How to celebrate Christmas: Wittgenstein

There is hardly any western philosopher who writes about Christmas. It’s a bit strange, since Christmas is the most important holiday in the western world, even though for many people it’s no longer celebrated because of its religious meaning. It has turned into an important secular holiday, especially to be celebrated in the family. In this way Christmas is gradually becoming important all over the world, also in non-Christian countries. Therefore, it’s remarkable that all major (western) philosophers philosophically ignore it, although much can be said about it. Even such a devote roman-catholic like Montaigne usually kept away from writing on Christmas, probably because he didn’t want to be involved in the religious conflicts of his time. He was afraid of being accused to support the Reformation, if he would present a moderate point of view.

It’s true that Sartre wrote a kind of Nativity play, when he was interned as a prisoner of war in Germany during Christmas 1940, but actually it was an act of solidarity with his fellow prisoners and a rejection of Nazism. But it is an exception and in fact only Wittgenstein devotes occasionally some words to Christmas. We know that he often celebrated it with his family – anyway before he definitively moved to England – but that he didn’t like it. However, during the First World War, so exactly hundred years ago, he was not at home, since he was a soldier. Wittgenstein wrote a diary during these years, and it would be interesting to know what he did on December 25 or 26, 1916, but alas, this part of his diary has been lost or he didn’t write about it. What we do know is what he did during Christmas two years before. These were the days that soldiers on the Western Front fraternized and celebrated Christmas together with the enemy, to the great annoyance of the generals, who succeeded to suppress this fraternization in later years. But in December 1914 Wittgenstein was in Eastern Europe and his post was behind the front line at a quiet place. So even if he would have liked to fraternize with the Russian enemy – which I doubt – he couldn’t do that.

Wittgenstein tells us that on Christmas Day 1914 he takes the midday meal in the officers’ mess. Was it special Christmas dinner? I don’t know, for he doesn’t mention what he ate. And Wittgenstein tells us that “he worked a bit”. The next day, on Boxing Day, he “hardly worked”, so he writes, and in the evening he went to a coffee house with a young man whom he had met, and he had an interesting discussion with the guy.

It needs some explanation what Wittgenstein means when he writes that he “worked”. He doesn’t mean that he did his tasks as a soldier, but that he worked on the manuscript of what would later become his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. We know even exactly what he wrote then:

“The proposition says something” is identical with: It has a particular relation to reality, whatever this may be. And if this reality is given and also that relation, then the sense of the proposition is known, "pvq" has a different relation to reality from "p.q", etc.

The possibility of the proposition is, of course, founded on the principle of signs as going proxy for objects. [Cf. 4.0312.]

Thus in the proposition something has something else as its proxy. But there is also the common cement. My fundamental thought is that the logical constants are not proxies. That the logic of the fact cannot have anything as its proxy. [See 4.0312.]

[from Notebooks 1914-1916]

In the Tractatus (4.0312) this would become:

The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs.

My fundamental thought is that the “logical constants” do not represent. That the logic of the facts cannot be represented.

So, during Christmas 1914, four months after he had voluntarily joined the army, Wittgenstein was working on the most fundamental thoughts of his early philosophy, namely that a language represents the world it depicts. This idea would become one of the basic ideas of analytical philosophy. Even though today we will not take it in a literal sense any longer, isn’t it still considered true that the words we speak represent at least our view on the world and how we want that others – the persons we are speaking to – see it?

Source, besides Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914-1916, Wilhelm Baum, Wittgenstein im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die „Geheimen Tagebücher“ und die Erfahrungen an der Front 1914-1918), Klagenfurt-Wien: Kitab Verlag 2014.

Passing a square

Nancy, France, Place Stanislas

A few weeks ago I wrote here about a series of photos I presented recently at a photo exhibition in my town. These photos were mainly landscapes but what was special was that each photo was framed by a natural frame, for instance a window frame. Just by the frames the pictures got a philosophical meaning, for don’t we all look at the world through our mental frames? However, I presented then also another series of photos, which showed pictures on a theme that seems meaningless at first sight: People crossing squares. Why taking pictures of such an ordinary if not banal event that is not conspicuous in any sense and doesn’t seem worth to remember? In a way you are right, I think, when you say that we can ignore such daily events like – in this case – crossing squares. Nevertheless I don’t agree with you. In order to explain that I’ll concentrate on the theme of the exhibition (people crossing squares) but it’s only an example of the “banal” things we do.

