Facts and what we remember

Rowan

A rather new branch of philosophy is experimental philosophy. It gathers experimental data in order to test fundamental philosophical questions and suppositions, usually by interviewing non-philosophers in an experimental setting. Actually “experimental philosophy” is a contradiction, for traditionally philosophy is seen as a kind of a priori reasoning – “armchair philosophy” – but experimental philosophy is just a reaction to the idea that truths can be found only by arguing from intuitions. One problem with this is that what is intuitively true for some need not to be so for others. Moreover, philosophers can disagree on the right argumentation leading to a certain conclusion. Etc. Then experimental testing can help to find out what is right and what isn’t.
Although experimental philosophy has forerunners in the sense that late mediaeval / early modern natural philosophy can be seen so, present-day experimental philosophy began around 2000, especially within analytical philosophy. Leading experimental philosophers are Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. In several blogs I have discussed already some results from experimental philosophy. In this blog I want to discuss results from an article by the Lithuanian philosopher Vilius Dranseika about a philosophical intuition on memory. (see Source)
A common Claim among philosophers is (although not all philosophers say so) “that one can be truly said to ‘remember’ some event only if that person originally experienced or observed that event.” (p. 175). It is true that people can be blamed for saying that they remembered to be present at an event or that they took part in it, if it is clear that they weren’t there. Nevertheless, as an experimental study by Dranseika showed, Claim is too strict. For investigating its truth, he distinguished three kinds of memories: true memories (T), quasi-memories (Q) and artificial memories (A). To make things short, Q is for example a dream of something you never experienced but after the dream you think you did. A is for example a chip with someone else’s memories put in your brain. In order to check whether non-philosophers will consider cases of quasi-remembering and artificial memories as cases of remembering Dranseika presented vignettes with variations for T, A and Q to test persons. By way illustration, here is such a vignette:
Imagine it is 2086. Scientists have invented a technology that allows one [to install human memories (for Q and T) / to create artificial memories and to install such memories (for A)] into biological storage devices created for this purpose. This technology also allows one to transfer such memories into the brains of other people. A person, into whose brain such [other people’s (for Q and T) / artificial (for A)] memories are transferred, cannot distinguish such transferred memories from their own memories. Also, no available technologies can distinguish such memories from others. This technology at the moment is experimental and secret, but it is already sometimes used as an educational tool, since it provides an easy way to transfer knowledge that was memorized by another person. It is also sometimes used as a means to improve psychological wellbeing by transferring pleasant [memories of other people (for Q and T) / artificial memories (for A)]
Imagine now that Albertas is a teenager who had a lot of [other people’s (for Q and T) / artificial (for A)] memories transferred into his brain in his childhood. Albertas does not know and has no reason whatsoever to suspect that such memory transfer was performed on him. [Not all his memories, however, are transferred memories of other people. Some of his memories are from the period before memory transfer. (only in T)] One of [the transferred (for Q and A) / such original (for T)] memories is about tasting rowan-berries in childhood. When someone asks Albertas whether he has ever tasted rowan-berries, Albertas replies with confidence: “Yes, I clearly remember eating rowan-berries when I was a child.” (pp. 178-9)
Test persons got vignettes either for the quasi-memory case, or for the artificial memory case or for the true memory case. After having read them, they were asked two questions: “Do you agree that Albertas remembers that he has tasted rowan-berries when he was a child?”; the second question reads “knows” instead of “remembers”. They had to answer on a Likert scale. The result was that the test persons were willing to say that the agent “remembers” both in case of artificial memory and of quasi-memory. This is contrary to Claim, for the artificial and quasi memories in the vignettes were not based on what Albertas truly remembered!
In order to avoid the science fiction scenario in the test just presented, Dranseika made a new vignette and did a new test but for misidentified dreams (one thinks to have experienced a certain event, but in fact had only dreamed it), again with the same result, in this case that the test persons tended to agree that misidentified dreams were memories.
Dranseika makes yet a few refinements in his test, but they do not substantially change his results. So the upshot is (following Dranseika): Claim is not an essential feature of our ordinary use of “remembering” and “having a memory of”. We sometimes say “s/he remembers” while actually s/he doesn’t. We know s/he doesn’t, but we don’t see it as a problem. In view of other studies in the field of experimental philosophy (and not only there) once again there is reason to be skeptical about philosophical intuitions: Philosophers often think things are intuitively the way they claim, but once tested it appears to be nothing more than an opinion among other opinions. 

