Epistemological anarchism

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Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924 – 1994), originator of epistemological anarchism and "worst enemy of science".

Epistemological anarchism is an epistemological theory advanced by Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself.^[1]

The use of the term anarchism in the name reflected the methodological pluralism prescription of the theory; as the purported scientific method does not have a monopoly on truth or useful results, the pragmatic approach is a Dadaistic "anything goes" attitude toward methodologies.^[1] The theory advocates treating science as an ideology alongside others such as religion, magic and mythology, and considers the dominance of science in society authoritarian and unjustified.^[1] Promulgation of the theory earned Feyerabend the title of “the worst enemy of science” from his detractors.^[2]

[edit] Rationale

The theory draws on the observation that there is no identifiable sole scientific method that is consistent with the practices of the paradigm of scientific progress – the scientific revolution.^[2] It is a radical critique of rationalist and empiricist historiography which tend to represent the heroes of the scientific revolution as scrupulous researchers reliant on empirical research, whereas Feyerabend countered that Galileo for example, relied on rhetoric, propaganda and epistemological tricks to support his doctrine of heliocentrism, and that aesthetic criteria, personal whims and social factors were far more prevalent than the dominant historiographies allowed.^[2]

Scientific laws such as those posited by Aristotelian or Newtonian physics are regularly proven not only to be locally incorrect, but entirely false, relying on assumptions about non-existent entities. That the movement from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity theory is a paradigm of scientific progress and yet that each has been in turn proven false illustrates for the epistemological anarchist that scientific theories do not correspond to truth but should rather be assessed on their desirability on other grounds. Feyerabend drew a comparison between the manner in which one scientific paradigm triumphed over or superseded another, and comparative mythology, in which elements of one myth are adapted and appropriated by a new, triumphal successor. Feyerabend contended, with Imre Lakatos whom he identified as a fellow epistemological anarchist, that the demarcation problem of distinguishing on objective grounds science from pseudoscience was irresolvable and thus fatal to the notion of science run according to fixed, universal rules.^[1]

Furthermore, Feyerabend held that deciding between competing scientific accounts was complicated by the incommensurability of scientific theories. Incommensurability means that scientific theories cannot be reconciled or synthesised because the interpretation and practice of science is always informed by theoretical assumptions, which leads to proponents of competing theories using different terms, engaged in different language-games and thus talking past each other. This for Feyerabend was another reason why the idea of science as proceeding according to universal, fixed laws was both historically inaccurate and prescriptively useless.