To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon for proposing that there is no such thing as a universal one-size-fits-all scientific method:
> Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.
He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered interesting or provocative?"
I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with his orneriness as with his science.
The book’s great value is in dissolving rigid views of “the” scientific method. Feyerabend‘s simple challenge is: if you claim you have a model of the scientific method, I can always find a historical example of someone (Galileo, Einstein, etc.) needing to break the rules of that method to make scientific progress. That’s it.
I think it could have been written in a less provocative and eccentric way. Feyerabend had a certain rhetorical style that tends to get some folks unnecessarily riled up. Rewrite the core argument in a plain and simple way and I agree most working scientists wouldn’t have a whole lot to object to (remember Feyerabend was writing against other Philosophers). Some working scientists have been inspired by the book, though. Here’s a great quote from physicist Lee Smolin:
> What Feyerabend's book said to me was: Look, kid, stop dreaming! Science is not philosophers sitting in clouds. It is a human activity, as complex and problematic as any other. There is no single method to science and no single criterion for who is a good scientist. Good science is whatever works at a particular moment of history to advance our knowledge. And don't bother me with how to define progress — define it any way you like and this is still true.
> From Feyerabend, I learned that progress sometimes requires deep philosophical thinking, but most often it does not. It is mostly furthered by opportunistic people who cut corners, exaggerating what they know and have accomplished. Galileo was one of these; many of his arguments were wrong, and his opponents — the well-educated, philosophically reflective Jesuit astronomers of the time — easily punched holes in his thinking. Nevertheless, he was right and they were wrong.
> What I also learned from Feyerabend is that no a priori argument can tell us what will work in all circumstances. What works to advance science at one moment will be wrong at another. And I learned one more thing from his stories of Galileo: You have to fight for what you believe.
On top of it there is the awful truth that the ‘scientific method’ is not really practiced.
In junior high school I remember getting taught about the scientific method, particularly the use of controls. I wrote 5 papers and didn’t use a control in any of them (it wouldn’t have been appropriate.).
Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t. There was that paper where they measured vitamin C levels of COVID-19 patients but didn’t compare it to a baseline of people who were not sick, which is problematic in many ways.
When they do meta-analysis by the Cochrane methodology they usually throw out at least half of the studies at the beginning because of glaring methodological flaws. Practically it is not much better than anarchy in terms of what gets funded and published.
I'm a physicist, and read AM. It didn't overturn my own thinking about how to do science, but helped me understand my discomfort when non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science.
Over the years I grew uncomfortable with the fact that I could not track down any of his references, e.g., to Aristotle. I don't remember the specific cases any more, but still it was a bit unnerving.
It’s funny because those with a mindset - probably mostly unconscious and deeply engrained - that science (or scientism) is the one true method will feel “trolled” by these ideas and that feeling is apparent in the comments…
When really the intention comes from a different place and requires a slightly more open mind to grok
The fuss is that by refusing to solve the Demarcation Problem, a lot of non-science has to be treated as science. Feyerabend points out that there's ultimately no difference between scientific "hypothesis revision" and pseudoscientific "moving the goalposts".
The astronomers hate being lumped in with the astrologers, and with good reason. Feyerabend points out that it's maddeningly hard to be rigorous about exactly what that reason is. When the astronomers claim "the scientific method", this book shows them that they're wrong, but without suggesting a really good alternative.
Giving $10 billion to the astrologers (the price of the JWST) is not an option. It would be nice to have a method to say why. Ultimately, that's the real controversy: not epistemology, but money.
> He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
He has a lot to do with them. One of the themes in Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting” revolves around the maxim, “there is no passe-partout (a master key that opens all locks).” Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization” is partially about the lack of a single axis of “Reason”, which would presumably be the antonym of a similarly univocal “Madness”.
Yeah. A big part of Against Method just examines proposals for universal scientific methods, and points out cases where they would have failed. Galileo was the major example but IIRC there were several others.
Completely agree, but a second point is incommensurability of ways of knowing.