Source
Vilius Dranseika, “False memories and quasi-memories are memories”, in Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (eds.), Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pp. 175-188. I have extensively quoted from this article. A preliminary version can be found here.

Random quote
Our minds are arrangements and activities in matter and energy. But those arrangements, once they exist, are not causes of minds; they are minds. Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences.

Peter Godfrey Smith (1965-)

Collective intentionality and the development of man

One of the most discussed issues in present philosophy of action is whether some kind of group intention, collective intention, shared intention or how you would call it exists. If an individual plans an action like going to run tomorrow, we say that she intends to do so or has such an intention. But what if several persons plan to do something together like playing tennis or bridge? Since you cannot do this alone, can we say then that there is a kind of common intention and, if so, what is it? Several answers to this question have been proposed. Especially those by Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, John Searle and Raimo Tuomela are considered important.
In Bratman’s approach to common intentionality each individual has the intention to do his part of the shared goal and knows that the other(s) will do her part or their parts, while moreover the individual action plans mesh. According to Gilbert, if two or more individuals plan to do something together, they have a joint commitment. Each individual can cancel the obligation to contribute to the common task only after the consent of all other participants. According to Searle, collective intention transcends the individual minds “and collective intentions expressed in the form ‘we intend to do such-and-such’, and, ‘we are doing such-and-such’ are … primitive phenomena and cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentions …” According to Tuomela, individual contributors have a kind of we-intention or joint intention to perform a planned joint action together.
All such tries to solve the problem of common intentionality start from two claims. These are (following Schweikard and Schmid in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – SEP):
- Common intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim).
- Common intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is their own (the Individual Ownership Claim).
As can be seen in the four different approaches just mentioned, the answers to the question what the commonness of common intentionality involves are very different, despite these shared starting points. Again following SEP, some see the commonness in the content of the intention, like Bratman: individual actors strive to do the same together. Others see the commonness in the mode of the intention, like Tuomela: the actor switches from an individual action mode to a we-mode, when he plans to perform an action together with others. Again others see the commonness in the acting subject, like Gilbert: for her a group is a plural subject with its own collective intentional state called joint commitment. Searle’s approach is a kind of mix between the mode-approach and the subject-approach: we-intentions are not individual intentions put together (mode-switch), but the bearer (=subject) of the intention is not the individual but the group.
Most accounts suppose – usually implicitly – that there is one kind of common intentionality and that the question is to find out what it is like. However, the American developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has put forward a very different idea. For why should there be only one kind of common intentionality and why shouldn’t there be a kind of relationship, for instance developmental relationship, between the different types of common intentionality proposed? From that perspective prehistoric humans long ago first acted only individually together, so to speak: for practical reasons they sought the cooperation of other individuals for performing tasks that together could be done more successfully and effectively than alone (cf Bratman’s approach). Later this developed that way that humans who had made the appointment to work together were obliged to do so in the sense of Gilbert’s joint commitment. One could only withdraw, if the other partners in the job had rescinded the obligation (on sanction of being seen as untrustworthy if one didn’t meet one’s commitments). Later then, more complicated forms of common intentionality as discussed by Searle and Tuomela developed. (by the way, this is my interpretation of Tomasello; he doesn’t exactly say so) Seen this way it’s not the question which approach of common intentionality is the right one, be it the one proposed by Bratman, Gilbert, Tuomela or Searle, or who else has come with an idea what it is like, for the different approaches can be seen in a developmental perspective in the sense that one was followed by another. Moreover, this view on common intentionality makes it quite well possible that currently common intentionality still can have different expressions and can take different shapes. 

Sources
- Schweikard, David P., Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Intentionality”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/#WhaColAboColInt. See here also for literature on Bratman, Gilbert, Searle and Tuomela.
- Searle, John, “Collective Intentions and Actions”, in: P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M.E. Pollack, (eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1990; pp. 401-415.
- Tomasello, Michael, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass. Etc.: Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Zahavi, Dan, Glenda Satne, “Varieties of shared intentionality: Tomasello and classical phenomenology”, in: Jeffrey A. Bell, et.al., Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide. Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2015; pp. 305-325.

Random quote
The dimension of the mental, the psychic, is pushed away from the debate, because necessarily it doesn’t fit anywhere in a causal connection.

