#28: Moore's paradox: When what you believe about yourself doesn't make sense
Do you ever have thoughts like, 'It's ok to take breaks, but I don't believe it's ok to take breaks'? Or, 'Nobody will think less of me if my writing isn't great, but I don't believe nobody will think less of me if my writing isn't great'? If so, what on earth can you do about it? There's no point telling yourself that what you believe isn't true - you already know that. If your mental life is this sort of hot mess, then maybe there's no hope for you. You may as well give it up, go to bed, and wait for the next series of Tiger King to drop.
Except, not so fast. Dig down a bit and you'll find that your limiting beliefs about yourself are not as crazy as they seem. They're probably not even beliefs at all. They're feelings, and there's plenty you can do about them. Let The Academic Imperfectionist point you in the right direction, with a little help from those renowned self-help gurus, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and David Hume.
Episode transcript:
How can you make positive changes when you don't even believe consistent things about yourself?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms. Hello, imperfectionists. Before I get into today’s topic, I wonder if your day might be improved by the following recording of Madam Puff, who lay on my lap and purred into my microphone earlier. She doesn’t purr all that often, so I hope you’ll enjoy this rare treat. *purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr* Now. Next item on the agenda is the actual episode. Is there anything weird about making an assertion like, ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it’s raining’? The 20th century British philosopher G. E. Moore thought so. Or, rather, he thought that, while there would be something absurd and apparently contradictory about asserting ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining’, it’s not obvious why. ‘It’s raining’ is perfectly consistent with ‘I don’t believe it’s raining’. There’s nothing absurd about believing something that’s false - unfortunately for us, we do it pretty regularly. But there is something odd about asserting something which you also claim not to believe. Moore died in 1958, but philosophers are still puzzling over how exactly to explain the weirdness of what has come to be known - thanks to Ludwig Wittgenstein - as ‘Moore’s paradox’. I hadn’t thought of applying Moore’s paradox to the way we think about ourselves until my friend Steinvör Arnadottir drew my attention to it. Steinvör left academic philosophy a few years ago to retrain as an interior designer, and now has her own design business in Edinburgh, which is a fascinating story for another time. She described to me how she often has Moore’s paradox-style thoughts about herself, which made me realise that I often have them about myself too, and so do lots of my coaching clients. Perhaps you do, too. By way of some examples, here are some of the things I hear on a pretty regular basis. I have clients who tell me that they can’t bring themselves to put their feet up for 20 minutes to take a break, because that would be unacceptably lazy of them. When I ask them whether taking a 20-minute break is really unacceptably lazy, they tell me that no, of course it’s not. At least, they’d never think it unacceptably lazy for someone else to take a break. But even so, they can’t quite get rid of their conviction that there’s something bad about them taking a break. What they’re telling me is, effectively, ‘It’s ok to take a break, but I don’t believe it’s ok to take a break’. I have other clients who have trouble writing anything because of anxieties about disappointing people if what they write turns out not to be good enough. If I get them to think through what would really happen if they were to write something below-par, it turns out that nobody would actually be disappointed in them after all. Most of them wouldn’t even notice, or care. Those that did care would be more likely to respond with sympathy and compassion than with disappointment. Worst-case scenario is that the person who has this sort of thought would need to do a bit more polishing on whatever it was that they’d written. But articulating all this doesn’t magically get rid of the conviction that writing is somehow dangerous. They end up thinking: ‘Nobody is going to be disappointed with me if I write something that’s not up to scratch, but I don’t believe that nobody is going to be disappointed with me if I write something that’s not up to scratch’. So, there you have it. Especially when some topic has emotional significance for it - as when there are feelings of guilt or anxiety involved - we can go all Moore’s paradox. We are capable of sincerely asserting something that we claim - with equal sincerity - not to believe. What’s going on here? What are we doing when we have these thoughts, and what can we do about it? I think that part of what’s going on here is that there’s a conflict between the head and the heart. Or, as the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume put it, between reason and the passions. Viewing things coldly and dispassionately, we can see that of course it’s not lazy to take a break, and of course nobody is going to be disappointed by what we write. That’s the head; that’s reason. But when it comes to working out what to do next, reason - as Hume famously claimed - is the slave of the passions. And the passions - our heart, our emotions - don’t always pay much attention to what we have evidence to believe or whether our conclusions are valid and justified. We feel guilty about being lazy, and feeling guilty is uncomfortable, so we don’t take a rest. That’s it. That’s a pathway from emotion to action. Belief, actually, doesn’t need to come into it. When, in this scenario, we don’t take a rest, or when we avoid writing, we’re not doing that because of what we believe. The belief isn’t part of the causal chain. We don’t believe, and then as a result feel, and then as a result act. It’s more that we feel and then act. We feel guilty about resting, so we don’t rest. Belief comes in later, when we’re asked to explain why we act the way we do. And when we come up with that sort of explanation, we don’t always do it very well. We try to infer what we believe from the way we feel and act, and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick. That shows up when we do the Moorean thing of claiming not to believe what we are prepared, sincerely, to assert. Less esoterically, it shows up in therapy. If you’ve ever had therapy, you’ll be familiar with the realisation that you were wrong about why you behave in the way that you do. For example, you might believe for a long time that you have high professional standards because you care deeply about accuracy and truth, but then with the help of a therapist, you eventually come to realise that your high standards are a result of being loved too conditionally as a child. When it comes to the question of how we can dislodge those unhelpful, limiting beliefs that arise from our anxiety, there are a couple of complications. One is that a common way to deal with anxiety involves