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The book’s great value is in dissolving rigid views of “the” scientific method. Feyerabend‘s simple challenge is: if you claim you have a model of the scientific method, I can always find a historical example of someone (Galileo, Einstein, etc.) needing to break the rules of that method to make scientific progress. That’s it.

I think it could have been written in a less provocative and eccentric way. Feyerabend had a certain rhetorical style that tends to get some folks unnecessarily riled up. Rewrite the core argument in a plain and simple way and I agree most working scientists wouldn’t have a whole lot to object to (remember Feyerabend was writing against other Philosophers). Some working scientists have been inspired by the book, though. Here’s a great quote from physicist Lee Smolin:

> What Feyerabend's book said to me was: Look, kid, stop dreaming! Science is not philosophers sitting in clouds. It is a human activity, as complex and problematic as any other. There is no single method to science and no single criterion for who is a good scientist. Good science is whatever works at a particular moment of history to advance our knowledge. And don't bother me with how to define progress — define it any way you like and this is still true.

> From Feyerabend, I learned that progress sometimes requires deep philosophical thinking, but most often it does not. It is mostly furthered by opportunistic people who cut corners, exaggerating what they know and have accomplished. Galileo was one of these; many of his arguments were wrong, and his opponents — the well-educated, philosophically reflective Jesuit astronomers of the time — easily punched holes in his thinking. Nevertheless, he was right and they were wrong.

> What I also learned from Feyerabend is that no a priori argument can tell us what will work in all circumstances. What works to advance science at one moment will be wrong at another. And I learned one more thing from his stories of Galileo: You have to fight for what you believe.

On top of it there is the awful truth that the ‘scientific method’ is not really practiced.

In junior high school I remember getting taught about the scientific method, particularly the use of controls. I wrote 5 papers and didn’t use a control in any of them (it wouldn’t have been appropriate.).

Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t. There was that paper where they measured vitamin C levels of COVID-19 patients but didn’t compare it to a baseline of people who were not sick, which is problematic in many ways.

When they do meta-analysis by the Cochrane methodology they usually throw out at least half of the studies at the beginning because of glaring methodological flaws. Practically it is not much better than anarchy in terms of what gets funded and published.

- Incorrect use of statistics tools.

- Cherry-picking of data.

- Flawed or missing controls.

- Lack of replication, and in the few cases where it's attempted, failure to replicate.

- Non-publication of failures.

- Publish-or-perish providing huge incentives to publish junk.

- Peer review being an old boys club that enforces the party line.

- All funding coming from few sources that tacitly use their funding power to fund only those that toe the party line.

- So much basic science having been done by now that the remaining science to do is generally expensive to do, thus inviting the above funding / control problem.

- Dogmatism.

- Media attention.

These are the problems that plague science today. Some of these have been there for a long time, like dogmatism. There are people alive today who were taught that the continents don't move, and that noticing that South America and Africa fit together and concluding that they must have moved is nonsense of the highest order. There are people alive today whose treatment for Polio was not physical therapy but immobilization. The list of dogma, old and new, is long. The malign ways in which some lords of science fiefdoms defend their dogmas have not gone away in spite of Popper's method.

> Even in cases where people obviously should use controls, such as clinical trials, they frequently don’t.

This is not true in my experience (I have designed and run pharmaceutical clinical trials in humans). Can you give some examples?

Some treatment trials do compare the existing standard of care vs the new one rather than placebo against proposed treatment, but those are certainly controlled studies too.

I do know of cases where a control is impossible, such as some surgical procedures, though even then sometimes sham surgery is performed (this is controversial). Those are singly-blinded controls as the surgeon knows.

It is endemic in statistical studies based on medical data. They reach a conclusion that is statistically supported but never do the work to verify it.

A statistical study is not a clinical trial, which was the term used by the GP poster.

Definitely you want to use controls if you want regulators to take your work seriously. A lot of stuff gets found on pubmed that isn't meant for regulators and it doesn't.

Doesn't the question of controls basically boil down to: it's hard to know things without them, but they're often hard to create anyway, ergo it's hard to know things in general - now welcome to the nastiness of real science?

Right or the replication crisis. Which people often forget affected far more than just the field of Psychology. It's a problem throughout most of western science in general. And a big problem imo. Because studies are expensive and replicating those studies is nearly just as expensive. What happens when our idealized scientific process is literally just unachievable because we don't have the resources to carry it out

A puzzle seems to be why some scientific fields fare better than others, in the face of the replication crisis. Why do we take Maxwell's Equations seriously? It means that replication, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of science research. There must be something else.

