Part 6 (1/2)

The central text for Lakatos's methodology is his 1970 text, ”Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”. Most of the other key papers have been collected in Won all and Currie (1978a and 1978b). Also important is Lakatos (1968), The Problem of Inductive Logic, and (1971), ”Replies to Critics”. A fascinating account of Lakatos's application of his ideas to mathematics is his Proofs and Refutations (1976b). Howson (1976) contains historical case studies designed to support Lakatos's position. Another such study is Lakatos and Zahar (1975). Cohen, Feyerabend and Wartofsky (1976) is a collection of essays in memory of Lakatos. Feyerabend (1976) is an important critique of Lakatos's methodology. The notion of a novel prediction is discussed by Musgrave (1974b), Worrall (1985), Worrall (1989a) and Mayo (1996). A useful overview of Lakatos's work is B. Larvor (1998), Lakatos: An Introduction.

CHAPTER 10.

Feyerabend's anarchistic theory of science.

The story so far.

We seem to be having trouble with our search for the characterisation of science that will serve to pick out what distinguishes it from other kinds of knowledge. We started with the idea, adopted by the positivists who were so influential earlier in the century that science is special because it is derived from the facts, but this attempt floundered because facts are not sufficiently straigt.i.tiorward for this view to be sustained, since they are ”theory-dependent” and fallible, and because no clear account of how theories can be ”derived” from the facts could be found. Falsificationism did not fare much better, mainly because in any realistic situation in science it is not possible to locate the cause of a faulty prediction, so a clear sense of how theories can be falsified becomes almost as elusive as a clear sense of how they can be confirmed. Both Kuhn and Lakatos tried to solve the problem by focusing attention on the theoretical framework in which scientists work. However, Kuhn, for his part, stressed the extent to which workers in rival paradigms ”live in different worlds” to such a degree that he left himself with inadequate resources for elucidating a sense in which a change from one paradigm to another in the course of a scientific revolution is a step forward. Lakatos tried to avoid that trap, but, apart from problems concerning the reality of the methodological decisions he freely invoked in his answer, he ended up with a criterion for characterising science that was so lax that few intellectual pursuits could be ruled out. One philosopher of science who was not surprised by, and who attempted to draw out what he saw to be the full implications of, these failures was Paul Feyerabend, whose controversial but nevertheless influential ”anarchistic” account of science is described and a.s.sessed in this chapter.

Feyerabend's case against method.

Paul Feyerabend, an Austrian who was based in Berkeley, California, for most of his academic career, but who also spent time interacting with (and antagonising) Popper and Lakatos in London, published a book in 1975 with the t.i.tle Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. In it he challenged all of the attempts to give an account of scientific method that would serve to capture its special status by arguing that there is no such method and, indeed, that science does not possess features that render it necessarily superior to other forms of knowledge. If there is a single, unchanging principle of scientific method, Feyerabend came to profess, it is the principle ”anything goes”. There are pa.s.sages in Feyerabend's writings, both early and late, that can be drawn on to severely qualify the extreme anarchistic account of science that is contained in the bulk of Against Method. However, it will be most instructive for our purpose to stick to the unqualified, anarchistic theory of science to see what we can learn from it. In any case, it is the extreme form of Feyerabend's position that has made its mark in the literature and which philosophers of science have, not without difficulty, attempted to counter.

Feyerabend's main line of argument attempts to undermine characterisations of method and progress in science offered by philosophers by challenging them on their own ground in the following way. He takes examples of scientific change which his opponents (including the vast majority of philosophers) consider to be cla.s.sic instances of scientific progress and shows that, as a matter of historical fact, those, changes did not conform to the theories of science proposed by those philosophers. (Feyerabend does not have to himself agree that the episodes in question were progressive for his argument to go through.) The main example appealed to by Feyerabend involves the advances in physics and astronomy made by Galileo. Feyerabend's point is that if an account of method and progress in science cannot even make sense of Galileo's innovations, then it is not much of an account of science. In this outline of Feyerabend's position I will stick largely to the Galileo example, mainly because it is sufficient to ill.u.s.trate Feyerabend's position, but also because the example is readily understood without requiring resort to recondite technicalities.

A number of Feyerabend's points will be familiar because I have already drawn on them for various purposes earlier in this book.

