Extremely disappointing in an otherwise fine article to see Feyerabend slandered as a Nazi or "carrying a gun for Hitler". In point of fact, he was not a Nazi (what part of Feyerabend's personality strikes you as compatible with as totalizing an ideology as Nazism?). Rather, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht (the regular German army, not a Nazi institution like the SS) along with practically every other German or Austrian man at the time. To describe his service in the war as "carrying a gun for Hitler" would be a bit like describing you as having "voluntarily paid taxes to the US government [which did this or that horrible thing]" or having "signed a statement saying it would be just fine with you if USG conscripted you into any hypothetical future war, just so you could receive federal student aid."
The worst that could be said about Feyerabend in that regard is that he failed to make himself into a Sophie Scholl, a Claus von Stauffenberg or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But the thing about exemplary moral courage is that it is rare, and accordingly tawdry to criticize others for their lack of it in circumstances that one has never, oneself, had to face.
The Eastern Front was one of the most horrible episodes in human history, and it left Feyerabend-- who never signed up for it and in fact tried unsuccessfully to get out of it--permanently disabled and in chronic pain for the rest of his life. I don't think I'm in any position to decide whether he later talked about it in a way that was nice enough to suit my taste.
Yeah that's a nit for me as well. German soldier in WWII does not equal Nazi. I mean, he was drafted. I wonder what would happen to a conscientious objector or draft dodger in Nazi Germany?
You make some valid points. A drafted WWII German soldier does not deserve the same condemnation as an SS officer.
But the obvious answer to the question, "what part of Feyerabend's personality strikes you as compatible with as totalizing an ideology as Nazism?" is: Feyerabend's nihilism.
I'm curious what strikes you as nihilistic about Feyerabend? He was certainly an epistemological pluralist or even an anarchist but I see his work as a defense of human flourishing as against a hegemony of The Experts, rather than the view that nothing matters.
came here to say this. he also never joined the Nazi party despite the fact that doing so would've been advantageous for his career. This is from his memoir Killing Time.
that said -- I'm not sure he would've cared too much about what we said about him :)
Sorry, but no. Yes, exemplary moral courage is rare. That does not mean that the rest of us can or should be forgiven for not displaying it when it is called for. If one person stands up and says, "No," they will, of course, be shot. But if everyone stood up and said no, there would be no one to do the shooting. Our obligation, therefore, is to stand up and say "No."
It is true that all states are transgressive to one degree or another. On the other hand, it is good that governments exist because anarchy is bad. So it is morally necessary to comply with transgressive governments up to a point. We must say with St. Thomas More, "I am the king's good servant, but God's first."
And yes, it can be difficult to decide where the line is. What exactly is the point at which you decide that the state has gone sufficiently rogue that, like the people of South Korea, you must go out into the streets to stand between the soldiers and the parliamentarians that they are trying to arrest?
Deciding where to draw that line is hard. Deciding whether carrying a gun for Hitler is over that line isn't hard, though facing the consequences of refusing to carry a gun for Hitler would certainly have been very hard indeed. I doubt I should have had the courage to do it myself, though I hope I should at least have been ashamed of myself if I had.
But we have to ask ourselves what we are to make of people like St Maximilian Kolbe, who said No to Hitler and suffered grievously for it. Either Kolbe was wrong to say No to Hitler, or Feyerabend was wrong to say Yes to him. You can't have it both ways.
I fear writing what I am about to say because it feels transgressive to acknowledge the value of a scientific wild hair up someone's ass as the source of inspiration for true "scientific" change. But I believe it to be true. I have spent almost 40 years learning, reviewing or implementing some form of "scientific" discovery -- and the process you describe is exactly right. The characterization of the NIH in particular is quite apt. Does it mean that we destroy the infrastructure that is an outgrowth of an illusion -- well, the hockey stick (and its twin that depicts historical changes in life expectancy) suggest something is working. So maybe not destroy the infrastructure but loosen some parameters so that we catch that wild hair a bit sooner? I appreciate the disquiet in embracing someone who was comfortable being a Nazi but perhaps this is an accident of history -- I have known many scientists famous or otherwise -- whose moral fabric has only a fragile connection to morality as we commonly view it. It is a common fallacy that science is a noble calling populated only by the self-sacrificing. Thank you for the clear and entertaining writing about what most people trained or practicing "science" know to be true.