Actually squares are quite prominent in a town. Some are even famous, like Trafalgar Square in London, St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City or the Red Square in Moscow. It’s not without reason, for a square can have all kinds of functions like being a market place, a place where people meet, a place where buildings of a certain type are concentrated, and many more. Squares are also connecting and communicating spaces. They are places you must pass when you want to move from one part of a town to another part. In the latter sense they are transit places, or as I prefer to call them: passages. Squares are not the only kind of passages. Other passages are, for instance, waiting rooms, highways and railway stations. One characteristic of passages is that you want to pass them as quickly as possible. Or sometimes you use them in a way related to their meaning of a passage: If you are too early for an appointment, it’s a nice place to wait just there. Usually squares got their function as a passage and their other functions not by chance: They have been made that way. Towns develop around markets. Museums are deliberately concentrated around a square. Spaces are left open as meeting places. Squares are essential when planning a town.

Just this given functionality makes that passing a square is not an accidental affair. People are – often unconsciously – led along squares. City planners can have made it so that you have to pass them (because of the pattern of the streets). People may like it to pass them if they find them beautiful, even if they don’t give attention to the beauty once they are there, because they are in a hurry. And look: most people pass squares in the same way, along the same lines. Such things make that from a philosophical and sociological point of view passing a square is not an event without meaning, even if it may lack meaning from the point of view of the passer-by. Passing a square is one of the simple and apparently banal things that make up life, just like many other simple actions do like emptying your mail box, going to the baker’s, taking a breakfast, waiting in a waiting room. Actually such things are essential for life and we necessarily spend a lot of time on them. They cover also a big part of our planning when we prepare what we see as a meaningful event like a party. Just this is the meaning of “banality” in daily life, like passing a square.

Recommended authors: Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé.

More photos of passing a square on: http://www.henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/128627778_Open+ruimtes.html#.WE7Tz6KbjNA

The Raven Paradox

Since I didn’t succeed to take a picture of a raven, instead I have photographed an orange.

Last week I talked about the liar’s paradox and the Sorites’ paradox. Paradoxes are self-contradictory reasonings, for short. They have to be distinguished from fallacies, which are invalid or otherwise faulty reasonings that often seem correct (or to some they do) and therefore deceive the mind. I have talked about paradoxes and fallacies in my blogs before.

Paradoxes seem unsolvable but once they have been solved they appear to be fallacies. An example of a paradox that became a fallacy is Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the tortoise. (Zeno of Elea lived from 490-430 BC) Achilles and the tortoise are in a footrace and the tortoise starts, say, 100 metres ahead of Achilles. Then, so Zeno, Achilles cannot outrun the tortoise, for when he has done 50 metres, the tortoise has done, say, 5 metres in the same time, and when Achilles has done half the distance to the tortoise that then remains, the tortoise has advanced again, and so each time that Achilles has done half the distance separating him from the tortoise, the latter has moved forward again, etc. Only in modern times this paradox could be solved, which made it a fallacy. The flaw in the reasoning is that Zeno does as if the time doesn’t move on.

When browsing on the Internet for more paradoxes, I came upon one that is interesting from a methodological point of view, namely Carl G. Hempel’s Raven Paradox, which he expounded originally in an essay published in 1945 (republished in 1965; see footnote). Hempel himself calls it the “confirmation paradox”, and just this name shows why it is interesting, for Hempel’s idea is that we must try to find confirming evidence for our hypotheses, which brought him into conflict with Karl R. Popper, who says that we must try to falsify hypotheses (and must formulate them that way, that this is possible). I’ll quote the paradox not from Hempel’s essay, but from a website that explains it without the logical notation used by Hempel:

“[T]he Raven Paradox begins with the apparently straightforward and entirely true statement that ‘all ravens are black.’ This is matched by a ‘logically contrapositive’ (i.e. negative and contradictory) statement that ‘everything that is not black is not a raven’—which, despite seeming like a fairly unnecessary point to make, is also true given that we know ‘all ravens are black.’ Hempel argues that whenever we see a black raven, this provides evidence to support the first statement. But by extension, whenever we see anything that is not black [and not a raven; HbdW], like an apple, this too must be taken as evidence supporting the second statement—after all, an apple is not black, and nor is it a raven.” (http://mentalfloss.com/article/59040/10-mind-boggling-paradoxes)

So, the evidence that apples are not black while ravens are so by hypothesis seems to confirm that ravens are black, indeed.

