Wittgenstein on Covid-19 before it existed

and other remarks on Wittgenstein

I wondered whether I could make again a special end of the year blog, for example about what philosophers do during the turn of the year. However, it appeared difficult to find such information. I found only what Wittgenstein had written about it in a diary that I have here at home. During the First World War (1914-1918) Wittgenstein volunteered in the Austrian-Hungarian army and then he kept two diaries: a personal diary and a philosophical diary. The first one begins on 9 August 1914 and ends on 19 August 1918. The philosophical diary begins on 22 August 1914 and ends on 10 January 1917. The philosophical diary became the foundation of his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein didn’t write each day in his diaries and moreover several parts of his personal diary have been lost.
When Wittgenstein was in the army, first he had several functions behind the frontline. Later he got – on his request – frontline tasks. He was taken prisoner by the Italian army in 1918. Since the personal diary is not complete, we know only what Wittgenstein did on the last day of 1914 and the first day of 1915 and not on the other New Year’s Eves and Days in this period. He was then somewhere in Poland where he had a quiet job and much time to philosophize. On 30 December he wrote: “Didn’t work. Only take care not to get lost”. Next on 2 January he writes that the day before he suddenly had heard that he would go to Vienna with his commander (where he would then visit his family). In his philosophical diary Wittgenstein wrote nothing for almost two weeks during this time. So although Wittgenstein had apparently much time to philosophize at the end of 1914, for me there is nothing to philosophize about what he did. The only interesting thing to remark here is that when writing “not worked” Wittgenstein didn’t mean that he had nothing to do in his job as a soldier, but that he hadn’t worked on what would later become his Tractatus.
Dissatisfied with this result, I browsed a little bit in Wittgenstein’s philosophical diary. My eye was caught by this sentence: “Empirical reality is limited by the number of objects”, which he wrote down on 26 April 1916. But how do you count the number of objects? For what an object is, is in some sense arbitrary. Is it for this reason that in his Tractatus Wittgenstein changed it to “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects”? (5.5561). But it doesn’t really solve the problem of countability. Still thinking about this statement, I saw a few lines down another striking statement in the philosophical diary, which Wittgenstein wrote on 6 May 1916: “At the basis of the whole view of the world of the moderns lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” You find this sentence almost literally in the Tractatus, namely in 6.371. At first sight it seems quite obscure, but a few sentences later, Wittgenstein explains: 

“6.373 The world is independent of my will.
 6.374 Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.” 

How relevant this is in view of the present situation in which the coronavirus rules the world! For what Wittgenstein maintains in these almost religious statements is: What happens in the world is completely independent of what we think of it and what we would like to happen. Whatever we think about natural phenomena and the way they come about, they just happen, despite our will or opinion. And if things happen the way we like, it’s mere chance. Translated to the present pandemic this means: Whatever the origin of the coronavirus is, as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way. Even if it would have a human origin, so even if it would have been made and spread by man on purpose (which I don’t believe), as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way by its own logics. But then we have no other choice, than to adapt ourselves and to follow the logics of nature in order to fight the virus. From that point of view keeping distance, lockdowns and vaccination are reasonable measures for they are based on the natural character of the phenomenon.
However, Wittgenstein didn’t say so. It’s my interpretation. His Tractatus and his later works, published or not published by himself, are abstract works. Nevertheless Wittgenstein wasn’t an ivory-tower thinker. During the First World War he was a soldier by choice; during the Second World War he was a nurse in an English hospital. In this period he also saved the capital of his family from the Nazis, although long before that date he had given away his part.
Be it as it may, my present reflections haven’t helped to answer the main question of this blog: How do famous philosophers meet New Year? Therefore, I want to end with another quote from the Tractatus, namely its last sentence:
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Happy New Year!

Sources
- Baum, Wilhelm, Wittgenstein im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die “Geheimen Tagebücher“ und die Erfahrungen an der Front 1914-1918). Klagenfurt-Wien: Kitab Verlag 2014.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 to all my readers, wherever you live in the world! 

Framing

I have always been charmed by the work of the American sociologist Ervin Goffman, especially by his book Frame Analysis. I have devoted already two blogs to this book (see Sources below) and framing is also an important theme in my photography (see for example https://henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/213265933_Vensters.html ). However, after I had read Nathalie Heinich’s La cadre-analyse d’Erving Goffman [Erving Goffman’s frame analysis], I thought that it would be a good idea to write another blog about it, even if this might mean that I would repeat something that I had written already before. It stresses how important framing is to my mind. In describing Goffman’s ideas I’ll mainly follow chapter I in Heinich’s book.
When you want to understand what Frame Analysis is about, you can best start reading the subtitle of the book, which says that it is An Essay on the Organization of Experience. This experience has two aspects: An experienced part of the activity that takes place (called “strip” by Goffman) and the way this activity is organized (“frame”). A strip is “any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity” (p. 10), while a frame consists of the basic elements of a social situation that “are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events … and our subjective involvement in them” (10-11) In short, a frame is the way we experience what happens. Events and situations can be framed in different ways, but the point of departure is the basic frame or “primary frame” as Goffman calls it. “Such a [primary] framework is seen … as not depending on or harking back to some prior or ‘original’ interpretation”. (21) To give an example: I hear a bang and I see people running. I wonder what is happening. Is it an explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a car? One of these possibilities forms the basic interpretation or primary frame of what is happening.
However, once we have a primary frame, an activity can be given a new interpretation that modifies the original interpretation. Goffman calls such a modifying frame a “key”: “The set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else. The process of transcription can be called keying.” (43-44) For example: The bang is not a real terrorist bomb attack, but it is a scene in a stage play. Goffman distinguishes five fundamental ways a primary frame can be keyed:
- make-believe
- contests (such as in sport)
-ceremonials
- technical redoings (like exercises, experiments, role playing)
- regroundings (for example in charity work: a princess serves as a salesperson at a salvage sale).
|All these ways of keying an activity have in common that they are “straight”: They appear in the same way to all participants and onlookers. However, besides keying there is also another way to transform a primary frame: fabrications. It is “the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on.” (83) Plots and conspiracies are of this kind and the individuals involved can be divided into “the operatives, fabricators, deceivers” and their co-workers on the one hand and “the dupes, marks, pigeons, suckers, butts, victims, gulls” on the other hand. Fabrications, unlike keyings are subject to a special kind of discrediting, for once discovered what is going on and seen as a deception, they collapse. Fabrications can be divided into benign fabrications and exploitive fabrications. Benign fabrications are such like playful deceit, experimental hoaxing (like psychological experiments: the subject isn’t aware of what is being tested), training hoaxes and a few more. Examples of exploitive fabrications are the plots and conspiracies just mentioned. Another way to subdivide fabrications is to distinguish between other-induced and self-imposed fabrications.
Once Goffman has introduced his concepts, his next step is to apply them. I think that most important in the analysis that follows in his Frame Analysis is the idea that frames can be layered: They can fit one into another like the well-known matryoshka dolls (“Russian dolls). In this way we can get a stratification of frames. An example from theatre is an opera that I have seen long ago in which the singers played that they were performing an opera. It’s a “trick” regularly used in stages plays. An example used by Goffman and taken from “real life” is the case of a company agent who is sent around incognito to see if service standards are being maintained.
Another interesting theme discussed by Goffman is the possibility to break the frame. But should I say more? I think that it’s clear from what I have said that applying the idea of frames is one of the most important ways to understand what is happening around us. It helps us also to find our way in what is happening. 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. If so all participants share an understanding of what is going on and what everyone is doing. If this is the case, frames help to understand ourselves and others. 

Sources
- Goffman. Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (my edition).
- Heinich, Nathalie, La cadre- analyse d’Erving Goffman. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020; 23-41.
My blogs:
- “Frame analysis”, dated 10 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/frame-analysis_73.html
- “Framing the mind”, dated 13 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/framing-mind.html

How I prophesied reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic

Actually, I could upload here an old blog that I have written about six years ago: my blog “All things have their season”. It was already the second blog with this title, but I mean the one about apples, dated the 26th October, 2014. For what has happened? Recently, when leafing through my book “Rondom Montaigne” (“About Montaigne”) and rereading old blogs I discovered that both in this blog and in my book – in chapter 9 – I had prophesied how people would react to the present Covid-19 pandemic! Of course, I didn’t forecast this pandemic but what I did forecast were the reactions to a natural disaster, and isn’t it so that the present pandemic is such a disaster? Now I could stop writing and simply paste here the blog just mentioned. Instead, I’ll write a summary of this blog with an explanation and comment. If you want to read the original blog, you can find it here: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html 

“All things have their season”, as Montaigne tells us in the 28th essay in Book II in his Essays. Montaigne sees there a strict connection between a certain stage of life and what you can do; not so much what you can do physically but what is reasonable to do in that stage of life, or what is right to be done. Montaigne gives us the example of Xenocrates who was still studying, when he was already very old. Montaigne comments by quoting Eudemonidas: “When will this man be wise, if he is yet learning?” For learning is something you do, when you are young, for what sense does it have to study when your life soon will come to an end? Although Montaigne admits that you can also study simply for pleasure, even when you are old. But in general it’s so that all things have their season.
Seasons like life rhythms are natural and you must adapt yourself to it, so Montaigne. Maybe this was true in antiquity and also in the days of Montaigne, but the times are changing and gradually the seasons of life disappear; at least to a high extent, for birth and death, being young or old, still exist and will ever exist. But let me explain the disappearance of the seasons with the help of the example of apples.
When I was young, say in the 1960s, all through the year there was a kind of seasonal rhythm of apple varieties that you could buy in a supermarket or in a greengrocer’s shop, especially in autumn, but in fact the rhythm existed the whole year round. In autumn, when the apples were harvested, a certain apple variety was for sale only during a short time and then the next variety came in the shop. In winter they sold apples that could be stored for a longer time. Of course, there was some overlap, but in fact one variety followed after another. There was a rhythm in apple varieties that followed the seasons. Discovery, Alkmene, Benoni and so on, one after another, till the long season of Elstar apples begun. One year later the cycle started anew. All apples had their season. Today, however, this seasonal rhythm in apple varieties has almost disappeared and the whole year round you find the same apple varieties in the supermarket and greengrocer’s shops, independent of the season you are in. That’s pleasant, for so you can always buy the apples that you find tasty.
This example illustrates how we have become less and less dependent on nature. Today, we can make and adapt nature as we like. At least, that’s what we think, but when a calamity happens, and then I mean a real calamity, a natural calamity, like a nuclear disaster or an earthquake, do we know then what to do? Of course, there are bodies, organisations, the government, relief workers, regulations, and so on that will handle the physical side of the calamity but are you mentally prepared? Less and less we are able to deal with unexpected occurrences. We tend to think that what is, will exist eternally. And if then something happens that we didn’t expect, even if it is natural, we blame others for it and aim our frustrations at them. 

That’s more or less what I prophetically wrote six years ago in my blog “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”. Indeed, prophetically, for it is what we see now: A pandemic has broken out and many people mentally panic, because they no longer know how to deal with an event like this. Government and virologists are blamed for the consequences of the pandemic, they are accused of evil intentions and they are even physically threatened. Others think that a conspiracy is the cause of the pandemic: The coronavirus has been spread on purpose, they say, for what reason ever. Even Bill Gates is mentioned as one of the perpetrators. However, the simplest explanation of the present calamity is reasoned away by (too) many people, since they can no longer mentally grasp it: They cannot understand that the Covid-19 pandemic is a natural phenomenon and that it has a natural origin. Therefore, it is important that seasonal rhythms and other dependencies on nature keep existing, for they show us that we still are a part of nature, anyhow and despite all scientific progress. So they prepare us mentally for calamities. “All things have their season”, as Montaigne taught us. 

Sources
- Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, Book II, chapter XXVIII, “All things have their season”, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#2HCH0049
- Weg, Henk bij de, “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html
- Weg, Henk bij de, Rondom Montaigne. The Hague: Uitgeverij U2pi, 2019.

Who I am

In my blogs, I have often written about the problem of personal identity. Most times I have written about it from the perspective of analytical philosophy. In this branch of philosophy the main question then is what makes a person an entity of its own. This leads to questions like “What makes me the same person as the person I was five, ten, twenty, fifty … years ago?”; “What happens with me when I am teletransported to another planet?”; “What happens to a person when her brain is swapped with the brain of another person?” This problem of identity is especially a continuity problem: The problem which makes me as I am now continuous with the person who I was in the past, and what separates me from other persons. However, there are different perspectives to discuss the question of a person’s identity, and I think that the continuity problem is the last one most people – non-philosophers – will think of when we bring up the problem of personal identity. When we ask questions about a person’s identity, I think that most people want to know who they are in relation to others. I think that most people are not interested in continuity problems and the like but want to know what characterizes a person and what makes him or her different from other persons as an individual. Therefore, it is not surprising that Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, discusses the question from just this perspective. Because I find her view on personal identity quite interesting and important, I want to give it some attention in this blog.
Before doing so, I want to present first an important aspect of the social theory of George Herbert Mead, namely his famous distinction between Self, I and Me. The “Self”, which Mead also calls the “generalized other”, comprises, briefly, the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to toward him or her and toward one another in what they do. The “I” is the response of the person to the attitudes of the others leading to a self-image, and the “Me” consists of the attitudes of others toward the person as seen by him or herself. We can also say that the “I” is the person for himself as a subject and the “Me” is the self for this person as an object.
What does this mean for Heinrich’s view on a person’s identity? In most identity discussions a distinction is made between the person him or herself on the one hand and society (“the others”) on the other hand. In this way we can distinguish a “personal identity”, i.e. the way a person sees him or herself (the subjective view on identity) and a “social identity”, which is the way society or others see you (the objective view on identity). For instance, for you your painting is not more than daubing on a canvass, but for others you are a real artist. Some views on a person’s identity take one of these two conceptions as the “real” identity a person has (unidimensional views), other views stress the relationship between the personal identity and the social identity (bidimensional views).
What is lacking in such conceptions, so Heinich, is Mead’s idea that the relationship person-society has three aspects. It involves not only an I versus an Other (Self) but also a Me, so an I as seen by the other according to the I. It was Erving Goffman, she says, who has applied Mead’s idea to the conception of identity: Goffman replaces the bidimensional view on identity in which “personal identity” opposes “social identity” – referring to the I and the Self respectively – by a tridimensional view by adding a third category: the “identity for yourself”. While the social identity still refers to the Self, now the personal identity refers to the Me and the new category of identity for yourself refers to the I. In short:
- social identity: the way others see you (1)
- identity for yourself: the way you see yourself (2)
- personal identity: the way you think that others see you (3).
In this view on a person’s identity all three aspects put forward by Mead are important. Such a tridimensional view has big advantages on the ordinary unidimensional and bidimensional views, so Heinich. By adding (3) and by taking account of all three aspects together, one can see how the social identity reflects itself in the perception one has of oneself. Moreover, for the person him or herself there is a gap between the objective social view of who s/he is and his/her subjective self-image and now this gap is filled by the third category of personal identity. Besides, if one attaches the labels “designation”, “autoperception” and “presentation” to the types of identity just given (in the order mentioned), than we have strong instruments to analyse how people present themselves in society and how they try to manipulate others by their presentation, and to see how a person’s autoperception develops influenced by the designation of the identity by others and the other way round.

Sources
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972; esp. ch. 5.
- Heinich, Nathalie, Ce que n’est pas l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2018; esp ch. 5.
- Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 (1934).

Sorts of mistakes

For one reason or another I find the following example by Elisabeth Anscombe in her Intention intriguing. It’s about a shopper and a detective. Maybe, you are also fascinated by it, so here it is: A man is going around with a shopping list that says what he is to buy. A detective follows him and makes a list of what the man buys. I think that we can say at least three things about this example, which are related, though.
1) Following Anscombe, we can say that the shopper’s list describes his intention, or alternatively it is an order that the shopper executes (maybe his wife made the list). Even if the list is an order, we can see it as an expression of the shopper’s intention, for it describes what he wants to do when going around. However, the detective observes the shopper, so for him his list is a record of what the shopper has bought. We can say that the shopper’s list contains his first-person perspective on what he is doing, while the detective’s list describes what the shopper does from a third-person perspective.
2) Let’s suppose now that the shopper or the detective makes a mistake. By mistake the shopper buys butter instead of margarine, as his list says. Or by mistake the detective notes down “butter”, for the shopper bought margarine. What is the difference? Since the shopper’s list is meant to direct his actions, he made a mistake in performance by buying butter, since he didn’t perform what he intended to do. However, the detective’s list is meant to record what the shopper did and by writing “butter” instead of “margarine” his list has become inaccurate. Here we see two sorts of mistakes that you can make when acting: mistakes in performance and inaccuracy. In the first case the list is good but the mistake is in what the shopper did. In the second case, the list is not true to the facts.
3) However, when we look at the shopper only, there are more kinds of mistakes he can make, so that his list and what he buys diverge:
a) There is a mistake in the construction of the list: One or more items on the list cannot be bought in the town where the man is shopping. They don’t sell cowpeas there, for instance. Here we have another sort of mistake you can make: A mistake of judgment
b) The shopper changes his mind because in the end he thinks that butter tastes better than margarine in the cake he is going to bake. Here there is no mistake in the proper sense, except then that shopper behaved against what the list said to buy or that he misjudged what should be on the list. Actually, this is also a kind of mistake of judgment
c) The shopper simply doesn’t buy what is on the list, for instance because he forgot to buy an item. We can call this mistake “carelessness”, or what you like. 

Especially the mistakes given under 3) are not unrelated to what I wrote in my blog last week, as Schwenkler makes clear. Let’s look at the ways a person can fail to perform an intention:
- A person fails to act because s/he cannot act (3a). This is in line with the soldier in my example last week who couldn’t clench his teeth because his teeth were false.
- A person changes his/her intention or expresses an opposing intention (3b). This is in line with a soldier who refuses to obey an order or a commander who gives an opposing order.
- A person simply fails or is failing to act (3c). This is in line with a soldier who fails to act as ordered. 

There are mistakes and mistakes, but making mistakes is what humans do, anyway. 

Sources
- G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976 (my edition); § 32.
- Schwenkler, John, Anscombe’s Intention. A Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp. 111-114.

