
Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's Detective - gruseom
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Errol-Morris-The-Thinking-Mans-Detective.html?c=y&story=fullstory
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abruzzi
This man's documentaries are amazing. It is a shame that one of the techniques
he pioneered--the reenactments in 'Thin Blue Line' have become part of the
ruin of documentaries. When 'Thin Blue Line' showed reenactments, it was to
reinforce uncertainty, so you could easily see the conflicts in the statements
of different witnesses. When the Discovery Channel uses reenactments, it is a
cheap trick to dramatize the past, and implies certainty where none exists.

Many of Morris' files are about belief, knowledge and certainty. Take 'Mr.
Death' for example. It's about a guy--not necessarily a bad guy--that thought
the Holocaust was implausible, and tried to prove it. The problem was he
didn't know as much as he thought he knew, and his tests were fatally flawed.
The had the hubris I've often seen in engineers that science conveys
certainty.

If you want to see another side of Morris, his commercials for Miller High
Life:

[http://errolmorris.com/commercials/miller/miller_ducttape.ht...](http://errolmorris.com/commercials/miller/miller_ducttape.html)

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bradleygriffith
Unless I missed it, I think the article neglected a pretty interesting facet
of Morris' technique: the interrotron.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-
wea...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-weapon-for-
unsettling-interviews-the-interrotron)

