Errol Morris Refutes It Thus

Historically it was thought that the cause of something (the origin) must share properties with the event caused (the product). This is just a false assertion. Today we understand "emergence" in which properties arise in aggregate products that are not present in their constituent origins.

Without that every argument of the form "experience is a closed system" fails: the causal origin of experience does not "need" to be experience.

Light strikes a surface, it collides with your eye, your nervous system enters a state known as "visual perception" and that has properties not present in any prior step (ie., it feels like something). These properties emerge out of the whole interaction of the system, and are not present within any mere piece of it.

Idealism is very much an epistemological virus, a metaphysical conspiracy theory, that will quickly run a wildefire through your whole belief system with its plausible soundbites. "From experience, only experience, surely?!" No.

Berekely's Master Argument is the beginning of a line of "argument by amazement at how cool it all sounds" that ends up in Heidegger. Justified by the constant refrain that the experience is an epistemically closed system, a genetic fallacy whose plausibility is only ever achieved through rhetorically pleasing soundbites.

Would physics as a discipline exist in its current form without thinkers like Aristotle? That’s the more important question for me.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826

Ironically, given the fact that Morris and Weinberg both prize clarity of thought, I think they are talking at cross purposes when they critique historians of science and are not properly defining their terms.

Take this quote from the OP for instance:

"While studying at Princeton, Morris soon learned that Kuhn held in particular contempt any view of science as a triumphal procession toward a more accurate description of the universe and how it works, a view called 'Whiggishness,' from British politics. The ultimate mouthpiece of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggish position in The Ashtray is an unnamed Harvard graduate student who insists that a new paradigm is not necessarily better than the old one, 'just different.'"

But Butterfield and other critics of the so-called "Whig" school of history are not contesting the proposition that we now understand the natural world better than a cave man (or a Hellenistic Greek) did. (They're also not relativists, incidentally). Instead, they're critiquing the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable.

In other words, there is an underlying physical reality that sets constraints on what we can know and how we know it. But within those constraints there are innumerable potential branching paths. A Whiggish take on history of science might say, for instance, that it was inevitable that the first moon landing would be achieved by a nation with Enlightenment values. A non-Whig interpretation is not saying that the moon doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't care about the Apollo program. It's pointing out that the specific course taken by our timeline of history of science is not an inevitability. It could have been otherwise.

The short version is that any theory of observations (i.e., scientific theory) necessarily defines the observational process and therefore the observations themselves, so that it is impossible to separate an explanation from its explanandum. What's relativist about this is that the very thing you are explaining by the theory is implicit in the theory, so that what you have are a series of paradigms or theories that replace one after the other.

This isn't to say that we don't predict things better, or even that there is no reality separate from the theory, only that it doesn't matter at some level.

All of this too is sort of distinct from what Kuhn is remembered for, which is the social nature of science, which is all too real.

Scientists are often in denial about these social factors, which is naive at best and dangerous at worst. Humans are not conduits of God; they are imperfect machines that are part of the system they are studying.

My sense is that Morris (who I respect immensely for his work) is kind of fighting a strawman argument whose depths he doesn't entirely understand, because of some personal conflict he hasn't come to terms with (ironically, given the nature of what he is arguing against).