The Kiki-Bouba effect

Look at the picture above. Which one of the two figures would you call Kiki and which one would you call Bouba? I guess that you’ll say that the left one with jagged shapes is Kiki and the right one with round shapes is Bouba. If so, you are not alone. More than 95% of all people who were asked this question gave the same answer. Moreover, it’s an intercultural phenomenon and it’s also independent of age. The Kiki-Bouba effect prevails even in cultures with no written language and among pre-reader children. Apparently, the relation between the sound of a word and the image it evokes (and the other way round) is to a high extent innate in man. It belongs to man’s nature. On purpose I write “to a high extent”, for, as we saw already, not 100% of all who were asked the question called the jagged-shaped figure Kiki, and for some groups, like autists, and for some cultures the connection is weaker, though it still exists. Nevertheless, we can call the Kiki-Bouba effect a natural phenomenon.
The effect was first discovered in 1929 by the German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, but it has especially been investigated since Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard repeated Köhler’s experiment in 2001. They introduced also the nonsense words Kiki and Bouba. The effect exists also outside language. For instance, we call some music romantic and other music wild. In music the effect is used for evoking certain feelings or emotions.
Linguists always thought that the relation between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The Kiki-Bouba effect shows that as such this view is not right. Of course, when we say “table”, it’s not so that it is inherent to the word that we are talking about a certain piece of furniture with four legs. But the opposite would be that a relationship between language and meaning is completely absent, and that’s not true either. I have shown already that such a relationship exists in my blog “How we think, at least initially”, dated 18 November 2013. The Kiki-Bouba effect is another instance of this relationship.
There are several explanations for the phenomenon. One is quite interesting in view of the relation between language and the way we think: Ideasthesia. Ideasthesia is the term for the neuroscientific phenomenon in which activations of concepts evoke perception-like sensory experiences. Synesthesia is a well-known example. In the case of synesthesia people have sensory responses in reaction to external stimuli. For instance, they see colours, when they hear music. Ideasthesia is broader and involves also the cognitive and semantic aspects of the stimulus: The relationship involved is dependent on the meaning of the stimulus. In the relationship between music and colours, for instance, meaning doesn’t play a part; the phenomenon just happens. In the Kiki-Bouba effect, however, meanings are essential. If you think of a sharp sound you can think of a knife, because a knife is also sharp, albeit in another sense. In the same way there is a relation between Kiki and jagged-shaped and between Bouba and round-shaped. In view of the idea that there is a connection between language and thought this is quite interesting. The Kiki-Bouba effect is an instance of the way we think. It says something about how we are constituted. It’s an example of how in a sense a concept determines the way we look at the world and see reality. Language influences our thinking about the world, although it goes in two directions, of course, for what we see influences also how we speak about it: Whether something is Kiki or whether it is Bouba. 

Some sources and literature
- “Bouba/kiki effect”, in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
- Peiffer-Smadja, Nathan; Laurent Cohen, “The cerebral bases of the bouba-kiki effect”, on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811918321141
- Ramachandran, V.S,; E.M. Hubbard, “Synaesthesia – a window into perception, thought and language.” Journal of  Consciousness Studies, 2001/8: 3-34.
- “What is the Kiki-Bouba test?”, on https://brainstuff.org/blog/what-is-the-kiki-bouba-test
- Shukla, Aditya, “The Kiki Bouba effect – research overview & explanation”, on https://cognitiontoday.com/the-kiki-bouba-effect-research-overview-explanation/#The_Kiki-Bouba_effect

Democracy in America

When I heard of the attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., I had immediately to think of Democracy in America, a book written by the French count and politician Alexis de Tocqueville, almost 200 years ago (published in 1835). Tocqueville wrote his book after his travels in the USA in the early 19th century. It is a praise of American democracy and an analysis of how it worked. Since it is a thick book of almost thousand pages, it is impossible for me to summarize the main ideas in a blog. Instead you’ll find here some quotes, collected from my notes in the book and from what stroke my eye, when I leafed through it, plus some comments. I’ll restrict myself to quotes from volume I which is about the political institutions (while volume II is about the influence of politics on society). 

- [I]n a State where the citizens are nearly on an equality, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power. No one among them being strong enough to engage in the struggle with advantage, nothing but a general combination [of the strength of all] can protect their liberty. (I-3)
To my mind, this passage from one of the first chapters of the book is very relevant to the presidential term that now comes to an end: How to stop a non-democratic president that follows the democratic rules but actually does not follow them and who has a big group of supporters who also follow the rules but actually do not and who are often on the brink of violence and sometimes really use it?

- On CNN, Fox News and the press in general and on Facebook, Twitter and other social media: 
[I]n the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd. … The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press [are] correlative institutions; just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed … [The press] constitutes a singular power, so strangely composed of mingled good and evil that it is at the same time indispensable to the existence of freedom, and nearly incompatible with the maintenance of public order. … It is an enemy with which a Government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time. (I-11) See also my comment on the first quote.

- On Trump and his supporters (but not only):
[I]n the first instance, a society [= party] is formed between individuals professing the same opinion, and the tie which keeps it together is of a purely intellectual nature;[then] small assemblies are formed which only represent a fraction of the party. Lastly,… they constitute a separate nation in the midst of the nation, a government within the Government. Their delegates, like the real delegates of the majority, represent the entire collective force of their party; and they enjoy a certain degree of that national dignity and great influence which belong to the chosen representatives of the people.
That’s how democracy works, indeed. However, this can also work against democracy, as we have seen during the past four years, which Tocqueville implicitly admits: It must be acknowledged that the unrestrained liberty of political association has not hitherto produced, in the United States [till 1835], those fatal consequences which might perhaps be expected from it elsewhere. … At the present time the liberty of association is become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority. (I-12) But during the Trump years it failed, as said (compare again also the first quote).

- [A]t the present day the most able men in the United States are very rarely placed at the head of affairs … [affairs=public office, as my home edition of the book says] (I-13)

- Nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people, because, whilst it exercises that moral influence which belongs to the decision of the majority, it acts at the same time with the promptitude and the tenacity of a single man. (I-13)

- I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny. (I-15)

- On social and moral pressure: [T]he majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America. (I-15)

- The majority is principally composed of peaceful citizens who, either by inclination or by interest, are sincerely desirous of the welfare of their country. But they are surrounded by the incessant agitation of parties, which attempt to gain their co-operation and to avail themselves of their support. (I-9) 

In selecting these quotes, I could neither do justice to Tocqueville’s book nor to the USA and democracy in America. The selection is quite arbitrary and I have chosen the quotations in view of the present crisis in the country. Seen thus I think that the quotes tell us a lot about the state of the union. 

Note on the source
There are many editions of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, in many languages. For this blog I used the internet version in English on the Gutenberg website:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm (Volume I)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm (Volume II)
Way of quoting: Volume-Chapter. So I-3 means vol I, ch. 3.

Complementarity

Actually it is strange that I haven’t written here about it before: the so-called complementarity thesis. It’s strange, for this thesis has influenced my thinking a lot. Even more, it is one of the leading ideas I used in my PhD thesis on the method of understanding. I realized this omission, when I read the last issue of the Dutch Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte (General Dutch Journal for Philosophy), devoted to the question: “Which philosophical idea deserves wider attention?” The first idea discussed was complementarity, an idea that first has been developed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in his debate with Werner Heisenberg. However, since I got it from Karl-Otto Apel, who also has written much about it, I’ll discuss his version.
When Apel discussed the complementarity thesis, there was a hot debate going on on the question whether there is a distinction between the method of explanation, especially used in the natural sciences but also in psychology and the social sciences, for instance, and the method of understanding, used in the humanities and also in psychology and the social sciences. Sometimes explanation is seen as a “hard” method that gives concrete results, while understanding is seen as a “soft” subjective method founded on empathy. Apel wanted to make clear – especially in his Die Erklären-Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht (= The controversy between explanation and understanding from a transcendental-pragmatic perspective) – that a thus conceived distinction between both methods is not correct and that explanation and understanding are just different approaches with different purposes. He did this with the help of Bohr’s complementarity thesis.
What we often see, so Apel, is that the methods of explanation and understanding are associated with different types of sciences (“sciences” understood in the German and Dutch sense, so as all kinds of systematically gathering knowledge, including the humanities and not only the exact sciences). Then explanation is the method of the physical sciences and the science-based approaches of the social sciences and the like, while understanding is the method of the humanities. However Apel’s thesis is (and mine as well) that explanation and understanding are different approaches that can be used in all kinds of sciences (in the broad sense, as just explained). For what is relevant when you gather knowledge is not the field of investigation as such (physical sciences vs humanities) but the type of questions you ask when gathering knowledge. If – my words – you are interested in causes, laws, objective connections etc., you use the method of explanation. In this case you ask why-questions. If you are interested in reasons, motives, or the meaning or sense that something happened, you use the method of understanding. Then the leading questing is the “what … for”-question. Especially (but certainly not only) psychology and sociology are the meeting points of both types of questions. For instance, we want to know why John murdered his father. Then we can ask whether John has an Oedipus-complex, whether he is a psychopath, whether he had used drugs at the moment of the murder, etc. In this explanatory approach we see John as an object drifted by objective forces “external” to him, so to speak. However, we can John also see as a subject with reasons and motives, and then we ask him himself what made him kill his father. Maybe John will tell us that he had been sexually assaulted by his father when he was a child, or, that his father always beat his mother and that he wanted to take revenge. Then we try to understand John and what he did.
As this example shows, explanation and understanding do not need to exclude each other but they are different methods to gather knowledge that can be used alongside each other: both methods are complementary. This made Apel formulate his version of the complementarity thesis:
“Understanding and explanation ... are complementary forms of knowledge corresponding to complementary leading knowledge-interests. That is to say, they
(a) supplement each other within the whole household of human knowledge, so to speak, and at the same time,
(b) they exclude each other as different interests or intentions of asking questions, and,
(c) for both reasons, they cannot be reduced to each other.”
(1979b:12‑13; italics mine).
Now it is so that complementary in this sense is not limited to the methods of explanation and understanding. It is a wider phenomenon. Actually, methodical complementarity is a special instance of the dual aspect view that says that the world as a whole and man in particular can be considered in two ways: objectively and subjectively. For example, man can be considered either as a biological body or as a conscious and thinking subjective mind, as we just have seen. Or, to take another example, nature can be considered as a natural, so physical process, or it can be considered as it is subjectively experienced and constructed (a duality that is important to take into account in this age of global warming and a decreasing biodiversity). But don’t take the complementarity thesis and the dual aspect view in the wrong way. They are ways to look at the world around us. The complementarity thesis and generally the dual aspect view stress that the world or whatever we want to study can be approached from different sides and can be seen from different angles. In the end the world is one. 

Sources
- Apel, Karl-Otto, Die Erklären-Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendental pragmatischer Sicht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979a.
- Apel, Karl-Otto, “Types of social science in the light of human cognitive interests”, in: S.C. Brown (ed.), Philosophical disputes in the social sciences. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979b; pp. 3‑50.
- My PhD thesis (see the column left on this blog page). 

Family resemblances

At the moment many countries are again in lockdown because of the second wave of Covid-19. I told a friend of mine in another country what the present lockdown in the Netherlands involves: Non-essential shops are closed. Schools are closed. Groups outside are not allowed to be bigger than two persons. You are allowed to receive only two persons a day at home. Libraries, concert halls etc. are closed. People have to work at home again, as much as possible. Etc. Etc. However, people can leave their homes when they like, so they are not locked up in their houses. In my friend’s country, however, people must stay at home and will be allowed to leave only for work, health issues, or buying daily necessities like food. There are yet a few other exceptions that you are allowed to leave your home but if you don’t have a legally accepted reason, you can be fined. Therefore, we can say that in my friend’s country people are locked up in their houses, unless they have a legal reason to go out. The difference with the Netherlands made my friend remark: “I understand that the term ‘lockdown’ has different meanings and is applied with different guidelines in the countries adopting it.” Apparently, the word “lockdown” doesn’t have the same meaning for everybody. In one country it means this, in another country that, although in a way the idea of lockdown is the same everywhere in the world. What a lockdown involves can even differ from person to person. To quote a blog by Chris Bloor: “Some friends have considered themselves ‘in lockdown’ while permitting themselves visits to relatives’ homes, family gatherings, a long trip to a distant beauty spot. Others I know have enforced a virtual total exclusion from the world.” (source) How can one word have such different meanings?
In order to answer this question, I think we can best go to Wittgenstein. Somewhere in the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations he explains the idea of language-game. In this blog it’s not important what he means by it, but then, in § 65, he says: “[S]omeone might object against me: ‘You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game … is: what is common to all these activities …’ ” Wittgenstein’s admits that this is true and then he begins to explain (66): “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? … [I]f you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. … Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”
And then Wittgenstein continues (67): “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.”
Now back to my question: How is it possible that the word “lockdown” has so many different meanings? As we have just seen: How different games may be from each other, we see enough similarities in them to call them all “games”. Games have “family resemblances” in Wittgenstein’s words. It’s the same so for all kinds of lockdown: How different they are, apparently we see enough similarities in them to call them all “lockdown”. All these kinds of lockdown have “family resemblances”. What they all have in common is even clearer than in the case of games: We talk of a lockdown in case of restrictions imposed on society or on large groups in society by the state for a public reason. You can refine this definition, but I guess that this is what all lockdowns have more or less in common. Of course, you can say that it’s weird to use for all different types of lockdown the same word. But this is how we use the word, and as Wittgenstein said: “[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (43)

