Omitting and responsibility

People are responsible for what they do but are they also responsible for what they omit to do? That’s what I want to discuss in this blog.
Omitting is not acting in a situation where you could have acted. Omitting can also be described as allowing that something happens. A man beats his wife and nobody interferes. A child has fallen in a canal and a passer-by who sees it refrains from jumping after her or looking for help. There can be good reasons for doing nothing but if someone refrains from acting where s/he could and should, we call it “omission” and s/he can be blamed for it. If that’s right, we can ask the question of responsibility also in cases of omitting, and not only when someone actively performs an action.
Take now these cases:
Case 1: Victim is drowning and Agent is the only person around. The sea is infested with sharks and Agent just had seen one swimming by. Agent decides not to spring in the water and help Victim, and Victim dies. Since it would have been almost certain that the sharks would have attacked Agent and would have prevented Agent from saving Victim, I think that nobody will blame Agent for omitting to act and hold him responsible for the death of Victim.
Case 2: Same situation but agent does not know that the sea is infested with sharks and he hasn’t seen one. Again Agent decides to do nothing and Victim dies. Is Victim to be blamed for that and to be hold responsible for Victim’s death? Some philosophers say “no”, for the death of Victim couldn’t have been prevented, anyhow. As Willemsen (2020), p. 233 (who doesn’t endorse this view as such) explains: “In order to be morally responsible for the consequences of an omission … the agent needs to be able to perform a relevant action that would have prevented the outcome”, and that’s not the case. Although this sounds reasonable, nevertheless it’s a bit counterintuitive and I think that many readers of this blog will not agree.
What’s the problem then? Why are we hesitating to say that in Case 2 Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death? In order to make this clear, let’s look a bit closer at the cases. Then we see that they are different in an important way. In Case 1 Agent refrained from acting because it would have made no sense to do so and he knew it. If he had tried to save Victim and had sprung in the sea, sharks would have attacked him and might have killed him. Therefore, his omitting to act was involuntarily. Case 2 says nothing about the reasons why Agent didn’t act, but given the description of the case as it is, it would have been reasonable for Agent to spring in the water, for he didn’t know about the sharks. At least he could have tried to save Victim. The sharks would have attacked him and let’s hope that he would have escaped, but Agent in Case 2 didn’t know that this could happen. So, it’s true that Agent in Case 2 cannot be held responsible – at least morally responsible – for the death of Victim, but we can hold him (morally) responsible for not having tried to safe Victim. In Case 1, however, Agent knew already in advance that trying to save Victim would have no sense, and so for him trying was no option. Therefore Agent cannot be held (morally) responsible for not having given it a try in Case 1.
In an important sense we cannot hold Agent responsible for Victim’s death in both cases: He didn’t bring him in his perilous situation. Nonetheless, we can ask whether Agent was morally responsible for Victim’s death in the sense that Agent could have prevented it. When doing so we must realize that “moral responsibility” can be understood in two ways. It can refer to the results or consequences of an action (consequential moral responsibility) or it can refer to the action as such (actional responsibility). In the former sense Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death, neither in Case 1, nor in Case 2. In Case 2, however, we can hold Agent responsible in the latter sense, while in Case 1 nothing can be held against Agent that way. 

Source and inspiration
- Pascale Willemsen, “The Relevance of Alternate Possibilities for Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions”, in Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Volume Three. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pp. 232-274.

Random quote

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

W.I.Thomas (1863-1947)

