The Ashtray: (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) by Errol Morris (PDF)

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Filmmaker Errol Morris offers his perspective on the world and his powerful belief in the necessity of truth. In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result. At the time, Morris was a graduate student. Now we know him as one of the most celebrated and restlessly probing filmmakers of our time, the creator of such classics of documentary investigation as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. Kuhn, meanwhile, was—and, posthumously, remains—a star in his field, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a landmark book that has sold well over a million copies and introduced the concept of “paradigm shifts” to the larger culture. And Morris thought the idea was bunk. The Ashtray tells why—and in doing so, it makes a powerful case for Morris’s way of viewing the world, and the centrality to that view of a fundamental conception of the necessity of truth. “For me,” Morris writes, “truth is about the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence idea of truth.” He has no patience for philosophical systems that aim for internal coherence and disdain the world itself. Morris is after bigger game: he wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions. Rather, Morris argues powerfully, it is our duty to do everything we can to establish and support it. In a time when truth feels ever more embattled, under siege from political lies and virtual lives alike, The Ashtray is a bracing reminder of its value, delivered by a figure who has, over decades, uniquely earned our trust through his commitment to truth. No Morris fan should miss it.

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⭐Call this autobiographical philosophy. Errol Morris is a renowned filmmaker, and a one-time philosophy graduate student. He’s not an academic philosopher, or, at least prior to this book, a participant in the arcane debates of professional philosophers. His motivation for writing the book, from what he has said here, is autobiographical. He was at one time a student of Thomas Kuhn (the “man who denied reality”) and had a falling out with Kuhn, resulting in Kuhn’s throwing an ashtray at Morris and in Morris having to leave the graduate program at Princeton where he’d been studying with Kuhn.Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an immensely influential book, not only in philosophical circles but in popular culture. Kuhn brought the term “paradigm shift” — a characterization of a kind of large scale shift in scientific world view and consequently in scientific practice — into common use, to describe more vaguely any significant shift in how something is thought about.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is also a flashpoint among some traditional philosophers of science and practicing scientists. Kuhn’s arguments undermine some of the familiar tenets of how science as an enterprise has been conceived — tenets having to do with what constitutes scientific progress, how theories relate to one another, how theories supplant older theories, and underlying beliefs about what scientific reality itself is.Morris’s opposition to Kuhn — and this is again what makes this book autobiographical philosophy — is vehement. He believes that Kuhn is not just guilty of technically faulty argument. Kuhn defies common sense, and does so in a way as to undermine the things we rely upon to know what’s going on in the world and determine what to do about it. Morris says of Kuhn’s work, “It is, at best, an inchoate, unholy mixture of the work of others — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Darwin, Rudolf Carnap, Norwood Russell Hanson, Alexandre Koyré, Jerome Bruner, and more. At worst, it is an assault on truth and progress.”In fact, Morris places Kuhn on the wrong side in a really large array of philosophical issues and discussions —- truth- skepticism- scientific realism- naive realism- scientific progress- incommensurability- translatability- referenceAnd I’m sure I’m overlooking others.But it’s that last one — reference — that seems to be at the center of not only Morris’s arguments against Kuhn, but also his feelings about Kuhn. There is a simple idea about reference that a lot of us would like to be valid. That idea is that the world is composed of things, and words (at least nouns) in languages refer to them. “Tables” refers to . . . tables. There are tables out there, and we have a word for them. It’s as simple as that. I suppose you could call it the common sense theory of reference.Kuhn, in Morris’s account, unforgivably messes with that simple theory of reference. Part of what makes a scientific revolution a revolution is that, in fact, the “objects” of scientific theory change — what light is changed when scientists developed electromagnetic theory and then quantum theory. That, in Kuhn’s theory, is in fact a major reason the change in theory is important — what we refer to when we talk of light in electromagnetic theory is different than what we referred to when we previously talked of light.Morris takes inspiration from Saul Kripke’s discussion of reference and meaning in his book, Naming and Necessity. The problem that Kripke took up in the lectures comprising that book is in fact the problem of reference — how names of objects actually refer to those objects. His primary opponents are philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, who contended that, in one way or another, various descriptions do that job (e.g., George Washington is the man who was the first President of the United States, George Washington was the General who led his troops across the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War, . . . ). Kripke’s counterclaim is that George Washington would still have been the same person (entity) if he hadn’t done those things. He proposes instead a “causal theory of reference” by which speakers of a language historically fix the reference of a name to an object.A similar argument regarding general terms, such as “gold”, depends on a theory of “natural kinds”, that contra many modern theories of linguistics, the world itself, independently of language, is divided up into “kinds” of entities (gold, stones, tables) and referred to by those familiar general terms.How well Kripke’s arguments apply to Kuhn’s shifting paradigms and the consequences for scientific language use can be debated. Certainly Kuhn rejects any kind of scientific realism that may be implied by Kripke’s arguments. And, to Morris’s credit, Kuhn often expands from his theory of scientific revolutions and what is going on in the referents of scientific theories to remarks about language and reality in general.I guess my biggest problem with Morris’s arguments, as philosophical arguments and not just autobiographical exclamations, is that he doesn’t really dig into the arguments. His stance seems not far from a kind of caricature of a G.E. Moore style defense of common sense. Kuhn denies reality and truth, at least as we common sensically take those things to be — isn’t that outrageous?I should mention that Moore’s actual arguments are much more subtle and usher in decades of discussion about the relationship between philosophy and common sense. Morris’s own stance is much more of a condemnation of Kuhn for abandoning what Morris takes to be common sense.Morris’s outrage reminds me of one of my undergraduate professors, who once referred to the Pre-Socratic philosophers (Thales, Parmenides, etc.) as “the Pre-Socratic comedians.” Thales said, at least according to Aristotle, that the nature of all matter is water. Well, if all matter is, in its nature, water, then not only is water water, but stones are water, too. Stones are obviously not water. Thales has made a ludicrous mistake. Hence “Pre-Socratic comedians.”But of course Thales didn’t think that stones were water, in any ordinary sense anyway. The dismissal is simplistic and misses everything that Thales may have actually thought.I’m not saying that Morris’s dismissal of Kuhn is as simplistic as my undergraduate professor’s dismissal of the Pre-Socratics, but the point is that it is a dismissal, a refusal to actually enter into Kuhn’s thoughts, entertain them, and find what truth (if any) there is in them. Like Thales’ claim about water, Kuhn’s arguments about reference, truth, and incommensurability have far more subtlety than a straightforward denial of common sense. To the extent that Morris mounts arguments against Kuhn, e.g., in providing a version of Kripke’s arguments on reference, he counterposes a theory that he feels retains the common sense he wants to be true to Kuhn’s own work. Philosophical engagement per se is missing.All of that said, why read the book? Why not read the philosophical literature about Kuhn instead? Morris cites some of that work, including Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, itself a renowned and often remarked paper. If you’re interested in the philosophical debate, I would recommend doing exactly that.On the other hand, Morris is an interesting person in his own right. That was certainly why I read the book. I have loved his films, partly because of the passion behind them. The autobiographical aspects of this book, including his vehement, long-lived reaction to the incident referred to in the book’s title, are both entertaining and deepen my understanding of Morris and his work.

