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Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in scienc

Anyone who enjoys Kuhn's Structure should go on to read Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and Farewell to Reason. To summarise: there is only one rule in science, and that is "anything goes!". There are interesting parallels between scientific method and software methods...

leephillips 11y ago
I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.
- osullivj 11y ago
  Anything goes!
- foldr 11y ago
  Could you mention some specifics? In which respects was it intellectually dishonest?
  - leephillips 11y ago
    I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.
    - foldr 11y ago
      You're missing the point of the discussion. The point is that observation is a far less straightforward thing than it's sometimes made out to be. It is clear with hindsight that Galileo was indeed observing the moons of Jupiter, but it was far from clear at the time. The reports of people who didn't see anything are no more "anecdotal" than Galileo's reports that he did see something, and there is little reason to doubt the veracity of either set of reports. It is well known that there's a certain knack to seeing things through telescopes and microscopes, and if you look through one for the first time you may simply fail to see what a trained observer sees. Neither the telescope nor human visual perception were well understood at the time, and it must have been difficult to know what to make of the conflicting reports. Feyerabend's entire argument depends on the assumption that Galileo was - at least in retrospect - doing the right thing. However, the right thing in this instance turned out to require the violation of pretty much every prescription of the "scientific method".
      - leephillips 11y ago
        If that were the point, it's unlikely that I missed it, because it was a commonplace before Feyerabend wrote his book, and I was and am steeped in the idea. Feyerabend's position was far more radical. He (and, again, I'm trying not to misrepresent him, but I haven't read any of his stuff in decades) was trying to show that science is no more rational than anything else that people do, that scientists accept or ignore evidence arbitrarily, and that the existence of a scientific method is a myth. He was wrong, and the Galileo stuff is a good example. On the one hand, you have, not just Galileo himself, but a bunch of other people, observing very specific things, and the same things, repeatably; things that have natural physical explanations. On the other hand, you have some people who didn't see anything, or just a blur. You're right that there was little experience of looking through telescopes. But the failure to make an observation is not an observation. That scientists were influenced, in their model building, by observations, even in the face of the inability of some people to make them, does not mean that science is irrational. That the course of science is complex and mired in politics doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a scientific method.
        11y ago
selimthegrim 11y ago
Feyerabend didn't understand QM whatsoever, not just on some philosophical level. Among his other sins, he went around parading van Leeuwen's theorem like it was some deeply profound philosophical statement. Yes, I can dig up references if someone asks, I'm just lazy atm.
- foldr 11y ago
  Could you? I couldn't find anything by Feyerabend that mentions that particular theorem.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    It's in a commentary by someone who knew him, and I don't think Feyerabend knew the proper name of the theorem himself.
    - foldr 11y ago
      "Parading" must mean something different to you than it does to me, then. I'd be wary of taking those sorts of secondary sources too seriously. It is not very difficult to get academics to say mean things about each other.
      - selimthegrim 11y ago
        True but if this is more than calumny, Feyerabend was taking the theorem to mean way more than it meant about our ability to do calculations.
        foldr 11y ago
        He doesn't appear to ever have written about it. This is a very odd way to criticize him. Why not focus on his published work? He wrote a lot about QM, so his purported total lack of understanding should be evident in that body of work. Much better than digging up some rumors that you can't even provide a reference for. (The commentary that you're referring to appears to be rather well hidden, by the way.)
pvitz 11y ago
I would rather suggest to read Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or works of Lakatos before reading Feyerabend's Against Method. Feyerabend was a former assistant of Popper and mainly criticised his methodological views.

leephillips 11y ago

I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.

osullivj 11y ago
Anything goes!
foldr 11y ago
Could you mention some specifics? In which respects was it intellectually dishonest?
- leephillips 11y ago
  I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.
  - foldr 11y ago
    You're missing the point of the discussion. The point is that observation is a far less straightforward thing than it's sometimes made out to be. It is clear with hindsight that Galileo was indeed observing the moons of Jupiter, but it was far from clear at the time. The reports of people who didn't see anything are no more "anecdotal" than Galileo's reports that he did see something, and there is little reason to doubt the veracity of either set of reports. It is well known that there's a certain knack to seeing things through telescopes and microscopes, and if you look through one for the first time you may simply fail to see what a trained observer sees. Neither the telescope nor human visual perception were well understood at the time, and it must have been difficult to know what to make of the conflicting reports. Feyerabend's entire argument depends on the assumption that Galileo was - at least in retrospect - doing the right thing. However, the right thing in this instance turned out to require the violation of pretty much every prescription of the "scientific method".
    - leephillips 11y ago
      If that were the point, it's unlikely that I missed it, because it was a commonplace before Feyerabend wrote his book, and I was and am steeped in the idea. Feyerabend's position was far more radical. He (and, again, I'm trying not to misrepresent him, but I haven't read any of his stuff in decades) was trying to show that science is no more rational than anything else that people do, that scientists accept or ignore evidence arbitrarily, and that the existence of a scientific method is a myth. He was wrong, and the Galileo stuff is a good example. On the one hand, you have, not just Galileo himself, but a bunch of other people, observing very specific things, and the same things, repeatably; things that have natural physical explanations. On the other hand, you have some people who didn't see anything, or just a blur. You're right that there was little experience of looking through telescopes. But the failure to make an observation is not an observation. That scientists were influenced, in their model building, by observations, even in the face of the inability of some people to make them, does not mean that science is irrational. That the course of science is complex and mired in politics doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a scientific method.
      - 11y ago

selimthegrim 11y ago

Feyerabend didn't understand QM whatsoever, not just on some philosophical level. Among his other sins, he went around parading van Leeuwen's theorem like it was some deeply profound philosophical statement. Yes, I can dig up references if someone asks, I'm just lazy atm.

foldr 11y ago
Could you? I couldn't find anything by Feyerabend that mentions that particular theorem.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  It's in a commentary by someone who knew him, and I don't think Feyerabend knew the proper name of the theorem himself.
  - foldr 11y ago
    "Parading" must mean something different to you than it does to me, then. I'd be wary of taking those sorts of secondary sources too seriously. It is not very difficult to get academics to say mean things about each other.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      True but if this is more than calumny, Feyerabend was taking the theorem to mean way more than it meant about our ability to do calculations.
      - foldr 11y ago
        He doesn't appear to ever have written about it. This is a very odd way to criticize him. Why not focus on his published work? He wrote a lot about QM, so his purported total lack of understanding should be evident in that body of work. Much better than digging up some rumors that you can't even provide a reference for. (The commentary that you're referring to appears to be rather well hidden, by the way.)

pvitz 11y ago

I would rather suggest to read Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or works of Lakatos before reading Feyerabend's Against Method. Feyerabend was a former assistant of Popper and mainly criticised his methodological views.