Hot Pokers and Ashtrays

|Peter Boettke|

There is a famous story in philosophy where during a seminar at Cambridge, Wittgenstein grabbed the poker from the fire place and raised it in a threatening fashion to Popper.

Now we learn in the NYT about how Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at a graduate student, and then forced that student out of graduate school.

Wittgenstein's temper is well captured in a variety of reports, e.g., the biography by Monk.  But I had never heard of Kuhn's temper before.   Had you heard of Kuhn losing his head before?

Comments

[twitter.com/AFG85]

I had heard that Kuhn and Popper (ironically) got into it pretty seriously at one point, though I don't know the details.

[Richard Ebeling]

If this story about Kuhn is true, it may require a paradigm shift!

Richard Ebeling

[Lee Kelly]

Now we learn what Kuhn really meant by "incommensurable". When it is impossible to resolve our differences with mutual criticism and rational discussion, then what better way to settle a dispute but with ashtrays at dawn?

[Stewart]

If you've ever wondered why Austrians tend to write thousand page treatises, now you know! :P

[Mario Rizzo]

Based on the linked piece, I think that the graduate student had a good point against Kuhn. Perhaps Kuhn perceived that. In any event, Kuhn turns out to have been something of a passing fad -- or, perhaps, the philosophy of science "paradigm" just shifted.

[Greg Ransom]

Anyone heard any good Kripke stories?

I've heard some doozies.

[Greg Ransom]

The Kuhn "fad" outside of the history and philosophy of science was nothing to be proud of, and can't be blamed on Kuhn.

Much of Kuhn's work has to be considered a permanent achievement.

Kuhn brought Wittgenstein's insight about learning significance through training and engagement in open ended patterns of practice to the philosophy of science -- going beyond the post-positivist developments of Toulmin and Hanson.

The formal metric bias of academia may lead publish or perish academic to have contempt for such insights, but I take that to be interest driven faddism of the most self evident kind.

[Greg Ransom]

I noticed one difference.

The poker story had witnesses.

This one didn't.

[Rafe Champion]

Tell us some Kripke stories Greg! It is not really off topic because Kripe was an important part of the story about Kuhn.

In fairness to Wittgenstein, he did not threaten Popper with the poker, he was just fiddling with it, and Popper made a joke and a point at the same time (using poke-waving as an example of an action that would be precluded by a moral rule that outlawed threatening people with pokers). I don't really want to be fair to Wittgenstein, who can be held responsible for promoting two equally unhelpful dead ends in philosophy.

Likewise, when Wittgenstein banged the door on the way out, it is only fair to say that this was standard procedure.

[Greg Ransom]

Kripke did to Wittgenstein's private language argument what Lerner and Lange did to Mises & Hayek's socialist calculation argument -- in effect he turned it on it's head caating the problem from a god's eye view made up of logical givens. Quite a trick.

I've seen a Kripke school philosopher of language grapple with the Wittgensteinian "social" view of language, and eventually be won over to some version of it -- see Howard Wettstein's _The Magic Prism_.

So it is not impossible to go from Kripke to Kuhn (Wettstein learned most of his Wittgenstein in reading groups with a Kuhnian/Wittgensteinian philosopher of science and his students).

One Kripke story I've heard involves a home cooked kosher meal -- prepared according to Kripke's written instructions -- rejected in favor of a can of tuna.

[Wonks Anonymous]

This is the closest think to a Kripke story I've ever heard:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000190.html