Ep. 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science (Part One)

0:07 Dylan: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life podcast by some guys who are, one point, set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 281 is again, something like, how does science make progress? And we read selections from Paul Feyerabend's against method from 1975. For more information, please visit partialexaminedlife.com this is Dylan Casey, not so much against method, but against meth heads in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, empirically irrelevant in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes all on trying to avoid being a rodent of neopositivism in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: That's good. I have to confess, I stole that from Mark, so Mark sent me his notes. That's clearly Mark's style.

0:54 Wes: It is, that's true.

0:56 Dylan: You should have just noticed that was Mark's. That wasn't yours. He knows that you didn't think of that.

1:01 Wes: So are you going to be playing the part of Mark tonight on the show?

1:04 Dylan: No, that's my end of playing Mark. Mark isn't feeling great, so he wasn't able to show up. But we will carry on without him

1:15 Wes: and we will try to imagine what he might have said. We will apply our theory of Mark, rational reconstruction of Mark.

1:22 Dylan: Is it a rodent like reconstruction of Mark? Okay.

1:27 Wes: I think anything goes is a good approach, yes.

1:30 Dylan: Now remind me, I don't even know if I got his name pronounced correctly. I fairaband.

1:36 Wes: It's Fireabend.

1:38 Dylan: Fireabend. Sorry about that.

1:40 Wes: Fireabend.

1:41 Dylan: Fireabend.

1:41 Wes: Yeah. Fireabend.

1:42 Dylan: Yeah, you got to remember that a in the middle of it. So he wrote this book and published it shortly after Lakatosh published his book that we read, or papers that we read, early 1970s. He and Lakatosh were very good friends. And in fact, Feyerabend calls him the best friend that he ever had. And he says that Lakatosh told him, you know, you should write your stuff down, then we can go back and forth about it. It'll be great fun. But then Lakatosh died, and I believe that Feyerabend published this after he died. He says that. And he never. Lakatoche was never able to, of course, respond to him.

2:21 Wes: In particular, they were actually gonna publish a book together. I think.

2:25 Dylan: I think you're right.

2:26 Wes: That was the plan with their back and forth.

2:28 Dylan: But that's not to say that this book, to my knowledge, didn't elicit a lot of reaction, which I think will be pretty obvious why once we start getting into it. Even the title will probably Tell you why Against Method. He went on to publish a couple other books. This book itself went through several revisions. And in the preface he says it's really organized as a kind of. He calls it a series of letters to a friend. So it's really a set of sort of sequential essays that he, even at the beginning, sort of summarizes the thread of the argument. He goes through every chapter, so to speak, and says what the takeaways are from them. And subsequent additions, he made fairly substantial revisions in terms of what he included and what he didn't include. But this is the last one that he, to my knowledge, released.

3:14 Wes: Yeah. So this is quite a polemic, I guess, is what I would call it. I was reminded a little bit in my reaction to it of the way I felt about reading Richard Rorty on epistemology. So Rorty's political book I was very excited about and very positive about. But before that we did some epistemology. Rorty and I wasn't so fond of it. This, I'm a little bit more conflicted about the style of. This is someone who's very. Who's quite excited. And you can tell that his temperament is anarchistic and he's a very good writer. And he's entertaining to read, and he's quite opinionated.

And this kind of anarchism that he's arguing for with respect to the way that science should make progress does make progress. I think there's an element of that in his character which really does come across in the way he writes. So he's making a lot of bold statements. And I think sometimes I don't know if it's just because we only read part of this book, but there's often. Doesn't feel like there's enough substance or actual data to support some of his bold claims. And a lot of it we already saw. I think the groundwork for this is set by Lakatosh.

Lakatosh tells us in great detail about some of the ways in which naive falsificationism fails. So I think listeners should definitely listen to that first. It really is kind of a prerequisite to this. So then the question is, well, what is Feyerabend offering above and beyond that? What is he doing that's different than what Lakatosh did, except for making some very sweeping conclusions about scientific method? Anyway, so that's the question for me. How much has he added? And is what he's added, if anything, warranted by the record? I guess the historical record.

5:08 Dylan: Yeah. And I agree, is it safe to say that in a nutshell, that Feyerabend, he agrees basically with everything Lakatosh says except for the defensive rationality of science and that he wants to come down that science is not rational and he has political and procedural reasons for that regarding basically as in interpreting whether science works in that way. But everything else basically he agrees with. It's just that he doesn't agree with Lakatosh's defense of science is a rational process.

5:39 Wes: Yeah, I think he thinks it's not a rational process and it shouldn't be rational. Yes, it wouldn't. In fact, if it were rational, science would be wiped out.

5:48 Dylan: It can't be rational and do what it does.

5:50 Wes: Yeah. But beyond that, I think what Lakatosh gave us was a more. So what Feyerabend is attacking is what he calls critical rationality, which he associates with Popper. So of some version of falsificationism. I think he sees Lakatosh as a kind of refined version of that. And what Lakatosh gives us is this idea that, yes, newer theories can contradict the existing observational data and, you know, science does not proceed necessarily in a very orderly way. But what new theories have to do is they have to be able to explain some of the anomalies and problems that were not solved by previous theories, and they have to explain the success of the old theories and in a way incorporate them into themselves and then finally produce new empirical content, make predictions which are then at least some of which ideally are confirmed observationally.

So there's a whole theory there of how science in fact does make progress. I think this idea of what we ought to do is a little odd, as if philosophers of science are telling people how science ought to progress and they should follow these rules. That's where I don't get Feyerabend. He's arguing against a straw man there, as if this, you know, we're going to give scientists the wrong advice. But anyway, so Feyerabend, I think, would reject that idea that the newer theory, I think he rejects the idea that it has to incorporate the old or that it has to have greater empirical content.

But we can see in the meat of the text, I'm not sure that was so clear.

7:26 Seth: I just want to go back to what Dylan said very quickly about. He seems to agree in principle with everything Lakatosh has to say except for the idea that science is rational. And in fact, reading it, he explicitly and implicitly more or less agrees with Lakitoshan and in fact cites this is one of those texts that there's a lot of work being done in the footnotes. I always found that a peculiarity. I remember somebody talking about some radical statement that Kant makes this kind of a throwaway comment in a footnote in the Critique somewhere that is very famous for.

And there's a footnote on page six already where he just talks about Niels Bohr and quotes Bohr as to how he was approaching. And it's literally exactly what Lakatosh was talking about, setting out a research program that was different from the research program that was commonly accepted, and so forth. So I found myself wondering exactly where the difference lie. And the one way to characterize it is he's more like Kuhn in the respect that he seems to think of research programs or a research paradigm, a prevailing paradigm for how things go, almost like a system.

And it seems like the claim he's trying to make is something like, you can't get outside the system from within the system. So it's almost like he's talking about. In terms of. I don't know if set theory is the right term, but something. What he's trying to answer is how does a scientist come up with not just the idea, but the inspiration, the will, the courage, the passion, whatever it is, to just ignore or throw away the old and come up with something new and then embark on that new research program?

9:17 Dylan: He explicitly is mainly concerned about human freedom in a very political way. And when you mentioned, well, maybe it's some kind of set theory concern, that you can't change it from the inside, you have to change it from the outside kind of thing, kind of a Godel's Theorem type thing, I see him as understanding it as a political enterprise in which you have to maximize the freedom involved. Because basically every kind of system, every research program, is dogmatism in seed, at least. And his great fear is dogmatism in science. And that's the thing that he thinks has to be constantly guarded against and undermined.

And he thinks that that's a danger for society as a political entity, that science grows as. As its dogmatism grows, grows in power as a political enterprise. And so something like scientism would be something that he is very concerned about. And he thinks that it is bad for the progress of science. And it's an interesting question of whether he thinks that there actually is. I tend to think that he thinks that there's progress in science, but that progress is dependent upon its intellectual freedom and being non dogmatic.

10:38 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I like that element to this. And he's obviously very impressed with Mill. And this is one of the ways in which I think, as I think I mentioned last time, there's a lot of interesting crossover between questions of freedom of thought and speech, or freedom of what Mill called freedom of discussion and the question of how we make intellectual progress. Because Mill's argument is that making intellectual progress on a societal level, whether it's the development of new or better theories or on a personal level, educationally, requires this constant struggle and engagement that's easily lost at the point where a accepted point of view becomes entrenched.

And so it always needs to be challenged. And then, Seth, going back to your point, how is it challenged? How does it come to be challenged? I think he thinks that a certain predominant theory operates within its own little bubble, its own little conceptual scheme. And this is something I disagree with, but I think he thinks it can't evaluate itself. It can't be evaluated according to its own standards, its own lights, which I think is something that is actually untrue. And that's the whole point of dialectic, is that we can evaluate our conceptual schemes from within the scheme as long as we believe in broader value rules about consistency and logical truth and contradiction.

