Sorry Ernest, the Sun Doesn't Rise.

In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers the leading character tells a story about a famous philosopher who asked the question:

“Why do people always say it was natural for men to assume the sun went round the earth?” 

The answer is obvious, right?  It just looks as if the sun is going around the earth. But then I began to think about it.  What would it look like if the earth was rotating?  It would look just the same so why did men suppose it was the sun that was moving?

We still do it don’t we?  We still say the sun rises in the east, crosses overhead and sets in the West but it doesn’t.  Are we lying to ourselves? Hemingway got his idea from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.  Does the Old Testament need a rewrite?  Why don’t we say the east horizon turns toward the sun in the morning and the west horizon turns away from the sun in the evening?  Instead of saying that ‘dawn breaks’ we could say that ‘the sun’s rays leak past the horizon’, which may well be a truer description of the world.

Is it curious that people should deliberately harbor an illusion to satisfy an aesthetic impulse?  We deliberately hold a false belief about the reality of the situation which psychologists would describe as holding an illusion.   I guess it is not as hard to believe things we know are not true as some would have us think. 

When we say the sun is setting we are employing a convention which is an agreement among members of a society to describe the world in a particular way.  Indeed, all our descriptions of the world are conventions.  It is our descriptions of the world, our conventions, that create our reality.  Our reality doesn’t have to consist of true descriptions.  Many will be true but a number will be false but the latter should not be a cause for concern.  A child playing with mud pies and putting them into a wooden crate calling it an oven is creating a convention for herself and her playmates.

While false beliefs are not components of knowledge they can become stepping stones toward knowledge.  False beliefs often provide us with entertainment and stimulate our capacity for imaginative experiences.  Most of us have had the experience of fighting back tears while sitting in a crowded cinema.  We accept the film as an example of our world.  We know that Stuart Little is a cartoon but convention allows us to fear for his safety and silently rejoice when all ends well. After all we’re human aren’t we?

Launt Thompson

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