bertrand russell and the turkey

 Happy Thanksgiving! (a national holiday in the United States). What is Bertrand Russell's Turkey fallacy/illusion of Thanksgiving? Bertrand Russell introduced this thought experiment in his classic work The Problems of Philosophy (1912).

*Disclaimer: To be fair the turkey was originally a chicken. Later philosophers have inexplicably switched these fowl. Bertrand Russell Facebook understands philosophy concerns questioning. The page also understands there are probably some questions best left unanswered.

Russell employed the Turkey fallacy/illusion thought experiment as a way of showing the fallacy of using past events to calculate future ones. The Turkey fallacy/illusion is basically used to illustrate a problem with inductive reasoning. In the same way, we believe the sun will rise tomorrow because it has always done so in the past, the chicken/turkey believes the farmer will feed it tomorrow as she has always done so before. The turkey problem/illusion is that we often mistake the continued absence of harm as evidence that there will be no harm. The turkey thinks that because there is no current evidence that the farmer is harming her (in fact, to the contrary, the farmer is feeding her quite well), that means that her future is secure.

Full citation of Bertrand Russell's Turkey/Chicken) fallacy/illusion of Thanksgiving

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“We are all convinced that the sun will rise tomorrow. Why? Is this belief a mere blind outcome of past experience, or can it be justified as a reasonable belief? It is not easy to find a test by which to judge whether a belief of this kind is reasonable or not, but we can at least ascertain what sort of general beliefs would suffice, if true, to justify the judgment that the sun will rise tomorrow, and the many other similar judgments upon which our actions are based.

It is obvious that if we are asked why we believe that the sun will rise to-morrow, we shall naturally answer, "Because it always has risen every day." We have a firm belief that it will rise in the future, because it has risen in the past. If we are challenged as to why we believe that it will continue to rise as heretofore, we may appeal to the laws of motion: the earth, we shall say, is a freely rotating body, and such bodies do not cease to rotate unless something interferes from outside, and there is nothing outside to interfere with the earth between now and tomorrow. Of course it might be doubted whether we are quite certain that there is nothing outside to interfere, but this is not the interesting doubt. The interesting doubt is as to whether the laws of motion will remain in operation until tomorrow. If this doubt is raised, we find ourselves in the same position as when the doubt about the sunrise was first raised.

The only reason for believing that the laws of motion will remain in operation is that they have operated hitherto, so far as our knowledge of the past enables us to judge. It is true that we have a greater body of evidence from the past in favour of the laws of motion than we have in favour of the sunrise, because the sunrise is merely a particular case of fulfilment of the laws of motion, and there are countless other particular cases. But the real question is: Do any number of cases of a law being fulfilled in the past afford evidence that it will be fulfilled in the future? If not, it becomes plain that we have no ground whatever for expecting the sun to rise to-morrow, or for expecting the bread we shall eat at our next meal not to poison us, or for any of the other scarcely conscious expectations that control our daily lives. It is to be observed that all such expectations are only probable; thus we have not to seek for a proof that they must be fulfilled, but only for some reason in favour of the view that they are likely to be fulfilled.

Now in dealing with this question we must, to begin with, make an important distinction, without which we should soon become involved in hopeless confusions. Experience has shown us that, hitherto, the frequent repetition of some uniform succession or coexistence has been a cause of our expecting the same succession or coexistence on the next occasion. Food that has a certain appearance generally has a certain taste, and it is a severe shock to our expectations when the familiar appearance is found to be associated with an unusual taste. Things which we see become associated, by habit, with certain tactile sensations which we expect if we touch them; one of the horrors of a ghost (in many ghost-stories) is that it fails to give us any sensations of touch. Uneducated people who go abroad for the first time are so surprised as to be incredulous when they find their native language not understood.

And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals also it is very strong. A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Ch. VI: On Induction, pp. 94-8

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Image: Bertrand Russell in his private study at his home in Penrhyndeudreath, Gwynedd, United Kingdom. Look Magazine photo study night of 13 January 1962.

Thanksgiving is primarily a Holiday in the United States. It occurs on the fourth Thursday in November, and is based on the colonial Pilgrims' 1621 harvest meal. The holiday continues to be a day for Americans to gather for a day of feasting, football and family. The holiday, while quite popular for many Americans is not without controversy. For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed