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You cannot organise kindness, but you can organise the conditions for it. 

Otto Neurath (1882-1945)

Who do belong to us?

With each other, for each other. Sculpture made by Nicolas Dings

Actually, what I am going to write now is a bit Eurocentric. Or maybe it is not the right word, for the distinctions I am going to make are typical for English, Dutch (my mother tongue) and the other Indo-European languages and these languages are not only spoken in Europe. However, there are many languages in which these distinctions do not apply. Keeping this in mind, let’s start.
Take this case: John says to Anna: “We’re going to the movies.” Question: Does Anna or doesn’t Anna go to the movies with John? Only context can tell. This becomes clear if we add what John also said:
- “We’re going to the movies. My wife is waiting. See you later”. OR
- “We’re going to the movies. Are you ready?”
In the first case John uses a, what linguists call, exclusive we: Anna is not included in (excluded from) the we-group. The speaker or writer refers to him or herself plus his or her associates but not to the person(s) addressed. In the second case John uses an inclusive we: Anna is included in the we-group. When the inclusive we is used, the speaker or writer includes the addressee(s), for example the person(s) s/he is talking with or his or her audience or readers.
In English, Dutch and many other languages, there is only one word for the inclusive and exclusive use of we, but not in all languages this is the case. Some languages use different words for the exclusive and the inclusive we. Click HERE for a map of languages that distinguish or do not distinguish linguistically both types of we.
The inclusive/exclusive distinction of we is not simply a linguistic distinction that makes clear that “we” can have two meanings. It is also practical to know it, for speakers, including politicians, often confuse them or use them intentionally in an ambivalent way in order to build a relationship with their audience. Such a relationship can be built because the inclusive we evokes a sense of commonality and rapport between speaker or writer and audience. So, in order to get support for new covid restrictions, a prime minister can say “We all must tackle the coronavirus. That’s why we have decided to take these measures…”. The first we, which refers to all inhabitants of the country including the government, is used to evoke support for what the second we (the government) has decided. The first inclusive we is used in order to bring about that everybody is behind the measures taken by the second, exclusive, we. Or take the situation that a speaker says that if the government will continue its present policy, many refugees will come to this country, and then he says “It’s that what we want?”, suggesting that the audience agrees with him and doesn’t want this to happen, while actually it is maybe so that only he, the speaker, doesn’t want it. Then saying “we” is a manipulative use of “we" in order to evoke support for his words. Actually, there are countless ways to use “we” in a manipulative manner.
Although the inclusive we and the exclusive we are the main meanings this pronoun has, there are also other ways “we” can be used. For instance:
- The medical or institutional we. Examples: “Have we slept well tonight?”, “Have we opened our bowels?’, “Have we been a good boy today?”
- The royal we: “We” is said while “I” is meant. This is especially used by persons in high office, but also in other contexts like the Bible and the Quran.
- The third person we: Take this sentence: “We in this country should spend more money on social security.” In this sentence, it is meant that the government should do so, but not only. The we refers to a third person, but the speaker feels a kind of responsibility for or involvement with the issue stated.
The upshot is that we must realize well what we mean when we ue we or talk about us, and even more so when others try to involve us in their projects by suggesting that we are involved. 

Sources
- Michael Cysouw, “Chapter Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Exclusive ‘We’: Definition and Examples”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Inclusive ‘We’ (Grammar)”.

Random quote
When he [Einstein] commits a breach of etiquette, it is said that he does so because he is a man of genius. In my case, however, it is attributed to a lack of culture

Mileva Marić (the wife of Albert Einstein) (1875-1948) 

Measures that divide the world

A virus is haunting the world — the coronavirus. All the world organisations have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this virus: WHO and UN, USA and EU, Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, BioNTech and AstraZeneca have joined hands and even Bill Gates seems to contribute his bit.
Where are those in opposition to the proposed restrictions who have not been decried as scatterbrains by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of being anti-vaxxers, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? An important thing results from this fact: Anti-vaxxers have been acknowledged to be itself a power.

