“The Ashtray Argument”

Meaning that when someone says something you don’t like, you throw an ashtray at their head.

The concept comes from THIS INTERESTING PIECE in the NY Times by filmmaker Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line” et al.). The person who allegedly threw the ashtray at his head was none other than Thomas Kuhn. The story also contains an interesting anecdote about Kuhn “forbidding” Morris to attend Saul Kripke’s 1972 Princeton repeat of the Naming and Necessity lectures. (Funny, I don’t find Kuhn and Kripke incompatible, but it’s my interpretation of Kuhn that’s quite a bit different from the usual one.)

I’d never heard of Kuhn being such a hothead, but he doesn’t come off well in this story.

The ashtray video at the top of the story is absolutely hilarious, no doubt filmed by Morris himself since it looks exactly like something he’d do in one of his documentaries.

Whoa, I just read what he’s quoted as saying about Philosophy at Berkeley, where he went after Kuhn forced him out of History of Science at Princeton:

“He left Princeton in 1972, enrolling at Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in philosophy. At Berkeley Morris once again found that he was not well-suited to his subject. ‘Berkeley was just a world of pedants. It was truly shocking. I spent two or three years in the philosophy program. I have very bad feelings about it,’ he later said.”