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

The anti-vaccination fallacy

Statement: “They say that vaccination against Covid-19 will bring the solution. It doesn’t, so I don’t want to take the jab.” Here “they” are the politicians, virologists and all others who urgently advice to have yourself vaccinated against Covid-19. In this blog I don’t want to discuss the question whether this vaccination really will bring the “solution” and will end the pandemic, but there are a few mistakes in the reasoning in Statement – a reasoning I often hear – and this gives me the opportunity to discuss again a few bad arguments and fallacies. Maybe there are more in it, and it’s up to you to discover them, but here I’ll discuss four such bad arguments.

Appeal to ridicule
Gregory L. Bock describes the appeal to ridicule fallacy in this way: “To ridicule a point of view is to disparage or make fun of it. When someone uses ridicule as part of an argument, she commits an appeal to ridicule, which is a fallacy of relevance”, so an attempt “to support a conclusion using an irrelevant premise.” Making fun of a premise doesn’t make this premise and so the whole reasoning false.
Indeed, that’s usually the context in which I hear this false reasoning: Making fun of and also talking down to those who promote vaccination. However, most politicians and virologists know that vaccination cannot make an end to Covid-19. The coronavirus will continuously change and new strains of the virus will develop, but vaccination will at least make the problem manageable by reducing the number of infections and making that vaccinated people become less seriously ill if they get Covid-19. But those who support Statement often have their own simple solutions to the pandemic and ignore that the problem is complicated. They just find it enough to ridicule politicians and virologists who incite people to take the jab. In this sense Statement is also an argumentum ad hominem (see here and here). (see Source, p. 118) 

Oversimplification
Implicitly I have discussed also another bad argument in the section above: the fallacy of oversimplification. This fallacy happens “when we attempt to make something appear simpler by ignoring certain relevant complexities”, so Dan Burnett (Source, p. 286). In Statement we see that politicians and virologists are said to see vaccination as the solution, while actually they see vaccination only as a part of the solution to end the pandemic. However, as Burnett ends his description of this fallacy: “When we obscure, ignore, or simply fail to identify certain factors, we run a high risk of misunderstanding reality.” Then “there’s a good chance our actions will – at best – be ineffective, or – at worst – exacerbate the very problem we are trying to solve.” (p. 288)

False dilemma
A false dilemma is reducing a complicated issue to excessively simple terms (see Source p, 346). Often it is reducing a problem to an either-or question. This makes it a kind of black-and-white thinking. In Statement it is either you see vaccination as “the solution” or you don’t take the jab. Nevertheless it can be reasonable to take the jab, although you don’t think that vaccination will bring an end to the pandemic. Being vaccinated will at least diminish the chance that you’ll become – seriously – ill for the time to come. Maybe you must be vaccinated later again, but taking the vaccination now is at least a temporarily solution; anyway for you, even if on a world-scale Covid-19 will not go away. Moreover, taking the jab is only one of the measures in the fight against the coronavirus. Keeping distance is another thing for example, like avoiding large parties, etc. 

Confusing levels
The idea that vaccination against Covid-19 will end the pandemic, as ascribed to politicians and virologists in Statement, is a claim that concerns the pandemic as a whole, but it doesn’t mean that there’ll still no longer be individuals who’ll get Covid-19. But by vaccinating the number of Covid patients will go down that much, so these experts say that we don’t need to speak of a pandemic anymore. Vaccination will make the problem manageable and make that the health services will not be overloaded any longer. This is a claim on national, regional or world-scale, but it is still quite well possible that a relatively small number of individuals will get Covid-19. In order to make that it will not be you who’ll get it, it is reasonable for you to take the jab. What’s true on a higher level (that most people will not become ill) doesn’t need to be true on a lower level (that you will not become ill). 

With the help of Statement I discussed four fallacies that are often heard in discussions. In some respects they overlap, as we could see in my explanations. Actually, at the same time Statement is an oversimplification, a false dilemma and a matter of confusing of levels, while also those who propagate anti-Covid vaccination are ridiculed. If right, together the fallacies discussed can be summarized in the context of the coronavirus pandemic as the “anti-vaccination fallacy”.
But maybe by using Statement as the starting point of this blog, I have ridiculed a substantial group of anti-vaxxers by oversimplifying what they think, by mistakenly saying that they maintain a false dilemma and by asserting that they confuse levels. Nevertheless some do. 

Source
Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.

