The function of books

Four years ago I posted here a photo of my study by way of illustration of a blog: http://www.philosophybytheway.blogspot.nl/2009/09/reading-book-makes-my-quiet.html. The walls of the room are full of books, as you can see; not only the one in the picture, but also the other walls. Once I have finished reading a book, I put it there. The books yet to be read have a special shelf. Books are the wall paper of my study, so to speak.

I have uploaded the photo of my study also to a social networking website. People there often ask me: Have you read all those books? Actually, I find it a bit a silly question. For why else should I have my books? Okay, I did not read the dictionaries and the atlases, for one doesn’t “read” such books but one uses them. But I have read my books insofar they have been published for reading in the normal sense. All of them? I must admit that the answer is “no”. Indeed, there are a few books that I didn’t read for some reasons, or I did only for a part. Why? Some had been so long on the waiting shelf that I wondered why I had ever bought them. Again and again I postponed reading them, because other books I had bought later looked more attractive and got a preferential treatment. Now I have solved the problem by reading books more or less in the order I have bought them: It has no sense to read a book ten years later when your interest has changed. Another reason why I sometimes postponed reading a book is that it looked so difficult to me that I found it better to read it with extra attention instead of reading it quickly and a bit superficially, as I often do. However, I did not make time for doing it and in the end the book came in the “Why had I ever bought it?” category. And there are also those books that I started to read but I found them so boring or incomprehensible or obscure that I put them aside before having finished reading them. Without a doubt there are other reasons why I didn’t read some books, but these are some of the most important. In fact, it didn’t happen so often so when asked “Have you read all those books?” I can honestly answer: “Yes, I did, or at least, say, 95% of them”.

Nevertheless, I always feel myself a bit ashamed when admitting that I haven’t read all, for in the end that’s why I bought them. But is this feeling right? Maybe my idea that books are there only for being read is too narrow minded. I got the idea that they can have other functions, too, when I read Arthur Schopenhauer’s preface to the first edition of his The World as Will and Representation, where he said:

“The reader … has bought the book for cash, and asks how he is to be indemnified. My last refuge is now to remind him that he knows how to make use of a book in several ways, without exactly reading it. It may fill a gap in his library as well as many another, where, neatly bound, it will certainly look well. Or he can lay it on the toilet-table or the tea-table of some learned lady friend. Or, finally, what certainly is best of all, and I specially advise it, he can review it.”

When writing this blog, I still have to read the rest of Schopenhauer’s book, which will be quite a job, for it has nearly thousand pages. But even if I’ll not succeed to read it till the end, I’ll have learned at least one thing: A book can have many functions. Using it as wall paper is acceptable even if you haven’t read it (so Schopenhauer). Improving the relation with an intelligent lady friend is good, too (how about a gentleman friend? Schopenhauer doesn’t talk about it). Writing about it makes also sense (it seems that Schopenhauer supposes that you do not need to read a book in order to criticise it). And certainly there are more usefull applications for a book as well (like supporting a wobbling table). And in the end a book has another possible function as well, for you can read it, too.

Double truth (2)

In my blog on double truth last week I argued that the truth of a statement must often be put into perspective and that it may depend on the position of the person who utters the statement. I expressed this by saying that truth can be double or even multiple. Is that all there is?

I begun to think about this question, when I heard about a new doping scandal in sport. This time it is not in cycle racing, which gradually seems to become cleaner. No, the present scandal is in athletics, where recently a range of athletes, among them several Olympic gold medal winners, have been exposed as doping users. This raised in me the question: Has there always been doping?

When searching for the answer on the Internet, I discovered that it is yes and no. Since sport in its present manifestation goes back to classical antiquity I wondered how it was in those days and what I found was double: yes, doping existed; no, it did not exist. I’ll not go into the details, but indeed, it was so that in Greece and Rome athletes and their trainers of all kinds of sports had discovered that there are nutrients but also, for example, mushrooms that improved the sporting achievements. The answer is no, since there was no doping in the modern sense for there were no rules that forbade the use of doping. Paraphrasing Feyerabend, it was “everything goes”. Doping as we know it today, so drugs that are explicitly forbidden because they improve the results, is a recent phenomenon. One website says that it was in 1865 that in modern times the positive effects of doping were established for the first time, when Dutch cross-Channel swimmers used caffeine. The first sportsman who died by using doping is said to be Arthur Linton, the 1896 winner of the Bordeaux-Paris cycling race, who died eight weeks after his victory. Since then gradually rules have been made that forbid the use of doping in sport, and now the list of “List of Prohibited Substances and Methods” is long. However, developing rules and adding drugs to the prohibited list is not one-way. Sometimes drugs that were once not allowed have been removed from the list again. Caffeine is a case in point. Until 2004 it was on the list when a certain threshold value had been exceeded. Then it has been dropped from the list, and a sportsman or sportswoman can drink as many cups of coffee and other caffeine containing drinks as s/he likes.

What does this mean for my theory of double or multiple truths? The statement that a range of athletes recently has been exposed as doping users is true from the present perspective: According to the present sport laws they simple are doping offenders. Using oxilofrine and other dope, as they did, is a sports offence today. But if they had used the same drug on, say, the Olympic Games of 676 BC they would have been no more than smart athletes who followed the rules and who would have been honoured as decent winners. Using oxilofrine was no offence at all. Even if the use of dope could and would have been established afterwards then, nobody would have thought of depriving them of their titles. They would have been honest winners.

The upshot is that truth cannot only be double or multiple if we take the perspective of another person or of other persons, it can also be double or multiple from the perspective of time: what is true at one point in time need not be true at another point in time. We can also say: Truth has both a synchronic and a diachronic dimension.

Double truth

In my last blog I criticized Wittgenstein’s remark in On Certainty 80-81 that asserted that whether I understand what I state depends on whether it is true or false what I state. My objection was that it is easy to give examples of false statements that have nevertheless an obviously clear meaning for the speaker, for instance that the earth is the centre of the universe. What I actually want to say in my criticism is that truth, at least empirical truth, is often a matter of perspective and that it is often not possible to say “This statement is true and the opposite statement is false”. It’s a bit surprising for me that two paragraphs later in his On Certainty Wittgenstein actually says the same:

83. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.

Without a doubt, it will be possible to give a sound explanation or interpretation of this remark by Wittgenstein in the context of his On Certainty. However, here I’ll leave it as it is.

Probably some readers of my blogs find the remark that truth may be a matter of perspective (or a matter of frame of reference, in Wittgenstein's words) a bit shocking. But is it really so shocking? Isn’t the phenomenon of double or even multiple truths, as I would call it, something that abounds in daily life? Take for instance the caption of the photo in my last blog: Does the sun go down or does the earth come up? The former is true from the perspective of what we see; the latter is true from the perspective of astronomy.

