Errol Morris on photography.

This is part one of a five-part series.

1.

THE ULTIMATUM

I don’t want to die in a language I can’t understand.

— Jorge Luis Borges (as quoted in Alberto Manguel, “With Borges”)

It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head.

Courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study

It had all begun six months earlier.

“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.

But what was Kuhn’s problem with Kripke?

Kuhn was becoming more and more famous. He would become not just a major figure in the history and philosophy of science, but an icon – and his terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” became ubiquitous in the culture-at-large. An astrophysicist and rock-climbing friend from Princeton, Dick Saum, later sent me a picture of a bumper sticker that said, “Shifts happen.” [1]

David Saum

Kripke was slight, bearded, in his early thirties. He was not well known but had a reputation as a genius. He had provided a completeness proof for modal logic (which deals with necessity and possibility) while still a teenager — and in the process reinvigorated Leibniz’s ideas about possible worlds. [2] There was also the amusing anecdote of Kripke being offered a chair at Harvard when he was 16. He supposedly wrote back, “Thank you, but my mother thinks I should finish high school first.” Nonetheless, it was hard to see how Kripke’s theories had much to do with Kuhn. Or at least, it seemed so, at first.

I ignored Kuhn’s ultimatum and went to Kripke’s lectures anyway. My relationship with Kuhn ended badly. But more about that later.



Kripke addressed the 20 or so graduate students and professors assembled in a small seminar room by looking at them through an empty water glass as if it were a telescope or the lens of a camera. The water glass created all sorts of optical distortions, making Kripke’s left eye distend like the eye of a flounder. I assume that the glass had the same effect for him — rendering the seminar into an aquarium of academics.

I didn’t really understand Kripke’s lectures. It was only a year or so later at the University of California, Berkeley, that I began to understand Kripke’s ideas, due to the efforts of my friend and fellow graduate student Charles Silver.

Pall Mall Cigarettes

True Blue Cigarettes

Kuhn in those days was an incredible chain-smoker. First Pall Malls and then True Blues (a low tar and low nicotine alternative). Alternating. One cigarette lighting another. Matches were irrelevant. Maybe six, maybe seven packs of cigarettes a day. All that was essential was burning and smoke. And a massive cut-glass ashtray filled with the debris of an endless series of burnt-out butts.

The seminar was filled with an odd collection of people. Some of his graduate students from the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, and a couple of visiting academics. He had already attracted the interest of social scientists around the world, and there were a couple who made a pilgrimage to Princeton to attend his lectures.

His often repeated, most scathing complaint concerned Whiggishness — in history of science, the tendency to evaluate and interpret past scientific theories not on their own terms, but in the context of current knowledge. The term comes from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History,” written when Butterfield, a future Regius professor of history at Cambridge, was only 31 years old. Butterfield had complained about Whiggishness, describing it as “…the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present” – the tendency to see all history as progressive, and in an extreme form, as an inexorable march to greater liberty and enlightenment. [3] For Butterfield, on the other hand, “…real historical understanding” can be achieved only by “attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.” [4][5]

Princeton was sort of a consolation prize. I had not been accepted in Harvard’s history of science program, and Erwin Hiebert, a professor at Harvard, had written a letter of recommendation to Kuhn for me. I should have known that there was going to be trouble. I had imagined graduate school as a shining city on a hill, but it turned out to be more like an extended visit with a bear in a cave.

I had written a paper on James Clerk Maxwell’s displacement current for Kuhn’s seminar on 19th century electricity and magnetism. The paper might have been 30 or so double-spaced pages. Kuhn’s reply, typed on unlined yellow paper, was 30 pages, single-spaced, with Courier marching all the way from the left to the right side of the paper. No margins. He was angry, really angry.

He had written at the very end of his comments, “You have long since passed the end of the road on which you began.” I asked, “What is that supposed to mean? I’m 24 years old.” He said that I was a “good” first-year graduate student but would become “less good” in subsequent years.

Our discussion took place at West Hall, a new building at the Institute for Advanced Study. Kuhn had taken a leave of absence from Princeton to write the book “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912.”

We began arguing. Kuhn had attacked my Whiggish use of the term “displacement current.” [6] I had failed, in his view, to put myself in the mindset of Maxwell’s first attempts at creating a theory of electricity and magnetism. I felt that Kuhn had misinterpreted my paper, and that he — not me — had provided a Whiggish interpretation of Maxwell. I said, “You refuse to look through my telescope.” And he said, “It’s not a telescope, Errol. It’s a kaleidoscope.” (In this respect, he was probably right.) [7]

The conversation took a turn for the ugly. Were my problems with him, or were they with his philosophy?

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]

He started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.”

And then I added, “…except for someone who imagines himself to be God.”

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

And missed.

I see the arc, the trajectory. As if the ashtray were its own separate solar system. With orbiting planets (butts), asteroids and interstellar gas (ash). I thought, “Wait a second. Einstein’s office is just around the corner. This is the Institute for Advanced Study!!” [9]

Errol Morris

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

The end result was that Kuhn threw me out of Princeton. He had the power to do it, and he did it. God only knows what I might have said in my second or third year. At the time, I felt that he had destroyed my life. Now, I feel that he saved me from a career that I was probably not suited for.

[1] I was looking online for some information about Saum’s whereabouts and learned that he had died in 2000 of brain cancer. A terrible loss. I had spent a good part of my year at Princeton climbing — on the buildings of the university and at the Shawangunks.

[2] One way to think about possible worlds is in the context of love. For example, people often ask: would you still love me if I were poor? Would you still love me if I had no arms? And so on and so forth. They are asking a question about possible worlds. That possible world in which you have no arms. Or that possible world in which you are poor. Or perhaps even that possible world in which you are poor and have no arms.

[3] Herbert Butterfield, “The Whig Interpretation of History,” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1931, p.11-12. The Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament, are distinguished from the Tories, advocates of the power of the King.

[4] Here’s another Butterfield quote, the “tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” For an interesting discussion of the Whig theory of history, see David Hackett Fischer’s “Historians’ Fallacies.” Fischer’s book is one of my favorites.

[5] Nick Jardine in a journal article on Butterfield writes, “By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science to employ the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Whiggish,’ often accompanied by one or more of ‘hagiographic,’ ‘internalist,’ ‘triumphalist,’ even ‘positivist,’ to denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress… In particular, they were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress that had proliferated in the inter-war years.” Nick Jardine, “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science,” History of Science, 41 (2003): 125-140, at pp. 127-8.

[6] The displacement current, a concept invented by Maxwell, means something different to modern-day physicists. In many ways, it is ideal for any discussion of reference and belief. Our beliefs about the displacement current have changed since Maxwell’s time, but does that mean we are referring to something different? Maxwell was initially wedded to a mechanical aether that was replaced in successive versions of his theories. Does this mean that we cannot discuss the differences between Maxwell’s early ideas about the displacement current based on various mechanical models of electricity and magnetism, and modern non-mechanical models of electromagnetism?

[7] A version of this story appears in “Predilections,” Mark Singer’s profile of me in The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 1989.

[8] “Incommensurability” is a term introduced by Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Although it is used repeatedly in the book, Kuhn offers no clear definition. Much of this essay is an attempt, albeit an unsuccessful one, to pin it down. Here is a sample of some of Kuhn’s explanations: (1) “The normal scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” (2) “These examples point to the…most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” And (3) “Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (thought not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.” Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. pgs. 103, 150

[9] The reenactment of the tossed ashtray at the beginning of the piece was shot with the Phantom Gold at 1,000 fps.

Note: In an earlier version of this article, a caption misidentified Dick Saum; that has been corrected.