Random quote
The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)

The discursive dilemma

To my mind, one of the most intriguing issues in social philosophy is that groups as such can have different opinions than its individual members taken together have. It is not simply an ivory tower problem, for it can have practical consequences, for instance when a group takes a decision that is against the will of its members or when it takes a decision that doesn’t find enough support among its members, so that it is difficult to get it executed. I have discussed this problem already before in these blogs, but when I noticed that the last time I did is already six years ago (see here and here), I thought that it would be worthwhile to raise the matter again, but then from a somewhat different angle.
The problem has been famously discussed by Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager in their article “The one and the Many” in which they analysed the case of a three-member court that passes a verdict that deviates from what the individual judges think. But here I prefer to discuss an example treated by List and Pettit (2013, pp. 45-46), which is more general, because unlike judges, the participants are not limited by exogenous constraints like official procedures in their decisions. List and Pettit call this more general problem the “discursive dilemma”. Here it is, a little bit adapted by me:
  “[I]magine an expert panel that has to give advice on global warning. … The panel seeks to form judgments on the following propositions (and their negations):
- Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are above 6500 million metric tons of carbon per annum (proposition ‘p’).
- If global carbon dioxide emissions are above this threshold, then the global temperature will increase by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next three decades (proposition ‘if p then q’).
- The global temperature will increase by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next three decades (proposition ‘q’).
The three propositions are complex factual propositions on which the experts may reasonably disagree. Suppose the experts’ judgments are shown in the table below, all individually consistent. … 

                        Emissions above         If p then temper-         Temperature
                        threshold?                   ature increase?            increase?
                        (p?)                             (if p then q?)               (q?) 

Individual 1                True                True                            True 

Individual 2                True                False                           False 

Individual 3                False               True                            False 

Majority                     True               True                           False

Given the judgments in this table, a majority of experts judges that emissions are above the relevant threshold (‘p’). Moreover, a majority judges that, if they are above this threshold, then the temperature will increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius (‘if p then q’). Nevertheless, a majority judges that there will be no temperature increase (not ‘q’).” List and Pettit conclude then that “a majority voting on interconnected propositions may lead to inconsistent group judgments even when individual judgments are fully consistent …” (p. 46).
I think that examples like this one illustrate that groups are not simply aggregates of individuals. Groups are not just collections of certain individuals but they are entities of their own and in a sense they are independent of the individuals that make up the group. Otherwise, we couldn’t explain, for instance, how a sports team can become champion, if the members that make up the team at the beginning of the season are not the same members that make up the team at the end of the season (or for a part). Just as we don’t get a new car, when its tyres are replaced, we don’t get a new team when one or more members are replaced. That a team becomes champion is the consequence of purposeful and intentional actions by the team members but as such these individual actions aren’t actions of the group. A team can play a match because its actions are constituted by the individual actions of its players, but the players of the team don’t need to be the same players all the time. Therefore, in the end, it’s not that the individual players win the cup but the team does. I think that something like this happens when a group takes a decision, as in the example above. The group members think individually and vote individually and this results in a group decision, but this individual voting is not the same as the group decision. It would be different if the group members would take a decision in a joint consultation in consensus.
The case discussed exemplifies that generally what groups do and what individuals do are different things and are on different levels. Groups are not simply individuals put together. This is an important conclusion. If one doesn’t take it into account, it can happen, for instance, that a group takes a decision that cannot be executed because it is against the will of its members, although all members had a say in it. 

Source
Christian List; Philip Pettit, Group Agency. The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Random quote
One of the reasons that we find so few persons rational and agreeable in conversation is there is hardly a person who does not think more of what he wants to say than of his answer to what is said. 