Being responsible for what you do

Whether an agent is responsible for what s/he does depends on whether s/he did what s/he did intentionally or whether what s/he did happened to him or her. We have seen this in my last blog. In my argument I referred to Donald Davidson and, without saying so, I have also made use of what Davidson has written about the subject, although I didn’t fully follow his line of reasoning. Davidson was one of those who discussed the relationship between intentionally acting and responsibility from an analytical philosophical perspective, but as such the theme is already as old as philosophy. Look for example what Aristotle said about it at the beginning of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics:
“Since virtue is concerned with passions and actions, and on voluntary passions and actions praise and blame are bestowed, on those that are involuntary pardon, and sometimes also pity, to distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary is presumably necessary for those who are studying the nature of virtue, and useful also for legislators with a view to the assigning both of honours and of punishments. Those things, then, are thought involuntary, which take place under compulsion or owing to ignorance; and that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside, being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who is acting or is feeling the passion, e.g. if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power.” (III 1109b30-1110a4)
So, according to Aristotle, actions are voluntary or they are involuntary and this makes whether we are or are not responsible for them. So simple it is. Or isn’t it? As I have argued in some old blogs (for example in Digging your garden alone or Do pure individual intentions and actions exist?) actions rarely are isolated events but usually they are embedded in or at least depend on what others do or have done. This has also been seen by Aristotle, for next he says:
“With regard to the things that are done from fear of greater evils or for some noble object (e.g. if a tyrant were to order one to do something base, having one's parents and children in his power, and if one did the action they were to be saved, but otherwise would be put to death), it may be debated whether such actions are involuntary or voluntary.” (III 1110a4-8) In other words, you can be forced by the circumstances to do what you don’t like to do, even if in theory you are free to act in a different way, although no one expects you to do so. Usually things are not as simple as a dichotomy can make you think they are. Pure dichotomies are exceptional.
Rather than going on with what Aristotle says about the question, I want to give some examples in order to clarify the present problem a bit (the examples are taken from Manninen 2019).
The first example is rather clear: A person gets in her car and goes driving. Suddenly she gets a stroke and loses the control of her car and causes a collision that results in fatalities. Then the driver is causally responsible for the collision, but most of us will agree that morally she isn’t: The collision happened by factors beyond the driver’s control.
The second example is the much-discussed Eichmann case. Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for his contribution to the holocaust. He stated, however (again I follow Manninen here): “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.” Orders are orders, aren’t they? Not so, it was judged, and Eichmann was hanged, among other things on account of the Nuremberg Principle IV, saying: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” So, even if you are ordered to do something, you remain personally responsible for the moral consequences of what you do, unless there is reasonably no escape. The “unless” is crucial and gives ground for discussion about when and whether an agent really has acted freely. That’s why the Eichmann case has been so much discussed.
The upshot is that responsibility for what you do often depends on the context in which the deed is done, for the context often makes whether what you do is an intentional action or something that happens to you. Whether a deed is intentional depends on how it seems to others, rightly or mistakenly. 

Sources
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.mb.txt.
- Tuomas W. Manninen, “Diminished Responsibility”, in Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 145-148.

Random Quote

Every society as a whole learns that happiness cannot be equated with development.

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)

Action, deed and responsibility

The question what an action is has long been a hot topic in action theory. Recently yet, I have written a blog about it (see my blog “What is an action?”). But take now this case: A hired assassin kills the wrong person, a thing that now and then happens. To keep my example simple, let’s say that the assassin kills by mistake a passer-by, when pointing at his intended victim. Then the question is: What action did the shooter perform? This is not only a philosophical question, but it is also important to know if we want to ascribe responsibility and administer punishment.Generally we can say that an action is a piece of behaviour with an intention, as I have explained in my blog just mentioned. But suppose that a policeman pushed the shooter in his back at the moment that the man pulled the trigger. It made that the shooter missed his intended victim and killed by accident the passer-by. Can we attribute then the killing of the passer-by to the shooter? For isn’t it so that the shooter did not intend to do so and that he didn’t aim at the passer-by and that he was pushed in his back?Take this: A woman has a cup of coffee in her hand and she spills the coffee. She can have done it intentionally, she can have done it unintentionally, someone pushed intentionally against her hand, someone did this unintentionally, etc. In the third and fourth cases we wouldn’t say that it was the woman who spilled the coffee. In the same way, we can say that in case the shooter got a push in his back it wasn’t he who killed the passer-by. If it was someone who killed the passer-by, it was the pusher, so the policeman. Right? Is this true even if the policeman wanted to prevent that the shooter would kill the intended victim? Maybe, we should say the policeman should have been more careful and that he can be blamed for that, but nevertheless we would say that it was the shooter who killed the passer-by. Even more, the shooter can be punished for having killed the passer-by. Why? For isn’t it so that the shooter didn’t intend to kill the passer-by, as we have seen, and wouldn’t have shot if he had known before that he would have been pushed in his back?Let’s compare again the coffee spiller and the shooter. The coffee spiller did not intend to spill the coffee, i.e. she did not intend to move her hand that way that she would spill the coffee. Moreover, she couldn’t expect that someone would push against his hand. So far, the cases of the shooter and the coffee spiller are analogous: both do what they do unintentionally, at least if we look at the consequences of what they do. The shooter, however, did have the intention to move his hand that way that he would shoot, albeit in a different manner. He hadn’t expected that someone would push his back, indeed, but the shooting as such was intentional, or, as I want to say, the deed of shooting was intentional. On the other hand, the spilling of the coffee was simply a movement of her hand for the spiller: It happened to her. The hand movement wasn’t a deed of hers The shooting, however, didn’t merely happen but was done by the shooter himself and someone who shoots knows that by shooting much can go wrong, like that there is a chance that he will miss. This shooting that made that a passer-by was killed was an intentional act, while the hand movement that led to spilling the coffee was not (for the coffee spiller). And, as Donald Davidson says: “a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.” (p. 46) Therefore, although in a sense we can say that the killing of the passer-by was not an action the shooter performed (for it wasn’t his intention to perform this action), it was something that the shooter did, while the spilling the coffee was not something that the coffee spiller did, since it merely happened to her. That is why the shooter is responsible for the consequences of his shooting while the coffee spiller isn’t. And maybe the punishment for the shooter will be even more severe for having killed an innocent man than if he had killed his intended victim. But that’s what the court decides. 

