Banal objects

Last week I was on holiday and so I couldn’t write a blog. Like a few weeks ago, again I have uploaded a photo instead. This time it is a photo taken during my trip to the East of the Netherlands. The photo shows a transformer house. In my blogs, I have sometimes written about the value and meaning of normal, if not “banal”, objects of our daily life. A transformer house is such a thing. Usually we ignore them, but in modern life we cannot do without them for they are an important link in the chain that transport electricity from the power station to our houses. They are there of all kinds, shapes and architecture, but I guess you’ll ignore them, passing them without realizing that you pass such a vital object of your life, for without electricity your life would be very different, especially if you live in a modern town and cannot have a power generator of your own. But why don’t you give them more attention? I admit that many transformer houses are boring objects; a kind of metal boxes coloured green, white or grey. But some are real pieces of art, like this one in Groenlo, about hundred years old. 

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If you start a man killing, you cannot turn him off like a machine

Guy Chapman

Back to the future

In my blog last week, we saw that we represent time often by spatial concepts. There I treated the question how to arrange the past and the future if you had to put them on a timeline. Suppose now that you are simply asked: If you have to spatially locate the future, where would you place it? In front of you? Behind you? Above you? Under you? Or maybe somewhere else? I asked this question to several persons in different parts of the world, in regions as far away from each other as Europe or Thailand, Indonesia or Azerbaijan. All gave the same answer: The future is in front of us. Investigations have shown that most of us will give this answer, independent of language and culture. Nevertheless, not everybody thinks that the future is in front of us, as the Dutch linguist Riemer Reinsma says in a radio interview. The Greeks have a different view. They can say, for instance, “The weather is nice today, but what will we have behind us?”, meaning “What will happen?” In other words, the Greeks live with their backs to the future. They reason: We don’t have eyes on our backs, so we cannot see what happens behind us. Therefore, the future must be behind us, for we cannot see it. However, we know what is in front of us, since we can see it. Since we know the past, it must be in front of us. This sounds not unreasonable, but it’s not where the Chinese locate past and future. For them the past is over their heads and the future is under their feet. This is just opposite to what English speakers say when they say “That threat is hanging over me”. It’s striking that in English the expression “over me” refers only to something negative that may happen. Possibly this expression is constructed analogous to a thunderstorm that is coming near. (By the way, this shows that English speakers sometimes locate the future above themselves instead of in front of themselves).
Although views on future and past are, of course, expressed in a language, probably differences where to locate them are not so much the result of differences in language as in culture. This is shown, for example, by the fact that also the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of them. The Aymara are a people that lives in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile and their language, also called Aymara, is not related to the Greek language. The Aymara view on past and future has been investigated by the American cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez. In the Aymara language, for example, “nayra” means “eye,” “front” or “sight” in the first place but also “past”. Moreover, “qhipa”, which means “back” or “behind” in the first place, is also used for “future”. So “nayra mara”, which means “last year”, literally means “front year”. That the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of themselves is supported by the gestures they make when speaking: They indicate space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and they indicate space in front of themselves when speaking of the past by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. The Aymara gestures fit the way they speak.
It seems so obvious: The future is in front of us and the past is behind our backs. It’s such a general phenomenon that once linguists and culture scientists thought that everybody sees it this way. However, as we have just seen, thus mapping the future is a cultural phenomenon and not something “given”. Ignoring this may have profound consequences. “This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed,” so Nunez, “to the conquistadors’ disdain of the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going ‘forward’.” If we see the future in front of us, it can lead to an activistic attitude. What we see is what we can grasp and change, or at least we can face it. What we don’t know, for instance because it is behind our backs, we can only ignore or accept. We cannot influence it. How we see the world makes how we act. But we can also learn another lesson from what I have written above: What is obvious for us need not be so for someone else. It’s good to realize this when you meet another person, especially if he or she is from another culture. And in the end, it’s not illogical to locate the future behind your backs and so out of sight. For who can see and know the future? 

Sources
- “De toekomst ligt achter je in Griekenland”. Interview met Riemer Reinsma, https://radio1.be/luister/select/nieuwe-feiten/de-toekomst-ligt-achter-je-in-griekenland
- Jansen, Mathilde, “Aymara laten de toekomst achter zich”, 29 juni 2006, https://www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/aymara-laten-de-toekomst-achter-zich/
- Kiderra, Inga, “Backs to the future”, 12 June 2006, https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp

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What’s a philosopher nowadays else than an expert for rephrasing jokes into problems? … Philosophizing today means to take the trouble not to write a satire.

