Paul Feyerabend has maintained in his 1975 "How to Defend Society Against Science" that science is yet another human-produced myth, a modern religion,
or in his phrasing: "just
one of the many ideologies that propel society and it should be treated as such". Feyerabend set out to defend society against ideologies,
science, as he takes care to note, very much included. He distinguishes two
interchanging types of ideologies: one positive in virtue of its ability to
destabilize conventional dogmatic beliefs, as science was during the 17th
and 18th centuries when he freed men from the constraints of
religion. The other type of ideology is negative in being dogmatic and
reluctant to negotiate its "truths", as religion was and as,
Feyerabend argues, science has become. He revokes the claim that science has
managed to achieve a "correct" method for attaining knowledge, one
that boasts in its success in explanation and prediction as an indication of
its validness. He claims that "theories never follow from [empirical] facts in the
strict logical sense" and that analytic philosophy has fell
short in providing a viable method that on empirical evidence and logic
alone. Where positivistic philosophers
such as Karnap and Hempel strain to fill in the ever emerging holes in the logics
of scientific method, Feyerabend prefers to just kick the bucket, or better
yet, to collide it with another bucket to see which one is left holding more
water. Feyerabend believes that a single theory will always be able to confirm
itself while relying on its own standards. He therefore asserts that a
scientific theory cannot and should not be confirmed on its own autonomous
grounds by relating exclusively to empiric evidence, and that it could only
gain some sort of temporary prominence by being favorably compared with other
theories. This sort of conformation does not suggest to some inherent realist
quality of the theory, but just that it was the best alternative, under the
criterions for choosing between theories that are themselves determined in the
same relativistic manner. This line of
thought follows from J.S.Mill and Feyerabend's teacher Karl Popper, and it is
implemented by Feyerabend not only in relation to scientific theories but also
to the broader category of ideology.
Feyerabend's science
Feyerabend's ultimate conclusion is his famous principle of
"anything goes" which is crowned by him as "the only principle
that does not inhibit change". Feyerabend later snickered
at those who took this who took this who took the "anything goes"
criterion for an actual normative prescription and felt they were missing the
point, which is that there shouldn’t be any constant normative prescriptions,
criterions and abiding methods in science, since adherence to these ultimately
leads to dogmatism and atrophy. If any theory has the capacity of justifying
itself, the only way of ever extending beyond its epistemological boarders is
by confronting it with another theory confirmed but contradicting theory.
In "Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism"
Feyerabend
attacks two ground assumptions associated with logical empiricism, that
derivation between two theories and of meaning invariance of terminology in
different theories. He uses this attack to show how two theories could match
the same body of evidence but at the same time be mutually incommensurable.
This since universal theories always exceed known evidence while compliance of
evidence with a theory is always determined within a margin of error. The first
reason allows for theories to contradict each other within the realm on unknown
predicates, while the seconds allows for contradiction in regards to known
predicates. This leads Feyerabend to denounce the possibility (and
desirability) of a formal criterion for science. Feyerabend's perception of
science is similar to that of Thomas Kuhn, namely viewing science not as a
collection of facts expressed in propositions, but rather as whole world-view
that has a unique epistemological, ontological and methodological
characteristics that are subjected to change and replacement when a new theory
takes the place of an old one. Unlike
Kuhn, Feyerabend supports a constant, rather than periodic, paradigm shift and
for the perpetual challenging of any ruling theory. Unanimity of opinion, he says, may be fitting
life under the church or a tyrant, but a humanistic view dictates a pluralism
of opinions which in turn also assures objective knowledge.
Feyerabend's ideology
Feyerabend's use of the term
"ideology" is not explicated but only implied. He holds ideology as either
productive or degenerative and it is therefore deducible that ideology for
Feyerabend is something that precedes these two options. In addition, ideology
for Feyerabend, unlike Marxism, is not defined by being distinguished from
actual reality or the material truth, and this is evident from his arguing that
"if… [science) has found the truth
and now follows it, then I would say that there are better things than first
finding, and then following such a monster".
Another central aspect of Feyerabend's
view of what constitutes ideology is implied in his statement that " theories shape and order
facts and can therefore be retained come what may… because the human mind either
consciously or unconsciously carries out its ordering function". He also feels
that the competition mechanism he suggests is valid not only for
theories/ideologies, but also for their methods, the "ordering
function". An affixed and unwilling method is what eventually leads to a
dogmatic and non-progressing science. In hid book "Against Method"
Feyerabend is more explicit on this point in arguing that a method or mode on
inquiry is an ideological apparatus that enforces a limited perspective on
reality and subsequently a limited scope for science. Science, Feyerabend
demonstrates, is helpless in explaining the efficiency of traditional Chinese
medicine due to the incommensurability of the different methods. Such an
example serves to illustrate Feyerabend's claims against favoring one ideology
over another, but it also shows how for Feyerabend ideology to a large extent
is the manner and method by which one engages in practices of explanation and
prediction.
Conclusion, analysis and
commentary on Feyerabend's perception of science and ideology
One of Feyerabend's main arguments in
"How to Defend Society Against Science" can be formulated in the form
of a classic dilemma:
- Science does not deliver absolute truths and claiming it does is a repressive ideological act.
- Even if Science was to deliver truths, an uncompromising obligation to it is still running the risk of degenerating human spirit.
This implies that the validity of
scientific knowledge, though heavily criticized by Feyerabend, is in fact
non-relevant for the question of ideology and its dogmatic function. Feyerabend
does not necessarily hold that scientific knowledge is ideological or false,
but he does argue that western science itself, as a social or cultural
phenomenon, is an ideology. Thus a distinction should be made in Feyerabend's
doctrine between scientific knowledge (and knowledge in general) and scientific
ideology (and ideology in general). The former is surly logically dubious, but
then again so is everything else we believe we know and scientific knowledge
can be as useful and interesting as any other kind of knowledge. Scientific
ideology, on the other hand, attempts to present itself and its results as an
undisputed truth while everything that is not rigorously scientific is reduced
to the status of metaphysical nonsense. With scientific ideology attempting to
gain absolute adherence, the question of truth as objective truth is still
none-relevant for the question of science as an ideology, but truth as being
presented as objective truth is nonetheless relevant and even more relevant is
the question of the method that introduces itself as the exclusive way of
explaining reality.
