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

A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)

The discursive dilemma

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

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

Individual 1                True                True                            True 

Individual 2                True                False                           False 

Individual 3                False               True                            False 

Majority                     True               True                           False

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

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

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

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Mumpsimus

Mass at Fatima, Portugal

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

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

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

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

Mental fog

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

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

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

How we perceive

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

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

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

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

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

Normative objects

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

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

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

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

Someone else’s shoes

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

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

Karl Popper (1992-1994)

Homesickness or desire? Or just waiting?

 

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

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1888-1951)

“You cannot step in the same river twice”

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

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

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

René Girard (1923-2015)

Montaigne and the Olympic Games

OLympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece

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

Random quote
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Photos as representations of society

For Wittgenstein, a picture represents what it depicts. Often it also expresses what we cannot say in words. If we can, maybe we need a long essay to describe what the picture captures in one image. As a photographer it’s obvious that I agree with this view and therefore it is not strange that once I got the idea to illustrate these blogs with photos. At first I did it only now and then, but now you find a photo of mine at the top of each blog. Sometimes I pick one from my archives and sometimes I take one especially for a blog. However, it happens also the other way round: I have taken a photo, for instance because I like the scenery that I captured with the photo, and afterwards I give it a wider – philosophical or sociological – interpretation and write a blog about it.
Take for instance the photo at the top of this blog. To my mind, it’s not only an interesting picture, but it says also much about our society and how we interact with each other. But let me first tell a bit about what made me take it.
Once on a trip to Paris I took a photo of Les Halls (once the old fresh food market, now a shopping centre; click here for the photo.) It’s a picture of a square in the shopping centre. In the middle you see a man with a notebook or something like that. Around him, people are passing by. What makes this photo special is that the people around the man look like shadows or ghosts. This effect was brought about by using a long shutter speed, when taking the photo. I had done so only because it was quite dark then. However, when I saw the result, it appealed so much to me that I wanted to take more photos like this one. It was just because of the artistic expression, not because they had a special philosophical or sociological meaning for me.
It proved very difficult to find places where I could take such photos, so places with the right people (one person stationary plus some persons moving) and the right light conditions. In the 30 years since I took the Paris photo, I succeeded to take only a few like that. One is the photo here at the top of this blog, taken in a shopping mall in Helsinki, some 15 years ago. At first, I found the result a bit disappointing, for wasn’t there too much movement in the photo? However, when I looked at it again after a while, my view had changed, for it was precisely this strong blur of the moving people passing by, as distinct from the still figures who were in focus – a man and a woman with a pram – that seemed to me to enhance the effect even more. Just this contrast turned out not only to produce a photographically appealing image, but also to give the photo a meaning that goes beyond the purely photographic image. In fact it is the core of the philosophical or sociological expression of the photo, not in the sense that it places this photo in a certain philosophical or sociological frame, for example because it is the photo of a certain type of photographer or because such photos are characteristic of a certain era or society, because many people took such photos then or there. No, the photo is, as it were, a theory about man himself.
On the one hand, when people act, they do it in a certain social environment that functions as the background of their actions. It is the space in which they act. However, this social environment is not merely background. The acting people are not separate from it. By their actions people also make their own social environment. The social environment is background and product of their actions at the same time. But what is the relationship with the social environment, with the people around us, worth when it really comes down to it? In this respect, this photo shows a pessimistic view. The man in the photo is doing something with the pram. Does he need help? No one seems to care. In this sense, the photo gives a certain pessimistic, if not negative, picture of society, indeed: in the end, we must rely on ourselves. Or is this too pessimistic? For there is also another person who obviously is involved. Is it the partner of the man behind the pram? The photo doesn't make it clear. What is clear is that we see one or two individuals socially isolated from the environment. From this point of view, and if this interpretation is right, the photo is an expression of our present highly individualistic society.
But maybe all this is a too pessimistic view on society. On the one hand people often altruistically help each other if they see others in need – see the present flood disaster in Europe – but on the other hand, how often isn’t it so that people think only of themselves and don’t care about others when they should. – see the corona crisis – However, that’s another discussion. What I want to show here is that photos often are not simply beautiful pictures, art for art’s sake, a manner to show to others what you did during your holiday, and so on. Photos can also – and I think they do so most of the time, if not always – have a wider philosophical and/or sociological meaning. They say something about who we are and how we live. A photo is a picture of reality; it is a model of the reality as we think it is.

