Against Method
en.wikipedia.orgTo 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.
- Incorrect use of statistics tools.
- Cherry-picking of data.
- Flawed or missing controls.
- Lack of replication, and in the few cases where it's attempted, failure to replicate.
- Non-publication of failures.
- Publish-or-perish providing huge incentives to publish junk.
- Peer review being an old boys club that enforces the party line.
- All funding coming from few sources that tacitly use their funding power to fund only those that toe the party line.
- So much basic science having been done by now that the remaining science to do is generally expensive to do, thus inviting the above funding / control problem.
- Dogmatism.
- Media attention.
These are the problems that plague science today. Some of these have been there for a long time, like dogmatism. There are people alive today who were taught that the continents don't move, and that noticing that South America and Africa fit together and concluding that they must have moved is nonsense of the highest order. There are people alive today whose treatment for Polio was not physical therapy but immobilization. The list of dogma, old and new, is long. The malign ways in which some lords of science fiefdoms defend their dogmas have not gone away in spite of Popper's method.
> Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t.
This is not true in my experience (I have designed and run pharmaceutical clinical trials in humans). Can you give some examples?
Some treatment trials do compare the existing standard of care vs the new one rather than placebo against proposed treatment, but those are certainly controlled studies too.
I do know of cases where a control is impossible, such as some surgical procedures, though even then sometimes sham surgery is performed (this is controversial). Those are singly-blinded controls as the surgeon knows.
It is endemic in statistical studies based on medical data. They reach a conclusion that is statistically supported but never do the work to verify it.
A statistical study is not a clinical trial, which was the term used by the GP poster.
Definitely you want to use controls if you want regulators to take your work seriously. A lot of stuff gets found on pubmed that isn't meant for regulators and it doesn't.
Doesn't the question of controls basically boil down to: it's hard to know things without them, but they're often hard to create anyway, ergo it's hard to know things in general - now welcome to the nastiness of real science?
Right or the replication crisis. Which people often forget affected far more than just the field of Psychology. It's a problem throughout most of western science in general. And a big problem imo. Because studies are expensive and replicating those studies is nearly just as expensive. What happens when our idealized scientific process is literally just unachievable because we don't have the resources to carry it out
A puzzle seems to be why some scientific fields fare better than others, in the face of the replication crisis. Why do we take Maxwell's Equations seriously? It means that replication, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of science research. There must be something else.
Physics (especially classical physics) has the advantage of dealing with things that are both extremely repeatable and consistent, and are just about omnipresent. When a physics model is flawed, you start piling up edge cases that violate our current understanding of physics, until someone comes up with a model that explains most of them while not violating the relatively decent predictive power of the previous models (which obviously have predictive power, since they've been being used to predict things successfully for a while).
For example, Newton laid out classical mechanics. Which very adequately modeled most things moving around in scales we could observe. Except Mercury's orbit was a little fucky. Now, one new model could be that "Classical mechanics works everywhere but on Mercury, where they have different physics", but eventually relativity was postulated, and calculated to predict Mercury's orbit to within our ability to observe it. Rinse, repeat, for things like QM, orbital mechanics, etc, etc.
Heck, there's a pile of inconsistencies in our current models. Neutrinos have mass, the universe's expansion is accelerating, and where's all the antimatter?
Very good points. I think another is that we can develop theories that relate different experimental cases, so that a "replication" doesn't have to be precisely the same study, but different studies in a sense replicate different but overlapping views of the theory.
> the ‘scientific method’ is not really practiced
There is a big difference between "often not practiced" and "not really practiced [ever]". The former is true, the latter is not.
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.
Hard agree. People are surprised when I, as a physicist, am so riled up by things like “trust science!” T-shirts and the general science-washing (a-la green-washing) of products, politics, etc.
I think this is part and parcel of the same “cargo-cult” appropriation of “science” that results in what you’re saying, and represents a real threat to science.
I would say that "trust science!" tee-shirts aren't really about Feyerabend's epistemological anarchy. You could frame it that way, but that would be philosophy-washing (to coin a term).
Against Method points out that there's no rigorous method for pursuing the difference between truth and non-truth, but at least accepts that there is something like "truth" out there and that it's better than falsehoods.
When people put on "trust science!" shirts, they're not arguing about whether we should continue working on homeopathy. They're saying that people are promoting deliberate falsehoods, things that they know or should know are wrong, because they are indifferent to the difference between truth and lies.
Homeopaths at least want to be right. There are surely some charlatans, but at least some of the kooky nutbags selling homeopathic remedies believe in it. Against Method makes it impossible to argue that they cannot possibly ever succeed, if they keep revising their hypothesis, even though we "know" that they won't.
The opponents of those who "trust science", by contrast, just don't care if they're right. They care only that they've won some kind of victory in a culture war. They don't apply epistemic anarchy to all sciences, only ones that they view as ideological opponents.
That isn't the only threat to science, to be sure. Science and scientists make genuine mistakes. But again, that's not really important to those who are rejecting science for cultural reasons, not philosophical ones. That challenge makes dealing with the others even harder.
I was responding to the parent’s
“ 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.”