Right? Because all we have to do is generate a contradiction. That's the whole Platonic or Socratic enterprise is to say, yes, we operate within a conceptual scheme, let's try and generate some contradictions so we can improve that scheme from within. But anyway, his idea is that to improve the scheme you need to develop, in a way, yes, you do need new observations that are in tension with it. But those new observations don't come about without new theories, without at the very least new observational theories, because observations are theory laden.

So there are many observations which are not even available to us until we've developed a new theory. So we actually have to, just out of some sort of irrational passion or moment of creativity, we have to be playful and we have to generate a new theory, even if it's not solving an existing problem, even if it's not trying to account for an existing observation. We make that leap of faith and then we see, okay, here's a new theory. And now we can generate new observations according to this theory and see how they work with the other theories. So you get these competing theories with competing facts according to their inbuilt observational theories and so on, and that's the chaos and anarchy that Feyerabend thinks is important to progress in science.

13:22 Dylan: You made a nice summary and you Sort of recapitulated it just now at the beginning about the way Lakatosh understood the progress of science. And what struck me was that the difference between one of the difference between Lakatosh and Feyerabend is that I think Lakatosh's account has lots of ambiguity in it. Depending upon the stage you are within, the relative success of a given theory and the progress there'll be times where the waters are very mudd and there's lots of anomalies and a lot of ad hoc ness. And that's all incorporated within Lakatos conceptual framework for understanding progress in science.

And importantly he draws on that and points that out to undermine sort of the single mindedness of a scientific method and scientific progress that has preceded a lot of discussion about science. He is adamant, Lakatos is adamant that it's not sort of univocal. Whereas I think that Fire Robin this is a way in which it felt a little straw manny and without getting into sort of too much judgment on it is that he wasn't really admitting that sort of status of ad hoc ness being part of the rational enterprise. He either doesn't face up to it being true of his own account where he wants to hold on to the anarchic part about it, or he is just choosing to ignore it.

It seemed to me that Lakatosh has a lot of ad hoc ness as part of the rational enterprise of science's progress. And Feyerabend doesn't seem to necessarily give it that due. He seems to focus on the systemization of individual theories without as you pointed out, acknowledging that those theories can be criticizing themselves from within as well as theories criticizing each other and evaluating each other individually.

15:29 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking when you're talking about ad hoc just the way according to Lakatosh, ad hoc, the way adjustments are made to auxiliary hypotheses for what, according to what he calls sophisticated methodological falsificationism. So that there is a standard for the making those adjustments. Right. In that case you rule out mere ad hoc adjustments for the new theory. And the way you do that is that the new theory. So if your anomaly is the perihelion of Mercury that isn't quite consistent with Newtonian mechanics, what's the auxiliary hypothesis?

And then how do you evaluate that? You could say well there's something missing tugging on that or you could give a million other things but ultimately it's with relativity that we get something which happens to solve the problem of Mercury's perihelion wasn't developed to do that. But it's got to be a theory that also explains Newtonian mechanics and incorporates it in a way explains its success and then also generates new empirical content, or that is it makes new predictions that are later on confirmed. So for Lakatosh, there is a method to the way science progresses and there are good rules and reasons for why it is that one theory will supplant another theory.

In Feyerabend, I didn't get the sense that he thought there was a clear cut set of rules for how that happens. Or he seemed to be saying that a new theory might involve simply ad hoc hypotheses, which is, you know, I think even Lakatos would agree in the beginning it might be that. But anyway, I'm not quite sure where Feyerabend has taken this because I don't think he, you know, he doesn't give in the parts we read. He doesn't give examples that are of the same detail as Lakatosh. It's unclear where he objects to Lakatosh or how he wants to modify Lakatosh.

17:41 Dylan: Let me just underline, because you said it at the end, that Lakatosh would allow for some amount of time, at least there to be ad hoc hypotheses. And it's sort of a progressive amount of ad hoc ness than is indicating the progressively less robust of a theory. I mean, I think the perihelion example and Einstein's general relativity is a perfectly good example, but one that I think resonates to me a little bit more because of the amount of time that people held onto. The theory when it had lots of ad hoc ness, was Bohr's theory. Bohr's theory is around and he's trying to capture the quantum mechanical piece and he has a solution based upon these shells, but basically no explanation whatsoever in any satisfactory way about what the heck you could possibly mean by the electron being in one shell and then being in another shell and just being restricted in that way.

