Normative objects

The photo at the top of this blog shows a boundary stone somewhere east of the Dutch town of Nijmegen. The stone marks there the border between the Netherlands and Germany. The foreground is the Netherlands and on the other side of the stone it is Germany. Once this stone had a compelling force: It told you that without permission it was forbidden to cross the border it marked. Many boundary markers of this kind – besides marking the border – still have this prohibitive function, like those on the border between Lithuania and Belarus. Instead of a stone (or pole) you could put there also a board with a text or a symbolic drawing or a border guard. Just like the board or the guard such a boundary stone has a normative force. It replaces the board or the guard. Therefore we call a boundary stone a deontic artifact: an artifact with a normative intent. The stone prescribes you what to do, or rather what not to do: to pass the stone without permission. Once, this was the normative function of the stone in the photo. Now, in these days of open EU borders, it warns you only that the rules and laws on the other side of the side of the stone are different from those on your side, but it is still a deontic artifact in a sense, for it prescribes you that on one side of the stone you need to obey other laws than on the other side.
Look around and you’ll see that deontic artifacts abound. You see them especially in traffic: traffic signs and lights, lines and symbols on the roads, etc. Examples of other deontic artifacts are hedges and fences that mark out private territory or now in the days of the Covid pandemic arrows on the floor of a shop that tell you how to walk. Deontic artifacts are not only symbolic but they can also force you to behave in a certain way. A roundabout is a typical example. It prescribes you to follow a certain route and to give priority to the traffic on the roundabout. You can ignore the prescriptions, but you will not do so for it is risky.
As my examples make clear, deontic artifacts can be of different kinds. A boundary stone is normative or prescriptive: It informs you about desired or prescribed behaviour. Or better, take a road sign. It tells you what to do, though in many cases you can ignore it, if you want to. On the other hand, a roundabout is regulative: it regulates or enforces your behaviour for you don’t want to have an accident. Another example is a speed bump on a road. It doesn’t prescribe you to drive slower, but you’ll do for you don’t want to damage your car. Because as such a speed bump is not normative, actually we can call it better a regulative adeontic artifact. A fence marking a private territory not only marks what is private and what is public, but if it is high enough it also stops you to enter the private area and so it is a regulative deontic artifact.
A deontic artifact can be permanent or temporarily. Above I discussed already several examples of permanent deontic artifacts, like boundary stones or fences. Once placed, they stay there “for eternity” or at least for an indefinite time. But sometimes we want to mark a place or forbid certain behaviour only for a short time. A row of chairs barring the entrance of a lounge or a bar or a part of a room is a case in point. Normally you can come there for a drink or a meal but the barman has closed the space for a little while, for instance because it must to be cleaned. Another example is a coat left on a chair telling you that the chair is already used by someone else who has left for a moment. The momentarily deontic artifacts just mentioned are informal markers, but markers can also be formal, like the traffic cones used by road workers to mark a hole in the road or the place where they are working. However, we consider a traffic cone only as a marker of danger or as a sign that marks out road works if placed on the road. If you see a few disorganized traffic cones on the roadside, you’ll not see them as markers, so as deontic artifacts that warn you for a danger or that regulate your behaviour. They are just there; left. This exemplifies that a deontic artifact gets its meaning as such only if it is situated: it needs “to be installed in a particular place to exercise [its] function and influence.” A deontic artifact “only performs its function when it is in its place.” (see Source, p. 194)
These are only a few distinctions that characterize deontic artifacts, or normative objects as they can be called as well. If we think of norms that prescribe or regulate what we do, usually we think of texts set down in explicit rules and laws or in cultural habits and customs or in implicit behavioural precepts; that is, we think of something that is linguistic in some way. As we have seen above regulative phenomena of everyday life can and often do have also a material aspect, or they are even fully material (like the speed bump). The material dimension of a normative phenomenon is often as important as its linguistic dimension. 

Source
When writing this blog I have leaned heavily on
Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni, Olimpia Giuliana Lodo, “Deontic artifacts. Investigating the normativity of objects”, in Philosophical Explorations, 24/2 (June 2021).

Random quote
No man shall be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one is to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleases.

Akbar, Indian Moghul Emperor, Muslim (1542-1605)