Random Quote
The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

The second-person perspective

In philosophy (and not only there) we often talk about the first-person perspective. It is the way that I as a subject look at the world and interprets it. Another way of looking is the third-person perspective. It is the way to look at the world in an impersonal way, from a distance, without being involved. We can also speak here of a detached perspective or, using the words of Thomas Nagel, a “view from nowhere”. This view is also called “objective”, since it considers what it perceives as objects, as much as possible without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations. In the same way, the first-person perspective is usually called “subjective”, since the feelings, prejudices and interpretations of the perceiving subject are inherent in this perspective. But if there is a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective, then there should be also a second-person perspective, and indeed there is. To my mind it is quite neglected in philosophy, although the second-perspective is basic to how we as humans live, as, for instance, becomes clear from the works of Michael Tomasello.
In fact, the second-perspective is simple: It is the I’s view of you, the person whom I am dealing with in one way or another. Put yourself in the shoes of the other and then you have the second-person perspective. So simple is it. Simple? Not that much, for it took man a long way through prehistory to come that far. Still today many people have problems with taking the perspective of the other, let alone with taking it into account when dealing with others. But let me first look at what Stephen Darwall says about it, who has thoroughly studied the second-person view.
The “second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint”, so Darwall. “It is the perspective one assumes in addressing practical thought or speech to, or acknowledging addresses from, another…” The I sees the other, the you, as his or her equal and because of this gives the other authority and keeps the other accountable for what s/he does, especially towards the I. This concerns for example orders, requests, claims, reproaches, complaints, demands, promises, contracts, givings of consent, commands, etc. If the you accepts the I as an authority in these respects, the I can ask explanation from the you in case s/he fails (or just is successful); or the other way round, of course, for the I-you relationship is reciprocal. It is a relation from person to person. So, “[w]hat the second-person stance excludes is the third-person perspective, that is, regarding, for practical purposes, others (and oneself), not in relation to oneself, but as they are … ‘objectively’ … [I]t rules out as well first-personal thought that lacks an addressing, second-personal aspect.” (pp. 8-10).
Michael Tomasello, who heavily relies on Darwall in this respect, says it this way: “Second-personal engagement has two minimal characteristics: (1) the individual is directly participating in, not observing from outside, the social interaction; and (2) the interaction is with a specific other individual with whom there is a dyadic relationship, not with something more like a group … (3) the essence of this kind of engagement is ‘mutual recognition’ in which each partner gives the other, and expects from the other, a certain amount of respect as an equal individual – a fundamentally cooperative attitude among partners.” (p. 48)
At first sight a mutual relationship based on a second-person perspective seems obvious when two persons meet. However, look around and you’ll see that often it is absent where it should be expected, with nasty consequences. I want to give two examples, which I have both discussed in older blogs albeit in another connection:
The first example is the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo (for details see here): In a prison experiment Zimbardo had selected about twenty test subjects and assigned them at random to two groups, one group being the prisoners, the other group being the prison warders. Although there was no initial fundamental difference between the test subjects in both groups, after one-two days both the prisoners and the prison warders acted very differently in a way that went beyond their particular roles: the warders begun to torture the prisoners, psychologically as well as physically. Isn’t it here that we see that at least the members of one party (the warders) forgot that they were dealing with fellow humans (the prisoners) even though they often dealt with them in personal relationships?
We see the same in a modern phenomenon: Contact via the Internet. Here we are in contact with another person, but some aspects of the immediate relationship from person to person are absent, especially when chatting. As the British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has pointed out: 50% of our communication with other people consists of body language and eye contact, another 30% is done by our voice. The importance of direct body contact like hugging or shaking hands is still unknown. Just such from-person-to-person contacts are often absent when we communicate on the Internet by chatting or in another virtual way. This absence of bodily communication limits our assessment of how other people react to us and restricts our own reactions: We do not see the impact of our words on our conversation partner, so that we hurt him of her unknowingly or even on purpose as often happens. (for details see here) We can also say it this way: Even though we are in touch with the other and relate with each other as an I and a you, because of the imperfect technology the I-you relationship is affected, with possible harmful consequences.
Doesn’t this illustrate how basic the second-person relationship is for understanding how we live?

Sources
- Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint. Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Michael Tomasello, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 

Random quote
Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.