 

Wittgenstein on Covid-19 before it existed

and other remarks on Wittgenstein

I wondered whether I could make again a special end of the year blog, for example about what philosophers do during the turn of the year. However, it appeared difficult to find such information. I found only what Wittgenstein had written about it in a diary that I have here at home. During the First World War (1914-1918) Wittgenstein volunteered in the Austrian-Hungarian army and then he kept two diaries: a personal diary and a philosophical diary. The first one begins on 9 August 1914 and ends on 19 August 1918. The philosophical diary begins on 22 August 1914 and ends on 10 January 1917. The philosophical diary became the foundation of his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein didn’t write each day in his diaries and moreover several parts of his personal diary have been lost.
When Wittgenstein was in the army, first he had several functions behind the frontline. Later he got – on his request – frontline tasks. He was taken prisoner by the Italian army in 1918. Since the personal diary is not complete, we know only what Wittgenstein did on the last day of 1914 and the first day of 1915 and not on the other New Year’s Eves and Days in this period. He was then somewhere in Poland where he had a quiet job and much time to philosophize. On 30 December he wrote: “Didn’t work. Only take care not to get lost”. Next on 2 January he writes that the day before he suddenly had heard that he would go to Vienna with his commander (where he would then visit his family). In his philosophical diary Wittgenstein wrote nothing for almost two weeks during this time. So although Wittgenstein had apparently much time to philosophize at the end of 1914, for me there is nothing to philosophize about what he did. The only interesting thing to remark here is that when writing “not worked” Wittgenstein didn’t mean that he had nothing to do in his job as a soldier, but that he hadn’t worked on what would later become his Tractatus.
Dissatisfied with this result, I browsed a little bit in Wittgenstein’s philosophical diary. My eye was caught by this sentence: “Empirical reality is limited by the number of objects”, which he wrote down on 26 April 1916. But how do you count the number of objects? For what an object is, is in some sense arbitrary. Is it for this reason that in his Tractatus Wittgenstein changed it to “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects”? (5.5561). But it doesn’t really solve the problem of countability. Still thinking about this statement, I saw a few lines down another striking statement in the philosophical diary, which Wittgenstein wrote on 6 May 1916: “At the basis of the whole view of the world of the moderns lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” You find this sentence almost literally in the Tractatus, namely in 6.371. At first sight it seems quite obscure, but a few sentences later, Wittgenstein explains: 

“6.373 The world is independent of my will.
 6.374 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.” 

How relevant this is in view of the present situation in which the coronavirus rules the world! For what Wittgenstein maintains in these almost religious statements is: What happens in the world is completely independent of what we think of it and what we would like to happen. Whatever we think about natural phenomena and the way they come about, they just happen, despite our will or opinion. And if things happen the way we like, it’s mere chance. Translated to the present pandemic this means: Whatever the origin of the coronavirus is, as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way. Even if it would have a human origin, so even if it would have been made and spread by man on purpose (which I don’t believe), as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way by its own logics. But then we have no other choice, than to adapt ourselves and to follow the logics of nature in order to fight the virus. From that point of view keeping distance, lockdowns and vaccination are reasonable measures for they are based on the natural character of the phenomenon.
However, Wittgenstein didn’t say so. It’s my interpretation. His Tractatus and his later works, published or not published by himself, are abstract works. Nevertheless Wittgenstein wasn’t an ivory-tower thinker. During the First World War he was a soldier by choice; during the Second World War he was a nurse in an English hospital. In this period he also saved the capital of his family from the Nazis, although long before that date he had given away his part.
Be it as it may, my present reflections haven’t helped to answer the main question of this blog: How do famous philosophers meet New Year? Therefore, I want to end with another quote from the Tractatus, namely its last sentence:
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Happy New Year!

Sources
- Baum, Wilhelm, Wittgenstein im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die “Geheimen Tagebücher“ und die Erfahrungen an der Front 1914-1918). Klagenfurt-Wien: Kitab Verlag 2014.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 to all my readers, wherever you live in the world! 

Framing

I have always been charmed by the work of the American sociologist Ervin Goffman, especially by his book Frame Analysis. I have devoted already two blogs to this book (see Sources below) and framing is also an important theme in my photography (see for example https://henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/213265933_Vensters.html ). However, after I had read Nathalie Heinich’s La cadre-analyse d’Erving Goffman [Erving Goffman’s frame analysis], I thought that it would be a good idea to write another blog about it, even if this might mean that I would repeat something that I had written already before. It stresses how important framing is to my mind. In describing Goffman’s ideas I’ll mainly follow chapter I in Heinich’s book.
When you want to understand what Frame Analysis is about, you can best start reading the subtitle of the book, which says that it is An Essay on the Organization of Experience. This experience has two aspects: An experienced part of the activity that takes place (called “strip” by Goffman) and the way this activity is organized (“frame”). A strip is “any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity” (p. 10), while a frame consists of the basic elements of a social situation that “are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events … and our subjective involvement in them” (10-11) In short, a frame is the way we experience what happens. Events and situations can be framed in different ways, but the point of departure is the basic frame or “primary frame” as Goffman calls it. “Such a [primary] framework is seen … as not depending on or harking back to some prior or ‘original’ interpretation”. (21) To give an example: I hear a bang and I see people running. I wonder what is happening. Is it an explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a car? One of these possibilities forms the basic interpretation or primary frame of what is happening.
However, once we have a primary frame, an activity can be given a new interpretation that modifies the original interpretation. Goffman calls such a modifying frame a “key”: “The set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else. The process of transcription can be called keying.” (43-44) For example: The bang is not a real terrorist bomb attack, but it is a scene in a stage play. Goffman distinguishes five fundamental ways a primary frame can be keyed:
- make-believe
- contests (such as in sport)
-ceremonials
- technical redoings (like exercises, experiments, role playing)
- regroundings (for example in charity work: a princess serves as a salesperson at a salvage sale).
|All these ways of keying an activity have in common that they are “straight”: They appear in the same way to all participants and onlookers. However, besides keying there is also another way to transform a primary frame: fabrications. It is “the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on.” (83) Plots and conspiracies are of this kind and the individuals involved can be divided into “the operatives, fabricators, deceivers” and their co-workers on the one hand and “the dupes, marks, pigeons, suckers, butts, victims, gulls” on the other hand. Fabrications, unlike keyings are subject to a special kind of discrediting, for once discovered what is going on and seen as a deception, they collapse. Fabrications can be divided into benign fabrications and exploitive fabrications. Benign fabrications are such like playful deceit, experimental hoaxing (like psychological experiments: the subject isn’t aware of what is being tested), training hoaxes and a few more. Examples of exploitive fabrications are the plots and conspiracies just mentioned. Another way to subdivide fabrications is to distinguish between other-induced and self-imposed fabrications.
Once Goffman has introduced his concepts, his next step is to apply them. I think that most important in the analysis that follows in his Frame Analysis is the idea that frames can be layered: They can fit one into another like the well-known matryoshka dolls (“Russian dolls). In this way we can get a stratification of frames. An example from theatre is an opera that I have seen long ago in which the singers played that they were performing an opera. It’s a “trick” regularly used in stages plays. An example used by Goffman and taken from “real life” is the case of a company agent who is sent around incognito to see if service standards are being maintained.
Another interesting theme discussed by Goffman is the possibility to break the frame. But should I say more? I think that it’s clear from what I have said that applying the idea of frames is one of the most important ways to understand what is happening around us. It helps us also to find our way in what is happening. By applying frames, we constitute what we see and experience. Often frames are shared among individuals in the sense that they apply more or less the same frames to the same situations or events. If so all participants share an understanding of what is going on and what everyone is doing. If this is the case, frames help to understand ourselves and others. 

Sources
- Goffman. Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (my edition).
- Heinich, Nathalie, La cadre- analyse d’Erving Goffman. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020; 23-41.
My blogs:
- “Frame analysis”, dated 10 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/frame-analysis_73.html
- “Framing the mind”, dated 13 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/framing-mind.html

How I prophesied reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic

Actually, I could upload here an old blog that I have written about six years ago: my blog “All things have their season”. It was already the second blog with this title, but I mean the one about apples, dated the 26th October, 2014. For what has happened? Recently, when leafing through my book “Rondom Montaigne” (“About Montaigne”) and rereading old blogs I discovered that both in this blog and in my book – in chapter 9 – I had prophesied how people would react to the present Covid-19 pandemic! Of course, I didn’t forecast this pandemic but what I did forecast were the reactions to a natural disaster, and isn’t it so that the present pandemic is such a disaster? Now I could stop writing and simply paste here the blog just mentioned. Instead, I’ll write a summary of this blog with an explanation and comment. If you want to read the original blog, you can find it here: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html 

“All things have their season”, as Montaigne tells us in the 28th essay in Book II in his Essays. Montaigne sees there a strict connection between a certain stage of life and what you can do; not so much what you can do physically but what is reasonable to do in that stage of life, or what is right to be done. Montaigne gives us the example of Xenocrates who was still studying, when he was already very old. Montaigne comments by quoting Eudemonidas: “When will this man be wise, if he is yet learning?” For learning is something you do, when you are young, for what sense does it have to study when your life soon will come to an end? Although Montaigne admits that you can also study simply for pleasure, even when you are old. But in general it’s so that all things have their season.
Seasons like life rhythms are natural and you must adapt yourself to it, so Montaigne. Maybe this was true in antiquity and also in the days of Montaigne, but the times are changing and gradually the seasons of life disappear; at least to a high extent, for birth and death, being young or old, still exist and will ever exist. But let me explain the disappearance of the seasons with the help of the example of apples.
When I was young, say in the 1960s, all through the year there was a kind of seasonal rhythm of apple varieties that you could buy in a supermarket or in a greengrocer’s shop, especially in autumn, but in fact the rhythm existed the whole year round. In autumn, when the apples were harvested, a certain apple variety was for sale only during a short time and then the next variety came in the shop. In winter they sold apples that could be stored for a longer time. Of course, there was some overlap, but in fact one variety followed after another. There was a rhythm in apple varieties that followed the seasons. Discovery, Alkmene, Benoni and so on, one after another, till the long season of Elstar apples begun. One year later the cycle started anew. All apples had their season. Today, however, this seasonal rhythm in apple varieties has almost disappeared and the whole year round you find the same apple varieties in the supermarket and greengrocer’s shops, independent of the season you are in. That’s pleasant, for so you can always buy the apples that you find tasty.
This example illustrates how we have become less and less dependent on nature. Today, we can make and adapt nature as we like. At least, that’s what we think, but when a calamity happens, and then I mean a real calamity, a natural calamity, like a nuclear disaster or an earthquake, do we know then what to do? Of course, there are bodies, organisations, the government, relief workers, regulations, and so on that will handle the physical side of the calamity but are you mentally prepared? Less and less we are able to deal with unexpected occurrences. We tend to think that what is, will exist eternally. And if then something happens that we didn’t expect, even if it is natural, we blame others for it and aim our frustrations at them. 

That’s more or less what I prophetically wrote six years ago in my blog “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”. Indeed, prophetically, for it is what we see now: A pandemic has broken out and many people mentally panic, because they no longer know how to deal with an event like this. Government and virologists are blamed for the consequences of the pandemic, they are accused of evil intentions and they are even physically threatened. Others think that a conspiracy is the cause of the pandemic: The coronavirus has been spread on purpose, they say, for what reason ever. Even Bill Gates is mentioned as one of the perpetrators. However, the simplest explanation of the present calamity is reasoned away by (too) many people, since they can no longer mentally grasp it: They cannot understand that the Covid-19 pandemic is a natural phenomenon and that it has a natural origin. Therefore, it is important that seasonal rhythms and other dependencies on nature keep existing, for they show us that we still are a part of nature, anyhow and despite all scientific progress. So they prepare us mentally for calamities. “All things have their season”, as Montaigne taught us. 