Physics (especially classical physics) has the advantage of dealing with things that are both extremely repeatable and consistent, and are just about omnipresent. When a physics model is flawed, you start piling up edge cases that violate our current understanding of physics, until someone comes up with a model that explains most of them while not violating the relatively decent predictive power of the previous models (which obviously have predictive power, since they've been being used to predict things successfully for a while).

For example, Newton laid out classical mechanics. Which very adequately modeled most things moving around in scales we could observe. Except Mercury's orbit was a little fucky. Now, one new model could be that "Classical mechanics works everywhere but on Mercury, where they have different physics", but eventually relativity was postulated, and calculated to predict Mercury's orbit to within our ability to observe it. Rinse, repeat, for things like QM, orbital mechanics, etc, etc.

Heck, there's a pile of inconsistencies in our current models. Neutrinos have mass, the universe's expansion is accelerating, and where's all the antimatter?

Very good points. I think another is that we can develop theories that relate different experimental cases, so that a "replication" doesn't have to be precisely the same study, but different studies in a sense replicate different but overlapping views of the theory.

> the ‘scientific method’ is not really practiced

There is a big difference between "often not practiced" and "not really practiced [ever]". The former is true, the latter is not.

I'm a physicist, and read AM. It didn't overturn my own thinking about how to do science, but helped me understand my discomfort when non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science.

Over the years I grew uncomfortable with the fact that I could not track down any of his references, e.g., to Aristotle. I don't remember the specific cases any more, but still it was a bit unnerving.

Hard agree. People are surprised when I, as a physicist, am so riled up by things like “trust science!” T-shirts and the general science-washing (a-la green-washing) of products, politics, etc.

I think this is part and parcel of the same “cargo-cult” appropriation of “science” that results in what you’re saying, and represents a real threat to science.

I would say that "trust science!" tee-shirts aren't really about Feyerabend's epistemological anarchy. You could frame it that way, but that would be philosophy-washing (to coin a term).

Against Method points out that there's no rigorous method for pursuing the difference between truth and non-truth, but at least accepts that there is something like "truth" out there and that it's better than falsehoods.

When people put on "trust science!" shirts, they're not arguing about whether we should continue working on homeopathy. They're saying that people are promoting deliberate falsehoods, things that they know or should know are wrong, because they are indifferent to the difference between truth and lies.

Homeopaths at least want to be right. There are surely some charlatans, but at least some of the kooky nutbags selling homeopathic remedies believe in it. Against Method makes it impossible to argue that they cannot possibly ever succeed, if they keep revising their hypothesis, even though we "know" that they won't.

The opponents of those who "trust science", by contrast, just don't care if they're right. They care only that they've won some kind of victory in a culture war. They don't apply epistemic anarchy to all sciences, only ones that they view as ideological opponents.

That isn't the only threat to science, to be sure. Science and scientists make genuine mistakes. But again, that's not really important to those who are rejecting science for cultural reasons, not philosophical ones. That challenge makes dealing with the others even harder.

I was responding to the parent’s

“ non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science.”

I think the “trust science” stuff is mixed into the same cargo-cult co-opting of science by people who are actually more worried about politics, identity, and generally what I would call “scientism”. To be clear, I think such people would NOT like Feyeraband. If you believe science is The One Source Of Truth, then Feyeraband is a heretic.

You’re also bringing in the other side: Those that reject science for cultural reasons. I think they don’t give a crap about Feyeraband. I also think the “trust science” scientism stuff is partly to blame for this cultural backlash.

I think Feyeraband is right, and that it strengthens the pursuit of science to acknowledge it.

I think scientism leads to the scientific method being misunderstood and misapplied, and makes public trust of science way more brittle.

It’s funny because those with a mindset - probably mostly unconscious and deeply engrained - that science (or scientism) is the one true method will feel “trolled” by these ideas and that feeling is apparent in the comments…

When really the intention comes from a different place and requires a slightly more open mind to grok

There’s a more practical and tragic reason to desire a “one true method”.

Imagine spending your whole life working under method X. You study its precepts, gain practical knowledge, go out into the field and test your assumptions. Your desire is to end human suffering using method X, and build a better world where good triumphs over evil and everyone can pursue their bliss.

