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Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

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Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#11

Post by 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

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#12

Post by 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.

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#13

Post by neuxenian »

woodandsteel wrote: post #12

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,…

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).

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#14

Post by schoen »

benbreen wrote: post #7
andy_wrote wrote: post #4

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…

I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: 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, Morr…

Your review is a very interesting take. It reminds me of someone's observation (I forgot whose) that mathematics is often presented as a set of successful proofs and derivations, without an explanation of the motivation behind them or how they were discovered. So proof tactics may seem somewhat magical, even though they might in fact be a result of a mathematician's tinkering and blundering around, including alternative approaches that didn't work.

An interesting example that someone gave from elementary mathematics is the derivation of the quadratic formula.

ax²+bx+c=0 (a≠0)

4a(ax²+bx+c)=4a(0)=0

4a²x²+4abx+4ac=0

4a²x²+4abx+4ac+b²=b²

4a²x²+4abx+b²=b²-4ac

(2ax+b)(2ax+b)=b²-4ac

2ax+b=±√(b²-4ac)

2ax=-b±√(b²-4ac)

x=(-b±√(b²-4ac))/2a

Someone discussing this pointed out that this derivation is easy to follow, but extraordinarily mysterious in terms of how we knew to do various things at various steps, such as mysteriously multiplying both sides by 4a or mysteriously adding b² to each side at some point. How did we know to do that?

Of course there are different explanations of the underlying motivations and the history of how people discovered this proof, but it's easy to be given the proof without any of that context, and that kind of thing is in fact the rule rather than the exception in many parts of math study.

Again, I think this was someone else's observation but I don't remember where I came across it.

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#16

Post by mr_toad »

benbreen wrote: post #7
andy_wrote wrote: post #4

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…

I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: 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, Morr…

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

Seems like a straw man.

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#18

Post by whatshisface »

mr_toad wrote: post #16
benbreen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: 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, Morr…

> the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable. Seems like a straw man.

It's also one of those typical philospher's tricks: you can get a scientist on record agreeing that such-and-such is reasonable, but they're thinking about something like "maybe the Hall effect could have been discovered before or after the completion of Maxwell's equations," while every reader is imagining natural science but based on drum beats.

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#19

Post by benbreen »

mr_toad wrote: post #16
benbreen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: 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, Morr…

> the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable. Seems like a straw man.

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.

Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

#20

Post by failrate »

woodandsteel wrote: post #12

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,…

I see contemporary radical relativism as being inevitable.
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