Banville and Fodor on Frayn
It’s amusing to compare John Banville’s review of Michael Frayn’s The Human Touch with that of Jerry Fodor. Frayn is a novelist with a philosophical background, Banville is a novelist, Fodor is a philosopher.
Banville is keen.
In his opening “Prospectus” he modestly insists that, although he has studied philosophy, his book is not an attempt to do philosophy – “I shouldn’t have the courage to make any such claim” – but then goes on to take a sly dig at the extreme specialisation and technicality of much of modern-day philosophical research…From his acquaintance with philosophy and his readings in the work of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr…he has got hold of a simple fact about the world, which is its indeterminacy. What you see is not what you get, and Frayn is here to tell us how it is not…But Frayn is concerned with far more than physics. In his vast overview of this anomalous universe in which we find ourselves thrown, he takes a good-humoured crack at a broad range of our certainties, from the laws of nature – or “the laws of nature” – through the chimera of free will, the dubious status of truth and the ambiguousness of language, to, at the close, the question of the self itself. The breadth of his reading is awesome and he is fearless in interpreting, and in some cases attacking, the philosophical or scientific dogmas of this or that revered savant. Everywhere he is eminently sensible, especially when he is making nonsense of our illusory certainties.
Fodor not so much.
For one thing, it’s clear at a glance that this is no joke; it’s a book of philosophy, not a book on philosophy, and I can’t imagine an author who is more in earnest. It’s also clear that the thing is much too long. These days nobody writes philosophy in chunks of four hundred pages (plus notes). Partly that’s just fashion; partly it’s tenure politics; but mostly it’s because the problems philosophers work on have turned out to be much more subtle than we used to suppose them, and much more idiosyncratic. You have to do them one at a time, and the progress you make is generally inch by inch…Frayn, however, doesn’t approve of all that picking of nits…the range of issues Frayn takes on is staggering…And these topics are not treated narrowly: one gets a whole spectrum, from Frayn on quantum mechanics to Frayn on the psychology of perception, to Frayn on the ontology of numbers, to Frayn on Chomskian linguistics, to Frayn on personal identity, to Frayn on the phenomenology of dreaming, with many, many intermediate stops. Could anybody conceivably have views worth hearing on all those topics?…The basic idea is to undermine the authority of science (and, indeed, the authority of common sense) by launching a general attack on the notions of truth and knowledge. What a Copernican astronomy taketh away, a relativist epistemology giveth back…And finally, with a flourish: ‘The story is the paradigm. Factual statements are specialised derivatives of fictitious ones.’
To which Fodor replies, crisply, ‘Piffle.’ In between, where all those elipses are, he says why it’s piffle, but I didn’t need all that to illustrate the difference in tone. Wondering awe from the novelist, amused irritation from the philosopher. There’s making nonsense of our illusory certainties for you.
Ophelia,
I can’t say that I understand why Banville enjoys Frayn so much, since I don’t think it has much to do with being a novelist or not. To my mind (no irony intended), it seems more a case of the self-satisfaction of thinking the world revolves around ourselves, which is perhaps more common among artists and academics than others (being both an artist and an academic, I can confirm that this is my experience of both types). As I mentioned to Norm Geras in an email a few weeks ago, all of this Frayn business, and really all of the relativist literary theory of the last fifty years, seems like warmed-over Paterism to me — take a look back at the conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance and see if you disagree.
As to relativism and Frayn himself, I’d say that John Ruskin had the appropriate, if deist, response back in 1856, in his essay “On The Pathetic Fallacy” (available at http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/ if you’re curious), when he wrote that: “Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at once, be it observed that the word ‘ Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary.
In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness if you don’t look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And, therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.”
Thanks for providing the good reading.
David
It’s invariably a bad sign when someone starts quoting Bohr on quantum mechanics. As Einstein noted, Bohr thought very clearly, wrote obscurely and considered himself a mystic. (The last was a typical piece of Einsteinian mischief).
Feynman tells the story of presenting an unfinished version of his famous diagrams to an audience including Bohr and Einstein. When Feynman finished, Bohr took the stage and rubbished the work on the grounds that it violated indeterminacy, while Einstein commented that it might be fruitful. That Bohr could be so wrong about what has become the essential tool of quantum theories shows suggests his philosophizing should be ignored in its entirety as being misleading.
