I didn't know about Errol Morris before I read this article, so I went and read the Ashtray pentalogy. It was very well written and interesting indeed, but I cannot help thinking that it was also a bit too harsh on Kuhn.

What I can totally understand is that someone at whom has been thrown an ashtray, not to mention being kicked out of Princeton simply because of having an opinion, might hold a bit of a grudge. Being tossed around is never nice and maybe Morris should have sued Kuhn. But dismissing him entirely as a thinker is another thing. So let me here play the devil's advocate for a while, please, with the big reservation that I haven't read Kuhn either but only heard and read about him and his works.

What seems to bother Morris most is Kuhn's idea of incommensurabilty between the worlds before and after a paradigm shift, a profound incapability of agreeing about anything at all. This he regards an indicator of a relativistic theory of truth where everything is subjective and everybody's idea of reality is as good as his neighbour's by definition. Only Kuhn himself rises above this relativity and is able to spot paradigms here and judge disputes there. Which is no doubt the interpretation that pissed off Kuhn so much that he started throwing ashtrays.

I don't defend that kind of behaviour and Morris's first-person testimony clearly proves that at some point Kuhn was intoxicated and blinded by his popularity and the power it brought about. So much so that he gave edicts of what classes his students should take and got them kicked out if they didn't obey.

But the article also reveals a different Kuhn who walks around and mutters to himself in a restless and haunted manner in the late 1940's. Someone who is genuinely bothered about all the cognitive dissonance of the time. Just a few years after Hitler, Stalin at the peak of his power, Mao just about to break through, Wittgenstein saying that what we consider truth is just a mutual agreement not necessarily based on reality. So many competitive interpretations of reality so far apart of each other and no-one to set the record straight.

To dissolve the controversy Kuhn comes up with the idea that maybe our perception of reality has always evolved this way. And that trying a dialog between the different viewpoints is fruitless and futile. Better just let the alternatives fight each other and the winner take it all -- for a while, until yet another better viewpoint takes over. A bit like a Darwinist theory of truth.

What I agree with Morris is that I also believe that step by step things improve and our conception of reality and ethics gets better. Judging by the fact that slavery was abolished in the western countries some 150 years ago, that public torture is no longer a main attraction and that most civilized countries have abolished the capital penalty for some fifty years ago.

If Kuhn later started to thing that reality is a totally subjective construction he most certainly was wrong. But really, that doesn't mean that his main idea that our perception of reality evolves not linearly but in somewhat violent and destructive quantum leaps would be null and void.

Morris proves conclusively that there is no evidence that the revelation of Hippasus of Metapontum about the fact that the length of a diagonal of a square cannot be expressed as a fraction of two natural numbers caused a major paradigm shift and a consequent mayhem among the Pythagoreans. But he doesn't prove the opposite either. What we today exactly know about those events is pretty much nothing. The closest description of them was written almost 800 years after the fact and is notoriously unreliable, as Morris points out. So it could have happened and then again maybe not. Not good proof material anyways.

It makes sense to think that when we look at history we project ourselves into it and pick up the details that we are interested in. That is probably true. It is the core of the Whiggish viewpoint which Morris and Kuhn heavily critizise. Arrogant and complacent use of the past to pursue the present or something like that.

Morris quotes Kunh saying that at one point for him "Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed", then goes on to point out all of his obvious errors. Now who is it that is arrogant, complacent and whiggish again? Scholars have known for centuries that Aristoteles was clearly wrong saying that women have fewer theet than men or that a rock falls because it wants to return to where it came from. Even Kuhn must have known that. So what did he mean when he said that after a lot of thinking and studying Aristotles suddenly started to make some sense? Could it mean that he somehow managed to get in his imagination across the paradigm shift and see things in Aristotle's and his contemporaries eyes? I think that goes beyond tooth counting.

Besides, do we have any actual proof that women didn't start to loose their wisdom theeth a bit earlier then men, perhaps around Aristotle's times? Didn't think so.

It is all about perception of reality. Morris tells about Saul Kripke, whose lectures were banned by Kuhn, and his alternative theory of reality. No doubt Kripke is a brilliant thinker, but the account Morris gives about him makes him look a bit conservative. He proposes that we call things with certain names because that is what we have used to do. Well doh! We have to goldfish, one yellow that is called Goldie and another green called Greenie. If they switch colours wouldn't we still call Goldie "Goldie", as that is what she still is, despite the switch of colours.

This is such a good example that I have to take it further. Imagine that you go for a vacation for a month (as in an imaginary world everything is possible). The fish switch their colours while you are away having your faithful neighbour feeding them.

You come back and see a golden goldfish and a green goldfish in the tank. Is it not your natural instinct to call the golden one "Goldie" and the green one "Greenie"? Do you notice the difference? Do the fish notice the difference? Do they care? Do you care? Does it make any difference whatsoever?

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I think Kuhn was very right in saying that every revelation has a built-in tendency of turning into an established truth, then stagnating and starting to stall new innovation. Eventually the established truth has to be somewhat violently broken by another revelation which in its turn changes into an established truth. This is the dynamic nature of every system that is complex enough, a kind of harmonic oscillation really. There is no reason why a planet could not circle a star in a perfect circle. It is just that there are so immensely many more elliptic trajectories that are also stable that it is very unlikely that the perfect circle would get chosen. Likewise there is a static equilibrium in every dynamic system but as there are so many more oscillating and also stable states it is just so much more likely that they bounce mindlessly between the extremes like the English political system than stay still. I feel this is the gist of Hegel, Marx and dialecticism in general as well. I have actually met some very intelligent people that highly regard that line of thought and I don't think it is total bogus either.

In a way I cannot help feeling that Kuhn has turned into a paradigm himself and Morris is the anomaly trying to drive the wedge in his walls. Be as it may, I would like to thank him for inspiring reading. If Kuhn threw an ashtray on your person you should threw something else heavy pointed object back. But Kuhn's thoughts you have to fight with thoughts.