Quotations invoked in chapter 1 of this book ill.u.s.trate the positivist or inductivist view that Galileo's innovations can be explained in terms of the extent to Which he, took the observable facts seriously and built his theories to fit them. The following pa.s.sage from Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967), cited by Feyerabend (1975, pp. 100-101), indicates that Galileo thought otherwise.

You wonder that there are so few followers of the Pythagorean opinion [that the earth moves] while I am astonished that there have been any up to this day who have embraced and followed it. Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding ac.u.men 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 the contrary For the arguments against the whirling of the earth we have already examined are very plausible, as we have seen: and the fact that the Ptolemaics and the Aristotelians and all their disciples took them to be conclusive is indeed a strong argument of their effectiveness. But the experiences which overtly contradict the annual movement are indeed so much greater in their apparent force that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that, in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief.

Far from accepting the facts considered to be borne out by the senses by his contemporaries, it was necessary for Galileo (1967, p. 328) to conquer sense by reason and even to replace the senses by ”a superior and better sense” , namely the telescope. Let us consider two instances where Galileo needed to ”conquer” the evidence of the senses - his rejection of the claim that the earth is stationary and his rejection of the claim that the apparent sizes of Venus and Mars do not change appreciably during the course of the year.

If a stone is dropped from the top of a tower it falls to the base of the tower. This, and other experiences like it, can be taken as evidence that the earth is stationary. For if the earth moves, spinning on its axis, say, (the whirling of the earth referred to by Galileo in the pa.s.sage cited) then should it not move frOM beneath the stone during its fall, with the result that the stone should fall some distance from the base of the tower? Did Galileo reject this argument by appealing to the facts? That is certainly not how Galileo did it in the Dialogue, as Feyerabend pointed out. Galileo (1967, p. 125 ff) achieved the desired result by ”picking the brains” of the reader. He argued as follows. The speed of a ball set rolling down a frictionless slope will increase, because it is ”falling” towards the centre of the earth to some degree. Conversely, the speed of a ball rolled up a frictionless slope will decrease because it is rising away from the centre of the earth. Having persuaded the reader to accept this as obvious, he or she is now asked what will happen to the speed of the ball if the slope is perfectly horizontal. It would seem that the answer is that the speed will neither increase nor decrease since the ball will be neither rising nor falling. The horizontal motion of the ball persists and remains constant. Although this falls short of Newton's law of inertia, it is an example of a uniform motion that persists without a cause, and it is sufficient for Galileo to counter a range of arguments against the spinning earth. Galileo draws the implication that the horizontal motion of the stone falling from the tower, which it shares with the tower as the earth spins, remains unchanged. That is why it stays with the tower, striking the ground at its foot. So the tower argument does not establish that the earth is stationary in the way many had supposed. To the extent that Galileo's case was successful it did not involve appealing to the results of observation and experiment, at his own admit ance, (I point out here that frictionless slopes were eve harder to obtain in Galileo's time than they are now, and that measuring the speed of a ball at various locations on the slope lay beyond what was feasible at the time.) We saw in chapter 1 that the apparent sizes of Venus and Mars were important insofar as the Copernican theory predicted that they should change appreciably, a prediction not borne out by naked-eye observations. The problem is resolved once the telescopic rather than the naked-eye data is accepted. But how was the prefyrence for the telescopic data to be defended? Feyerabend's rendering of the situation and Galileo's response to it run as follows. Accepting what the telescope revealed in the astronomical context was by no means straightforward. Galileo did not have an adequate or detailed theory of the telescope, so he could not defend the telescopic data by appeal to one. It is true that in a terrestrial context there were trial and error methods of vindicating telescopic sightings. For instance, the reading of an inscription on a distant building, indiscernible to the naked eye, could be checked by going close to the building, and the identification of the cargo of a distant s.h.i.+p could be vindicated once the s.h.i.+p arrived in port. But the vindication of terrestrial use could not be straightforwardly emptOyed to justify astronomical use of the telescope. Terrestrial use of the telescope * is aided by a range of visual cues absent in the astronomical case. Genuine images can be distinguished from many artifacts of the telescope because we are familiar with the kinds of things being inspected. So, for instance, if the telescope reveals the mast of a distant s.h.i.+p to be wavy, red on one side and blue on the other and accompanied by black specks hovering above it, the distortions, colours and specks can be dismissed as artifacts. However, when looking into the heavens, we are in unfamiliar territory and lack clear guidance as to what is really there as opposed to an artifact. What is more, comparison with familiar objects to help judge size, and the use of parallax and overlap to help judge what is far and what is near, is a luxury not in general available in astronomy and it is certainly not the case that Galileo could check telescopic sightings of planets by moving closer to them to check with the naked eye. There was even direct evidence that the telescopic data was erratic insofar as it magnified the moon to a different degree than it magnified the planets and stars.

According to Feyerabend (1975, p. 141), these difficulties were such that recourse to argument would have been inadequate for the task of convincing those opponents who wished to deny both the Copernican theory and the telescopic data relating to the heavens. Consequently, Galileo needed to, and did, resort to propaganda and trickery.

On the other hand, there are some telescopic phenomena which are plainly Copernican. Galileo introduces these phenomena as independent evidence for Copernicus while the situation is rather that one refuted view - Copernicanism - has a certain similarity to phenomena emerging from ari,other refuted view -The idea that telescopic phenomena are faiihful images of the sky. Galileo prevails 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.

It should be clear that if Feyerabend's construal of Galileo's methodology is correct and typical of science, then standard positivist, inductivist and falsificationist accounts of science have serious problems accommodating it. It can be accommodated into Lakatos's methodology according to Feyerabend, but only because that methodology is so lax that it can accommodate almost anything. Feyerabend teased Lakatos by welcoming him as a ”fellow anarchist”, albeit one ”in disguise”, playfully dedicating Against Method to Lakatos ”friend, and fellow anarchist”. The way in which Feyerabend construes the two frameworks, the Aristotelian stationary earth framework backed up by naked-eye data and the Copernican, moving earth theory supported by telescopic data, as mutually exclusive circles of thought, as it were, is reminiscent of Kuhn's portrayal of paradigms as mutually exclusive ways of seeing the world. Indeed, the two philosophers both independently coined the word ”incommensurable” to describe the relations.h.i.+p between two theories or paradigms that cannot be logically compared for lack of theory-neutral facts to exploit in the comparison. Kuhn avoided Feyerabend's anarchistic conclusions essentially by appealing to social consensus to restore law and order. Feyerabend (1970) rejected Kuhn's appeal to the social consensus of the scientific community, partly because he did not think Kuhn distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate ways (for example by killing all opponents) of achieving consensus, and also because he did not think the appeal to consensus was capable of distinguis.h.i.+ng between science and other activities such as theology and organised crime.

Given the failure of attempts to capture the special features of scientific knowledge that render it superior to other forms, which failure Feyerabend considered himself to have established, he drew the conclusion that the high status attributed to science in our society, and the superiority it is presumed to have not only over Marxism, say, but over such things as black magic and voodoo, are not justified. According to Feyerabend, the high regard for science is a dangerous dogma, playing a repressive role similar to that which he portrays Christianity as having played in the seventeenth century having in mind such things as Galileo's struggles with the Church.

Feyerabend's advocacy of freedom.

Feyerabend's theory of science is situated in an ethical framework which places a high value on individual freedom, involving an att.i.tude that Feyerabend described as the 'humanitarian att.i.tude”. According to that att.i.tude, individual humans should be free and possess liberty in something like the sense the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill (1975) defended in his essay ”On Liberty”. Feyerabend (1975, p. 20) declared himself in favour of ”the attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life” and supports Mill in advocating ”the cultivation of individuality which alone produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings”. From this humanitarian point of view, Feyerabend supports his anarchistic account of science on the grounds that it increases the freedom of scientists by removing them from methodological constraints and, more generally, leaves individuals the freedom to choose between science and other forms of knowledge.