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Mumpsimus

Mass at Fatima, Portugal

One of the strangest, if not weirdest, words that you can find in many English dictionaries is “mumpsimus”. It looks like Latin, but everybody who knows a little Latin and has a feeling for the language, knows that it cannot be Latin, nor cannot it be an original English word. But what then can the origin of this word be?
I didn’t know the word, until I read a biography of the great Dutch theologist and philologist Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536). One of the tasks Erasmus had set himself was making an improved edition of the New Testament. In the days of Erasmus the Bible version used by everybody was the so-called Vulgate. The origin of the Vulgate goes back to the fourth century. After intensive study of the Vulgate it had become clear to Erasmus that the book was full of mistakes. The origins of these mistakes were many. For example, the original books of the New Testament were in Greek, but the Vulgate is in Latin, so it’s a translation of the original. Moreover, when the Vulgate had been written, already several versions of the Greek Bible books existed, and they were all a bit different. The question then is: What is the real original text? Also important was that the Vulgate was already more than thousand years old and it had been copied by hand again and again. Especially this was a source of many mistakes. And last but not least, for several reasons sometimes sentences had been added to or omitted from the Vulgate during these thousand years. Erasmus decided to try to reconstruct the New Testament in order to get a text that was as near to the original as meant by the authors as possible. He called the result Novum Instrumentum (New Instrument). The Novum Instrumentum contained the original reconstructed Greek text of the New Testament, a Latin translation and an extensive explanation of both, so that the readers could judge themselves whether Erasmus had made the right choices when reconstructing and translating the New Testament.
When Novum Instrumentum was published in 1516 Erasmus was sharply criticized. However, it was not because the Erasmus should have made the wrong choices in his text reconstruction, but he was criticized because he had reconstructed the Vulgate. People were angry because Erasmus had replaced old familiar words by new words. There were even rumours that the Novum Instrumentum would be judged by the Inquisition, the court of the Roman Catholic church. This made Erasmus in a letter to a friend refer to a story going around in his days “about a poorly educated Catholic priest saying Latin mass who, in reciting the postcommunion prayer Quod ore sumpsimus, Domine (meaning: ‘What we have received in the mouth, Lord’, instead of sumpsimus (meaning: ‘we have received’) substitutes the non-word mumpsimus ... After being made aware of his mistake, [this priest] nevertheless persisted with his erroneous version, whether from stubbornness, force of habit, or refusing to believe he was mistaken.” (quoted from the Wikipedia) The theologians who judge my Novum Instrumentum, so Erasmus, are like this priest who didn’t recognize and correct his mistake, even after it had been explained to him. When former students of Erasmus in Cambridge heard about this letter, it caused such great hilarity among them that since then “mumpsimus” became an expression for nonsense, inveteracy and for an inveterate person in the English language, an expression that still exists in modern English. So we can say “He prefers his mumpsimus for my sumpsimus”, meaning that he stubbornly sticks to a clear mistake that I have explained to him. Generally, a “mumpsimus” is a person who adheres to or persists in old ways or ideas, practices, uses of words, etc., although it has been made clear that they are wrong, erroneous, etc. Also the practice, idea etc. itself can be called a mumpsimus. A modern example of a mumpsimus is the former American president George W. Bush, who persisted in saying “nucular”, when meaning “nuclear”. And I would call also many anti-coronavirus-vaxxers mumpsimusses, in view of all the facts that have shown the value of vaccination against Covid 19. On the other hand, one shouldn’t be too hard on someone who is a mumpsimus, especially when it is on matters that aren’t really important. Aren’t we all often mumpsimusses? Don’t we all often stick to ideas, habits, practices and so on, which we once thought reasonable if not good but which have shown to be mistakes, false ideas, bad habits …? Many people often make themselves immune to criticism, just because they don’t want to change, just because they don’t like the person who criticizes them, just because going on in the old way is easier than changing, despite the negative consequences. Is not everybody a mumpsimus in his or hear heart? Everyone thinks his own geese swans. 

Source
Sandra Langereis, Erasmus dwarsdenker. Een biografie. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2021; pp. 542-544.

Random quote
The criterion for philosophy of primitivism lies not in the conceptual form to which one feels absolutely allied, but in the pursuit of a fixed idea that there should be something like a single unified, all-compassing, exhaustive form.

Wolfram Eilenberger, abstracting Ernst Cassirer’s (1874-1945) philosophy of culture.