My rule of thumb has generally been that if something feels transgressive, it means you're on to something. I can't claim that rule has always served me well, but it has helped me more often than it has hurt me.
Are the best parts of philosophy and of science that the books are always kept open, i.e., are always subject to audit?
Was Thales, as an ur-philosopher and ur-scientist, onto something? That the proof in both philosophy and science is whether the insights work? (Unfortunately, as in your examples, ssometimes it takes years to prove a theory or an insight works).
Socrates and Richard Feynman the pragmatic and joy/ satisfaction heirs of Thales.
And, pace Francis Bacon, the usefulness accumulates and compounds, hence Hockey Stick.
Here’s another take on that, per Stewart Brand:
“Science is the only news.
“When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science.
“Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009), page 216.
"Are the best parts of philosophy and of science that the books are always kept open, i.e., are always subject to audit?" Yes! And that is part of the great value of Popper. Science never proves anything. It can always turn out to be wrong. Humans hate uncertainty but absolute certainty and proof have no place in science (or should not).
Maybe I'm missing something, but it kind of seems like you end up in a pretty Kuhnian place there, talking about how great science breaks rules and often starts out worse than the old regime but through an almost cultlike devotion to a weird new thing takes over because eventually it can solve the normal problems of science better. That sounds pretty Kuhnian! From my admittedly meager understanding of his theory.
I do think Kuhn is broadly right, but he thinks that you can only proceed along the lines of the current paradigm, and anomalies are discovered basically by accident. I think Feyerabend would say that if you look closely, you'll find much more deviation from that paradigm even in periods of "normal science".
Nice to be one of four people, having read both Against Method and Origin of Consciousness. People told me not to waste time on the latter because the academy had thoroughly rejected it. Nonetheless, I still think he may be on to something (even though the physical mechanism he proposes has been refuted entirely by modern neuroscience.) There are plenty of people out here who
Also, I found Against Method close to unreadable, and I frequently wanted to throw the book at Feyerabend's head, or at least write him a long letter telling him how I disagreed with some point.
I didn't include this because it was too niche, but I think the thing that limits Against Method the most is that it's written to other philosophers of science rather than the public. Which makes total sense because Feyerabend was an academic, but it means that he's extremely concerned with disciplinary disputes that ultimately aren't that interesting. And it means he whipsaws between writing accessible prose and sentences like "Archaic pictures are paratactic aggregates, not hypotactic systems"
Great post, I'm here commenting to engagement farm what would otherwise be me eating popcorn to the Feyerabend Stans' reactions to you quoting him in his own words. Also, I'm planning to use (insert Spiderman Willem Dafoe meme) "I'm somewhat of an epistemological anarchist myself" in my daily life more.
As an aside, I find Popper even more annoying than Feyerabend, not least because his definition is the one thing that "everybody knows" about the philosophy of science*. Interestingly, astrology does pass his definition: it has a hypothesis, and it makes predictions. The fact that the predictions routinely fail to match the experimental outcome is perhaps something Popper should have included in his definition?
And also because The Open Society and its Enemies is dangerous bollocks, and his "three worlds" theory is just Descartesian dualism with an extra world thrown in.
IMO, the essence of the scientific method is not how you get to your hypotheses, but how you test them. To the extent Feyerabend has a valid point, a hypothesis can arrive via many different routes, and we should acknowledge that the process is not always systematic or linear.
But validation needs to be more methodical. Kekulé's daydream about a snake eating its own tail might (or might not) have been his inspiration for the proposed structure of benzene, but it wasn't *evidence*.
1) Serving in the Wehrmacht didn't make you a Nazi. In fact, it was the only major institution in Germany which did NOT come under Nazi control (as opposed to, say, the police, which were all suborned under the Gestapo, etc.)
