Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
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Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
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Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#2I prefer the longer but more detailed writeup that LARB published: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ashtray-has-landed-t...!
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.
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#3Off-topic, but their GDPR popup just redirects me to the same popup.
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#4In 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.
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#5Recent HN discussion of a different review of this book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217444
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#6In 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 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.
Would physics as a discipline exist in its current form without thinkers like Aristotle? That’s the more important question for me.
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#7In 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, 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.
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#8Off-topic, but their GDPR popup just redirects me to the same popup.
Idem, using Firefox 60.0.1
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#9I remember some form of this came out on opinionator, a thoroughly enjoyable read!
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/the-ashtray...
Re: Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
#10In 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…
This comment is at least as useful as the article. Thanks!