Sources
- Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, Book II, chapter XXVIII, “All things have their season”, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#2HCH0049
- Weg, Henk bij de, “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html
- Weg, Henk bij de, Rondom Montaigne. The Hague: Uitgeverij U2pi, 2019.

Who I am

In my blogs, I have often written about the problem of personal identity. Most times I have written about it from the perspective of analytical philosophy. In this branch of philosophy the main question then is what makes a person an entity of its own. This leads to questions like “What makes me the same person as the person I was five, ten, twenty, fifty … years ago?”; “What happens with me when I am teletransported to another planet?”; “What happens to a person when her brain is swapped with the brain of another person?” This problem of identity is especially a continuity problem: The problem which makes me as I am now continuous with the person who I was in the past, and what separates me from other persons. However, there are different perspectives to discuss the question of a person’s identity, and I think that the continuity problem is the last one most people – non-philosophers – will think of when we bring up the problem of personal identity. When we ask questions about a person’s identity, I think that most people want to know who they are in relation to others. I think that most people are not interested in continuity problems and the like but want to know what characterizes a person and what makes him or her different from other persons as an individual. Therefore, it is not surprising that Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, discusses the question from just this perspective. Because I find her view on personal identity quite interesting and important, I want to give it some attention in this blog.
Before doing so, I want to present first an important aspect of the social theory of George Herbert Mead, namely his famous distinction between Self, I and Me. The “Self”, which Mead also calls the “generalized other”, comprises, briefly, the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to toward him or her and toward one another in what they do. The “I” is the response of the person to the attitudes of the others leading to a self-image, and the “Me” consists of the attitudes of others toward the person as seen by him or herself. We can also say that the “I” is the person for himself as a subject and the “Me” is the self for this person as an object.
What does this mean for Heinrich’s view on a person’s identity? In most identity discussions a distinction is made between the person him or herself on the one hand and society (“the others”) on the other hand. In this way we can distinguish a “personal identity”, i.e. the way a person sees him or herself (the subjective view on identity) and a “social identity”, which is the way society or others see you (the objective view on identity). For instance, for you your painting is not more than daubing on a canvass, but for others you are a real artist. Some views on a person’s identity take one of these two conceptions as the “real” identity a person has (unidimensional views), other views stress the relationship between the personal identity and the social identity (bidimensional views).
What is lacking in such conceptions, so Heinich, is Mead’s idea that the relationship person-society has three aspects. It involves not only an I versus an Other (Self) but also a Me, so an I as seen by the other according to the I. It was Erving Goffman, she says, who has applied Mead’s idea to the conception of identity: Goffman replaces the bidimensional view on identity in which “personal identity” opposes “social identity” – referring to the I and the Self respectively – by a tridimensional view by adding a third category: the “identity for yourself”. While the social identity still refers to the Self, now the personal identity refers to the Me and the new category of identity for yourself refers to the I. In short:
- social identity: the way others see you (1)
- identity for yourself: the way you see yourself (2)
- personal identity: the way you think that others see you (3).
In this view on a person’s identity all three aspects put forward by Mead are important. Such a tridimensional view has big advantages on the ordinary unidimensional and bidimensional views, so Heinich. By adding (3) and by taking account of all three aspects together, one can see how the social identity reflects itself in the perception one has of oneself. Moreover, for the person him or herself there is a gap between the objective social view of who s/he is and his/her subjective self-image and now this gap is filled by the third category of personal identity. Besides, if one attaches the labels “designation”, “autoperception” and “presentation” to the types of identity just given (in the order mentioned), than we have strong instruments to analyse how people present themselves in society and how they try to manipulate others by their presentation, and to see how a person’s autoperception develops influenced by the designation of the identity by others and the other way round.

Sources
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972; esp. ch. 5.
- Heinich, Nathalie, Ce que n’est pas l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2018; esp ch. 5.
- Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 (1934).

Sorts of mistakes

For one reason or another I find the following example by Elisabeth Anscombe in her Intention intriguing. It’s about a shopper and a detective. Maybe, you are also fascinated by it, so here it is: A man is going around with a shopping list that says what he is to buy. A detective follows him and makes a list of what the man buys. I think that we can say at least three things about this example, which are related, though.
1) Following Anscombe, we can say that the shopper’s list describes his intention, or alternatively it is an order that the shopper executes (maybe his wife made the list). Even if the list is an order, we can see it as an expression of the shopper’s intention, for it describes what he wants to do when going around. However, the detective observes the shopper, so for him his list is a record of what the shopper has bought. We can say that the shopper’s list contains his first-person perspective on what he is doing, while the detective’s list describes what the shopper does from a third-person perspective.
2) Let’s suppose now that the shopper or the detective makes a mistake. By mistake the shopper buys butter instead of margarine, as his list says. Or by mistake the detective notes down “butter”, for the shopper bought margarine. What is the difference? Since the shopper’s list is meant to direct his actions, he made a mistake in performance by buying butter, since he didn’t perform what he intended to do. However, the detective’s list is meant to record what the shopper did and by writing “butter” instead of “margarine” his list has become inaccurate. Here we see two sorts of mistakes that you can make when acting: mistakes in performance and inaccuracy. In the first case the list is good but the mistake is in what the shopper did. In the second case, the list is not true to the facts.
3) However, when we look at the shopper only, there are more kinds of mistakes he can make, so that his list and what he buys diverge:
a) There is a mistake in the construction of the list: One or more items on the list cannot be bought in the town where the man is shopping. They don’t sell cowpeas there, for instance. Here we have another sort of mistake you can make: A mistake of judgment
b) The shopper changes his mind because in the end he thinks that butter tastes better than margarine in the cake he is going to bake. Here there is no mistake in the proper sense, except then that shopper behaved against what the list said to buy or that he misjudged what should be on the list. Actually, this is also a kind of mistake of judgment
c) The shopper simply doesn’t buy what is on the list, for instance because he forgot to buy an item. We can call this mistake “carelessness”, or what you like. 