Peter Sloterdijk (1947-)

Time and space

Humans don’t have a well-developed sense of time but their sense for space is rather good. Therefore they often use spatial terms or representations in order to express time. Take an old-fashioned analogue clock, for example. One hand moves around in order to indicate the hours, and the further it has turned around the later it is. In the same way the other hand indicates the minutes. Or when I want to make a walk of an hour, I know that I am halfway not because of an inner clock, but because I have reached a certain point and I know that it’s about 3 km from my house. I can check it by looking at my watch. But that’s about lived time. How do we represent past and future if we actually have only spatial terms in order to represent time?
Let’s first see how we refer to space. There are three ways to do so. One way is to take yourself as the centre of the world, so as your “frame of reference”. John sits left of you and so you sit right of John. It depends on whose frame of reference you take: yours or John’s. This is called a relative frame of reference. However, a frame of reference can also be intrinsic. Then the object you see, talk about, etc. is the centre of the frame of reference. Terms like above/below or on/under are intrinsic, for instance: The cup is on the table, even if you are looking down on the table, so that the cup is under you. Moreover, a frame of reference can be absolute. Examples are the geographic coordinate system (latitude and longitude) and the cardinal points of a compass (north, south, east, and west).
Suppose you are a native speaker of English and you take part in an investigation. You sit at a table, the sun in your face, and the investigator asks you to arrange sets of cards depicting a temporal sequence in order of time from earliest to latest. For example, a card with a photo of a crocodile egg might be followed by a photo of a crocodile hatching, followed by a juvenile crocodile, followed by a mature crocodile. So you do, and you arrange the cards with the “youngest” image (say the crocodile egg) on the left, then the youngest image that remains (say the crocodile hatching) etc. and the oldest image to the right (say the crocodile dying). Then a native speaker of Kuuk Thaayorre, a language spoken by the Thaayorre who live on the northern shore of Australia, takes your place. He gets the same cards and arranges them in exactly the same way as you did. Next the investigator asks you to sit down at the opposite side of the table and to arrange the cards again. Again you put the card with the youngest image left ending with oldest image on the right side. Then your place is taken by the Kuuk Thaayorre speaker. However, now this person arranges the cards with the oldest image on the left side and the youngest image on the right side. Why this difference?
Several explanations are possible for this difference in arranging between the speakers of English and the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, but most likely is that the language used in daily life is the main cause. The cultural background might also have an impact, but Thaayorre people in northern Australia who spoke only English (and no Kuuk Thaayorre) arranged the cards in the same way as the other English speakers did, so as you did. Let’s look at the language. I mentioned three ways to describe space: by relative, intrinsic terms or absolute terms. Now it is so that English speakers predominantly use the relative and intrinsic terms for describing their worlds. Although absolute terms are not absent in English, in daily life they are not much used. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, however, have at their disposal dozens of absolute terms plus a few intrinsic terms, but relative terms are absent. Speakers of both languages use spatial terms in order to describe time. The first choice for English speakers then is to use relative spatial terms for arranging time events. Of course, they could arrange things also from right to left, but probably because English is written from left to right, English speakers are used to arrange things that way. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers have no relative spatial terms at their disposal. However, they are used to employ the terms for the cardinal directions (which are absolute terms) for arranging things. Apparently for them the obvious way to arrange things (anyway, if it is on a time scale) is from east to west. That’s what they did. In the first session, they faced south and so they arranged the cards in the same way as the English speakers did, for east-west happened to be left-right. However, in the second session, when all test persons faced north, east-west had become what is right-left for an English speaker. So now the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers arranged the cards right-left. That it was the language that made this shift (“shift” from the viewpoint of English speakers!) is shown by the monolingual English speaking Thaayorre who arranged the cards just the way all other English speakers did.
The upshot is that the language you use, especially your native language, influences the way you see and interpret the world. But be careful: Studies have shown that language does not determine your world view. Other factors have also an impact. Such an influence can be the way speakers of other languages look at the world. We can learn a lot of other language speakers, like go west if you want to look to the future. 

Source
- Alice Gaby, “The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space”, on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428806/

Random quote
Killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man.

Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563)

Acting with words

In my blog last week, I wrote about J.L. Austin’s language theory. John Searle became that much inspired by Austin’s work, and also by the work of P.F. Strawson, that he has developed their ideas into a theory of what he called “speech acts”. Searle elaborated his views in his dissertation, titled “Sense and Reference”, which became the basis of his famous book Speech Acts, published in 1969. This book is full of ideas and theoretical insights. Here I want to focus on Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts, since it gives a good impression of how we act with words when we speak.
Originally Searle presented in his Speech Acts a kind of taxonomy of eight types of illocutionary acts. By combining some types, later he distinguished five main types:
1) Assertives
2) Directives
3) Commissives
4) Expressives
5) Declarations
Ad 1) Assertives are statements or assertions that something is the case. However, they do not utter objective facts like locutionary acts but views, as the name already implies. So, they are more than simple factual sentences like “The cat is on the mat”. For instance, an utterance like “I am an expert in pinhole photography” is an assertive in Searle’s sense, since I claim to be such an expert, although it may be false. Assertives try to convince the speaker. Here are some other ones: suggesting, putting forward, swearing, boasting, concluding.
Ad 2) Directives are utterings that are meant to make someone else act. “Can you open the window?” “Can you give me the pen?” are examples. Besides questions they can be orders, requests, invitations, advices, begging, and so on.
Ad 3) Commissives commit the speaker to future actions. “I promise you that I’ll come tomorrow.” Or less explicitly: “I’ll buy the book for you.” Or “Tomorrow I’ll be at home.” So commissives are more or less explicit promises, plans, vows, bets, oaths, and the like.
Ad 4) Expressives tell how the speaker feels about the situation. “Thank you” is a case in point, or “I like it”, “Sorry”, etc. So here one must think of thanking, apologizing, welcoming, deploring, and the like.
Ad 5) Declarations are utterings that make something happen by its content. Austin would call them performative sentences. Marrying a couple and declarations of war are examples. It will be clear that such an uttering is only valid if the speaker is entitled to make the declaration concerned. If this is not the case, we say, for instance, that the speaker is a crook, an actor, an imitator, or something like that.
That’s how we act with words. 

Sources
- “3.1.3 Searle’s Classification of Speech Acts”. https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/milca/courses/dialogue/html/node66.html#searleclass
- “Cultural Reader”. https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2018/01/speech-acts-classifications.html
- John Searle. American philosopher”. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle
- Searle, John, R., Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
- Searle, John R., “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”. file:///C:/Users/bijde/AppData/Local/Temp/7-08_Searle.pdf

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We should not take the absence of the word to be equivalent to the absence of thought.

Martha C. Nussbaum (1947-)

Words and deeds

You don’t need to write thick books and many articles to have a big impact on philosophy. Wittgenstein, for instance, published only one article and one book (the Tractatus) during his life. His Philosophical Investigations were more or less ready for publication, when he died. His other later published works were lecture notes taken by students and fragments and notes by Wittgenstein himself that were not (yet) meant to be published. Or take Edmund Gettier. His publication list is also short, but he has become famous by an article of only three pages (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”). His other works have been forgotten, but this article, published in 1963, is still much discussed and belongs to the classics of epistemology.
Also J.L. Austin’s (1911-1960) publications list is short. Moreover, his most famous work How to do things with words has been published in 1962, so two years after his death, and it has not been edited by himself. It has become one of the most influential books in the philosophy of language, but the ideas Austin developed in this little book help also to understand what we do in daily life, when we are speaking. Actually, these ideas are very simple and looking back one wonders why nobody have had them before. But as it happens so often, ideas need a fertile soil to shoot, in this case the breeding ground of the relatively new analytical philosophy. Austin tells us that his first views on the theme were formed in 1939 and next he used them in an article in 1946. However, he fully developed his views only in his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, which were published only seven years later, in 1962.
Traditionally, certainly during the first days of analytical philosophy, language was seen to exist of statements that can be true or false. “The cat is on the mat”, is a typical example of such a statement. The cat is there on the mat or it isn’t there. In the first case the statement is true, in the second case it is false. But stop! This is quite a limited view on language, so Austin. Not all sentences are descriptive in this way and so not all sentences have a “truth value”. Take this sentence: “I do” (meaning “I take this person to be my lawful wedded wife/husband”). Or take these words: “I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’ ”, while smashing the bottle against the stem. With sentences like these we don’t state a fact that can be true or false. Such sentences are also not meant to utter a statement that has a truth value. No, with such a statement we perform an act. By saying “I do”, I take the other person as my spouse. The utterance is not a description of what happens, which can be a right or a wrong description, but the utterance is an action; it is performing the act of marrying the other itself. Therefore Austin calls such a sentence a “performative sentence”. Although a performative sentence cannot be true or false, nevertheless something can go wrong. Then we say that this sentence was not uttered at the right place, it was a mistake, it was fake, it was infelicitous, or something like that.
Austin makes also clear that by speaking a sentence we can do different things. Take for example again the sentence “The cat is on the mat”. When uttering this sentence, we can mean to say that a certain animal is at a certain place, and nothing more. Austin calls uttering a sentence in this way a locutionary act. However, usually we have a further aim when uttering this sentence. For instance we want to inform you, so that you’ll not step on the cat; or maybe you are looking for the cat. Then we utter a warning, or give information, etc. Austin says then that we perform an illocutionary act by uttering this sentence. But it is also possible that we want that the person we are addressing brings the cat to us, or that this person gives the cat some milk: we want to bring about or achieve something with our words. If so, then we perform a perlocutionary act by uttering our sentence.
People often say: No words but deeds. Now we know that it is false contradiction. But who didn’t know that words can hurt … or can make you happy?

