Against Method

I keep thinking how modern philosophers of science, who talked about how science is done, would have a field day outlining recent social changes in sciences, with various shifting incentives, pressures from various media, strings attached to sources of financing, and competing interests.

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon for proposing that there is no such thing as a universal one-size-fits-all scientific method:

> Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.

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

Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered interesting or provocative?"

I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with his orneriness as with his science.

One can certainly be accused or perceived as being pedantic without thinking oneself to know the truth though, or actually being pedantic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

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.

I think I remember Imre Lakatos (another 20th century philosopher of science) saying that one application of philosophy of science is to determine which 'research programs' should (continue to) be funded.

Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are doing good work. If you apply a method too rigorously, you'll end up rewarding the wrong people.

It's been ages since I read these philosophers but in my mind Feyerabend's position sort of boiled down to 'at the forefront of any specialization only the experts are able to judge which investigations are worth pursuing further'. With the corollary that experts sometimes disagree among themselves.

In the field of software engineering I've encountered several cases where new engineers are onboarded and they promptly decide that the codebase is unmaintainable and should be rewritten from scratch. I usually don't give up on legacy code so easily, but there was one project where I did genuinely held the opinion that rewriting it would have been more efficient than refactoring. It occurred to me, though, that when a software engineer says a particular piece of codebase is crap, there usually is no good way for outsiders to tell whether that's true or not.

Incidentally, Feyerabend's Against Method originated out of a challenge by Lakatos to copublish a book in which they debate various ideas. That's a useful thing to keep in mind when reading Against Method. Later someone did publish a book titled For And Against Method [1], in which writings of both Lakatos and Feyerabend are juxtaposed.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo362971...