There's 'science', 'morality', etc. Not all decision are scientific, even if they require scientific knowledge as a factor. Here he aligns with Focualt when discussing power and the urge to use science, or Hayekian scientism, to say there is one true way and the decision should be X.
Its hard to speak of epistemology without mentioning Foucault. He's a great philosopher of the history of knowledge and its preconditions. I have not read Feyerabend (yet) though. But if he's going deep into the history of knowledge, there will be at least some associative closeness if not one in methodology.
Foucault, studied under Georges Caguilhem who was an influential philosopher of sience. Another student of his is Gilbert Simondon, a philospoher of technology who was writing on the process of the individuation of machines. I say this because I sometimes get the impression that some people, especially those educated in the US, have a quite distorted impression of the so called continental tradition.
Also if one was to speak of a certain group of philosophers in France after May 68 like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze (who are actually rather different thinkers), they are commonly reffered to as post-structuralists, not post-modernists. Haven't heared the latter term to often in philosophical debates as in use for people. Of the top of my head I can' t really think of a person that could function as representative of postmodernism as a coherent school of thought, besides maybe Francis Fukuyama. Maybe thats different in US discourse. The term post-modernists always sounds a bit funny to me, like the "Neomarxists" that haunt the plot of Southland Tales.
I think I remember Imre Lakatos (another 20th century philosopher of science) saying that one application of philosophy of science is to determine which 'research programs' should (continue to) be funded.
Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are doing good work. If you apply a method too rigorously, you'll end up rewarding the wrong people.
It's been ages since I read these philosophers but in my mind Feyerabend's position sort of boiled down to 'at the forefront of any specialization only the experts are able to judge which investigations are worth pursuing further'. With the corollary that experts sometimes disagree among themselves.
In the field of software engineering I've encountered several cases where new engineers are onboarded and they promptly decide that the codebase is unmaintainable and should be rewritten from scratch. I usually don't give up on legacy code so easily, but there was one project where I did genuinely held the opinion that rewriting it would have been more efficient than refactoring. It occurred to me, though, that when a software engineer says a particular piece of codebase is crap, there usually is no good way for outsiders to tell whether that's true or not.
Incidentally, Feyerabend's Against Method originated out of a challenge by Lakatos to copublish a book in which they debate various ideas. That's a useful thing to keep in mind when reading Against Method. Later someone did publish a book titled For And Against Method [1], in which writings of both Lakatos and Feyerabend are juxtaposed.
I think ultimately the biggest problem science has is the type of thinking that fuel's things like "Occam's razor". It's the same reason why things like Euclid's 5th Postulate (the Parallel postulate) puzzled so many mathematicians for so many years. It wasn't till the 19th century that non-Euclidean geometries were finally considered, but it seems pretty obvious in hindsight given how rare flat 2d planes actually are in nature
The common metaphor given for Occam's razor is a field with some random dots plotted. Those points are "evidence" and drawing a shape around them is a "theory" or hypothesis. Then a shape that encapsulates those dots is said to be the most preferred theory when compared to something like a rabbit or some other arbitrary shape
But there is an inherent assumption there about what the plane looks like. It's entirely possible that the geometry on which those points of evidence lie actually lends itself to where drawing a rabbit around all those points actually IS the "simplest" assumption
The are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. But there's a fourth category: ideology. The unknown knowns
In my view, it's this 4th category that ultimately dooms science. Science is ultimately cultural and there's no way around that. Our institutional science is always looking at analyzing outwardly: gathering more and more data; but just as important is analyzing inwardly. Being self-critical about our invisible assumptions.
We can never fully absolve ourselves of unknown knowns, but I do believe in a "more perfect" mission. One in which we always accept we're imperfect but working towards a closer vision. But to work towards this, we need to not only analyze the dots, but also the geometries on which we place those dots
YES! "Science is ultimately cultural and there's no way around that."
I think that many people recoil at this idea and just don't want to believe this, but it is the truth. To those individuals I would say do not confuse the map with the territory or perhaps they map making and surveying they also are not the territory.
Procedure is created as the percentage of high functioning workers decreases relative to the amount of work output necessary for the system to survive.
These procedures are for sure stifling. I recently read “From Atomos to Atom” and one of the things that stood out to me was the approach most philosophers who made substantial progress on the atom took: everything is false. To make progress, they started from a position of assuming everything humans knew about this domain was incorrect; they then systematically proved _to themselves_ why each step in human thinking was correct.
I’m starting to wonder if there are two distinct concepts that we’ve conflated in the term “Science.”
One science refers to humanity’s collective constructs, the things we catalogue and teach and reconcile the world with in mass. This is a deeply social philosophy that is based on trust and not personal rigor. The scale of our collective constructs is too massive for any one person to tear apart and prove to themselves, so we substitute trust for rigor - we trust that someone else has been rigorous in generating these constructs.
The other science refers to practicing the generation of those constructs. This is a deeply personal philosophy in which there is no trust. It dictates our personal relationship and understanding of the world we inhabit. Here, science is something we personally practice in developing that understanding. We trust nothing, validate everything, and build up our own understanding in the domain.
With both, the defining trait is that reality is the final arbiter of truth.
To tie it back into business org and startup culture, not everyone in science is working towards paradigm shifts. The processes we have in place for indexing, compiling, and reconciling the constructs of science are likely sufficient. But they’re likely insufficient for generating a paradigm shift.
That being said, I find it unlikely that you’d have to tell someone working towards a paradigm shift that they should shun procedure. Many seem to share the trait of insatiable curiosity, where they’re going to build a construct against reality regardless of protocol.
An interesting book for pointing out that actual scientific progress sometimes doesn't follow strict methodology (see e.g. Mendel's approximations). Alas, like most writing from the 60's/70's, it overstates its case through heavy sophistry that may go well with polemists and (pseudo-science) hacks, but not in real life.
I would put it slightly differently, and I honestly don't know if I'm being kinder or not. I'd say that in this book, Feyerabend is being a troll. He's out to get a reaction out of you more than to argue in great faith. In my view it's actually to the detriment of his point.
I'm still happy I read it, but I think it's one of those finicky, "meso-scale" ideas that's useful, but doesn't apply at very small or very large scales. It's also interesting that it came out a good decade after moral particularism came out, and it feels to me that his principle is "simply" methodological particularism.
Sophistry unfortunately didn't die in the 70s, but it's not a bad book, IIRC. It's ages ago that I read it, but it does take a very formal, undergrad-philosophy-of-science model as the one and true model, which everybody religiously adheres to. Pedantic might be a better predicate. Which is odd, now that I think about it, because you can't really be pedantic without believing you know the truth.
It’s mostly a kind of applied epistemology. It also asks the question “how do we move past postmodernism?”. It accepts that tools like the scientific method have obvious limits and are not foolproof recipes for knowledge. This is what Feyerabend argues, and I pretty much agree with him.
However, it rejects the postmodern idea (post-Feyerabend) that this makes rationality useless or wrong. The idea that all truth is subjective or that truth is not a useful concept. Instead he argues for embedding the tools of rationality into a larger framework that he calls “meta-rationality”.
I think there is not really anything “new” in this analysis — he is in some ways just describing how applied rationality already works in practice. I have nonetheless personally found the ideas very clarifying.
I keep thinking how modern philosophers of science, who talked about how science is done, would have a field day outlining recent social changes in sciences, with various shifting incentives, pressures from various media, strings attached to sources of financing, and competing interests.
Does anyone have a link to the original 1975 version, preferably a digital one? In the foreword to the new edition it says that the publisher now provides it online, but it seems to have vanished since then.
You weren't kidding. I managed to find a part of "Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology (1970)" where I think his first iteration of Against Method was published as a paper (113 pages).
