Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend

543 Pages·1991·15.35 MB·English

by  Gonzalo Munévar (ed.)

BEYOND REASON
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board
ADOLF GRONBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of
the City University ofN ew York
VOLUME 132
BEYOND REASON
Essays on the Philosophy of
Paul Feyerabend
Edited by
GONZALO MUNEVA R
The Evergreen State College, Washington, U.SA.
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond reason : essays an the philosophy of Pau; Feyerabend I edited
by Gonzalo Munevar.
p. cm. -- (Boston studies in the philosophy of science ; v.
132)
"Most of the essays in this festschrift were originally published
in German in Hans Peter Duerr's ed., Versuchungen Aufsătze zur
Phi losophie Paul Feyerabends, Shurkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,
1980"--P.
ISBN 978-94-010-5406-5 ISBN 978-94-011-3188-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-3188-9
1. Feyerabend, Paul K., 1924- 1. Feyerabend, Paul K., 1924-
II. Munevar, Gonzalo. III. Versuchungen Aufsătze zur Philosophie
Paul Feyerabends. IV. Ser ies.
B3240.F484B49 1991
193--dc20 91-17470
ISBN 978-94-010-5406-5
printed on acid-free paper
AlI Rights Reserved
© 1991 by Springer-Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1991
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1991
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
"What I really am, a dishwasher",
Table of Contents
GONZALO MONEV AR / Introduction ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxi
1. PAULM. CHURCHLAND / A Deeper Unity: Some
Feyerabendian Themes in Neurocomputational Form 1
2. MARX W. W ARTOFSKY / How to Be a Good Realist 25
3. C.A. HOOKER / Between Formalism and Anarchism: A
Reasonable Middle Way 41
4. ALASTAIR HANNAY / Free of Prejudice and Wholly
Critical 109
5. IAN HACKING / Speculation, Calculation and the Creation
of Phenomena 131
6. JOHN KEKES / Reason and Practice 159
7. GONZALO MONEVA R / Science in Feyerabend's Free
Society 179
8. MARGHERIT A VON BRENTA NO / Letter to an Anti-
Liberal Liberal 199
9. WERNER DIEDERICH / Obituary on the "Anarchist" Paul
Feyerabend 213
10. NORETTA KOERTGE / Ideology, Science and a Free
Society 225
11. ALAN MUSGRA VB / The Myth of Astronomical Instrumen-
talism 243
12. GUNNAR ANDERSSON / Feyerabend on Falsifications,
Galileo, and Lady Reason 281
Vll
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
13. FREDERICK SUPPE / The Observational Origins of
Feyerabend's Anarchistic Epistemology 297
14. ANTHONY N. PEROVICH, Jr. / Incommensurability, its
Varieties and its Ontological Consequences 313
15. JOHN WORRALL / Feyerabend and the Facts 329
16. JEROME R. RA YETZ / Ideological Commitments in the
Philosophy of Science 355
17. JOSEPH AGASSI / As You Like It 379
18. VINE DELORIA / Perceptions and Maturity: Reflections on
Feyerabend's Point of View 389
19. ARNE NAESS / Paul Feyerabend - a Green Hero? 403
20. HERBERT HORZ / Ecology as a Challenge to Philosophy 417
21. HERBERT SCHNADELBACH / Against Feyerabend 433
22. DWIGHT VA N DE VA TE, JR. / A New Slant on the Tower
Experiment 449
23. GROVER MAXWELL / Feyerabend's Materialism 453
24. JOSEPH MARGOLIS / Scientific Methods and Feyerabend's
Advocacy of Anarchism 465
25. PAUL K. FEYERABEND / Concluding Unphilosophical
Conversation 487
INDEX 529
GONZALO MUNEV AR
Introduction
Some philosophers think that Paul Feyerabend is a clown, a great many
others think that he is one of the most exciting philosophers of science of
this century. For me the truth does not lie somewhere in between, for I am
decidedly of the second opinion, an opinion that is becoming general
around the world as this century comes to an end and history begins to
cast its appraising eye upon the intellectual harvest of our era.
A good example of this opinion may be found in the admiration for
Feyerabend's philosophy of science expressed by Grover Maxwell in his
contribution to this volume. Maxwell, recalling his own intellectual
transformation, says also that it was Feyerabend who "confirmed my then
incipient suspicions that most of the foundations of currently fashionable
philosophy and even a great deal of the methodology to which many
scientists pay enthusiastic lip service are based on simple mistakes -
assumptions whose absurdity becomes obvious once attention is directed
at them". And lest the reader thinks, as many still do, that however sharp
Feyerabend's attacks upon the philosophical establishment may have
been, he does not offer a positive philosophy (a complain made by C.A.
Hooker and some of the other contributors), Paul Churchland argues
otherwise.
Churchland points out several claims extracted from Feyerabend' s
philosophy of science and views on materialism which violated many of
the crucial tenets of the dominant philosophy in the 60's: that perceptual
knowledge is never ideologically neutral, that the commonsense
framework of our mental lives could be replaced by a materialist
framework, that competing views occasionally are incommensurable, that
scientific progress occasionally requires the proliferation of alternative
IX
G. Munevar (ed.), Beyond Reason, ix-xx.
© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
x INTRODUCfION
theories, as well as of alternative methodologies. Indeed, Churchland