Someone else’s shoes

Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations, § 443: “ ‘The red which you imagine is surely not the same (not the same thing) as the red which you see in front of you; so how can you say that it is what you imagined?’ ” Let’s forget the quotation marks and concentrate on the contents and take the remark as it is. Let’s go one step further. Then we get the question: Is what you see exactly the same as what I see, even if we describe it with the same words? For instance: You see something red and describes it as being red. But is your red also my red? It’s a thing I always have wondered, already as a child. To be exact, then I wondered whether the yellow colour that you see is the same yellow colour as I see it. In short, I wondered whether your yellow is my yellow. Not only then I asked myself this question, but I still do. Even more, when I keep a hand for my right eye and then for my left eye, I always have the impression that the yellow I see with my left eye is a little different from the yellow I see with my right eye: My left eye yellow is slightly darker than my right eye yellow. Leaving aside for a moment the latter problem of seeing the same thing in different ways, depending on the eye I use, I think that we have here a fundamental problem of human relationship and being human: Are we really able to have the same experiences as other persons when seeing the same red object or taking part in the same event, even though – at first sight, at least – we and they are the same in relevant respects? So, can we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Many people think we can: That we can experience another person’s feelings, but also another person’s reasoning when taking a decision. And many people think we often do: they often automatically think that another person’s view point is their view point. For instance, someone tells a dirty joke and you think that he knows that he tells a dirty joke; his view on the world is your view on the world.
The problem here is that you may be right in thinking that what you see, feel, experience, etc. is what the other sees, feels, experiences ... However, this doesn’t need to be so. You can make the mistake – and it often happens –that is called the psychologist’s fallacy (a term coined by William James some 150 years ago). The Lexico dictionary describes it this way: “The confusion of the thought of the observer with that which is being observed; the assumption that motives, etc., present in one’s own mind are also present in that of the subject under investigation.”
There are different types of the psychologist’s fallacy, which I’ll not discuss here (see for instance this link, where you can also find more examples). However, it’s a fallacy that is prevalent. For many people it is difficult to imagine that other people are different, think differently and behave differently. Oh, certainly, they say that they can imagine that others are different etc. and in the abstract they know that it happens, but when it comes to the point they feel that not being, thinking and behaving like they do is strange, if not weird. It’s the basis of prejudices. “Why are they not as us”, they say. “It’s normal to do it our way.” Etc. This thinking, being, behaving differently is enough to look down on “them”, and to turn their backs on them. But note that your own left eye may see things in a different way than your right eye does. Aren’t we so already a bit as the other whom we think we don’t understand? Even if you wouldn’t want to be in someone’s shoes, maybe those shoes do fit him or her better.

Random quote
The history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. … This history is thought in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

Karl Popper (1992-1994)

Homesickness or desire? Or just waiting?

 

Last week I was on holiday and so I couldn’t write a blog. Instead, I have uploaded this photo. It’s a photo that I like a lot. I have taken it in Klaipeda in Lithuania, a few years ago. I had spent a holiday in the Baltic States and I was waiting in the harbour of Klaipeda till the ferry would appear that would bring me to Germany. I think that this photo can express a lot. Is it homesickness? Desire? Hope? Or nothing of this at all, and does it capture simply the idea of waiting? Or is it not more than a harbour view? Or is it something else? But does the photo really express anything? It’s a photo that raises many questions. That’s why it is a really philosophical photo.

Random quote
That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1888-1951)

“You cannot step in the same river twice”

I find fallacies intriguing. That’s why I have treated them already several times in these blogs. Fallacies are incorrect reasonings and sooner or later everybody makes mistakes of this kind. Even philosophers, scholars and scientist do. So a good reason to keep paying attention to them. As before, I make extensive use here of Arp, et al., 2019 (see Reference). Here is their full definition of a fallacy:
“A fallacy is an error in reasoning whereby someone attempts to put forward an argument whereby a conclusion supposedly has been appropriately inferred from a premise (or premises) when, in fact, the conclusion does not and should not be inferred from the premise(s).” (p. 19; italics in the original)
Fallacies are errors and should be avoided. They are based on false facts or views and usually the conclusion is a false fact or view (although it remains possible that the conclusion of a false reasoning happens to be true despite the false reasoning). However, it’s often not noticed that a reasoning is false and fallacies can have long lives. Some fallacies may have been put forward while those who did simply thought that the reasoning was correct, but it also often happens that false reasonings are put forward on purpose by people who think to gain by doing so and who want to manipulate people. Especially in politics both things happen, and maybe the latter more than the former, but that’s a personal opinion that I cannot substantiate with facts. Anyway, beware of politicians who use rhetoric.
Fallacies can be divided into formal and informal fallacies. A formal fallacy is one in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise(s) because of errors in the structure (form) of the reasoning, rather than in the content. The fallacy called “affirming the consequent” is a case in point, for instance: “If it is raining, the sidewalk is wet. > The sidewalk is wet, so it is raining”. The conclusion doesn’t follow, for maybe someone has just scrubbed the sidewalk. This simple fallacy is committed more often than you think!
An informal fallacy is one in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise(s) because of errors in the content of the reasoning. Since the content is expressed in language, often we find the false reasoning in the language used, like the misuse of words or grammar, false understanding, vague use of conceptions, and so on. Prejudices belong to this type of fallacy, for instance: Someone did something wrong and then the reasoning is “it is because s/he is a person from that ethnicity/sex/creed and my experience is that such persons behave that way.” (cf. Arp, et al., 2019, pp. 18-27) Arp et al. discuss seven formal fallacies and 93 informal fallacies, but it’s only a selection.
Also schooled thinkers commit fallacies. Even the Old Greek philosophers did, although they introduced the idea of fallacy in Western philosophy. By way of example, I’ll discuss here a statement by Heraclitus (540-480 B.C.). Fallacies were first systematized by Aristotle (who lived after Heraclitus, namely from 384-322 B.C.; click here for his work on fallacies), but I think that fallacies were certainly already known to Heraclitus.
Last year in a blog (click here; at the end) I shortly discussed Heraclitus’s statement that you cannot step into the same river twice. I explained that in this statement Heraclitus confused levels, namely the levels of the river and the water, and that you can step into a river as often as you like. We can also say that Heraclitus committed the fallacy of composition. The river consists of a bed in a landscape and this bed contains streaming water, indeed. However, it is not so that the river itself streams but that the water in the river streams. As such the river has a fixed place in the landscape and keeps this place when you cross it. If we say that a river streams, it is only a metaphor, a figure of speech that means that the water in the river streams. So, if we say “a fast-flowing river”, in fact we mean that the water in the river is fast-flowing. Therefore, you cannot step into the same (river) water twice, but you can step in the river itself as often as you like. The fallacy of composition is the error to ascribe characteristics, attributes or features of a part to the whole it belongs to, and this is what Heraclitus did: streaming is a characteristic of the water in the river but not of the river itself. (cf. Arp, et al., 2019, pp. 250-1; the example is mine)
Now it is up to you to uncover the fallacies that I committed in my blogs. 

