This multiple-section series by filmmaker Errol Morris is very, uh, thought-provoking - here is the series - follow the links to read all of each piece.Philosophy is supposed to be difficult
Mar 15 2011
Andreas Follesdal (Oslo): The Philosopher as Coach. Philosophy is literally the "love of wisdom" — but what does it mean to love, pursue, and possess wisdom? Philosophy is supposed to be difficult: We complain about its thorny prose and technical intricacy, but should philosophy really be accessible to all? In philosophy, logic is too often considered the only appropriate analytical instrument; adding fiction to the toolkit can offer new and illuminating ways to contemplate human existence and its dilemmas. Erroll Morris on a series on meaning, truth, intolerance and flying ashtrays. What is x-phi good for? Its significance is not exactly cosmic. Hawking contra philosophy: Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. In Turkmenistan, philosophy is more than welcomed by the authorities — so long as it's dead. A review of Do Llamas Fall in Love? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles by Peter Cave. A review of Philosophy Bites: 25 Philosophers on 25 Intriguing Subjects by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. The spirit of inquiry: Socrates spoke his ideas, and so brought them to life. It’s de Botton v Skidelsky: For decades, philosophers spoke only to each other, but that is changing as they once more reconnect with a wider public. Philosophy as confession: A review of Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory by Stanley Cavell. Lawrence Harvey gives a snapshot of the life of the German philosopher Paul Ree. Is it worth knowing about the lives philosophers led, or is their philosophy enough?
The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part 1)
By ERROL MORRIS
This is part one of a five-part series.
1.
THE ULTIMATUM
I don’t want to die in a language I can’t understand.
— Jorge Luis Borges (as quoted in Alberto Manguel, “With Borges”)It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head.
Courtesy of the Institute for Advanced StudyIt had all begun six months earlier.
“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.
But what was Kuhn’s problem with Kripke?
Kuhn was becoming more and more famous. He would become not just a major figure in the history and philosophy of science, but an icon – and his terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” became ubiquitous in the culture-at-large. An astrophysicist and rock-climbing friend from Princeton, Dick Saum, later sent me a picture of a bumper sticker that said, “Shifts happen.” [1]
David SaumErrol Morris with Dick SaumKripke was slight, bearded, in his early thirties. He was not well known but had a reputation as a genius. He had provided a completeness proof for modal logic (which deals with necessity and possibility) while still a teenager — and in the process reinvigorated Leibniz’s ideas about possible worlds. [2] There was also the amusing anecdote of Kripke being offered a chair at Harvard when he was 16. He supposedly wrote back, “Thank you, but my mother thinks I should finish high school first.” Nonetheless, it was hard to see how Kripke’s theories had much to do with Kuhn. Or at least, it seemed so, at first.
I ignored Kuhn’s ultimatum and went to Kripke’s lectures anyway. My relationship with Kuhn ended badly. But more about that later.
Read more…
The Ashtray: Shifting Paradigms (Part 2)
By ERROL MORRIS
This is part two of a five-part series.
2.
SHIFTING PARADIGMS
Saul Kripke is considered one of the seminal thinkers of our time. Philosophers can and will endlessly debate the content of “Naming and Necessity.” Currently, there are hundreds if not thousands of journal articles devoted to this series of three lectures. [10] His lectures realigned our ideas about meaning and reference — essentially, about how language “connects” to the world. And affirmed a decidedly un-postmodern idea of meaning, reference and truth. In Kripke’s view words are attached to things in the world through an historical (or causal theory) of reference. [11] And although Kripke’s theories examined proper names, like “Julius Caesar” or “Moses” or “Kurt Gödel,” they also apply to terms like “water” and “gold.” [12] [13]
Kripke’s theory provides an alternative to what had become known as the description theory, an amalgam of ideas proposed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (And to that mix, in the ‘50s and ‘60s you can add Peter Strawson and John Searle.) Here’s one way to distinguish between Kripke’s theories and the description theory that preceded it.
You have two fish in a fishbowl. One of them is golden in color; the other one is not. The fish that is golden in color, you name “Goldie.” The other fish you name “Greenie.” Perhaps you use the description “the gold fish” and point to the one that is golden in color. You are referring to the gold fish, Goldie. Over the course of time, however, Goldie starts to change color. Six months later, Goldie is no longer golden. Goldie is now green. Greenie, the other fish — the fish in the bowl that was green in color — has turned golden. Goldie is no longer “the fish that is golden in color.” Greenie is. But Goldie is still Goldie even though Goldie has changed color. The description theory would have it that Goldie means the fish that is golden in color, but if that’s true then when we refer to Goldie, we are referring to the other fish. But clearly, Goldie hasn’t become a different fish; Goldie has merely changed his (or her) appearance. [14]
It’s Kripke’s version of “Where’s Waldo.” If the description theory (courtesy of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) is correct, then Goldie is on the right. If Kripke’s historical-chain of reference theory is correct, then Goldie remains Goldie no matter what color Goldie is. [15]
You could also think of Goldie and Greenie in terms of beliefs, although this is not how the description theory was originally framed. Goldie is the fish that you believe is golden in color. But Goldie starts to change color. I can believe anything I want about Goldie. I can even believe that Goldie isn’t a fish, but Goldie — that fish out there swimming around in a fishbowl — remains Goldie.
Read more…
The Ashtray: Hippasus of Metapontum (Part 3)
By ERROL MORRIS
This is part three of a five-part series.
3.
HIPPASUS OF METAPONTUM
All-History.orgHippasus of MetapontumIncommensurable. It is a strange word. I wondered, why did Kuhn choose it? What was the attraction? [27]
Here’s one clue. At the very end of “The Road Since Structure,” a compendium of essays on Kuhn’s work, there is an interview with three Greek philosophers of science, Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu and Vassiliki Kindi. Kuhn provides a brief account of the historical origins of his idea. Here is the relevant segment of the interview.
