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Comment by sb1752 | Hacker News Reader

As the philosopher of science Paul Feyrabend wrote and made the convincing case in his book Against Method:

"Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives."

"The consistency condition which demands that new hypotheses agree with accepted theories is unreasonable because it preserves the older theory, and not the better theory."

"Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy, it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state."

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  "As the philosopher of science Paul Feyrabend wrote and made the convincing case in his book Against Method"

Convincing case? I think not.

Feyrabend is about the worst of the philosophers of science, and that's saying something[0]. He forms part of the tradition of humanities scholars who feel they have something of insight and utility to add to understanding science, but who offer insufficient evidence to match the claims they make.

It's with value-vacuum and nonsense statements like this:

  "Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives."

and this:

  "Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy, it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state."

that these people trade in. What does this even mean? Where is the actual evidence to support such claims?

Science is far from an 'anarchic enterprise'. It has the most rigidly regulated mechanisms for knowledge procurement and knowledge dissemination available to us.

Further, science is a single tradition (underpinned by the scientific method) and it is the best tradition we have; no other field of human endeavour has progressed as far in 2,500 years as science has. This is in sharp contrast to Feyrabend's own field, philosophy, where such a claim cannot be sustained.

[0] Popper is easily the least-worst of this group.

[EDIT] Grammar clarity.

> rigidly regulated mechanisms for knowledge procurement and knowledge dissemination available to us.

Exactly.

And the DSL in which science should be written as much as possible in order to make scientific results as reproducible as possible (which includes spelling out as many underlying assumptions as possible) is called mathematics, which in recent years has been improved into formal mathematics that is mechanically checkable through (interactive and automatic) proof assistants. This 2.5k year old human endeavour of improving science has not yet finished. The next big milestone, which I expect to see completed before the year 2200, is to finish the mechanisation of all existing mathematics.

> Science is far from an 'anarchic enterprise'. It has the most rigidly regulated mechanisms for knowledge procurement and knowledge dissemination available to us.

> Further, science is a single tradition

Have these rigidly regulated mechanisms been in place for 2500 years? Because if not, that seems like the sort of thing that Feyrabend might have meant by saying science isn't a single tradition.

  Have these rigidly regulated mechanisms been in place for 2500 years? Because if not, that seems like the sort of thing that Feyrabend might have meant by saying science isn't a single tradition.

The programme/process of Science - the overarching belief that the natural world can be understood through rational means - has itself gone through numerous process improvements during those 2500 years; yet it remains the same endeavour and retains the same core impetus.

Okay, but it seems like "science isn't a single tradition" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe this state of affairs. So when you ask "what does this even mean" I think there's a fairly straightforward answer.

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