Source
Davidson, Donald, “Agency”, in Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 43-61.

Random quote

We like to give a beautiful name to what belongs to us and to use mean words for what belongs to others. 

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

The Covid Paradox

When browsing the internet, I stumbled on a Covid paradox. Some examples:

1) “The World Health Organization’s Europe director Hans Kluge said Thursday the continent is in the midst of what he calls the COVID-19 ‘pandemic paradox,’ in which vaccine programs offer remarkable hope, while emerging variants present greater uncertainty and risk. … ‘This paradox, where communities sense an end is in sight with the vaccine, but at the same time are called to adhere to restrictive measures in the face of a new threat, is causing tension, angst, fatigue and confusion…,’ Kluge said.” (see note 1).
2) Another article, titled “The COVID Paradox” (see note 2), says that nobody should overstate the “pain and loss of this era in human history. … When organisational life is normal, patterns often continue because they existed before. When crisis happens, however, what was once intractable becomes open. Cultural norms can be analysed and adjusted. Leaders who did not have time or appetite for change demand new ways of thinking and working.” In other words, the pandemic doesn’t bring only misery, but, paradoxically, it creates also chances for new developments.
3) In another article titled “The Covid Paradox” (see note 3), the tenor is the same, although the accent is somewhat different: “While in the short run, one would arguably return to pre-Covid behavior patterns quite quickly, we are likely to see more fundamental changes play out in the long run. The long-term impact of Covid is likely to be far more significant than its immediate effect in the next year or two. Reactive change tends to feel significant, but is not necessarily durable, but the Covid experience will produce organic shifts in mindsets that will make themselves manifest over a much longer period of time. Covid will be transformative, but not in the way that it was imagined a few months ago.” 

Actually, we have different paradoxes here. The COVID-19 pandemic paradox in 1) says that the assumed solution of the pandemic doesn’t bring a solution. This sounds paradoxical, indeed, but I think that we cannot speak of a paradox here. The present vaccines help to stop only one strain of the coronavirus, but not possible new strains, so they solve only a part of the problem, and there is nothing paradoxical in this. We simply need better solutions, like improved vaccines, and then as yet the restrictions can be lifted.
Cases 2 and 3 have more the air of being paradoxes, and in a sense they are. On the other hand, they simply describe normal facts of life. The difference is that the scale of the pandemic is much larger. When the road to the left is blocked, we choose the road to the right. When in a supermarket the shelf with rice is empty, we buy millet or potatoes. Your attention is drawn to new options and maybe it leads to new behaviour. Nobody calls this paradoxical.

