Was Philosopher Thomas Kuhn evil?

In 1972, Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Morris was his graduate student. Kuhn was already renowned for his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which helped propagate the skeptical philosophical perspective known as postmodernism.

During a meeting in Kuhn’s office, Morris questioned Kuhn’s views on paradigms, the webs of conscious and unconscious assumptions that underpin, say, Aristotle’s physics, or Einstein’s. You cannot say one paradigm is truer than another, according to Kuhn, because there is no objective standard by which to judge them. Paradigms are incomparable, or “incommensurable.”

If Kuhn was right, Morris asked, wouldn’t history of science be impossible? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible — except, Morris added, for “someone who imagines himself to be God?” Kuhn realized his student had just insulted him. He muttered, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.” Then he threw the ashtray at Morris and threw him out of the program.

Morris went on to become an acclaimed maker of documentaries. He won an Academy Award for “The Fog of War” (which I show students in my “War and Science” seminar). But Morris never forgot or forgave Kuhn. In his book The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), Morris accuses Kuhn of being a bad person and bad philosopher. “Many may see this book as a vendetta,” Morris writes. “Indeed it is.”

Morris blames Kuhn for undermining the notion that there is a real world out there, which we can, with some effort, come to know. Morris despises Kuhn’s postmodernism, which he believes has had insidious effects. The denial of objective truth enables totalitarianism and genocide and “ultimately, perhaps irrevocably, undermines civilization.”

I love Morris’s films, and I love The Ashtray, which is an eccentric as well as deadly serious book. I also agree, to an extent, with Morris’s take on Kuhn. I spent hours talking to Kuhn in 1992, when he was at MIT, and he struck me as almost comically self-contradicting. He tied himself in knots trying to explain precisely what he meant when he talked about the impossibility of true communication. He really did seem to doubt whether reality exists independently of our flawed, fluid conceptions of it.

But I’d like to offer a few points in Kuhn’s defense. Morris proposes that postmodernism is an attractive ideology for right-wing authoritarians. To support this claim, he notes the scorn for truth evinced by Hitler and the current U.S. President, for whom power trumps truth. Morris suggests that “belief in a real world, in truth and in reference, does seem to speak to the left; the denial of the real world, of truth and reference, to the right.”

That’s simply wrong. Postmodernism has often been coupled with progressive, anti-authoritarian critiques of imperialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism. Yes, postmodernism can become decadent, questioning even the paradigms that underpin proven science, and social justice movements. But it serves as a valuable counterweight to our yearning for certainty and tendency toward dogmatism.

Scientists often cling to paradigms for non-scientific reasons. (In fact, that is a major theme of my book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity and Who We Really Are.) Kuhn’s model is all too apt for describing modern psychiatry, which often acts like the marketing arm of the pharmaceutical industry, or evolutionary biology, some proponents of which have made excuses for the persistence of racism, sexism, and militarism.

Nietzsche once said that “every great philosophy” is a “confession,” a “species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Structureis a great work of philosophy, and so is Ashtray, which helps us see the world with Morris’s obsessive curiosity. For all his faults, Kuhn goaded Morris into writing a strange, brilliant, entertaining book. For that, if for nothing else, Morris and the rest of us should thank Kuhn. 

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”