2) How are you so sure Feyerabend was on the wrong side of WW2? Have you ever asked THAT question? :))
3) There is no scientific method because the hypothesis part doesn't originate in "research" but via metaphysics, aka accessing the spirit realm, the "great beyond", the dream world, or whatever other name you want to call it.
As you might expect, that sounds insane in the first instance, but the more you delve into it, the more you'll see that it's true. TESTING the hypothesis is science, but the ORIGIN of the hypothesis itself is neither founded in logic nor rationality.
4) Speaking of which, ask Kary Mullis about the first paper he ever published in Science (yes, I know he's dead - I'm speaking metaphorically here). And then you'll see just how often this happens in scientific breakthroughs (including how the structure of benzene was discovered, how Einstein solved Brownian motion, etc). The "breakthroughs" always start with a hypothesis that "breaks through" from the other realm into this one and then is tested and verified in the rational/logical realm, thus transmuting magic into science.
So much good stuff here. I have a lot of questions about the assumption that GDP is a good measure of some incredible and beneficial transition in human history. Why GDP? Why measure the accomplishments of humanity by how much money they made per capita? There are a lot of modern critiques of GDP, including that it tells us nothing about things like happiness or inequality or, you know, totalitarianism. You can have quite high GDP in a country and also have very high levels of inequality...like the United States.
I'm not saying there aren't other hockey sticks you could look at. I guess you might find a similar one for lifespan, which you could also argue might not be the best measure. Who cares if people are living longer on average if we're all still assholes? What are we doing with that extra life?
It's more than a nitpick because the question is, is there really some hockey stick that shows how much better life got for humans at a certain historical point? Or is that an illusion? Is it a story we tell ourselves, sort of like the story that the earth is the center of the universe? Is history really some march toward progress or is it just a lot of tradeoffs. Technology gives us the ability to prevent dysentery, but also gives us climate change and the atom bomb. I guess it's partly the very dark moment we're in right now globally, but did science really make the world better, all in all?
GDP and inequality are not correlated (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip), but GDP and happiness are (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness). I agree that history is a series of tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs have gotten a lot better over time, and I think the only reason for that is the increase in knowledge. I can't think of what I would be willing to trade to live in a world where 50% of kids die before they turn five, and where most people will ultimately die of starvation, violence, or diseases we can now prevent.
A peasant from anywhere prior to 1800 miraculously moved to any of the poorest places in the US today would rejoice at how life was better. Climate change as opposed to the real, current possibility of starvation? Many in France met their deaths from starvation in the 1700s. And so the rest of technology. Yes. We’re all still assholes. As it has been ever thus, I just say it’s reality and deal with my and other’s nature as best I can.
Exactly. And I don't know why it's some big "mystery" when the thing that changed 400 years ago wasn't science but the beginning of capitalism, wherein "capital" (aka money) is ginned up out of thin air as opposed to being rooted to some physical material (like gold and silver). So all that GDP growth is just a balloon filled with hot air, signifying nothing.
There is a huge gap between "no method" and "no single method." Feyerabend does us a favor in emphasizing the non-rational (not irrational) aspects of scientific discovery. But he goes way too far. Popper's criterion, it seems to me, is perfectly compatible with various non-rational aspects involved in the formation of hypotheses and their testing.
Harsh criticism of *institutionalized* science is welcome!
Perhaps there's no Method for Great Science, and perhaps there never will be; but perhaps there is an Attitude, which started with the Renaissance loonies, and the rejection of the roughly Scholastic medieval model where knowledge was seen to reside in books/authority/the Word, out there to be received vs *created* in a dynamic interaction with the world outside our heads (and their library extensions).
That said, perhaps a Method is perfectly valid for day to day polishing, honing and refining. And that's most of the science. Is it unnecessary? I don't know. I feel it's the mulch for the Crazy New Ideas to germinate from.