Source
J.L. Austin, How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Random quote
The relative independence of the motorway in the landscape demonstrates the independence that travelling has gained in our society.

                                                                            Ton Lemaire (1941-)

Lost or left behind

Philosophers write about all kinds of ingenious and difficult themes that are often remote from day life. They (and I must say that I am often among them) write about questions that only philosophers find interesting. It also happens that what they say or write what seems obvious to everybody, unless she or he is a philosopher. “The world is everything that is the case”, Wittgenstein famously wrote. What else could the world be? But he elaborated this in a little book that became one of the classics of modern philosophy. Heidegger even wrote “The nothing nothings”, which everybody, if s/he is not a follower of Heidegger, would call nonsense. Especially the first half of the last century was a period with many obscure and difficult to understand – for non-philosophers – writings. Was this the reason that there was a reaction to this in philosophy called “ordinary language philosophy” that wanted to bring back philosophy to what words mean in everyday life instead of constructing complicated structures of theoretical constructs? However, this attention for daily words and objects gradually faded away and abstract thinking became mainstream again, certainly in analytical philosophy, which still is one of the most important streams in western philosophy. Philosophical articles have become increasingly complicated and can usually be understood only by philosophical experts. Even if you are a philosopher but not an expert you often feel lost. In a sense it is normal. Although I exactly know how to keep my income in balance with my expenses, I am not a bookkeeper, and now and then I need one to help me. However, sometimes I wonder, whether themes from daily life that are actually normal for everybody are not too much neglected.
Take for instance the picture at the top of this blog. It shows a box with pastry on a bench. You may say: Nothing special. However, I didn’t take the picture, after I had put the pastry there for a picture. No, I found the box with pastry there on a bench near a road junction, left behind. When you know this, it may raise several philosophical or sociological questions: What has happened that the pastry was left behind? Why didn’t the eaters take it with them? Hadn’t what remained of the pastry any worth for them? Although pastry isn’t really expensive for most people, you don’t throw it away but keep it for later. Moreover, didn’t the pastry eaters care for the environment? You simply don’t leave your waste behind (and it can be fined, too). Certainly, if such things like people leaving behind their waste (or certain kinds of waste) often happen, it says a lot about society and the people who make up that society.
It is for such reasons that I have several series of photos of daily life and of objects lost or left behind on my Dutch photo website. Since bikes are popular in the Netherlands, you find there two series of bike photos (look for fiets of fietsen in the column left): How people park their bikes everywhere and how they turn bikes into objects of art or simply leave them behind, broken. I think that these photos are not only photographically interesting, but also philosophically and sociologically. They show that bikes are an integrated part of Dutch daily life and they show an aspect of this daily life and how bikes are used and treated.
Other objects I like to photograph are lost gloves and mittens (handschoenen and wanten). Also these photos have a philosophical meaning. It’s obvious that I seldom find them in summer. Gloves are lost in the cold season, when people wear them. When lost, some are lying on the ground for weeks. Nobody seems to care for them. The owner didn’t do any effort to get it back, or s/he didn’t know where s/he had lost it or lived too far away to make it worth the effort. But look! Sometimes a passer-by has taken up the glove or mitten and has laid it on a striking place, like a pole or a gate, so that the owner can easily find it and so that the glove or mitten doesn’t become dirty. This action says a lot about the mentality of people who find objects. They know that a lost object like a glove has worth and that the owner may want to look for it in order to get it back. In this way they take care of someone they don’t know, a stranger. Maybe they bring the lost object even to the police or a depot for lost objects. However, I am afraid that the latter happens less and less. But doesn’t this say something about our present mentality and how we were in the past? Be it as it may, have you ever heard about a monkey or a wolf that finds an object in the wood and thinks: “Hm, maybe someone of a neighbouring group has lost it. Let me put it on that pole, hoping that the owner will find it there”? Objects lost or left behind say a lot about who we are; more than you might think.

Random quote
In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true.

Donald Davidson (1917-2003)

Are philosophers moral experts?