I think that unstructured observations of new phenomenon doesn't get enough credit in general, thought some fields seem to be all phenomenology and little theorizing. But in most it's hard to write grants for unstructured observation of a phenomenon and you have to pretend to be doing some specific experiment to get the experience necessary to be putting forward real hypotheses.
You can't bring up Feyerabend without mentioning Imre Lakatos. The "methodology of scientific research programmes" is another fun read that takes the matter of demarcation a bit more seriously than AM.
For example, Lakatos isn't satisfied with "anything goes" because it fails to consider the political and social consequences of being unable to recognize science from pseudoscience. For Lakatos, demarcation is necessary to maintain a "standard of objective honesty", and avoid falling into an "intellectual decay".
Overall, Lakatos is much less provocative than Feyerabend, but is equally invested in picking apart the historical nuances of scientific progress brought into question by Popper and Kuhn.
> The author argues that science should become an anarchic enterprise, not a nomic (customary) one;[1] in the context of the work, the term "anarchy" refers to epistemological anarchy, which does not remain within one single prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would restrict scientific progress.
So sometimes we can have randomized controlled trials to really understand the effectiveness of drugs, but we can't RCT climate change or the big bang, so we have to use simulations and models. That doesn't seem like "anything goes", more like a response to that one guy in my econ class who always ranted that if it wasn't backed by a RCT, all theories are BS.
Somehow (I still wonder) I got to spend an afternoon as a fly-on-the-wall (what could I say?) at a seminar which included Feyerabend and Feigl. Feyerabend was a very down-to-earth fella, with a unique history, and well-armed to defend his thesis. (I know of no Feynman/Feyerabend discussion, but there'd be much common ground.)
Polanyi -was- a scientist, and his recognition of the influence of tacit knowledge ... 'an understanding that defies articulation' is equally essential. We all know things we cannot tell.
This summary reminds my of Jerome Ravetz’s advocacy of “Post-Normal Science”, to fix the current problems in scientific discourse. https://youtu.be/qVLpbtkqERY
How does his argument work with the current belief that objectivity and the scientific method is white supremacist oppression? Does his argument support the "alternate ways of knowing" that are being pushed as "indigenous science"?
Please help me understand. Who currently believes this and more meta, which people believe that people believe this and who in reality are those groups?
This is just a bad take which was artificially pushed for pseudo-political reasons.
That we have no hard and fast rules for what is good science does not mean that anything goes. This is like saying that because it's impossible to write perfectly safe C++ programs, then we should just use raw pointers. Imprecise methods that work with a certain probability still have value.
Leaps of logic like that are popular even more generally and they leave me speachless.
I struggle with Feyerabend a bit. First, a big part of that book is case studies and the problem with case studies is that they are not representative of the underlying population. It’s very easy to simply cherry pick examples that advance your thesis, whereas what we really care about is population averages.
Second, let’s assume there is no method for arriving at truth. Well then how do we verify that some discovery is actually a discovery? Presumably if there was a way to do this, we could incorporate it into our method, thus undermining Feyerabend’s thesis. Well it turns out that his answer to this is to say that evaluation should consist entirely in the contribution of the discovery to happiness and flourishing. This could be useful at a general level, but seems useless when it comes to judging between theories and research paths within science.
Feyerabend may or may not have been right about physics or astronomy, but he sure as hell sounds like he knew what software engineering would be like.
Should programs be written in a procedural, object-oriented, or functional style? Just how much should you care about scalability when you're building your MVP? What's the best way to write tests for a program that makes API calls to servers you don't control? Rails or Next.js? Emacs or vi?
There's no tried and true method for determining the answer to any of the above. Most people will say "it depends." Depends on what? How do you tell if you made the right choice? Very often, you can only tell afterward when your company gets a bazillion users and your servers start crashing left and right. Even then, the answer is fairly subjective and boils down to whether your team, shareholders, and users are happy.
stdbrouw|3 years ago
> Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.
He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered interesting or provocative?"
