Against Method by Paul Feyerabend;

Author:Paul Feyerabend;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

Secondly, let us assume that the expressions ‘psychology’, ‘anthropology’, ‘history of science’, ‘physics’ do not refer to facts and laws, but to certain methods of assembling facts including certain ways of connecting observation with theory and hypothesis. That is, let us consider the activity ‘science’ and its various subdivisions. Then we may lay down ideal demands of knowledge and knowledge-acquisition, and we may try to construct a (social) machinery that obeys these demands. Almost all epistemologists and philosophers of science proceed in this way. Occasionally they succeed in finding a machinery that might work in certain ideal conditions, but they never inquire, or even find it worth inquiring, whether the conditions are satisfied in this real world of ours. Such an inquiry, on the other hand, will have to explore the way in which scientists actually deal with their surroundings, it will have to examine the actual shape of their product, viz. ‘knowledge’, and the way in which this product changes as a result of decisions and actions in complex social and material conditions. In a word, such an inquiry will have to be anthropological.

There is no way of predicting what an anthropological inquiry will bring to light. In the preceding chapters, which are rough sketches of an anthropological study of particular episodes, it has emerged that science is full of lacunae and contradictions, that ignorance, pigheadedness, reliance on prejudice, lying, far from impeding the forward march of knowledge may actually aid it, and that the traditional virtues of precision, consistency, ‘honesty’, respect for facts, maximum knowledge under given circumstances, if practised with determination, may bring it to a standstill. It has also emerged that logical principles not only play a much smaller role in the (argumentative and non-argumentative) moves that advance science, but that the attempt to enforce them would seriously impede science. (One cannot say that von Neumann has advanced the quantum theory. But he certainly made the discussion of its basis more long-winded and cumbersome.96)

Now a scientist engaged in a certain piece of research has not yet completed all the steps that lead to definite results. His future is still open. Will he follow the barren and illiterate logician who preaches to him about the virtues of clarity, consistency, experimental support (or experimental falsification), tightness of argument, ‘honesty’, and so on, or will he imitate his predecessors in his own field who advanced by breaking most of the rules logicians want to lay on him? Will he rely on abstract injunctions or on the results of a study of concrete episodes? I think the answer is clear, and with it the relevance of anthropological field work not just for the anthropologists but also for the members of the societies he examines. I now continue my narration and proceed to describing the transition from the paratactic universe of the archaic Greeks to the substance-appearance universe of their followers.

The archaic cosmology (which from now on I shall call cosmology A) contains things, events, their parts; it does not contain appearances.

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