
Errol Morris Refutes It Thus - tptacek
https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/errol-morris-book-about-thomas-kuhn-the-ashtray-reviewed.html
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pmoriarty
_" The 18th-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley concluded that,
since all we know of the universe is what our senses convey to us, things in
the world exist only to the extent that we perceive them."_

This is a mischaracterization of Berkeley's position.

Berkeley did not admit even the existence of the senses, much less that they
convey anything to us, nor the unstated assumption of the above description
that there's something outside our senses to be conveyed to us through the
senses.

To Berkeley, everything that exists is either a perception in the mind or the
mind itself.

Berkeley's writing is very accessible and clear, entertaining even. To anyone
interested, I strongly recommend reading his _" Three Dialogues Between Hylas
and Philonous"_[1] where he leads you through his thinking step by step. I
wish more philosophers wrote as well as he.

[1] -
[http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/berkeley1713.pdf](http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/berkeley1713.pdf)

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mjburgess
Before anyone jumps into Berkelyian idealism like a conspiracy theorist into
youtube, note that this whole line of thinking is fundamentally based on a
genetic fallacy embed in an antiquated notion of causation.

Historically it was thought that the cause of something (the origin) must
share properties with the event caused (the product). This is just a false
assertion. Today we understand "emergence" in which properties arise in
aggregate products that are not present in their constituent origins.

Without that every argument of the form "experience is a closed system" fails:
the causal origin of experience does not "need" to be experience.

Light strikes a surface, it collides with your eye, your nervous system enters
a state known as "visual perception" and that has properties not present in
any prior step (ie., it feels like something). These properties emerge out of
the whole interaction of the system, and are not present within any mere piece
of it.

Idealism is very much an epistemological virus, a metaphysical conspiracy
theory, that will quickly run a wildefire through your whole belief system
with its plausible soundbites. "From experience, only experience, surely?!"
No.

Berekely's Master Argument is the beginning of a line of "argument by
amazement at how cool it all sounds" that ends up in Heidegger. Justified by
the constant refrain that the experience is an epistemically closed system, a
genetic fallacy whose plausibility is only ever achieved through rhetorically
pleasing soundbites.

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andy_wrote
In what may be a case of Baader-Meinhof, I just came across the term
"Whiggish" for the first time, reading Steven Weinberg's _To Explain the
World_ (pretty good so far). He also has a dig at Kuhn, recounting a time when
they met briefly and Kuhn gave a defense of Aristotle that he found
incoherent.

I'm no expert in the field of scientific thought, but my sympathies fall with
Morris and Weinberg and the like. I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle
understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to
say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of
the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you've had the
privilege to learn from.

There are legitimate social and ethical concerns for everyone to keep in mind
with the advancement of scientific knowledge. But this shouldn't be conflated
with the idea that we don't understand the natural world better than we used
to. We do.

~~~
benbreen
I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue
here:

[https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826](https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826)

Ironically, given the fact that Morris and Weinberg both prize clarity of
thought, I think they are talking at cross purposes when they critique
historians of science and are not properly defining their terms.

Take this quote from the OP for instance:

"While studying at Princeton, Morris soon learned that Kuhn held in particular
contempt any view of science as a triumphal procession toward a more accurate
description of the universe and how it works, a view called 'Whiggishness,'
from British politics. The ultimate mouthpiece of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggish
position in The Ashtray is an unnamed Harvard graduate student who insists
that a new paradigm is not necessarily better than the old one, 'just
different.'"

But Butterfield and other critics of the so-called "Whig" school of history
are _not_ contesting the proposition that we now understand the natural world
better than a cave man (or a Hellenistic Greek) did. (They're also not
relativists, incidentally). Instead, they're critiquing the idea that the
_specific path_ of progress is inevitable.

In other words, there is an underlying physical reality that sets constraints
on what we can know and how we know it. But within those constraints there are
innumerable potential branching paths. A Whiggish take on history of science
might say, for instance, that it was inevitable that the first moon landing
would be achieved by a nation with Enlightenment values. A non-Whig
interpretation is not saying that the moon doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't
care about the Apollo program. It's pointing out that the specific course
taken by our timeline of history of science is not an inevitability. It could
have been otherwise.

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mr_toad
> the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable.

Seems like a straw man.