Actually, the perspective or contextual dependence of truth is not limited to such rather trivial examples as the question whether the sun goes down or the earth comes up. It can be a source of serious social and political conflicts. I’ll give two examples:

- Ethiopia has started to construct a barrage in the Nile. Egypt, which is downstream of the new barrage, is afraid that this will be detrimental for the water supply in the Nile and it threats to take measures. It’s a case of double truth, I think, where both countries are right in a certain sense from the perspective of state autonomy and the right to defend its interests.

- Terrorism is a threat for the world, so you are allowed to collect any data that might help to prevent it. Citizens of a state have a right of privacy. Who is right? Obama or Snowden?

Maybe these cases or not well-chosen or not clear-cut enough, and that’s then my fault. Look around and I don’t doubt that you’ll find much better instances. But I think that you’ll understand the idea I want to express: At first sight, what is true is not as plain as you might think but it may depend on where you stand.

On Certainty

Does the sun go down or does the earth come up?

In On Certainty Wittgenstein writes:

80. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.

81. That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.

Broadly speaking, this is not correct. For example, when the Inquisition sentenced Galileo, because he denied the official doctrine of the roman catholic church that the earth is the centre of the universe, the inquisitors understood and knew exactly what they were talking about, although their doctrine appeared to be false – and was actually already superseded in those days – and Galileo appeared to be right. What is true is often not a matter of yes or no but it must be seen in the perspective of place and time (history). This is for social facts even more so than for physical facts.

And what to think of lies? They are produced with insight and understanding of what’s true.

There are many other instances that speak against the truth of these two combined statements, at least in general.

Double identity

Actually I need not to write about it, for it’s a well-known phenomenon: role playing. No, I don’t mean what actors do on the stage but what we do in everyday life, although in a certain sense it’s a bit like what actors do. At home, we are father, mother or child. On the workplace we are accountant, teacher, manager, or student. On the sports field we are long distance runner, goalkeeper, referee or spectator. And so on. Every position has its rules of what the holder of the position is supposed to do, what s/he is allowed to do and what is forbidden. The accountant registers the money transactions of his or her company but doesn’t take the decisions what to do with the money. That task belongs to the manager or to the director. And the worker on the shop floor is the one who factually makes the products. By analogy of what is happening on a stage such positions are called roles and the position holders are called role players. Since each person always plays several roles, daily life can be quite compartmentalized. Then you have to do this, an hour later (or sometimes a few moments later) you have to play another role and each role has its rules and requirements. This can be quite confusing. The American sociologist Robert Merton has become famous by his social role playing theory (but not only by this) but the idea that we play roles is already much older.

Because role playing is an essential part of our lives and is an essential way of filling in our relations with others, the roles we play are important elements of our personal identities (next to our experiences, for instance). Usually it is so that we not only play our roles but we are our roles. I mean, as a rule we don’t just pretend to be father, teacher or long distance runner. We believe in what we do and we do it with our whole hearts. However, it doesn’t need to be so, as everybody knows. An extreme case of pretending a role is a seeming customer who wants to observe the bank in order to come back next day as a raider. Actually it is so that in most roles we play we always need to pretend a bit as well.

For most people their different roles are well integrated. It’s true, roles can conflict, for instance, when a teacher has her own child in her class, so that the roles of teacher and mother can conflict. But most people can play their different roles openly and they can be tuned to one another, so that role conflicts can be avoided. And normally one doesn’t need to hide particular roles for other people. Nevertheless this can happen, for instance when someone doesn’t dare to say that he is gay to his parents, boss or other relevant people in his environment. If he wants to visit a gay cafe, for instance, this needs to be kept secret. Then such person leads a “double life”: two “lives” strictly kept apart. In a certain sense he has a double identity. In a more innocent way, you can say that someone has a double identity if one of the roles he openly plays actually has nothing to do with his daily life. People have hobbies, and hobbies like playing chess, collecting stamps, voluntary work, or whatever, usually involve roles that are well integrated with the other roles of the role player. But what to think of an actor or a member of a historical re-enactment group? The role as such as a player is well integrated with other social roles, but what about the role played? The actor playing Napoleon is Napoleon at the moment he is playing if he is playing well. The man playing a mediaeval knight is this mediaeval knight at the moment he is playing if he is playing his part well. In this sense we can say that persons playing the role of another have a double identity. This has been shown so well by Wim Piesen in his excellent series of photos (http://www.wimpiesen.be/category.php?catId=64338).

To what extent are double identities kept apart and to what extent can they be kept apart? And to what extent are people pretending playing the role they play not the role player they pretend to be? I think that the cases of the actor or the pretender are not problematic. Even if the actor is playing Napoleon or another role, he is always giving a personal interpretation of the parts being played. This points to an integration of his, what I would call now, “secondary identity” with his “main identity”. And the pretender pretends his role usually in function of the other roles that make up his or her identity (the customer in my example is a raider in disguise). But also the person who keeps one of his identities secret for the daily environment is actually “playing” the person he is for his environment: Much he does in his daily environment is often done  in function of keeping a part of his identity secret. This keeping secret influences the ways the “public” roles are filled in. Therefore, we can say with Montaigne, “Whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it” (from “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die”).

Acting without moving one’s body

My last blog was about the moral relevance of the distinction between doing and allowing. My analysis suggested that the difference between both is not very clear-cut. Nevertheless, there seems to be a basic distinction between the concepts: Doing is making things happen and allowing is letting things happen. The former is usually interpreted that way that the making implies an intention in what we do plus a relevant movement of our body. As a rule we call such a doing an action. Allowing is usually interpreted that way that the letting implies that the things that take place will happen anyway without our intervention. However, as the two cases in my last blog show, the distinction is not as marked as it might look to us on the face of it. In Case 1 the doctor turns off the life-support machine in order to let John die. In Case 2 Bill turns off the life-support machine in order to make John die. The difference is here a matter of interpretation, but just this might cast doubt on the idea that there is a fundamental difference between doing and allowing. This may be even more so, if one realizes that allowing is not merely a matter of letting things happen and that’s it. Many things in the world around us occur and we take hardly any notice of them if we do it at all. Then we don’t say that we allow them. Especially we do not say that if we cannot have any influence on what is going on. Just the fact that we notice what is happening; that we have the possibility to intervene; and that we have a reason to intervene makes that we speak of “allowing”. In other words: Allowing is intentionally not intervening. Seen that way, the difference between doing and allowing tends to fade away, for then allowing is nothing else than a passive doing. It’s a kind of action without moving one’s body, so to speak. If we add to this that allowing is a matter of degree (see my last blog), then it’s only one step to see doing, or better acting, and allowing as extremes on a sliding scale.

