Reviewing Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics for the Wall Street Journal, I had a strange moment of deja-vu. Writing about free will, Hossenfelder wrote:
Let us therefore talk a little more about compatibilism, the philosophy that Immanuel Kant charmingly characterised as a “wretched subterfuge,” that the nineteenth-century philosopher William James put down as a “quagmire of evasion,” and that the contemporary philosopher Wallace Matson called out as “the most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject.”
Checking my 2015 book Freedom Regained, I found that I had written of compatibilism:
Kant called it a “wretched subterfuge”, James a “quagmire of evasion” and Wallace Matson “the most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject to be encountered anywhere in the complete history of sophistry.”
The same three quotes, in the same order. It looked too similar to be a mere coincidence, yet there was no mention of my book in her endnotes.
Even if my book was Hossenfelder’s source, there is no plagiarism here. The words weren’t mine and it is normal practice to cite a quotation with its original source rather than where you came across it. Still, at first glance, it looked like a piece of wholesale borrowing that merited at least an acknowledgment.
That first glance, however, was almost certainly misleading. There is a better explanation for the similarity between mine and Hossenfelder’s sentences. I wasn’t her source: we were both drawing on common sources. If you’re looking for critical quotes about compatibilism, these three are going to pop up all over the place. And if you’re selecting the best ones for a short paragraph, these colourful, expressive lines are the obvious candidates. There is always going to be an overlap between the the historical examples writers choose and every now and again it will be a perfect one, even down to the order they come in.
I have been primed to be careful before calling out plagiarism since I was the victim of such a complaint many years ago. Someone thought that my book of thought experiments, The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, was a rip-off of theirs. It was a totally absurd claim and the only evidence my accuser had was that both books had a 100-or-so entry format and that many of these covered the same philosophical source material. Neither similarity is at all mysterious. Thousands of books every year take the 50/99/100/101 entries format and if you’re writing introductory philosophy, there are many classic arguments you are bound to include, such as Descartes’s Demon, Plato’s Ring of Gyges, Mill’s liberty principle, and so on. Once again, it wasn’t that I had copied someone else, but that we had both fallen back on the same old tried and tested raw material.
It seems we have a tendency to believe that if someone says or does the same thing as someone else before them, they must have copied them in some way. Call it the fallacy of precedence. My favourite example is the observation that Hume’s ideas about the self are remarkably similar to those of the Buddha’s. This has led some to speculate that he had read about Buddhist ideas, perhaps via the Jesuit monks he met in La Flèche, some of whom had been missionaries in Asia. (Alison Gopnik wrote a brilliant essay for The Atlantic exploring this idea.) It’s possible, of course. But it could also be the case that if you get two very smart and attentive people to think about the same thing, they are likely to draw the same conclusions. There are only so many ways of conceiving the self and it is unlikely that the true one would only have occurred to one man in ancient India.
The sobering reason so many people say similar things is not usually that they copy each other but that being original is really difficult. Often, it’s not always desirable either. When writing about certain issues, you owe it to the reader to give them the most important arguments and information, and that means repeating what others have previously said. A history of twentieth century popular music that leaves out the Beatles is not refreshingly original but gratuitously iconoclastic.
How then can we be original enough to not sound stale or repetitive? I think finding the right degree of originality requires distinguishing between what is familiar but can’t be left out and what is constantly recycled without necessity. This isn’t easy. For example, in Freedom Regained, I used story of railroad worker Phineas Gage, whose personality dramatically changed after a large iron rod was driven through his skull. It’s a classic psychology case study for good reason, but since I wrote the book, every time I have come across it being used yet again I regret choosing it myself. The key point about how brain function determines behaviour could have been made with any number of other examples, and I had settled on the most obvious too easily, without realising it was already tired, or even asking myself if it might be.
One of the most difficult challenges for originality concerns form. I’m getting tired of the fashion for non-fiction writing to be very “authored”. For example, whereas a book on a building like Hagia Sophia used to be all factual and objective, today it would most likely include a lot about the author’s own experience of visiting it, talking to experts and so on. Phrases like “I had to find out…” or “I needed to see for myself…” would abound. Many books in this style are very good and I’ve done a certain amount of such writing myself. But I think it’s become over-used and clichéd. It’s not about you! I scream at the page. (And at the screen: documentary makers love this approach too.)