Mental fog

Yes, I know that you are eagerly waiting for a new blog. However, this time you’ll see only mental fog. Sometimes I must working on my physical shape and I give my mind a little rest. So, again, like a few weeks ago, I took a mental break and worked on my physical condition. Last week I have cycled a lot and now I hope to have a fresh mind for a new series of blogs. But as it goes, my mind kept working when I wasn’t in the saddle, so I read a lot, too, and I kept thinking as well. Next week you’ll see some fruit of my thinking, but this week you’ll see only fog.

Random quote
One does not need to hope in order to undertake something, nor to succeed in order to persevere.

William I of Orange (the Silent) (1533-1584)

How we perceive

Traces of a roe (little deer) in the concrete
of a cycle track

Philosophers often come with new theories which then are refuted by other philosophers with again new theories. Such theories are about all kinds of themes: ethical and moral theories about what we should do, theories about the best political system, theories about the essence of man, theories about how we act (my specialty), theories about being, theories about happiness, and so on. I could make here a long, if not very long list of philosophical theories, but you know what I mean. And, of course, philosophers discuss, and sometimes fight as well, what the best theory in their field is. But how do we know what the best theories are? How do we know which theories are true? Philosophical discussions are mainly discussions about ideas, not about facts. By nature, philosophical theories just are about what cannot be experienced or at least not directly, and because of this they cannot be tested. In the end, philosophical ideas are mere speculations; they are views – albeit reasoned views – on how the world is constituted. They are subjective. We can also say that philosophy is about what is not empirical.
Therefore it’s a pleasure when we find facts that maybe don’t prove philosophical views – for that’s not possible – but that at least make some theories quite likely and in a sense give them a kind of empirical foundation. Take for instance the way we look at the world. A view long sustained by many is that what we see around us is passively received in the brain via the senses, especially by the eyes and ears. The world we see leaves a kind of imprint somewhere in the brain, like in the memory, just as a stamp that you push in a soft substance like wax; or, to take a modern metaphor, like how a printer prints the image on your computer screen on a piece of paper. This view is called naïve realism. However, as empirical research has made clear, it works in a very different manner. In a way, perceiving is more a brain-to-world process than a world-to-brain process, although the latter certainly plays an important part. I’ll spare you the details how it really works but basically it is so that we first make a construction in the brain how the world around us is and then we test this construction with the information that comes to us through the senses. With the help of this incoming information the constructed “image” in the brain is improved. To know this as a philosopher is very interesting, especially if you are an epistemologist, for in fact it confirms two philosophical theories. As Gerhard Roth makes clear in his Aus Sicht des Gehirns (= From the Brain’s View Point), pp. 86-87: Thinking is the most important organ for perception. Starting from genetically determined interpretations or interpretations required in early life, each process of perception or observation is a kind of making hypotheses about forms, relations and meanings in the world. To put it differently: The way that processes of perception and observation articulate our environment in meaningful forms and events is the consequence of trial and error; of trials to make constructions and interpretations that are then tested and improved. It is a matter of confirmation and correction. Is this not exactly Karl Popper’s well-known scheme P1 > T1 > E > T2 > P2 as discussed, for example in my blog dated 13 July 2015? Is this not Karl Popper’s theory that scientific theories are developed by putting forward an idea, then testing it and then correcting it with the help of the test results as summarized in this scheme?
This way how the brain forms an image of the world is, so Roth continues, also exactly the way it is stated in the field of knowledge theory by the adherents of the idea of epistemological constructivism. This view says that there is no direct representational connection in the brain of what happens in the world and the contents of our perceptions and observations. To put it crudely, there is not a kind of photo of the world around us in the brain. What happens in the world stimulates our senses and these stimulations are the basis of the processes that construct our conscious perceptions and observations, so what we think to “see”. In this way there is no independent knowledge of the world (so there is no “photo”), but for us our knowledge of the world is what these brain-made constructions are. These constructions are continuously tested with the help of new information coming from the outside in the Popperian way just mentioned. However, the brain as such cannot distinguish between its own constructions and the world outside. For the brain the world outside is the construction it has made.
Although philosophical theories are non-empirical, when developing and discussing their views, philosophers can learn a lot from what empirical research has brought. 

Source
Gerhard Roth, Aus Sicht des Gehirns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015.

Random quote
As is well known, everyone sees the world differently, but he usually does not notice anything of it.

Gerhard Roth (1942-)