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:
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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.
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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! Most philosophers would say the answer is the barista doesn’t exist. No door opening soon!
The paradox has a sprinkling of the terms ‘all’, ‘only’ and “if and only if” which signals it’s a problem in logic rather than a real life problem. They force the description into saying that all coffee drinkers who do not make their own coffee can only get it from the barista, and nobody else. Not realistic, if the café has a future.
The barista paradox shows what happens when buying coffee is forced into a logical problem. Logic has many applications; electronics, computer science and mathematics. Wittgenstein would show the words from logic have lost their meaning, when used in buying coffee, and we have been sucked into a philosophical vortex. Rather than spending time puzzling about the paradox, we should see it as nonsense, and have another cup.
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.