And the evidence is a, that it works, that if you make that kind of discrete restriction, you get calculations that work, at least for a hydrogen atom at the beginning. So you get some powerful explanatory power out of that discreteness assumption. And then it also, at least in a phenomenological way, solves your problem with classical electrodynamics. Basically you just say, well, the electron can't spiral into the nucleus because it just doesn't work that way. That's basically the tenet. And none of those things are explained for a very long Time.

And some people would say that because you'll eventually run into just sort of quantum mechanics interpretation that they haven't been solved in terms of a picture of the world very satisfactorily. That's to me a really good example of Lakatosh's version happening. Lots of advocates for that theory holding onto it despite the fact that there's lots of things unexplained.

19:47 Wes: Lakatosh allows for a lot of ad hoc ness.

19:50 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

19:51 Wes: For however long a period of time. The methodological unit is the research program. And the question is, is it degenerating or is it progressive? And it takes a while to figure that out, but eventually we needed to have some predictive power and we needed to have some confirmation. I think for Thyrabend it sounds almost as if he thinks that, you know, an older theory should never be completely discarded and there's nothing. And this is kind of the million element. There's always a grain of truth in any sort of theory, or there's no idea that's too crazy, such that we have to completely throw it out. And I'm very sympathetic to this view. So it's. Even flat Earthers have something to say to us.

20:34 Dylan: He uses the example of voodoo, right?

20:36 Wes: Yeah. And also I think, what does he say about. So our current cosmology, it's not like we or Genesis. Right. He talks about Genesis. His argument is to maximize empirical content, we need basically a pluralistic methodology. So we compare ideas with ideas or theories with theories rather than theories with just experience. So we don't just discard views that have been out competed. So Genesis as a theory of where all of us, life and all life forms came from. We don't just kick Genesis to the curb, we keep it alongside evolution. And in fact it helps us evaluate evolutionary theory in a sense.

It leaves us with some tools. A point of comparison, let's say. He doesn't give any details of how that works exactly. But basically you get this idea that knowledge is this what he calls an ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives. And they force each other into greater articulation. Another million point of view. So if you have to argue against Genesis, you're a better evolutionist for doing it, for example, Something like that. But nothing is ever settled. And that's where I think he may be making too strong a claim.

21:52 Seth: So I don't know if chapter 16 was part of the reading, but since Dylan alluded to it in one of our lead ups, I went ahead and looked at it and I think the way to frame that question of he gets to some extent into scientific and non scientific theories, what counts as, you know, that was one of the things that Lakatos was very interested in being able to delineate a scientific research program versus a non scientific one. Right. So he wanted to say that the social sciences were not scientific because they didn't proceed in the same way and have research programs in quite the same way.

So I don't think Feyerabend would claim that Genesis is a research program in the same way that whatever our modern scientific worldview is. But what he does say in that chapter 16 to some extent is the theory, if you will, of let's call it creationism versus the theory of evolution is wrapped up in a whole bunch of social practices, religious beliefs, political organization, technological advances and so forth. And that the view of the individuals that came up with that particular theory, if you will, can't be discredited from the perspective of, of if you take pluralism seriously, you can't say, well that stuff's non scientific, they were pre scientific, they're just wrong about.

It's like saying the pre Socratics are just wrong about atomism and chemical theory and whatever, so let's just throw them out because they're just completely useless. And I think what he wants to say is, no, if you understand the world the way those people understood it, and you try to take seriously the way in which they experience the world, but also the way in which they represented it in their naturalistic philosophy or their poetry or their political institutions, you can see that there's a logic to it, if you will, or at least a structure to it that makes sense.

And to just discount them as being not like we are now is, I think the move that he's trying to avoid or that he's arguing that we shouldn't do.

24:05 Dylan: Yeah, this is where he's very sensitive to science as a dogmatism. And so when somebody says appeals to the authority of science as a clear rational enterprise that has authority, this is where Fire Robin is just like smoke is coming out of his ears and flames are coming out of his eyes. He's just, you know, livid about that idea that you would say something like, well, the science says, science says X. He just thinks that's complete baloney because he doesn't believe that there's a unitary endeavor called science. And he goes as far, at least explicitly to say that it's not even a rational enterprise, much less it being a unitary enterprise.

