This man's documentaries are amazing. It is a shame that one of the techniques he pioneered--the reenactments in 'Thin Blue Line' have become part of the ruin of documentaries. When 'Thin Blue Line' showed reenactments, it was to reinforce uncertainty, so you could easily see the conflicts in the statements of different witnesses. When the Discovery Channel uses reenactments, it is a cheap trick to dramatize the past, and implies certainty where none exists.
Many of Morris' files are about belief, knowledge and certainty. Take 'Mr. Death' for example. It's about a guy--not necessarily a bad guy--that thought the Holocaust was implausible, and tried to prove it. The problem was he didn't know as much as he thought he knew, and his tests were fatally flawed. The had the hubris I've often seen in engineers that science conveys certainty.
If you want to see another side of Morris, his commercials for Miller High Life:
> "Thinking man's detective" is a very unusual phrase. It's like "rich man's Rolls Royce" or "tall man's basketball player."
I think that your two sentences point up exactly why it is not such an unexpected phrase (the which, or something close to it, is I guess what you meant). "Rich man's Rolls Royce" is redundant: you have to be rich to have a Rolls Royce (more or less). "Tall man's basketball player" is not redundant: you don't have to be tall to have a basketball player (in the sense of preferring, rather than owning, I mean); you have to be a tall man to be a basketball player (more or less).
"Errol Morris: the detective who's a thinking man" would have been redundant; but "Errol Morris: the thinking man's detective" is not, as (one presumes) many stupid men through history have had detectives (in the sense now of employing them, or of reading about them, or … whatever).
P.S. And let me just take this chance to say: I love Errol Morris. Thanks to the other poster who mentioned 'Mr. Death'; it was the first film of his I saw, and remains probably my favourite. (Also high up there is 'Fog of War'.)
I assumed it was a description about how his detective work involves more intellectual subjects than the stereotypical detective work of, say, catching a cheating spouse.
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 pursu...
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadMany of Morris' files are about belief, knowledge and certainty. Take 'Mr. Death' for example. It's about a guy--not necessarily a bad guy--that thought the Holocaust was implausible, and tried to prove it. The problem was he didn't know as much as he thought he knew, and his tests were fatally flawed. The had the hubris I've often seen in engineers that science conveys certainty.
If you want to see another side of Morris, his commercials for Miller High Life:
http://errolmorris.com/commercials/miller/miller_ducttape.ht...
"A thinking man's [noun]" is an expression meaning, "A [noun] that thoughtful, intelligent people will likely appreciate".
I think that your two sentences point up exactly why it is not such an unexpected phrase (the which, or something close to it, is I guess what you meant). "Rich man's Rolls Royce" is redundant: you have to be rich to have a Rolls Royce (more or less). "Tall man's basketball player" is not redundant: you don't have to be tall to have a basketball player (in the sense of preferring, rather than owning, I mean); you have to be a tall man to be a basketball player (more or less).
"Errol Morris: the detective who's a thinking man" would have been redundant; but "Errol Morris: the thinking man's detective" is not, as (one presumes) many stupid men through history have had detectives (in the sense now of employing them, or of reading about them, or … whatever).
P.S. And let me just take this chance to say: I love Errol Morris. Thanks to the other poster who mentioned 'Mr. Death'; it was the first film of his I saw, and remains probably my favourite. (Also high up there is 'Fog of War'.)
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-wea...
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 pursu...