 Nevertheless, there is at least one a paradox that is relevant in this pandemic: the Sorites paradox. Sooner or later the number of coronavirus infections will go down, be it because the restrictions will be effective, or, what is more likely, be it because vaccinations will end the pandemic, or be it because the pandemic will end in a natural way. Then the question is: When can we say that the pandemic has ended? How many patients make the difference between a pandemic and a “normal” situation in which some people are ill and most are not, and in which the chance that the coronavirus will spread again has been minimalized? The Sorites paradox is about an analogous question: How many grains of sand make a heap? Or, formulated in a way that is more relevant to the present pandemic: How many grains must we remove from a heap of sand till it is no longer a heap? Remove one grain and you’ll still call it a heap. Take away another grain, and it is still a heap. But what, if you have removed, one by one, thousand grains? Or a million? Do we then still have a heap? At some point, the heap will not be a heap any longer, but how many grains must be removed until we have reached that point? Until now, nobody has given a convincing answer to this question. Actually such an answer doesn’t exist. It is a matter of subjective decision and definition.
In case of the present pandemic, we basically have the same question as in the Sorites paradox. When the number of Covid-19 patients goes down, finally we’ll not have a pandemic any longer, but when we’ll have reached that point? This question is important in order to determine when the restrictions can be lifted and to what extent, but in fact nobody knows the answer. Each country has its own ideas about it. It is just a matter of policy (making choices) and politics (the execution of choices); a matter of intelligent guesswork and of establishing safe standards. It’s better to stay on the safe side and to maintain the restrictions that must contain the pandemic too long than too short. But being overcautious in view of the pandemic can be dangerous in other respects, like for the mental health of the population and for its economic health (which in the end also affects the mental and physical health of a population). It will be a wise person who knows what to do.

Notes
1) https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/who-europe-chief-says-region-midst-covid-19-pandemic-paradox
2) https://www.russellreynolds.com/newsroom/the-covid-paradox
3) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Citycitybangbang/the-covid-paradox/ 

Bayle and Montaigne on torture

Detail of a memorial stone on the remains

of the gallows of Amerongen, Netherlands.

When Bayle wrote his treatise on tolerance, he seldom referred to other thinkers who had influenced him or whose ideas he used in order to substantiate his stand. However, there is one striking exception: Montaigne. After having read my last blog, I think you’ll not be surprised that Bayle fully rejected a practice that was common and also legal in his days and that was often used in juridical fact-finding examinations: torture. Torture was also used when (religious) authorities like the inquisition wanted to convert or punish heretics. Although generally Bayle is quite comprehensive in his argumentation, not so when he rejects torture. He simply says that torture often makes that accused confess crimes that they haven’t committed, and then he goes on: “Montaigne writes about this very wise: ….”, followed by a long quotation after the colon. Since torture is still practised, legally and illegally, I think that here, too, it is worthwhile to quote Montaigne in full as well:
“The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth. Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than force me to say what is not! And, on the contrary, if he who is not guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward as life being in his prospect? … But when all is done, ’tis, in plain truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger: what would not a man say, what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments? ‘Pain will make even the innocent lie.’ Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked.” (Essays, Book II-5). And Bayle adds: “These are really the most terrible effects of the terrible pains that a man, whose limbs are violently stretched out, have to suffer.” (Tolerance II-2).
As said, in Montaigne’s days and a century later when Bayle lived, too, torture was an accepted practice in juridical examinations and also as a means of punishment. Then it was often executed in public. Since torturing is illegal nowadays, so hidden, in most countries, it is difficult for modern man to imagine how cruel it was. You can get an impression by visiting a torture museum or by googling a bit on the internet and looking for torture instruments. It’s unbelievable what kinds of cruel instruments man has developed through the ages (and actually still develops).
Montaigne was nearer to the execution of torture than Bayle. While Bayle was “not more than” a philosopher, for many years Montaigne has worked as a counsellor of the courts (“Parlements”) of Périgueux and Bordeaux. However, he was neither directly involved in this practice, nor has he ordered to torture someone. Montaigne was a kind of examining magistrate and his job was collecting information and evidence for lawsuits. He didn’t pass judgements himself. By the way, Montaigne was not against the death penalty (nor was Bayle), but then he wanted a short and simply execution.
In the essay just quoted (titled “Of conscience”) Montaigne didn’t only demonstrate that torture is pointless and senseless, in an example he also showed that it can be unjust:
“A country-woman, to a general of a very severe discipline, accused one of his soldiers that he had taken from her children the little soup meat she had left to nourish them withal, the army having consumed all the rest; but of this proof there was none. The general, after having cautioned the woman to take good heed to what she said, for that she would make herself guilty of a false accusation if she told a lie, and she persisting, he presently caused the soldier’s belly to be ripped up to clear the truth of the fact, and the woman was found to be right. An instructive sentence.”
But what if the country-woman did have lied and the soldier was innocent? It makes me think of another practice that was also not unusual in Montaigne’s time: Women accused of being witches were thrown in a lake. If she remained afloat, she was a witch, and was hanged as yet; if she sank, she was innocent. Too bad that she didn’t survive the test.
From the end of the 18th century on the legal practice of torturing almost disappeared. Also the number of offences punishable by death diminished a lot. While before a simple theft could be punished with the death, since then in most countries the death penalty can be imposed only yet for murder or for serious violation of the public order. In many countries, especially in Europe, torture and death penalty have become illegal, anyway. Nevertheless, illegal torture and illegal death penalties are still widely practised. The recent attempt to murder the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is an example of a failed illegal execution. Or think of Belarus, where arrested demonstrators have been tortured simply because they were protesting against the illegal re-election of “their” president.
I think that everybody will agree that torture is cruel, for otherwise it would not be practised. It is practised just because it is cruel and people cannot withstand the suffering. However, just because of this – to quote Montaigne again –, “[a] thousand and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions … Are not you [then] unjust, that, not to kill him without cause, do worse than kill him?” But is not the cruelty already reason enough to stop the practice? 

