Feyerabend, Science and Scientism

Abstract

Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) acquired a variety of epithets during the latter stage of his career. The most persistent is perhaps Nature’s description of him as ‘the worst enemy of science’, later adopted as the title of an important collection of essays in his honour. The label encapsulates his bad reputation, at least within philosophy of science, which can be divided roughly into two aspects. The first are criticisms of the actual or perceived content of his work, most usually that he was, at least at certain points in his career, anti-science, propseudoscience and a radical relativist or perhaps post-modernist. Some of these can be easily rebutted. Considered closely, the putative ‘defences’ of astrology, parapsychology, witchcraft and alternative medicine turn out to be nothing of the sort (Kidd 2013, 2016a, 2018). His general strategy was to point out the epistemic failings of those scientists who dismissed such beliefs and practices without any properly informed understanding of them. Astrology was ‘bunk’, he argued, but one needs better arguments against it than those typically offered by those whose social authority owes to their elevated epistemic standing. In the case of relativism and other alleged philosophical sins, recent work by Martin Kusch (2016) and Lisa Heller (2016) tell a more complex story: the ultra-relativism of Science in a Free Society modulated, slowly, into those thirteen ‘relativistic theses’ in Farewell to Reason, most then rejected by the time of Conquest of Abundance. Similarly, there are no good reasons to regard him as a post-modernist, at least on three substantive characterisations of that capacious term (Kidd 2016b). As to the other charge – that Feyerabend was ‘anti-science’ – refuting that is the aim of this chapter. The second aspect of Feyerabend’s bad reputation is less easily disposed of, since it is rooted in criticisms of his professional conduct. Certainly, polemic, rhetoric and a jocular tone are not to everyone’s taste, but there