I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with his orneriness as with his science.
libraryofbabel|3 years ago
I think it could have been written in a less provocative and eccentric way. Feyerabend had a certain rhetorical style that tends to get some folks unnecessarily riled up. Rewrite the core argument in a plain and simple way and I agree most working scientists wouldn’t have a whole lot to object to (remember Feyerabend was writing against other Philosophers). Some working scientists have been inspired by the book, though. Here’s a great quote from physicist Lee Smolin:
> What Feyerabend's book said to me was: Look, kid, stop dreaming! Science is not philosophers sitting in clouds. It is a human activity, as complex and problematic as any other. There is no single method to science and no single criterion for who is a good scientist. Good science is whatever works at a particular moment of history to advance our knowledge. And don't bother me with how to define progress — define it any way you like and this is still true.
> From Feyerabend, I learned that progress sometimes requires deep philosophical thinking, but most often it does not. It is mostly furthered by opportunistic people who cut corners, exaggerating what they know and have accomplished. Galileo was one of these; many of his arguments were wrong, and his opponents — the well-educated, philosophically reflective Jesuit astronomers of the time — easily punched holes in his thinking. Nevertheless, he was right and they were wrong.
> What I also learned from Feyerabend is that no a priori argument can tell us what will work in all circumstances. What works to advance science at one moment will be wrong at another. And I learned one more thing from his stories of Galileo: You have to fight for what you believe.
PaulHoule|3 years ago
In junior high school I remember getting taught about the scientific method, particularly the use of controls. I wrote 5 papers and didn’t use a control in any of them (it wouldn’t have been appropriate.).
Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t. There was that paper where they measured vitamin C levels of COVID-19 patients but didn’t compare it to a baseline of people who were not sick, which is problematic in many ways.
When they do meta-analysis by the Cochrane methodology they usually throw out at least half of the studies at the beginning because of glaring methodological flaws. Practically it is not much better than anarchy in terms of what gets funded and published.
analog31|3 years ago
Over the years I grew uncomfortable with the fact that I could not track down any of his references, e.g., to Aristotle. I don't remember the specific cases any more, but still it was a bit unnerving.
hammock|3 years ago
When really the intention comes from a different place and requires a slightly more open mind to grok
jfengel|3 years ago
The astronomers hate being lumped in with the astrologers, and with good reason. Feyerabend points out that it's maddeningly hard to be rigorous about exactly what that reason is. When the astronomers claim "the scientific method", this book shows them that they're wrong, but without suggesting a really good alternative.
Giving $10 billion to the astrologers (the price of the JWST) is not an option. It would be nice to have a method to say why. Ultimately, that's the real controversy: not epistemology, but money.
thebooktocome|3 years ago
He has a lot to do with them. One of the themes in Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting” revolves around the maxim, “there is no passe-partout (a master key that opens all locks).” Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization” is partially about the lack of a single axis of “Reason”, which would presumably be the antonym of a similarly univocal “Madness”.
SatvikBeri|3 years ago
culi|3 years ago
See this review for a decent overview of it:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-tyranny-of-science/
dantheman|3 years ago
There's 'science', 'morality', etc. Not all decision are scientific, even if they require scientific knowledge as a factor. Here he aligns with Focualt when discussing power and the urge to use science, or Hayekian scientism, to say there is one true way and the decision should be X.
polypodiopsi|3 years ago
cowfish|3 years ago
Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are doing good work. If you apply a method too rigorously, you'll end up rewarding the wrong people.
It's been ages since I read these philosophers but in my mind Feyerabend's position sort of boiled down to 'at the forefront of any specialization only the experts are able to judge which investigations are worth pursuing further'. With the corollary that experts sometimes disagree among themselves.
In the field of software engineering I've encountered several cases where new engineers are onboarded and they promptly decide that the codebase is unmaintainable and should be rewritten from scratch. I usually don't give up on legacy code so easily, but there was one project where I did genuinely held the opinion that rewriting it would have been more efficient than refactoring. It occurred to me, though, that when a software engineer says a particular piece of codebase is crap, there usually is no good way for outsiders to tell whether that's true or not.
