Paul Feyerabend
Verso, 3rd Edition 1993 (first published 1975)
ISBN 0860916464 (paper)
(may be out of print but second-hand copies are available)
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If you think that philosophy means difficult, boring, traditional and stodgy, then Against Method will come as a delightful surprise. Feyerabend is fresh, rude, funny, and stimulating all at once. He's also really quite uncomfortable; for what he proposes, supported by what is (when you stop to reflect on it) a considerable weight of evidence and argument, is that knowledge is relative, subjective, and likely to change. There is no scientific theory (for which read: nothing at all that we think we know) which is certainly correct, no fact which we can be perfectly sure of. All of science is one vast enterprise, a network of connected ideas. Some parts at the centre of the net seem unlikely to be revised (much); others feel pretty speculative and could easily change. Now that does sound like a Logic of Scientific Discovery, but not one that a Popper could willingly endorse.
Feyerabend illustrates his argument with examples as diverse as the astronomy of Copernicus, the anthropology and ethnography of Evans-Pritchard, the impact on classical physics of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the observations of 'Horky, Kepler's overly-excited pupil' on first looking through Galileo's telescope and concluding that it 'deceived' because it showed that some fixed stars such as Spica Virginis were seen double! Even the optical illusions described by the art writer Gombrich are discussed -- how one diagram can give rise to two incompatible perceptual objects, or even no object at all.
When Feyerabend writes that 'modern science overpowered its opponents, it did not convince them.' he echoes Thomas Kuhn, and like him delights us with his reasoning while indeed possibly not convincing us. The relativist message is unpalatable; but remarkably hard to counter.
© Ian Alexander, 2004
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