Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#41

Post by lacker »

tokai wrote: post #13
Rochus wrote: post #3

If a field of knowledge is associated with a person or group of persons ("Frankfurter Schule", "Wiener Kreis"), I am a priori sceptical. Genuine scientific knowledge exists for itself and does not require authority and sectarian admiration. Philosophy can produce more useful things (e.g. knowledge representation, ontologies) than subjective individual opinions.

So how do you feel about Newtonian physics or algorithms? All knowledge is social.

Newtonian physics is a great example, because Newtonian physics is wrong! Due to relativity and quantum mechanics. If it were still our best guess at how the world worked, I think we would just call it "physics" rather than "Newtonian physics".

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#42

Post by lacker »

dang wrote: post #40
iron0013 wrote: post #34

“Feyerabend, who defended astrology and creationism...” go ahead and stop right there, that’s all anyone needs to know, frankly.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Honestly I found this comment to be useful. Supporting astrology and creationism is a pretty damning set of facts about someone.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#43

Post by dang »

lacker wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Honestly I found this comment to be useful. Supporting astrology and creationism is a pretty damning set of facts about someone.

It's not a useful or interesting representation of Feyerabend.

The internet habit of reducing everything to its most sensational detail, and cleansing it of all context, for damning purposes, is a bad one. It's what that HN guideline is intended to cover.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#44

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lacker wrote: post #41
tokai wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you feel about Newtonian physics or algorithms? All knowledge is social.

Newtonian physics is a great example, because Newtonian physics is wrong! Due to relativity and quantum mechanics. If it were still our best guess at how the world worked, I think we would just call it "physics" rather than "Newtonian physics".

"Science isn't useful because it is right, science is right because it is useful." (Unknown philosopher of science, possibly but probably not Feyerabend)

From this perspective, there's nothing "wrong" with Newtonian physics as long as you understand the domain in which it is useful (essentially: larger than molecules, smaller than planets).

Newtonian physics, QM and relativity are all just stories we tell in our attempt to understand how the universe came to be as it is, and predict how it will change (with or without our own actions). They are all "wrong" in the sense that none of them are the way the universe actually is, but they are all "right" in the sense that they provide us with immense explanatory and predictive power when used in the appropriate domain(s).

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#45

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lacker wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Honestly I found this comment to be useful. Supporting astrology and creationism is a pretty damning set of facts about someone.

Maybe if you read a little more about why he "supported" them, you'd find that even more useful?

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#46

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

choonway wrote: post #17

Never heard of him. I read the article and now I know why. There are plenty of people like him out there all kinds of non-constructive thinking and talking.

Actually, there's almost nobody else remotely like Feyerabend. Imre Lakatos came close, but was more interested in mathematics than science. Feyerabend was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of the 20th century, whether or not he was right about some things, or about anything at all.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#47

Post by danharaj »

jhbadger wrote: post #14
osullivj wrote: post #11

His insistence that there is no scientific method is pro-science. Science’s only method is “opportunism,” he said. “You need a toolbox full of different kinds of tools. Not only a hammer and pins and nothing else." This is what he meant by his much-maligned phrase "anything goes" (and not, as is commonly thought, that one scientific theory is as good as any other). Restricting science to a particular methodology--suc…

Well, it's true that the cliched "scientific method" taught in high schools is a gross oversimplification, and many discoveries are made by accident rather than deliberately trying to test a clearly defined hypothesis. But in the 1980s-1990s "Science Wars", there was a movement by postmodernists to try to claim that science is just an ideology no better than religion or magic. This movement liked to quote Feyerabend…

Considering the replication crises and the utter failure of, for example, supersymmetry in theoretical high energy physics, maybe the criticism was warranted. Ignoring the ideological forces that drive science as it actually exists doesn't make them go away.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#48

Post by jnwatson »

Feyerabend's work reminds me a bit of Alvin Plantinga's.

As a young objectivist at university, I had the idealistic idea that if two people could use logic and science to determine certain facts, they could settle any disagreement, even moral ones.

However, science is built upon certain assumed first principles, like causation and other minds sharing your reality. Plantinga argued that one could start with additional first principles (he called "basic beliefs"), in particular, belief in God.

In this way, two people might disagree without having any way to resolve disagreements, because they don't share the same first principles.

Science does not have primacy here. It is just one of several ways to arrive at knowledge.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#49

Post by mcguire »

vageli wrote: post #15
pjc50 wrote: post #12

> "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!" By modern social convention this is "trolling". > If he was not anti-science, I asked, what did he mean by his statement in Who's Who that intellectuals are cri…

> > "I have no position!" he cried. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twisted an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!" > By modern social convention this is "trolling". Can you expand on this? That hardly sounds like trolling and more like "Strong opinions loosely held" which…

I like pjc50's answer, but here's an alternative take: it's a matter of intention. Trolling involves making people angry because making them angry is fun. It's not any kind of intellectual stance.

The alternative is a method of teaching or learning, where unpopular opinions are as something between a counterfactual for exploration and the best way of getting a question answered on the internet: by asserting a wrong answer.

"Strong opinions loosely held" requires the opinions to actually be loosely held. You have to admit there are other options and you have to let go when yours are shown to be silly.

On the other hand, keep in mind that intent is impossible to judge from the outside.

Re: Was Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"? (2016)

#50

Post by andrepd »

Rochus wrote: post #25
claudiawerner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the humanities ("Geisteswissenschaften", and similar disciplines) the situation is different. Knowledge is rather believable and not falsifiable, but only accepted on the authority of the person who uttered the sentence. I'm curious if you have any evidence that this is a general trend. Your original comment is also wrong; the "Frankfurt School", one of your examples, does not ascribe particular authority to its…

When we hear the name Adorno, we have to tremble with awe, don't we? >> A school of thought[0] specifically denotes a commitment to a particular method or set of principles Agree, but this does not improve the quality of the sentences uttered by the members of this "school" (sorry if I'm hurting the feelings of any Marxists here). >> Besides, the Frankfurt School never claimed to be carrying out science. Well, in Ger…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN