The commonsense fallacy

Get up early, when it is yet dark, and go to a place where you have a wide view. Look to the east, and then, yes, you’ll see the sun rise. Or rather that’s the way it seems to you, for actually it is not so that the sun rises, but it is the earth that goes down. The earth rotates on its axis and every time the point where you are turns to the side where the sun is, the sun comes in your field of view. Then it seems to you as if the sun rises, though in fact the sun doesn’t move, but the point where you are “rises”, so to speak, i.e. it moves so that the sun becomes visible. Nowadays, this is what everybody (or most of us) knows. It’s commonsense. That the sun “rises” is merely an old-fashioned way of speaking. Nonetheless, once there was a time that everybody on earth thought that the sun really rises. That it was not a kind of metaphor but that it was a fact. You could even be killed if you dared to assert that it was not. Then it was commonsense that the sun really rises.
What this case illustrates is that commonsense ideas may not be reliable. They are generally accepted but this doesn’t mean that they are true knowledge. They are just views based on how things appear and on what is commonly accepted. However, it’s often important to have reliable knowledge and that’s why we have developed science: a method to get reliable knowledge based on sound reasoning plus ways to test whether statements about possible facts are true. (As you see here, I think that the essence of science is in the method, not in the facts, as many people think). In spite of this it often happens that people say that a statement is true or that something is a fact, merely because it is “commonsense”, or because “everybody knows”, or, as we say in Dutch, because it is a matter of “healthy reasoning”. Such an appeal to commonsense is called the “commonsense fallacy” (CSF), or, as the case may be, an “appeal to the people fallacy” “argument from popularity”, “argument from tradition”, and the like. Although there are slight differences between these fallacies, I treat them here as if they are all varieties of the commonsense fallacy. Of course, commonsense can be true. For example, the scientific explanation of sunrise has become commonsense, as we have seen. Therefore, I must further explain what the commonsense fallacy involves:
Committing the commonsense fallacy is “asserting that your conclusion or facts are just ‘commonsense’ when, in fact, they are not. We must argue as to why we believe something is commonsense if there is any doubt that the belief is not common, rather than just asserting that it is. This is a more specific version of alleged certainty.” (source) Or let me quote a little bit more from the same source:
The logical form of CSF is:
                                        It’s commonsense that X is true.
                                        Therefore, X is true
Example: It's commonsense that if you smack your children, they will stop the bad behaviour. So don't tell me not to hit my kids.
Explanation: What is often accepted as “commonsense” is factually incorrect or otherwise problematic. While hitting your kids may stop their current bad behaviour, the long-term psychological and behavioural negative effects can far outweigh the temporary benefits. Logically speaking, the example simply appeals to “commonsense” rather than makes an attempt at a strong argument. (more examples in this same source)The source of the idea that commonsense is true because it is something that “everybody” knows is the wrong idea that what seems true to you or true to many must be true just for that reason. However, each person has his or her own individual experiences and beliefs, and, in addition, groups of people, if not whole cultures, have often common or equal experiences and beliefs. So, what seems right to one person may not seem right to everyone, and what seems right to one group or even culture may not seem right to others, who belong to other groups or cultures. When one person, group or culture accepts a view that others don’t, it’s usually due to a difference in their views of the world and internalized ideologies rather than an intellectual deficit or incapacity to reason. But so long as beliefs are based simply on commonsense and aren’t supported by evidence, they aren’t reliable. So if an assertion or statement is not more than that and not (implicitly) based on evidence but merely based on an appeal to commonsense, it’s a case of the commonsense fallacy. Beliefs that rely on the ambiguous concept of something being self-evident can change according to personal, group or cultural experiences. (see also here) However, what once was dubious commonsense can become evidence-based commonsense, as the sunrise example shows.

Random quote
Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen. 

