When I came across The Barista Paradox, I started to imagine a queue of puzzled people standing outside my favourite café. Would it’s door open or not?
The Barista Paradox is as follows: in a small town there is one barista, where the rule is that they make coffee for those people, and only those people, who don’t make it for themselves. But, who makes coffee for the barista? There are two situations:
-
If she makes it for herself, then because she only makes it for those that do not make it for themselves, she can not make herself a coffee.
-
If she does not make it herself, then because she makes it for all those that don’t make their own coffee, she makes herself a coffee.
Therefore, the barista only makes herself a coffee, if and only if she does not make herself a coffee. A paradox! At this point, most philosophers would say that the only answer to this paradox is that the barista doesn’t exist. No door opening soon at the café!
The first thing to notice about the paradox is the sprinkling of the terms ‘all’, ‘only’ and “if and only if” which signals that this is a problem in logic rather than a real life problem ( all the baristas that I know make their own coffee ). They add up to saying that for all coffee drinkers who do not make their own coffee they can only get it from the barista, and nobody else. Not a realistic situation, especially if the café is going to have a secure financial future.
The barista paradox shows what happens when a description of buying coffee is squeezed into a problem in logic. Logic has many applications; electronics, computer science and mathematics, but not buying a coffee. At this point, Wittgenstein would point out that the words from logic have been used in a situation where they have lost their meaning, and we have been sucked into the vortex called philosophy. Rather than spending lots of time puzzling over the meaning of the paradox we should grasp it for what it is: nonsense, and have another coffee.
Philosophers spend most of their careers thinking about our lives. Questions about what we know and the world that we live in, including how we should live with people. What they find is wrapped up in books that most of us don’t open. However, they can influence decision makers who are always grasping for a banner to wave as a gathering point, such as monetarism, classical liberalism, securonomics etc. Maybe we should have a closer look at what they are waving, just in case it is riddled with paradoxes which lead us nowhere.
Next time you are in your favourite café and the barista is crafting a delicious coffee, why don’t you buy them a coffee to make sure that they don’t fall into the The Barista’s Paradox.