Historically Speaking: Evidence and Argument

The Errol Morris Ashtray Episode is kind of interesting. Oral history is a kind of historical evidence, but it is a notoriously slippery kind. The main reason being that all narrators are unreliable.  Today Morris describes how he ended up at Princeton thusly:

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.

In a New Yorker profile from 1989, he described it this way

Next came the University of Wisconsin, where he excelled academically ("the first time I did really well at anything, except elementary school") and, in 1969, received a degree in history. For a couple of years, he drifted about, earning money as a cable-television salesman in Wisconsin and as a term-paper writer in Massachusetts and "trying to get accepted at different graduate schools just by showing up on their doorstep."

The two story are incompatible unless, of course, it was his showing up at Harvard's doorstep that led to the letter of recommendation.

In the events leading up to the ashtray throwing, currently Morris writes

[Kuhn] had written at the very end of his comments, “You have long since passed the end of the road on which you began.” 

 In 1989 Morris explained that

I was wrong [about getting a doctorate]. I had big fights with my adviser. I was supposed to be concentrating on the history of physics. And, naturally, my adviser expected me to take all these courses in physics. But the classes were always full of fourteen-year-old Chinese prodigies, with their hands in the air - 'Call on me! Call on me!' I couldn't do it. I reneged on some of my commitments.

It appears that by reneged he means dropped out of or didn't complete a series of courses that were "naturally" necessary to his selected course of study, and it is clear that he saw his relationship with Kuhn as adversarial.  There no mention of Kripke in the 1989 essay; there is, however, this description

At the end, my adviser actually assaulted me. He was on sabbatical and had an office at the Institute for Advanced Study. I remember thinking, This is the Institute for Advanced Study, and he's assaulting me. I'd written a thirty-page double-spaced paper, and he produced thirty single-spaced pages of his own criticizing it. The bile just flowed out of him. I accused him of not even finishing reading what I'd written. It turns out I was a problem, but at least I wasn't a drudge, and that school was filled with drudges. I remember saying to my adviser, 'You won't even look through my telescope.' And his response was 'Errol, it's not a telescope, it's a kaleidoscope.'"

 There is no mention of an ashtray, which today Morris describes in detail.

Currently, he describes the event like this:

We began arguing. Kuhn had attacked my Whiggish use of the term “displacement current” [in the paper]. [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.

In the first version, Morris seems to present himself round peg in a square hole who really didn't like Princeton, he doesn't seem to have like Berkeley much better, and who was involved in an adversarial relationship with his advisor because Morris wasn't doing his work. In the second he seems much more the innocent victim whose keen insight into a fundamental flaw in Kuhn's argument led to an ashtray flinging.

While I am willing to believe the worst about nearly everyone and so wouldn't say that the ashtray couldn't have been flung, it does seem like the narrative has evolved, as is their wont. More, in a note to the current version, aknowledges this when he writes that

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

It's always helpful when dealing with facts, evidence, and argument to weigh a source's value. As I mentioned, oral histories are slippery bits of evidence because of the problem of their truth across all possible versions.