Aristotle, the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy

In the abstract of his article “Are moral philosophers moral experts?”, Bernward Gesang writes: “I call people moral experts if their moral judgments are correct with high probability and for the right reasons.” It’s a theoretical article about the question whether there are moral experts. I don’t want to discuss the article here, but I think that it is reasonable to say that moral philosophers and in fact philosophers in general are moral experts in this sense. And if such philosophers are moral experts, they shouldn’t be influenced in their judgments by irrelevant factors. For instance, an experiment showed that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. (see this blog). Other possible influences on judgments found are the presence of an odour, the presence or absence of direct physical contact or the order in which hypothetical moral scenarios are presented. (see Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012, p. 135) Philosophers should not be influenced by factors of this kind, when judging a moral problem, for if so they don’t pass judgment for the right reasons. However, are philosophers really free from the influence by irrelevant factors? It’s what the authors just mentioned, Schwitzgebel and Cushman, wanted to know. “Because of their extensive training, professional philosophers are a ‘best case’ population for the skilful use of principled reasoning to influence moral judgment, and they have occasionally been explicitly described as such by psychologists”, and judging studies in this field, “[t]here is some empirical cause for optimism about philosophical expertise in moral reasoning”, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman (p. 136). However, because they had some doubts about the value of such studies, they decided to test the expertise of philosophers on moral questions for so-called order effects: Philosophers and non-philosophers were presented three series of two moral problems. Half of them got them in the order AB and the other half in the reverse order BA. Would the order presented have an impact on their judgments of these moral problems? If the philosophers would be experts, they should not be influenced by such an irrelevant factor like order of presentation, or at least less than non-philosophers.
One of the questions the test persons had to pass a judgment on concerned the so-called “doctrine of the double effect”: It is worse to harm a person as a means of saving others than to harm a person as a side-effect of saving others. An example of this doctrine is the trolley problem, which I have discussed several times before in my blogs (see here). In short it’s this: Switch: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it will kill five people, if nothing stops it. A bystander can save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, then a man walking on that track will be killed instead of the five. Push: Alternatively, a bystander can stop the trolley by pushing a fat man from a footbridge on the track. The test persons had to read these cases either in the order Switch-Push or in the order Push-Switch and then rate the hypothetical action on a seven-point scale from (1) ‘extremely morally good’ to (7) ‘extremely morally bad’ with the midpoint (4) labelled ‘neither good nor bad’. (In fact the test was more complicated, but we can ignore it in this blog; see Source below). The result was, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman, that “Push was rated better when presented after Switch than when presented first, and Switch was rated worse when presented after Push than when presented first. Thus, respondents tended to assimilate their responses to the second scenario to their responses to the first scenario.” (pp. 141-2). This was the average result of all test persons, and we should expect, if philosophers are moral experts, that they would be less influenced by the order of presentation of the hypothetical cases than non-philosophers. However, what was the case? The philosopher maybe did slightly better than non-philosophers, but not significantly. Tests for the two other moral problems in the investigation showed about the same results. Even more, when the results on the three tests were aggregated philosophers appeared to be more influenced by the order of presentation of the cases than non-philosophers (p. 356).
Philosophers are supposed to do better than non-philosophers in passing moral judgments. We can ask what “better” involves, but anyway they should not be influenced by irrelevant factors. However, the investigation by Schwitzgebel and Cushman doesn’t support this view: Judgments by philosophers seem to be as much influenced by irrelevant factors as judgments by non-philosophers. At least, philosophers are as much vulnerable to order effects as lay persons, while they should be resistant to them. As the authors say: “Our analysis found no support for the view that philosophical expertise enhances the stability of moral judgment against order effects.” (p. 147) Since in the investigation the judgments by philosophers also appeared to be not fundamentally different from those passed by non-philosophers, it calls into question whether philosophers are really moral experts. Of course, there is much more to say about the moral expertise of philosophers and about the expertise of philosophers in general. For example, we may expect that they are better in logic and that they are better deductive reasoners. However, we should not overestimate their expertise, for philosophers are as human as humans are. 

Source
Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman, “Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers”, Mind & Language, Vol. 27, No. 2 April 2012, pp. 135–153. Or here.

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

A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)

The discursive dilemma

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

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

Individual 1                True                True                            True 

Individual 2                True                False                           False 

Individual 3                False               True                            False 

Majority                     True               True                           False