Random quote
The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

To say and to show. Wittgenstein and photography (2)

In my last blog we have seen that photography was important for Wittgenstein, not only because he himself was an enthusiast photographer, but also because he often referred to photos in his work, especially in his Philosophical Investigations (PI). Apparently, the basis for his “photographic view” on philosophy was laid in the 1920s by his photographic experiments, but we find already elements of this view in the preceding years. So, in a letter to Russell in 1919 Wittgenstein called the distinction between to say and to show the “main problem of philosophy”, and actually he stressed the significance of this distinction already in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. From here the move from showing in general to showing with a photo is easily made, if you have become interested in photography.
In the Tractatus philosophizing is talking, saying, in the first place. There philosophy is logical analysis, so analysis in words. It is talking about thinking, and language is the totality of our thoughts. For example, Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus:
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
4.001 The totality of propositions is the language.
4.0031 All philosophy is “Critique of language” …
But what if you cannot express things in words? What if you have no words for what you want to say? What if there are no words for what you want to say? Wittgenstein gives the answer in the famous last sentence of the Tractatus:
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
In the German original we read “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”, and maybe this statement could be better translated as:
7’. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one needs to be silent.
Or in other words, one has no choice but to be silent.
That is what Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus. But in this work we find already the seeds of one of the main points of his Philosophical Investigations, namely the importance of the picture, the image, and so also of the photo, which is expressed in his famous words “Don’t think, but look!” (PI, 66) For we read already elsewhere in the Tractatus:
2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth. (italics mine)
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said.
Here, implicitly, the importance of showing is presented as an alternative to saying, although this idea is not yet developed in the Tractatus. Rather it is there ignored, if not rejected (cf. 7 above). Note, by the way, that in 4.1212 Wittgenstein sees saying and showing not as supplements to each other but as alternatives. This changes in the PI (which I’ll not demonstrate in this blog, but see what I said in my blog last week about the importance of photos and photography in the PI). But if, as in the PI, showing comes of equal standing to saying, then it is no longer true what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus 5.6, namely
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,
for now my world comprises also what can be represented in pictures, in images. Once we see this, the importance of photography becomes clear, for photography is one way – and currently one of the most important ways – to make images of the world. In a photo we show instead of say, and often we show with a photo what we cannot say. 

Related literature
|- Franz Hoegl, “Sagen, Zeigen, Beobachten.Eine philosophisch-systemtheoretische Betrachtung,” (click here)
- Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, “Sagen und Zeigen. Wittgensteins Hauptproblem” (click here, chapter 2)

Random quote
Every people must face the truth that in the space it calls its property and to which it is attached, it is a relatively recent and, moreover, contingent appearance.

Ton Lemaire (1941-) 

Wittgenstein and photography

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face reduced in scale struck them as inhuman. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xi). 