Especially the mistakes given under 3) are not unrelated to what I wrote in my blog last week, as Schwenkler makes clear. Let’s look at the ways a person can fail to perform an intention:
- A person fails to act because s/he cannot act (3a). This is in line with the soldier in my example last week who couldn’t clench his teeth because his teeth were false.
- A person changes his/her intention or expresses an opposing intention (3b). This is in line with a soldier who refuses to obey an order or a commander who gives an opposing order.
- A person simply fails or is failing to act (3c). This is in line with a soldier who fails to act as ordered. 

There are mistakes and mistakes, but making mistakes is what humans do, anyway. 

Sources
- G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976 (my edition); § 32.
- Schwenkler, John, Anscombe’s Intention. A Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp. 111-114.

Contradiction and contrariety

It seems so simple: The opposite of yes is no; of doing is not doing. However, I came to realize that matters are more complicated when I recently reread Elisabeth Anscombe’s Intention and read John Schwenkler’s guide to this book. Anscombe’s Intention is one of the most influential books in analytical philosophy. I have bought it already many years ago. It’s a little book with less than hundred pages but it is full of ideas. Anscombe was a student and friend of Wittgenstein and so it is not surprising that Intention has been written in a Wittgensteinian style. Anscombe was also one of the executors of Wittgenstein’s literary legacy. Enough reason to reread Anscombe’s book. It’s a pity that in my blogs I can discuss only some aspects. Here I want to write about contradiction and contrariety.
Take this example, also used by Anscombe: A man is operating a pump in order to replenish the water supply of a house. What is the opposite of this action? The first answer that probably comes to your mind is not pumping: The man does nothing. However, suppose that there is a hole in the pipe leading from the pump to the house. The man doesn’t know and keeps pumping (but so doing he isn’t replenishing the water supply). Can we say then that this is the same as doing nothing (not pumping) and that pumping without the intended effect is opposite to pumping with the intended effect? I think that this cannot be true.
Take now this example used by Anscombe, which she had read in a newspaper: “A certain soldier was court-martialled (or something of the sort) for insubordinate behaviour. He had, it seems, been ‘abusive’ at his medical examination. The examining doctor had told him to clench his teeth; whereupon he took them out, handed them to the doctor and said ‘You clench them’.” (§ 31). The soldier was court-martialled because he had refused an order: Not executing the order is considered here the same as refusing the order. But what if it is impossible to do what you are ordered to do? Apparently the soldier had thought (and in a sense he was right): “My teeth are false, so I cannot clench my teeth, for I don’t have them anymore.” Looking that way at the order to clench your teeth, not doing so is opposite to the order in a different way than refusing the order is.
Discussing these examples by Anscombe Schwenkler – following Aristotle – distinguished two kinds of opposition between statements: contradictories and contraries. “In Aristotelian logic”, so Schwenkler, “a pair of statements are contradictories just in case the truth of each entails the falsehood of the other and vice versa; and contraries just in case the truth of each entails the falsehood of the other, but the falsehood of neither entails the other’s truth.” ... A “contradictory pair says precisely that the other member is false. But Aristotelian contraries are opposed as well, as each member of a pair of contraries is such that its truth would entail the falsity of the other …” (pp. 109-110; italics Schwenkler), but I want to add: “though not the other way round”.
With the help of the distinction contradictory-contrary we can understand what went wrong in calling both not pumping and pumping without the intended effect as opposite to pumping, or, taking the other example, why court-martialling the soldier because he should have refused an order resulted from a misunderstanding. If the pumping man says “I am replenishing the house water supply” and you say “You aren’t, but I am going to repair the hole in the pipe”, we have a contradiction. However, if you say, “You aren’t for there is a leak in the pipe”, we have a contrariety. And the same so for the case of the soldier. The contradiction of “Clench your teeth” is “Do not clench your teeth”. That’s what the doctor thought and so he thought that the soldier simply refused to clench his teeth, and that he refused an order. However, the soldier thought: “I cannot clench them. I have no teeth. My teeth are false”, and not clenching his teeth for this reason is not contradictory but contrary to the doctor’s order. You cannot refuse what you cannot do. See here the reason of the misunderstanding between the doctor and the soldier that made that the latter was court-martialled.
There are many cases where the distinction contradiction-contrariety can be relevant. One such a case where the distinction can be meaningfully applied is telling the truth versus lying versus being silent. Another case is doing versus allowing versus doing nothing. 

Sources
- G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976 (my edition).
- Schwenkler, John, Anscombe’s Intention. A Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

When prophecy fails: Trump

When I saw how the American President Trump reacted to his defeat in the presidential elections I had to think of the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. I have written here already more about it, although it was already eight years ago, but, in a nutshell, the theory says that we try to bring our beliefs into line with the facts, when we notice that the facts are not what we originally believed. We call this cognitive dissonance reduction: The gap between our beliefs and the facts is reduced, if not closed.
Cognitive dissonance reduction is a normal and daily phenomenon. You want to buy a certain tool. You think that it costs € 25,-, but in the shop you see that it costs € 40,-. You think that you were wrong and that € 40,- is the real price. Then the gap between belief and fact is closed: your belief is adapted to the fact. However, it is also possible that you think that the shop owner made a mistake or that you can get a reduction of € 15,-. You ask the shop owner, and if it appears that you are right, and if the shop owner makes a new price tag, the fact is adapted to your belief. Now the gap is closed.
Such belief-fact dissonances and then adaptions are normal in life and usually the adaptions are rational. What the belief is and what the fact is is clear, and the one is adapted to the other in a rational manner. However, often it doesn’t happen this way. People don’t always want to give up their beliefs but the facts are adapted, even if it is clear that facts are correct. For example, a smoker hears about the bad effects of smoking and he quits. Nevertheless, it is also possible that he doesn’t believe that smoking is bad for your health and that he thinks that the positive effects prevail, for instance because his grandfather, who was a fervent smoker, has become hundred years old, or which other positive reasons for smoking may come to his mind. Such an irrational adaptation of the facts to the beliefs happens so often and is so striking that the theory of cognitive dissonance reduction has become almost synonymous with a theory that explains this irrationality.
The Leon Festinger et al. famously described in When Prophecy Fails an extreme case of cognitive dissonance reduction in which the gap was closed in a remarkably non-rational way: Members of a small sect thought that the world would be destructed by a flood but that only they would be saved (by a UFO). The believers came together at the pre-determined time and place and waited for the UFO that would save them but nothing happened. Then they thought that there must be a reason that nothing happened, and they came to the conclusion that the world would get a second chance, and they adapted their behaviour by trying to convert the world to their belief so that the world will be saved as yet. In this case the cognitive dissonance is reduced by giving the facts a new interpretation (or the facts are changed, if you like), although it would have been rational to give up the belief.
Such an extreme irrational adaption of the facts if a belief fails especially happens if
1) The belief is a very deep conviction.
2) The belief is supported by relevant actions.
3) Events can unequivocally refute the belief.
4) Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and is recognized by the believer.
5) The individual believer is supported by others.
And that’s what we see in the case of Trump’s defeat. Of course, it’s normal that in elections candidates say that they’ll win, but (1) from everything that Trump said and did during his campaign and after the elections it is clear that he didn’t only say that he would win, but that he was 100% convinced that he would win. (2) Moreover, Trump did everything he could to win the elections and (5) there were many people who actively supported him. He would (3,4) have failed if the election result showed that his opponent would be the winner.
Normally participants in elections know that it is possible that they will not win, even if the pre-election polls say that they will. In the end, the voters determine who wins and not the convictions of the candidates. A candidate who has lost may be disappointed but s/he knows that losing is in the game and it’s usual to congratulate your winning opponent. The facts are what the facts are.
Not so for Pres. Trump. Because the facts were not in accordance with his conviction that he would win, only one thing could be the case: Not his conviction was false but there was something wrong with the facts: The facts (the elections results) were fake and had been falsified, even though there was not any reason to think so. Who were the frauds? His opponent and his supporters, of course: the Democrats. Trump had been cheated. The votes (in some states) must be recount, so he says. Of course, it’s not unusual to ask for a recount in case of a close election result; you never know whether mistakes have been made. But that’s not the essence in Trump’s case. For him it’s so that if the facts don’t match his conviction, the gap between them must be closed by changing the facts and not be changing the conviction. Only then the cognitive dissonance will have been reduced for him.