In 1967, the British mathematician Jack Good wiped the floor with the Raven Paradox. I haven’t read his article, but only a short version of his argumentation. However, already immediately after I had read Hempel’s reasoning it seemed counterintuitive to me and with right, for it’s not correct: There is simply no relation between the colour of apples and the colour of ravens and between apples and ravens, so what could apples tell about ravens? Whether apples are red, white, yellow or black, it’s quite well possible that there are white ravens, and the colour of apples cannot confirm or disconfirm the existence of this variety of ravens. The Raven Paradox is simply a fallacy.

Talking about fallacies, what the author of the website just quoted, Paul Anthony Jones, probably didn’t realize is that also his explanation of the Raven Paradox contains a fallacy (or to say it more friendly: it’s not correct). For immediately after the passage I quoted he goes on:

“The paradox here is that Hempel has apparently proved that seeing an apple provides us with evidence, no matter how unrelated it may seem, that ravens are black. It’s the equivalent of saying that you live in New York is evidence that you don’t live in L.A., or that saying you are 30 years old is evidence that you are not 29.”

The first sentence of the quotation is okay, and that’s what the Raven Paradox mistakenly says. However, Hempel’s reasoning is not the equivalent of the two examples that follow then, for there is a relation between living in New York and living in LA in this case, and there is a relation between being 29 or 30 years old, and this relation is you. You can live in only one place, which can be described by its geographical coordinates. When those coordinates are those of NY, they are simply different from those that belong to LA, although this doesn’t say something, of course, about what the coordinates of LA are and whether or how they relate to the coordinates of NY. In the same way, the fact that your age is 30 years old does say that you are not 29, for your age is a measurement on a time scale and just like that you cannot be at two places at the same time, you cannot have two ages (and, by the way, there is a relation between 29 and 30 years as such, namely that they indicate points on the same time scale).

The upshot is that one must not compare apples with oranges, not to speak of apples and ravens.

Note: Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: The Free Press, 1965; pp. 14ff.

The paradox of lying

In On what matters. Volume One, pp. 277-78 Derek Parfit writes:

‘[According to Kant] “It is wrong to act on any maxim of which it is true that, if everyone accepted and acted on this maxim, or everyone believed that if it was permissible to act upon it, that would make it impossible for everyone successfully to act upon it.”

...

Turn next to lying. Herman writes that [Kant’s statement] “seems adequate for maxims of deception ... Universal deception would be held by Kant to make speech and thus deception impossible.”

Korsgaard similarly writes “lies are usually efficacious in achieving their purposes because they deceive, but if they were universally practiced they would not deceive ...” ’,

so Parfit, and he continues:

‘But no one acts on the maxim “Always lie”. Many liars act on the maxim “Lie when that would benefit me”.’

So far so good. It’s not only true for liars but for all deceivers like corrupt people, people who give themselves bonuses which they don’t deserve, and so on: If everyone benefits at the cost of others, no one benefits. Then you can better stop deceiving, for everybody would be better off if no one deceives. However, if only some deceive, the deceivers are better off and the victims are the losers, even when they don’t notice it.

But here we have a problem that looks like the liar’s paradox: “All Cretans are liars, said Epimenides, himself a Cretan”. For if everybody lies, it’s almost sure that everybody knows it. Then we’ll give what someone says the opposite meaning of what it actually means. But then the opposite meaning becomes the factual meaning of the words. However, it remains possible that everybody is basically a liar but doesn’t lie always but most of the time. It would living together make quite complicated, if not impossible.

What when only some people lie (at least sometimes they do) or only some people are corrupt (sometimes)? Then lying or being corrupt can be effective. But how far does it go? Take the case of corruption. If in a society nobody is corrupt with the exception of only a few, these few are better off and as a whole this society flourishes, as practice shows. But to the extent that corruption grows, a society becomes worse off (in the sense that most people it in are worse off), and in a very corrupt society, everybody suffers, with the exception of some “happy few”, and the society tends to fall apart or to be ruled by the “happy few” who are the most efficacious in their corrupt practices. But where are the limits that divide societies that are well off because there is only little corruption from societies that are rather well off, because corruption is present but not disturbing, and these from societies that are undermined by corruption? It’s like the Sorites’ paradox: How many grains of sand make a heap? Or how many grains of sand must we remove from a heap of sand till it is no longer a heap?