From Feyerabend's point if view, the inst.i.tutionalisation of science in our society is inconsistent with the humanitarian att.i.tude. In schools, for example, science is taught as a matter of course. ”Thus, while an American can now choose the 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” (1975, p. 299). What we need to do in the light of this, wrote Feyerabend (1975, p. 307) , is to ”free society from the strangling hold of an ideologically petrified science just as our ancestors freed us from the strangling _hold of the One True Religion!”. In Feyerabend's image of a frees ' 'society, science will not se given preference over other forms of knowledge or over other traditions. A mature citizen in a free society is ”a person who has learned to make up his mind and who has then decided in favour of what he thinks suits him best”. Science will be studied as a historical phenomenon ”together with other fairy tales such as the myths of 'primitive' societies” so that each individual ”has the infoi [nation needed for arriving at a free decision” (1975, p. 308, italics in original). In Feyerabend's ideal society the state is ideologically neutral between ideologies to ensure that individuals maintain freedom of choice and do not have an ideology imposed on them against their will.

The culmination of Feyerabend's case against method, together with his advocacy of a particular brand of freedom for the individual, is his anarchistic theory of knowledge (1975, pp. 284-5, italics in original).

None of the methods which Carnap, Hempel, Nagel [three prominent positivists], Popper or even Lakatos want to use for rationalising scientific changes can be applied, and the one that can be applied, refutation, is greatly reduced in strength. What remains are aesthetic judgments, judgments of taste, metaphysical prejudices, religious desires, in short, what remains are our subjective wishes: science at its most advanced and general returns to the individual a freedom he seems to lose in its more pedestrian parts.

There is no scientific method, then: Scientists should follow their subjective wishes. Anything goes.

Critique of Feyerabend's individualism.

A critique of Feyerabend's understanding of human freedom will act as a useful preliminary to an appraisal of his critique of method. A central problem with Feyerabend's notion of freedom is from the degree to which it is entirely negative, in the sense that freedom is understood as freedom from constraints. Individuals should be free of constraints to the extent that they can follow their subjective wishes and do what they like. This overlooks the positive side of the issue, the extent to which individuals have access to the means to fulfil their wishes. For example, freedom of speech can be, and often is, discussed in tei ins of freedom from constraints, in the form of state suppression, libel laws and the like. So, for example, if students disru '' Pf”a lecture on campus by an academic expressing views sympathetic to Fascism they might well be accused of denying the speaker freedom of speech. They are accused of putting an obstacle in the way of the speaker's natural right. However, freedom of speech can be considered, from the positive point of view, in terms of the resources available to individuals to have their views heard by others. What access does a particular individual have to the media, for example? This point of view puts our example in a different light. The disruption of the lecture could perhaps be justified on the grounds that the speaker was given access to a university lecture hall, microphone, media advertising and so on in a way that those advocating other views were not. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume nicely ill.u.s.trated the point I am getting at when he criticised John Locke's idea of the Social Contract Locke had construed the social contract as being freely adopted by members of a democratic society and argued that anyone not wis.h.i.+ng to subscribe to the contract was free to emigrate. Hume responded as follows: Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well a.s.sert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the domination of the master; though he was carried on board while a:sleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her. Individuals are born into a society that pre-exists them and which, in that sense, possesses characteristics they do not choose and cannot be in a position to choose. The courses of action open to them, and, consequently, the precise senses in which they are free, will be determined by the access that they have in practice to the resources necessary for various courses of action. In science too an individual who wishes to make a contribution to a science will be confronted by the situation as it stands various theories, mathematical techniques, instruments and experimental techniques. The paths of action open to scientists in general will be delimited by that objectively existing situation, while the paths open to a particular scientist will be determined by the subset of the existing resources to which that individual scientist has access. Scientists will be free to follow their ”subjective wishes” only insofar as they are free to chose among the restricted range af_nptions open to them. What is more, a prerequisite for an understanding of that situation will be a characterisation of the situation that individuals face, like it or not. Whether it be changes in science or in society generally, the main theoretical work involves understanding the situations confronted by individuals rather than involving some generalised appeal to unconstrained freedom.

It is ironic that Feyerabend, who in his study of science goes to great lengths to deny the existence of theory-neutral facts, in his social theory appeals to the far more ambitious notion of an ideology-neutral State. How on earth would such a State come into existence, how would it function and what would sustain it? In the light of work that has been done in making serious attempts to get to grips with questions about the origin and nature of ”the State”, Feyerabend's fanciful speculations about a utopia in which all individuals are free to follow their inclinations in an unrestricted way appear childish.