I think the “trust science” stuff is mixed into the same cargo-cult co-opting of science by people who are actually more worried about politics, identity, and generally what I would call “scientism”. To be clear, I think such people would NOT like Feyeraband. If you believe science is The One Source Of Truth, then Feyeraband is a heretic.
You’re also bringing in the other side: Those that reject science for cultural reasons. I think they don’t give a crap about Feyeraband. I also think the “trust science” scientism stuff is partly to blame for this cultural backlash.
I think Feyeraband is right, and that it strengthens the pursuit of science to acknowledge it.
I think scientism leads to the scientific method being misunderstood and misapplied, and makes public trust of science way more brittle.
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
There’s a more practical and tragic reason to desire a “one true method”.
Imagine spending your whole life working under method X. You study its precepts, gain practical knowledge, go out into the field and test your assumptions. Your desire is to end human suffering using method X, and build a better world where good triumphs over evil and everyone can pursue their bliss.
But you must sacrifice in order for method X to work. The precepts demand you honor the gods. If you are an Aztec, you end up with pyramids covered in blood and tens of thousands dead, but are still woefully unprepared for disease and Europeans, your people suffer immensely and are virtually extinguished, and you die realizing your method was wrong and your sacrifices were in vain.
You can avoid that with a meta method that helps you select proper methods.
The amount of human suffering that can be avoided if people are able to distinguish the effectiveness of method X from method Y is extreme. That is where the hard earned victories of modernity come from. Science is the preeminent comparative meta method that identifies which methods are most effective at alleviating human suffering and people are right to uphold it (and to distinguish it from scientism/confusion with scientific bureaucracy)
There is no universal, rule based, propositional method of betterment, but to give up on the idea of any method being objectively better than another is to give up on the idea of meta negotiation and the pursuit of universal peace and prosperity. The pursuit is worthwhile, even if it may not be fully achieved in billions or trillions of years and may be more of an art than a system of computation.
It's important to understand this in the context of the cultural and political fights of the American academy as well. Feyerabend's position is very reasonable, but the straw-man treatment went both ways. It also played to the biases of people who felt that they were/are being marginalized by the evolution of the academy into a more scientific/technical institution. (For most of History, Stanford's number one major was History. This is one no longer the case and the degree has lost a lot of its former prestige). These factions routinely took his work to then argue that all science is irrational or baseless or incorrect as if it were a logical either or proposition. This is also absurd and not really what Feyerabend was going for, but the debate is maybe not really about method as much as it is about the political concerns of academics.
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.
I would also highly recommend The Tyranny of Science by him
See this review for a decent overview of it:
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.
It's waaay worse than that. My understanding of the point of incommensurability is not the obvious morality is different from science but it goes back to Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argues scientists speaking literally the same words with different paradigms of understanding that science will suffer from the inability to communicate effectively because the differing paradigms lead to different meanings and ways of interpretation.
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.
We are "all" postmoderns at this point.
Einstein ; Gödel ; Popper => Kuhn => Feyerabend (among others) have basically wrecked the big modern positivist project (not that I blame them).
Quite related :
https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9mo...
And :
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/french-theory-how-foucault-derrida-...
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.
[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo362971...
Yeah, Wikipedia is nice, but really doesn't hold a candle to Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy that insists on the "half-book" part : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#AgaiMeth1970
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.
thanks for sharing your views; I hadn't thought of ideology as that "fourth category" but it resonates deeply.
This resonates well, and has parallels to business orgs and startup culture: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 (slide #48)
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.
Yeah, I mostly agree.
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.
One can certainly be accused or perceived as being pedantic without thinking oneself to know the truth though, or actually being pedantic.
Related reading which I found very interesting is this in-progress essay/book:
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.
>vanished
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)
Yes, there is a link to the 1970 paper on the Wiki page as well, but I think it is different from the 1975 version.
I've recently liked the metaphor of science as a four stroke engine.
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.
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.
> that one guy in my econ class who always ranted that if it wasn't backed by a RCT, all theories are BS.
The converse may be true though. If it is not backed by a theory, an RCT is BS.
There are many effective medicines for which the mechanism is unclear or disputed. Should we stop using them?
You can use things for which there is weak or conflicting evidence for, just as you can take a sauna just becuase it makes you feel good. But take them as what they are and accept that doing so does not follow a strict interpretation of the scientific method.
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 is probably wrong, interesting and useful.
Useful to train for critical thinking.
Nothing should be considered sacred, it's OK to be wrong when exploring new ideas.
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?
https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/fil... - page 7 for objectivity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMepYJhI7HU - for non-readers
https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/biology/graduate/intersection-sc...
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
Thanks, I think I understand your question better now. I guess Feyerabend's point is not that there are multiple valid opinions about the world but rather multiple adequate ways on finding (maybe universal) truth about the world. The frameworks you are referencing however seem to emphasize that there is no such thing as objective truth (and that claiming so might even be promoting white supremacy or racism). So I don't see how it would support it.
I have not seen this view expressed in this way except by people who do not support it. Do you remember or know any examples I could check out?
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.
> This is like saying that because it's impossible to write perfectly safe C++ programs, then we should just use raw pointers.
Anything goes does not imply a proscription like that.
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.