Parfit tells us that ‘no one acts on the maxim “Always lie”. Many liars act on the maxim “Lie when that would benefit me”.’ That’s a philosophical answer but practice shows that deceiving like corruption can become endemic in a society. Then in the end nobody will profit by deceiving (I am convinced that also the “winners” of deceiving would be better off if they would stop deceiving). Nevertheless everybody continues, for who stops first will lose anyway.

Find here be way of illustration the Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 by Transparency International: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2015#results-table

Reference: Derek Parfit, On what matters. Volume One. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

The garden of philosophy

Philosophers disagree on almost everything and there is no hard core of philosophical thinking. That was my conclusion last week. However, lack of consensus is one thing, lack of progress is something else. As Chalmers states in his paper quoted last week (p. 9): “Despite this lack of convergence, it is hard to deny that the insights of Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Frege and Russell, Kripke and Lewis have involved significant philosophical progress.” Now I can examine what this progress involves, but I think that the result will be anyway that there is no progress comparable with the progress made in hard sciences like physics, chemistry and biology. But is the comparison right?

***

Once upon a time there was a field behind my house. It gave me plenty of space for sitting in the sun and reading a book, but it was empty. Or so it seemed to me, for actually it was full of weeds and the insects, butterflies and birds loved it, and the mice and voles liked it, too. However, it didn’t satisfy my mind and I wanted to change it. So I bought a spade, and bags of seed and some little trees and fertilizer as well. I made a design and I started to dig and to sow, and I planted the trees, and I built also a pond. I looked how others made their gardens, and I copied them or let myself inspire by their ideas. After a few years I had a beautiful garden with a good structure and every plant had its place and everything fitted together in a harmonious way. The insects and butterflies and birds loved my garden even more than before and the mice and the voles loved it, too, as did the frogs attracted by the pond and the slugs attracted by the sappy plants. They all were very satisfied with my garden, but I wasn’t. Or rather, I thought that it wasn’t bad but it could be better, for everything that is good can be improved, and so I thought “Let’s make things better”. I restructured my garden, I removed plants and I replaced them by even more beautiful plants. I replaced the trees by yet more beautiful trees that even better fitted my garden. After some time I saw that it had really improved and that I had made a lot of progress in gardening as well. I had got a lot of knowledge how to make a garden and everybody praised my expertise. And the insects, butterflies, birds, mice and voles and also the frogs and slugs praised me by their deeds, for they came in increasingly bigger quantities to my garden and they were even more pleased with this piece of land than before.

However, better is not good enough, and although I thought that my garden was not bad and that it was even better than before, I got the idea that here a plant should be removed, there one had to be replaced; elsewhere a plant had to added, and I saw also that the structure of the paths had to be changed yet a bit. Of course, some time was spent on weeding, too. Again everyone praised my expertise and insight and the garden became better and better. And also the wild life in my garden thought so and it came there in still bigger quantities.

But each person becomes older, and after many years I sold my garden and I started to philosophize, since it takes less effort. I sold also my house and moved to the other side of the street and I saw how the new owner of the garden found it a good place for taking a sunbath and for reading. However, although he wasn’t really dissatisfied with the garden, he saw some weak points in it, and since good is not good enough, he thought “let’s make things better” and so he did and cleared the garden, built it up anew and he liked it, at least for some time, and everybody else who saw it liked it as well. The animals in the garden loved it even more than mine, or at least most of them did. But since better is not good enough ...

***

Once I wrote a blog about the relation between gardening and philosophizing. Philosophizing can be seen, I said there, as weeding the thoughts that you have developed till you have an ordered whole. It is sowing and planting the ideas in your head and structuring them in the right way. If the result is not satisfactory in some way, you try to improve it, even when others say that what you did is beautiful. But most of us – the gardeners – don’t breed the plants and seed ourselves but we leave it to specialists. And so the quality of our plants improves and they become more beautiful and they fit better our soil and they are less vulnerable to pests and weeds, and we call it plant improvement. But they who improve the plants don’t put them in a garden. That’s what the gardeners do. We the gardeners give each plant its place and puts it in the structure of the garden so that it comes out best and fits in the whole. If we are not satisfied with what we made, we try to do it better, till we become old and leave the job to young gardeners. I think that this is what philosophers do and what philosophizing involves. Philosophizing is cultivating the fields left and ignored by the branches of science and giving everything it’s meaningful place – a place that gives sense to those who see it. As long as we are pleased with it, we think that we have made things better. But people come and people go and everyone his mind, for better is not good enough.

