Words and worlds

Heroes and villains – Kripke vs Kuhn

By Joel Isaac

“Atlas Coelestis Seu Harmonia Macrocosmica” by Andreas Cellarius, 1661|© Nir Alon/Alamy
November 2, 2018
Read this issue
IN THIS REVIEW
THE ASHTRAY
Or The Man who Denied Reality
192pp. University of Chicago Press. £22.50 (US $30).
Errol Morris
As its name suggests, the town of Dartmouth in Devon lies on an estuary where the River
Dart empties into the English Channel. The Dart estuary is a large, narrow ria – a drowned
river. As a result, Dartmouth has long been an attractive deep-water port. In the twelfth
century, fodder for the Crusades boarded ships in Dartmouth. The Mayflower docked briefly
in its harbour on its journey to North America. American GIs piled into transport vessels
there bound for the beaches of Normandy. For many years, the town has been home to the
Royal Navy’s officer training school.
In this potted biography of Dartmouth, I have presumably succeeded in referring to a place in
the real world. But how did I do that? How exactly does “Dartmouth” refer to Dartmouth?
This is, of course, an elementary question in semantics and the philosophy of language, but,
as Errol Morris points out in his charming, maddening new book, it is an issue that has
divided philosophers over the past half-century. One theory, which Morris emphatically
rejects, is that the reference of proper names is fixed by the descriptions or properties we
associate with them. For example, “Dartmouth” denotes whatever has properties such as
lying at the mouth of the River Dart, being the home of the Britannia Royal Naval College,
and so on. This so-called descriptive theory of names is associated with Bertrand Russell
and the German logician Gottlob Frege.
In the 1960s and 70s, a number of philosophers of language spotted some problems with
the descriptive theory. What happens, they asked, when the connotations of a word change
in the light of new knowledge? If descriptions determine reference, then the reference of a
word must change when the descriptions or connotations associated with it change. We
often learn that an attribute we thought essential to an object rested on a mistaken belief.
Take the belief that one of the essential attributes of the celestial body we call “the Sun” is
that it revolves around Earth. Many educated Europeans once believed this. When, after
Copernicus, astronomers rejected the earlier, erroneous description, did the Sun to which
they had earlier been referring – the Sun answering to the description “celestial body that
revolves around Earth” – no longer exist? Had pre-Copernican users of the term “the Sun”
never actually succeeded in referring to the Sun? Or consider Dartmouth. If the river
suddenly shifted course, such that the town was no longer at the mouth of the Dart, must we
say that it is no longer Dartmouth?
The intuitive answer to this last question is no. Surely we are talking about the same thing all
along, even if our beliefs about it change. When the descriptivist makes our ability to refer to
things turn on our ability to correctly attribute properties to them, we make reference
vulnerable to beliefs and meanings – slippery, mental stuff. Our descriptions of things are,
quite obviously, mutable, either when we revise our beliefs in the light of evidence, or when
the world itself changes. Does it follow that the world to which we refer – the world out there,
beyond our conceptualization of it – is mutable too? Is reality no more and no less solid than
the fragile, endlessly rewoven threads that connect our descriptions to the world?
Morris is deeply worried about this problem. The descriptive theory, as he sees it, paves the
way to relativism. Russell and Frege did not follow the implications of their theory all the way
to a relativistic view, but it was only a matter of time until someone did. That someone,
Morris claims, was the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn is famous,
above all, for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was one of the most
widely cited and bestselling works of philosophy, in any language, of the twentieth century.
(A quarter of a century after its publication in 1962, it had sold almost 650,000 copies.) Kuhn
understood that modern science, with its emphasis on experimentation and hypothesis-
testing, was constantly revising our descriptions of the world. But if the meanings of scientific
terms – terms like motion, mass and force – were being often radically revised, was the
world to which they referred changing, too?
Notoriously, Kuhn bit the bullet: he held that during a scientific revolution not just the
meanings of words but also the world to which they referred changed. “The very ease and
rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old
instruments”, he wrote, “may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived
in a different world.” The realignment of word and world rendered theories on either side of
the revolutionary divide not just different, such that the later theory supplemented or
corrected the earlier one, but “incommensurable”. For Kuhn, scientific development was not
a process of linear, incremental accumulation of knowledge; it unfolded in revolutionary
leaps. The beliefs scientists held about the phenomena they studied were not tested and
revised, piece by piece; rather, they were rooted in a single “paradigm” or model of how to
frame and solve puzzles in the field. During a scientific revolution, one paradigm was
substituted for another, and with it a whole set of mutually supporting beliefs and definitions
was replaced with another.
Why does Morris, one of the most creative documentary filmmakers around, care about any
of this? It would appear that Morris has two answers to this question – answers, that, despite
his attempt to make them complementary, render his book less of a revelation than his films
tend to be. One turns on a matter of principle: if Kuhn is right, Morris insists, many of us
hoping to grasp the truth must be deluding ourselves. Our knowledge of the world would be
relative to our historically formed conceptual scheme. In films such as The Thin Blue Line,
The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, Morris deployed a detective’s skills to uncover
difficult, uncomfortable, or hidden truths about his subjects. Morris’s recounting of the murder
of a Dallas police officer in The Thin Blue Line helped to overturn the conviction of the man
wrongly charged with the killing, who had been, at one point, three days from execution. No
wonder he looks askance at Kuhn’s notion of paradigm-relative knowledge. Morris is happy
to press the point:
When I was investigating the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer, and the
prosecution and conviction of Randall Dale Adams for that murder, would it have made
sense to describe my viewpoint as one paradigm and the viewpoint of the Dallas police as
another? Surely, we had different ways of looking at the evidence, different interpretations of
the eyewitness testimony, different ways of looking at the crime. Suppose someone said,
there’s no way of comparing these two paradigms. They’re incommensurable. Or, even if
they can be compared, you can’t say one is true and the other false. Or even that one is
more true than the other. There is no absolute truth.
A Kuhnian, in other words, could never have exonerated Robert Dale Adams. Indeed,
Kuhn’s relativism gives one no response to “members of the Trump administration” who
“have denied the relevance of truth and suggested there are such things as ‘alternative facts’
– in short, that history is up for grabs and can be defined by those in power”. As an
alternative to Kuhn’s supposed relativism, Morris champions “investigative realism”, which
boils down to the claim that “there is a real world out there – a world of history and science –
and we can come to know it”.
To the outsider, it might appear that Morris is crossing the road to pick a fight. After all,
Kuhn’s arguments about theory change were made to handle the rather unique conditions of
knowledge-production in the sciences. A criminal investigation must bear at best only a weak
resemblance to the process of a chemist testing for the presence of oxygen. Investigators
want to know what happened in a particular case: who did what, who knew what, where the
principals were when, and so on. Scientists want knowledge of laws, not particulars. A law
will say something like: this kind of thing, under the same circumstances, will (tend to)
behave in this way. This kind of thinking requires a knack for generalization and
classification, of a sort that Kuhn, not implausibly, argued was taught to scientists through
their exposure to model puzzle-solutions. The PI’s search for particulars, by contrast, seems
more an art than a science. They need heuristics and rules of thumb, not general laws.
Morris’s investigative realism is not a rebuttal of Kuhn’s theory of science. This brings us to
Morris’s second reason for taking issue with Kuhn and the people whom he disparagingly
calls the “post-Kuhnians”.
In the early 1970s Morris studied briefly with Kuhn in graduate school at Princeton. It did not
go well. Morris committed the mortal sin of questioning the very idea of incommensurability.
The two men’s simmering dislike of one another came to the boil over their differing views on
how to interpret Maxwell’s theory of the displacement current. Morris voiced his doubts about
incommensurability, asking Kuhn “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of
science possible? Wouldn’t we merely be interpreting the past in the light of the present?
Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us . . . . except for someone who imagines himself to be
a God?” Kuhn muttered to himself (twice!) “He’s trying to kill me”. Then he threw an ashtray
in Morris’s direction.
Soon after this incident, Kuhn kicked Morris out of the university. Morris has not let bygones
be bygones. He admits the book is really a “vendetta”, but only (he tells us) because he finds
Kuhn’s theory “deeply disturbing, even pernicious”. Kuhn, as Morris sees things, was not just
misguided, but prone to violent and intolerant outbursts, and his views have helped erode
our belief in objective truth and rationality.
If Kuhn is the villain of Morris’s tale, Saul Kripke is its hero. It was at Kuhn’s Princeton that
Kripke attacked the descriptive theory of reference in lectures in the 1970s. Kripke’s
message, as Morris received it, was that the referential function of proper names and some
common nouns did not depend on descriptions. In making this argument, Kripke was taking
a lead from John Stuart Mill. Mill was happy to acknowledge that Dartmouth was so-called
because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart. But it did not follow that the possibility of
referring correctly to Dartmouth required that the town “be situated at the mouth of the Dart.
If sand should choke up the mouth of the river, or an earthquake change its course, and
remove it to a distance from the town, the name of the town would not necessarily be
changed”. Mill’s conclusion was that “proper names are attached to the objects themselves,
and are not dependent on the continuance of any attribute of the object”. Reference need
have nothing to do with description. It could be determined instead by a simple public act of
naming – a baptism – in which a thing is associated with a word; this referential relation was
preserved when the association was passed on by speakers of a language, one to another.
Beliefs about the object could change, on this “causal theory”, but reference would not.
Morris likes Kripke’s approach, because it implies that we “can grab ahold” of an object of
reference “independent of any belief or theory” we have about it: “as Mill argued, names are
attached to things themselves”. The causal theory of reference allows us to tell a historical
story about how names become attached, limpet-like, to things. It stops us sifting endlessly
through descriptions to guide us towards the contact point where word latches onto object.
I wonder how much of a balm to relativist worries the causal theory of reference can be.
Many philosophers of science have questioned the efficacy of Kripke’s philosophy of
language in the case of theoretical terms. Insofar as these denote unobservable entities, or
phenomena discernible only under laboratory conditions, it seems unlikely that the historical
chain theory, reaching from a public act of naming to current usage, will settle all disputes
about the phenomena to which a scientific term refers. The causal theory of reference has
been stretched from proper names to common nouns, but it is not at all obvious how much
further it can go in accounting for the referential capacity of scientific language, let alone
other forms of speech. And it’s worth pointing out that Kripke never claimed that it could.
There are not, pace Morris, straightforward heroes and villains in this story: realists and bad-
faith relativists. Morris doesn’t bother with the scholarly details, and even expresses
impatience with those who would bring out the nuances of Kuhn’s position, and the
subsequent commentary it has elicited. The fact remains that the complexities of the debate
surrounding these issues resist being broken down into ailment (Kuhnian relativism) and
remedy (Kripkean realism). Settling accounts with Thomas Kuhn is unlikely to help us much
with fake news and democratic decay.
Suppose that we take Morris at his word, and try to reassure ourselves that we can cling to
Dartmouth through an unmediated relation of reference. When the seas rise, in ten years or
a thousand, Dartmouth will be submerged, as the old river valley was before it. If the
referential chain is preserved, “Dartmouth” will still refer to Dartmouth, beneath the waves.
For our descendants, living in that world, what comfort can this semantic guarantee provide?
Not very much, I think. It is a precondition of successful communication that we assume a
world in common. But this assumption does little to dictate how truthful or intelligent or
resolute we are in our political and moral lives. I doubt that the correct semantic theory –
whatever it may be – will help us with these matters.