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

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

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

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Mumpsimus

Mass at Fatima, Portugal

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

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

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

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

Mental fog

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

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

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

How we perceive

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

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

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

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

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

Normative objects

The photo at the top of this blog shows a boundary stone somewhere east of the Dutch town of Nijmegen. The stone marks there the border between the Netherlands and Germany. The foreground is the Netherlands and on the other side of the stone it is Germany. Once this stone had a compelling force: It told you that without permission it was forbidden to cross the border it marked. Many boundary markers of this kind – besides marking the border – still have this prohibitive function, like those on the border between Lithuania and Belarus. Instead of a stone (or pole) you could put there also a board with a text or a symbolic drawing or a border guard. Just like the board or the guard such a boundary stone has a normative force. It replaces the board or the guard. Therefore we call a boundary stone a deontic artifact: an artifact with a normative intent. The stone prescribes you what to do, or rather what not to do: to pass the stone without permission. Once, this was the normative function of the stone in the photo. Now, in these days of open EU borders, it warns you only that the rules and laws on the other side of the side of the stone are different from those on your side, but it is still a deontic artifact in a sense, for it prescribes you that on one side of the stone you need to obey other laws than on the other side.
Look around and you’ll see that deontic artifacts abound. You see them especially in traffic: traffic signs and lights, lines and symbols on the roads, etc. Examples of other deontic artifacts are hedges and fences that mark out private territory or now in the days of the Covid pandemic arrows on the floor of a shop that tell you how to walk. Deontic artifacts are not only symbolic but they can also force you to behave in a certain way. A roundabout is a typical example. It prescribes you to follow a certain route and to give priority to the traffic on the roundabout. You can ignore the prescriptions, but you will not do so for it is risky.
As my examples make clear, deontic artifacts can be of different kinds. A boundary stone is normative or prescriptive: It informs you about desired or prescribed behaviour. Or better, take a road sign. It tells you what to do, though in many cases you can ignore it, if you want to. On the other hand, a roundabout is regulative: it regulates or enforces your behaviour for you don’t want to have an accident. Another example is a speed bump on a road. It doesn’t prescribe you to drive slower, but you’ll do for you don’t want to damage your car. Because as such a speed bump is not normative, actually we can call it better a regulative adeontic artifact. A fence marking a private territory not only marks what is private and what is public, but if it is high enough it also stops you to enter the private area and so it is a regulative deontic artifact.
A deontic artifact can be permanent or temporarily. Above I discussed already several examples of permanent deontic artifacts, like boundary stones or fences. Once placed, they stay there “for eternity” or at least for an indefinite time. But sometimes we want to mark a place or forbid certain behaviour only for a short time. A row of chairs barring the entrance of a lounge or a bar or a part of a room is a case in point. Normally you can come there for a drink or a meal but the barman has closed the space for a little while, for instance because it must to be cleaned. Another example is a coat left on a chair telling you that the chair is already used by someone else who has left for a moment. The momentarily deontic artifacts just mentioned are informal markers, but markers can also be formal, like the traffic cones used by road workers to mark a hole in the road or the place where they are working. However, we consider a traffic cone only as a marker of danger or as a sign that marks out road works if placed on the road. If you see a few disorganized traffic cones on the roadside, you’ll not see them as markers, so as deontic artifacts that warn you for a danger or that regulate your behaviour. They are just there; left. This exemplifies that a deontic artifact gets its meaning as such only if it is situated: it needs “to be installed in a particular place to exercise [its] function and influence.” A deontic artifact “only performs its function when it is in its place.” (see Source, p. 194)
These are only a few distinctions that characterize deontic artifacts, or normative objects as they can be called as well. If we think of norms that prescribe or regulate what we do, usually we think of texts set down in explicit rules and laws or in cultural habits and customs or in implicit behavioural precepts; that is, we think of something that is linguistic in some way. As we have seen above regulative phenomena of everyday life can and often do have also a material aspect, or they are even fully material (like the speed bump). The material dimension of a normative phenomenon is often as important as its linguistic dimension. 

Source
When writing this blog I have leaned heavily on
Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni, Olimpia Giuliana Lodo, “Deontic artifacts. Investigating the normativity of objects”, in Philosophical Explorations, 24/2 (June 2021).

Random quote
No man shall be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one is to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleases.

Akbar, Indian Moghul Emperor, Muslim (1542-1605)