The Scientific Method does exist. Every person that can think logically and can solve problems automatically follows the method. The method, as shown in the graphic inserted in your article describes the steps that any successful problem resolution has followed. It is a good framework (a philosophical construct) to describe what has happened when a problem is solved. It is not terribly useful as a recipe because for any particular problem that is at the bleeding edge of current knowledge the details of how to find a solution do not yet exist.
The Galileo example, when looked at in retrospect, does actually follow the method. He was doing research, he was hypothesising, and he was experimenting. The problem was that they were working on bodies in motion with insufficiently sensitive methods to measure the motion of a large mass. Movement amongst the stars, as Galileo observed, was a very indirect motion measurement. His peer reviewers were using even more inappropriate motion measurements (the human body's ability to sense acceleration) to refute his hypothesis. Thus he appears to have been unsuccessful. It took 200 more years of work before Newton's math and Foucault's Pendulum more directly sensed/codified the earth's motion.
I would venture that the examples of where the method does not appear to work is a misapplication of the method concept. In the case of the heliocentric solar system, the steps are there but they each encompass tens to hundreds of years with many individuals contributing. On a problem that large, taking one individuals work and trying to show that they were exactly following the steps is silly.
Even today, lots of research uses inappropriate measurements (the answer being pursued is smaller than the error bound of the instrumentation) or sample sizes inappropriate for the statistical method applied. Or best of all using a computer model to study a complex system. If someone follows the steps but does so poorly or inappropriately their conclusion will still be wrong. That is not a failure of the method that is failure of the researcher. 50 years later when the problem is finally solved, all of the work will fit in the framework of the method.
Extremely disappointing in an otherwise fine article to see Feyerabend slandered as a Nazi or "carrying a gun for Hitler". In point of fact, he was not a Nazi (what part of Feyerabend's personality strikes you as compatible with as totalizing an ideology as Nazism?). Rather, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht (the regular German army, not a Nazi institution like the SS) along with practically every other German or Austrian man at the time. To describe his service in the war as "carrying a gun for Hitler" would be a bit like describing you as having "voluntarily paid taxes to the US government [which did this or that horrible thing]" or having "signed a statement saying it would be just fine with you if USG conscripted you into any hypothetical future war, just so you could receive federal student aid."
The worst that could be said about Feyerabend in that regard is that he failed to make himself into a Sophie Scholl, a Claus von Stauffenberg or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But the thing about exemplary moral courage is that it is rare, and accordingly tawdry to criticize others for their lack of it in circumstances that one has never, oneself, had to face.
The Eastern Front was one of the most horrible episodes in human history, and it left Feyerabend-- who never signed up for it and in fact tried unsuccessfully to get out of it--permanently disabled and in chronic pain for the rest of his life. I don't think I'm in any position to decide whether he later talked about it in a way that was nice enough to suit my taste.
Yeah that's a nit for me as well. German soldier in WWII does not equal Nazi. I mean, he was drafted. I wonder what would happen to a conscientious objector or draft dodger in Nazi Germany?
You make some valid points. A drafted WWII German soldier does not deserve the same condemnation as an SS officer.
But the obvious answer to the question, "what part of Feyerabend's personality strikes you as compatible with as totalizing an ideology as Nazism?" is: Feyerabend's nihilism.
I'm curious what strikes you as nihilistic about Feyerabend? He was certainly an epistemological pluralist or even an anarchist but I see his work as a defense of human flourishing as against a hegemony of The Experts, rather than the view that nothing matters.
came here to say this. he also never joined the Nazi party despite the fact that doing so would've been advantageous for his career. This is from his memoir Killing Time.
that said -- I'm not sure he would've cared too much about what we said about him :)
Sorry, but no. Yes, exemplary moral courage is rare. That does not mean that the rest of us can or should be forgiven for not displaying it when it is called for. If one person stands up and says, "No," they will, of course, be shot. But if everyone stood up and said no, there would be no one to do the shooting. Our obligation, therefore, is to stand up and say "No."
Do you pay taxes?
I was not aware that paying taxes was considered a moral failure.
If everyone stood up and stopped paying taxes, there would be no one to to do the various appalling things that the state does. But I forgive you!
Anyway, if we're arguing about this then I take it my original point about Feyerabend not being a Nazi stands, so happy to leave it here.
It is true that all states are transgressive to one degree or another. On the other hand, it is good that governments exist because anarchy is bad. So it is morally necessary to comply with transgressive governments up to a point. We must say with St. Thomas More, "I am the king's good servant, but God's first."
And yes, it can be difficult to decide where the line is. What exactly is the point at which you decide that the state has gone sufficiently rogue that, like the people of South Korea, you must go out into the streets to stand between the soldiers and the parliamentarians that they are trying to arrest?
Deciding where to draw that line is hard. Deciding whether carrying a gun for Hitler is over that line isn't hard, though facing the consequences of refusing to carry a gun for Hitler would certainly have been very hard indeed. I doubt I should have had the courage to do it myself, though I hope I should at least have been ashamed of myself if I had.
But we have to ask ourselves what we are to make of people like St Maximilian Kolbe, who said No to Hitler and suffered grievously for it. Either Kolbe was wrong to say No to Hitler, or Feyerabend was wrong to say Yes to him. You can't have it both ways.
I fear writing what I am about to say because it feels transgressive to acknowledge the value of a scientific wild hair up someone's ass as the source of inspiration for true "scientific" change. But I believe it to be true. I have spent almost 40 years learning, reviewing or implementing some form of "scientific" discovery -- and the process you describe is exactly right. The characterization of the NIH in particular is quite apt. Does it mean that we destroy the infrastructure that is an outgrowth of an illusion -- well, the hockey stick (and its twin that depicts historical changes in life expectancy) suggest something is working. So maybe not destroy the infrastructure but loosen some parameters so that we catch that wild hair a bit sooner? I appreciate the disquiet in embracing someone who was comfortable being a Nazi but perhaps this is an accident of history -- I have known many scientists famous or otherwise -- whose moral fabric has only a fragile connection to morality as we commonly view it. It is a common fallacy that science is a noble calling populated only by the self-sacrificing. Thank you for the clear and entertaining writing about what most people trained or practicing "science" know to be true.
My rule of thumb has generally been that if something feels transgressive, it means you're on to something. I can't claim that rule has always served me well, but it has helped me more often than it has hurt me.
Are the best parts of philosophy and of science that the books are always kept open, i.e., are always subject to audit?
Was Thales, as an ur-philosopher and ur-scientist, onto something? That the proof in both philosophy and science is whether the insights work? (Unfortunately, as in your examples, ssometimes it takes years to prove a theory or an insight works).
Socrates and Richard Feynman the pragmatic and joy/ satisfaction heirs of Thales.
And, pace Francis Bacon, the usefulness accumulates and compounds, hence Hockey Stick.
Here’s another take on that, per Stewart Brand:
“Science is the only news.
“When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science.
“Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”
― Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009), page 216.
"Are the best parts of philosophy and of science that the books are always kept open, i.e., are always subject to audit?" Yes! And that is part of the great value of Popper. Science never proves anything. It can always turn out to be wrong. Humans hate uncertainty but absolute certainty and proof have no place in science (or should not).
Maybe I'm missing something, but it kind of seems like you end up in a pretty Kuhnian place there, talking about how great science breaks rules and often starts out worse than the old regime but through an almost cultlike devotion to a weird new thing takes over because eventually it can solve the normal problems of science better. That sounds pretty Kuhnian! From my admittedly meager understanding of his theory.
(Also for a fun analogy see a review of a book on the necessity of bubbles for economic progress: https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-boom-by-byrne-hobart-and-tobias?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app )
I do think Kuhn is broadly right, but he thinks that you can only proceed along the lines of the current paradigm, and anomalies are discovered basically by accident. I think Feyerabend would say that if you look closely, you'll find much more deviation from that paradigm even in periods of "normal science".
