It was at this point that Kuhn threw the ashtray at me.

[skyecaptain]

Strange essay by Errol Morris recounting his brief tenure as a Princeton grad student under Kuhn:

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ” [8

Comments

[dubdobdee]

Discussions of same here and here

Some funny and flippant points well made in both, but very little attempt actually to outline Kuhn's or Kripke's ideas, I think. My reductive take on Morris's work has always been that he's smug d!ck, who does actually secretly think he has God's Eye View...

[skyecaptain]

That would explain his affinity for Herzog, anyway.

[skyecaptain]

Kuhn's son sums up my feeling so far (haven't finished the series yet) well here:

What we’re seeing here is not a rejection of his views; it’s a rejection of a caricature of his view. He never believed in any sort of relativism that says there is no truth other than the point of view people take on it. He believed very much in truth, but he also knew that understanding what it is to be true is much more complicated than it might first appear.

I don't understand Kuhn very well yet, but I think I understand him well enough to know that cries of "relativism" etc. (whatever a person means when he/she says it) are horseshit.

[koganbot]

Haven't clicked the link yet, and may never, since Morris is a major bore, and stupid (relatively speaking; I mean, he's probably above average, but he's no thinker

[skyecaptain]

I put "relativism" in quotation marks because I think Morris takes the word to mean something like "truth doesn't exist." But I haven't spent much time with it because even after two segments I wanted to throw an ashtray at this guy's face.

[koganbot]

Of course, "Truth doesn't exist" is an absolute statement, and an absolutist position. Those who think that's what "relativism" is are like those people who assume that, e.g., if I'm an atheist I must think that life has no meaning

[doxedeed]

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[hapigris]

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