The Construction of Impossibility: a Logic-Based Analysis of Conjuring Tricks

ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 14 June 2016 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00748 The Construction of Impossibility: A Logic-Based Analysis of Conjuring Tricks Wally Smith 1*, Frank Dignum 2 and Liz Sonenberg 1 1 Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 2 Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands Psychologists and cognitive scientists have long drawn insights and evidence from stage magic about human perceptual and attentional errors. We present a complementary analysis of conjuring tricks that seeks to understand the experience of impossibility that they produce. Our account is first motivated by insights about the constructional aspects of conjuring drawn from magicians’ instructional texts. A view is then presented of the logical nature of impossibility as an unresolvable contradiction between a perception-supported belief about a situation and a memory-supported expectation. We argue that this condition of impossibility is constructed not simply through misperceptions Edited by: and misattentions, but rather it is an outcome of a trick’s whole structure of events. Gustav Kuhn, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK This structure is conceptualized as two parallel event sequences: an effect sequence Reviewed by: that the spectator is intended to believe; and a method sequence that the magician Ronald A. Rensink, understands as happening. We illustrate the value of this approach through an analysis University of British Columbia, Canada Peter Lamont, of a simple close-up trick, Martin Gardner’s Turnabout. A formalism called propositional University of Edinburgh, UK dynamic logic is used to describe some of its logical aspects. This elucidates the nature Peter William McOwan, and importance of the relationship between a trick’s effect sequence and its method Queen Mary University of London, UK sequence, characterized by the careful arrangement of four evidence relationships: *Correspondence: Wally Smith similarity, perceptual equivalence, structural equivalence, and congruence. The analysis [email protected] further identifies two characteristics of magical apparatus that enable the construction of apparent impossibility: substitutable elements and stable occlusion. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Keywords: stage magic, conjuring, propositional logic, impossibility Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology INTRODUCTION Received: 31 January 2016 The methods of stage magicians have long been regarded as a potential source of insight into the Accepted: 06 May 2016 workings of the human mind. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, several leading figures in Published: 14 June 2016 the new psychological sciences extended an interest in visual illusions to the illusions of stage magic Citation: (e.g., Binet, 1894; Jastrow, 1900; Triplett, 1900). Connections between magic and psychology have Smith W, Dignum F and Sonenberg L been made periodically since then (e.g., Kelley, 1980; Hyman, 1989), including links to cognitive (2016) The Construction of Impossibility: A Logic-Based Analysis science (Kuhn et al., 2008) and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Macknik et al., 2008; Parris et al., 2009; of Conjuring Tricks. Leeuwen, 2011). The premise underlying all of these investigations is that conjuring tricks, that Front. Psychol. 7:748. routinely and reliably bring about radical failures in how people make sense of the world, might doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00748 open a new window into how that sense is normally achieved. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 June 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 748 Smith et al. The Construction of Impossibility Many of these investigations have focussed on understanding aim is to take the essence of Kelley’s approach further, albeit localized points of perceptual or attentional failure within the with different terms and concepts, and thereby to focus on performance of a magic trick (e.g., Cui et al., 2011; Kuhn and what we will refer to as the constructional aspects of conjuring Martinez, 2011). In this paper, we seek to complement this line of tricks. As with Kelley, we consider how a trick’s events are research by exploring a parallel question of how spectators reach organized, as distinct from the affective aspects of the story that an experience of witnessing something impossible. This requires they project. This focus on event structure rather than story a different kind of explanation to that for how misperceptions meaning resembles work in the field of narratology that studies and misattentions occur. In the course of normal life, people the event structures of all narrative forms, including literature, frequently misperceive or misattend relevant events but this drama and film (e.g., Landa and Onega, 2014). This is not to almost never produces the dramatic experiences of impossibility deny the importance of the affective aspects of conjuring, as that characterize successful magic tricks. Rather, people typically argued by a long line of insightful magicians including Sharpe discount everyday anomalies in their sense-making through (1932), Nelms (1969) and Burger and Neale (2009). Rather, metacognitive awareness of the fallibility of their perceptual, our premise is that we can independently and usefully analyse attentional and cognitive systems. The question arises, then, as to the underlying structure and logic of event sequences that how it is that a spectator of a trick, who has also misperceived or create apparently impossible outcomes. This entails not just misattended events, does not simply discount the final magical misperceived and misattended events, but the larger sequence effect because they aware are that sensory information and of false and genuine actions and objects that make up a trick’s therefore sense-making is fallible. To reach its conclusion, a performance. By implication, we focus not only on perceptual magic trick must be designed and performed not only to deceive and attentional errors, but also on veridical cognitions and the perception and attention, but also to trap the human mind in a metacognitive aspects of what agents believe about their beliefs situation where the only sense that can be made is of something and percepts. In this way, we hope to contribute to recent impossible having occurred. approaches that seek broader theories of conjuring across a In this article, we attempt to develop an account of the range of cognitive aspects (Kuhn et al., 2014; Rensink and Kuhn, logical form of beliefs that a spectator of a conjuring trick 2015). holds to underpin the experience of witnessing an impossible As our starting point, the next section draws insights from event. In this way, we seek to add to recent mathematically- magicians’ texts about the constructional aspects of tricks. based treatments of magic more generally, both in the workings Following this, we develop some logical formalisms that express of tricks (e.g., Diaconis and Graham, 2011) and in theorizing a general account of how an impossible situation comes about about their computational aspects (e.g., Williams and McOwan, through a magic trick. To illustrate the concepts in action and to 2014). Our aim is to show that the precision in expression explore them further, a particular trick is then analyzed: Martin mandated by the demands of assigning meaning to the Gardner’s Turnabout (Fulves, 1977, p. 88). It is important to components of logical formalisms can serve to illuminate emphasize that our treatment does not attempt to do justice to the underlying complexity of beliefs that underpin even a the full richness of the conjuror’s craft. Instead we concentrate on simple conjuring trick. This complements other logical and the structure of a very simple trick with a single effect, and do not computational treatments of related experiences such as surprise address the higher-level aspects of conjuring like routining, effect (e.g., Ortony and Partridge, 1987; Casati and Pasquinelli, 2007; repetition, double-bluffs and false exposés; these latter things now Lorini and Castelfranchi, 2007; Macedo et al., 2009), as well as familiar through performers such as Penn and Teller, and Derren accounts of surprise from mathematical (Baldi and Itti, 2010) and Brown. Nevertheless we contend that important principles can psychological (Maguire et al., 2011) perspectives. In these studies, be extracted from the simplest forms of conjuring. The article surprise is generally regarded as a belief-based phenomenon, concludes with comments on the insights gained and the issues associated with disconfirmed expectations. Some approaches arising from our analysis. have considered how an event is processed, represented, and integrated within an unfolding scenario theorized as a sequence of world states, successively changing by the application of INSIGHTS FROM MAGICIANS’ TEXTS actions (e.g., Maguire et al., 2011). We adopt a similar approach ABOUT THE CONSTRUCTIONAL ASPECTS to the understanding of impossibility. OF CONJURING TRICKS An important premise of our analysis is that to understand how an experience of impossibility is reached demands an The seminal writings of magicians about their craft contain a understanding of the full sequence of a trick’s events. Kelley central core of ideas and principles about the way conjuring (1980) took a similar approach in a qualitative analysis of magic tricks should be constructed to be effective. We will briefly tricks from

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