Nice to be one of four people, having read both Against Method and Origin of Consciousness. People told me not to waste time on the latter because the academy had thoroughly rejected it. Nonetheless, I still think he may be on to something (even though the physical mechanism he proposes has been refuted entirely by modern neuroscience.) There are plenty of people out here who
Also, I found Against Method close to unreadable, and I frequently wanted to throw the book at Feyerabend's head, or at least write him a long letter telling him how I disagreed with some point.
I didn't include this because it was too niche, but I think the thing that limits Against Method the most is that it's written to other philosophers of science rather than the public. Which makes total sense because Feyerabend was an academic, but it means that he's extremely concerned with disciplinary disputes that ultimately aren't that interesting. And it means he whipsaws between writing accessible prose and sentences like "Archaic pictures are paratactic aggregates, not hypotactic systems"
Footnote 6: the new definition of body count isn't the old definition so it took my brain a second to adjust back to the old definition!
Great post, I'm here commenting to engagement farm what would otherwise be me eating popcorn to the Feyerabend Stans' reactions to you quoting him in his own words. Also, I'm planning to use (insert Spiderman Willem Dafoe meme) "I'm somewhat of an epistemological anarchist myself" in my daily life more.
As an aside, I find Popper even more annoying than Feyerabend, not least because his definition is the one thing that "everybody knows" about the philosophy of science*. Interestingly, astrology does pass his definition: it has a hypothesis, and it makes predictions. The fact that the predictions routinely fail to match the experimental outcome is perhaps something Popper should have included in his definition?
And also because The Open Society and its Enemies is dangerous bollocks, and his "three worlds" theory is just Descartesian dualism with an extra world thrown in.
One of my favorite books of all time
IMO, the essence of the scientific method is not how you get to your hypotheses, but how you test them. To the extent Feyerabend has a valid point, a hypothesis can arrive via many different routes, and we should acknowledge that the process is not always systematic or linear.
But validation needs to be more methodical. Kekulé's daydream about a snake eating its own tail might (or might not) have been his inspiration for the proposed structure of benzene, but it wasn't *evidence*.
1) Serving in the Wehrmacht didn't make you a Nazi. In fact, it was the only major institution in Germany which did NOT come under Nazi control (as opposed to, say, the police, which were all suborned under the Gestapo, etc.)
2) How are you so sure Feyerabend was on the wrong side of WW2? Have you ever asked THAT question? :))
3) There is no scientific method because the hypothesis part doesn't originate in "research" but via metaphysics, aka accessing the spirit realm, the "great beyond", the dream world, or whatever other name you want to call it.
As you might expect, that sounds insane in the first instance, but the more you delve into it, the more you'll see that it's true. TESTING the hypothesis is science, but the ORIGIN of the hypothesis itself is neither founded in logic nor rationality.
4) Speaking of which, ask Kary Mullis about the first paper he ever published in Science (yes, I know he's dead - I'm speaking metaphorically here). And then you'll see just how often this happens in scientific breakthroughs (including how the structure of benzene was discovered, how Einstein solved Brownian motion, etc). The "breakthroughs" always start with a hypothesis that "breaks through" from the other realm into this one and then is tested and verified in the rational/logical realm, thus transmuting magic into science.
So much good stuff here. I have a lot of questions about the assumption that GDP is a good measure of some incredible and beneficial transition in human history. Why GDP? Why measure the accomplishments of humanity by how much money they made per capita? There are a lot of modern critiques of GDP, including that it tells us nothing about things like happiness or inequality or, you know, totalitarianism. You can have quite high GDP in a country and also have very high levels of inequality...like the United States.
I'm not saying there aren't other hockey sticks you could look at. I guess you might find a similar one for lifespan, which you could also argue might not be the best measure. Who cares if people are living longer on average if we're all still assholes? What are we doing with that extra life?
It's more than a nitpick because the question is, is there really some hockey stick that shows how much better life got for humans at a certain historical point? Or is that an illusion? Is it a story we tell ourselves, sort of like the story that the earth is the center of the universe? Is history really some march toward progress or is it just a lot of tradeoffs. Technology gives us the ability to prevent dysentery, but also gives us climate change and the atom bomb. I guess it's partly the very dark moment we're in right now globally, but did science really make the world better, all in all?