Reference
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
Fighting for prestige, for honour, is litteraly fighting for nothing,

René Girard (1923-2015)

Montaigne and the Olympic Games

OLympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece

In the days of Montaigne there were no Olympic Games. The original Olympic Games of Antiquity had ended about 400 B.C. (the precise date is not known), while the first modern Olympic Games have been held in 1896. When Montaigne lived – the time of the Renaissance or Rediscovery of Antiquity – it was known that such games had been held long ago, but no one was interested to bring this past to life again. Compared to the day of today there was by far less interest in sport. However, tournaments like in the Middle Ages were still held, jeu de paume was quite popular, especially in France, as were boule games. Other sports practised were running, ice-skating (especially in the Netherlands), weight lifting, wrestling, etc., etc. But there was no competition on a scale that can be compared with what happens nowadays (one practical reason for this was, of course, that there was no good and fast transport system). Montaigne himself liked horse riding; just for pleasure, not for competition. One of his brothers played jeu de paume (and died after a ball had hit his head). So sport belonged to Montaigne’s life and to the society he lived in. Therefore it is not surprising that he mentions sport now and then in his Essays, though not very often. Sometimes Montaigne mentions the jeu de paume, sometimes he mentions sport in quotations or examples from Antiquity, and that’s most of it.
It is in examples that Montaigne mentions the Olympic Games four times in his Essays. Three references are not very interesting. However, one reference to the Olympic Games is, for it tells us a lot about the meaning and significance of sport. Although this reference doesn’t contain an idea of Montaigne himself but one developed by Pythagoras, it’s clear that Montaigne agrees with it. Here it is:
“Pythagoras was want to say that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.” (Essays, Book I, 25)
Montaigne refers to this view of Pythagoras in his essay “Of the Education of Children”. First, he says there that we must watch others and see how they behave, so that we can learn from it. In this context he mentions especially the ridiculousness and the arrogance of others. Such examples, such knowledge of what others have done “fortify our sight without closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good company in the other world.” And then Montaigne comes with the passage on how Pythagoras interpreted the Olympic Games. With this passage Montaigne wants to say that children – and actually not only children, but everybody – must be like spectators and that they must learn from what they see happening around them. However, to my mind the meaning of this passage is wider. It contains not only the metaphor that a child (and actually everybody) is like a spectator of a sports event, but the passage is a kind of allegory of life. Life is like a sports tournament in which each person has a role to play and in which the occurrences and incidents are like the occurrences and incidents in life. In a sports event like the Olympic Games but also in smaller sports events there are players – the main participants –; there are winners and losers; those who try to profit for personal gain, but are not the main players; onlookers and bystanders; but also others, not mentioned by Pythagoras, like organizers, people in the background who may have the real power, manipulators, cheaters and deceivers, supervisors, innovators, and so on. The more you think about it, the more you’ll see that the Olympic Games and in fact any sports event is a reflection of life. Events like the Olympic Games are maybe too big for it, but smaller events of that kind, local and regional events, can function as a school of life. Then we don’t need to be only spectators, as Montaigne suggests, but we can also play one of the other parts. Every part in a sports event has aspects that are important in life. In this sense, sport is more than relaxation and recreation as is often thought. But can we reproach Montaigne that he wasn’t aware of it? For sport in his days was very different from sport in 2021. Then sport was mainly relaxation and recreation, indeed, and several centuries would have to pass by before it became a real model of life; before it became life itself.