Someone else’s shoes

Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations, § 443: “ ‘The red which you imagine is surely not the same (not the same thing) as the red which you see in front of you; so how can you say that it is what you imagined?’ ” Let’s forget the quotation marks and concentrate on the contents and take the remark as it is. Let’s go one step further. Then we get the question: Is what you see exactly the same as what I see, even if we describe it with the same words? For instance: You see something red and describes it as being red. But is your red also my red? It’s a thing I always have wondered, already as a child. To be exact, then I wondered whether the yellow colour that you see is the same yellow colour as I see it. In short, I wondered whether your yellow is my yellow. Not only then I asked myself this question, but I still do. Even more, when I keep a hand for my right eye and then for my left eye, I always have the impression that the yellow I see with my left eye is a little different from the yellow I see with my right eye: My left eye yellow is slightly darker than my right eye yellow. Leaving aside for a moment the latter problem of seeing the same thing in different ways, depending on the eye I use, I think that we have here a fundamental problem of human relationship and being human: Are we really able to have the same experiences as other persons when seeing the same red object or taking part in the same event, even though – at first sight, at least – we and they are the same in relevant respects? So, can we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Many people think we can: That we can experience another person’s feelings, but also another person’s reasoning when taking a decision. And many people think we often do: they often automatically think that another person’s view point is their view point. For instance, someone tells a dirty joke and you think that he knows that he tells a dirty joke; his view on the world is your view on the world.
The problem here is that you may be right in thinking that what you see, feel, experience, etc. is what the other sees, feels, experiences ... However, this doesn’t need to be so. You can make the mistake – and it often happens –that is called the psychologist’s fallacy (a term coined by William James some 150 years ago). The Lexico dictionary describes it this way: “The confusion of the thought of the observer with that which is being observed; the assumption that motives, etc., present in one’s own mind are also present in that of the subject under investigation.”
There are different types of the psychologist’s fallacy, which I’ll not discuss here (see for instance this link, where you can also find more examples). However, it’s a fallacy that is prevalent. For many people it is difficult to imagine that other people are different, think differently and behave differently. Oh, certainly, they say that they can imagine that others are different etc. and in the abstract they know that it happens, but when it comes to the point they feel that not being, thinking and behaving like they do is strange, if not weird. It’s the basis of prejudices. “Why are they not as us”, they say. “It’s normal to do it our way.” Etc. This thinking, being, behaving differently is enough to look down on “them”, and to turn their backs on them. But note that your own left eye may see things in a different way than your right eye does. Aren’t we so already a bit as the other whom we think we don’t understand? Even if you wouldn’t want to be in someone’s shoes, maybe those shoes do fit him or her better.

Random quote
The history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. … This history is thought in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

Karl Popper (1992-1994)

Homesickness or desire? Or just waiting?

 

Last week I was on holiday and so I couldn’t write a blog. Instead, I have uploaded this photo. It’s a photo that I like a lot. I have taken it in Klaipeda in Lithuania, a few years ago. I had spent a holiday in the Baltic States and I was waiting in the harbour of Klaipeda till the ferry would appear that would bring me to Germany. I think that this photo can express a lot. Is it homesickness? Desire? Hope? Or nothing of this at all, and does it capture simply the idea of waiting? Or is it not more than a harbour view? Or is it something else? But does the photo really express anything? It’s a photo that raises many questions. That’s why it is a really philosophical photo.

Random quote
That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1888-1951)

“You cannot step in the same river twice”

I find fallacies intriguing. That’s why I have treated them already several times in these blogs. Fallacies are incorrect reasonings and sooner or later everybody makes mistakes of this kind. Even philosophers, scholars and scientist do. So a good reason to keep paying attention to them. As before, I make extensive use here of Arp, et al., 2019 (see Reference). Here is their full definition of a fallacy:
“A fallacy is an error in reasoning whereby someone attempts to put forward an argument whereby a conclusion supposedly has been appropriately inferred from a premise (or premises) when, in fact, the conclusion does not and should not be inferred from the premise(s).” (p. 19; italics in the original)
Fallacies are errors and should be avoided. They are based on false facts or views and usually the conclusion is a false fact or view (although it remains possible that the conclusion of a false reasoning happens to be true despite the false reasoning). However, it’s often not noticed that a reasoning is false and fallacies can have long lives. Some fallacies may have been put forward while those who did simply thought that the reasoning was correct, but it also often happens that false reasonings are put forward on purpose by people who think to gain by doing so and who want to manipulate people. Especially in politics both things happen, and maybe the latter more than the former, but that’s a personal opinion that I cannot substantiate with facts. Anyway, beware of politicians who use rhetoric.
Fallacies can be divided into formal and informal fallacies. A formal fallacy is one in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise(s) because of errors in the structure (form) of the reasoning, rather than in the content. The fallacy called “affirming the consequent” is a case in point, for instance: “If it is raining, the sidewalk is wet. > The sidewalk is wet, so it is raining”. The conclusion doesn’t follow, for maybe someone has just scrubbed the sidewalk. This simple fallacy is committed more often than you think!
An informal fallacy is one in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise(s) because of errors in the content of the reasoning. Since the content is expressed in language, often we find the false reasoning in the language used, like the misuse of words or grammar, false understanding, vague use of conceptions, and so on. Prejudices belong to this type of fallacy, for instance: Someone did something wrong and then the reasoning is “it is because s/he is a person from that ethnicity/sex/creed and my experience is that such persons behave that way.” (cf. Arp, et al., 2019, pp. 18-27) Arp et al. discuss seven formal fallacies and 93 informal fallacies, but it’s only a selection.
Also schooled thinkers commit fallacies. Even the Old Greek philosophers did, although they introduced the idea of fallacy in Western philosophy. By way of example, I’ll discuss here a statement by Heraclitus (540-480 B.C.). Fallacies were first systematized by Aristotle (who lived after Heraclitus, namely from 384-322 B.C.; click here for his work on fallacies), but I think that fallacies were certainly already known to Heraclitus.
Last year in a blog (click here; at the end) I shortly discussed Heraclitus’s statement that you cannot step into the same river twice. I explained that in this statement Heraclitus confused levels, namely the levels of the river and the water, and that you can step into a river as often as you like. We can also say that Heraclitus committed the fallacy of composition. The river consists of a bed in a landscape and this bed contains streaming water, indeed. However, it is not so that the river itself streams but that the water in the river streams. As such the river has a fixed place in the landscape and keeps this place when you cross it. If we say that a river streams, it is only a metaphor, a figure of speech that means that the water in the river streams. So, if we say “a fast-flowing river”, in fact we mean that the water in the river is fast-flowing. Therefore, you cannot step into the same (river) water twice, but you can step in the river itself as often as you like. The fallacy of composition is the error to ascribe characteristics, attributes or features of a part to the whole it belongs to, and this is what Heraclitus did: streaming is a characteristic of the water in the river but not of the river itself. (cf. Arp, et al., 2019, pp. 250-1; the example is mine)
Now it is up to you to uncover the fallacies that I committed in my blogs. 