Sources
- Montaigne’s Essays quoted from https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hazlett-essays-of-montaigne-vol-4#lf0963-04_head_006
- Pierre Bayle: See blog last week.

Tolerance

Pierre Bayle

The modern idea of tolerance goes back to what Baruch de Spinoza and John Locke have written about it. Of course, they had their predecessors, such as Montaigne and the Dutch Renaissance scholar Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590). Less known is Pierre Bayle’s contribution to the development of the idea.
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a French Huguenot who had to flee from his country because of his religion. He lived many years in exile in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where he also died. He was one of the leading scholars of the Early Enlightenment. One of his main works was Tolerance. A philosophical commentary (abbreviated title), published in 1686. In this book he developed one of the “three leading tolerance conceptions of his time”, so Buddeberg and Forst (p.21). The work must be seen against the background of the persecution of protestants in roman-catholic countries in the 17th century, especially in France. Before Bayle, Spinoza had already argued for an individual freedom of religion, although the state could order which religion would be publicly practiced within its territory. A few years after Bayle Locke argued for a separation of church and state. Religions should be allowed to organize themselves in voluntary societies and there should be freedom of conscience. The state could interfere only when a religion would question the authority of the state and when a denial of the existence of God would undermine the moral foundations of society. (ibid.) Bayle was more radical and pleaded for freedom of conscience anyway
Bayle’s Tolerance consists of two parts. In part 1 he rejects the arguments based on Augustine’s view that it is allowed to force non-believers with violence to accept the right Christian faith. In part 2 Bayle discusses possible replies to his arguments in part 1. One can summarize Bayle’s argumentation against violent non-tolerance as follows: Violent non-tolerance is either 1) hypocrite, or 2) it is senseless, or 3) it is counterproductive. Let me explain. 

1) Bayle says, for instance: Assume your faith is a minority faith in the country where you live and you are persecuted by the defenders of the main religion (as was the case in the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, for example). Or you are sent as a missionary to China, but the Emperor of China chases you away by force. What would you say then? Indeed, your view would be that the rulers have no right to do so and you’ll detest what they do. But what right then do you have to persecute and kill others who don’t accept your faith, when you are the ruler of a country? It’s hypocrite to think that you are allowed to persecute non-believers in case you have the power to do so. You are not allowed to do to others what you don’t want that they do to you.
2) Persecuting those who don’t have your faith is not only hypocrite, often it is also senseless. Assume now that you are persecuted for having a minority religion. For example, you are a Huguenot in France at the end of the 17th century. You are not allowed to have public and many non-public functions any longer. Your possessions are robbed by the state. Many people with your religion are tortured because of their faith and you fear to be tortured, too. You can even be killed because of your faith. What will you do? It’s not unlikely that you’ll think: Let me pretend that I have given up my faith and let me feign that I have accepted the official religion. And so you do and from then on you go to the state church or temple and you do the prescribed rituals. But in your heart you still belief what you always believed. Your conversion is mere appearance. The tries to convert you by force have been senseless.
3) It is also possible, however, that the violent tries to convert non-believers fail and just make that they are strengthened in their belief. Doesn’t the Gospel say already that your faith will be badly received by the world? That’s what you are experiencing now, and you think that your salvation is in the hereafter, not in this world. If non-believers react in such a way, tries to convert them with violence are simply counterproductive. 

