Popular Philosophy and Kuhn’s Ashtray

Socrates’ hemlock cup?

Samuel Johnson’s “large stone”?

After reading the full series I feel like throwing Morris another ashtray. Only this time I would make sure I would not miss the target.
“There is an objective reality. There is objective truth. And there is objective history.” says Morris in his last installment. Humpty Dumpty at his best.

I got a chuckle out of Topher’s line, too.

““radical incommensurability” and good old fashioned “not being able to understand what the hell someone is going on about””

“It’s more of a Hegelian higher synthesis of not being able and not wanting to. It’s learned helplessness meets Absolute Spirit.”

It thought it was more of a variation on the good old fashioned “comparing apples and oranges” cliche. So: neither as insightful nor as offensive, exciting nor dangerous, as anyone on the hey-everybody-boy-do-I-love-him-or-hate-him, it’s the second-coming-of-something, boats make it out to be.

If there is an evil genius at work, at least these machinations keep the Wunderkinder employed.

Martin Luther’s inkpot!

Holbo’s objection objection reminds me of one of my general rules about science: when an outsider to some field claims that all the practitioners in the field are making an elementary mistake that any bright kid could uncover, that person is probably wrong. Not certainly wrong—this does happen—but it’s the way to bet.

EM over at the NYT: “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.”

I’d say this is a bit more than a problem of popularization — more like a willful mischaracterization of the development of the incommensurability thesis.

But one can’t complain too much, I suppose. As Josh notes, the quality of the discussion thread is pretty impressive for the NYT.

Elisabeth Anscombe once tried to use snake-and-crane kung fu on me, but it was no match for my drunken boxing.

“The Cruel Tutelage of Elizabeth Anscombe”?

Ayn Rand’s atlas?

Possibly this was raised on the NYT thread, but w/r/t EM’s objection that incommensurability is self-undermining: why can’t you say that paradigms A and B are incommensurable if you stand outside both of them, e.g., if you’re discussing a past scientific controversy that has now been settled (and such historical but no-longer-live controversies, IIRC, figure prominently in ‘Structure’).

Nietzsche’s overshoes.

Walter Benjamin’s Transit Visa.

Descartes was a military man and presumably had passable combat skills. Marcus Aurelius led troops in battle.

It’s more of a Hegelian higher synthesis of not being able and not wanting to. It’s learned helplessness meets Absolute Spirit.

Or possibly, Absolut spirit.

Protevi’s hissy-fit?

Morris is a cheap shot artist. If you want to trash philosphers, its easy. They tend to be freaks. Searle the alleged slumlord, for example, or (perhaps more to the point) Kripke the alleged plagiarist, or whatever. I admit I stopped after the first installment of Morris, as I could see where it was going. And if it spawned thoughtful commentary, then this was in the service of refuting crap, and therefore a waste of everyone’s time.

Fabula de te narratur

It’s always the self-instantiation that trips them up, these empire-builders.

What launched that ashtray wasn’t just some random and idiosyncratic foible of Kuhn’s. We all have random and idiosyncratic foibles that have nothing much to do with anything we believe.

The ashtray was Kuhn’s admission to Morris that, “Yes, incommensurability applies to you and me and what we are talking about right now. I choose to throw an ashtray at you rather than back down and accede to the alternate claim that I could compel a reasonable person’s assent to my views through reason.”

Kuhn made a very odd and wilful choice in settling on modern physics as the paradigm case of science.

If you actually want to understand human knowledge, you would choose as your object of study an ordinary, garden-variety intellectual endeavor like medicine, that submits to the discipline of formulating a theory about any matter brought to it by patients. Physicians don’t have the luxury of only addressing the very few diseases, such as, say, an acid-base disturbance, that lend themselves to neat mathematical modelling.

Modern Physics, in contrast, is practically defined by the turn it took away from Francis Bacon’s demand that it formulate explanations for his whole laundry list of natural phenomena. It went instead into the two or three questions at a time that lent themselves to mathematical formulation, and pointedly ignored everything else. Of course, following this path away from human experience, it quickly worked itself into a self-contained enterprise that no longer has anything to do with explaining what we see in nature. It’s incommensurable with human experience as a feature, not a bug. And that unmooring is exactly what allows it to have the well-defined structure that an actual body of human knowledge like medicine lacks.

By choosing to formulate his theory of how science works based on Modern Physics, because it’s transparent structure allowed a highly compact and comprehensible model, Kuhn’s work took on the sins of the thing it was modelling. It would never occur to me to throw an ashtray at a colleague, student or patient — not for lack of provocation from intransigent opposition from all three, and certainly not because I’m some sort of secular saint. I simply have not got so far out of myself as to imagine that it is anything but central to my business to make my reasons understood to colleague, student and patient.

Of course you will run into physicians who are of the ashtray-throwing persuasion. Physics Envy runs deep in any intellectual endeavor these days.

I stumbled on the traffic stats for my blog and found out that almost all of it came from here. Thanks for the shout(s)-out.