But he's very, very sensitive about it, the idea that you would quench thought in order to by an appeal to particular notion of what science is and what it says and what it claims. And he thinks that that in fact saying that undermines science's progress altogether. What I don't know that you get out of it though, is what it means to have some argument overcome another argument at all in any different way than it's just the will of the stronger. If he thinks that there's anything, any content to it, because that's what Lakatosh is trying to preserve is sort of rational content to why you would be compelled to agree eventually with one argument over another.

25:36 Wes: Yeah, chapter 16 is about incommensurability. The argument is that you can't really ultimately make these comparisons and say one is superior to another, because the new conceptual scheme, it has a whole set of different assumptions and theories built into it, such that it can't recreate the evidence that was produced within the old conceptual scheme. So the ancient Greeks have a certain way of looking at the world and you want to come along and say, no, it's not like that. But in a way you're comparing apples and oranges. The kind of evidence that you want to produce to refute the ancient Greek way of looking at things in a way already assumes your new conceptual scheme, your new theory.

So this I think, is not correct. And that we could refer listeners to our Davidson episode where we read a paper where he explicitly argues against this idea of untranslatable conceptual schemes that are incommensurable, we can never translate between them. I think that's an incoherent idea that ultimately collapses into relativism.

26:49 Dylan: The one thing that resonated to me about his analysis in 16 was just thinking about the difference between number and magnitude in ancient Greek mathematics and trying to take seriously the notion of a ratio as distinct from a fraction. And maybe in the end you say, well, look, there just isn't any difference. Certainly that is the way in sort of modern mathematics, modern meaning Descartes on that you would understand a ratio is really just a thing in itself, that's a fraction, as opposed to a relationship between two numbers or two magnitudes.

Importantly, and the only reason why it sort of resonates to me is that it's either that they just couldn't see it for hundreds of years, or that they understood those entities in a fundamentally different way and that you had to either relieve those concepts of some stricture, you had to allow for magnitudes to become numbers in some way. And that in some ways is a problem that early modern mathematics tries to solve. But I myself find it confusing why it seems so foreign to Greek mathematicians because they walked up to the edge so many times.

Archimedes, his work with squaring the circle and stuff like that, he does what is just in a plain faced way looks like proto calculus and he doesn't go all the way. And when you're reading through the Euclid, you could go through and recast all kinds of those propositions into algebraic propositions that you're very familiar with from 10th grade geometry, but they don't do that either. Dealing with magnitudes and numbers is a very different enterprise. And so if I take it seriously that they weren't just dumb, then I feel like they're working with a conceptual scheme that means that number becomes something different than it was for them.

When you start numbering a magnitude, you change what you mean by it. When you say I have an irrational number, you mean that that thing that's called number is different than what it was for them. And that to me is something very close to what Feyerabend is talking about.

29:14 Wes: The other way to look at this I think is in terms of, we can think about this in terms of scientific progress, as in progress in the hard sciences and progress in mathematics, but we can also think about whether the methods of the hard sciences are replicable and applicable to non material domains, let's put it that way. So for instance, the kinds of questions that philosophy asks, the kinds of questions that psychology asks, I happen to think that those domains, and this is, I talked about this in the past and when scientism was more of a hot topic, I would talk about this a bit, but I would always get irritated by the idea that, like Stephen Hawking saying philosophy is dead, you know, science has or will answer all these questions and so philosophy should stop doing its thing.

And you know, we could say that about other endeavors which we think have something to do with quote, unquote knowledge, right? So anything from literary criticism to philosophy to other types of traditions. And that's where I think Feyerabend is onto something. Right? And that's where I think Lakatosh I think went a little too far in saying, yeah, the social sciences are not scientific, so screw them. Unfortunately. I just think that's the nature of the subject matter and that their methods in fact have to be different. But there are still rational standards for the way we make progress in those fields as well.

So that's where I'm not sure where Faraban stands on all that. So in my view, it's not just that we have a pluralism with respect to general rational standards. I think the rational standards, ultimately they're logical. Right. They don't actually vary. There isn't a conceptual scheme in which basic logic or the law of non contradiction does not hold.

31:11 Dylan: We've sort of been mainly sort of just engaging the main themes so far. But should we sort of try to work through the reading that we have? Did you have anything else you wanted to generally add, Seth?

31:24 Seth: No, I think it'd be better to get to the text.

31:27 Dylan: Okay. Our selection was to read through one through five out of the essays in Against Method plus 15 and 16. I think that's what we decided on.

31:40 Wes: Oh, really? I read the prefaces, the introduction, and then parts 1 through 3 and then parts 15 and 16. So I guess I misunderstood, but I have the general sense of the other ones.