~~~
benbreen
It isn’t if we’re talking about histories of science and medicine written
between, say, 1850 and 1950. Nowadays I agree, few would argue this directly.
But then again, that’s because of Butterfield and the turn away from Whig
histories among hist sci types - which, itself, was far from inevitable. And
if you read Weinberg, I think you do still see that point of view in play.

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maldusiecle
I prefer the longer but more detailed writeup that LARB published:
[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ashtray-has-
landed-t...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ashtray-has-landed-the-
case-of-morris-v-kuhn/#)!

The Janet Malcolm dispute is instructive in this regard. Malcolm's book on the
MacDonald case is a classic, assigned reading for many aspiring journalists;
her book is on the difficulties of the relationship between journalist and
subject, and the impossibility of perfect objectivity. Morris's documentaries,
sometimes downright hamfisted in their edits (he is cruel to, for example, his
subjects in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), could be taken as an opposite
extreme. Objectivity is hardly even intended.

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royjacobs
Off-topic, but their GDPR popup just redirects me to the same popup.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
Idem, using Firefox 60.0.1

~~~
retsibsi
Come on man, 'idem' doesn't even have fewer characters than 'same' :)

For other readers: 'idem' = 'the same'

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woodandsteel
Whether or not Kuhn was a radical relativist, a great many intellectuals today
are.

Radical relativism rests on Cartesian dualism. This is a philosophical
doctrine that, as anyone who has studied philosophy knows, is highly
problematic. In the last century or so it has been rejected by a long string
of major philosophers, include Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur,
Whitehead, the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, Putnam, Dewey, Peirce, and James.
Kuhn, alas, apparently was unaware of this.

Also, Kuhn believed that James was right when he said that the mind of the
infant is a ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’. However, this claim was made
before there had been any scientific investigation of infant perception. In
recent decades there has been a great deal such research, and it has been
determined that infants do perceive the world, and according to universal
principles.

~~~
neuxenian
The relativist position in modern philosophy of science has little or nothing
to do with Cartesian dualism; it has more in common with the incompleteness
theorem in certain respects.

The short version is that any theory of observations (i.e., scientific theory)
necessarily defines the observational process and therefore the observations
themselves, so that it is impossible to separate an explanation from its
explanandum. What's relativist about this is that the very thing you are
explaining by the theory is implicit in the theory, so that what you have are
a series of paradigms or theories that replace one after the other.

This isn't to say that we don't predict things better, or even that there is
no reality separate from the theory, only that it doesn't matter at some
level.

All of this too is sort of distinct from what Kuhn is remembered for, which is
the social nature of science, which is all too real.

Scientists are often in denial about these social factors, which is naive at
best and dangerous at worst. Humans are not conduits of God; they are
imperfect machines that are part of the system they are studying.

My sense is that Morris (who I respect immensely for his work) is kind of
fighting a strawman argument whose depths he doesn't entirely understand,
because of some personal conflict he hasn't come to terms with (ironically,
given the nature of what he is arguing against).

~~~
woodandsteel
>The short version is that any theory of observations (i.e., scientific
theory) necessarily defines the observational process and therefore the
observations themselves, so that it is impossible to separate an explanation
from its explanandum.

What I am saying is that all the different scientific theories are ultimately
based on a universal understanding of reality that is in turn due to the
universal nature of the human organism and its engagements with the real
world. That's why I included the last paragraph in my comment.

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schoen
Recent HN discussion of a different review of this book:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217444)

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mlthoughts2018
I am reminded of the Max Planck quotation, "science progresses one funeral at
a time," which sort of makes both Kuhn and Morris correct.

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carlob
I remember some form of this came out on opinionator, a thoroughly enjoyable
read!

[https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/the-
ashtray...](https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/the-ashtray-the-
ultimatum-part-1/)

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syntaxfree
Morris comes across as pulling a Neil deGrasse Tyson stunt.