[That Bohr could be so wrong about what has become the essential tool of quantum theories shows suggests his philosophizing should be ignored in its entirety as being misleading.]
what? one might as well say “because Goedel couldn’t bake a decent strudel we should ignore his mathematics”.
btw, the answer to Fodor’s rhetorical question:
[Could anybody conceivably have views worth hearing on all those topics?]
is surely “William James”. and probably WVO Quine too.
I’ve shuffled through the bits on philosophy of mathematics in the Frayn book in Waterstones and they looked pretty good; it’s a kind of Wittgensteinian constructivism that I’ve always found appealing but never really believed. I note that Fodor quotes Frayn’s view in a long list of things he regards as obviously ridiculous but then chickens out of actually saying it’s “obvious” that numbers would exist if we weren’t meant to count them. The fact that a) there are very strong reasons for believing that mathematical entities have an objective existence and b) there are very strong reasons for believing that mathematical entities depend on our recognising them is quite a problem for Fodor’s view and quite congenial to Frayn’s.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never known a physicist who thought that “Copenhagen” wasn’t brilliant, and entirely accurate on the quantum mechanics. I haven’t read the whole Frayn book and don’t propose to but Fodor’s review looks very much as if he is fighting a proxy war against John Bennett.
‘is surely “William James”.’
Fodor notes (approvingly) that Frayn quotes WJ a lot. But I think in context he meant ‘Could anybody conceivably have views worth hearing on all those topics now?’ I wonder if he thinks WJ would now.
That was part of my point in the post – at least the possibility of misplaced professional arrogance. I take both Banville and Fodor to be writing from within the trade, as it were, and I find the resulting contrast quite amusing.
That was why I mentioned the novelist aspect, David – because Frayn has a foot in both camps, so I liked the contrasting reactions from each. Thanks for the Ruskin passage!
dsquared:
it was bohr’s philosophizing that led him astray on the physics, so that he made a complete ass of himself on what his behaviour in the instance, as elsewhere, showed him to consider to be his home turf. Therefore your analogy fails.
“I’ve never known a physicist who thought that “Copenhagen” wasn’t brilliant” just shows that physicists should stick to their knitting and not mkae philosophical fools of themselves.
Besides, Gödel made a brilliant strudel. Einstein always said if Mileva had made a strudel like that he would have shared his Nobel prize with her.
I thought it was pretty ridiculous when people on this blog decided to hand out theology lessons, but the idea that we are now in a position to say “hahaha Niels Bohr made an ass of himself on the physics” is surely the chilly limit of ludicrous. In actual fact, the reification of Feynman diagrams is an incredibly controversial matter in quantum physics and since the practical consequence of their adoption in theoretical physics has been the long march of string theory, it is not at all obvious that Bohr and Oppenheimer were wrong.
“the reification of Feynman diagrams” has nothing to do with it. It’s about physics alone, not the philosophy behind it.
Feynman was trying to solve the biggest problem in quantum physics of his time. We lacked the tools to perform all sorts of necessary calculations in theories like Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). A physics theory that cannot produce numbers is next to useless so when a relatively unheard-of young physicist proposes a solution then he gets 3 legends in the audience – Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Einstein.
We can debate here the ins and outs of the appropriate philosophical interpretation of quantum phenomena till we are all sick of it, but we do not have to. This story allows us to put something to the test: on one side Bohr and Pauli are saying that the diagrams are bad physics while Einstein is claiming that they might prove useful. (At the time Feynman was still working out all the details and so was unable to present the final version).
Einstein was right and Bohr/Pauli wrong – the diagrams are brilliant physics and got Feynman his Nobel prize.
So why were Bohr/Pauli wrong about the physics? Either the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong or else they applied it incorrectly. Either way, Bohr’s pronouncements on the philosophy of quantum phenomena are not reliable since they led even him astray.
The “Copenhagen interpretation” may mathematically, produce correct answers, but the philosophical interpretation put upon it, especially by popularising writers is dead wrong.
The famous Young double-slit experiment has been repeated several times recently, with carefully-released single photons.
Each photon goes through ONE SLIT.
After about 1000 – 2000 photons have been released, a wave pattern starts to appear, instead of the apparently random single-slit pattern when a small number of particles have been loosed.
It is clear that there is some underlying statistical rule or law, governing the paths taken, at a deeper level than that presently understood.
This is (in my opinion only(?)) one of the great present problems of fundamental Physics.
Over to those who are more current, and up-to-date, and presently practicing in the field.