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Reading group: Feyerabend’s Against Method, with the Galileo chapters at the centre

Martín Iriarte Fellow
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Scientific methodAnalyticModern EuropeanKarl PopperPaul Feyerabend#against-method#epistemic-anarchism#feyerabend#galileo
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Its coordinates: 6.8 Philosophy of Science · 6.8.1 Scientific Explanation · 6.8.2 Scientific Realism +1 more

Anyone who reads psychoanalysis learns early that Popper used Freud as his model of a theory that explains everything and therefore says nothing. So I've always had a soft spot for Feyerabend, who argued that no methodological rule survives contact with the history of science. Against Method (1975) is famous for the slogan “anything goes”, which is almost always misquoted. I'd like to read it properly.

Plan, three weeks:

  • Week 1. The introduction and the opening chapters, including where “anything goes” appears and what he says it means.
  • Week 2. The long central case study of Galileo: the tower argument, the telescope, and Feyerabend's claim that Galileo won partly by persuasion and by changing how observations were interpreted, not by following rules.
  • Week 3. The later chapters on incommensurability, and his remarks on traditional knowledge and the authority of science in society.

Edition: any; later editions add new prefaces, which are worth reading for how he looked back on the book.

Question to carry: is Feyerabend an enemy of reason, or a historian telling methodologists their rules are too tidy?

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5 replies

  1. Tomasz Szewczak

    Fellow

    Week 1. The misquotation matters. Feyerabend presents “anything goes” as the only principle that can be defended in all circumstances and at all stages of history, given how often every proposed rule has been broken. It reads to me as a reductio aimed at rationalists who want a universal rule: this is all you'd be left with. It is not advice to do whatever you like.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Week 2, the tower. The Aristotelian argument was strong: drop a stone from a tower and it lands at the foot, so the earth can't be moving beneath it. Galileo's reply required people to reinterpret what they saw: the stone shares the earth's motion, so the observation is neutral. Feyerabend's point is that Galileo had to change the “natural interpretation” of a perfectly ordinary observation before the evidence could count for him. As someone who teaches Aristotle, I found that generous to both sides.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    Week 2, the telescope. Feyerabend notes that early telescopes produced artefacts and that Galileo had no adequate optical theory of why his instrument could be trusted for the heavens. Reasons for trusting it came later. I resisted this at first, but it's accurate, and it's a better lesson for students than the legend of a man who simply looked and saw.

  4. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Week 3. Feyerabend defends traditional knowledge against the authority of science, and he discusses the revival of traditional medicine in China. As someone who works on Chinese and European thought together, I'm grateful for the instinct and uneasy with the execution. Traditions deserve to be understood on their own terms, but that's a case for better comparison, not for epistemic anarchism. You can respect Xuanzang without thinking method is a myth.

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  5. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    Week 3, and an answer to my own question. He isn't an enemy of reason; he's an enemy of the idea that reason fits in a rulebook. Reading him as someone steeped in Freud, I notice he doesn't rescue Freud from Popper either. He changes the question from “is it scientific?” to “what does this practice actually do, and who decides?” I find that the more useful question about psychoanalysis too.

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