                                                      ***
Those who know their classics will immediately see that the sentences above are a paraphrase of the first words of the preface of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adapted to the present situation. My rewording of this passage is sarcasm, but it is also serious. The world does suffer from a virus and that virus is so dangerous that strong measures are necessary to fight it, and that’s why world organisations etc. join hands. But humans wouldn’t be humans if they wouldn’t disagree about the measures to be taken and about which measures are best. However, where measures are taken there are people who are against them, and where a vaccine is developed there are people who are anti-vax. And when people oppose, they are often lumped together and branded as simply being “against us”.
Let’s look at the measures. As I see it, the present anti-covid measures are of two kinds: Measures to stop the spread of the virus and measures against people that might spread the virus. Let’s call them virus-based measures and human-based measures respectively. When talking of virus-based measures I think of face masks; covid passes (a proof that you have been vaccinated, recently had covid, or have been tested negatively on the coronavirus); keeping distance; home working; etc. When talking of human-based measures I think of a curfew or, what you more and more see happen now, a ban on going out for non-vaccinated people or at least for them a ban on visiting certain events like concerts or sports events, based on the idea that it is more likely that the coronavirus will be spread by non-vaccinated people than by vaccinated people.
On the face of it both virus-based measures and human-based measures seem reasonable. Before I am going to argue that the latter aren’t, let me first say something about political systems. There are roughly two types of political systems: democracies and dictatorships. Of course, in the first place, both types are about how rulers are selected, but democracies take into account the interests of the people as much as possible, including the interests of minorities, while dictatorships govern in the interest of those who are in power, oppressing or at least downgrading those who don’t support them. With this distinction in mind, let’s now consider the anti-covid measures. I think that all such measures are dictatorial in some way, but, paraphrasing Orwell, some measures are more dictatorial than others. That’s what we see here, too. Virus-based measures tell people what they must not do but they leave much elbow room to adapt and to choose your own way. So, if a covid pass is required for visiting a concert, the visitor has at least the choice between being vaccinated, being tested or not to go (choosing to become ill is not a reasonable option, of course). Human-based measures, on the other hand, take this elbow room away from the people and instead they prescribe what they must do. So, if non-vaccinated people are forced to stay home (with some exceptions, like going to a food shop) they have no other choice than doing what is ordered them to do. In other words, virus-based measures give (by far) more freedom than human-based measures, and in this way they take the interests of the people more into account than human-based measures. Or, in again other words, virus-based measures are relatively democratic while human-based measures are (relatively) dictatorial. Need I say yet which kind of measures are to be preferred? Human-based anti-covid measures must be avoided as much as possible if not rejected at all.
Moreover, there is more. Human-based anti-covid measures are not only bad because they harm the democratic rights of individuals, but they are also bad for society. By the way they are presently applied they lead to a dichotomy in society between the “good guys and girls” (the vaccinated) and the “bad guys and girls” (the non-vaccinated), which can lead to serious conflicts (as we see already here and there). But look at the non-vaccinated: people have not taken the vaccine for all kinds of reasons: for religious reasons; for medical reasons; because they don’t trust the vaccine; because they don’t trust the makers of the vaccine or those who tell them to take it; because they are lax and have postponed again and again taking their jabs; etc. You cannot approach the non-vaccinated as if they were one group. And so we are back at the introductory paraphrase of this blog: Those who are against you are often seen as one; wrongly. This is another plea to fight the virus that haunts the world only with virus-based measures. What else?

Random quote
Does it never strikes you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?

L.F. Richardson (1881-1953) 

On collective intentionality

In my blogs, now and then I have written about the problem of collective intentionality. At the moment it is one of the most discussed themes in the field of philosophy of action. It is discussed so much just because philosophers cannot get a grip on it. The essence of the discussion is: What are collective intentions and actions and how can we explain them? And here the problem starts, for since intentions are in the minds of individuals and actions are performed by individuals, how then is it possible that groups (and collectivities in general) have intentions and perform actions that are not simple aggregations of what the individuals who make up these groups intend and do? What do we mean when we say that the team wins, while there is no team that has kicked the ball for there are only individual players who have done so? But John, one of the players, doesn’t say “I have won”, but he says “We have won”. And here we are at the heart of the problem: How can the I-we distinction be bridged? To my mind, until now no philosopher has convincingly succeeded to do so. And just this made for me the problem intriguing and challenging and it made me – being an action philosopher myself – to give my thoughts to the question and put down my ideas in an essay. My blogs about the theme published here on blogspot are either a kind of prepublications of parts of the essay or they are tryouts that helped me develop my ideas. Last week, then, I uploaded the essay to my website. I hope that it will help bring the discussion on collective intentionality a step further.
Below you find the abstract of my essay. Are you interested in reading the full essay? Don’t hesitate then to go to my website and to download it. And once you have read it, don’t hesitate to send me your comments!
Click HERE in order to go to the full essay.

***

Abstract of “Collective intentionality and the constitution view. An essay on acting together”.
One of the currently most discussed themes in the philosophy of action is whether there is some kind of collective intention that explains what groups do independent of what the individuals who make up the group intend and do. One of the main obstacles to solve this problem is that on the one hand collective intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim), while on the other hand collective intentionality is in the heads of the participating individuals, so to speak, and so it is owned by each of the separate individuals who make up the group (the Individual Ownership Claim). The claims are contradictory and until now no satisfactory solution how to reconcile them has been found. In this article I argue that the constitution view, like the one developed by Lynne R. Baker, can provide a way to sidestep the contradiction. Just as a statue as such is constituted by the marble it is made of but has characteristics that are different from the marble (a statue has a head and legs, while the marble hasn’t; while the marble is stony and the statue as such isn’t), I argue that a group is constituted by its members and that a group on the one hand and its members on the other hand have different characteristics. This is possible because group and members are on different levels. Then there is no longer a contradiction between the Irreducibility Claim and the Individual Ownership Claim, for the former claim concerns the group level and the latter claim concerns the level of the group members. This explains that a group can have intentions that are no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive patterns of the intentions of its members and that group intentions can be different from if not contradictory to what the individual members taken together intend.

***

In fact, the essay just mentioned is my second contribution to the debate on collective intentionality. HERE you find the find my first article, titled “Collective intentionality and individual action”.

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The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1888-1951)

Banal objects

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

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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/

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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

Random quote
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)