avoiding the situations that make us feel anxious. That’s natural, and it does spare us some discomfort, but the avoidance reinforces the anxiety. If presenting to an audience makes you anxious, and you avoid presenting to audiences, then - although you spare yourself the odd stressful situation - you reinforce the anxiety. Presenting to an audience becomes something you feel less able to cope with. This is well known, and it’s the basis of exposure therapy, in which therapists try to break this cycle of anxiety and avoidance by helping people confront what makes them anxious in a controlled way. So if you deal with your guilt around resting by avoiding resting, or if you deal with your anxiety around writing by avoiding writing, you reinforce that anxiety. You teach yourself that the thing you’re avoiding really is worth avoiding. And when you do that, the belief that you infer - correctly or otherwise - from your behaviour becomes more convincing. It must be true that it’s not ok to rest, or that writing is dangerous, because look how reluctant you are to do it. Another complication is our in-built negativity bias. We’ve evolved to view negative information as more significant than positive information. That means that we’re hardwired to pay more attention to threats, insults, failures, and other emotional nasties than we are to take account of more uplifting, pleasant, affirming experiences. Because of that, while we often like to think that we’re guided by truth - that we form the beliefs we form because they’re true, or at least we have good reason to believe they’re true - we’re just as often guided by vigilance. In other words, we take a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude to the information we gather about the world, and that leads us to assume the worst, just in case. The problem is, that’s not how it feels from the inside. It might be true that we form the belief that writing is dangerous because believing that is somehow ‘safe’, but when we reflect on that belief, we don’t feel like it’s something that we believe simply because it’s safe. It feels like something we believe because it’s true. As Wittgenstein observed in his discussion of Moore’s paradox, we don’t ascribe present-tense false beliefs to ourselves. He wrote, ‘One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief’. So, what can you do? How do you get yourself out of this rut where you end up believing not only the opposite of what’s true, but the opposite of what you’re happy to assert is true? How do you respond when you find yourself having thoughts like, ‘It’s ok to take a break, but I don’t believe it’s ok to take a break’? I think a useful first step is to de-rationalise your attitude to whatever it is - the acceptability of taking breaks, in this case. I might just have made up the term ‘de-rationalise’, sorry about that. What I mean is this: see if you can express ‘I don’t believe it’s ok to take a break’ as if it’s not a belief, but some other state. Because, really, it is some other state. It’s an emotional state. What you mean when you say that you don’t believe it’s ok to take a break is that you are not comfortable taking breaks; that you feel guilty about taking breaks; or that you’re worried about taking them. Why is that helpful? It’s helpful, first, because it makes you seem less bonkers. ‘It’s ok to take breaks, but I feel guilty about taking breaks’ is much less paradoxical than ‘It’s ok to take breaks, but I don’t believe it’s ok to take breaks’. With the former, you can get a handle on where you need to start with addressing the problem - but with the latter, well, what on earth can you do? That brings us to the second benefit of de-rationalising your attitude: it affects how you deal with the problem. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt uses the beautiful analogy of a person riding an elephant to describe the relationship between our rational side and our emotional side. Our emotional side is the elephant, and our rational side is the person riding the elephant. The rider is better than the elephant at making decisions about where to go and how fast or slow, at weighing different options, considering counterfactual scenarios, and so on. But the elephant is stronger. The elephant will basically do what she likes and go where she wants, and if the rider wants to do something else or go somewhere else, then tough. The rider isn’t going to win by brute force. To get the elephant to cooperate, the rider needs to learn how to engage with her - to learn what motivates her, what matters to her, and how to use all this to get her to do the right thing. Similarly, the decisions you make are often - even primarily, according to Hume - led by emotion rather than reason. You’re not going to turn in a direction you’re emotionally opposed to, no matter how good an idea you think it would be. Your emotion is going to have you avoid taking the rests that make you feel guilty, and avoid doing the writing that makes you feel scared, even while your rational side is screaming about how important it is to rest and work on your writing. If you want to change the choices your emotion is leading you to make, reason might not be your most effective tool. Bombarding yourself with logical argument - as when you point out to yourself the inconsistencies in what you believe - that’s equivalent to the rider tugging ineffectually on the reins of the elephant to try to get her to change direction. You’ll tire yourself out and still not end up where you want. Try, instead, engaging with your reluctance to do the right thing by treating that reluctance as emotional rather than rational; in other words, it’s about how you feel rather than what you believe. If you feel anxious about writing, address the anxiety itself. That might mean doing things you find comforting, allowing yourself to slow down and take baby steps, cheering yourself on for small successes, and working through the anxiety with a therapist or a coach. If you ignore the anxiety and instead focus on what you take to be your belief that writing is dangerous, you leave your powerful emotional side cold. Even so, let’s not be too binary about this. It’s not either/or. The importance of addressing your emotional side when you want to make changes doesn’t entail that it’s not also important to address your rational side. Of course it’s important to question suspicious beliefs when you find them, and to resolve inconsistencies between different beliefs. Doing that can change the way you feel and the choices you make, even if it takes longer than engaging your emotions. The point is that addressing your rational side is not the only tool in your amoury when you’re doing battle with the ways that you’re limiting yourself. And part of that questioning attitude can involve exactly the sort of de-rationalisation I described earlier: that is, asking yourself whether what seems to be a belief really is a belief, or whether it’s a feeling, or something else. What look like limiting beliefs are not always beliefs at all. From Madam Puff and me, goodbye until next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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