The hard core of philosophy

One question is whether there has been progress in commonsense thinking (or folk psychology as it is called most of the time), which I discussed last week. A different question is, whether there has been progress in philosophy, a question that has also been the subject of quite a bit of philosophical debates and that has been discussed by some of the most prominent thinkers, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl R. Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn. In this blog I’ll not try to answer this question, but I want to talk about one important aspect of it: whether there is a received body or “hard core” of philosophical knowledge.

Progress is a relative matter in the sense that things are compared “before” and “after”. So we must have something to compare and what we want to compare must be viewed at several moments in time. Without any further discussion, I think that we can say that in the “hard” sciences like physics, chemistry and biology there is a core body of knowledge that is generally accepted and that has been growing through the years. But how about philosophy? Does it have a received body of knowledge?

In 2009 David J. Chalmers and D. Bourget made a list of thirty central themes in philosophy and asked via a survey academic philosophers – mainly in the field of analytic/Anglocentric philosophy – what their positions on those themes were. There were some 2000 recipients of the survey and 47% filled it in and sent it back. The outcome? It’s not unexpected, and actually it was what everybody who knows a bit about philosophy could tell you, but from the point of view of the hard sciences it’s somewhat shocking: There is no hard core of philosophical thinking. Maybe the conclusion is a bit too hard, for if you look closer you may find some points about which all philosophers agree (but I guess that they are rare), but on almost any theme in the survey philosophers are divided. I’ll not go into the details what all the terms that follow mean, but here are some examples, and if you only take a look at the division of the percentages, you’ll see that there is no unanimity among the thinkers (you can find the full list in Chalmers article below):

- free will: compatibilism 59%, libertarianism 14%, no free will 12%, other 15%

- mental content: externalism 51%, internalism 20%, other 29%

- normative ethics: deontology 26%, consequentialism 24%, virtue ethics 18%, other 32%

- truth: correspondence 51%, deflationary 25%, epistemic 7%, other 17%

Etc.: On almost all 30 themes the philosophers who filled in the survey disagree to an important extent on what “the facts” are. Only on one theme more than 80% agreed: On the question whether there is an external world, for 82% of the philosophers asked think that the outside world “really” exists. Three views (namely that there is a priori knowledge; atheism; and scientific realism – saying that the world is as described by science) attracted over 70% support. Three more views got more than 60% support. On all the other 23 questions the philosophers disagreed in a more or less stronger way.

What to say more? I think that the conclusion is clear. Philosophers disagree on almost any issue that is important for them and there is no hard core of philosophical thinking. Is it surprising? No, of course, for what should philosophers philosophize about when they agreed?

Source: David J. Chalmers, “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”, on http://consc.net/papers/progress.pdf

Thinking in progress

Industrial agriculture: Genetically manipulated sunflowers. Progress in science?

When the neurophilosopher Paul M. Churchland argued that “both the content and the success of FP [folk psychology, or commonsense] have not advanced sensibly in two or three thousand years”, he put forward a controversial view. He actually stated that our commonsense thinking is still on the level of the Ancient Greeks and that it has come to a standstill since then, if there has been any progress at all before these times. This becomes clear, when we see how Churchland goes on with his argument immediately after the sentence quoted: “The FP of the Greeks is essentially the FP we use today, and we are negligibly better at explaining human behavior in its terms than was Sophocles. This is a very long period of stagnation ...”. Actually it is not only Churchland who says so. It has often been contended that there is no progress in commonsense thinking, for the difference with the spectacular progress in scientific thinking is great. And not only commonsense thinking seems to stagnate but also more learned but non-scientific ways of thinking like philosophy according to some.