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

 

Philosophical jokes

Philosophy is seen as a serious affair and also my blogs are meant to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, philosophers are as human as humans are and they, too, sometimes make jokes: philosophical jokes. Then I don’t mean philosophical views that are meant seriously but ridiculed by other philosophers. For who isn’t a Heideggerian probably will laugh at Heidegger’s statement that “the nothing nothings”? Indeed, this phrase is enough for some students of philosophy not to bother him or herself with what the master has written, though for others it is a deep philosophical, so serious, remark. The latter apparently believe in what is not, or isn’t it so?
Be that as it may (or may not), what I want to present here are “real” philosophical jokes. Now it is so that you’ll understand a joke only and you can laugh about it only, if you know what it is about. However, if it must be explained, it is not funny any longer. This is the more so for philosophical jokes that often are funny only for philosophical insiders. There is no help for that and here I’ll avoid explanations.
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Anyway, the first joke is clear without any philosophical knowledge, although I find it a bit unreal, for which philosopher can allow him or herself to have a driver? (Russell could)
– A renowned philosopher was held in high regard by his driver, who listened in awe as his boss lectured and answered difficult questions about the nature of things and the meaning of life.
Then, one day, the driver approached the philosopher and asked if he was willing to switch roles for just one evening. The philosopher agreed, and, for a while, the driver handled himself remarkably well.
However, when the time came for questions, someone at the back of the room asked him, “Is the epistemological meta-narrative that you seem to espouse compatible with a teleological account of the universe?”
“That's an extremely simple question,” he replied. “So simple, in fact, that even my driver could answer it.” (source)

– A methodologist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says: “Oh look! Those sheep have been shorn.” “Yes,” says the methodologist. “On this side.” (source)

– An angel appears to the head of a Philosophy Department and says, “I'll grant you whichever of three blessings you choose. Wisdom, beauty, or ten million dollars.”
Immediately, the professor chooses wisdom. There is a flash of lightning, the professor is transformed, but then he just sits there, staring down at the table.
One of his colleagues whispers, “You have great wisdom. Say something!” The professor says, “I should have taken the money!” (source)

– A philosopher once had the following dream.
First Aristotle appeared, and the philosopher said to him, “Could you give me a fifteen-minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy?” To the philosopher's surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere fifteen minutes. But then the philosopher raised a certain objection which Aristotle couldn’t answer. Confounded, Aristotle disappeared.
Then Plato appeared. The same thing happened again, and the philosophers’ objection to Plato was the same as his objection to Aristotle. Plato also couldn’t answer it and disappeared.
Then all the famous philosophers of history appeared one-by-one and our philosopher refuted every one with the same objection.
After the last philosopher vanished, our philosopher said to himself, “I know I'm asleep and dreaming all this. Yet I've found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably have forgotten it, and the world will really miss something!” With an iron effort, the philosopher forced himself to wake up, rush over to his desk, and write down his universal refutation. Then he jumped back into bed with a sigh of relief.
The next morning when he awoke, he went over to the desk to see what he had written. It was, “That’s what you say.”  (source)

– A philosophy professor walks in to give his class their final. Placing his chair on his desk the professor instructs the class, “Using every applicable thing you've learned in this course, prove to me that this chair DOES NOT EXIST.”
So, pencils are writing and erasers are erasing, students are preparing to embark on novels proving that this chair doesn't exist, except for one student. He spends thirty seconds writing his answer, then turns his final in to the astonishment of his peers.
Time goes by, and the day comes when all the students get their final grades...and to the amazement of the class, the student who wrote for thirty seconds gets the highest grade in the class. His answer to the question: “What chair?” (source)

– “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 467.
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The jokes above may not be the funniest philosophy jokes you can find on the Internet, but I wanted the present here a few that are not only funny but that say also something about philosophy itself. Let me end with a few very short ones:
– How many Marxists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. The lightbulb contains the seed of its own revolution. (many sources)
– “Hello? Zeno taxi service? I called for a cab forever ago...”
“What do you mean he’s half way there?”
– Someone asked me to name a greater philosopher than Nietzsche. …. I. Kant
– What is Mind? No Matter. What is Body? Never Mind.
– “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” (Bertrand Russell)
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Want to have more philosophy jokes? Just google “philosophical jokes” or visit these websites:
- Neil Burton, “Top 10 Philosophy Jokes. The ten sharpest philosophy jokes.”
- David Calmers, Philosophical Humor.
- Work Joke, Funny philosophical jokes.
- “40+ Philosophy Jokes That We Kant Stop Laughing At” 

Also these websites might be interesting:
- “Joking, and Learning, About Philosophy”
- Scotty Hendricks, “5 philosophy jokes that will actually teach you something”

Random quote
No man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another.

John Locke (1632-1704)

Are Covid restrictions that bad?

What I am going to write now is not my own idea. I found it on the Facebook page of Emal Roshandel, who lives in Denmark. But I agree with much what he wrote there and I think that it’s so important that I want to share it with others. Moreover, it certainly fits in my blogs, for isn’t it about the question “Who are we?”, which is one of the leading themes of my blogs. However, I’ll not give a literal translation of Roshandel’s Facebook post, but I’ll write my own version. 