Doing and allowing (2): Two cases

Case 1. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. After several years the family and the medical staff see it as the best solution for John to turn off the life-support machine and let him die. So the doctor who is responsible for John’s treatment turns off the machine and John dies. Many people will say that this is a case of allowing (that John dies): The doctor lets John die. If there hadn’t existed a life-supporting machine, John would have died anyway.

Case 2. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. In his active life John was a criminal who has killed a member of another gang. The remaining members want to take revenge. After a few years, Bill, a member of this gang, discovers that John lies in coma in a hospital. He wants to turn off the life-support machine and so kill John. In the meantime, John’s family and the medical staff have decided that it is best for John is to turn off the life-support machine that is keeping John alive and let him die. However, just before the doctor responsible for John’s treatment can carry out the decision, Bills sneaks in the room where John is lying and turns off the machine. When the doctor has entered the room he can only certify John’s death. Many people will say that this is a case of doing, namely murder: Bill made John die, although John would have died a few moments later anyway, if Bill hadn’t turn off the machine.

What’s the difference? Can we say that the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is basically a matter of intention? Or maybe it is a matter of action and inaction, as some philosophers suggest in other examples?

The problem of the difference between doing and allowing is not new. It has been discussed already by many philosopher. One question is: Is the distinction between doing and allowing morally significant in relevant cases (like mine)? Is this also the case, if, as in Case 2, John would have died also if Bill hadn’t turned off the life-support machine?

In this blog I can pass only a few comments, but the answer seems to depend on many factors and cannot be clear-cut in the sense that allowing is either (morally) different from positive acting (doing) or it isn’t. Some relevant points are:

- What do we mean with “morally”? If you think that lives must be saved anyway under any condition, you might conclude that there is no difference between doing and allowing, at least not in my cases (but what do you mean then with “life”?).

- There are different types of relevance. Maybe the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is juridically relevant (for instance, because euthanasia is legal if certain procedures have been fulfilled), but at the same time it can also be morally relevant (see the former point; maybe you accept the legality of euthanasia because, as a democrat, you accept that the law on euthanasia has been passed in the right way, but nevertheless you don’t agree with it). This shows that allowing is a multidimensional concept. Maybe there are more dimensions than the two I just mentioned. For instance, allowing can be intentional (Case 1) or unintentional (not knowing what to do) or in between (having to make a choice: see the next point for an example), a matter of unconcern (see also the next point), and so on.

- Allowing can also be a matter of degree. It is a big difference when you see a car accident but you do nothing and the victim dies, because you didn’t care or because you were on the way to the hospital with another person who was in peril of death. Or the person that you brought to the hospital was not in peril of death, but it was your father, so you were very worried, while you didn’t realize that the victim of the car accident needed immediate help. It will not be difficult to find other intermediate cases that exemplify that allowing may be a matter of degree.

There are certainly other points that can be put forward that make it impossible to say in general that the difference between doing and allowing is fundamentally relevant or just that it isn’t, although I personally think that it is not not relevant.

In writing this blog I am greatly indebted to Fiona Woollard, “The doctrine of doing and allowing”, part I and II, in Philosophy Compass, 7/7 (2012), pp. 448-469.

“Equality is the soul of equity”

A reader of this website kindly commented on the passage in my last blog that said that the quotation from Richardson (“killing one man is seen as wicked while killing ten thousand is seen as glorious”) points to a double morality. I thought that it would be a good idea to say something more on the idea of “double morality” and, of course, there is a lot to say about it but I didn’t find anything that was good enough to use for my blog or – from another point of view – I wasn’t inspired enough to use what I found on the Internet and in my books and what popped up in my mind. So, I did what I often do then: I took Montaigne’s Essays from my bookcase and I glanced through it. It was no surprise that I ended up in the essay titled “That to study philosophy is to learn to die”, since it is full of underlines in my paper edition, made when I read this essay (which I did several times). The essay is really a place where the reader can find many interesting and stimulating thoughts, and if you want to read at least one essay by Montaigne in your life before you die, this one is a good choice (another good choice is Montaigne’s essay on friendship). It’s almost sure that I’ll use this essay later again here in my blogs, but now my eye was immediately caught by a statement by Montaigne that seemed to apply exactly to the theme of double moral standards: “Equality is the soul of equity”. For isn’t equality the soul of a moral standard that is the same for all? So I thought that this quotation would be a good starting point for a blog on double morality and I still think it is, but then I realized that Montaigne’s statement is even more important in its historical context. For nowadays, more than two hundred years after the French Revolution and 65 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the idea that rights are the same for everybody, which is what this statement implies, is something that goes without saying, albeit it so that often the practice is still different. But in the age of Montaigne justice wasn’t the same for all but it was based on the estate a person belonged to, although in his time the idea of justice based on estate begun to change, after it had reached its summit in the Middle Ages, namely the idea that there is a different kind of justice depending on whether you are a noble, a clergyman or a commoner. However, in this little remark by Montaigne it can be seen that then not everybody agreed with this idea and it shows that the medieval view already became discredited, although it would still last ages, before the idea had faded away, or at least almost…  

The downward trend of violence

Monument for Roland, commander of the rear guard of
Charlemagne’s army in 778 in the Battle of Roncevaux

In my last blog I mentioned Steven Pinker’s thesis that the world is becoming increasingly peaceful. In fact, this remark was only indirectly connected with what I wanted to say there, but at the moment I am reading his The Better Angels of Our Nature. I have almost finished it and I am impressed, so I couldn’t help referring to it. Pinker’s thesis that the world has become safer and less violent through the years is convincing, although this doesn’t imply (and Pinker doesn’t say so) that this tendency is irreversible. The trend of violence goes down even if one takes into account the effects of two world wars and other carnages in the twentieth century, for violence is more than war and revolution. In the past, violence in daily life was by far more important than it is today. For instance, more people were killed by murder, but also on legal grounds. In 1822 an Englishman could be sentenced to death for 222 reasons, including, so Pinker, poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren or cutting down a tree. By 1861 only four capital offenses remained. The downward trend can be seen in other countries as well and gradually many countries have abolished death sentence. Also if violence does not lead to death there has been a downward trend. Moreover, the way people are punished has been humanized. Punishment in the ages before the French Revolution was heart breaking and cruel in due form. Although torture still exists in this world (but has become illegal in most countries) even here you find a “humanizing” trend, how terrible and intolerable it still is. Even if one doesn’t belief that violence is diminishing worldwide, the book is full of facts and insights on the history of its practice and by that on the social history of man and only that is already a good reason for reading it.