T. KUHN: Look, “incommensurability” is easy.
V. KINDI: You mean in mathematics?
T. KUHN: …When I was a bright high school mathematician and beginning to learn Calculus, somebody gave me—or maybe I asked for it because I’d heard about it—there was sort of a big two-volume Calculus book by, I can’t remember whom. And then I never really read it. I read the early parts of it. And early on it gives the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2. And I thought it was beautiful. That was terribly exciting, and I learned what incommensurability was then and there. So, it was all ready for me, I mean, it was a metaphor but it got at nicely what I was after. So, that’s where I got it. [28]
“It was all ready for me.” I thought, “Wow.” The language was suggestive. I imagined √2 provocatively dressed, its lips rouged. But there was an unexpected surprise. The idea didn’t come from the physical sciences or philosophy or linguistics, but from mathematics. Namely, the proof that √2 can not be expressed as the ratio of two integers. “…it was a metaphor but it got at nicely what I was after.” Read more…
The Ashtray: The Author of the ‘Quixote’ (Part 4)
By ERROL MORRIS
This is part four of a five-part series.
4.
THE AUTHOR OF THE QUIXOTE
I have suggested that Kuhn had created his own reductio ad absurdum – not unlike the proof of the incommensurability of √2. If everything is incommensurable, then everything is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now. All history is Whiggish history. There is no history. There is no truth, just truth for the moment, contingent truth, relative truth. And who is to say which version of the truth is better than any other, if we can’t look beyond the paradigm in which we find ourselves.
But there is a messier problem. Why stop at historical relativism? Why not imagine each and every person in a different island universe? And indeed, Kuhn at least in one instance seems to embrace that possibility. In one particularly bizarre passage in “The Road Since Structure,” he suggests that his critics are writing about two different Thomas Kuhns – Kuhn No. 1 and Kuhn No. 2.
I am tempted to posit the existence of two Thomas Kuhns. Kuhn No. 1 is the author of this essay and of an earlier piece in this volume. He also in 1962 published a book [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]. Kuhn No. 2 is the author of another book by the same title…
That both books bear the same title cannot be altogether accidental, for the views they represent often overlap and are, in any case, expressed in the same words. But their central concerns are, I conclude, usually very different. As reported by his critics (the original is unfortunately unavailable to me), Kuhn No. 2 seems to make points that subvert essential aspects of the position outlined by his namesake. [64]
To me Kuhn’s claim – that there are two Thomas Kuhns plus two books by the same name and author – suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy. Kuhn, of course, sees it differently. For Kuhn, the multiplicity of Kuhns and Kuhn-authored-books-with-the-same-title provides further proof of his belief that people with “incommensurable” viewpoints can’t talk to each other. That they live in different worlds. He writes, “This collection of essays…provides an extended example of what I have elsewhere called partial or incomplete communication – the talking-through-each-other that regularly characterizes discourse between participants in incommensurable points of view.” [65]
Courtesy of The University of Chicago PressI suppose Kuhn No. 1 is the Kuhn you can criticize, and Kuhn No. 2 is the Kuhn you can’t. As the philosopher Donald Davidson, an early critic of Kuhn, has written, “Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. …what sounded at first like a thrilling discovery — that truth is relative to a conceptual scheme — has not so far been shown to be anything more than the pedestrian and familiar fact that the truth of a sentence is relative to (among other things) the language to which it belongs. Instead of living in different worlds, Kuhn’s scientists may, like those who need Webster’s dictionary, be only words apart.” [66]
Kuhn’s remarks remind me of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote.” Instead of two Cervantes, Borges imagines a second author, Pierre Menard, a fictional character, who manages to recreate “Don Quixote,” word for word with the original. And yet, creates an entirely different work of art. Borges writes, “[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” [67] [68]
Read more…
The Ashtray: This Contest of Interpretation (Part 5)
By ERROL MORRIS
This is part five of a five-part series.
5.
THIS CONTEST OF INTERPRETATION
Photo by Bill Pierce//Time Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThomas KuhnSteven Weinberg has written eloquently in The New York Review of Books about Kuhn and paradigm shifts. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist was outlining the difference between “Kuhnian science” (that is, science as Kuhn imagined it) and actual science. And argued that Kuhn’s theories did not characterize science as Weinberg knew it. Weinberg wrote, “What does bother me on rereading Structure and some of Kuhn’s later writings is his radically skeptical conclusions about what is accomplished in the work of science…conclusions that have made Kuhn a hero to the philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cultural critics who question the objective character of scientific knowledge, and who prefer to describe scientific theories as social constructions, not so different from democracy or baseball.”
Or not so different from parapsychology, astrology or witchcraft.
He was also bothered by Kuhn’s arguments against progress. “[Kuhn] went on to reason that… there can be no sense in which theories developed after a scientific revolution can be said to add cumulatively to what was known before the revolution… More recently, in his Rothschild Lecture at Harvard in 1992, Kuhn remarked that it is hard to imagine what can be meant by the phrase that a scientific theory takes us ‘close to the truth.’”
And yet, Weinberg fails to drive the stake through the heart of the vampire. If paradigms are incommensurable how can we talk about their incommensurability? If the Pythagoreans did not understand (or could not have understood) Hippasus’s proof because it was “incommensurable” with the Pythagorean paradigm, then why bother killing him? Read more…
ERROL MORRIS
Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He has also directed “Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” “A Brief History of Time” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” His new film, "Tabloid," will have its premiere in the Fall. "Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography," a book of his essays (many of which have appeared here), will be published in 2011. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives with his wife and two French bulldogs (Boris and Ivan) in Cambridge, Mass.
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