Let’s assume that you were born in the year 1900 and that you had a happy childhood. Then in 1914 the First World War broke out. If you were a boy, you were too young for the army, but if you lived in Europe (or in the USA, later) probably your father and uncles had to fight, and maybe your elder brother as well. Many of them didn’t come back from the war and you and those who stayed home suffered from hunger and many goods were in short supply. You were happy when the war ended and your father came back, but then a pandemic broke out, the Spanish flu, which hit especially younger people, like you, now 19 years old. You recovered and gradually times became better. You were in your twenties, maybe married, and faced the future with confidence. Alas, the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange and the economic crisis that followed made you unemployed and your savings soon became worthless by the high inflation. In the end you overcame the difficulties, got a good job again, when – you had become 40 years old – the Second World War broke out. Although you weren’t maybe an immediate victim, these were dark times. There were lockdowns, shortages of food and goods, people you knew disappeared. But also this came to an end.
I can go on, and mention yet the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the oil crisis of the 1970s, or, if you lived in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, the communist repression. There is certainly much more to mention, and Emal Roshandel mentions on his Facebook page also some other events. If you live outside Europe and the USA, you’ll certainly think of other bad experiences.
Be it as it may, let’s now assume that you were born in, say, 1980. Today, you are 41 years old. If you are one of my readers, probably you didn’t go through even one event of the kind described above. (Note, that I don’t mean personal, private sad experiences, but world experiences like those described above.) However, now you have to go through a pandemic that broke out about almost two years ago. And you complain. Sometimes there are lockdowns; you cannot go to the cinema or to concerts during several months. You cannot always meet your friends; schools are closed. And so on. Moreover, you complain that you have to wear a face mask and that people ask you to be vaccinated. People who say that you must adapt yourself to the situation don’t understand you, you think, for these people don’t know what a difficult life is, you think. However, you have a lot what the generations before you didn’t have: All services, like power, food supply, public transport and whatever function well. Even more: you have the internet and your mobile, which didn’t yet exist when you were born. Must I go on?
I don’t want to say here that you deserve it to suffer what your parents or grandparents have suffered. I hated it when my father said that I had to eat what was on the table, since during the Second World War he couldn’t get to eat what he liked and sometimes he was hungry. And, indeed, probably your grandparents didn’t experience all calamities I mentioned above, or maybe they didn’t personally much suffer from them. I don’t want to say: Once the times were so bad and now they aren’t, so you must be happy (although also today yet many people must flee from war and economic misery). You must live your own life in a situation as it is today for you. You have the right to complain about stupid restrictions. You have also the right to complain because you don’t feel happy. But be real. We live now in a situation of a world pandemic and actually at the moment nobody knows how to stop it. So, adapt yourself. Do what you can and do not complain about what you cannot.
I want to end this blog with a quote from Roshandel’s Facebook post: “Today we live in a new world full of comfort, but unfortunately in the middle of a new pandemic. … But humanity survived these conditions, and they never lost their joy of life.”
It is as it is. 

Random quote
You cannot organise kindness, but you can organise the conditions for it. 

Otto Neurath (1882-1945)

Who do belong to us?