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aqme28
"Thinking man's detective" is a very unusual phrase. It's like "rich man's
Rolls Royce" or "tall man's basketball player."

~~~
JadeNB
> "Thinking man's detective" is a very unusual phrase. It's like "rich man's
> Rolls Royce" or "tall man's basketball player."

I think that your two sentences point up exactly why it is _not_ such an
unexpected phrase (the which, or something close to it, is I guess what you
meant). "Rich man's Rolls Royce" is redundant: you have to be rich to have a
Rolls Royce (more or less). "Tall man's basketball player" is not redundant:
you _don't_ have to be tall to have a basketball player (in the sense of
preferring, rather than owning, I mean); you have to be a tall man to _be_ a
basketball player (more or less).

"Errol Morris: the detective who's a thinking man" would have been redundant;
but "Errol Morris: the thinking man's detective" is not, as (one presumes)
many stupid men through history have had detectives (in the sense now of
employing them, or of reading about them, or … whatever).

P.S. And let me just take this chance to say: I love Errol Morris. Thanks to
the other poster who mentioned 'Mr. Death'; it was the first film of his I
saw, and remains probably my favourite. (Also high up there is 'Fog of War'.)

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akkartik
I remember reading the article on the crimean war photos. Still great:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-
came-f...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-
the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one)

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purephase
Errol Morris is great. Thanks for the link. Great article.

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juhanima
I didn't know about Errol Morris before I read this article, so I went and
read the Ashtray pentalogy. It was very well written and interesting indeed,
but I cannot help thinking that it was also a bit too harsh on Kuhn.

What I can totally understand is that someone at whom has been thrown an
ashtray, not to mention being kicked out of Princeton simply because of having
an opinion, might hold a bit of a grudge. Being tossed around is never nice
and maybe Morris should have sued Kuhn. But dismissing him entirely as a
thinker is another thing. So let me here play the devil's advocate for a
while, please, with the big reservation that I haven't read Kuhn either but
only heard and read about him and his works.

What seems to bother Morris most is Kuhn's idea of incommensurabilty between
the worlds before and after a paradigm shift, a profound incapability of
agreeing about anything at all. This he regards an indicator of a relativistic
theory of truth where everything is subjective and everybody's idea of reality
is as good as his neighbour's by definition. Only Kuhn himself rises above
this relativity and is able to spot paradigms here and judge disputes there.
Which is no doubt the interpretation that pissed off Kuhn so much that he
started throwing ashtrays.

I don't defend that kind of behaviour and Morris's first-person testimony
clearly proves that at some point Kuhn was intoxicated and blinded by his
popularity and the power it brought about. So much so that he gave edicts of
what classes his students should take and got them kicked out if they didn't
obey.

But the article also reveals a different Kuhn who walks around and mutters to
himself in a restless and haunted manner in the late 1940's. Someone who is
genuinely bothered about all the cognitive dissonance of the time. Just a few
years after Hitler, Stalin at the peak of his power, Mao just about to break
through, Wittgenstein saying that what we consider truth is just a mutual
agreement not necessarily based on reality. So many competitive
interpretations of reality so far apart of each other and no-one to set the
record straight.

To dissolve the controversy Kuhn comes up with the idea that maybe our
perception of reality has always evolved this way. And that trying a dialog
between the different viewpoints is fruitless and futile. Better just let the
alternatives fight each other and the winner take it all -- for a while, until
yet another better viewpoint takes over. A bit like a Darwinist theory of
truth.

What I agree with Morris is that I also believe that step by step things
improve and our conception of reality and ethics gets better. Judging by the
fact that slavery was abolished in the western countries some 150 years ago,
that public torture is no longer a main attraction and that most civilized
countries have abolished the capital penalty for some fifty years ago.

If Kuhn later started to thing that reality is a totally subjective
construction he most certainly was wrong. But really, that doesn't mean that
his main idea that our perception of reality evolves not linearly but in
somewhat violent and destructive quantum leaps would be null and void.

Morris proves conclusively that there is no evidence that the revelation of
Hippasus of Metapontum about the fact that the length of a diagonal of a
square cannot be expressed as a fraction of two natural numbers caused a major
paradigm shift and a consequent mayhem among the Pythagoreans. But he doesn't
prove the opposite either. What we today exactly know about those events is
pretty much nothing. The closest description of them was written almost 800
years after the fact and is notoriously unreliable, as Morris points out. So
it could have happened and then again maybe not. Not good proof material
anyways.

It makes sense to think that when we look at history we project ourselves into
it and pick up the details that we are interested in. That is probably true.
It is the core of the Whiggish viewpoint which Morris and Kuhn heavily
critizise. Arrogant and complacent use of the past to pursue the present or
something like that.

Morris quotes Kunh saying that at one point for him "Aristotle seemed a very
good physicist indeed", then goes on to point out all of his obvious errors.
Now who is it that is arrogant, complacent and whiggish again? Scholars have
known for centuries that Aristoteles was clearly wrong saying that women have
fewer theet than men or that a rock falls because it wants to return to where
it came from. Even Kuhn must have known that. So what did he mean when he said
that after a lot of thinking and studying Aristotles suddenly started to make
some sense? Could it mean that he somehow managed to get in his imagination
across the paradigm shift and see things in Aristotle's and his contemporaries
eyes? I think that goes beyond tooth counting.

Besides, do we have any actual proof that women didn't start to loose their
wisdom theeth a bit earlier then men, perhaps around Aristotle's times? Didn't
think so.

It is all about perception of reality. Morris tells about Saul Kripke, whose
lectures were banned by Kuhn, and his alternative theory of reality. No doubt
Kripke is a brilliant thinker, but the account Morris gives about him makes
him look a bit conservative. He proposes that we call things with certain
names because that is what we have used to do. Well doh! We have to goldfish,
one yellow that is called Goldie and another green called Greenie. If they
switch colours wouldn't we still call Goldie "Goldie", as that is what she
still is, despite the switch of colours.

This is such a good example that I have to take it further. Imagine that you
go for a vacation for a month (as in an imaginary world everything is
possible). The fish switch their colours while you are away having your
faithful neighbour feeding them.

You come back and see a golden goldfish and a green goldfish in the tank. Is
it not your natural instinct to call the golden one "Goldie" and the green one
"Greenie"? Do you notice the difference? Do the fish notice the difference? Do
they care? Do you care? Does it make any difference whatsoever?

\--

I think Kuhn was very right in saying that every revelation has a built-in
tendency of turning into an established truth, then stagnating and starting to
stall new innovation. Eventually the established truth has to be somewhat
violently broken by another revelation which in its turn changes into an
established truth. This is the dynamic nature of every system that is complex
enough, a kind of harmonic oscillation really. There is no reason why a planet
could not circle a star in a perfect circle. It is just that there are so
immensely many more elliptic trajectories that are also stable that it is very
unlikely that the perfect circle would get chosen. Likewise there is a static
equilibrium in every dynamic system but as there are so many more oscillating
and also stable states it is just so much more likely that they bounce
mindlessly between the extremes like the English political system than stay
still. I feel this is the gist of Hegel, Marx and dialecticism in general as
well. I have actually met some very intelligent people that highly regard that
line of thought and I don't think it is total bogus either.

In a way I cannot help feeling that Kuhn has turned into a paradigm himself
and Morris is the anomaly trying to drive the wedge in his walls. Be as it
may, I would like to thank him for inspiring reading. If Kuhn threw an ashtray
on your person you should threw something else heavy pointed object back. But
Kuhn's thoughts you have to fight with thoughts.

