Source: Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verso.
“This is shown both by an examination of historical episodes and by an abstract analysis of the relation between idea and action. The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes” p. 23
Feyerabend’s account of science is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. For Feyerabend, rule breaking is an important part of science and scientists try all sorts of creative and sometimes irrational strategies in their effort to make discoveries.
“events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution … occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound by certain ‘obvious’ methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them … More specifically, one can show the following: given any rule, however ‘fundamental’ or ‘necessary’ for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.” p. 23
The dedication to Against Method is to Lakatos “friend, and fellow-anarchist”. Feyerabend is implying that Lakatos-account-of-science despite being rule-governed ends up being an anarchist account like Feyerabend because Lakatos does not end up defining when scientists should abandon a research program and so, in a way, it does support the idea that anything goes in a small sense.
Like Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions, Feyerabend thinks science consists of paradigms and that ideas and standards in paradigms are incommensurable. But unlike Kuhn, he does not accept that science is in a healthy state when there is a single dominant paradigm.
criticism of Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions = Feyerabend saw Kuhn as glorifying the mind-numbing routine of normal science and the rigid education that Kuhn thought produced a good normal scientist. He saw Kuhn as encouraging the worst trend in 20th century science towards professionalism, narrow-mindedness, and exclusion of unorthodox ideas. 1
An important idea for Feyerabend’s account is that science is an aspect of human creativity and that science does not deserve any special status; it is just another human project among many.
Two guiding principles in Feyerabend’s account of science:
- Principle of Tenacity = stick with a theory, even in the face of problems
- Principle of proliferation = a diversity of approaches should be encouraged
Kuhn-1962-structure-of-scientific-revolutions says that proliferation of ideas should wait for a crisis but Feyerabend’s ideal picture of science is a population of people happily developing their theories and also trying to think up new ones.
Feyerabend on Galileo
In his struggle with the Church, Galileo made claims about the heavenly bodies which contradicted the evidence of the senses. He described his new telescope as a ‘superior and better sense’. Feyerabend made this a prime example in his book ‘Against Method’ (1975).
He portrayed Galileo as making full use of rhetoric, propaganda, and various epistemological tricks to support the heliocentric position. Feyerabend also sought to downgrade the importance of empirical arguments by suggesting that aesthetic criteria, personal whims, and social factors have a far more decisive role in the history of science. 2
Feyerabend argued that Galileo changed the definition of “evidence” in order to save his theory. Hence, he did not provide agreed upon evidence for his theory, he persuaded people to embrace a new paradigm of using telescope observations.
‘Galileo triumphs because of his style and his clever techniques of persuasion, because he writes in Italian rather than in Latin, and because he appeals to people who are temperamentally opposed to the old ideas and the standards of learning connected with them.’ (Against Method, p.141)
I think that Feyerabend is getting the idea across that even if scientists want an objective account of science that does not remove the fact that political and societal factors played a role in science. Feyerabend has a point that persuasion is needed in a sense when it comes to new paradigms, but he may be pushing this idea too far.
Also, even if Galileo needs to persuade people to embrace the idea of telescope, there is still some objective observational evidence that comes to play in evaluating whether the telescope is reliable and is not only a matter of rhetorical persuasion by Galileo
Feyerabend on pseudo-science
For Feyerabend, modern science behaves like the Church in the middle ages. So instead, alternative science should have the same access to funding and the education system as science. People should be able to choose the science that meets their need.
Feyerabend’s ideas raise real problems for the problem-of-demarcation i.e. the question of what counts as science and what doesn’t.
If there is no special method that unifies different scientific efforts, then who says astrology or voodoo can’t count as sciences?
Fundamentally, Feyerabend is challenging the social position of science:
“Thus, while an American can now choose what religion he likes, he is still not permitted to demand that his children learn magic rather than science at school. There is a separation between State and Church, there is no separation between State and science.” p. 229
Evaluating Feyerabend
| strength | weakness |
|---|---|
| creativity is encouraged! Diversity of ideas is attractive! | some problems take longer than one scientist’s research career to solve (or realize that they are anomalous) which is a problem when everyone is working on their own science |
| sometimes we need to get outside of a paradigm with a creative idea to make progress even if it seems that science is in a period of normal-science | if we gave up on the idea of a consensus-shared society, we lose the advantage promoted by Kuhn-on-normal-science of having a community of scienctis ts working together within an accepted paradigm that results in collaborative and deeper progressive work. If everybody works on different ideas then it can lead to bashing heads on the same matter with no actual progress and non-compatible ideals |
| teaching magic or “alternative science” in schools: practical harms from anti-vaccination propaganda, including social harms (scapegoating) | |
| there may be examples of a few rule-breaking scientists (Galileo, Einstein) but is science as a whole better off when all scientists adopt Feyerabend’s account? The mere possibility that a rule may lead to bad consequences does not mean we should give up rules entirely |
Footnotes
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Theory and Reality, Godfrey-Smith, p. 112 ↩
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Oberheim, Eric and John Preston, “Paul Feyerabend”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/feyerabend/ ↩