says, most analytic philosophers "still find these claims to be individually
repugnant and collectively confusing". Nevertheless recent developments
in experimental neuroscience incorporate and make very plausible all of
those claims by Peyerabend. What may have looked like a negative
philosophy from a certain vantage point, now serves as part of the
conceptual foundation of a new and exciting understanding of the mind
(Churchland is particularly interested in the connectionist approach to the
nature of the brain - an approach that has risen, incidentally, as a serious
challenger to traditional Artificial Intelligence, a field closely allied with
analytic philosophy). The reader may wish to contrast Churchland's
contribution with Maxwell's more traditional appraisal of Peyerabend's
materialism.
Controversial figures like Peyerabend often elicit strong responses and
their work provokes no end of misunderstandings, just as it also provides
opportunities for new developments. In the essays collected in these pages
the reader will find ample evidence for these remarks. As examples of
very strong responses I can point to, among others, the essays by Joseph
Agassi and Vine Deloria. The first goes beyond the customary bounds of
academic essays into what may be fairly called a sustained and very
strong personal attack against Peyerabend (Agassi argues that
Peyerabend's philosophy could give comfort to a Nazi ideology, and he
believes, given his acquaintance with Peyerabend, that such result is no
accident). The second, by contrast, argues that Peyerabend is one of the
few thinkers who make a serious case for treating all the peoples of the
planet with respect. This is so, at least in part, because Peyerabend, as
Deloria says, sees that the contributions of non-Western cultures should
not be limited merely to adding to an "already constructed edifice of
Western knowledge". The content of human knowledge should instead be
"a discontinuous arrangement of smaller bodies of knowledge derived
from the many traditions represented in planetary history".
When I was an undergraduate social concerns were not topics fit for
discussion in the philosophy of science. Some decry this transformation
of the field, others feel intellectually liberated by it. But they can all
recognize that Peyerabend had a good part in bringing it about. Of course,
that certain topics were not brought up does not imply that philosophy of
science never made (implicit?) ideological commitments of a moral,
social, or political nature. Jerome Ravetz argues that philosophy of
science did make such commitments and tries to expose them in his
INlRODUCTION xi
account of the history of the Vienna Circle, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and
finally Feyerabend.
The first, decisive step in the transformation of the field came when
Feyerabend (and Thomas Kuhn) showed, by a series of analyses of
crucial episodes in the history of the physical sciences, that the "facts"
used by scientists to pass judgement upon scientific theories are them
selves based on theoretical assumptions, and are thus also theoretical.
And here I include "facts" apparently as straightforward as the vertical
motion of a stone as it is dropped from a tower (a fact which was long
considered as a refutation of the rotation of the earth). From Feyerabend' s
analysis of the Tower Argument it became clear that such fact assumed,
among other things, an operationist concept of motion (motion as
observable displacement), that is, a properly empiricist concept, whereas
Galileo introduced unobservable, theoretical components into the motions
of bodies. I place emphasis on this assumption rather than on the assump
tion that space was absolute, although the relation is close, because it
serves to remind us that in that particular episode the Aristotelians, the
losers, were on the side of methodological propriety. For this has been
one of Feyerabend's main themes: that on occasion scientific method
must be violated if progress is to result (progress as determined by today' s
science).
This limitation on method, on any method conceived according to the
canons of traditional empiricism, was an unavoidable consequence of the
breakdown of the distinction between theory and "fact" (as given by
experience). For at the very heart of empiricism was the belief that
experience had epistemological priority over theory. But if "facts" are
theoretical too, instead of a clash between theory and fact (to be resolved
in favor of fact) we ultimately have a clash between theory and theory.
Thus it is possible that on occasion the theory under trial should overturn
the verdict of the facts. Indeed many of the great developments in the
history of science could not have come about otherwise.
Many philosophers of science have come to accept a position along
these lines to the degree that Feyerabend's work must seem to them full
of truisms (although, it seems to me, rather in the manner that
Shakespeare's is full of cliches). But others will resist. John Worrall, in
this volume, resurrects Poincare's distinction between scientific and crude
facts, and argues that this is all it takes to rescue empiricism from
Feyerabend. Once we accept this distinction there remains a core of
sensible things that Feyerabend has said, but those can be better accom-