"The juice doesn't want to come out!"

This morning, Helena had her sippy-cup full of juice in her hand, but she hadn't opened it completely, so the juice didn't come out.  After trying various positions, she turned to us and complained, "O suco não quer sair!" (The juice doesn't want to come out [of the cup])

We understood perfectly well what Helena Iara meant, though the phrase, on further examination, is a strange one.  The juice doesn't want?  Does juice have free will, that it can decide to leave the cup or not?

Babies aren't the only ones to attribute desire or will to inanimate objects.  I often hear myself say things like "The car doesn't want to start," or "What a stubborn screw!  It just doesn't want to come out."  It's a way of talking about cause an effect... or more exactly, why a cause doesn't lead to the effect I expect.  If I turn the key and the car doesn't start, there must be a foreign will in the way.

Almost fifteen months ago, I was excited when Helena came to realize the connection between turning the knob on the faucet, and water coming into the sink.  Back in the 18th century, David Hume challenged this easy connection between cause and effect, saying that there was nothing "in the world", certainly nothing visible or palpable, that could be called a cause.  "Between the movement of one billiard ball and that of the second, I see no third term," he famously said.  A good bit philosophy for the rest of the century was dedicated to responding to this problem.

One of my favorite answers, and one that Helena's comment about juice seems to endorse, came from the Scot Thomas Reid.  "Cause is our externalization of what we recognize in ourselves to be an active power," he said, in prose less clear than is usual for him.  What he meant (I think) is that we act, and these acts have results.  The connector between my action and its result seems to come from my intention, what I wanted to do.  Imagine, Reid says, an intelligent being without will or desire: he doubts (and I agree) that this being might never develop the idea of cause and effect.  We see causes and effects in the world, because we perceive them in ourselves.


So Helena is right, if in a metaphorical way: the juice doesn't "want" to leave the cup.  In her innocent way, she's captured why we humans connect cause and effect.

MommyDaddyBaby

Helena has a way to say "family": MamãePapaiBebê, all said together as one word.  Since she is just working on the idea of plurals (her three dolls are "bebês", the only plural she uses), it isn't strange that collective nouns like family express concepts that are still difficult for her... but her word brings up the basic question of how collective nouns are possible at all.

The history of metaphysics spent a lot of time on an even simpler question, that of the noun itself.  If we think about, for instance, the birds that flit outside of Helena's window, she'll she sparrows and canaries, azure crows, bem-te-vis, and loads of songbirds... but also arancuás, which look like chickens and jump from tree to tree like monkeys.  And in the marshes on the way to the beach, she sees ibis and herons wading.  Then frigate birds and gulls high above... and how does she know to call all of these animals "birds"?  An amazing process of categorization is going on here.

Bertrand Russell famously insisted that the only real "proper nouns" were "this" and "that", because even to say that John in the morning is John in the afternoon, is really giving the same name to a person who has changed.  (Borges made a great story out of the idea, Funes el Memorioso)  The point is, that seeing the sameness of things around us isn't as simple as we feel it is: in fact, the mind is involved in a major effort of organizing and categorizing a waterfall of colors and sounds that come through the senses, trying to make them meaningful and comprehensible.

Fortunately, babies don't get lost in that kind of speculative claptrap, and Helena isn't worried about why nouns work.  She just uses them.  However, the next step of generalization, that of collective nouns (family as a group of people, forest as a group of trees), still stands a little beyond her.  MamãePapaiBebê works as a list instead of a collective, something that might work for small groups like out family.  But when Rita was a girl, with seven brothers and sisters, as well and Mom and Dad and a couple of uncles and aunts living in the house, I doubt that she could have described family with a list.  It just gets too long and complicated, like saying "aspen, pine, lodgepole, grass, aspen, bear, deer, pine (and one and on)" instead of saying "forest."

It's interesting to see how watching a baby learn language, clarifies old debates between Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein, which seemed so academic twenty years ago.  They aren't academic at all; they're exactly what goes on in a baby's mind as she learns to speak.

Cause and Effect

Helena loves the bathroom sink.  I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating.  And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image.  As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on.  She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume.  As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect.  I got sick, and I don't know why.  On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me.  Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it.  Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water.  To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped.  The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses.  When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect.  We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right.  It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle).  This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara.  She wasn't that interested.  She just wanted to turn the water on again.