Fred Dretske: A Reminiscence

Fred Dretske was one of the most elegant men I knew. I became friends with him at a conference that he was attending together with his friend Berent Enç. Both could always make you laugh, but first they’d make you feel wanted and at home. Fred had a quick and intimate smile, the kind of smile that made you think he liked you. And he probably did. It was his way to see, and perhaps more remarkably, to look at and attend to, the best in everything and everybody. I remember his gestures and way of talking: simple, economical; he’d smile a lot but laugh much less often. He had the look of being comfortable in his body in the way that athletes are, but as far as I know, he wasn’t an athlete.

His critical remarks were always understated: you’d say something, and he’d say “You mean . . . ?” and it would be clear he’d understood, but didn’t agree. Many people talk about discussing some point with Fred for hours on end. With me, it wasn’t like that. It’d be a word here and a word there, and he’d get it across how he was thinking about something. I was usually able to take it from there. In my 2005 book, I was quite critical of occasions when he didn’t seem to distinguish between information-contained and information-extracted. When we talked about it, he simply smiled. I asked why he hadn’t mentioned the point in his review of my book. He smiled some more. I guess he thought I had him and it wrong. I thought a lot about how. Later, some of the experts in the field taught me some of the advanced moves, and maybe I would have written Chapter 3 of my book somewhat differently if I had known them. Fred, however, didn’t think that it was his role to teach me. He would have thought it overly forward.

Fred’s book Knowledge and the Flow of Information is one of the two or three most important works on perceptual knowledge in the last fifty years or so. Some philosophical works are argumentative—forcefully arguing for a philosophical thesis. Such works are immediately controversial. They expand and enrich the field, but are forever debated. In epistemology, externalism and contextualism are programs of this sort.

KFI falls into another category: books that create new structures.

These books are transformative: they offer apparatus that enable us to categorize familiar phenomena in new ways. It seems beside the point to debate them; the point is more to understand and internalize them. There are debatable parts of KFI: chapter 6, on sensation and perception, is a tremendously rich application of information theory to the problem. There is much to contest in this chapter. But like the rest of the book, it changes your approach. You can contest the conclusions, but you cannot escape the way that the problems are formulated.  It is canonical.

I’ll miss Fred. I will never have another Martini with him at his ritual hour of 6 pm. I will never again be the butt of his gentle teasing. He wasn’t a big part of my life, but he was a part of it that I valued, and will not be replaced.