31:51 Dylan: He hopefully has the beginning of each one. He just says, what does this section say? So the first one, which is he calls the introduction is. He says science is an essentially anarchic enterprise. Theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress and his law and order alternatives.

32:09 Wes: Yeah, this is just a very general polemic here to begin with. But his claim is that the history of science is not just about, hey, here are the facts, and then we do some induction and now we can draw some general theoretical conclusions from the facts. Rather, there are different ideas, different interpretations of facts, problems created by conflicting interpretations. And the way we progress theoretically is very complicated. It's not the case that we can see facts driving that process as if they were somehow independent of theory or opinion or belief or cultural background. What the facts are, are determined by again, that conceptual scheme. And so we can't just say, you know, that there is just these given data that simply drives the process from its end. There's also top down theoretical stuff going on.

33:04 Dylan: Yeah. He says, is it not clear that successful participation in a process of this kind, the process of science, is possible only for a ruthless opportunist who is not tied to any particular philosophy and who adopts whatever procedure seems to fit the occasion. And then later on, a complex medium containing surprising and unforeseen developments demands complex procedures and defies analysis on the basis of rules which have been set up in advance and without regard to ever changing conditions of history. This reminds me of what you said at the beginning, Wes.

That might be a straw man in the sense of he's saying that science doesn't have a prescriptive method that guarantees its progress in a particular way. And it's certainly true that in the history of science that some people have made that argument that it works that way. But it doesn't seem like, even for Lakatosh's time, that super naive position, Anybody really thought that.

34:02 Seth: Yeah, I think the red flag there is, is it not clear? Anytime anybody says something like that, you have to kind of. It's not clear to me that it's only possible if you're a ruthless opportunist. In fact, it seems to me that you could only become the kind of ruthless opportunist that he talks about later in the essay. If you spend some time tied to a particular philosophy, you can't be an anarchist unless you have some understanding of the system against which you're rebelling.

34:38 Dylan: He says about two thirds of the way through two reasons for why he thinks that there's no structure here. So it's the very top of page 12. He says the first reason is that the world which we want to explore is largely an unknown entity. We must therefore keep our options open and we must not restrict ourselves in advance. This is again, sort of, to me, the Strauman kind of argument. Epistemological prescriptions may look splendid when compared with other epistemological prescriptions or with general principles, but who can guarantee that they are the best way to discover not just a few isolated facts, but some deep lying secrets of nature?

So to me, he's operating like an optimistic skeptic. He's skeptical about the epistemological nature of the world, but he's framing it as, we'll figure out more stuff where it's not exactly clear, because he abandons any notion of a distinction between, call it science and pseudoscience. And maybe that for Lakatos, that's basically legitimate and illegitimate ways of going about figuring out the world. He basically says that's going to work out, and it's not clear to me. You have to be so prescriptive as he thinks that it is. But you have to have in mind a way that that happens.

35:53 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. Earlier on, I was acting as if that this whole question of epistemological prescriptions was not even really relevant because scientists just do what they do, right? They're not thinking about what philosophers are saying. And really this comes up in political debates a lot or in debates within the humanities or where there are sort of conflicting areas of conflict between the sciences and the humanities, where a Scientist will want to make some sort of naive philosophical generalization based on what they do.

And then a philosopher might come along and say, hey, that's silly and naive, and that's not being a scientist doesn't actually qualify you to say that. And the scientists might respond, philosophy is just quackery. It's completely unscientific. All you do is all day long you make a bunch of unfalsifiable statements. And this word, as I said in our previous episode, this word falsifiable does come up a lot, and it comes up in political debates as well. And so, yeah, I think that sort of prescription happens, but I don't think it's as relevant to what goes on within the hard sciences as it is to sort of these turf wars between the hard sciences and other disciplines, in my experience.

So it's not as if any of the work that these philosophers of science are doing has all that much to say about, is prescribing some specific methodology to people. As if Popper has to come and say to physicists, you better make your theories falsifiable. So that's where I find it, a little straw manish on the one hand. But on the other hand, those prescriptions, if we think of knowledge more generally, then that sort of prescription becomes more important. And it's clear that Feyerabend is worried about that kind of thing. Right. So like medical doctors saying Chinese medicine is quackery and that's not consistent with medical science, or that's not been proven.

There's no empirical evidence for that. I think Feyerabend is on much firmer ground there in saying people who are championing the sciences overstep their bounds in trying to rigidly apply the principles of the hard sciences to some other domain.