An insight that doesn’t come directly from Pinker himself but that he quotes from L.F. Richardson’s Statistics of deadly quarrels (Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press, 1960) runs: “Does it never strikes you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?” (p. 243). This quotation refers to one of the myths of history: the idea that maybe it is not good to kill but killing on order of a higher authority is to be honoured. In this case it says that war is allowed for carrying out state policy if other means fail. Isn’t this a double moral standard? But also here we see a downward trend. Killing on order of a higher authority has become less and less acceptable (see for instance the abolishment of capital punishment, a movement that is still going on). But also war has become an increasingly less palatable solution for political quarrels. International institutions have been established for ending international conflicts, like the United Nations and its institutions or the European Union. It’s one of the merits of the latter that it has made war between its members unthinkable (remember how many bloody wars their member states have fought out against each other till 1945). Gradually war is being held in disrespect. In fact it already is, and maybe once we’ll see the day that a country with an army will be treated as an outcast. As Montaigne said: “N’y avoir qu’une justice”, there is only one justice.

The meaning of the present

A time difference of thousand human lives

Of late I read in the science section of a newspaper about the recent discovery that already 25 million years ago apes and monkeys were different species. This means that these creatures have become separated much earlier than thought before. One can wonder then when man became a separate species. I am a layman in paleoanthropology, but one who reads books and articles about it with much interest and I know that at least eight million years ago a kind of “man” existed and, who knows, maybe “man” existed already at least 25 million years ago. This would imply that “we” are already quite a long time present on this earth in some form or another, although it’s nothing in view of the fact that some 200 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared in this world and that planet earth as such is about three billion (three thousand million) years old. If we take a shorter time perspective, I could mention that the homo sapiens, so modern man, came into being some 200,000 years ago, and that modern abstract types of thinking (if one can see the cave paintings as an expression of it) are maybe some 50.000 years old.

Looking to the future, it’s not possible to say much about how this earth and mankind will develop, besides that within x billions of years this planet will be swallowed up by the sun; that within three or four billion years the earth will be so hot that only the most primitive micro-organisms can survive; and that already long before this will happen mankind and its civilization literally will have been scorched. But first, many, many generations will live yet on earth, many wars will be fought, including several world wars – unless the trend seen by Steven Pinker that the world is becoming more and more peaceful will go on – and civilizations will come and go (including my own Western civilization).

These thoughts came up in me when I read that little article on the origin of apes. It made me down, for what is then the worth of a human life in the perspective of eternity? A man or a woman becomes, say, 80 years old and then s/he dies. Some people become older, but 20 or 30 years older at most. Many don’t even reach these 80 years. In the poorest countries of the world the average life expectancy is only 40+. So, roughly speaking, a man or a woman becomes 40 or 80 years old and that’s it. In the perspective of eternity it’s nothing. If we are lucky, we’ll live on for some time after our physical death through the influence we had on other people, through our deeds, and through our children, but soon this influence will fade away with the exception maybe for some “happy” few, whose impact will stay a bit longer. But what then is the meaning of our lives, if nothing remains? Seen that way, I think it can only be in one thing: in the present, in the now. Only the present can count for a human being, for his or her life will be lost in the light of the future, and also in the light of what has been. The upshot is: Live now and enjoy it as it is.

On quality

The French musician Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was not only a talented composer, but also a critic, scholar and teacher, who wrote more than 400 articles. When I listened to the radio programme “Composer of the week” on the Dutch Radio 4, which presented the life and music of Dukas, I heard the following quotation from an article that he had written in the 1920s (the quote was in Dutch, which I have translated here into English):

“Every day the blasé public is surrounded by the sound of telephones and cars that transport them at top speed from one art manifestation to another. They hog the conversation but they don’t want to waste a minute. When this operation has been finished and has already been forgotten again, they do not ventilate an impression but an opinion; especially one that is elegant and that has been provided with a superior smile for the occasion in the midst of all these tortures.”

Dukas went on with some remarks in which he wondered whether music (and art in general) has to be adapted to this rising superficiality and whether society still has a need for a kind of art that follows its own fundamental principles.

When I heard this quotation, I wondered whether much has changed since Dukas wrote these words ninety years ago. Even more, hasn’t the situation become more marked in these days of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and so on, where everyone has the opportunity and is in the position to express an opinion on who knows what – not only on art – on any moment and to the whole world? Or is this quote simply the thought of a frustrated critic who is himself blasé by thinking that there is some kind of “high culture” that is not reserved for everybody and that has to be admired with awe? For isn’t such a criticism as passed by Dukas of all times? I think it’s double: The quote contains the unreal feeling of a paradise lost but isn’t it so that we need standards of quality and aren’t they always threatened by superficiality and laziness, not only in art but everywhere in life? But what then is quality and who tells us what it is?

Source: http://componistvandeweek.radio4.nl/uitzending/199291/Componist%20van%20de%20week.html (in Dutch)

Will and world

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein wrote: “The world is independent of my will.” (6.373) And he explains it by saying: “Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.” (6.374) But if this were true, what then is the relation between my will and the world? Is my will then outside the world and is it no part of this world? But this would mean that there is a second world, which contains my will (for my will must exist somewhere). And what is this second world then and what is the relation of my will to it?

Moreover, we can apply Wittgenstein’s reasoning to anything else: the existence of bikes, trees, rocks, and so on. (note the wording, for Wittgenstein says: “The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” 1.1.1) But what do we mean then when we ask whether there is a free will? What does it mean then that some say that experiments show that we first start to act and only then develop a will to perform the action concerned? (Libet and Wegner, for instance) Reasoning in Wittgenstein’s way, life would not be a part of the world, or at least not of the “primary world” he talks of. And, whether we have a free will or whether we haven’t (but I think we have, at least in some sense), what does acting then involve if it doesn’t mean performing something in the world? There is only one world, and will and willing are a part of it, as does everything there is.

The other-directed man

Recently I had to think of an article, or rather a book excerpt, that was one of the first pieces I had to read, when I started studying sociology: “The other-directed man” by David Riesman. It had been included in a reader with articles and book extracts and I read it again. It was just as I thought: Although it had been written 60 years ago, it was still very relevant.

Riesman distinguishes three types of persons: the tradition-directed type, the inner-directed type and the other-directed type. The tradition-directed person steers his (or her) life with the help of traditional values, norms and goals, as he learned them in his childhood. These values etc. give him his place in life and society and determine the scope for what he can and cannot do. This type of man is typical for strictly stratified societies where social change is at a minimum, such as the medieval society.

When such a traditional society begins to change more rapidly, as it happened for instance in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, a new type of man comes to the fore: the inner-directed type. Also this type of man learns his values, norms and goals in his childhood from his parents and other influential adults, of course, but the values etc. are no longer those prescribed by society, but they are individual and serve as lifelong orientations that guide the major decisions in life. The person’s internalized goals are very generalized (Riesman mentions wealth, fame, goodness, achievement as instances) and one may fail to reach them, but one never doubts their guiding value. Riesman calls inner-directed people “gyroscopically driven – the gyroscope being implanted by adults and serving to stabilize the young even in voyages occupationally, socially, or geographically far from the ancestral home”.

But today, now that society changes exceedingly quickly, another type of person comes up: the other-directed man. Such a quickly changing society requires a more resilient type of person; one who lets himself be oriented by the opinions of the people around him. His conformity to society is no longer an internally acquired guide of values etc. but a “sensitive attention to the expectations of contemporaries”. Goals have become fluctuating and short-term, and the other-directed person is no longer steered by an internal gyroscope but goals are “picked up … by a [internal] radar.” One gets this radar also in childhood from the parents and influential adults, but now these relevant others “encourage the child to tune in to the people around him and any given time and share his preoccupation with their reactions to him and his to them” (my italics).

Of course, “pure” persons, who belong completely to one type, do not exist, let alone that a whole society of people of one type exists. It’s a matter of degree to which type a person belongs, and he or she is always a mixture of types, as Riesman stresses. However, one type tends to gain the upper hand in a certain society or in a certain period.

Riesman’s analyses of types of persons help me understand what is going on in society today. Although in the days that Riesman wrote his sentences the other-direct man was yet a new type that was not yet very wide spread (Riesman thinks of the USA and parts of Sweden, of Australia and New Zealand), now, 60 years later, one gets the impression that it is becoming the general type of man – anyway in Western society (but certainly not only there) and among the younger generation. It is not difficult to give examples that underline the present other-directedness of modern man: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on are all expressions of the new type of modern man that is developing and that exists already to a high degree. Just these new media are used for telling your occupations to the world, sharing them with others, encouraging reactions from others, and participating in the occupations of others by giving your reactions. In this way, your internal radar picks up the expectations other people have of you, so that you can adapt your short-term goals and your behaviour to them. It’s what we do in our status updates or tweets and by sending our “likes” (or by our invitations to send them). Or in publishing our most private photos on the Internet, showing what we do to others and hoping that it fits what our relevant others think of us.

Source: David Riesman, “The other-direct man”, in Dennis H. Wrong and Harry L. Gracey, Readings in Introductory Sociology, The Macmillan Cy, 1967, pp. 610-616.

The shared character of concepts

The research mentioned in my last blog on the mental representation of dreams is an important step forward in brain research. It is in line with research results that I have discussed before in my blogs. The essence is that they show that objects in the world around us but also our virtual images are represented in our brain in some way. As such it is no surprise, but there is a difference between supposing how things are and seeing a supposition substantiated. We are still far away from really knowing how objects – real or virtual – are represented in the brain, but this type of research helps us understand how the brain is structured and maybe also how we think.

But does this imply that the concepts that refer to such representations – or “forms” in the Platonic sense – are also in the head? Without a doubt concepts have a place in the brain. Many studies have shown that brain damages can lead to serious damages of our conceptualizations or even can make that we fail to remember certain concepts that we did have before the brain damage happened. Nevertheless this doesn’t mean that concepts exist only in the brain. Concepts are constructions of how the objects in the world are like, of personal histories and of how other people see the objects. The latter makes concepts intrinsically socially determined. Instances that show it abound. Take for example this. Once in Germany I was walking in a kind of nature park with a paper with questions in my hand. Somewhere I saw bird in a cage and the question was: What kind of bird is this? Since the answer needed only to be general my answer was “It’s an owl”. It appeared to be wrong. The right answer was that it was not an “Eule” but a “Kauz”. This made me realize that the birds that in Latin terminology are called Strigidae and in English are called owls (and in Dutch uilen) in German common parlance are divided into two groups: Eule and Kauze, a distinction that exists only in German and not in other languages. The first group refers to Strigidae that have a more or less slender appearance, while the Kauze are stockier and rounder. Moreover, Germans feel also that they are two kinds of birds. For them they are two general forms of birds corresponding to two general concepts, while for Dutchmen, Britons, Americans etc. there is only one general form and one general concept.

What this instance illustrates is that concepts are not simply private ideas but that they are intrinsically shared with other people. This is not mere coincidence but it is the way concepts are formed. So, even if the forms of objects in the head are private, the concepts that refer to these forms have a social dimension. In this way, they exist not only in a single brain but are the property of all of people that participate in its production and reproduction.

A horse in your head

You want to make a chair. What are you going to do? According to Plato we have innate ideas in our heads that show how the objects in the world look like. These ideas are more like blueprints or templates than the abstract conceptions that nowadays are called “ideas”. Therefore, they are also called “forms”. What you do then when you want to make a chair is that you call up the form “chair” from your memory and make a wooden (or stone etc.) copy of it, of course with your personal variations or with the variations demanded by your client. But does it really work that way?

Yukiyasu Kamitani and his colleagues of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, asked three volunteers to have a nap in an fMRI brain scanner. While the test subjects were sleeping the scanner registered the activities of their visual cortices. When they started to dream, the volunteers were wakened and asked to tell what they dreamed about. From these dreams the researchers choose some simple objects like house, table, man, and so on. In the second part of the experiment the volunteers were shown pictures of these same simple objects, while the brain scanner registered again their brain activities. Then the volunteers had again to sleep in the fMRI scanner. When they had woken up, the researchers compared the scans made in this third phase of the experiment with the results of phase one and two and in about two third of the cases they could read correctly what the volunteers had been dreaming about. What the researchers saw was still rather abstract and when they concluded correctly, for instance, that a volunteer had been dreaming about a man, they couldn’t say whether this man was his neighbour or the Japanese Prime Minister or whoever, but anyway a first step has been done on the path of dream reading.

What does this mean? Paraphrasing moon walker Neil Armstrong, we can say that it’s one small step for the researchers but a giant leap for dream research. It will help us understand what dreams really are: Just epiphenomena of brain activity or ways of storing our recent experiences? Steven Scholte, neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, thinks that the implications are even wider: “At the moment there is a wide gap in our understanding how visual perception is related to concepts like ‘chair’ or ‘horse’. This kind of research will redefine what semantic knowledge is and how the external world is enciphered in the brain”. And this has philosophical implications, so he goes on, for “unless when you believe in ghosts, this representation in the brain is also what the external word is … When talking about a horse what do we exactly mean by ‘horseness’? What do we mean by ‘chairness’? On a fundamental level this is about what the world is and how we experience the world”.

Actually this fits well what Plato thought, for maybe ideas or forms are not innate, as he believed, it seems that Plato rightly supposed that you need to have a horse in your head in order to know that what you see out there really is a horse.

Source: De Volkskrant, April 6, 2013: Science Supplement, p. V5.

On lying and misleading

Is lying worse than misleading? This question is discussed by Jennifer Saul in an article that I came across on the Internet. I found the question intriguing, maybe because I had never thought about it. That lying should be worse than misleading, as many people think, is puzzling, so Saul, for why would it be so if the result is often the same? Why should we then prefer misleading to lying? For misleading needs not be better than lying as we from the bank crisis know.