Reference
Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.

Random quote
Fighting for prestige, for honour, is litteraly fighting for nothing,

René Girard (1923-2015)

Montaigne and the Olympic Games

OLympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece

In the days of Montaigne there were no Olympic Games. The original Olympic Games of Antiquity had ended about 400 B.C. (the precise date is not known), while the first modern Olympic Games have been held in 1896. When Montaigne lived – the time of the Renaissance or Rediscovery of Antiquity – it was known that such games had been held long ago, but no one was interested to bring this past to life again. Compared to the day of today there was by far less interest in sport. However, tournaments like in the Middle Ages were still held, jeu de paume was quite popular, especially in France, as were boule games. Other sports practised were running, ice-skating (especially in the Netherlands), weight lifting, wrestling, etc., etc. But there was no competition on a scale that can be compared with what happens nowadays (one practical reason for this was, of course, that there was no good and fast transport system). Montaigne himself liked horse riding; just for pleasure, not for competition. One of his brothers played jeu de paume (and died after a ball had hit his head). So sport belonged to Montaigne’s life and to the society he lived in. Therefore it is not surprising that he mentions sport now and then in his Essays, though not very often. Sometimes Montaigne mentions the jeu de paume, sometimes he mentions sport in quotations or examples from Antiquity, and that’s most of it.
It is in examples that Montaigne mentions the Olympic Games four times in his Essays. Three references are not very interesting. However, one reference to the Olympic Games is, for it tells us a lot about the meaning and significance of sport. Although this reference doesn’t contain an idea of Montaigne himself but one developed by Pythagoras, it’s clear that Montaigne agrees with it. Here it is:
“Pythagoras was want to say that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.” (Essays, Book I, 25)
Montaigne refers to this view of Pythagoras in his essay “Of the Education of Children”. First, he says there that we must watch others and see how they behave, so that we can learn from it. In this context he mentions especially the ridiculousness and the arrogance of others. Such examples, such knowledge of what others have done “fortify our sight without closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good company in the other world.” And then Montaigne comes with the passage on how Pythagoras interpreted the Olympic Games. With this passage Montaigne wants to say that children – and actually not only children, but everybody – must be like spectators and that they must learn from what they see happening around them. However, to my mind the meaning of this passage is wider. It contains not only the metaphor that a child (and actually everybody) is like a spectator of a sports event, but the passage is a kind of allegory of life. Life is like a sports tournament in which each person has a role to play and in which the occurrences and incidents are like the occurrences and incidents in life. In a sports event like the Olympic Games but also in smaller sports events there are players – the main participants –; there are winners and losers; those who try to profit for personal gain, but are not the main players; onlookers and bystanders; but also others, not mentioned by Pythagoras, like organizers, people in the background who may have the real power, manipulators, cheaters and deceivers, supervisors, innovators, and so on. The more you think about it, the more you’ll see that the Olympic Games and in fact any sports event is a reflection of life. Events like the Olympic Games are maybe too big for it, but smaller events of that kind, local and regional events, can function as a school of life. Then we don’t need to be only spectators, as Montaigne suggests, but we can also play one of the other parts. Every part in a sports event has aspects that are important in life. In this sense, sport is more than relaxation and recreation as is often thought. But can we reproach Montaigne that he wasn’t aware of it? For sport in his days was very different from sport in 2021. Then sport was mainly relaxation and recreation, indeed, and several centuries would have to pass by before it became a real model of life; before it became life itself.