These are the main reasons why Bayle pleads for a complete tolerance of all religious views and for freedom of conscience. He wants a tolerance of different and dissenting religious views, anyhow. Actually, there is only one standard for what you believe: your conscience. For what else should decide which religion, view or opinion is true? Who will say which conviction is best? It is absurd to say that there is a criterion to decide this. If you think that such a criterion exists, what actually happens is that the strongest wins and that the arguments of the strongest are seen as best. Then being true and being the strongest are different words for the same. Or, as Bayle also says: We give a beautiful name to what is ours but hold in contempt what belongs to others.
Bayle aimed against religious intolerance, but his arguments are valid against all kinds of intolerance. It makes Bayle one of the founders of the modern idea of tolerance, together with Spinoza and Locke. Although now Bayle is less known than them, his view has certainly been as influential. 

Source
Pierre Bayle, Toleranz. Ein philosophischer Kommentar. Herausgegeben von Eva Buddeberg und Rainer Forst. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2016.
There are several English editions of Bayle’s Tolerance. Just google.

Fake News

Now that Trump has left the White House, an era of fake news has ended. Do you believe it? I don’t. Fake news is of all times. Millenarian movements are a case in point.
If you ask what fake news is, many people will have an answer. Nevertheless, I think that a correct reply to this question is not easy. It’s not simply so that fake news is a message or generally a fact that is said to be true although actually it is false. For example, if in the 13th century someone would have said that the earth revolves around the sun, probably he would have been accused of bringing fake news. Maybe he would even be sentenced to the stake for that view. At least in Europe this could happen. In the 17th century, however, there were already many people who believed that the statement was true, although in some countries it was still dangerous to say so (see what happened to Galileo). Now in the 21th century almost everybody thinks that the statement is true and it is safe to express this view. Nevertheless, people in the 13th century had good reasons to think that it’s not the earth that revolves around the sun, but that’s the other way round. Then (in Europe) the highest authority for truths was the Bible, and hardly anybody called in question what is written in this Holy Book. Today the highest authority is science. This shows that what fake news is, is not only an objective fact but also a social affair.
Here we see that what fake news is, is determined by two factors: Its truth and its relation with other statements that are considered to be true. However, both factors are problematic, for when do we call a statement true? There are several definitions of “true” (or “truth”). The most accepted definition says that a statement is true, if it corresponds to the facts, or, as others say, to the actual state of affairs. But how do we know what the facts are or what is actual? Here we have a problem. In short it is this: In order to know what a fact is, we must now what is true, and in order to know what is true, we must know what the facts are. The circle is round. You might try to solve the problem by developing reliable measures instruments, but even then the question remains when we consider instruments reliable. Another way to solve the problem is saying that the search for truth has a long history and that we must try to relate new statements to the already established facts in order to find out whether they are true. If a new statement coheres with the old truths, it’s probably also true, if it doesn’t it is apparently false. However, does it get us any further? For in medieval Europe what the Bible said was considered true, so seen that way the idea that the sun revolves around the earth was correct. Today we say that it is false.
Gradually I have come to discuss already the second factor just mentioned that determines whether a statement is fake or fact: Its relation with other statements that are considered to be true. This leads us to another theory of truth: A statement is true not if it corresponds to the facts, but if it properly fits with a system of coherent facts that have been accepted on reasonable grounds. However, also this approach is problematic, for also here the question arises what makes us accept a system of coherent facts. Also here the circle is round. Nevertheless, I think that there is an elegant solution of this circularity problem. Actually it combines both views on truth just discussed and it leads to a kind of spiral idea of truth: Karl R. Poppers idea of error elimination. Represented schematically it goes this way:

P1 > T1 > E > T2 > P2.