With each other, for each other. Sculpture made by Nicolas Dings

Actually, what I am going to write now is a bit Eurocentric. Or maybe it is not the right word, for the distinctions I am going to make are typical for English, Dutch (my mother tongue) and the other Indo-European languages and these languages are not only spoken in Europe. However, there are many languages in which these distinctions do not apply. Keeping this in mind, let’s start.
Take this case: John says to Anna: “We’re going to the movies.” Question: Does Anna or doesn’t Anna go to the movies with John? Only context can tell. This becomes clear if we add what John also said:
- “We’re going to the movies. My wife is waiting. See you later”. OR
- “We’re going to the movies. Are you ready?”
In the first case John uses a, what linguists call, exclusive we: Anna is not included in (excluded from) the we-group. The speaker or writer refers to him or herself plus his or her associates but not to the person(s) addressed. In the second case John uses an inclusive we: Anna is included in the we-group. When the inclusive we is used, the speaker or writer includes the addressee(s), for example the person(s) s/he is talking with or his or her audience or readers.
In English, Dutch and many other languages, there is only one word for the inclusive and exclusive use of we, but not in all languages this is the case. Some languages use different words for the exclusive and the inclusive we. Click HERE for a map of languages that distinguish or do not distinguish linguistically both types of we.
The inclusive/exclusive distinction of we is not simply a linguistic distinction that makes clear that “we” can have two meanings. It is also practical to know it, for speakers, including politicians, often confuse them or use them intentionally in an ambivalent way in order to build a relationship with their audience. Such a relationship can be built because the inclusive we evokes a sense of commonality and rapport between speaker or writer and audience. So, in order to get support for new covid restrictions, a prime minister can say “We all must tackle the coronavirus. That’s why we have decided to take these measures…”. The first we, which refers to all inhabitants of the country including the government, is used to evoke support for what the second we (the government) has decided. The first inclusive we is used in order to bring about that everybody is behind the measures taken by the second, exclusive, we. Or take the situation that a speaker says that if the government will continue its present policy, many refugees will come to this country, and then he says “It’s that what we want?”, suggesting that the audience agrees with him and doesn’t want this to happen, while actually it is maybe so that only he, the speaker, doesn’t want it. Then saying “we” is a manipulative use of “we" in order to evoke support for his words. Actually, there are countless ways to use “we” in a manipulative manner.
Although the inclusive we and the exclusive we are the main meanings this pronoun has, there are also other ways “we” can be used. For instance:
- The medical or institutional we. Examples: “Have we slept well tonight?”, “Have we opened our bowels?’, “Have we been a good boy today?”
- The royal we: “We” is said while “I” is meant. This is especially used by persons in high office, but also in other contexts like the Bible and the Quran.
- The third person we: Take this sentence: “We in this country should spend more money on social security.” In this sentence, it is meant that the government should do so, but not only. The we refers to a third person, but the speaker feels a kind of responsibility for or involvement with the issue stated.
The upshot is that we must realize well what we mean when we ue we or talk about us, and even more so when others try to involve us in their projects by suggesting that we are involved. 

Sources
- Michael Cysouw, “Chapter Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Exclusive ‘We’: Definition and Examples”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Inclusive ‘We’ (Grammar)”.

Random quote
When he [Einstein] commits a breach of etiquette, it is said that he does so because he is a man of genius. In my case, however, it is attributed to a lack of culture

Mileva Marić (the wife of Albert Einstein) (1875-1948) 

Measures that divide the world

A virus is haunting the world — the coronavirus. All the world organisations have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this virus: WHO and UN, USA and EU, Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, BioNTech and AstraZeneca have joined hands and even Bill Gates seems to contribute his bit.
Where are those in opposition to the proposed restrictions who have not been decried as scatterbrains by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of being anti-vaxxers, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? An important thing results from this fact: Anti-vaxxers have been acknowledged to be itself a power.

