The Multidisciplinarian

“How easy it is to lead people by the nose in a rational way.”

A similarly named post I wrote on Paul Feyerabend seven years ago turned out to be my most popular post by far. Seeing it referenced in a few places has made me cringe, and made me face the fact that I failed to make my point. I’ll try to correct that here. I don’t remotely agree with the paper in Nature that called Feyerabend the worst enemy of science, nor do I side with the postmodernists that idolize him. I do find him to be one of the most provocative thinkers of the 20th century, brash, brilliant, and sometimes full of crap.

Feyerabend opened his profound Against Method by telling us to always remember that what he writes in the book does not reflect any deep convictions of his, but that he intends “merely show how easy it is to lead people by the nose in a rational way.” I.e., he was more telling us what he thought we needed to hear than what he necessarily believed. In his autobiography he wrote that for Against Method he had used older material but had “replaced moderate passages with more outrageous ones.” Those using and abusing Feyerabend today have certainly forgot what this provocateur, who called himself an entertainer, told us always to remember about him in his writings.

Any who think Feyerabend frivolous should examine the scientific rigor in his analysis of Galileo’s work. Any who find him to be an enemy of science should actually read Against Method instead of reading about him, as quotes pulled from it can be highly misleading as to his intent. My communications with some of his friends after he died in 1994 suggest that while he initially enjoyed ruffling so many feathers with Against Method, he became angered and ultimately depressed over both critical reactions against it and some of the audiences that made weapons of it. In 1991 he wrote, “I often wished I had never written that fucking book.”

I encountered Against Method searching through a library’s card catalog seeking an authority on the scientific method. I learned from Feyerabend that no set of methodological rules fits the great advances and discoveries in science. It’s obvious once you think about it. Pick a specific scientific method – say the hypothetico-deductive model – or any set of rules, and Feyerabend will name a scientific discovery that would not have occurred had the scientist, from Galileo to Feynman, followed that method, or any other.

Part of Feyerabend’s program was to challenge the positivist notion that in real science, empiricism trumps theory. Galileo’s genius, for Feyerabend, was allowing theory to dominate observation. In Dialogue Galileo wrote:

Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true: they have, through sheer force of intellect, done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to be the contrary.

For Feyerabend, against Popper and the logical positivists of the mid 1900’s, Galileo’s case exemplified a need to grant theory priority over evidence. This didn’t sit well with empiricist leanings of the the post-war western world. It didn’t set well with most scientists or philosophers. Sociologists and literature departments loved it. It became fuel for fire of relativism sweeping America in the 70’s and 80’s and for the 1990’s social constructivists eager to demote science to just another literary genre.

But in context, and in the spheres for which Against Method was written, many people – including Feyerabend’s peers from 1970 Berkeley, with whom I’ve had many conversations on the topic, conclude that the book’s goading style was a typical Feyerabendian corrective provocation to that era’s positivistic dogma.

Feyerabend distrusts the orthodoxy of social practices of what Thomas Kuhn termed “normal science” – what scientific institutions do in their laboratories. Unlike their friend Imre Lakatos, Feyerabend distrusts any rule-based scientific method at all. Instead, Feyerabend praises the scientific innovation and individual creativity. For Feyerabend science in the mid 1900’s had fallen prey to the “tyranny of tightly-knit, highly corroborated, and gracelessly presented theoretical systems.” What would he say if alive today?

As with everything in the philosophy of science in the late 20th century, some of the disagreement between Feyerabend, Kuhn, Popper and Lakatos revolved around miscommunication and sloppy use of language. The best known case of this was Kuhn’s inconsistent use of the term paradigm. But they all (perhaps least so Lakatos) talked past each other by failing to differentiate different meanings of the word science, including:

1. An approach or set of rules and methods for inquiry about nature
2. A body of knowledge about nature
3. In institution, culture or community of scientists, including academic, government and corporate

Kuhn and Feyerabend in particular vacillated between meaning science as a set of methods and science as an institution. Feyerabend certainly was referring to an institution when he said that science was a threat to democracy and that there must be “a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions.” Along these lines Feyerabend thought that modern institutional science resembles more the church of Galileo’s day than it resembles Galileo.