Contradiction and contrariety

It seems so simple: The opposite of yes is no; of doing is not doing. However, I came to realize that matters are more complicated when I recently reread Elisabeth Anscombe’s Intention and read John Schwenkler’s guide to this book. Anscombe’s Intention is one of the most influential books in analytical philosophy. I have bought it already many years ago. It’s a little book with less than hundred pages but it is full of ideas. Anscombe was a student and friend of Wittgenstein and so it is not surprising that Intention has been written in a Wittgensteinian style. Anscombe was also one of the executors of Wittgenstein’s literary legacy. Enough reason to reread Anscombe’s book. It’s a pity that in my blogs I can discuss only some aspects. Here I want to write about contradiction and contrariety.
Take this example, also used by Anscombe: A man is operating a pump in order to replenish the water supply of a house. What is the opposite of this action? The first answer that probably comes to your mind is not pumping: The man does nothing. However, suppose that there is a hole in the pipe leading from the pump to the house. The man doesn’t know and keeps pumping (but so doing he isn’t replenishing the water supply). Can we say then that this is the same as doing nothing (not pumping) and that pumping without the intended effect is opposite to pumping with the intended effect? I think that this cannot be true.
Take now this example used by Anscombe, which she had read in a newspaper: “A certain soldier was court-martialled (or something of the sort) for insubordinate behaviour. He had, it seems, been ‘abusive’ at his medical examination. The examining doctor had told him to clench his teeth; whereupon he took them out, handed them to the doctor and said ‘You clench them’.” (§ 31). The soldier was court-martialled because he had refused an order: Not executing the order is considered here the same as refusing the order. But what if it is impossible to do what you are ordered to do? Apparently the soldier had thought (and in a sense he was right): “My teeth are false, so I cannot clench my teeth, for I don’t have them anymore.” Looking that way at the order to clench your teeth, not doing so is opposite to the order in a different way than refusing the order is.
Discussing these examples by Anscombe Schwenkler – following Aristotle – distinguished two kinds of opposition between statements: contradictories and contraries. “In Aristotelian logic”, so Schwenkler, “a pair of statements are contradictories just in case the truth of each entails the falsehood of the other and vice versa; and contraries just in case the truth of each entails the falsehood of the other, but the falsehood of neither entails the other’s truth.” ... A “contradictory pair says precisely that the other member is false. But Aristotelian contraries are opposed as well, as each member of a pair of contraries is such that its truth would entail the falsity of the other …” (pp. 109-110; italics Schwenkler), but I want to add: “though not the other way round”.
With the help of the distinction contradictory-contrary we can understand what went wrong in calling both not pumping and pumping without the intended effect as opposite to pumping, or, taking the other example, why court-martialling the soldier because he should have refused an order resulted from a misunderstanding. If the pumping man says “I am replenishing the house water supply” and you say “You aren’t, but I am going to repair the hole in the pipe”, we have a contradiction. However, if you say, “You aren’t for there is a leak in the pipe”, we have a contrariety. And the same so for the case of the soldier. The contradiction of “Clench your teeth” is “Do not clench your teeth”. That’s what the doctor thought and so he thought that the soldier simply refused to clench his teeth, and that he refused an order. However, the soldier thought: “I cannot clench them. I have no teeth. My teeth are false”, and not clenching his teeth for this reason is not contradictory but contrary to the doctor’s order. You cannot refuse what you cannot do. See here the reason of the misunderstanding between the doctor and the soldier that made that the latter was court-martialled.
There are many cases where the distinction contradiction-contrariety can be relevant. One such a case where the distinction can be meaningfully applied is telling the truth versus lying versus being silent. Another case is doing versus allowing versus doing nothing. 

Sources
- G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976 (my edition).
- Schwenkler, John, Anscombe’s Intention. A Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

When prophecy fails: Trump

When I saw how the American President Trump reacted to his defeat in the presidential elections I had to think of the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. I have written here already more about it, although it was already eight years ago, but, in a nutshell, the theory says that we try to bring our beliefs into line with the facts, when we notice that the facts are not what we originally believed. We call this cognitive dissonance reduction: The gap between our beliefs and the facts is reduced, if not closed.
Cognitive dissonance reduction is a normal and daily phenomenon. You want to buy a certain tool. You think that it costs € 25,-, but in the shop you see that it costs € 40,-. You think that you were wrong and that € 40,- is the real price. Then the gap between belief and fact is closed: your belief is adapted to the fact. However, it is also possible that you think that the shop owner made a mistake or that you can get a reduction of € 15,-. You ask the shop owner, and if it appears that you are right, and if the shop owner makes a new price tag, the fact is adapted to your belief. Now the gap is closed.
Such belief-fact dissonances and then adaptions are normal in life and usually the adaptions are rational. What the belief is and what the fact is is clear, and the one is adapted to the other in a rational manner. However, often it doesn’t happen this way. People don’t always want to give up their beliefs but the facts are adapted, even if it is clear that facts are correct. For example, a smoker hears about the bad effects of smoking and he quits. Nevertheless, it is also possible that he doesn’t believe that smoking is bad for your health and that he thinks that the positive effects prevail, for instance because his grandfather, who was a fervent smoker, has become hundred years old, or which other positive reasons for smoking may come to his mind. Such an irrational adaptation of the facts to the beliefs happens so often and is so striking that the theory of cognitive dissonance reduction has become almost synonymous with a theory that explains this irrationality.
The Leon Festinger et al. famously described in When Prophecy Fails an extreme case of cognitive dissonance reduction in which the gap was closed in a remarkably non-rational way: Members of a small sect thought that the world would be destructed by a flood but that only they would be saved (by a UFO). The believers came together at the pre-determined time and place and waited for the UFO that would save them but nothing happened. Then they thought that there must be a reason that nothing happened, and they came to the conclusion that the world would get a second chance, and they adapted their behaviour by trying to convert the world to their belief so that the world will be saved as yet. In this case the cognitive dissonance is reduced by giving the facts a new interpretation (or the facts are changed, if you like), although it would have been rational to give up the belief.
Such an extreme irrational adaption of the facts if a belief fails especially happens if
1) The belief is a very deep conviction.
2) The belief is supported by relevant actions.
3) Events can unequivocally refute the belief.
4) Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and is recognized by the believer.
5) The individual believer is supported by others.
And that’s what we see in the case of Trump’s defeat. Of course, it’s normal that in elections candidates say that they’ll win, but (1) from everything that Trump said and did during his campaign and after the elections it is clear that he didn’t only say that he would win, but that he was 100% convinced that he would win. (2) Moreover, Trump did everything he could to win the elections and (5) there were many people who actively supported him. He would (3,4) have failed if the election result showed that his opponent would be the winner.
Normally participants in elections know that it is possible that they will not win, even if the pre-election polls say that they will. In the end, the voters determine who wins and not the convictions of the candidates. A candidate who has lost may be disappointed but s/he knows that losing is in the game and it’s usual to congratulate your winning opponent. The facts are what the facts are.
Not so for Pres. Trump. Because the facts were not in accordance with his conviction that he would win, only one thing could be the case: Not his conviction was false but there was something wrong with the facts: The facts (the elections results) were fake and had been falsified, even though there was not any reason to think so. Who were the frauds? His opponent and his supporters, of course: the Democrats. Trump had been cheated. The votes (in some states) must be recount, so he says. Of course, it’s not unusual to ask for a recount in case of a close election result; you never know whether mistakes have been made. But that’s not the essence in Trump’s case. For him it’s so that if the facts don’t match his conviction, the gap between them must be closed by changing the facts and not be changing the conviction. Only then the cognitive dissonance will have been reduced for him.

Sources

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails and my blogs dated 31 December 2012 and 15 December 2014.