Although it is true that there has been much progress in science, nevertheless I think we have to put it into perspective. Scientific progress has been spectacular, indeed, but in fact it mainly happened during the past 400 years. Before progress has been very slow, although undeniable. But the development of celts from the simplest forms to efficient instruments was already a matter of three million years, and for the development of industrial forms of agriculture man still needed 15-20,000 years, to take a few examples. Only since about 1600 A.D. the development of science has been exponential.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that commonsense thinking and also philosophical thinking will finally develop in the same exponential way. But why should it? For unlike what Churchland thinks, commonsense thinking is not a sort of making quasi-scientific theories that are confronted with what is happening in the world and then tested and improved, just in the way scientific theories are experimentally tested. Commonsense views are not theories from which predictions can be deduced that can falsify them, and they are not quasi-scientific theories that are replaced by better ones. This is not the way man thinks, as every psychologist can tell you. And just this “as every psychologist can tell you” is already a case of refutation of Churchland’s view, for in the days of Sophocles no one who thought about human behaviour would say that. Moreover, it’s simply not true that the “folk psychology” of the Greeks is essentially the same as ours. Ancient Greek society was a class society that distinguished between free citizens and slaves. Among the former, only adult males had the right to vote (at least that was the situation in Athens, which was a kind of democracy). This society was very different from today’s Western society and today’s Western democracy. Much of what belongs to our present commonsense conception would be completely useless in Ancient Greek society, not only because the social organization has changed but also because many daily social conventions are now entirely different. Just that is one reason why many people in authoritarian political systems rise in revolt against such systems since there have been developed democratic alternatives. In the days of the ancient Greeks authoritarian systems were replaced by other authoritarian systems if necessary, with a democratic upper layer at most. Nowadays people want a fully-fledged democracy. And should we not consider it to be progress that today human rights are generally accepted and applied to everybody irrespective of class, sex, origin, etc. (how poorly they may be observed), while in Ancient Greece human rights (or what counted as such in those days) obtained only for free citizens? And what about the feudal system? Were not even then the rights different according to which estate one belonged? Is it not to be called progress that today there are generally valid human rights? And what to think of the idea of women rights, gay rights, and so on? Isn’t all this a matter of progress in commonsense, so that we can say that “both the content and the success of FP have ... advanced sensibly?”

Reference: Churchland, Paul M. (1992), A neurocomputational perspective. The nature of mind and the structure of science, Cambridge, Mass. etc.: The MIT Press (quotes from p. 8).

Facing life

 The author facing life

The main lesson we can learn from my last blog is that death comes often in an unexpected way. If these inhabitants in Herculaneum had been asked how they might die, perhaps they would have mentioned ten or more ways how death could come to them, but probably none of them would have thought that they could die because of a volcanic eruption: For them, volcanic eruptions were an unknown phenomenon. Actually, the way these people in Herculaneum died, and even more what they knew about ways of dying is an argument in support of Montaigne’s contention that “seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of them?” For if we are afraid of all kinds of possible deaths, we may be afraid of the wrong one. And if we simply try to avoid that one of these kinds of death will happen, we are on the wrong track. I don’t mean that it isn’t good to take precautions against a possible premature death. It’s good to get injections against common illnesses and I should advice everybody to wear a seat belt in a car. But such measures should be seen as what they in fact are: They are not precautions – which suggests that they can prevent what we don’t wish to happen – but safety measures that reduce the chance that something undesirable happens but doesn’t exclude it. If this is the only thing we do, we are in the wrong. Safety measures are necessary but they are not sufficient and it is not right to think that this is the way to face death. It’s only negative and it doesn’t help us stand in life.

In his essay “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” (Essays I, 19), from which I borrowed the quotation above, Montaigne tells us about Chiron who rejected to get eternal life from his father Saturn. Why? In Montaigne’s words: “Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man [if it were eternal]. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it”. Suppose that you had eternal life. What would you do? What reason would you have to act? Everything could be done later. It’s quite likely that you’ll think so and act accordingly, even if having eternal life does not involve having eternal youth (many people who think that eternal life is something to be wished for, forget that it may be a life in which you still become physically older and cripple and helpless after some time). To my mind, just the fact that man is forced to act in order to survive gives life sense. Not taking precautions against death – which is impossible in the end, also because, as we have seen, death can come in an unexpected way – is the way to face death but acting is and so performing what we positively want. By doing so we give sense to life and we give it a meaning – namely in the way we act. Therefore I can fully agree with what Montaigne had written a few paragraphs before: “The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time”. It’s what Montaigne learned from his own experiences. When he was about thirty years old, several people dear to him died, including his father and his beloved friend Étienne de La Boétie. It made him afraid of death. And then it happened almost to himself, when he fell from his horse. Although he was unconscious and vomiting blood, for himself it was not an unpleasant event. When Montaigne came round, he tells us, “I shut my eyes, to help, methought, to thrust it out, and took a pleasure in languishing and letting myself go. It was an imagination that only superficially floated upon my soul, as tender and weak as all the rest, but really, not only exempt from anything displeasing, but mixed with that sweetness that people feel when they glide into a slumber.” (Essays II, 6). It made that Montaigne changed his attitude towards death and he was no longer scared of it and he became positive towards life. As we have seen, we find this vision on life already in his essay “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die”. Even though the essay is mainly about death, it’s why I think a better title would have been “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Live”, for what it actually says is that facing death is facing life.

