Practical example:
In order to get a job you need experience. To have experience you need to get a job.
What is the right term to call this?
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3 Answers
The English term you're looking for is Catch-22.
It comes from the title of the 1961 novel Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.
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Good. Never expected it to contain numbers. It makes me doubt about the usage in a sentence. "Catch-22 is that I need experience in order to get a job, but..." - doesn't feel correct. Is it?– SlavaCommented Oct 3, 2013 at 19:45
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1"The fact that I need experience to get a job, but need a job to get experience, is a cache-22"– ikeCommented Oct 3, 2013 at 19:46
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1@Alph.Dev the sentence you presented may be grammatically correct, but it sounds off to this native American English speaker. Instead I would have said "The catch-22 is that I need experience in order to get a job." Commented Oct 4, 2013 at 1:38
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1A catch-22 is a paradox, but IIRC it wasn't a temporal paradox. (Rather it required to approach discharge by both asking and not asking, which is mutually exclusive with no time element) Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 21:56
Also circular dependency or chicken-and-egg problem or (temporal) paradox.
As commented by @Ben, a "Catch-22" situation is is one where two mutually exclusive actions are required in order to achieve something (asking and not asking for an army discharge, in the original source Heller novel).
If the problem is that two different things both have to happen first, we call it a chicken and egg situation / problem. This same metaphor can be used when we're trying to figure out what came first in the past and (less commonly) when trying to decide which to do first in the future.
But it's also used to acknowledge the impossibility of making any progress at all, if two actions must both come "first" because each requires the prior existence of the other, and they can't happen simultaneously.
answered Apr 18 at 11:15
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I agree with this but it seems to be a (nicely-formatted) comment. Commented Apr 18 at 14:46
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Tbh, I didn't notice your answer until after I'd posted mine, which I'd just copied from What is it called when two things both have to happen first? (answered before it was closed as a duplicate of this one). I don't suppose I'd have bothered copying it if I'd seen your answer - and I certainly wouldn't have answered in the first place if I'd seen this question and your answer. I just didn't think Catch-22 (requiring two mutually exclusive actions) was le mot juste here. Commented Apr 18 at 15:01
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'Catch-22 or Catch 22 [singular noun, often as compound premodifier]: If you describe a situation as a Catch-22, you mean it is an impossible situation because you cannot do one thing until you do another thing, but you cannot do the second thing until you do the first thing.' [Collins]. The etymological fallacy can even apply to 20th century coinages. / M-W gives a broadened, reconciling definition. Commented Apr 18 at 15:20
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@EdwinAshworth: You (and Collins) have a different opinion to me, obviously. I think there's a significant difference between "chicken-and-egg" and "Catch-22". The actual paradox in Heller's book looks to me like two mutually exclusive constraints. Yossarian and other airmen can't get out of flying missions because 1) wanting to stop is seen as sane, and only the "insane" can be grounded. But 2) they can't prove themselves insane because requesting grounding demonstrates sanity. That's not really a problem about "which to do first", imho. It's "must ask" and "can't ask". Commented Apr 18 at 15:32
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1@FumbleFingers: What Edwin is saying is that the term "Catch 22" has a meaning unrelated to Heller's book. "etymological fallacy". This seems ridiculous because that term certainly would never have existed if not for the book, but indeed it does seem too late to expect everyone using it to know what they're talking about. Commented Apr 18 at 16:29