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/