Michael Tomasello (1950-)

Montaigne’s Father

Most of us owe much to their parents and so did Montaigne. It is striking, however, that Montaigne’s mother is completely absent in his Essays, while he regularly mentions his father and praises him as the “best father in the world”. Even more, thanks to his father Montaigne got the education that made him the philosopher we know today. So, good reason to ask the question: Who was Montaigne’s father, Pierre Eyquem?
Like later his son, Pierre Eyquem was born in the Château de Montaigne, on 29 September 1495. The castle had been owned by the family since his grandfather Ramon Felipe Eyquem (1402-1478) bought it. Ramon Felipe was a merchant from Bordeaux who had become rich through the trade in fish, wine and indigo. The business was continued by his son Grimon Eyquem (1450-1519). Grimon was also a councillor in the Bordeaux city council for some time. Because he pursued nobility for his family and because a noble could not be a merchant, Grimon Eyquem broke with this family tradition at a later age and decided that his son Pierre should be educated as a knight. Therefore, he sent him to Jean de Durfort, Viscount of Duras, to serve as a page. In 1518 Pierre joined king France I’s army, where he was a soldier for ten years. He joined a company of archers that only accepted noblemen. The army service brought Pierre Eyquem to Italy, where he came into contact with the Renaissance and with Humanism. This gave him all kinds of ideas that would strongly influence him in his actions and thinking, such as in the upbringing of his son Michel.
Back at his castle, Pierre Eyquem began to expand his estate with the purchase of new land. His wife, a strong personality, helped him managing the sites. For in 1529 he had married Antoinette de Louppes de Villeneuve (1514–1603), probably a daughter of a family of Spanish Jews who had been converted  to Christianity (voluntarily or by force) and who had moved to France. The couple had six children, of which Michel was the eldest, apart from two children who had died early. Pierre Eyquem also took part in the administrative life of Bordeaux and held there various important positions. In 1530 he was appointed first jurat and provost of Bordeaux. A jurat was what we would now call an alderman or councillor. Moreover, the jurats chose the mayor. A provost was a kind of tax administrator but also oversaw the management of the city’s buildings and goods and had a number of legal powers. In 1536 Pierre Eyquem was elected deputy mayor of Bordeaux and re-elected provost. In 1554 he was elected mayor. As mayor, he had the particularly difficult task of going to King Henry II to recover the city rights, which Bordeaux had lost in 1548 after a popular uprising against the salt taxes. Pierre Eyquem had to try to reconcile the king with the city. As a gesture of reconciliation, he had brought twenty barrels with Bordeaux wine with him. Some time later Bordeaux did indeed get its old rights back. Although he often stayed in his city house in Bordeaux, Montaigne’s father did not forget his status as a nobleman and chatelain. He continued to physically train himself as a true knight and he received distinguished guests at his castle. One of them was Pierre Bunel, a scholar from Toulouse. On a visit in 1542, Bunel left behind the book Theologia Naturalis by Raymond Sebond as a gift. This work would later exert great influence on young Michel.
In 1554, the year he became mayor, Pierre Eyquem was also allowed to fortify his castle with a wall and towers. Until then it was no more than a large mansion. This was also necessary because of the violent religious discords in the region, which were getting stronger and stronger.
Pierre Eyquem died on 18 June 1568 in Bordeaux, possibly from the effects of a kidney stone attack, an ailment that his son Michel would also suffer from.
Pierre gave his eldest son Michel a special upbringing that was strongly influenced by his contact with the Renaissance and Humanism in Italy. Immediately after his birth, Michel was taken to a nurse in a nearby village. He would stay there for two years. Pierre then decided that his son’s mother tongue would be Latin. This was recommended by Erasmus in his book De Pueris from 1529. Pierre Eyquem appointed a German educator for his son, who did not know French and had to raise him in Latin. Moreover, everyone in the castle had to speak Latin with the young Michel. It was only when Michel went to the prestigious Collège de Guyenne at the age of six to continue his education that he started speaking French again, but because of his knowledge of Latin he was allowed to skip two classes. Although Montaigne says in his Essays that his knowledge of this language later subsided, the level remained sufficient to read Latin works in the original language. In order to prevent that Michel would forget his Latin after his time at the Collège de Guyenne, his father asked him to translate the Theologia Naturalis. Michel did so and published the translation, a year after the death of his father. Sebond’s work would, as said, exert great influence on Montaigne, and he wrote a long treatise on the Theologia Naturalis. It has become by far the longest essay in the Essays. Pierre Eyquem managed it also that his son got a job as a lawyer at the Cour des Aides of Périgueux, a kind of court dealing with tax matters. This institution was later merged with the Parliament of Bordeaux and transferred to that city. Also Montaigne was transferred to Bordeaux. 

Sources
- Desan, Philippe, Montaigne. Une biographie politique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014
- “Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592)”, https://mediatheque.sainthilairederiez.fr/node/597440?&from=/node/597440
- “Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne”, in Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Eyquem_de_Montaigne