38:03 Seth: I mean, I feel like we're just sitting here saying, if we say he's just going after a straw man, then there's like, not too much to say about a lot of the rest of it.

38:11 Wes: Well, I was trying to give him some credit there in the end.

38:15 Seth: Yeah. Well, there's a kind of strange passage also on page 12. And so he says the attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life, and the corresponding attempt to discover the secrets of nature and of man entails, therefore, the rejection of all universal standards and of all rigid traditions. Naturally, it also entails the rejection of a large part of contemporary science. So, you know, this is kind of a statement of another kind where he's shifting from talking about the ways in which science might be done to saying something to the effect of scientific activity is human activity, and human activity requires liberty. Therefore, science requires liberty, which would be a much more succinct. But it's a different argument, I think, than what he's hinting at earlier on in the essay.

39:07 Wes: Right. He's saying that there's different sorts of values at play here in how we decide to approach inquiry. And one set of values is the sort of epistemic values that are common to, you know, not just to the hard sciences, but I think traditionally to, you know, also to philosophy and other areas. But just this idea of being truth seekers and its truth at all costs. And here there's a social critique to the effect that when we think about scientific method, we don't just think about what gets us at the truth. We should be thinking about whether it makes us better people or monsters.

I think he uses the word monster later on. Or whether it will make us more boring or more unhappy or less free. All those sorts of standards come into play. So when we say we need anarchy, he seems to think we need our anarchy for scientific progress to occur. But I think even apart from that, we need anarchy just to be culturally healthy. Maybe, let's put it that way, maybe scientific progress and. How do you say what scientific progress is? Maybe that to some extent he's advocating a new and looser standard which includes some kind of idea of health, some normative standard which simply isn't about the truth.

40:24 Dylan: Let's say he's for sure doing that. I mean, that's what he's getting at when he wants to say, you should be opening the gates all the way and not discounting. This is old voodoo discussion where he wants to allow. You can't discount voodoo as a scientific

40:40 Wes: enterprise as long as you do it well.

40:44 Seth: Sorry, I got it. Sorry.

40:47 Wes: That was me channeling Mark.

40:51 Seth: Yeah.

40:52 Wes: So the answer. Was there anything else in the introduction we wanted to touch on?

40:55 Dylan: The only thing I would say is at the end, because I keep coming back to fire Robin, feeling at once really a skeptic that wants to just sort of lay waste to the notion of rational standards. But then I find him to be a deep optimist about scientific progress. I think he really believes in scientific progress.

41:18 Seth: Absolutely.

41:19 Dylan: Okay. He doesn't articulate why you would have progress without being able to say how science is working. That gets you that progress, except it's just too wonderful. Like at the end of 13, at the beginning, he says it's not so clear. Writes a modern radical professor at Columbia that scientific research demands an absolute freedom of speech and debate. Rather, the evidence suggests that certain kinds of unfreedom place no obstacle in the way of science. So Feyerabend doesn't agree with us, agree with the idea that there should be any kind of unfreedom.

He goes on to say, there are certainly some people to whom this is not so clear. Let us therefore start our outline of anarchistic methodology and a corresponding anarchistic science. There's no need to fear that the diminished concern for law and order in science and society that characterizes an anarchism of this kind will lead to chaos. The human nervous system is too well organized for that. There may be, of course, come a time when it will be necessary to give reason a temporary advantage and when it will be wise to defend its rules to the exclusion of everything else.

I do not think we are living in such a time today. To me, what he's relying on is that whatever science is, he's linking it in that paragraph that the entity of science is. Is like a human nervous system or that it relies, that endeavor relies on our human nervous system. Maybe that's a better way to put it. It's not that science itself is like that, but it relies on the human nervous system and that it's the sheer biological organization of us as human beings and our brains that is going to provide the necessary organization, whatever that is, that undergirds the progress of science and that it's otherwise does not need to be articulated at all and may be inarticulable and certainly we don't have to do it now.

And I guess I wonder if he's sanguine about that because it's one of the things that someone like Lakatosh is doing. I mean, you could also say Kant against Hume is saying that I need to defend this as a process that I can appeal to in some way for authority to adjudicate decisions that we can agree upon.

43:30 Seth: So in that respect, I don't know if you were characterizing Lakatosh from your reading or if you were characterizing it from Feyerabend's perspective, but.

43:38 Dylan: Well, it's from my reading.

