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.
                                                                        ***
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.
                                                   ***
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)
                                                   ***
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)