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Those who know their classics will immediately see that the sentences above are a paraphrase of the first words of the preface of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adapted to the present situation. My rewording of this passage is sarcasm, but it is also serious. The world does suffer from a virus and that virus is so dangerous that strong measures are necessary to fight it, and that’s why world organisations etc. join hands. But humans wouldn’t be humans if they wouldn’t disagree about the measures to be taken and about which measures are best. However, where measures are taken there are people who are against them, and where a vaccine is developed there are people who are anti-vax. And when people oppose, they are often lumped together and branded as simply being “against us”.
Let’s look at the measures. As I see it, the present anti-covid measures are of two kinds: Measures to stop the spread of the virus and measures against people that might spread the virus. Let’s call them virus-based measures and human-based measures respectively. When talking of virus-based measures I think of face masks; covid passes (a proof that you have been vaccinated, recently had covid, or have been tested negatively on the coronavirus); keeping distance; home working; etc. When talking of human-based measures I think of a curfew or, what you more and more see happen now, a ban on going out for non-vaccinated people or at least for them a ban on visiting certain events like concerts or sports events, based on the idea that it is more likely that the coronavirus will be spread by non-vaccinated people than by vaccinated people.
On the face of it both virus-based measures and human-based measures seem reasonable. Before I am going to argue that the latter aren’t, let me first say something about political systems. There are roughly two types of political systems: democracies and dictatorships. Of course, in the first place, both types are about how rulers are selected, but democracies take into account the interests of the people as much as possible, including the interests of minorities, while dictatorships govern in the interest of those who are in power, oppressing or at least downgrading those who don’t support them. With this distinction in mind, let’s now consider the anti-covid measures. I think that all such measures are dictatorial in some way, but, paraphrasing Orwell, some measures are more dictatorial than others. That’s what we see here, too. Virus-based measures tell people what they must not do but they leave much elbow room to adapt and to choose your own way. So, if a covid pass is required for visiting a concert, the visitor has at least the choice between being vaccinated, being tested or not to go (choosing to become ill is not a reasonable option, of course). Human-based measures, on the other hand, take this elbow room away from the people and instead they prescribe what they must do. So, if non-vaccinated people are forced to stay home (with some exceptions, like going to a food shop) they have no other choice than doing what is ordered them to do. In other words, virus-based measures give (by far) more freedom than human-based measures, and in this way they take the interests of the people more into account than human-based measures. Or, in again other words, virus-based measures are relatively democratic while human-based measures are (relatively) dictatorial. Need I say yet which kind of measures are to be preferred? Human-based anti-covid measures must be avoided as much as possible if not rejected at all.
Moreover, there is more. Human-based anti-covid measures are not only bad because they harm the democratic rights of individuals, but they are also bad for society. By the way they are presently applied they lead to a dichotomy in society between the “good guys and girls” (the vaccinated) and the “bad guys and girls” (the non-vaccinated), which can lead to serious conflicts (as we see already here and there). But look at the non-vaccinated: people have not taken the vaccine for all kinds of reasons: for religious reasons; for medical reasons; because they don’t trust the vaccine; because they don’t trust the makers of the vaccine or those who tell them to take it; because they are lax and have postponed again and again taking their jabs; etc. You cannot approach the non-vaccinated as if they were one group. And so we are back at the introductory paraphrase of this blog: Those who are against you are often seen as one; wrongly. This is another plea to fight the virus that haunts the world only with virus-based measures. What else?

Random quote
Does it never strikes you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?

L.F. Richardson (1881-1953) 

On collective intentionality

In my blogs, now and then I have written about the problem of collective intentionality. At the moment it is one of the most discussed themes in the field of philosophy of action. It is discussed so much just because philosophers cannot get a grip on it. The essence of the discussion is: What are collective intentions and actions and how can we explain them? And here the problem starts, for since intentions are in the minds of individuals and actions are performed by individuals, how then is it possible that groups (and collectivities in general) have intentions and perform actions that are not simple aggregations of what the individuals who make up these groups intend and do? What do we mean when we say that the team wins, while there is no team that has kicked the ball for there are only individual players who have done so? But John, one of the players, doesn’t say “I have won”, but he says “We have won”. And here we are at the heart of the problem: How can the I-we distinction be bridged? To my mind, until now no philosopher has convincingly succeeded to do so. And just this made for me the problem intriguing and challenging and it made me – being an action philosopher myself – to give my thoughts to the question and put down my ideas in an essay. My blogs about the theme published here on blogspot are either a kind of prepublications of parts of the essay or they are tryouts that helped me develop my ideas. Last week, then, I uploaded the essay to my website. I hope that it will help bring the discussion on collective intentionality a step further.
Below you find the abstract of my essay. Are you interested in reading the full essay? Don’t hesitate then to go to my website and to download it. And once you have read it, don’t hesitate to send me your comments!
Click HERE in order to go to the full essay.

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Abstract of “Collective intentionality and the constitution view. An essay on acting together”.
One of the currently most discussed themes in the philosophy of action is whether there is some kind of collective intention that explains what groups do independent of what the individuals who make up the group intend and do. One of the main obstacles to solve this problem is that on the one hand collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim), while on the other hand collective intentionality is in the heads of the participating individuals, so to speak, and so it is owned by each of the separate individuals who make up the group (the Individual Ownership Claim). The claims are contradictory and until now no satisfactory solution how to reconcile them has been found. In this article I argue that the constitution view, like the one developed by Lynne R. Baker, can provide a way to sidestep the contradiction. Just as a statue as such is constituted by the marble it is made of but has characteristics that are different from the marble (a statue has a head and legs, while the marble hasn’t; while the marble is stony and the statue as such isn’t), I argue that a group is constituted by its members and that a group on the one hand and its members on the other hand have different characteristics. This is possible because group and members are on different levels. Then there is no longer a contradiction between the Irreducibility Claim and the Individual Ownership Claim, for the former claim concerns the group level and the latter claim concerns the level of the group members. This explains that a group can have intentions that are no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive patterns of the intentions of its members and that group intentions can be different from if not contradictory to what the individual members taken together intend.