Facing death

A picture can say more than thousands words. Or sometimes it can. When the volcano Mount Vesuvius near Naples in Italy erupted in the year of AD 79, at first nobody in the region understood what was happening. The volcano had been sleeping for 400 years and people had forgotten that living on a volcano could be dangerous. So the first reaction was going to see what it was. But soon it became clear that there was only one thing to do: flee. So that’s what most people did. Nevertheless many people in Pompeii, the biggest city in the region, died. The inhabitants of Herculaneum were more fortunate and almost everybody survived. Or so it was thought, when the town was rediscovered in the 18th century. But not so long ago, in the 1980s, some 300 dead bodies of men, women and children were found in the boat houses along the beach. Maybe they had been enclosed by the volcano and the sea, because they had no boats to escape, or maybe they had taken shelter and waited till they could go home again. Suddenly, “a scorching cloud of superheated volcanic ash burst into the crowded shelters. They were instantly fried alive.” The refugees thought to have escaped the danger, but death has overtaken them. However, it didn’t occur that fast that these poor people didn’t realize what was happening and what was waiting them. Look at the positions of the bodies. Look at the faces. Even though not more than the skulls remain from the faces, we still can see how afraid these people were and that they looked into the death’s eyes. They were literally facing death.

For more information and for the quote see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/4762420/Refugees-trying-to-shelter-from-Vesuvius-were-fried-alive-by-volcanic-ash.html.

Framing the mind

If framing is a way of organizing our experiences, as Erving Goffman puts it, then misframing can be a source of a lot of trouble and a source of manipulation as well. Moreover a situation we are confronted with can be that way that we don’t have a scheme for it: We are puzzled about what is going on.

In his book Frame analysis Goffman devotes a big part to examining what can go wrong with framing. Sometimes errors in framing or discord about what is going on is even a matter of dead and life. Indeed, framing is not an “innocent” affair but it is substantial for meaningful action, for in many respects framing and acting are one. Didn’t the sociologist W.I. Thomas say some 25 years before Goffman published his book that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”? For sustaining the same view, Goffman quotes another sociologist, namely Aron Gurwitsch, who said that “to experience an object amounts to being confronted with a certain order of existence” (see Frame Analysis p. 308). Misframing, so Goffman, will involve the framer in “the breeding of wrongly oriented behavior” (ibid.). But, as he continues, “then the misperception of a fact can involve the importation of a perspective that is itself radically inapplicable, which will itself establish a set, a whole grammar of expectations, that will not work. The actor will then find himself using not the wrong word but the wrong language. And in fact, this metaphor is also an actual example. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language’, then it would seem that speaking a sentence presupposes a whole language and tacitly seeks to import its use.” (id. pp. 308-309) Everybody who knows more than one language knows how much it is true that a langue gives you a framework of the world and how the same sound spoken within one language frame can mean something very different within another language frame, with all its consequences. When a Frisian – a speaker of a minority language in the North of the Netherlands – says “it kin net”, he means the opposite of what a Dutchman thinks he does if he wrongly interprets it as “’t kan net”, as often happens. For although the Frisian says “it cannot”, this Dutchman thinks that he means that “it just can”, so that it’s just possible (with sometimes fatal consequences).

Goffman’s remark on Wittgenstein brings me to philosophy. Also here we find the idea of framing everywhere, but often in another wording. Thomas Kuhn analyzed how the transition from one theoretical paradigm to another leads to a scientific revolution. But what else is such a paradigm shift than looking at the world through a new frame? And actually it is so that theories are frames of a lower level that are continuously renovated, polished and painted until the wood has become so rotten that the frame has to be replaced by a new structure.