But you must sacrifice in order for method X to work. The precepts demand you honor the gods. If you are an Aztec, you end up with pyramids covered in blood and tens of thousands dead, but are still woefully unprepared for disease and Europeans, your people suffer immensely and are virtually extinguished, and you die realizing your method was wrong and your sacrifices were in vain.

You can avoid that with a meta method that helps you select proper methods.

The amount of human suffering that can be avoided if people are able to distinguish the effectiveness of method X from method Y is extreme. That is where the hard earned victories of modernity come from. Science is the preeminent comparative meta method that identifies which methods are most effective at alleviating human suffering and people are right to uphold it (and to distinguish it from scientism/confusion with scientific bureaucracy)

There is no universal, rule based, propositional method of betterment, but to give up on the idea of any method being objectively better than another is to give up on the idea of meta negotiation and the pursuit of universal peace and prosperity. The pursuit is worthwhile, even if it may not be fully achieved in billions or trillions of years and may be more of an art than a system of computation.

It's important to understand this in the context of the cultural and political fights of the American academy as well. Feyerabend's position is very reasonable, but the straw-man treatment went both ways. It also played to the biases of people who felt that they were/are being marginalized by the evolution of the academy into a more scientific/technical institution. (For most of History, Stanford's number one major was History. This is one no longer the case and the degree has lost a lot of its former prestige). These factions routinely took his work to then argue that all science is irrational or baseless or incorrect as if it were a logical either or proposition. This is also absurd and not really what Feyerabend was going for, but the debate is maybe not really about method as much as it is about the political concerns of academics.

The fuss is that by refusing to solve the Demarcation Problem, a lot of non-science has to be treated as science. Feyerabend points out that there's ultimately no difference between scientific "hypothesis revision" and pseudoscientific "moving the goalposts".

The astronomers hate being lumped in with the astrologers, and with good reason. Feyerabend points out that it's maddeningly hard to be rigorous about exactly what that reason is. When the astronomers claim "the scientific method", this book shows them that they're wrong, but without suggesting a really good alternative.

Giving $10 billion to the astrologers (the price of the JWST) is not an option. It would be nice to have a method to say why. Ultimately, that's the real controversy: not epistemology, but money.

> He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.

He has a lot to do with them. One of the themes in Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting” revolves around the maxim, “there is no passe-partout (a master key that opens all locks).” Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization” is partially about the lack of a single axis of “Reason”, which would presumably be the antonym of a similarly univocal “Madness”.

Yeah. A big part of Against Method just examines proposals for universal scientific methods, and points out cases where they would have failed. Galileo was the major example but IIRC there were several others.

I would also highly recommend The Tyranny of Science by him

See this review for a decent overview of it:

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-tyranny-of-science/

Completely agree, but a second point is incommensurability of ways of knowing.

There's 'science', 'morality', etc. Not all decision are scientific, even if they require scientific knowledge as a factor. Here he aligns with Focualt when discussing power and the urge to use science, or Hayekian scientism, to say there is one true way and the decision should be X.

It's waaay worse than that. My understanding of the point of incommensurability is not the obvious morality is different from science but it goes back to Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argues scientists speaking literally the same words with different paradigms of understanding that science will suffer from the inability to communicate effectively because the differing paradigms lead to different meanings and ways of interpretation.

Its hard to speak of epistemology without mentioning Foucault. He's a great philosopher of the history of knowledge and its preconditions. I have not read Feyerabend (yet) though. But if he's going deep into the history of knowledge, there will be at least some associative closeness if not one in methodology. Foucault, studied under Georges Caguilhem who was an influential philosopher of sience. Another student of his is Gilbert Simondon, a philospoher of technology who was writing on the process of the individuation of machines. I say this because I sometimes get the impression that some people, especially those educated in the US, have a quite distorted impression of the so called continental tradition. Also if one was to speak of a certain group of philosophers in France after May 68 like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze (who are actually rather different thinkers), they are commonly reffered to as post-structuralists, not post-modernists. Haven't heared the latter term to often in philosophical debates as in use for people. Of the top of my head I can' t really think of a person that could function as representative of postmodernism as a coherent school of thought, besides maybe Francis Fukuyama. Maybe thats different in US discourse. The term post-modernists always sounds a bit funny to me, like the "Neomarxists" that haunt the plot of Southland Tales.

We are "all" postmoderns at this point.

Einstein ; Gödel ; Popper => Kuhn => Feyerabend (among others) have basically wrecked the big modern positivist project (not that I blame them).

And :

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/french-theory-how-foucault-derrida-...