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In fact, the essay just mentioned is my second contribution to the debate on collective intentionality. HERE you find the find my first article, titled “Collective intentionality and individual action”.

Random quote
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1888-1951)

Banal objects

Last week I was on holiday and so I couldn’t write a blog. Like a few weeks ago, again I have uploaded a photo instead. This time it is a photo taken during my trip to the East of the Netherlands. The photo shows a transformer house. In my blogs, I have sometimes written about the value and meaning of normal, if not “banal”, objects of our daily life. A transformer house is such a thing. Usually we ignore them, but in modern life we cannot do without them for they are an important link in the chain that transport electricity from the power station to our houses. They are there of all kinds, shapes and architecture, but I guess you’ll ignore them, passing them without realizing that you pass such a vital object of your life, for without electricity your life would be very different, especially if you live in a modern town and cannot have a power generator of your own. But why don’t you give them more attention? I admit that many transformer houses are boring objects; a kind of metal boxes coloured green, white or grey. But some are real pieces of art, like this one in Groenlo, about hundred years old. 

Random quote
If you start a man killing, you cannot turn him off like a machine

Guy Chapman

Back to the future

In my blog last week, we saw that we represent time often by spatial concepts. There I treated the question how to arrange the past and the future if you had to put them on a timeline. Suppose now that you are simply asked: If you have to spatially locate the future, where would you place it? In front of you? Behind you? Above you? Under you? Or maybe somewhere else? I asked this question to several persons in different parts of the world, in regions as far away from each other as Europe or Thailand, Indonesia or Azerbaijan. All gave the same answer: The future is in front of us. Investigations have shown that most of us will give this answer, independent of language and culture. Nevertheless, not everybody thinks that the future is in front of us, as the Dutch linguist Riemer Reinsma says in a radio interview. The Greeks have a different view. They can say, for instance, “The weather is nice today, but what will we have behind us?”, meaning “What will happen?” In other words, the Greeks live with their backs to the future. They reason: We don’t have eyes on our backs, so we cannot see what happens behind us. Therefore, the future must be behind us, for we cannot see it. However, we know what is in front of us, since we can see it. Since we know the past, it must be in front of us. This sounds not unreasonable, but it’s not where the Chinese locate past and future. For them the past is over their heads and the future is under their feet. This is just opposite to what English speakers say when they say “That threat is hanging over me”. It’s striking that in English the expression “over me” refers only to something negative that may happen. Possibly this expression is constructed analogous to a thunderstorm that is coming near. (By the way, this shows that English speakers sometimes locate the future above themselves instead of in front of themselves).
Although views on future and past are, of course, expressed in a language, probably differences where to locate them are not so much the result of differences in language as in culture. This is shown, for example, by the fact that also the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of them. The Aymara are a people that lives in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile and their language, also called Aymara, is not related to the Greek language. The Aymara view on past and future has been investigated by the American cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez. In the Aymara language, for example, “nayra” means “eye,” “front” or “sight” in the first place but also “past”. Moreover, “qhipa”, which means “back” or “behind” in the first place, is also used for “future”. So “nayra mara”, which means “last year”, literally means “front year”. That the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of themselves is supported by the gestures they make when speaking: They indicate space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and they indicate space in front of themselves when speaking of the past by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. The Aymara gestures fit the way they speak.
It seems so obvious: The future is in front of us and the past is behind our backs. It’s such a general phenomenon that once linguists and culture scientists thought that everybody sees it this way. However, as we have just seen, thus mapping the future is a cultural phenomenon and not something “given”. Ignoring this may have profound consequences. “This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed,” so Nunez, “to the conquistadors’ disdain of the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going ‘forward’.” If we see the future in front of us, it can lead to an activistic attitude. What we see is what we can grasp and change, or at least we can face it. What we don’t know, for instance because it is behind our backs, we can only ignore or accept. We cannot influence it. How we see the world makes how we act. But we can also learn another lesson from what I have written above: What is obvious for us need not be so for someone else. It’s good to realize this when you meet another person, especially if he or she is from another culture. And in the end, it’s not illogical to locate the future behind your backs and so out of sight. For who can see and know the future? 