Everybody knows Ludwig Wittgenstein as a philosopher. What is less known is that he had also a great interest in photography. Not only are there many references to photography in his work, like in the quote above, he himself was also an enthusiast photographer. In the mid-1920s, Wittgenstein did some photographic experiments with the help of his friend Moritz Nahr, a court photographer. One of these experiments was making a composite photo of three photos of his sisters and one of himself. This photo is said to be the start of the development of his ideas of language game and family resemblance. In the 1930s he made his own photo album. Now, in these days that everybody has a camera, albeit maybe only the one in the smartphone, this would not be worth to notice, but in Wittgenstein’s days not many people did. Then taking photos was something for the elite and for hobbyists, so it says something about the person Wittgenstein was. In 2011 photos by Wittgenstein have been exhibited by the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge, England, and from next November till March 2022 there’ll be such an exhibition in the Leopold Museum in Vienna on occasion of the 70th anniversary of his death.
Wittgenstein had an idea of what a photo represents and means that was yet rather unusual in his days. Then the mainstream idea was that a photo is an objective picture of reality. Generally, a photo that had not been taken according to strict technical rules, and was blurred, with a sloping horizon, too large a foreground, etc., was looked down upon as amateurish, even though there were already photographers who just used such “mistakes” as creative expression. Just in Wittgenstein’s time a new generation of photographers was coming that didn’t care about such rules. Already in his photo experiments we see that Wittgenstein had also a wider view on what a photo could be. Moreover, he didn’t think that a photo was an objective depiction of reality. A photo is a kind of “probability”. It is a mere snapshot. You don’t know what happened before and after it had been taken. If you would know it, the original meaning you had given to a photo might completely change. I can illustrate this best with a portrait: Someone poses for a portrait, but maybe s/he is acting and plays someone else. The real person is different, but can you see in the photo who s/he is? Knowing the before and after of the photo can give you a different view on the image. As Michael Nedo, keeper of the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge explains: “A photograph is a frozen moment, outside time. As Wittgenstein says it is ‘a probability’, not ‘all probabilities’, what one sees in the blink of an eye. But if you keep your eyes open you will see things move and change, nature as a dynamic event, and it is this constant changing that creates fuzziness on one hand but clarity on the other, because if you only glimpse then you exclude all other aspects, you have no greater clarity, you are blinkered.”
As we see in the quotation at the top of this blog a photo can, and is, also subjective in another way. Even if we agree what a certain photo is about, not everybody needs to see it in the same way. In Wittgenstein’s days photography was black-and-white photography. This gives him the idea that for one person a photo can be a good portrait and for another it is rather a caricature just because it lacks colour. But even if a photo, or in this case, a portrait, is in colour, it can bring different interpretations. For one a portrait of, say, Stalin, can arouse happy feelings because he sees in him the man that saved the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In another person the portrait can arise disgust because s/he sees in Stalin the man who murdered many innocent persons. In the same way non-portraits can lead to many different interpretations. As Wittgenstein implicitly said in the quote: A photo doesn’t depict an object but an idea, a view.
To end this blog, yet another quote from the Philosophical Investigations, although from a different context: “Don’t think, but look!” (66) Doesn’t this say more about Wittgenstein view on photography then any words? What you can’t say, you must show. 

Sources
- Josh Jones, „The Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein”, https://www.openculture.com/2012/11/photography_of_ludwig_wittgenstein.html
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw-duXxYihdvWVlFaUhzclY5Vmc/view?
esourcekey=0-yM43SGwy4WylmIhjksh2BA
- “Wittgenstein on Photography”, http://leicaphilia.com/tag/wittgenstein-and-photography/
- “Wittgenstein’s Camera”, https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/wittgenstein%E2%80%99s-camera

Random quote
The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Celebrate the Dutch Landscape

IJssel River near De Steeg, Netherlands. This is one of the photos I exhibit in

the Naarden Photo Festival (see link under "Sources" below; till 29 August 2021).