Sources

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails and my blogs dated 31 December 2012 and 15 December 2014.

Man, Nature and Pandemics

In my blog last week I have explained that the coronavirus and the present pandemic are not man-made but have a natural origin. Pandemics are of all times and the present pandemic is no exception. Nevertheless this pandemic is man-made in a sense. No, I’ll not go back on what I wrote last week. But I think that man is responsible and increasingly responsible for the circumstances that can make diseases and pandemics happen. By destroying nature and by causing air pollution and global warming, man has changed – no has impoverished – the natural environment that way that viruses and bacteria have got more chance to spread, leading to local and global epidemics. To mention a few recent infectious diseases that have their origins in the impact of man on nature and in a too narrow relationship between man and nature and that have become epidemic, if not pandemic: Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), the West Nile virus and the Zika virus. They have all come from animals and crossed from animals to humans. Here are a few factors that make that infectious diseases can easier cross from animals to man than they did in the past. In one way or another these factors are caused by man:
- Decreasing biodiversity, especially a decreasing number of animal species.
- Destruction of nature, like wild fires ravaging rainforests. For instance, in Brazil malaria gets a chance where rainforest has been burnt down.
- Destruction of their natural habitats makes wild animals looking for places to live nearer to humans. Farming, mining and housing, which as such already lead to destruction of nature, bring men from their side in closer contacts with wild animals.
- Eating bush meat. This probably made that the coronavirus crossed over to humans.
- Intensively animal keeping for meat consumption, for the dairy industry, for animal products, etc. Moreover, animals kept for these reasons must be traded, and animal transport and animal markets are known for their contribution to the spread of infectious diseases.
- Global warming, which changes the habitats of animals and makes them more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
These are a few factors that affect the spread of viruses and make it more likely that they jump from animals to humans. According to Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, our immediate priority is to protect people from the coronavirus and prevent its spread. “But our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss,” so Andersen. “Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.
One of the problems to prevent the origin and spread of viruses is in the mind of man. Man sees man as a civilized being distinct form nature. However, this is quite Cartesian, with Descartes’s distinction mind versus body replaced by the distinction man versus nature. But man and nature are not distinct. The idea that man and nature are distinct “gives humans a central role in life on Earth, and with that, the possibility to control this life. The corona crisis provides insight into the flaws of these apparent contradictions,” so the website of Dasym. And then: “Even before modern man, there was no harmonious natural order, the earth has always been an inhospitable place where live organisms are continuously exposed to disease, parasites and natural disasters. But modern man mostly considered himself to be separate from nature and romanticized living in harmony with it.” Man must realize that man must not live against nature but with nature, for man belongs to nature and is nothing but an animal of a kind, as I explained in my last blog. Man is not simply a civilized being but a civilized animal. Man is nature. Only if we realize this and live according to this, we can possibly prevent new pandemics. 

Sources
- Benton, Tim; Richard Anthony Kok; Gitika Bhardwaj, “Coronavirus Crisis: Exploring the Human Impact on Nature”, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-exploring-human-impact-nature
- Carrington, Damian, “Coronavirus: ‘Nature is sending us a message’, says UN environment chief”, 25 Mar 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-nature-is-sending-us-a-message-says-un-environment-chief
- Dasym, “Our post-corona relationship to nature”, 23 April , 2020, https://www.dasym.com/our-post-corona-relationship-to-nature/
- Taylor, L.H.; S.H. Latham; M.E. Woolhouse, “Risk factors for human disease emergence”, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11516376/

