the world is worse than he claims to see it, and he doesn't really believe the world is that good. The only consistent belief for an optimist or pessimist to hold is that they are a realist.
Meh. It's late and my plane leaves in the morning. So sue me.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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7 comments:
I think the issue is that we cannot change the state of the world, however hard we try. The only thing we can influence is our own reality - the level of happiness based upon our own perceptions of events.
Reminds me of this:
http://pathwaytohappiness.com/happiness/2007/09/27/mind-affects-happiness/
Long-winded but quite interesting to skim over. See you in Ox!
Your definition of optimism and pessimism has them as involving some kind of error. What would you say to someone who proposed the following as a parallel argument?
Defective sight is seeing the world as other than it is, so someone saying "I have defective sight" is contradicting himself.
But Mark, doesn't optimism and pessimism involve some error of some sort? If they truly saw the world as it was they'd be realists, not optimists nor pessimists.
The difference between this case and the parallel you proposed is that optimism requires the subject to believe that the world is as he (wrongly) sees it, whereas defective sight has no such requirement on his belief.
OK. If optimism were a perceptual defect, people would be able to distance themselves from it: "this room seems great to me, but then I'm an optimist, so perhaps it isn't really." So presumably you're instead taking optimism to consist in erroneous belief – for instance, the erroneous belief that the world is good to degree X (whereas in fact it is only good to degree Y<X)?
Hmm yeah that's more or less how I envisioned it. I saw optimism more as the belief that the world is better than it really was. The perceptual bias might come about because of that belief rather than the other way around. Optimism is after all a mental state rather than a more physical one such a perceptual defect.
Fair enough: "the world is better than it is" is indeed incoherent.
But now consider "I believed that the world was better than it was". That's obviously ambiguous (cf. "he thinks I'm someone else"). One reading demands the response: "You twerp, of course the world wasn't better than it was!" (cf. "of course I'm not someone else!"). But the other reading makes perfect sense: X is how I thought the world was, Y is how it actually was, and X was a better way for the world to be than Y. So it's quite alright for someone to say "I believed that the world was better than it was."
So much for the optimistic past. What about someone who finds himself saying this sort of thing a lot? Couldn't he say "I tend to believe that the world is better than it is"? After all, the latter is ambiguous in precisely the same way (cf. "I tend to think he's someone else"). On one reading, it's daft. On the other reading, it makes perfect sense: as experience has taught the poor fellow, he has a tendency to be (as we might put it, on which more anon) over-optimistic.
So, couldn't someone saying "I am an optimist" be talking about his character, his temperament, his habits (rather than his present beliefs)? In which case instead of saying something like "At this very moment I think that the world is better than it is", he would be saying something like "I tend to think that the world is better than it is."
Can that save the phrase "I'm an optimist"? And (more importantly) does it fit with what people mean when they say such things?
Well if we take optimism as having the tendency to be optimistic, then yes, there's nothing inconsistent in saying 'I'm an optimist'. A more interesting question is perhaps if 'I am optimistic about X' would work under our current definitions? Although arguably optimistic is used in a slightly different sense here, i.e. the sense of being positive or hopeful rather than having incorrect perception.
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