When Gilbert Ryle attacked Descartes’ idea that man is a kind of machine with a ghost in it that steers the machine (the body), he introduced the idea of category mistake. Once in a blog I explained this idea with the example of a river. A river consists of a countless number of water molecules. Nevertheless it is a category mistake to say that a single water molecule streams. It is not the water molecule that streams but the river does. So if we want to study fluvial processes like erosion or the velocity of the flow, we do not study the movements of the water molecules but we study the river. Nevertheless it is possible to study the river molecules as such, just as it is possible to study the river and fluvial processes. And so it is also a category mistake, I continued in the same blog, if we confuse brain and mind. It is true, as a river cannot exist apart from the water molecules that produce it, so also the mind cannot exist apart from the neurons and what else makes up the brain. In this sense the mind is the brain. Nevertheless it is a category mistake to reduce a typical phenomenon of the mind like thoughts to a phenomenon of the brain and its neurons. It is not our brain that thinks but our mind does, i.e. “we” do. But as we can study the river molecules and the fluvial processes, we can study the brain and the mind. It’s simply a matter of perspective; it’s simply a matter of aspect. Seen from the view that I have developed in my last blogs, is it then too far-fetched to say that a category mistake is nothing else but using the wrong frame? And that confusing brain and mind (and reducing the mind to the brain) is also nothing else but applying the wrong frame? In many respects, science is a matter of developing frames and then making the right choice.

Frame analysis

Photographic frames are actually nothing but instantiations of what are called “cognitive schemas” elsewhere in these blogs: schemas that help organize what you see; that let out what is unimportant; and bring to the foreground what is relevant for you. It’s a term that is especially used in linguistics and psychology. The philosopher Antonio Damasio calls them “maps”, while the term “frame” is common in sociology for the phenomenon (although the word is also often used in psychology). The classic book on “frame analysis” in sociology still is the one by Erving Goffman with the same title, published in 1974. Maybe the subtitle of this book describes best what framing is about: The organization of experience. The photo of the napalm girl discussed by me last week shows well how this works.

Goffman’s Frame Analysis is quite a thick book (nearly 600 ages) and in my blogs I can’t do justice to it, but let me pick a few elements from it. As we just have seen, for Goffman framing is a matter of organizing experience. More exactly, for him framing is a method we use for defining a situation we are involved in; so it is a way to give it an interpretation. He sees frames as “principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them” (pp. 10-11). For instance, suddenly I hear a bang and I see people running. I wonder what is happening and what I have to do. Is it an explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a car? Depending on how I interpret the bang, so how I frame it, and the reason I am there – am I a passer-by, a policeman or do I live there? – I decide what to do: Nothing, or going to the site for getting more information, calling for help, running away, etc. A frame is individual, as Goffman says a few pages further, it is subjective and, as I want to add – but certainly Goffman says it elsewhere in his book – it has consequences for our behaviour: from doing nothing and accepting as it is till taking action.

Most framing doesn’t happen explicitly and consciously. Goffman’s explanation is a bit complicated, so let me say it in my own words: As soon as someone recognizes a situation, he or she automatically applies a framework or schema of interpretation. Since everyone has gone through a shorter or longer period of education and internalization, initially he or she falls back on the concepts and standard interpretations typical for his or her culture when interpreting an event or situation. Goffman talks here of “primary frameworks”. So if we see someone taking a book from a shelf in a certain type of building and giving a sheet of paper to another person, we automatically apply the framework “buying a book” (p. 21; the example is mine).

Primary frameworks can be of two kinds, so Goffman: natural and social. Again I want to use my own words. A framework is “natural” – not to confuse it with the term “natural frame” as I used it in my blog last week – if it is purely physical and if its meaning does not depend on the willful agency and intentionality of other people. On the other hand it is “social”, if it gets its meaning from the wills, aims and intentions of others. So a certain object is for us just a round thin piece of copper if considered in the natural way or a five-cent piece if interpreted within a social framework. (cf. pp. 21-22) Dealing with objects within a natural frame requires instrumental action, while within a social frame it involves rule-guided action.

By applying frames we constitute what we see and experience. Often frames are shared among individuals in the sense that they apply more or less the same frames to the same situations or events. Then all share an understanding of what it is that is going on and what everyone is doing, and then the frame concerned is “effectively correct” (cf. p. 301). In this way shared frames make that people stick together so to speak.

Reference: Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (my edition).