The idea behind the difference in preference may be that there are differences in responsibility in the case of lying and in the case of misleading. If you say: “My husband is not at home” to the visitor, in a normal situation he will believe you. If you say “I didn’t see him come home”, the visitor will also think that your husband is not at home, but it can be argued that he should have been smart enough to ask whether you may have heard your husband coming home (which you actually did). The idea is, that the visitor is responsible himself, at least for a part, for not drawing the right conclusion and for thinking that your husband still hadn’t arrived. But actually, in a standard situation there is no reason to think that you would be mislead, for why would you? This argument disproves also the idea that lying is a breach of faith and misleading is not, since normally you need not take what a speaker says literally and you can suppose that the answer to your question is complete and to the point and doesn’t contain hidden implications. The latter is not always the case however, for if you are a witness in court and you declare on oath that you did not see your husband coming home (although you had heard him), you cannot be prosecuted for perjury if the judged concluded that your husband wasn’t at home, for you didn’t say that.

For reasons like these it is not tenable that generally misleading is better than lying. How about the other way round? I think that if we would discuss this question we would come to an equal conclusion: lying is not preferable to misleading. On the average lying and misleading are as good or as bad. Their moral goodness or badness simply depends on the situation. So, if the visitor asking whether your husband is at home wants to murder him, throw away your moral objection that lying might be worse than misleading – which generally is not right, as we just have seen – and say simply that he isn’t there, even if it is not true.

Source: Jennifer Saul, “Just go ahead and lie”, http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/72/1/3.full

On judging others

Say, we meet someone for the first time. How do we judge him or her then? We put them in one of the boxes that we have ready for it in our mind: the so-called prejudices or – with a less negative word – preconceptions. Where do these preconceptions come from? We learned them when we grew up, so from our parents, from other people around us and from the way such people are generally judged in the society we live in. Thus we judge people from another country or our neighbours, men or women, white, black or yellow people, and so on. The less we know about the stranger we judge the more we tend to apply our boxes for our judgments. Some people see through this mechanism and try to see the real person. Others never get the idea or never are able to see that such judgments are based on preconceptions.

Most people have several characteristics: they are both Frenchman and woman and black and … So they can be put in different boxes at the same time. Then we get a complicated image of the stranger, but it is still preconceived. What is interesting here is that the less interaction we had with the stranger before, the more the ratings of other people are based on our self-ratings of the traits judged (see for instance John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, “The unbearable automaticity of being”: http://www.yale.edu/acmelab/articles/bargh_chartrand_1999.pdf ). This substantiates the idea that we have boxes in our head in which we put persons we don’t know.

Sometimes the contacts with other persons are flimsy and superficial. We see them once and then never more. But it can also happen that the contact continues and even grows into a relation: the stranger becomes, for instance, our colleague, friend, partner, or it is a shopkeeper we see once or twice a week and with whom we always have a chat. Gradually our knowledge of what was once a stranger is deepened and we become more or less acquainted with him of her. Then we tend to put the sometime stranger less and less in our preconceived boxes and see him or her as a single person. Or so it is for most people. How this develops is mainly an individual process. For some people this process goes faster, for others slower. Some people keep always employing the preconceived categories for judging others in a certain degree, for other people the preconceptions fade completely away. Be this as it may, I always say: When I have seen someone three times, I forget how he or she looks like and I see only the person. And that’s also how we hope that the sometime stranger will go to think about us, for, as Montaigne said: “I very much desire that we may be judged every man by himself, and would not be drawn into the consequence of common examples.” (Essays, Book I, Chapter XXXVI, “Of Cato the Younger”)

What to read on holiday

I read a lot, especially when I am on holiday. Reading is just a part of my holiday and a holiday without reading is no real holiday for me. Also when I am travelling around and spend a big part of my day on moving, sight-seeing, visiting interesting sites and museums, and – not to forget – on making photos, there is always time for a book. However, on holiday I read other stuff than I do at home. What do I read then? Usually not philosophy but if I do it’s on philosophical subjects that are different from what I normally read. But I read history, for instance; a lot of history. Sometimes I read a novel and further anything else for which I don’t have time when I am at home or that I simply failed to read there. The books may have a relation to the region or town I visit, but often they haven’t.

I also buy books on holiday. I cannot pass a bookshop without at least taking a glance at what they sell. It’s very interesting to see what people elsewhere read and what makes the place I visit interesting in the eyes of the inhabitants. And, of course, often I don’t leave the shop with empty hands. Not uncommonly I buy something philosophical, something that’s difficult to get in my own town, or something that attracts my attention. In a strange bookshop you always find interesting books that you can’t buy at home or just failed to see there.

Lately during a weekend trip in my country, I bought something in a local bookshop, and, because it was Book Week, I got also a free book written by the Dutch author Kees van Kooten. Back in my holiday home, I opened it and immediately my eye was caught by this text:

“Who reads other books than local or regional publications when on holiday offends not only the local culture of the destination chosen but wastes moreover his precious holiday time”.

Actually, I should have brought the book back to the shop, for this free book had no relation at all with the town I visited, nor did the book I had bought. As just said, most books I read on holiday have no relation to the region I visit, and even less so I read local or regional publications. But is the quotation true? I think that it shows quite a limited view on why it is that we are on holiday. And I can say that since just I go often to rather unknown regions hardly visited by any tourist or it must be a lost Dutchman. Just for getting an impression how a country is like outside the well-trodden tourist paths.

You can be on holiday for many reasons and getting to know another region and going into the local culture is only one of them. Many people go on holiday for relaxing, lying on the beach or simply being away from work and home in an exotic or at least different environment. If they come back home mentally and physically fit and well, the holiday is a success. Then local culture is simply a decoration that makes such a holiday more effective; it’s not something you really need to know about. Other people go on holiday for visiting museums and places of cultural or historical interest. Or for practicing sport under circumstances they cannot do at home, like cycling in the mountains for Dutchmen. I can list many other reasons for taking a holiday, but I think that my point is clear: whether reading something different than local or regional publications is a waste of time depends on the reason why you are there. And often one goes on holiday for a mixture of reasons. For me, one of them is just reading the stuff that I didn’t get round to read at home. And be sure, if I am back from a trip to the unknown interior of this or that country, I know a lot of its local or regional culture, characteristics and curiosities, even though I have read a lot that has no relation to it.

Freedom and sticking with our choices

Philosophers generally accept that being free is a matter of having alternative choices. However, Harry G. Frankfurt showed that I can be free even when I had no choice, because the alternative chosen appeared to be my only possible choice (see my blogs dated Feb. 23, 2012, and Sep 3, 2012). Nevertheless, often real choices exist. Then I am free, anyway. Okay, I have yet to execute my decision, but after having done so, I can say that I have performed a free action. But is having alternatives enough for being free? For as Richard Holton says: “[I]t is not making the choice that is difficult, it is sticking with it”. Can I say that I am free if I can choose from alternatives and if I have begun executing my choice, but don’t bring the action to an end, although it was under my control to accomplish it?