The problem is that the viable alternatives are no more original. There are only a small number of standard forms for non-fiction writing for good reason: they work. Experiments in new forms often fall flat and require writers of rare talent to pull them off. The same is true of popular music. You could say that the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle eight/chorus structure is a cliché but for many songs it’s ideal. Many play with minor variations, such as starting with the chorus, but if you totally dismantle the structure you don’t get better pop – you get experimental music that just isn’t pop at all.
Creative people want to be original but our scope for radical originality is quite small. The raw materials of information and arguments as well as the forms we use constrain us. Very few can rip up the rule book completely and on closer examination even they are usually building on what has come before. Bebop may have turned jazz upside-down but it could never have happened if there weren’t a musical style to turn.
But before despairing about the impossibility of doing something truly different, perhaps we should be reassured that a lot of originality can be found in the details. Think about how James Brown invented funk. Most of what his band played was entirely continuous with soul, gospel and rhythm and blues. But he realised that by putting the stress of the beat on the first note of the bar—“on the one”—the feel of the music completely changed.
Of course, most tweaks are not this transformational. Still, we can often stop things becoming tired simply by not repeating what doesn’t need to be repeated or trying to change some of things everyone assumes can’t or shouldn’t be changed. Originality is rarely about big ideas and is more often found in little innovations. I’m surely not first person to have said that, and that doesn’t mean I stole the thought from someone else.
News
I’m resuming the supporters’ only online Cafe Philosophique discussions on 25 September at 8pm UK time. I’ll be facilitating a philosophical conversation on a subject suggested by participants. Some join in, others just listen in: all are equally welcome. If you are a supporter or become one, just let me know your suggestions well in advance. Supporters also get access to some exclusive content and offers from just £5 per month. There are currently 39 supporter-exclusive items on my website with more to come.
I’ve written a long piece on the ethics of second home ownership for the FT Weekend.
I’ve also been busy reviewing. The review of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder mentioned above can be read at the Wall Street Journal. Then there’s Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal by Norwegian chef Andreas Viestad, for the FT Weekend. Finally, there’s Losing Ourselves: Learning to live without a self by Jay L. Garfield behind the TLS paywall. Supporters can read the full unedited version here.
I appeared on The Prospect Podcast talking with science writer Philip Ball and host Sameer Rahim about AI.
I’ll be taking part in a couple of debates at the How The Light Gets In London Festival 17/18 September. I’m also chairing a session at the Values and Virtues for a Challenging World public philosophy day in Cardiff on Wednesday 20 September. Other events are coming up – stay subscribed to find out more in due course.
My last duty as Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy will be to chair the annual London lecture, delivered this year by the excellent Linda Martín Alcoff on “The Return of Cultural Racism” at the LSE on Friday 30 Sep at 18:30. It’s free but you need to register here.
On my radar
The BBC World Service’s The Compass mini series on “Green Energy: Some Inconvenient Truths” is well worth a listen. It’s not tediously debunking but it gets into some tricky issues.
Having previously enthusiastically recommend Matthew Sneyd’s Sideways I have to confess that it peaked in series one and although is still pretty good it’s no longer consistently rave-worthy. From the latest series, the episode on deception in sport, Fooling the Opposition, is a real standout.
You’re probably already familiar with the story about how big tobacco buried and distorted evidence linking smoking with lung cancer and heart disease. Still, Tobacco and Me from BBC Radio Four tells the story very well.
Having already seen Viktor Kossakovsky’s narrator-free black and white arthouse documentary Gunda about the eponymous pig, I recently saw Andrea Arnold’s narrator-free technicolour arthouse documentary Cow about the titular beast, Luna. Whereas Gunda lived in a pleasant, open farm, Luna’s life was on a more industrial one. I would have liked some context and explanation about what was being done and why. The picture we end up with is of a life that is dull but not dreadful, except when Luna is separated from her calves. It presents the reality of modern farming but I think it encourages us to project however we feel about in onto what we see without informing us about how we should best understand it. I’d be interested to know what others think.
That’s it for now. Remember that if you buy books online, you can avoid the tax-dodging giant and buy through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.