Thank you, Joshua Chawner, for such an interesting question!
I liked this question because I distinctly remember being baffled by a Flemmish expression that is taken to mean the same thing: ‘you need to taste all the sauces’ (or: ‘ge moet van alle saze nekeer proeve’). I was baffled because the proposed principle is so blatantly false when read without any restrictions. There are plenty of things I can knock of before trying them: eating hair, breaking both my legs, hate speech, … Anyone seriously endorsing this principle must be seriously out of their mind. In fact, the principle does not even seem to hold water if we restrict ourselves to just sauces (don’t try the cyanide laced sauce!). There’s no way this is advice worth taking.
Unless, of course, we should interpret such ‘Living La Vida Loca’-sayings more restrictively. Very often, we take what we say to apply only to a restricted domain. When I say ‘all the beer is in the fridge’, I mean that all the beer I have in the house is in the fridge, not that all the beer in the world is in the fridge. When you say ‘I haven’t had dinner’, you mean that you have not had dinner yet today, not that you have never in your entire life had any dinner. So we should at least grant our bon vivants the possibility of having implicitly restricted the domain of things we should try before we knock them. But what is the restricted domain supposed to be? All activities in the neighbourhood? All activities that are not life threatening? All the sauces that are not cyanide-laced? None of these restrictions seem safe enough to keep the speaker from recommending unspeakable things. We need more beefy restrictions to rein the speaker into the realm of the reasonable. But then the suspicion looms that our deranged YOLO-hashtagger is in fact proscribing a very meek principle: ‘except for those things that you should obviously knock before trying, it holds that you should not knock it before you try it’. Surely, they mean something wilder than THAT.
Here’s my guess. You and the speaker disagree on the knockworthiness of something or some range of things; or, at least, the speaker believes that you do. Now the speaker is telling you that, among this range of things, it is worth trying things before you knock them. Depending on what this range of things includes (The Avengers: Endgame? extreme sports? philosophy? party drugs?), the proposed principle may be wild or meek. And depending on the reliability of the speaker on these matters, and their sincerity, it may be worth taking their advice seriously. I know. That is a boring answer. I’m sorry. The truth is that, in philosophy, even fun questions can have boring answers.
What do you think? What things shouldn’t we knock before trying? Let us know in the comments.
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I am a researcher at the University of Cologne. Many topics in analytic philosophy intrigue me, but my main interest is in the philosophy of causation. I am especially excited about the idea that causation is just a pattern of correlation that is insensitive to different kinds of disturbances. My PhD dissertation argued that such a view on causation helps to resolve an age-old puzzle: if mental phenomena are not physical, how can they affect our behaviour? Currently, I investigate other puzzles about causation, such as ‘can absences cause?’ and ‘why does causation never go backwards in time?’