43:39 Seth: But look, they both agree there's progress. They both agree that the way we teach it in textbooks is wrong. They both agree that prioritizing the empiricist point of view, that you just basically you discover facts and then you have to mold your theory around the facts is false. Right. That's not the way it actually works.

43:58 Dylan: Yeah. So they're basically criticizing philosophy of science is look, you know, your theory of how science works is wrong. And to Wes's point, science is just going to do what it does. You just are wrong about how it does it.

44:10 Seth: Right? They're agreeing on everything they're trying to explain how does science progress? And from Lakatosh's perspective, it's important that science have a quote, unquote. Let's use the term rational for now, but I think that's a problematic term because I don't think that in itself is defined very well and some of the or it's misused. But it's important for him, for Lakatosh, that progress be rational because he wants to contrast it to non scientific research programs and point out that they aren't doing the same thing. So they're not real science and they're not rational in that respect.

Whereas for Feyerabend he has this concept of anarchism, but basically that progress is impossible if science is rational in the way that Lakatosh suggested is because it would be too confined by the structures of the given or of the assumed or of the currently and you wouldn't be able to get outside of it. I don't know that that criticism of Feyerabend holds. I don't think Feyerabend in any of his examples or any suggests that it's a rational approach, somehow obviates the possibility of discarding a theory or coming up with a new theory that you want to put in conflict with another theory.

But I think that that's why I feel like there's some kind of, maybe a partial debate about or misuse or misunderstanding about how the term rational is being used.

45:35 Dylan: Here he could address science versus pseudoscience, which might be because science, when you call something a science, it ends up being the thing that has the authority to make the decision. And something that is a pseudoscience is something that does not have the authority to make the decision.

45:50 Wes: Well, let's do this for, you know, there's obviously a lot of influence from Mill here and you get this idea right? So this whole nervous system analogy, Mill also is not worried about guiding discourse. He wants it to be as free as possible. And the idea is that, you know, as long as discourse is free as possible, then rationality will be an emergent effect upon discourse. So it's not like you need to set up rules to say, okay, only the smart people with certain degrees get to pontificate about this. It's a rough and tumble, everyone gets to participate.

Write your columns in the newspaper, be able to say what you want without government censorship, all that stuff, or even without social coercion as much as possible. And then so we're not relying on particular human beings to be rational because human beings are not rational. We want a kind of emergent rational effect that is the result of people over time fighting it out and having a battle of ideas. It's kind of like it's not the same thing as the whole marketplace of ideas analogy, which I think is generally unfortunate, but it's similar to that.

And you could say, yes, that's the way ideas develop historically. And you could say, and science too is pretty much just as chaotic. But someone like Lakatosh might want to come along and do two different things. One is to just say, well, when is the debate going in a good direction and when is it going in a bad direction? Don't we have universal standards of rationality that tell us that this society, its public discourse got degraded? It became really irrational. It embraced crazy ideas, including immoral and genocidal ideas. It did all kinds of horrible things because of that.

And you could say, yeah, the standards of reason and evidence and everything else, they're general, they're universally applicable. They stand outside of any conceptual scheme. They give us standards of comparison between any given conceptual scheme. And it's not that within the sciences that we have to go in and say, you got to be guided by this, or in public discourse about political and ethical matters, people tend to generate that guidance for themselves. So there's chaos. But then people are also trying to reason with each other. It's just a natural part of the process.

But regardless, a historian of science or historian of ideas wants to understand when that process is going well and when it isn't. So one might say, it just doesn't matter. Feyerabend. It doesn't matter that it's all passion and chaos and everything else. It doesn't matter that the individual actors are irrational. I want to know when the result is rational and when the result is not rational for various reasons. This is a criticism that he'll address later on, Right? The criticism that I'm leveling right now is about the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification.

So someone might come along and say, you're completely right about the context of discovery. It's chaotic and irrational. But in the context of justification, we're trying to evaluate the results, we're not trying to prescribe. This is where I think Feyeroppin gets it wrong. The context of justification doesn't mean I want to prescribe rigid rules and methodologies to scientists or to people operating within any other form of public debate. It's just that I want to be able to evaluate the process, and the better we are at that evaluation, the better the process will become.

Not because rigid rules are prescribed for it, but just because the evaluation is kind of a reflective moment folded into the process.

49:51 Dylan: Thanks for listening. We're going to continue for another hour or so to hit some more on details in the text. We'll get through the rest of the chapters after I'm finished up here with the introduction. It should be the next selection in your feed, so check it out.