King James’s smartphone

 Gareth B. Matthews, a philosopher professor, used to argue that children are naturally good philosophers

Imagine that you are listening as I try to tell the story of King James of Bible fame to my 7-year-old neighbor.

King James, I say, liked the notion of being an Absolute Ruler. He claimed that everything in his kingdom was his.

At this point, the 7-year-old asks if King James had a smartphone.

Here the story ends and the explanations begin: how smartphones weren’t invented hundreds of years ago. The 7-year-old, asking questions, soon learns the horrifying fact that King James didn’t even have a car or a flushing toilet. He’d never been in an airplane or seen a baseball game. His claim to own everything is preposterous.

If you think this is a story about anachronism, you’re missing most of the fun.

There is a logical problem here. It’s with everything.

Suppose we assembled the world’s experts and tried to get an inventory of everything — everything in the universe. What would we count?

Matter, of course, because everything is made of it. But how would we account for social structures? Would we say that a measurable amount of matter was tied up in churches and religious ceremonies that really didn’t believe in the reality of matter? How would we explain families and courting couples, the ties that hold them? Would those things count or we just ignore them?

Would we list the concepts and theories that are part of the school curriculum, even knowing that the list will be obsolete by the end of the year? Will we list everything we know about smartphone technology, knowing that list will be obsolete by the end of the week?

Bertrand Russell pointed out the puzzle in 1903. We can examine parts of the universe. When the consider the “conception of the totality of things,” the whole enchilada, the idea seems to be inherently contradictory.

Today’s editorial page laments the overwhelming amount and quality of bad thinking in this country. Today’s page is similar to yesterday’s. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if we heeded Professor Matthews’s advice and let children learn to think.

• Source: Gareth B. Matthews: Philosophy & the Young Child; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.