Sources
- “De toekomst ligt achter je in Griekenland”. Interview met Riemer Reinsma, https://radio1.be/luister/select/nieuwe-feiten/de-toekomst-ligt-achter-je-in-griekenland
- Jansen, Mathilde, “Aymara laten de toekomst achter zich”, 29 juni 2006, https://www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/aymara-laten-de-toekomst-achter-zich/
- Kiderra, Inga, “Backs to the future”, 12 June 2006, https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp

Random quote

What’s a philosopher nowadays else than an expert for rephrasing jokes into problems? … Philosophizing today means to take the trouble not to write a satire.

Peter Sloterdijk (1947-)

Time and space

Humans don’t have a well-developed sense of time but their sense for space is rather good. Therefore they often use spatial terms or representations in order to express time. Take an old-fashioned analogue clock, for example. One hand moves around in order to indicate the hours, and the further it has turned around the later it is. In the same way the other hand indicates the minutes. Or when I want to make a walk of an hour, I know that I am halfway not because of an inner clock, but because I have reached a certain point and I know that it’s about 3 km from my house. I can check it by looking at my watch. But that’s about lived time. How do we represent past and future if we actually have only spatial terms in order to represent time?
Let’s first see how we refer to space. There are three ways to do so. One way is to take yourself as the centre of the world, so as your “frame of reference”. John sits left of you and so you sit right of John. It depends on whose frame of reference you take: yours or John’s. This is called a relative frame of reference. However, a frame of reference can also be intrinsic. Then the object you see, talk about, etc. is the centre of the frame of reference. Terms like above/below or on/under are intrinsic, for instance: The cup is on the table, even if you are looking down on the table, so that the cup is under you. Moreover, a frame of reference can be absolute. Examples are the geographic coordinate system (latitude and longitude) and the cardinal points of a compass (north, south, east, and west).
Suppose you are a native speaker of English and you take part in an investigation. You sit at a table, the sun in your face, and the investigator asks you to arrange sets of cards depicting a temporal sequence in order of time from earliest to latest. For example, a card with a photo of a crocodile egg might be followed by a photo of a crocodile hatching, followed by a juvenile crocodile, followed by a mature crocodile. So you do, and you arrange the cards with the “youngest” image (say the crocodile egg) on the left, then the youngest image that remains (say the crocodile hatching) etc. and the oldest image to the right (say the crocodile dying). Then a native speaker of Kuuk Thaayorre, a language spoken by the Thaayorre who live on the northern shore of Australia, takes your place. He gets the same cards and arranges them in exactly the same way as you did. Next the investigator asks you to sit down at the opposite side of the table and to arrange the cards again. Again you put the card with the youngest image left ending with oldest image on the right side. Then your place is taken by the Kuuk Thaayorre speaker. However, now this person arranges the cards with the oldest image on the left side and the youngest image on the right side. Why this difference?
Several explanations are possible for this difference in arranging between the speakers of English and the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, but most likely is that the language used in daily life is the main cause. The cultural background might also have an impact, but Thaayorre people in northern Australia who spoke only English (and no Kuuk Thaayorre) arranged the cards in the same way as the other English speakers did, so as you did. Let’s look at the language. I mentioned three ways to describe space: by relative, intrinsic terms or absolute terms. Now it is so that English speakers predominantly use the relative and intrinsic terms for describing their worlds. Although absolute terms are not absent in English, in daily life they are not much used. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, however, have at their disposal dozens of absolute terms plus a few intrinsic terms, but relative terms are absent. Speakers of both languages use spatial terms in order to describe time. The first choice for English speakers then is to use relative spatial terms for arranging time events. Of course, they could arrange things also from right to left, but probably because English is written from left to right, English speakers are used to arrange things that way. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers have no relative spatial terms at their disposal. However, they are used to employ the terms for the cardinal directions (which are absolute terms) for arranging things. Apparently for them the obvious way to arrange things (anyway, if it is on a time scale) is from east to west. That’s what they did. In the first session, they faced south and so they arranged the cards in the same way as the English speakers did, for east-west happened to be left-right. However, in the second session, when all test persons faced north, east-west had become what is right-left for an English speaker. So now the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers arranged the cards right-left. That it was the language that made this shift (“shift” from the viewpoint of English speakers!) is shown by the monolingual English speaking Thaayorre who arranged the cards just the way all other English speakers did.
The upshot is that the language you use, especially your native language, influences the way you see and interpret the world. But be careful: Studies have shown that language does not determine your world view. Other factors have also an impact. Such an influence can be the way speakers of other languages look at the world. We can learn a lot of other language speakers, like go west if you want to look to the future. 

Source
- Alice Gaby, “The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space”, on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428806/