The way we look at the world around us says much about who we are. Therefore it is not without meaning that it was only in the 14th century that in Europe artists started to paint landscapes. At first landscapes were backgrounds of portraits, but gradually landscapes as such became the main theme. At the end of the 15th century the landscape had become a genre of its own in the western art of painting. At the same time also man and society began to change. The God-centred closed society of the Middle Ages gradually opened itself to the world. Traditional man discovered that things could be different from what it had been for them. Man began to travel and became an explorer and discoverer or a travelling scholar. Rich young people made “grand tours” for their education. Romantics made walks in nature or went to other countries to see different ways of life. People began to travel out of curiosity or just in order to see what there is behind the horizon, or they simply wanted to be away from home. Tourism developed. A new man was born.
In a way, landscapes had always existed before they were painted, of course, and without a doubt some people always have enjoyed them; have enjoyed being there and walking or riding in nature. However, landscapes were not a subject of art and reflection till the end of the Middle Ages. With the expansion of the traditional world there came room for a new look on the space around man: The space seen as landscape.
As such a landscape is not any view or representation of this view (painting or photo) on the man surrounding space, whatever it is. It’s true, generally speaking we can – and often do – call a view of the wild Rocky Mountains or icy Antarctica a landscape, but when we look at the way painters and later also photographers represented the idea, a landscape is usually something different: It is something between the wild untouched nature and the completely man-made environment, the town. In this sense a landscape is a mixture of nature and culture. Actually in all landscape paintings both aspects are present. A landscape painting is meant to represent space and nature but it’s actually never so that we see only wild nature in a landscape painting. There are always elements that refer to man, to human presence. We see a farmhouse, or a cabin, or the shadows of a town in the background; a (usually lonely) man or woman strolling along a muddy road. A landscape is nature and culture in one.
What also seldom is absent in a landscape painting is the horizon, explicitly or implicitly. A horizon symbolizes space, but it indicates also that the world is wider than what you see depicted. In this sense a horizon is also desire. It closes the view but there is always something behind it that we cannot see but actually want to see. It is a limit we want to overcome (although when we try, it moves further and further away, showing that there is no limit to our desires).
This idea of landscape is quite romantic, maybe too romantic. It supposes that there is something like nature in the space represented in the image. Just those painters that have become famous for their landscape pictures, the Dutch masters of the 17th century, in fact depicted fully man-made sceneries, although they suggest a meeting between man and nature. Almost each meadow, each ditch or river, each other element there has been made or shaped by man. Already since ages there is no real nature anymore in the Netherlands. It’s not without reason that there is a Dutch saying that “God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands”. And isn’t this so also for large parts of Europe, certainly around cities and bigger villages?
If this was already the case in the 17th century, it is the more so in this day and age in the 21th century. In most of Europe and I dare say on every square cm of the Netherlands nature does no longer exist. Everything there is man-made, everything is culture. Even so-called nature reserves are, and all “wild” birds and animals there actually are zoo animals. But when cities penetrate the countryside, as they increasingly do since the 19th century; when townspeople buy and build houses in the countryside; when the countryside urbanizes, what remains then of the idea of landscape? Or must we give it another meaning?
A few days before I published this blog, in Naarden in the Netherlands the biennial Photo Festival has been opened. A special project of this festival is “Celebrate the Dutch Landscape”. What makes this project so special and valuable, thanks to curator Kenneth Stamp, is that you see there not only landscapes in the traditional sense of the 17th century, but that it discusses the idea of landscape as such: Is the traditional idea of landscape still valid these days that “nature” has become man-made? What has changed in the landscape outside the towns? Must we not look for the landscape also within the towns? Aren’t towns types of landscapes as well? Is there still room for the horizon? Must we regret these changes? In the photo festival these questions are discussed for the Dutch landscape but they are important for everybody who is interested in the idea of landscape.

Sources
- Ton Lemaire, Filosofie van het landschap. Bilthoven: Ambo, 1970.
- Naarden Photo Festival, especially the subpage on the special project Celebrate the Dutch Landscape.

Random quote
Who wants to write an unreadable book must describe life exactly as it is.

Theo de Boer (1932-)

Waiting

Don’t we spend all a lot of time on waiting? Sorry, no blog this week but just wait: Next week there’ll be again a new one, as usual.

Random quote
War is always more popular with those who don’t experience it.

Mark Kurlansky (1948-)

