Filmmaker Errol Morris offers his perspective on
the world and his powerful belief in the necessity of
truth. In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an
ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result. Â At the
time, Morris was a graduate student. Now we know him as one of the
most celebrated and restlessly probing filmmakers of our time, the
creator of such classics of documentary investigation as The Thin
Blue Line and The Fog of War. Kuhn, meanwhile, was—and,
posthumously, remains—a star in his field, the author of The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a landmark book that has sold
well over a million copies and introduced the concept of
“paradigm shifts” to the larger culture. And Morris thought the
idea was bunk.  The Ashtray tells why—and in doing so, it
makes a powerful case for Morris’s way of viewing the world, and
the centrality to that view of a fundamental conception of the
necessity of truth. “For me,” Morris writes, “truth is about
the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence
idea of truth.” He has no patience for philosophical systems that
aim for internal coherence and disdain the world itself. Morris is
after bigger game: he wants to establish as clearly as possible
what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our
actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that
animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara
about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be
slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of
escape through philosophical evasions. Rather, Morris argues
powerfully, it is our duty to do everything we can to establish and
support it. Â In a time when truth feels ever more embattled,
under siege from political lies and virtual lives alike, The
Ashtray is a bracing reminder of its value, delivered by a figure
who has, over decades, uniquely earned our trust through his
commitment to truth. No Morris fan should miss it.
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