⭐You probably know Errol Morris as a filmmaker. The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War are probably his two most cited works. The Ashtray is not a book about film, nor the legal system nor about the atrocities of war. It is a book about the philosophy and history of science and their relationship to truth.As a young man, before he thought about filmmaking, Morris’s aspirations included rock climbing and philosophy. He climbed the edifices that rose above the campus of Princeton University and he studied the history of science under Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn is well-known as the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the work that made “paradigm shifts” and “incommensurable concepts,” part of a vernacular that spilled over into all areas of academia. Apparently Morris and Kuhn had disagreements over Structure and one day Kuhn ended the dispute by launching an ashtray in Morris’s general direction. That ended Morris’s stint at Princeton. He went from there to Berkeley and studied under Paul Feyerablend, with whom he also disagreed.According to Morris, Kuhn maintained that scientific theories can only be judged from within a critic’s chosen paradigm; that there is no outside or empirical perspective from which two paradigms can be compared nor is there any yardstick by which scientific progress can be measured. Truth is in general a social construct and the story of progress in science is just a story.Morris argues in opposition:“Is guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion? Is it relative? Is it subjective? A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. Yet you’re innocent…But we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period. If you were strapped into an electric chair…Would you be satisfied with the claim that there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? No such thing as absolute truth or falsity?”One can argue whether or not Thomas Kuhn is as anti-realist as Morris makes him out to be. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is not an easy read. It twists, it speeds forward and walks itself back, it qualifies and makes blatant assertions. It can be read, criticized and defended in many ways. Morris takes aim at the anti-realist Kuhn, the Kuhn for whom truth is relative. The Kuhn who maintains reference is impossible; i.e. that the term energy as used in modern statistical mechanics is incommensurable with the term as understood by Joule in the nineteenth century. To his argument Morris brings discussions and interviews with logician Saul Kripke, philosopher Hilary Putnam, scientist Steven Weinberg and others.Personally I’m inclined to side with Morris against the anti-realist version of Kuhn, except in the realm of mathematics where I count myself, or at least used to, among the formalists. It seems easy enough to refer to a real number. But is the thing you’re referring to a Dedekind cut or an equivalence class of Cauchy sequences? Truth about real numbers is perhaps less ambiguous than reference. There are some unambiguously true things one can say about real numbers, but there are also essentially undecidable questions about them. Nevertheless, it seems to me, that there is indisputable progress in mathematics as well as in the sciences.The Ashtray is a very entertaining read – even the footnotes. It is filled with beautiful and sometimes poignant photographs and illustrations – and it features an amusing cast of characters (listed in the end).

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