On the matter of state control of science, Feyerabend went further than Eisenhower did in his “military industrial complex” speech, even with the understanding that what Eisenhower was describing was a military-academic-industrial complex. Eisenhower worried that a government contract with a university “becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Feyerabend took this worry further, writing that university research requires conforming to orthodoxy and “a willingness to subordinate one’s ideas to those of a team leader.” Feyerabend disparaged Kuhn’s normal science as dogmatic drudgery that stifles scientific creativity.

A second area of apparent miscommunication about the history/philosophy of science in the mid 1900’s was the descriptive/normative distinction. John Heilbron, who was Kuhn’s grad student when Kuhn wrote Structure of Scientific Revolutions, told me that Kuhn absolutely despised Popper, not merely as a professional rival. Kuhn wanted to destroy Popper’s notion that scientists discard theories on finding disconfirming evidence. But Popper was describing ideally performed science; his intent was clearly normative. Kuhn’s work, said Heilbron (who doesn’t share my admiration for Feyerabend), was intended as normative only for historians of science, not for scientists. True, Kuhn felt that it was pointless to try to distinguish the “is” from the “ought” in science, but this does not mean he thought they were the same thing.

As with Kuhn’s use of paradigm, Feyerabend’s use of the term science risks equivocation. He drifts between methodology and institution to suit the needs of his argument. At times he seems to build a straw man of science in which science insists it creates facts as opposed to building models. Then again, on this matter (fact/truth vs. models as the claims of science) he seems to be more right about the science of 2019 than he was about the science of 1975.

While heavily indebted to Popper, Feyerabend, like Kuhn, grew hostile to Popper’s ideas of demarcation and falsification: “let us look at the standards of the Popperian school, which are still being taken seriously in the more backward regions of knowledge.” He eventually expanded his criticism of Popper’s idea of theory falsification to a categorical rejection of Popper’s demarcation theories and of Popper’s critical rationalism in general. Now from the perspective of half a century later, a good bit of the tension between Popper and both Feyerabend and Kuhn and between Kuhn and Feyerabend seems to have been largely semantic.

For me, Feyerabend seems most relevant today through his examination of science as a threat to democracy. He now seems right in ways that even he didn’t anticipate. He thought it a threat mostly in that science (as an institution) held complete control over what is deemed scientifically important for society. In contrast, people as individuals or small competing groups, historically have chosen what counts as being socially valuable. In this sense science bullied the citizen, thought Feyerabend. Today I think we see a more extreme example of bullying, in the case of global warming for example, in which government and institutionalized scientists are deciding not only what is important as a scientific agenda but what is important as energy policy and social agenda. Likewise the role that neuroscience plays in primary education tends to get too much of the spotlight in the complex social issues of how education should be conducted. One recalls Lakatos’ concern against Kuhn’s confidence in the authority of “communities.” Lakatos had been imprisoned by the Nazis for revisionism. Through that experience he saw Kuhn’s “assent of the relevant community” as not much of a virtue if that community has excessive political power and demands that individual scientists subordinate their ideas to it.

As a tiny tribute to Feyerabend, about whom I’ve noted caution is due in removal of his quotes from their context, I’ll honor his provocative spirit by listing some of my favorite quotes, removed from context, to invite misinterpretation and misappropriation.

“The similarities between science and myth are indeed astonishing.”

“The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and revisionism can be legitimized solely for motives of political opportunism.”

“All methodologies have their limitations and the only ‘rule’ that survives is ‘anything goes’.”

“Revolutions have transformed not only the practices their initiators wanted to change buy the very principles by means of which… they carried out the change.”

“Kuhn’s masterpiece played a decisive role. It led to new ideas, Unfortunately it also led to lots of trash.”

“First-world science is one science among many.”

“Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.”

“Research in large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion, and the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is — which means military matters.”

“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.”

“Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress.”

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Photos of Paul Feyerabend courtesy of Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend