Paul Karl Feyerabend
25 quotes
Biography
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in philosophy of science at the University of Bristol (1955–1958); afterward, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades (1958–1989).
"Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives."
"Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems."
"My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind."
"One can show the following: given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite."
"Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress."
"[On Empiricism] It is evident, on the basis of our considerations, that this appearance of success cannot in the least be regarded as a sign of truth and correspondence with nature. Quite the contrary, suspicion arises that the absence of major difficulties is a result of the decrease of empirical content brought about by the elimination of alternatives, and of facts that can be discovered with their help. In other words, the suspicion arises that this alleged success is due to the fact that the theory, when extended beyond its starting point, was turned into rigid ideology. Such Ideology is "successful" not because it agrees so well with the facts; it is successful because no facts have been specified that could constitute a test, and because some such facts have been removed. Its "success" is entirely man-made. It was decided to stick to some ideas, come what may, and the result was, quite naturally, the survival of these ideas. If now the initial decision is forgotten, or made only implicitly, for example, if it becomes common law in physics, then the survival itself will seem to constitute independent support., it will reinforce the decision, or turn it into an explicate one, and in this way close the circle. This is how empirical "evidence" may be created by a procedure which quotes as its justification the very same evidence it has Produced."
"Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives."
"Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense."
"Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook."
"Most scientists today are devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes "scientific progress" in many areas."
"Today science prevails not because of its comparative merits, but because the show has been rigged in its favour... It reigns supreme because some past successes have led to institutional measures (education; role of experts; role of power groups such as the AMA) that prevent a comeback of the rivals."
"Mathematical Reasoning is not only exact; it has its own criteria of reality"
"I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests."
"A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it."
"Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions."
"Rational discourse is only one way of presenting and examining an issue and by no means the best. Our new intellectuals are not aware of its limitations and of the nature of the things outside."
"I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an attitude that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in the treatment of minorities in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists of turning wonderful young people into colorless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and of "primitive" cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of so many so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty. As far as I am concerned there exists no difference between the henchmen of Aushwitz and these "benefactors of mankind.""
"Reading Feyerabend is like taking a cold shower. One steps in and is froze; one exits stimulated, invigorated, and agreeing with more of what he says than one is inclined to admit publicly."
"Feyerabend's Dadaesque rhetoric concealed a deadly serious point: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrology. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recognized—and he was horrified by—its power, its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific certainty for moral and political, rather than for epistemological, reasons."
"The working biologist does not ask whether he should follow the prescriptions of this or that school of philosophy. When one studies the history of various theories in science, one sympathizes with Feyerabend (1975), who claimed, "Anything goes." Indeed this attitude seems to be what guides the biologist in most of his theorizing. He does what François Jacob (1977) — with respect to natural selection — has called ‘tinkering.’ He uses whatever method will get him at the moment most conveniently to the solution of his problem."
"Paul Feyerabend was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century—unfortunately, I might add. While he was not a postmodernist (he reportedly did believe in an objective reality), his writings have given plenty of ammunition to post-modernists and even the few creationists who know who he was."
"It is true that Popper and Feyerabend differ in many respects. But it is unfair to single out Feyerabend as worse than the others. For he too sets out to do what he sincerely believes is best for society. This he does by declaring "Anything goes", a position that follows inescapably from the (popperian) premise that all observations are theory-laden. This premise is the most basic of all errors, and the writings of those who commit it are bound to be a hopeless muddle. If Popper, Kuhn and their followers do not like being called relativists, negativists and irrationalists, then they ought to repudiate this worst of all antitheses."
"It is only fair to admit my limitations and biases in making this judgment. After a few years’ infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity. Some of it was good reading and even witty, like the writings of Wittgenstein and Paul Feyerabend. But only rarely did it seem to me to have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it. According to Feyerabend, the notion of scientific explanation developed by some philosophers of science is so narrow that it is impossible to speak of one theory being explained by another, a view that would leave my generation of particle physicists with nothing to do."
"Beneath Feyerabend's rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized — and was horrified by — science's vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals."
"The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."