Yesterday I performed some experimental cooking - attempting to make something like balsamic vinegar, but from blackberries - part of this experiment involved simmering the pressed blackberry juice to reduce it to a syrup.
Anyway, midway through this process, the clusters of bubbles appearing on the surface of the liquid looked themselves exactly like blackberries.
Of course, this is entirely coincidental and of no significance outside of my own perception, but it made me wonder if there’s a term to describe such happenstance - when something is coincidentally truthful.
If someone had concluded from observing the blackberry-bubbles that you were preparing a dish containing blackberries, thus inferring a truth from facts not sufficient to infer it, you would have the setup of a Gettier-problem, which forms an attack on the received view of knowledge as justified true belief, going back to Plato’s Theaetetus IIRC. The idea is that while you’d arguably be justified in concluding the dish contained blackberries from observing what after all looked like blackberries, and thus, forming a belief about the dish that happened to be true, most people’s intuition would not agree that this constitutes truly knowing that there are in fact blackberries in your cooking, as some appropriate actual connection to the blackberries in it isn’t there.
I’m looking at the definition for that, and it seems to mean “coincidence” which IMO is what the OP had happen.
Synchronicity - Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related
Coincidence - A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.
I know I’m going to say this and get a bunch of counter examples, but I’m not sure (at 12:30 in the morning when I’m about to go to bed) how you can have a coincidence that can’t also be called synchronicity. Are they synonyms? Just similar words to be used in slightly different applications? The most I’m getting is that synchronicity is a slightly ‘weightier’ word, if that makes sense.
Having not read the wiki page, don’t you hate it when that happens and then you have to try to explain to the person that while they’re right, they’re right for the wrong reasons. Then, you’re not only the asshole, you’re the asshole, you’re wrong, and you haven’t convinced them of anything because ‘it doesn’t matter, I’m still right, so who cares why’. :mad: “No, but see, if it was blueberries, it still, ah nevermind”
I’m glad there’s a term for it.
I was thinking as I posted the question that maybe the answer is simply ‘coincidence’, but that’s quite a broad term that includes things like bumping into a long lost friend on the bus, or finding that the change in your pocket is exactly the right amount to buy the thing you want.
The blackberry thing seemed like it might be sufficiently specific to have its own term - in the same way that, for example, Serendipity is a term for a specific category of coincidences (i.e. fortunate ones). The Gettier problem seems like quite a good fit.
The difference is that “coincidence” carries the implication that there is no significance to the apparent similarity between things or events, whereas “synchronicity” carries the implication that the apparent similarity is in fact a sign of some real, deep, occult, highly-meaningful, quasi-causal (though not actually causal, in any way that can actually be spelled out) connection between them. “Synchronicity” is a term of woo; “coincidence” is a concept used to deflate woo.
Another idea related to both the notion of synchronicity and the situation described by the OP is the doctrine of signatures, which (unlike the modern concept of synchronicity, invented by woo-meister psychiatrist C.G. Jung in the 20th century), actually had a considerable influence on medical practice (and perhaps other things too) for many centuries. The doctrine of signatures held that apparent superficial resemblances between things (often, in practice, between parts of the human body and parts of plants) were a sign of a potential, and potentially useful, causal relation between them. For instance, the fact that kidney beans resemble the human kidney in shape and color might be taken as a sign that eating kidney beans would have a beneficial effect on kidney function, and might be expected to cure kidney disease. The doctrine was justified in terms of the notion that God had deliberately created these resemblances in order to clue people in to the otherwise unobvious usefulness of various things in nature.
The situation described by the OP could be used to set up an example of the Gettier problem, but it would only actually be such if someone who had no prior knowledge of the fact that blackberries had gone into the bubbling mixture were to infer that it contained blackberries solely on the basis of the blackberryish appearance of the bubbles. I think, however, that (unlike most other examples of the Gettier problem, which are usually set up such that the false inference to the correct conclusion is pretty compelling) few people would actually be likely to make that inference unless, perhaps, they subscribed to something like the doctrine of signatures (which few people these days do).
I’d like to point out that the resemblance in this case wasn’t entirely coincidental: The shape of the bubbles mimicking the shape of blackberries was a coincidence, but their color matching was due to the fact that the bubbles were, in fact, made out of the same substance as blackberries.
OP’s question is ancient. Sign and signified, as it is often put today.
njtt’s Wiki cite seems to grasp the stick from the wrong end, and is actually pretty wooly, despite a perfunctory nod to some philosophical underpinnings of the idea. My understanding comes through another avenue.
As he starts Chapter III of Ulysses, just when he wonders what the fuss was about when people said the book was so hard, the reader gets zapped with with the following:
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.
Stephen Daedalus, it appears, is walking along the beach thinking of the “mystic” Christian work of Jacob Boehme, Signata Rerum, 1621; (comple text)–The Signature of Things—and here of Berkely, and Aristotle: how the three conceive the nature of visible or otherwise sensible phenomena (the “signatures”) and a real knowledge which the modality of such perception obscures. (Spoiler to Stephen: it’s ineluctable, so suck it up.)
Each philosopher, although taking the concept from the same problematic, unsurprisingly comes to a different conclusion. Boehme’s Signata Rerum (complete text) begins not with the modality of the visual sense but with one more important for the the intellect, the aural–moreover, with the “modality” of negotiating those modalities, which in modern terms is cognition as a whole (that’s the mystic part):
All whatever is spoken, written or taught of God, without the knowledge of the signature is dumb and void of understanding; for it proceeds only from an historical conjecture…
Daedalus rejects immediately the mystic component, as we see a few sentences later, and kicks a rock in honor of Berkely.
But if any structure of intellect is ever present in Stephen’s Jesuitically trained mind (like Joyce’s), it is derived from Aquinas, Daedalus’s scholastic paragon and impossible challenger. In Stephen’s next thought he remembers a sentence from Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s On Sense and Sensibilia (the Aquinas section is here).
Hugh Kenner, on Aquinas in Joyce’s work and identity, puts it nicely (and throws in Dante to boot). It is but a moment in Kenner’s argument (excerpts here) on Joyce and Stephen’s rejection of such separation, but for Joyce’s wondrous and basic concept of the combined “signature”/ontic status of language. As a source of OP and njtt’s framing of it, I cite his citation for its succinctness:
“Signatures” and Signate Matter
The mind, then, literally knows things; it extracts intelligible species from things; it does not make its intelligible forms; it does not construct, acting on hints from the senses, its diagrammatic intelligible simulacra of things; it does not content itself with a Kantian metaphysic of things-as-they-appear, in contradistinction to supposedly unknowable things-as-they-are.
The classical account of the mode of knowledge postulated by Joyce is in the Summa Theologica, Part I, questions 84 to 88. Fundamental to this account is the so-called hylomorphic doctrine [Ftn. hylos-morphos [in Gk.]; see Jacques Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, pp.167-68] that created things are composed of signate matter plus substantial form. Signate matter is matter on which, so to speak, a signature has been impressed, as in Dante’s repeated simile of wax and seal (Hence “Signatures of all things I am here to read.")
(Page cites omitted)