GDP and inequality are not correlated (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip), but GDP and happiness are (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness). I agree that history is a series of tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs have gotten a lot better over time, and I think the only reason for that is the increase in knowledge. I can't think of what I would be willing to trade to live in a world where 50% of kids die before they turn five, and where most people will ultimately die of starvation, violence, or diseases we can now prevent.
A peasant from anywhere prior to 1800 miraculously moved to any of the poorest places in the US today would rejoice at how life was better. Climate change as opposed to the real, current possibility of starvation? Many in France met their deaths from starvation in the 1700s. And so the rest of technology. Yes. We’re all still assholes. As it has been ever thus, I just say it’s reality and deal with my and other’s nature as best I can.
I didn't die during my birth, which I certainly would have in any time before about 1900. So, yes, it made my world a lot better.
Exactly. And I don't know why it's some big "mystery" when the thing that changed 400 years ago wasn't science but the beginning of capitalism, wherein "capital" (aka money) is ginned up out of thin air as opposed to being rooted to some physical material (like gold and silver). So all that GDP growth is just a balloon filled with hot air, signifying nothing.
"signifying nothing" would seem a bold statement.
There is a huge gap between "no method" and "no single method." Feyerabend does us a favor in emphasizing the non-rational (not irrational) aspects of scientific discovery. But he goes way too far. Popper's criterion, it seems to me, is perfectly compatible with various non-rational aspects involved in the formation of hypotheses and their testing.
Harsh criticism of *institutionalized* science is welcome!
Perhaps there's no Method for Great Science, and perhaps there never will be; but perhaps there is an Attitude, which started with the Renaissance loonies, and the rejection of the roughly Scholastic medieval model where knowledge was seen to reside in books/authority/the Word, out there to be received vs *created* in a dynamic interaction with the world outside our heads (and their library extensions).
That said, perhaps a Method is perfectly valid for day to day polishing, honing and refining. And that's most of the science. Is it unnecessary? I don't know. I feel it's the mulch for the Crazy New Ideas to germinate from.
All in all, great great article.
The Scientific Method does exist. Every person that can think logically and can solve problems automatically follows the method. The method, as shown in the graphic inserted in your article describes the steps that any successful problem resolution has followed. It is a good framework (a philosophical construct) to describe what has happened when a problem is solved. It is not terribly useful as a recipe because for any particular problem that is at the bleeding edge of current knowledge the details of how to find a solution do not yet exist.
The Galileo example, when looked at in retrospect, does actually follow the method. He was doing research, he was hypothesising, and he was experimenting. The problem was that they were working on bodies in motion with insufficiently sensitive methods to measure the motion of a large mass. Movement amongst the stars, as Galileo observed, was a very indirect motion measurement. His peer reviewers were using even more inappropriate motion measurements (the human body's ability to sense acceleration) to refute his hypothesis. Thus he appears to have been unsuccessful. It took 200 more years of work before Newton's math and Foucault's Pendulum more directly sensed/codified the earth's motion.
I would venture that the examples of where the method does not appear to work is a misapplication of the method concept. In the case of the heliocentric solar system, the steps are there but they each encompass tens to hundreds of years with many individuals contributing. On a problem that large, taking one individuals work and trying to show that they were exactly following the steps is silly.
Even today, lots of research uses inappropriate measurements (the answer being pursued is smaller than the error bound of the instrumentation) or sample sizes inappropriate for the statistical method applied. Or best of all using a computer model to study a complex system. If someone follows the steps but does so poorly or inappropriately their conclusion will still be wrong. That is not a failure of the method that is failure of the researcher. 50 years later when the problem is finally solved, all of the work will fit in the framework of the method.
There is one method common to all science: peer review.
hoooo boy are you in the wrong substack to make that assertion!
Lol. So true.
That looks like "peer review", right there!