Let’s say that I take the New Year’s resolution to lose ten kilos in the year to come so that I’ll get my ideal weight. I begin to eat healthier food and to eat more moderately; I don’t take crisps and the like any longer on parties; and so on. In short, I do everything I need do in order to lose weight and at the end of the year I have achieved my aim.

On the same New Year’s Day my friend John calls me and says that he has also decided to lose ten kilos. I tell him that I had taken the same decision and I propose to support each other, which he accepts.

Ten days later John and I are at a reception, and I see John eating chocolate and crisps, while I don’t. So, I ask him: “Have you changed your plan to lose weight?” “No”, John says, “but these Belgian bonbons are delicious and a few crisps don’t care. I know what I do and I’ll certainly reach my aim”. And so it goes on. John keeps eating too much and too fat, although he is absolutely aware of what he is doing and although he perfectly knows that he has to behave otherwise. Each time he slips up. Although he said then first to himself “Shall I take it, or shall I not?”, most times he cannot resist the temptation, despite my warnings, if I am there. John is fully aware that he behaves contrary to his New Year’s resolution and that each time he can decide otherwise and that it is up to him to stop eating too much. Sometimes he really refuses the sweets and fat food he likes so much. But after a few months, his scales show that he hasn’t lost even one gram and John decides to give up and to take up the plan next year again.

Now I want to ask: Was I free and was John free? Is it enough to say that we are free if we can and do choose from alternatives, although we don’t carry out the decision? Is freedom simply a matter of just deciding, separate from the action that performs the decision? As we see in my cases: It is one thing to take freely a decision and another thing to carry it out. But can we say that I am free, if I am free to choose from alternatives, although my choice has no practical consequences? Decisions are often taken on psychological grounds, but the same is true when we are faced with the task to carry it out. It seems that this applies to the case of John. We can say that John decided and acted freely each time he took chocolate or crisps or ate too fat food. Nevertheless, we tend to say that some psychological mechanisms that fit his personality type made that again and again he took decisions that blocked his New Year’s resolution. But is John so different from me that we can say that these psychological mechanisms made that he wasn’t free and that he was a slave of his psychology, while I am free, because I achieve my aim? Isn’t it so that fulfilling a decision also requires certain psychological characteristics, anyhow?

I’ll not give an answer or a solution here. However, what my cases seem to suggest is this:

It needs more than simply having the choice from alternatives for being free. Freedom is not only a matter of having alternatives but it is also in some way related to the execution of the choice. For calling someone free we need a kind of time perspective, a thing that clearly fails in the traditional analytic view on it.

Richard Holton, Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009; pp. 177-8.

Philosophy between armchair and bullets (and on the saddle)

The expression “armchair philosophy” is proverbial. As I explained in my last blog it refers to a kind of philosophy that wears an air of not needing a factual basis or, more extremely, to an attitude that confronting ideas or opinions with the facts is an unnecessary effort. In short, it refers to simple homespun philosophy. Nevertheless, much philosophy literally takes place in an armchair and seen that way it is armchair philosophy. An example of it in due form was the well-known television programme “The Philosophical Quartet” broadcast by the German TV channel ZDF: two philosophers (Peter Sloterdijk and Rüdiger Safranski) discussing philosophical problems with two guests while sitting on two coaches without any other assistance than the ideas and opinions in their brains. (I admit: actually I should have to call it “coach philosophy”; see for instance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI7iVPzKb_M) Also Montaigne was an armchair philosopher in this sense. In my last blog I showed a picture of his armchair and desk in the library in the tower of his castle where he wrote his Essays. The difference is that Montaigne often consulted his books or used his personal experiences.

Is this the usual philosophical practice: sitting in an armchair, maybe in your tower, and letting your thoughts wander through a world of abstract and less abstract ideas? Or, if you philosophize with a group, the same process done in several armchairs plus verbal interaction between the thinkers? The wandering of the thoughts through the world of ideas is inherent to philosophy but I discovered that some of the masterpieces of philosophy and brilliant works of the mind were thought up in quite different and sometimes very extreme circumstances.

Maybe the situation where Descartes came to his idea of Cogito ergo sum – I think so I am – is yet close to the kind of armchair philosophy just discussed. Descartes had taken service in the army of Maximilian I of Bavaria. Once he travelled back from the coronation of the emperor to the army and the winter weather forced him to stop somewhere. While he sat there alone in a “stove” (heated room) because he felt cold and he had nothing else to do than thinking, he got the ideas that would determine western philosophy for four centuries. The story doesn’t tell whether Descartes sat in an armchair in his stove, but at least he was not in his familiar surroundings.

Also Erasmus wrote some of his works during his travels, not only during his stays in the inns along the roads but also on the back of his horse. And that is how Erasmus wrote his famous “In Praise of Folly” on his way back from Italy back to England, as he tells in his introductory letter to Thomas More.

Nietzsche, too, laid the foundation of at least some of his works not in his armchair. Because of his health Nietzsche had moved to the Swiss mountains. There he spent a big part of his days by making long walks during which he enjoyed not only the overwhelming nature around him but which he also used for thinking. Nietzsche had always a notebook with him for writing down the thoughts he found valuable. Back home he worked up his notes resulting in what he called his “wander books”.

So, much outstanding philosophy has not been written in an armchair and therefore isn’t literally armchair philosophy. Also Wittgenstein loved philosophizing elsewhere, for instance pacing up and down the lecture-room in front of his students, saying out loud the thoughts that popped up in his mind (which were noted down and later published by his students). But what beats all, I think, is the way he wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: he made the notes for this book between the bullets of the First World War and completed it when he was a prisoner of war in Italy. What would have happened with the Tractatus if Wittgenstein had been killed in action?

Be that as it may, I must admit that I am only a simple armchair philosopher: I wrote all my books and articles in the armchair on the photo above the blog three weeks ago. Nevertheless, not all my philosophical thoughts developed and still develop there, for sometimes I get my ideas while taking a shower or sitting on the saddle of my bike.

Armchair philosophy (3)

Montaigne's armchair

When I criticized “armchair philosophy” in my last two blogs, I meant the kind of philosophizing that looks more like groundless imagination than well-founded reflection. There is nothing against imagination in philosophy, of course, and imagination can be very useful when considering a certain problem or question. What I reject is that assumptions of imagined cases are unrealistic, and this is what often is the case. It can be said that philosophy begins where science ends, and that they are in line with each other. My criticism is then that too many philosophers forget this, which makes philosophy deficient and unprolific in the long run. That’s just why I so often refer to research results in these blogs: In order to give my analyses of who we are and what we do a solid foundation.