Incidentally, Feyerabend's Against Method originated out of a challenge by Lakatos to copublish a book in which they debate various ideas. That's a useful thing to keep in mind when reading Against Method. Later someone did publish a book titled For And Against Method [1], in which writings of both Lakatos and Feyerabend are juxtaposed.
[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo362971...
BlueTemplar|3 years ago
culi|3 years ago
The common metaphor given for Occam's razor is a field with some random dots plotted. Those points are "evidence" and drawing a shape around them is a "theory" or hypothesis. Then a shape that encapsulates those dots is said to be the most preferred theory when compared to something like a rabbit or some other arbitrary shape
But there is an inherent assumption there about what the plane looks like. It's entirely possible that the geometry on which those points of evidence lie actually lends itself to where drawing a rabbit around all those points actually IS the "simplest" assumption
The are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. But there's a fourth category: ideology. The unknown knowns
In my view, it's this 4th category that ultimately dooms science. Science is ultimately cultural and there's no way around that. Our institutional science is always looking at analyzing outwardly: gathering more and more data; but just as important is analyzing inwardly. Being self-critical about our invisible assumptions.
We can never fully absolve ourselves of unknown knowns, but I do believe in a "more perfect" mission. One in which we always accept we're imperfect but working towards a closer vision. But to work towards this, we need to not only analyze the dots, but also the geometries on which we place those dots
lootsauce|3 years ago
pksebben|3 years ago
r3trohack3r|3 years ago
Procedure is created as the percentage of high functioning workers decreases relative to the amount of work output necessary for the system to survive.
These procedures are for sure stifling. I recently read “From Atomos to Atom” and one of the things that stood out to me was the approach most philosophers who made substantial progress on the atom took: everything is false. To make progress, they started from a position of assuming everything humans knew about this domain was incorrect; they then systematically proved _to themselves_ why each step in human thinking was correct.
I’m starting to wonder if there are two distinct concepts that we’ve conflated in the term “Science.”
One science refers to humanity’s collective constructs, the things we catalogue and teach and reconcile the world with in mass. This is a deeply social philosophy that is based on trust and not personal rigor. The scale of our collective constructs is too massive for any one person to tear apart and prove to themselves, so we substitute trust for rigor - we trust that someone else has been rigorous in generating these constructs.
The other science refers to practicing the generation of those constructs. This is a deeply personal philosophy in which there is no trust. It dictates our personal relationship and understanding of the world we inhabit. Here, science is something we personally practice in developing that understanding. We trust nothing, validate everything, and build up our own understanding in the domain.
With both, the defining trait is that reality is the final arbiter of truth.
To tie it back into business org and startup culture, not everyone in science is working towards paradigm shifts. The processes we have in place for indexing, compiling, and reconciling the constructs of science are likely sufficient. But they’re likely insufficient for generating a paradigm shift.
That being said, I find it unlikely that you’d have to tell someone working towards a paradigm shift that they should shun procedure. Many seem to share the trait of insatiable curiosity, where they’re going to build a construct against reality regardless of protocol.
aredox|3 years ago
cscheid|3 years ago
I would put it slightly differently, and I honestly don't know if I'm being kinder or not. I'd say that in this book, Feyerabend is being a troll. He's out to get a reaction out of you more than to argue in great faith. In my view it's actually to the detriment of his point.
I'm still happy I read it, but I think it's one of those finicky, "meso-scale" ideas that's useful, but doesn't apply at very small or very large scales. It's also interesting that it came out a good decade after moral particularism came out, and it feels to me that his principle is "simply" methodological particularism.
tgv|3 years ago
heisenzombie|3 years ago
https://metarationality.com/
It’s mostly a kind of applied epistemology. It also asks the question “how do we move past postmodernism?”. It accepts that tools like the scientific method have obvious limits and are not foolproof recipes for knowledge. This is what Feyerabend argues, and I pretty much agree with him.
