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.

Do collective intentions exist?

Or : Can you step twice in the same river?

The IJssel near Kampen, Netherlands

A much-discussed question in the philosophy of action is whether collective intentions exist and if so what they would be like. Some philosophers defend the idea that there are shared intentions (like Bratman), but such intentions are literally shared by the individuals who have them: Each individual involved has the idea to do something together and in this way we can call such intentions shared but in the end they are individually owned. It’s the same for so-called joint intentions (Gilbert), which are owned by the individuals who jointly act. Also what others (like Searle) call collective intentions are individual states. Graduates of a business school who agree to strive for a liberal economy during their careers (Searle’s example) are still individuals with the same aim. They are not a group but simply businessmen (or whatever) who work independently from each other. So, all this cannot be what we rightly can take as “collective intention”. On the contrary, when we talk of collective intention the question is whether there can be a kind of intention in the sense that we say that a football club tries to become the national champion. For in this case we ascribe the aim to the team and not so much to the individual players. And we do not say that John or Pete became national champion if the team succeeds, but that the team did or at most we say that John or Pete became champion with the team.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, the central problem can be spelled out as a contradiction between the following two widely accepted claims:
-  Collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim);
-  Collective intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is his or her own (the Individual Ownership Claim).
I gave already an example of the irreducibility claim: We say that the team wants to become champion and not so much that the players want, for isn’t it so that during the season sometimes one or more players leave the team – and may even play then for another team – and are replaced by other players and we still say that the original team wants to become champion? As for the individual ownership claim, generally individual intentions are ascribed to persons, if not to their minds or brains. But where do we locate a collective intention if a team is actually something abstract with a fluid membership? We cannot say that the collective intention is in this or that player or in all players together (for what if someone leaves?), but where then is it?
I think there are several reasons that collective intentions in the sense that they can be ascribed to groups as such do not exist. I have presented already one reason, namely that people can leave or join groups, while this doesn’t influence the collective intention of the group. Generally groups don’t have the same members in the long run, even though they can keep the same goals. Moreover, in a small group one might say that the collective intention is in the heads of John, Mary and Anna, but what about big groups like business concerns? Maybe a company has the aim to maximize profits, but usually the employees only want to earn a decent income (and it is basically difficult to mark off smaller groups from bigger unities). There are more reasons, which I have expounded elsewhere (see my blog dated 27 July 2020), but I think that this is enough to substantiate my view that collective intentions in the right sense do not exist.
If then philosophers think that there is something like collective intentionality, to my mind it is because they confuse levels. By explaining this, let me take the example of a river. A river consists of water and water consists of molecules. So, in the end the molecules make up the river. Nevertheless, when you want to study a river, you are not going to study the behaviour of the molecules, for example by investigating how the separate molecules move from the source of the river to the sea. No, normally rivers are studied in terms of current, fall, erosion, depth of the river, sediment, bed, etc. So, we don’t study rivers in terms of their individual parts (the molecules) but in terms of aggregate concepts; in terms of really collective concepts and not in terms of collective concepts that actually refer to the individual parts that make up the whole. And this is what we must also do if we want to study groups. We must study groups at a group level and individuals at an individual level. There is nothing against speaking of collective intentionality, but if we do we must realize that we are simply using a metaphor, or that we (following Dennett and then Tollefsen) take an intentional stance towards groups: We study groups as if they have intentions, aims, etc. This can be a very useful approach, but we must not think that groups really have intentions, aims, etc.

P.S. All this made me think of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Didn’t he say that you cannot step twice in the same river? However, by saying so Heraclitus confused levels, namely the levels of the river and the water (or molecules), and you can step in a river as often as you like. 

Sources
- My blog “What is a group?”, http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/07/everybody-has-same-intention-but-do.html
- David P. Schweikard, Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Intentionality”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/#WhaColAboColInt
- Deborah Perron Tollefsen, Groups as Agents. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015