One point of view sees armchair philosophy as philosophy by “somebody who is a complete know-it-all, usually a douchebag or self-declared intellectual. They always feel the need to seem intellectually superior to others, by continuously arguing about any subject they see in media, conversations, etc. and quoting themselves as experts on the subject.” They stick to their opinions, even when confronted with contrary facts, and they feel a need to comment on everything, even “where careful analysis is needed”. (www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=armchair%20philosopher&defid=4816655) If this were the only correct view of armchair philosophy, there would be no place for armchair approaches in philosophy. More relevant here is what the Wikipedia says about it, which sees armchair philosophy as “an approach to providing new developments in a field that does not involve the collection of new information but, rather, a careful analysis or synthesis of existent scholarship.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armchair_theorizing) And that’s what academic philosophers often do:  trying to bring progress in the field under discussion by means of intuition, intelligent imagination, theoretical insight, and the like. That’s why, as Timothy Williamson says, “[a] striking feature of the traditional armchair method of philosophy is the use of imaginary examples” (http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1300/Aristotle.pdf). But just this “armchair thinking” has met opposition and led to a new philosophical movement, called “experimental philosophy” or “X-Phi” for short. According to this approach philosophical reasoning must be based on experimental data, philosophical questions can be answered by experimental data, conceptual analysis can be aided by experimental data. But can experimental data lead to philosophical answers, even to that extent that we could better burn our philosophical armchairs? (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt5Kxv8eCTA for this). I don’t think so. Maybe we can answer some philosophical questions by means of the X-Phi approach, but it doesn’t alter the fact that we need armchair analysis in order to raise the questions that we want to answer in an experimental way, to mention one thing. In a certain sense, it can be defended that actually all philosophy is armchair philosophy. Nevertheless, the X-Phi approach has a point, and as so often, the truth is somewhere in the middle, I think. Albert Einstein, one of the biggest geniuses that ever lived on earth was typically an armchair scientist. But weren’t also Einstein’s conclusions to a large degree founded on the analysis of experimental results? The same must also be expected from armchair philosophers: At least that their analyses and argumentation have a sound factual basis. Otherwise they will result in mere speculation and fantasy. Also an armchair needs a floor to stand on.

Armchair philosophy (2)

Terlassie passing the finish

Some time ago I criticized in a blog that philosophers using thought experiments often don’t realize that the assumptions of such an experiment can push the answer in a certain direction. In my last blog I criticized that in thought experiments the context often is left out, although it can be highly relevant for what we want to show in the experiment. Maybe there are more mistakes in thought experiments that I failed to notice. Who knows, for I have never made a systematic study of the subject. These were just two flaws that caught my eye.

Even so, I don’t want to say that thought experiments are useless but only that they bear the seed of misrepresentation within them and that they can be misleading. For there are also a lot of interesting and important philosophical thought experiments. And, to be honest, isn’t it just fun to think up a good one and to tease your mind with it? Isn’t just that one reason why we philosophize? One of the most famous thought experiments has laid even the foundation of modern western philosophy: Descartes’ evil demon (Descartes wondered whether his thoughts weren’t misled by a devil; or, in other words, whether his senses did not give him a complete illusion of the external world. He concluded that anyway his thinking activity could not have been misled). Used with insight, thought experiments can bring us a step forward or make us things clear. So, the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe used one for showing that in concrete situations it is not possible to delimit a person’s actions: What an action is is a matter of perspective. When I flip the switch, do I turn on the light in the room or do I warn the thief in my house? (the example is Davidson’s) If the thief left no traces and took nothing with him, I’ll never get the idea to use the latter description but only the former. This thought experiment shows also that actions can have side effects.

I think that in situations where assumptions and context play no fundamental role, thought experiments can be appropriate. That’s also the case when they are used for undermining arguments. This makes Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment so strong and to the point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). In this way, once I have used a thought experiment for refuting the idea that the person only goes where the brain goes and that brain and body can be separated, as is implicit or explicit in many theories on personal identity in the analytical philosophy, the so-called psychological identity theories (like the one defended by Parfit). Here I’ll present it in a new version:

Two marathon runners, Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat, have switched bodies, so that the brain of Gebrselassie and the body of Tergat belong together and the other way round (let we call them Gebregat and Terlassie respectively). They take part in the same race, but Gebregat leaves the race injured while Terlassie wins. Then, since the person goes where the brain goes according to psychological identity theorists, it is Paul Tergat who has won the race, although it was Haile Gebrselassie’s body that passed the finish line first and although Paul Tergat’s body could not withstand the strain of the race and even didn’t finish. So, if we may believe the psychological identity theorists it is not the body that runs but the brain. For how else could it have been that Paul Tergat had won?

Armchair philosophy

Philosophers think out all kinds of theoretical situations in order to discuss and answer their philosophical questions. However, it often happens that such a thought experiment starts from assumptions that push the answer looked for already into a certain direction. Thought experiments in which people switch brains are like that: how can we theoretically discuss brain switches and come to acceptable conclusions if we ignore factors that make such brain swaps impossible in practice? (see my “Can a person break a world record?” on http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/PersonalIdentity.htm ). An article by Allen Wood (“Humanity as End in Itself” in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. Two, pp. 58-82) drew my attention to another factor that is often left out, although it is usually relevant for the problem at hand: the context. In what follows I am greatly indebted to this article.

Two much discussed thought experiments in philosophy (also by Wood and Parfit) are “Sidetrack” and “Footbridge”:

Sidetrack: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it would kill five people. As a bystander, you could save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, there is a man walking on that track that would be killed instead of the five.

Footbridge: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it would kill five people. You are standing on a footbridge above the track. You are slim and short but a large man is just crossing the bridge. If you jump on the track, you will be run over by the trolley, which will kill you and the five people as well. If you push the large man on the track, he will be killed but the trolley will stop and the five will be saved.

Most people will say that it is permissible that you turn the switch in Sidetrack but not that you push the man in Footbridge. One explanation for this difference is that it is impermissible to intentionally cause harm as in Footbridge, but permissible to cause harm as a foreseen but unintended consequence of one’s action as in Sidetrack.

Whatever the explanation is, one can wonder how people would react if

- the five people are walkers who want to take a short cut but are not allowed to walk in the tunnel

or

- the five people are copper thieves stealing railway copper

while

- the single person is a railway worker doing his job.

Or

- it’s not you who have to take the decision but a mentally weak person who often takes wrong decisions.

Or

- the large man in Footbridge is an escaped murderer (sentenced to death, if that makes a difference to you).

I can give my thoughts free rein and add more situations or I can combine them. However, I think that one thing is clear: what you’ll do and what you’ll find permissible will depend on the situation. It has no sense to strip off the context and then in the abstract tell what is right, or, in other thought experiments, what we’ll do. It’s the context that makes what is acceptable or right, and this context is often more complicated than we can imagine in our philosophical armchair.