Man, Nature and Pandemics

In my blog last week I have explained that the coronavirus and the present pandemic are not man-made but have a natural origin. Pandemics are of all times and the present pandemic is no exception. Nevertheless this pandemic is man-made in a sense. No, I’ll not go back on what I wrote last week. But I think that man is responsible and increasingly responsible for the circumstances that can make diseases and pandemics happen. By destroying nature and by causing air pollution and global warming, man has changed – no has impoverished – the natural environment that way that viruses and bacteria have got more chance to spread, leading to local and global epidemics. To mention a few recent infectious diseases that have their origins in the impact of man on nature and in a too narrow relationship between man and nature and that have become epidemic, if not pandemic: Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), the West Nile virus and the Zika virus. They have all come from animals and crossed from animals to humans. Here are a few factors that make that infectious diseases can easier cross from animals to man than they did in the past. In one way or another these factors are caused by man:
- Decreasing biodiversity, especially a decreasing number of animal species.
- Destruction of nature, like wild fires ravaging rainforests. For instance, in Brazil malaria gets a chance where rainforest has been burnt down.
- Destruction of their natural habitats makes wild animals looking for places to live nearer to humans. Farming, mining and housing, which as such already lead to destruction of nature, bring men from their side in closer contacts with wild animals.
- Eating bush meat. This probably made that the coronavirus crossed over to humans.
- Intensively animal keeping for meat consumption, for the dairy industry, for animal products, etc. Moreover, animals kept for these reasons must be traded, and animal transport and animal markets are known for their contribution to the spread of infectious diseases.
- Global warming, which changes the habitats of animals and makes them more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
These are a few factors that affect the spread of viruses and make it more likely that they jump from animals to humans. According to Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, our immediate priority is to protect people from the coronavirus and prevent its spread. “But our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss,” so Andersen. “Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.
One of the problems to prevent the origin and spread of viruses is in the mind of man. Man sees man as a civilized being distinct form nature. However, this is quite Cartesian, with Descartes’s distinction mind versus body replaced by the distinction man versus nature. But man and nature are not distinct. The idea that man and nature are distinct “gives humans a central role in life on Earth, and with that, the possibility to control this life. The corona crisis provides insight into the flaws of these apparent contradictions,” so the website of Dasym. And then: “Even before modern man, there was no harmonious natural order, the earth has always been an inhospitable place where live organisms are continuously exposed to disease, parasites and natural disasters. But modern man mostly considered himself to be separate from nature and romanticized living in harmony with it.” Man must realize that man must not live against nature but with nature, for man belongs to nature and is nothing but an animal of a kind, as I explained in my last blog. Man is not simply a civilized being but a civilized animal. Man is nature. Only if we realize this and live according to this, we can possibly prevent new pandemics. 

Sources
- Benton, Tim; Richard Anthony Kok; Gitika Bhardwaj, “Coronavirus Crisis: Exploring the Human Impact on Nature”, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-exploring-human-impact-nature
- Carrington, Damian, “Coronavirus: ‘Nature is sending us a message’, says UN environment chief”, 25 Mar 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-nature-is-sending-us-a-message-says-un-environment-chief
- Dasym, “Our post-corona relationship to nature”, 23 April , 2020, https://www.dasym.com/our-post-corona-relationship-to-nature/
- Taylor, L.H.; S.H. Latham; M.E. Woolhouse, “Risk factors for human disease emergence”, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11516376/

Man, Covid-19 and Nature

What surprises me again and again is that so many smart people, who should have known better, think that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 [= coronavirus disease 2019] is man-made and that it is intentionally spread by man. Recently yet I heard the statement: Because the coronavirus has spread all over the world, it must be so that it has been made by man. Without any further explanation. Besides that this statement as such is a clear case of false reasoning (see my blog False reasoning in Covid-19 times (and not only then) ), also its contents is surprising: As if it isn’t so that pandemics are of all times. A simple Internet search will give you a long list of pandemics that have plagued man through the ages. Let me pick some from a list in the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Notable_outbreaks):
- Plague of Justinian (541-750 AD). The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague started in Egypt and reached Constantinople the following spring, killing … 10,000 a day at its height, and perhaps 40% of the city's inhabitants. Altogether the plague killed a quarter to half the human population of the known world. It halved Europe’s population between 550 AD and 700 AD
- Black Death (1331-1353), causing 75-200 million of deaths worldwide. Starting in Asia, the disease reached the Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 and killed an estimated 20-30 million Europeans in six years; a third of the total population, and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas. It was the first of a cycle of European plague epidemics that continued until the 18th century. There were more than 100 plague epidemics in Europe during this period.
- Third plague pandemic (1855). Starting in China, it spread into India, where 10 million people died. It reached also North America and, today, sporadic cases of plague still occur in the western United States.
- And not to forget: The Spanish flu pandemic that begun in 1918 in the USA (despite its name) and was “brought” by American troops fighting in the First World War to Europe. This flu infected 500 million people around the world, killing 20-100 million, especially young adults.
These are only a few examples of the many pandemics that have scourged humanity. Each pandemic had its own characteristics, but they have at least one characteristic in common: They had all a natural cause. And why would it now be different, also because there are good explanations about the natural origin of Covid-19? (see note below)
This being said, one wonders why so many people think that the coronavirus has been intentionally made and spread by man. Although it is mere speculation what I am going to say now (in the sense that I think that I cannot base my view on scientific investigations), I guess that one major reason is the alienation of man from nature. Most men today live in a civilized environment. Here I mean “civilized” as distinguished from natural. Everything around man is apparently man-made. Currently more than half of the world population lives in urban areas where most what you see has been artificially been made by men. This makes that more than ever before man is dependent on man and not so much on nature. Moreover, when people these days think of viruses, they don’t think of some nasty disease. No, what they think of are the viruses in their computers, and one thing that computer viruses have in common is that they are man-made and that they are intentionally spread by evil people. Isn’t it strange then that many people tend to think that also the coronavirus must have been made and spread by evil men? In these days and age many men are that way estranged from nature that they cannot imagine that it is nature – like in older days – that is responsible (in a neutral, causal sense) for the origin and spread of the germs of a disease. It’s true that also in the past there were all kinds of “explanations” for calamities that scourged man (for instance that they were punishments from God). However, in these days that man has become less and less dependent on nature and has become more and more civilized, in the sense that man has become increasingly dependent on what has been made by man, and in these days that men live farther away from nature than ever before, it seems almost obvious that everything that happens to man must be man-made and man-caused, including a nasty disease like Covid-19. But even though man is a civilized being through and through, man is and remains a natural being in the first place: A being made of natural stuff, “constructed” by nature from natural materials. Man is a civilized animal. And that’s why man will always be prone to what nature has in store for us, including a nasty virus like SARS-CoV-2, popular known as the coronavirus. 

Note
See for example https://globalhealthnewswire.com/viruses-vaccines/2020/03/17/the-covid-19-coronavirus-epidemic-has-a-natural-origin-scientists-say

Are you happier when you are rich?