The executive summary: my father could behave in ways that were far from admirable, and there is more than one person with a presumably well-earned grudge against him (the “Legacy of Thomas Kuhn” post is a response to another one), but neither I nor anyone else I’ve talked to who knows him well can find any way to imagine that he threw an ashtray ever, period, much less at someone’s head.

If the episode has rhetorical utility, I love it if people would refer to it as “Errol Morris’s ashtray.” That’s the only description we know is accurate.

Incidentally: my father wrote about physics because he had a PhD in physics. He was highly ambivalent about applications of his work outside the natural sciences.

I think that there’s a dynamic toward relativism and anti-science in American culture that causes a lot of misreading. For example, Foucault explicitly said that he deliberately chose to study the weakest sciences, sciences like criminology and penology. So what he was talking about was the expression of what were essentially non-sciences in scientific language. He may have moved toward relativism himself, I’m not sure now, but no one has to follow him, and the scientism in such fields (and you can add education and school psychology) is really horrifying.

Sartre’s cow.

Ayn Rand’s atlas?

Oh, that wouldn’t hurt. You’d be able to shrug that right off . . .

Quine’s no-longer-undetached rabbit parts.

One of the bits of the Morris piece seems to be little more than a series of picturesque (and indeed illustrated) allusions; Humpty is in there, doing little more than sitting on his wall, Bentham’s panopticon gadget, etc. It’s like a parody of Zizek, with the glimpses of insight removed.

One explanation of the long delay in this shock revelation might be that it was not deemed suitable for release while the plaintiff – sorry, subject – was still alive. But then maybe the delay was due the slow progress of repeated re-rememberings in building a new vivid memory. In any case, I’d be interested to hear this guy cross-examined about the episode: where did the object land, what happened to the ash and dog-ends, what happened afterwards, who else was around etc. (He may be warned now though, and already carrying out full-ashtray-throwing experiments in his shed – to refresh his memory you understand.)

But I don’t get what the tu quoque about incommensurability is supposed to amount to, at all. What is it?

IIRC, the trouble with Kuhn was mingling descriptive sociology with normative philosophy in a pretty obfuscatory way. Incommensurability is only of interest in relation to some such question as ‘is science steadily getting closer to the truth’? And I should have thought the answer to that (SPOILER: it’s ‘probably, kind-of’) is not really affected by questions of incommensurability of paradigms.

Take a Piercean ideal-convergence-of-humanoid-investigators understanding of truth, add the reasonable assumption that scientists as we know them are not overall headed backwards or sideways (and we can assess that in ways that treat paradigms holistically rather than trying to map corresponding concepts within them), and you get the idea that we are getting closer to truth in a kind of tendential way.

But just as with say a series of coin tosses tending to reveal the inherent bias or lack of it of a coin, we have no very good reason to think that the process is a steady (monotonic?) progress toward truth. The degree of verisimilitude of a state of a science at a certain time, which incommensurability says cannot be measured or compared, may nevertheless be reasonably believed to be positively, though loosely to an unbounded degree, correlated with those aspects of scientific theories which can be compared, e.g. power, fertility, unfalsifiedness, etc.

(Kuhn also did theory-ladenness of observation, which as a sociological thesis may be fine but as a philosophical one not so much, since all obeservation can pretty much be reduced to the quotidian common currency of people looking trhough lenses, joining wires together, putting stuff in test tubes, getting a dead fox out of the freezer, etc.)

Also, a propos I’m not sure what, I wonder whether Kuhn had read Winch.

IIRC, the trouble with Kuhn was mingling descriptive sociology with normative philosophy in a pretty obfuscatory way.

He was arguing with Popper, who did the same thing and in fact presented Science as the one holy and apostolic church. Kuhn was criticized for seeming to knock Science from that pedestal.

John, or anyone, can you explain why Kuhn’s theory requires the broader interpretation of incommensurable? My brief acquaintance with Kuhn’s writing led me to believe that he was advocating a kind of Kantian view of the world, but either without Kant’s fixed categories or with the belief that these categories or some form thereof are insufficient to allow us to evaluate comparatively various statements of different paradigms. This seems only to require incommensurable in the narrower sense, not the broader sense.

Put differently, my understanding to this point has been that Kuhn believes that we can learn to play the language-games of different paradigms, and in that sense understand them, but that we cannot compile a broader system of rules that incorporates both games at once while not deforming the rules of the respective paradigms.

Like I said, I have only a brief acquaintance with Kuhn’s work, so apologies in advance to all those more familiar.

Freud’s Black Mud.

“Martin Luther’s inkpot!

Holbo’s objection objection reminds me of one of my general rules about science: when an outsider to some field claims that all the practitioners in the field are making an elementary mistake that any bright kid could uncover, that person is probably wrong. Not certainly wrong—this does happen—but it’s the way to bet.”

If only this were true.

Walt: narrow his ideas when defending them and broaden them when promoting them.

Do you mean ‘permanently moderate his existing ideas in response to valid criticism, while avoiding excessive caution in proposing new ones’?

If only the former will suffice to describe K, and only the latter is defensible, then, well, I don’t know what you would call such a manoeuvre.

Heidegger’s televised soccer?