P1 is a problem we want to discuss. Then we form an idea (statement, theory) how things might be arranged (T1). Next we test the idea with what we consider reliable means, such as an experiment, in order to judge whether it holds. If not, we eliminate the idea as being false. If it holds, we add it to the existing stock of knowledge, which leads to an improved or extended theory (T2). Our knowledge has reached a higher level, so to speak. It has spiralled upward. Now the process can start anew with P2.
So far, so good. For this works for science where we have time, means and money to test statements, but not in daily life where these sources are often scarce. Even so, I think that what I have written here can be used as a guideline to judge what is fake and what is fact, if critically applied. The central questions are: What is the established stock of facts and what does a new view or statement add to it? Can it be fit into the established stock? Does it undermine established facts, and if so do we have reasons to belief that it undermines these facts on good grounds? Actually, this is the only thing the average citizen can do but it is at least something she or he can do in order to distinguish fact from fake. 

Sources
- Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; p. 164.
- My blog “Why it is good to make a bad plan”, dated 13 July 2015. 

What’s in a name?

Would Hillary Clinton have beaten Donald Trump in the American presidential elections in 2016, if she would have had a less round shaped face? This is what studies on the Kiki-Bouba effect discussed in my blog last week implicitly suggest. For when I searched for information on the Kiki-Bouba effect for that blog, I saw that it is not an isolated phenomenon. It is an effect with social implications. This became clear to me, when I read a research article by David N. Barton and Jamin Halberstadt. It will be the main source for my present blog (see Source below).
Barton and Halberstadt wondered whether there is a connection between a personal name and the kind of face that you think that belongs to that name, or rather what kind of shape the face of a person named so and so should have. Or, the other way round, what kinds of name would best fit persons with round faces or persons with angular faces. In short, the researchers wanted to know whether there is a kind of Kiki-Bouba effect between name and face shape. So should Bob have a round face and Kirk have an angular face?
In order to investigate this question, Barton and Halberstadt selected names that require rounding of the mouth to pronounce like Paul, Bob and George and names that require a more angular shaping of the mouth like Pete, Kirk and Mickey, and they took differently shaped faces (rounded or angular; the researchers used only male names and male faces). Then they combined arbitrarily names and faces or had test persons make name-face combinations. The researchers did several tests such as asking test persons to rank order names in terms of their suitability for ten rounded and ten angular male face caricatures, when the name-face combinations were given; to give the selected names to the faces; etc. The result of the tests was unequivocal and significant: Rounded names should belong to rounded faces and angular names should belong to angular faces. A man with a rounded face should have a name like Paul, Bob or George, and if he had an angular face a good name for him would be Pete, Kirk or Mickey. It is likely that the relationship exists also for female names and female faces.
In view of this result, I am glad that my given name fits the shape of my face. For the connection between name and face is not trivial, but it has social implications. The test persons didn’t only think that name and face should fit, but they also preferred persons with preferred name-face combinations. They liked them more, slightly but consistently. Therefore, Barton and Halberstadt investigated also the political consequences of the name-face relationship. They refer to an article by G. Friedman (2015) that shows “that candidates with extremely well-fitting names won their seats by a larger margin – 10 points – than obtains in most American presidential races, [which] suggests the provocative idea that the relation between perceptual and bodily experience could be a potent source of bias in some circumstances.” Research by the authors themselves shows that “well-named” political candidates who ran for the U.S. Senate between 2000 and 2008 inclusive had an advantage over those with non-congruent names by earning a greater proportion of votes.
In view of all this, Barton and Halberstadt conclude: “People’s names … are not entirely arbitrary labels. Face shapes produce expectations about the names that should denote them, and violations of those expectations carry affective implications, which in turn feed into more complex social judgments, including voting decisions.” Therefore, it is not too bold to say that, if Mrs. Clinton’s given name wouldn’t have been Hillary, but, say, Rose, she would have won the American presidential elections in 2016. So, don’t say anymore “What’s in a name?” 

Source
Barton, David N.; Jamin Halberstadt, “A social Bouba/Kiki effect: A bias for people whose names match their faces”, in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25 (2018), pp. 1013–1020. Also on website https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-017-1304-x 

The Kiki-Bouba effect

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

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

Democracy in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complementarity

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

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

Family resemblances

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

 

Wittgenstein on Covid-19 before it existed

and other remarks on Wittgenstein

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

“6.373 The world is independent of my will.
 6.374 Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.” 

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

Happy New Year!

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

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

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

Framing

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

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