15.3: Superstition

The people of China think Americans are silly and superstitious to believe that the number thirteen causes bad luck. This is because they know that the real unlucky number is four.

Suppose that anthropologists have discovered a very remote village in the Amazon River Basin where virgins are sacrificed during every solar eclipse. The tribe blames eclipses on an angry sun god. Immediately after every eclipse, the leader of the tribe throws a teenage girl to the caimans with the intention of appeasing the sun god and making certain the god returns to shine on the tribal lands.

"Superstitious, ineffective, and immoral,'' you might say. However, the tribal leader might respond with, "We have always sacrificed virgins, and it has worked every time before, hasn't it?" If you were to accuse the tribal leader of jumping to conclusions, and if you were to tell him that if he did nothing the sun would still return, he could reasonably respond by saying, "Your suggestion of doing nothing is too dangerous to try; the village cannot risk the possibility that the sun god will never return."

Because the tribal leader has his own explanation for why the sun disappears and reappears, shouldn't we say his explanation is true for him, while ours is true for us? No. The leader might genuinely believe what he believes, but what he believes is not true. Period. Don’t say, “It’s true for him.” This phrase is a misuse of words. Instead, say, "It's his belief.” Truth in these matters is not subjective; it is not relative to whichever human subject is doing the talking. That is, truth is not a matter of human choice; it is a matter of the way things are, objectively out there in the world. Our culture knows why the solar eclipse occurs; it has to do with the moon casting a shadow on the Earth, not with any sun god. We have the correct explanation because we can predict when and for how long solar eclipses will occur. These predictions are made using scientific knowledge that has been successfully tested in many other ways. That knowledge can be used to predict the tides, predict the angle of the sun at noon at any place in the world, and so forth. The tribal leader cannot do any of these things. That is why we very probably are onto the truth in these matters, while the tribal leader very probably is not. Saying this is not a sign of our cultural insensitivity but only of our being straightforward and not misleading.

What gets called "the truth” can be relative to one's culture, but the truth itself cannot be. Given what we know, the tribal leader is wrong and has jumped to conclusions. However, he is not being silly or irrational, because he cannot be expected to know what we know. If he had been raised in our modern civilization and yet persisted in his belief, he would be superstitious and acting irrationally. His beliefs about the sun god are "rational relative to his culture.” Nevertheless, those beliefs are not "true in his culture.” The beliefs may be justifiably believed, but they are not true in his or in anyone's culture.

The phrase true for is meaningful in English when used in certain ways, but only so long as it is not taken too literally. When someone says, "Everybody should get eight hours sleep a night," it would be appropriate to respond with "Well, that may be true for you, but it's not true for me." However, more straightforwardly, what the responder means is something like "Well, you may need eight hours of sleep a night, but I don't." The straightforward response doesn't use the unfortunate phrase true for, and it does not imply that truth is relative.

People who are superstitious about some topic are people who hold a belief about what causes what in regard to that topic despite having good evidence that should convince them their belief is false. In our society, the so-called modern world, that good evidence is usually what we know about the results of science and the proper and improper methods of gaining knowledge. Science tells us what can cause what. Signs are for the superstitious, but evidence is what we should be on the lookout for.

A man (or woman) is rational provided he arrives at, accepts, and revises his beliefs according to the accepted methods of his society. Otherwise, he is irrational. Although the tribal leader may be rational in his sacrifice of the virgin to the sun god, he is still superstitious about that because he holds beliefs for reasons that are well known to us to be unacceptable─usually those unacceptable reasons are based on fear of the unknown or trust in magic. When you say someone has a particular superstition you always imply that you don’t.

In our own culture, superstitious people believe that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day, that they should prevent a black cat from walking across their path, and that they will be safer if they occasionally throw salt over their shoulder. They hold these beliefs in spite of ample evidence to the contrary from the experts. These people are both irrational and superstitious on this topic, but just because a person is superstitious on one topic doesn’t imply they are superstitious on others, although it makes it slightly more probable.

The proof that convinces the experts that some belief or action is a superstition is actually a rather complicated philosophical argument that makes use of a principle called Occam's Razor. According to Occam's Razor, if you can have an adequate explanation without assuming some particular exotic entity (such as the hand of fate or devil cats), then don't assume that the exotic entity exists. Closely related to the notion of fate are other notions that are at the root of much superstition: destiny, fortune, chance, providence, predestination, and luck. If you believe that on some days Lady Luck will be with you and that you then have a better than one in fifty-two chance of picking your favorite card from an ordinary, shuffled deck of fifty-two cards, then you are being, well, you know.

Not every superstitious belief is false. What is important to its being superstitious is only why it is believed. If you believe it is unwise to walk on a hilltop during a rainstorm or to seek shelter there under a tree because the Devil or some other supernatural force might use the lightning to try to destroy you, then you are being superstitious and irrational even though you are correct about what to do during a storm.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Some of these statements about superstition and irrationality are false. Which ones?

a. Australian aborigines of the twelfth century who believed that the world was flat must have been irrational for believing this.
b. If Albert Einstein had believed more accidents happen on Friday the 13th than any other day because all the statistical data available to him showed these ideas to be so, he would have been rational.
c. A person can be both superstitious and irrational.
d. A person can be superstitious while being a nice person.

Answer

Answer (a). Presumably, many aborigines believed the world is flat on the basis of the methods acceptable within their own culture. So, they were rational, though superstitious. If you today believed the world is flat for those same reasons, you would be both irrational and superstitious

Because explanations need to be tailored to the audience, those that will be accepted by superstitious people might not be acceptable to the rest of us.

How should we react when faced with stories of the miraculous visions of clams flying over Los Angeles? We should apply the principle of logical reasoning that we need extremely good evidence before rejecting widely held beliefs. These miracles are too improbable to be believed solely on the basis of anecdotal reports, even though the reports are widespread and even though the people doing the reporting are speaking honestly. For a more detailed discussion of miracles, see the article “ Miracles.”

All of us at one time or another imagine we see things that we later learn aren't really there. We have good imaginations; sometimes too good. Drugs can promote hallucinations. A mass hallucination, one in which everybody imagines the same thing, is rare, drugs or no drugs. Because mass hallucination is so rare, if everybody were to say they see clams flying over Los Angeles but you see no clams, you would have to worry seriously that the problem is with you, not them.

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