Criticising Feyerabend for setting his views on science in an individualist framework involving a naive notion of freedom is one thing. Getting to grips with the details of the case he makes ”against method” in science is another. In the next chapter we will see what can be constructively salvaged from Feyerabend's attack on method.

Further reading.

Feyerabend develops some of the ideas of his Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975) in Science in a Free Society (1978). Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method (Feyerabend, 1981a) and Problems of Em piricism (Feyerabend, 1981b) are collections of his articles, a number of which predate his ”anarchistic” phase. ”Consolations for the Specialist” (1970) and ”On the Critique of Scientific Reason” (1976) are his critiques of Kuhn and Lakatos respectively. I have taken issue with Feyerabend's portrayal of Galileo's science in ”Galileo's Telescopic Observations of Venus and Mars” (Chalmers, 1985) and ”The Galileo that Feyerabend Missed” (Chalmers, 1986).

CHAPTER 11:.

Methodical changes in method.

Against universal method.

We saw in the previous chapter that Feyerabend made a case against the various accounts of scientific method that have been put forward by philosophers as attempts to capture the distinctive feature of scientific knowledge. A key strategy that he employed was to argue for the incompatibility of those accounts and Galileo's advances in physics and astronomy. Elsewhere (in Chalmers, 1985 and 1986) I have taken issue with Feyerabend's historical account of the Galileo episode and some of the details of my disagreement will be introduced and exploited in the next section. Once that history is corrected I believe it to remain the case that the corrected history poses problems for standard accounts of science and the scientific method. That is, I suggest there is a sense in which Feyerabend's case against method can be sustained ,provided we are clear about the notion of method that has been refuted. Feyerabend's case tells against the claim that there is a universal, ahistorical method of science that contains standards that all sciences should live up to if they are to be worthy of the t.i.tle ”science”. Here the term ”universal” is used to indicate that the proposed method is to apply to all sciences or putative sciences - physics, psychology, creation science or whatever - while the term ”ahistorical” signals the timeless character of the method. It is to be used to appraise Aristotle's physics as much as Einstein's and Democritus's atomism as much as modern atomic physics. I am happy to join Feyerabend in regarding the idea of a universal and ahistoric method as highly implausible and even absurd. As Feyerabend (1975, p. 295) says, ”The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules is both unrealistic and pernicious”, is ”detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change” and ”makes science less adaptable and more dogmatic”. If there is to be a scientific method capable of judging sciences of all kinds, past, present and future, one might well ask what resources philosophers have for arriving at such a potent tool, so potent that it can tell us in advance what are the appropriate standards for judging future science. If we have a conception of science as an open-ended quest to improve our knowledge, then why cannot there be room for us to improve our methods and adapt and refine our standards in the light of what we learn.

I have no problem joining the campaign that Feyerabend launched against method, then, provided method is understood as universal, unchanging method. We have seen that Feyerabend's response to the case against method is to a.s.sume that there is no method, that scientists should follow their own subjective wishes and that anything goes. However, universal method and no method at all do not exhaust the range of possibilities. A middle way would hold that there are methods and standards in science, but that they can vary from science to science and can, within a science, be changed, and changed for the better. Not only does Feyerabend's case not tell against this intermediate view, but his Galileo example can be construed in a way that supports it, as I shall attempt to show in the next section.

I hold that there is a middle way, according to which there are historically contingent methods and standards implicit in successful sciences. A common response from philosophers of science who reject Feyerabend's anarchism and extreme relativism as firmly as I do is that those like myself who seek a middle way are kidding ourselves. John Worrall (1988), for instance, has given clear expression to the general line of argument. If I am to defend a change in scientific method in a way that avoids extreme relativism then I am obliged to show in what way such a change is for the better. But better according to what standards? It would seem that unless there are some superstandards for judging changes in standards then those changes cannot be construed in a non-relativist way. But superstandards takes us back to the universal method that is meant to yield such standards. So, Won-all's argument goes, either we have universal method or relativism. There is no middle way. As at least a preliminary to a rejoinder to this argument it is useful to take an example from science of a change in standards. The next section is devoted to such a change accomplished by Galileo.

Telescopic for naked-eye data: a change in standards.