Can money make you happy? A common saying says that it doesn’t. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have some, and not only a little bit but enough to satisfy your basic needs and a little bit more. It makes you happy, if you haven’t only enough to eat and have a decent house, but also if you can – depending on your personal preferences – go to concerts, travel abroad, buy a lot of books etc. In this sense money makes you happy, for you need money in order to be able to do such things. Indeed, as Daniel Kahneman tells us in his Thinking, Fast and Slow: “An analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 Americans,” definitively makes clear “that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life-satisfaction”, although at a certain level of income your feeling of well-being levels off. But below that level, money will certainly make you happier.
This seems in line with what Richard Easterlin discovered. Easterlin, who is considered to be the first happiness economist, studied in the 1970s the relation between economic welfare and standard of living. His results were:
1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
Then you would think that people in rich countries are happier than those in poor countries. Not true, so Easterlin, for he also discovered that
2) rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
And also, which is actually a variation on the just mentioned levelling off thesis:
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.
Since these three points together seem contradictory, they are called the Easterlin Paradox.
Actually it is so, according to Easterlin, that happiness – certainly economic happiness – is relative and your feeling of (economic) happiness is related to what people around you have. So, if you become richer but everybody around you as well, your position in relation to those around you doesn’t change and so your feeling of happiness remains the same (compare also point 3 above). Or (I took this example from Geoff Riley): Faced with this choice what would you rather have: You get £5,000 and a friend gets £3,000 or you get £10,000 and a friend gets £15,000? You feel happier in the first case, so Easterlin.
Since Easterlin published his study in 1974, many other researchers have discussed the thesis and also many presented results that seem to refute the paradox. Nevertheless, yet in 2017 Easterlin maintained his original view and stated (quoted from Agarwal; see sources below) “that the ‘long-term trends in growth rates of happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related.’ He believes that the criticism towards the Easterlin Paradox is misguided and detractors ‘omit available data, overlook problems of data comparability, err in the measurement of economic growth, or, most importantly, fail to focus on long-term rather than short-term growth rates.’ ”
So far so good, and here I cannot judge who is right and who isn’t. The Easterlin paradox sounds interesting and there can be some truth in it. Nevertheless, I have some questions. Point 1 of the paradox says that within a society rich people tend to be much happier than poor people, while point 2 says that rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much). Then I would conclude that each country is more or less as happy as each other country, and if you live in a poor country you don’t need to compare your happiness with the happiness of the rich in the rich countries: an average happy person in a poor country is as happy as an average happy person in a rich country; there is no need to feel miserable because the average happy person in the rich country is, for instance, ten times or even 25 times richer than you in the poor country. Only the relative happiness counts, and average happiness is the same everywhere in the world in every country (and the same so for those 10, 20, 30 … % below or above the average happiness; etc.).
I have my doubts. Take for instance the ranking of happiness by country in the World Happiness Report 2019, Figure 2.7. In the first place you can see there that countries do differ in the degree of happiness and also that on average the richer countries are happier than the poor countries. The ranking gives the results of 156 countries and the top happiest countries in the world are Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands (which belong to the richest countries in the world), and at the other end you find Rwanda, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Central African Republic and South Sudan (which are among the poorest countries). And why would all those economic migrants try to come to Europe and North America, if they would be happy where they live? I guess that on average people are happier if they are richer (even if this may level off above a certain income level) and that your feeling of (un)happiness is not limited by international borders.

 Sources
- Agarwal, Prateek, “The Easterlin Paradox”, https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/easterlin-paradox/
- Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books, 2012; pp. 396-397
- Riley, Geoff, “Q&A: What is the Easterlin Paradox?”, https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/qa-what-is-the-easterlin-paradox. 1st April 2009
- World Happiness Report: John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shun Wang, Chapter 2: Changing World Happiness, https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/changing-world-happiness/ (20 March 2019)

Meaning

In my last blog I referred to my distinction meaning 1 / meaning 0 which I had used in older blogs. However, now I realize that I have never well explained here this important distinction. Therefore, let me do this now.
Let me repeat Stoutland’s example of the person who nods her head, used last week. We can take this movement sometimes as just physical (the person nods because she is falling asleep) and sometimes as an action (the person greets someone). But why is it sometimes just physical and sometimes an action? This becomes clear when we ask the person why she nodded. If she says, for instance, that she wanted to greet a friend, we call it an action. But if she nodded while falling asleep, she cannot give a reason for it: the nodding movement happened to her. We can say it also this way: the nodding of greeting, unlike the nodding of falling asleep, has a meaning for the agent.
However, the idea that physical data, unlike mental data, don’t have a meaning cannot be upheld. Like for instance Mary Hesse showed, every empirical assertion, also pure descriptions of observations, contain interpretations ‘in terms of some general view of the world or other ... There are no stable observational descriptions, whether of sense data, or protocol sentences, or “ordinary language”, in which the empirical reference of science can be directly captured’. It is true also for natural science that ‘what counts as facts are constituted by what the theory says about their interrelations with one another. … [M]eanings in natural science are determined by theory’ (Hesse 1980, 172-173). So both natural data, like the nodding of a person falling asleep, and mental phenomena, like the nodding of greeting, have a meaning. They don’t differ in this respect. However, Hesse neglects here that there really is a difference between the meanings we give to physical (natural) phenomena and those we give to mental phenomena: Mental phenomena are given meaning by the agent him or herself; physical phenomena get their meanings from us from the outside. Both the agent and the onlooker from the outside, like a scientist, interpret what an agent does. But as Anthony Giddens made clear, the (scientific) interpretation from the outside is double: the onlooker has to reckon with both with the way s/he sees what the agent does and with the way the agent him or herself sees it. This made Habermas distinguish two levels of meaning: level 1 and level 0. Level 1 is the level all sciences – and onlookers from the outside in general – are faced with when interpreting their objects. Moreover, there is a level 0 that is characteristic for those sciences that study objects that has been given a meaning by the people themselves, such as a nodding that the agent sees as a greeting (Habermas 1982, 162-163). This insight made me distinguish two kinds of meaning: meaning 1 and meaning 0. Meaning 1 is the meaning used on level 1. It is the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character. It refers to the theoretical interpretation of reality by the scientist in a scientific theory. Meaning 0 is the meaning on the underlying level 0. It refers to the meaning the people themselves who make up social reality give to their own reality, experiences and doings. It refers to the interpretation of their own lived reality. The existence of this double meaning from the scientist’s perspective does not imply, however, that the interpretation of reality by the people themselves is different in character from the theoretical interpretation of it by the scientist. It says only that the interpretations of the social reality by the agents themselves are single and that those by the scientist are double.
Since the matter is complicated, I want to illustrate the difference between both kinds of meaning yet with the help of the example of studying grammar as grammarians do. As native speakers of a language, we have in our heads a (usually implicit) knowledge of what are correct and incorrect sentences, forms, etc. in our language. We can call this our ‘implicit grammar’. Grammarians try to make this knowledge explicit and to systemise it. The ‘explicit grammar’ so made seems to be a reflection of our implicit grammar. In a certain sense it is but there are differences. The explicit grammar has been formulated in terms and rules native speakers will never use as such. For example, such a grammar distinguishes between substantives and adjectives and it indicates when inversion is applied, things native speakers usually are not aware of when they speak. And though it is correct to say that the explicit grammar is a reflection of the implicit one, the reverse is not true. If a native speaker no longer keeps to the current grammar and more native speakers begin to speak in the same deviant way, after some time we no longer say that these speakers make grammatical mistakes but that the language has been changed. If, on the other hand, the explicit grammar does not correctly reflect the implicit grammar, the language of the native speakers does not change, even if the grammarians maintain that they have described it correctly. If the native speaker does not want to conform to the rules of the explicit grammar, then the latter just describes the implicit grammar in a wrong way and it must be adapted. The language as spoken by the people themselves, so the implicit grammar, is the reality that patterns the explicit grammar. In the same way we can say: The way agents see their actions is the reality that patterns the way onlookers must conceive these actions.
The upshot is that interpretations from the outside, including scientific interpretations, always depend on the agent’s interpretations if we want to investigate what people do. If we don’t see this, in the end scientific explanations of what people do cannot be more than physical and chemical explanations of material stuff labelled “man” or “society”. 

Sources
- Giddens, Anthony, Studies in social and political theory, London: Hutchinson of London, 1977.
- Habermas, Jürgen, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
- Hesse, Mary, Revolutions and reconstructions in the philosophy of science, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980.
Weg, Henk bij de, “The commonsense conception and its relation to philosophy”, Philosophical Explorations, 2001/1, pp. 17-30.

What is an action?

If “in fact … the most essential part of the person is constituted by her actions”, as I maintained, with Korsgaard, in my last blog, what then is an action? When do we say that what constitutes us is not just a movement of our limbs, so a piece of behaviour, but something that we do? In order to make this clear I must first explain in what respect a simple bodily movement is different from an action. Now it is so that in my last blog I mentioned the characteristics of an action: It is guided by perception; it is guided by an intention; and the action is attributable to you. However, this needs further explanation, for isn’t it so that also behaviour is guided by a kind of experience in the sense that most behaviour not just happens but that it is a reaction to what happens to the behaving body or to what happens in its environment? And isn’t it so that often behaviour has a purpose and that it can – no must – be ascribed to a body for how else can we say that a body performs a piece of behaviour?
In order to make clear what the difference between an action and a piece of behaviour is, I take an extreme example. It’s extreme in the sense that the behaviour involved is not guided by a perception, anyhow, and that it has no apparent aim. I got this example from Frederick Stoutland (1976). We see a man nodding his head. Why does he nod? The simplest way to know is to ask him. If the man intentionally nodded his head, for example because he was greeting someone, he can tell you. However, if he nodded his head unknowingly, for example because he was falling asleep, he cannot give you a reason. In the first case we say that he performed an action and in the second case we say that what he did happened to him. But, alternatively, we can also say that in the first case the action had an intention for the man: The greeting is a greeting because the nodding man himself sees it as a greeting. However, if he nods his head when he is falling asleep, the nodding has not an intention for him. His head just moved and not more than that. In other words, in the first case the man who nodded can give it a sense, while he cannot when he nods while he is falling asleep. Only if the performer of a deed him or herself can give a sense to what s/he does, s/he performs an action; if s/he cannot, it is behaviour.
The distinction action-behaviour just described looks rather Cartesian, but in my PhD thesis I have explained that it isn’t. Here I want to ignore this problem. (You can also find some further explanation in my blog “Two levels of reality” and in other blogs (enter “meaning 1” or “meaning 0” in the search engine of my blog)). Here I want to concentrate on the significance of the distinction for the present problem. It’s true that there are pieces of behaviour that are guided by a perception and by an intention and that are – of course – performed by someone. For example (an example by Davidson), you come home at night and turn the light on and by doing so you warn a thief in another room of your house. Even though warning the thief is what you did by an intentional action (turning the light on) it’s not what you intentionally did, so it’s not your action (usually we call it a consequence of your action turning the light on). Only your doings that you yourself can give a sense (in the way described above) constitute you as a person. Doings that are merely pieces of behaviour and cannot be interpreted in this way do not constitute you as a person or contribute to your further development as a person (which doesn’t mean, of course, that they are not important for you (they can contribute to your animalistic side, for instance). I act so I am, because I can tell what I do.

Sources
- Davidson, Donald, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”, in: Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 3-20.
- Stoutland, Frederick, “The causal theory of action”, in: Juha Manninen and Raimo Tuomela (eds.), Essays on explanation and understanding. Dordrecht: Reidel,1976; pp. 271‑304.
- Weg, Henk bij de, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1996; chapter IV.

New photo book

 

My new photo book "Van Kinderdijk tot Kampen. Foto's met pinhole camera" - English: From Kinderdijk to Kampen. Photos with pinhole camera" The texts are in English and Dutch, including an explanation of the pinhole camera. The book contains 47 photos that I have taken for my newest project of pinhole camera pictures. I have followed the Lek river, starting in Kinderdijk (you know, the site with those famous Dutch windmills) and then followed the Rhine and IJssel till I reached the old Hansa town of Kampen. The photos show the changing landscapes that you pass when you follow this route. By capturing these landscapes with a pinhole camera, I got the romantic and sometimes surreal images of the heart of the Low Countries that you will find in this book. Already on the photo on the book cover above (the windmills of Kinderdijk) you can see some special features of pinhole camera pictures. You can see the wings of some windmills turning around. You can see the wind moving the grass and plants in the foreground. The clouds are brighter than in normal landscape pictures. And in the left upper corner you can even see the sun rays!

16 photos of this book will be exhibited in the library in Wageningen, from 3-30 October 2020 (Stationsstraat 2, 6701 AM Wageningen). Click here for more information about this exhibition (in Dutch).

The book is for sale for 29,95 euros + postage & package. You can order the book via this website or via my main website or Dutch photo website or by sending an e-mail to blog@bijdeweg.nl. 

I act so I am

By far my most successful blog is “I act, therefore I am”, written about twelve years ago. It has been read already more than 16,000 times, while my second successful blog (“By accident” and “by mistake”) has been read “only” 5,000 times. In the blog “I act, therefore I am” I defend the view that, unlike what Descartes says, it is not our thinking that is fundamental for us but that our acting is. Or as Christine M. Korsgaard says in her book Self-Constitution: “[A]ction is self-constitution. … [W]e human beings constitute our own personal or practical identities … through action itself” (p. 45). However, when I reread this blog now after so many years, I find it quite cryptical, but that regards the way I worded my view, not the view itself.
Take for instance a brain in a vat. It’s an example used by several philosophers in order to substantiate their views. Sometimes it is also used by me, but then in order to refute such views. Some philosophers (to start with John Locke) think that actually my body is not important for my personality. My question is then: So why have one? It would be enough to be a brain in a vat in order to exist. However, if you would be not more than a thinking brain in a vat that couldn’t express itself in some way, what would you be then? A minimal way to express yourself, even if it is only with the help of others or via others, is required or otherwise you cannot exist. And even a minimal way of expressing yourself is a way of acting. For even a minimal expressing of yourself, anyway, has the characteristics of an action: It is guided by perception (the mental stuff put into your brain by the person responsible for keeping you there as a brain in a vat plus your memories from the time before you were in this deplorable situation); the expression is guided by an intention; and the expression is yours, it is “attributable to you”, as philosophers say. And the body? Haven’t I always stressed in my blogs that a person needs a body? With the exception of the stuff that makes up the brain, you as a brain in a vat doesn’t have a real body, indeed, but just as many people have artificial limbs, the person who notes your expressions and executes them functions as your (artificial) body. In this way, we can defend that even a minimal you as a brain in a vat is constituted by your actions, as long as you can express yourself. If not, there is no way to say that you exist. Since already a self-expressing brain in a vat is constituted by his or her expressions, this is even more so for a more or less “normal” person.
I could give more philosophical reasons for my thesis, but as important is that there are also psychological reasons that man is constituted by his or her actions. I’ll give an example. You want to make a tour in the countryside and so you buy a day-ticket for a bus and let yourself drive around. Or, alternatively, you make a tour by bike or walking. Psychological investigations say that in such situations you see more and remember by far better what you have seen when you go by bike or walk than when you do a bus tour, for when you cycle or walk you are active, while in the bus you just sit down and are mainly passive.
Only by acting you exist. However, it is not only so that you have become what you are by acting, in fact your acting is what constitutes you and not your thinking does, as Descartes stated. If you don’t act (in the broadest sense), you are not. Or as Korsgaard says (p. 100): “The intimate connection between person and action does not rest in the fact that action is caused by the most essential part of the person, but rather in the fact that the most essential part of the person is constituted by her actions.” 

Sources
- My blog “I act, therefore I am”, http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-act-therefore-i-am.html

- My blog “ ‘By accident’ and ‘by mistake,’ ”, http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2009/07/by-accident-and-by-mistake.html
- Korsgaard, Christine M, Self-Constitution. Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
- O’Mara, Shane, In praise of walking. London: The Bodley Head, 2019

False reasoning in Covid-19 times (and not only then)

What surprises me a lot in these days of Covid-19 is that so many people stick to false views that allegedly should explain the origin of the virus. Even highly intelligent friends of mine with a university education adhere to so-called conspiracy theories, for instance.
One of the most important fallacies used when “explaining” the origin and spread of Covid-19 is the false cause fallacy. This occurs when “the link between premises and conclusion depends on some imagined causal connection that probably does not exist” (see Source below, p. 342). There are three different types of this fallacy:

- Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for: after this, so because of this).

- Cum hoc ergo propter hoc ((Latin for: with this so because of this).

- Ignoring a common cause.

The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy involves that “one argues that a causal relationship exists between A and B mainly because A happened before B” (id. p. 343). For instance this fallacy happens (Manninen’s example) when athletes attribute winning a race to an article of clothing they wore during the event. The cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy involves assuming “a causal relationship between two events [simply] because they occurred simultaneously” (id. p. 335). For instance, a door bangs shut and at the same moment you hear a bang outdoors. Your automatic reaction may be that the one caused the other, but normally there is no connection. The ignoring a common cause fallacy “occurs when one notices a constant correlation between A and B and assumes that A caused B (or vice versa) while ignoring that there is a third variable, C, that causes both and therefore accounts for the correlation” (id. p. 338). For instance, an example I learned when studying sociology: In the countryside more babies are born than in cities, while there are also more storks in the countryside than in cities. Of course, this doesn’t happen because storks bring the babies to the parents, as fairy tales say. My teachers didn’t tell what the common cause was, but if there is it must be a factor that can be typified as “countryside-city difference”.
You find the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy especially in politics and “so” also in Covid-19 discussions, which often are political. But actually this is not important. What is important is the false reasoning in these types of fallacies namely that correlations are interpreted as causal connections without any further proof but only for the reason that two events occur together.
We often see such unsound reasoning in popular Covid-19 theories. It’s true that in Wuhan, where the pandemic started, there is an institute that studies viruses, and viruses can escape from laboratories, indeed. However, in order to prove that this virus comes from this laboratory it must be explained how the virus escaped and spread and so far nobody has been able to do so. Or take the view that Bill Gates is the puppet player behind the Covid-19 scenarios to control the world. Until now I haven’t heard any sound reasoning that makes true how Bill Gates does this. The only thing I see is that Bill Gates is an influential person (indeed!) and that he has a big influence in the international health world by sponsoring the WHO and other organisations. Nobody has made clear by now what’s wrong with this and how he uses his impact to the detriment of others. It looks like the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. If a doctor sees many Covid-19 patients, it doesn’t mean that he made them ill …
Recently I read a suggestive article in a paper published by an “antivirus movement”. It stated that organisations like the WHO, the Rockefeller Foundation or persons like Bill Gates have developed or supported scenarios how to control people in order to stop a pandemic and how to keep controlling them after the pandemic has gone. It was also the WHO that declared that there is a pandemic going on. “Big organisations and do-gooder Bill Gates promise [sic] us a big pandemic already for years. And they got it. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared earlier this year Covid-19 to be a pandemic.” Now I must admit that it’s my interpretation but what this article suggests to me is that the WHO etc. are the cause of the misery that now rules the world. However, isn’t it just reasonable to develop scenarios of what might happen in case of …? And declaring the Covid-19 to be a pandemic is nothing else than stating how worrying the situation is.
I think that what the WHO etc. do can also be interpreted in a different way. You can read such scenarios as possible ways to restrict people in their doings in order to keep a virus under control (and if you are in bad faith how to oppress people). However, you can also read these scenarios and the measures proposed as what they consider the best thing to do in order to suppress a nasty virus. Of course, it’s no problem to discuss whether the proposed measures against the pandemic are correct. Many politicians have seen already that at least some measures taken were not the right ones. But when you want to solve a problem like Covid-19 you must not simply put facts (if they are facts) together and correlate them in the sense of simply saying that they occur together (and nothing more than that). What you must do is showing how such facts are causally connected. Otherwise we’ll never get rid of the problem and besides of a nasty virus we’ll also have a nasty controversy. 

Source

Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019, chapters 78-80 by Bertha Alvarez Manninen, pp. 335-345.