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Review

“A scrappy continuation of Morris's disagreement with Kuhn and an explanation of why he thinks Kuhn’s ideas, which bear a certain resemblance to Berkeley’s, are so pernicious.  . . . The Ashtray strikes me as an unlikely source for reaching a better understanding of Kuhn.; Morris dislikes him too much and can’t be trusted not to stack the deck against him. He ignores, for example, the excellent arguments against Whiggishness as a form of propaganda used to justify the historical dominance of Westerners over the rest of the world. But the book is a marvelous tool for the better understanding of Errol Morris, who is both a great artist and a fascinating individual in his own right.”   (Laura Miller Slate)"Oscar-winning filmmaker Morris was once a graduate student under philosopher Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and this intimate analysis of flaws in that 1962 treatise is driven by Morris's smart, conversational tone. . . . Throughout the heady discussion, Kuhn's cantankerous personality is revealed: he once threw an ashtray at Morris, who is responding--albeit 45 years later--by lobbing this combative tome into the academic and practical world."   (Publishers Weekly, starred review)“The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. A spellbinding intellectual adventure into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Morris’s tale is picaresque. Anecdotes, cameos, interviews, historical digressions, sly side notes, and striking illustrations hang off a central spine that recounts critical episodes in the history of analytic philosophy.”   (Boston Review)“What is it about philosophers? A more fissiparous bunch it would be hard to find: if they aren’t threatening each other with pokers, they are flinging ashtrays at each other’s heads. . . . The Ashtray is passionate, polemical and defiantly written in chatty, accessible language with copious amusing footnotes. Frequently scabrous, Morris acknowledges that it could be seen as a vendetta, and freely admits that it is, as he views Kuhn’s idea of the social construction of knowledge as pernicious and disturbing. As befits a man whose life has been dedicated to documentary films, Morris sets great store by the existence of an objective truth, and this book is his passionate defence of that truth. . . . I found this all rather enjoyable. If you want an opinionated, impolite page-turner picking a fight with half of the modern philosophy of science, this is definitely the book for you.”   (Fortean Times)"Many readers will know Errol Morris for his superb films that have won an Academy Award and other high honors. He has given us a book of the same quality and importance. It is a sustained argument in defense of Truth and Reality. At the same time, it is the story of a life in passionate pursuit of these vital ideas, not as distant abstractions but as things that actually exist in the world and demand our respect. It is about time! In an era of false news in our media, pseudo facts in politics, and political correctness in academe, no cause is more urgent than the cause of Truth and Reality."   (David Hackett Fischer, Brandeis University)"A compelling send-up of contemporary relativism about truth and epistemology by the distinguished film-maker and writer Errol Morris. He bases it on his own personal interactions with Thomas Kuhn, one of its most influential practitioners. But there is a little bit of everything in the book. Interviews with philosophers and scientists are intertwined with stories from many of my own favorite authors (Lewis Carroll, Russell, Borges), and discussions of notions such as reference, natural kind, paradigm, and incommensurability. Throughout we find, as we have come to expect from him, Morris's commitment to find out the truth. This time about truth itself." (Saul Kripke)"A wonderful read, combining memoir, epistemological reflection, the ethnography of academic philosophy -and confession of faith. The Ashtray will provoke and stimulate any serious reader, but it will provide particular insights for anyone familiar with Morris's important films."   (Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University)"Errol Morris is a remarkable documentary film maker. He pursues his craft in the conviction that there is truth to be found and that creative and determined efforts will uncover it. In this extraordinary book, Morris explores his animating philosophical commitments about truth, reality, and knowledge. He presents his outlook in sharp opposition to ideas about relativism and incommensurability that he associates with Thomas Kuhn’s profoundly influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Morris's book is entertaining and engaging, but above all else it offers us a compelling exploration of the value of truth." (Joshua Cohen, Apple University)"This book is brilliant, thought-provoking, sometimes infuriating, and nearly always convincing. Everyone interested in the fate of truth and knowledge in these postmodern, alternative fact times should read it." (David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit)"Is truth real or is it a matter of opinion? That is the question Errol Morris ponders in this fascinating book. His argument for the reality of truth is compelling, informative, and lively. And there's another powerful lesson in it that goes far beyond the seemingly abstract philosophical issues: We escape the bubble of relativism precisely when we reach out to other human beings, when we care about something more than the 'little me,' when we offer the world our love--as Morris has done with his inspiring films, and now with this book."   (Edward Frenkel, University of California, Berkeley, author of Love and Math)

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About the Author

Errol Morris is a director of films, primarily documentaries, including The Thin Blue Line; Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control; and The Fog of War, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 2003.  

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Product details

Hardcover: 192 pages

Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (May 16, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9780226922683

ISBN-13: 978-0226922683

ASIN: 0226922685

Product Dimensions:

8 x 0.8 x 10 inches

Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.7 out of 5 stars

13 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#180,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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 what 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).

A BOOK ON PHILOSOPHY, BUT YOU WILL NEVER BE BOREDA beautiful book in all respects...with an extra star to the University of Chicago Press for the imaginative design and layout.....Mr Morris is on target with a deft and wide-ranging discussion of what is real and what is legitimate process for establishing what is real. The enemies of reality perceivable and verifiable are the true dangerous desperadoes - the barbarians at the gate. He does give the late Kuhn a good working over, but he who lives by the ashtray risks perpetual pummeling by the ashtray, perhaps in perpetuity!

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