The free rider problem

Man is basically a social being. People help each other not only strategically, so with the purpose to gain from it, but also often for non-selfish reasons. However, the less someone is related to you, the smaller the chance that you will help this person for nothing, in the sense that you’ll not profit from it in some way. You are more likely to help a family member, a friend or a neighbour than a stranger, maybe in this order. And contributing to the “common good” without a special reason is not what many people do, for the idea of common good is quite abstract: Who are they, actually, whom you are supposed to help? Moreover, nothing is free. Every contribution to the common good brings you costs, at least in time and effort, and often also in money. For instance, you are asked to deposit your plastic waste in a common container at the end of your street, but nobody will force you or fine you if you don’t. Then the easiest for you is to put your plastic in your litter bin at home.
It is in this social space that the so-called free rider problem can arise. A free rider doesn’t only ignore the social well-being of others or the “common good”, s/he also profits from doing so. Or, to use the definition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a “free rider, most broadly speaking, is someone who receives a benefit without contributing towards the cost of its production.” An example that refers to the name of the problem is someone who takes the train but doesn’t buy a ticket. This person profits from the train service by a free train journey. Of course, there is the risk of being caught and fined, but if you are clever, you can minimalize this risk. And why wouldn’t you travel for free? One passenger more or less has no impact on the train service. True, when too many people think so, the train service will stop. That’s why the free rider problem is not simply a matter of someone who breaks the rules or the law, and that’s it. It can grow from an individual problem (an individual not paying the required contribution) into a social problem (the collective service or what kind of social activity we are talking about is undermined). The threat that the individual free rider problem becomes a social free rider problem is always in the background.
Some characteristics of the free rider problem are:
- The action is individual, the consequences are social.
- One single case of free riding doesn’t influence the availability of the common good. If enough people are vaccinated against a disease but you don’t want to have the jab for reasons of principle, nevertheless you’ll be protected by the herd immunity.
- The free rider problem is common with public goods. If enough people reduce pollution, everyone in society will benefit.
These characteristics show that the free rider problem has a clear moral aspect. It undermines the sociality of humans, so the idea that in the end we belong together and should help each other. 

Why people are free riders is sometimes explained by means of a prisoner’s dilemma game, such as this one, which I took almost literally from the website of the Corporate Finance Institute (see Sources):
Tom and Adel are considering a contribution to a public good. The personal cost of contributing is $6 and the benefit is $10. However, there is also an incentive to free ride as the benefit of this public good is freely available among the members of society.

Explanation:
- If Tom and Adel both contribute, the total benefit would be $20. Each person gains $10 for a net gain of +$4 ($10 – $6).
- If one person contributes but the other does not, the total benefit would only be $10. Each person gains $5, so the person who contributes would realize a net gain of -$1 while the person who does not would realize a net gain of +$5. So, if Adel contributes and Tom does not, Abel would be contributing $6 for a net gain of -$1 and Tom would be contributing $0 for a net gain of +$5 (because the benefit of the public good is divided among all members of society).
- If neither Adel nor Tom contributes to the public good, there would be no costs and no benefits of the public good (net gain of $0).
In the prisoner’s dilemma game above, we can see that both Tom and Adel would attempt to free ride (not contribute): If Adel thinks that Tom will not contribute, she would lose $1 for contributing, while, if Adel thinks that Tom will contribute, she would gain more by not contributing. Therefore, both people would come to the conclusion that it would be unwise to contribute. The public good, therefore, does not get built and thus a free rider problem is created. 

Several solutions are proposed for the free rider problem, such as
- Taxes, so that everybody pays, anyway.
- An appeal to altruism.
- Making a public good private, so making a barrier to profit by the once public good.
- Legislation that regulates use of the free good.
Of course, which solution is best, depends on the good concerned. 

Sources
- “Free Rider. Benefiting from a common resource without paying for it”, on https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/economics/free-rider/
- Hardin, Russel, “The Free Rider Problem”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/#toc 13 October 2020.
- Pettinger, Tejvan “Free Rider Problem” on https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1626/economics/free-rider-problem/ , 22 May 2019.

Random quote
The very same mistakes and instances of forgetfulness are ascribed to normal human frailty when a younger person makes them, but to age when an aging person makes them.

