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About This Passage
This passage performs a complete demonstration of how a believer protects an idea from challenge. Harold poses a direct question: what evidence have you actually seen? Chester's response unfolds in three stages. Stage one: the non-falsifiable defense ('I'm awake when it's important'), which makes the claim immune to any test by allowing Chester to retroactively define when his alertness counted. Stage two: the deflection ('He sleeps all day so I sleep all day'), which redirects the question by making Chester's behavior dependent on the rabbit's behavior in a way that obscures the original question about whether anything has actually been observed. Stage three: the verbal collapse ('I uh, that is') followed by the physical evasion (Chester bathing his tail). Howe even glosses the evasion explicitly: 'a cat-y way of changing the subject he finds uncomfortable.' The passage is teaching a writer how to render the small rhetorical maneuvers by which paranoid beliefs protect themselves from confrontation with evidence — a skill that takes most philosophers of science a long book to articulate. Howe does it in one paragraph, and the doing is one of the chapter's most precise achievements.
How can you call that alert? I'm awake when it's important. He sleeps all day so I sleep all day. So just what have you seen since that first night that makes you uneasy? Well, said Chester, I uh, tha...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.
Discussion Questions
- Chester escapes Harold's challenge with the non-falsifiable claim 'I'm awake when it's important.' This is a textbook example of what Karl Popper identified as the mark of pseudoscience — a claim that cannot be proven wrong because any possible evidence can be made consistent with it. Argue whether Howe is dramatizing a precise philosophical principle, and consider whether children's literature has particular advantages in delivering such principles to readers who would not otherwise encounter them.
- The Monroe family encounters the white tomato and offers a sequence of natural explanations: chemistry experiment, vegetable blight, DDT poisoning, faulty refrigerator. Chester offers a supernatural explanation. Argue whether the family's range is more rational or merely more conventional, and defend the distinction between the two. What is at stake in calling the family's response one or the other?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
describing a claim or theory whose structure makes it impossible to be proven wrong by any conceivable evidence; identified by Karl Popper as the distinguishing mark of pseudoscience and dogmatism
Item 2
the well-documented cognitive tendency to seek out, attend to, and remember information that supports one's existing beliefs while neglecting or dismissing information that would contradict them
Item 3
the sociological concept introduced by Erving Goffman for the social practices by which people preserve one another's dignity in interaction, often through small departures from strict literal honesty
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Critical Thinking
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