However, it rejects the postmodern idea (post-Feyerabend) that this makes rationality useless or wrong. The idea that all truth is subjective or that truth is not a useful concept. Instead he argues for embedding the tools of rationality into a larger framework that he calls “meta-rationality”.
I think there is not really anything “new” in this analysis — he is in some ways just describing how applied rationality already works in practice. I have nonetheless personally found the ideas very clarifying.
azangru|3 years ago
auggierose|3 years ago
Rzor|3 years ago
You weren't kidding. I managed to find a part of "Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology (1970)" where I think his first iteration of Against Method was published as a paper (113 pages).
https://pixeldrain.com/u/mRL52iYs (50MB, PDF, with preview)
https://gofile.io/d/rDASZh (50MB, PDF, with preview)
https://1fichier.com/?2i8f0l8ns1gi3v6yf7ea (50MB, PDF, no preview)
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Symmetry|3 years ago
Unstructured observations -> hypotheses -> structured observations (experiments) -> confirmed hypotheses.
I think that unstructured observations of new phenomenon doesn't get enough credit in general, thought some fields seem to be all phenomenology and little theorizing. But in most it's hard to write grants for unstructured observation of a phenomenon and you have to pretend to be doing some specific experiment to get the experience necessary to be putting forward real hypotheses.
anschwa|3 years ago
For example, Lakatos isn't satisfied with "anything goes" because it fails to consider the political and social consequences of being unable to recognize science from pseudoscience. For Lakatos, demarcation is necessary to maintain a "standard of objective honesty", and avoid falling into an "intellectual decay".
Overall, Lakatos is much less provocative than Feyerabend, but is equally invested in picking apart the historical nuances of scientific progress brought into question by Popper and Kuhn.
humanistbot|3 years ago
So sometimes we can have randomized controlled trials to really understand the effectiveness of drugs, but we can't RCT climate change or the big bang, so we have to use simulations and models. That doesn't seem like "anything goes", more like a response to that one guy in my econ class who always ranted that if it wasn't backed by a RCT, all theories are BS.
nequo|3 years ago
The converse may be true though. If it is not backed by a theory, an RCT is BS.
8bitsrule|3 years ago
Polanyi -was- a scientist, and his recognition of the influence of tacit knowledge ... 'an understanding that defies articulation' is equally essential. We all know things we cannot tell.
stephc_int13|3 years ago
Useful to train for critical thinking.
Nothing should be considered sacred, it's OK to be wrong when exploring new ideas.
cies|3 years ago
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oa335|3 years ago
jdmtheNth|3 years ago
affgrff2|3 years ago
kirkules|3 years ago
bannedbybros|3 years ago
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qsort|3 years ago
That we have no hard and fast rules for what is good science does not mean that anything goes. This is like saying that because it's impossible to write perfectly safe C++ programs, then we should just use raw pointers. Imprecise methods that work with a certain probability still have value.
Leaps of logic like that are popular even more generally and they leave me speachless.
civopsec|3 years ago
Anything goes does not imply a proscription like that.
mistermann|3 years ago
Gimpei|3 years ago
Second, let’s assume there is no method for arriving at truth. Well then how do we verify that some discovery is actually a discovery? Presumably if there was a way to do this, we could incorporate it into our method, thus undermining Feyerabend’s thesis. Well it turns out that his answer to this is to say that evaluation should consist entirely in the contribution of the discovery to happiness and flourishing. This could be useful at a general level, but seems useless when it comes to judging between theories and research paths within science.
kijin|3 years ago
Should programs be written in a procedural, object-oriented, or functional style? Just how much should you care about scalability when you're building your MVP? What's the best way to write tests for a program that makes API calls to servers you don't control? Rails or Next.js? Emacs or vi?
There's no tried and true method for determining the answer to any of the above. Most people will say "it depends." Depends on what? How do you tell if you made the right choice? Very often, you can only tell afterward when your company gets a bazillion users and your servers start crashing left and right. Even then, the answer is fairly subjective and boils down to whether your team, shareholders, and users are happy.