Martha Nussbaum, (1947-) 

Philosophical intuitions

In my blog two weeks ago I wrote about an investigation by the Lithuanian philosopher Vilius Dranseika. In this investigation Dranseika tested a philosophical intuition on memory. Philosophical intuitions are often subject of investigation in experimental philosophy, but what are actually philosophical intuitions? To make matters short, I want to define them here as immediately justified beliefs. However, philosophical intuitions are not “just” beliefs in the sense that a philosopher who has a certain intuition thinks: It’s what I think, but maybe I am wrong and maybe matters are different. No, a philosopher who has a philosophical intuition thinks that it is true and that every reasonable person will agree that this intuition is true. Seen this way, we can define a philosophical intuition more precisely as an immediately justified true belief. Moreover, intuitions are not only true, but, as said, they are immediately true. Of course, not everybody will an intuition proposed by a philosopher immediately consider true. Then the philosopher will not say: “Maybe I am wrong and maybe the intuition is not as intuitively true as I thought.” No, s/he’ll find reasons to explain why the intuition nevertheless is true, for philosophers are good in confabulating reasons, for it is their job. And in the end she can always “play the man” and say: “Strange that you don’t see it. Everybody sees so.” Actually, it’s the last rescue in case you cannot convince your opponent, for it’s typical for an intuition that you cannot give it a factual foundation. Intuitions are simply true. Are they?
Before I want to discuss this question, I want to distinguish philosophical intuitions yet from psychological intuitions. Rather than being a form of true knowledge, psychological intuitions are a kind of “gut feelings”, and basically they are open to refutation. “Intuitively, I think that this man is a scoundrel” (but maybe he is the most honest man in the world). “Intuitively I think we should go to the left” (but maybe it was the road to the right that let to our destination). Etc.
Now I go to the question whether philosophical intuitions are true. As a first step to undermine the idea they evidently are, I want to discuss an example from psychology: The well-known Müller-Lyer Illusion. Please, click here for a picture of the illusion. Most people believe that the line on the top is shorter than the line under. Nonetheless both lines have the same length. (Measure them if you don’t believe!) Your intuitive belief is contrary to the fact. However, the Müller-Lyer figure is an illusion, so an observation error. It’s not a (false) philosophical intuition. But if such an apparently true observation about the lines in the Müller-Lyer Illusion can be false, why not then the same so for apparently true illusions? And that’s what I want to maintain here: Most philosophical illusions are false or not true to that extent as philosophers thinks. With the latter I mean that their truth is limited to certain contexts, like the context of investigation, culture, and the like (and even then I have my doubts).
There are so many intuitions in philosophy that it’s simply impossible to discuss them all, certainly in a blog like this one. It’s even impossible to discuss a representative fraction of the existing philosophical intuitions. However, they are especially used in thought experiments and therefore, by way of illustration of my critique, I want to discuss a much-used thought experiment in the discussion about personal identity in analytical philosophy: brain swapping. Such thought experiments have the form that the brain of person A is transplanted to the body of person B. Variations of this standard case are that the brains of A and B are switched; that the halves of A’s brain are transplanted into different bodies; that only the information of A’s brain is brought to B’s brain (after that first the information of B’s brain has been removed); or even that persons are copied and are “teletransported” to another place. (see here) Of course, everybody is free to invent what s/he likes, but can this thought experiment be the basis of a serious philosophical discussion? For the idea of brain swapping in one form or another is based on the implicit assumption that brain swapping is possible and that with swapping brains we swap personalities. Weren’t it so, it would have no sense to draw conclusions from such thought experiments about the characteristics of our personal identity. Nonsense will lead only to other nonsense. And that’s what is the case here. I don’t mean that the ideas about personal identity are nonsense, but if they are correct it is not because of these thought experiments. Take for example the idea that we swap personalities if we swap brains. It is founded on the intuitive idea that we are our brains. But if I formulate it this way, many philosophers will say: Of course, we are not our brains, we are more. I guess, that even some of those philosophers who use brain swap thought experiments in their discussions on personal identity will deny that we are our brains. Why then do they use such brain swap arguments in order to substantiate their views? I’ll give one example why your identity is not just in your brain. Simply said, some runners have fast-twitch muscles and others have slow-twitch muscles. Fast-twitch muscles will never make you a good long-distance runner, while slow-twitch muscles will never make you a good sprinter. Isn’t it not so then that the type of muscles a runner has is a part of his or her personal identity?
The upshot is: Philosophical intuitions are just opinions. Another thing is, of course, whether we do without them.

Recommended literature
Elijah Chudnoff, Intuition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.