Man, Covid-19 and Nature

What surprises me again and again is that so many smart people, who should have known better, think that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 [= coronavirus disease 2019] is man-made and that it is intentionally spread by man. Recently yet I heard the statement: Because the coronavirus has spread all over the world, it must be so that it has been made by man. Without any further explanation. Besides that this statement as such is a clear case of false reasoning (see my blog False reasoning in Covid-19 times (and not only then) ), also its contents is surprising: As if it isn’t so that pandemics are of all times. A simple Internet search will give you a long list of pandemics that have plagued man through the ages. Let me pick some from a list in the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Notable_outbreaks):
- Plague of Justinian (541-750 AD). The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague started in Egypt and reached Constantinople the following spring, killing … 10,000 a day at its height, and perhaps 40% of the city's inhabitants. Altogether the plague killed a quarter to half the human population of the known world. It halved Europe’s population between 550 AD and 700 AD
- Black Death (1331-1353), causing 75-200 million of deaths worldwide. Starting in Asia, the disease reached the Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 and killed an estimated 20-30 million Europeans in six years; a third of the total population, and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas. It was the first of a cycle of European plague epidemics that continued until the 18th century. There were more than 100 plague epidemics in Europe during this period.
- Third plague pandemic (1855). Starting in China, it spread into India, where 10 million people died. It reached also North America and, today, sporadic cases of plague still occur in the western United States.
- And not to forget: The Spanish flu pandemic that begun in 1918 in the USA (despite its name) and was “brought” by American troops fighting in the First World War to Europe. This flu infected 500 million people around the world, killing 20-100 million, especially young adults.
These are only a few examples of the many pandemics that have scourged humanity. Each pandemic had its own characteristics, but they have at least one characteristic in common: They had all a natural cause. And why would it now be different, also because there are good explanations about the natural origin of Covid-19? (see note below)
This being said, one wonders why so many people think that the coronavirus has been intentionally made and spread by man. Although it is mere speculation what I am going to say now (in the sense that I think that I cannot base my view on scientific investigations), I guess that one major reason is the alienation of man from nature. Most men today live in a civilized environment. Here I mean “civilized” as distinguished from natural. Everything around man is apparently man-made. Currently more than half of the world population lives in urban areas where most what you see has been artificially been made by men. This makes that more than ever before man is dependent on man and not so much on nature. Moreover, when people these days think of viruses, they don’t think of some nasty disease. No, what they think of are the viruses in their computers, and one thing that computer viruses have in common is that they are man-made and that they are intentionally spread by evil people. Isn’t it strange then that many people tend to think that also the coronavirus must have been made and spread by evil men? In these days and age many men are that way estranged from nature that they cannot imagine that it is nature – like in older days – that is responsible (in a neutral, causal sense) for the origin and spread of the germs of a disease. It’s true that also in the past there were all kinds of “explanations” for calamities that scourged man (for instance that they were punishments from God). However, in these days that man has become less and less dependent on nature and has become more and more civilized, in the sense that man has become increasingly dependent on what has been made by man, and in these days that men live farther away from nature than ever before, it seems almost obvious that everything that happens to man must be man-made and man-caused, including a nasty disease like Covid-19. But even though man is a civilized being through and through, man is and remains a natural being in the first place: A being made of natural stuff, “constructed” by nature from natural materials. Man is a civilized animal. And that’s why man will always be prone to what nature has in store for us, including a nasty virus like SARS-CoV-2, popular known as the coronavirus. 

Note
See for example https://globalhealthnewswire.com/viruses-vaccines/2020/03/17/the-covid-19-coronavirus-epidemic-has-a-natural-origin-scientists-say

Are you happier when you are rich?

Can money make you happy? A common saying says that it doesn’t. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have some, and not only a little bit but enough to satisfy your basic needs and a little bit more. It makes you happy, if you haven’t only enough to eat and have a decent house, but also if you can – depending on your personal preferences – go to concerts, travel abroad, buy a lot of books etc. In this sense money makes you happy, for you need money in order to be able to do such things. Indeed, as Daniel Kahneman tells us in his Thinking, Fast and Slow: “An analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 Americans,” definitively makes clear “that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life-satisfaction”, although at a certain level of income your feeling of well-being levels off. But below that level, money will certainly make you happier.
This seems in line with what Richard Easterlin discovered. Easterlin, who is considered to be the first happiness economist, studied in the 1970s the relation between economic welfare and standard of living. His results were:
1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
Then you would think that people in rich countries are happier than those in poor countries. Not true, so Easterlin, for he also discovered that
2) rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
And also, which is actually a variation on the just mentioned levelling off thesis:
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.
Since these three points together seem contradictory, they are called the Easterlin Paradox.
Actually it is so, according to Easterlin, that happiness – certainly economic happiness – is relative and your feeling of (economic) happiness is related to what people around you have. So, if you become richer but everybody around you as well, your position in relation to those around you doesn’t change and so your feeling of happiness remains the same (compare also point 3 above). Or (I took this example from Geoff Riley): Faced with this choice what would you rather have: You get £5,000 and a friend gets £3,000 or you get £10,000 and a friend gets £15,000? You feel happier in the first case, so Easterlin.
Since Easterlin published his study in 1974, many other researchers have discussed the thesis and also many presented results that seem to refute the paradox. Nevertheless, yet in 2017 Easterlin maintained his original view and stated (quoted from Agarwal; see sources below) “that the ‘long-term trends in growth rates of happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related.’ He believes that the criticism towards the Easterlin Paradox is misguided and detractors ‘omit available data, overlook problems of data comparability, err in the measurement of economic growth, or, most importantly, fail to focus on long-term rather than short-term growth rates.’ ”
So far so good, and here I cannot judge who is right and who isn’t. The Easterlin paradox sounds interesting and there can be some truth in it. Nevertheless, I have some questions. Point 1 of the paradox says that within a society rich people tend to be much happier than poor people, while point 2 says that rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much). Then I would conclude that each country is more or less as happy as each other country, and if you live in a poor country you don’t need to compare your happiness with the happiness of the rich in the rich countries: an average happy person in a poor country is as happy as an average happy person in a rich country; there is no need to feel miserable because the average happy person in the rich country is, for instance, ten times or even 25 times richer than you in the poor country. Only the relative happiness counts, and average happiness is the same everywhere in the world in every country (and the same so for those 10, 20, 30 … % below or above the average happiness; etc.).
I have my doubts. Take for instance the ranking of happiness by country in the World Happiness Report 2019, Figure 2.7. In the first place you can see there that countries do differ in the degree of happiness and also that on average the richer countries are happier than the poor countries. The ranking gives the results of 156 countries and the top happiest countries in the world are Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands (which belong to the richest countries in the world), and at the other end you find Rwanda, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Central African Republic and South Sudan (which are among the poorest countries). And why would all those economic migrants try to come to Europe and North America, if they would be happy where they live? I guess that on average people are happier if they are richer (even if this may level off above a certain income level) and that your feeling of (un)happiness is not limited by international borders.

 Sources
- Agarwal, Prateek, “The Easterlin Paradox”, https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/easterlin-paradox/
- Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books, 2012; pp. 396-397
- Riley, Geoff, “Q&A: What is the Easterlin Paradox?”, https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/qa-what-is-the-easterlin-paradox. 1st April 2009
- World Happiness Report: John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shun Wang, Chapter 2: Changing World Happiness, https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/changing-world-happiness/ (20 March 2019)