Tayag, Aldrin M. Dr.

Archimedes David

November 24, 2011 Philosophy of Science

Paul Feyerabend Feyerabend's position was originally seen as radical in the philosophy of science, because it implies that philosophy can neither succeed in providing a general description of science, nor in devising a method for differentiating products of science from non-scientific entities like myths. (Feyerabend's position also implies that philosophical guidelines should be ignored by scientists, if they are to aim for progress.) To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend provides counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to a certain fixed method. He took some examples of episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress (e.g. the Copernican revolution), and showed that all common prescriptive rules of science are violated in such circumstances. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution. One of the criteria for evaluating scientific theories that Feyerabend attacks is the consistency criterion. He points out that to insist that new theories be consistent with old theories gives an unreasonable advantage to the older theory. He makes the logical point that being compatible with a defunct older theory does not increase the validity or truth of a new theory over an alternative covering the same content. That is, if one had to choose between two theories of equal explanatory power, to choose the one that is compatible with an older, falsified theory is to make an aesthetic, rather than a rational choice. The familiarity of such a theory might also make it more appealing to scientists, since they will not have to disregard as many cherished prejudices. Hence, that theory can be said to have "an unfair advantage". Feyerabend was also critical of falsificationism. He argued that no interesting theory is ever consistent with all the relevant facts. This would rule out using a nave falsificationist rule which says that scientific theories should be rejected if they do not agree with known facts. Feyerabend uses several examples, but "renormalization" in quantum mechanics provides an example of his intentionally provocative style: "This procedure consists in crossing out the results of certain calculations and replacing them by a description of what is actually observed. Thus one admits, implicitly, that the theory is in trouble while formulating it in a manner suggesting that a new principle has been discovered" Against Method. p. 61. Such jokes are not intended as a criticism of the practice of scientists. Feyerabend is not advocating that scientists do not make use of renormalization or other ad hoc methods. Instead, he is arguing that such methods are essential to the progress of science for several reasons. One of these reasons is that progress in science is uneven. For instance, in the time of Galileo, optical theory could not account for phenomena that were observed by means of telescopes. So, astronomers who used telescopic observation had to use ad hoc rules until they could justify their assumptions by means of optical theory. Feyerabend was critical of any guideline that aimed to judge the quality of scientific theories by comparing them to known facts. He thought that previous theory might influence natural interpretations of observed phenomena. Scientists necessarily make implicit assumptions when

comparing scientific theories to facts that they observe. Such assumptions need to be changed in order to make the new theory compatible with observations. The main example of the influence of natural interpretations that Feyerabend provided was the tower argument. The tower argument was one of the main objections against the theory of a moving earth. Aristotelians assumed that the fact that a stone which is dropped from a tower lands directly beneath it shows that the earth is stationary. They thought that, if the earth moved while the stone was falling, the stone would have been "left behind". Objects would fall diagonally instead of vertically. Since this does not happen, Aristotelians thought that it was evident that the earth did not move. If one uses ancient theories of impulse and relative motion, the Copernican theory indeed appears to be falsified by the fact that objects fall vertically on earth. This observation required a new interpretation to make it compatible with Copernican theory. Galileo was able to make such a change about the nature of impulse and relative motion. Before such theories were articulated, Galileo had to make use of ad hoc methods and proceed counterinductively. So, "ad hoc" hypotheses actually have a positive function: they temporarily make a new theory compatible with facts until the theory to be defended can be supported by other theories. Relevance to Modern Society 'His most basic conclusion is epistemic anarchism, expressed in the "anything goes" slogan ...' Slogans aside, wouldn't 'epistemic eclecticism' be a more accurate description, or does it mean something else? From the perspective of economics, I think Feyerabend is important because economics seems to have become trapped in a sort of a bastardized Kuhnism of which he was highly critical: " More than one social scientist has pointed out to me that now at last he has learned how to turn his field into a 'science' - by which of course he meant that he had learned how to improve it. The recipe, according to these people, is to restrict criticism, to reduce the number of comprehensive theories to one, and to create a normal science that has this one theory as its paradigm. Students must be prevented from speculating along different lines and the more restless colleagues must be made to conform and 'to do serious work'. Relation of Korners 4 Types of Philosophical Thinking Fundamentally my objection is that Feyerabend seems to leave no room at all for rationality in science: no scientific method, no grip for observation, and no force to scientific reasoning. A cartoon take away from his work is a slogan: science is just another language game, a rhetorical system, with no claim to rational force based on empirical study and reasoning. Feyerabend seems to be the ultimate voice for the idea of relativism in knowledge systems -- much as Klamer and McCloskey seemed to argue with regard to economic theory in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric . This isn't a baseless misreading of Feyerabend. In fact, it isn't a bad paraphrase of Against Method. But it isn't the whole story either. And at bottom, I don't think it is accurate to say that Feyerabend rejects the idea of scientific rationality. Rather, he rejects one common interpretation of that notion: the view that scientific rationality can be reduced to a set of

universal canons of investigation and justification, and that there is a neutral and universal set of standards of inference that decisively guide choice of scientific theories and hypotheses. So I think it is better to understand Feyerabend as presenting an argument against a certain view in the philosophy of science rather than against science itself. Instead, I now want to understand Feyerabend as holding something like this: that there is "reasoning" in scientific research, and this reasoning has a degree of rational credibility. However, the reasoning that scientists do is always contextual and skilled, rather than universal and mechanical. And it doesn't result in proofs and demonstrations, but rather a preponderance of reasons favoring one interpretation rather than another.

Discuss how some contemporaries describe Aristotles sense of wonder In an article entitled "Aristotle on Sense Perception," Thomas J. Slakey tries to show that Aristotle's theory of sense perception has little explanatory value. This implies that the sense [itself] is a `mean' [mesotes] between any two opposite qualities which determine the field of that sense. It is to this that it owes its power of discerning the objects in that field. What is `in the middle' is fitted to discern; relatively to either extreme it can put itself in place of the other. He then interprets Aristotle as making the following distinction between sense and sense-organ: "the sense-organ is a part of the body which becomes hot when heat is perceived, and so forth; each sense is located in a part of the body and is the power of the sense-organ to change in temperature or colour..." Thus he concludes that: "There is no distinction between the change of the sense and the change of the sense-organ. The only distinction between `sense' and `senseorgan' is that the word `sense' refers to the power of the sense-organ to change within a certain range of qualities."In other words, Slakey believes that Aristotle is trying to explain senseperception merely in terms of the sense-organ becoming like the thing it is perceiving. It is simply a description of what happens to the sense organ, he argues, not an explanation of senseperception. It appears, however, that Slakey's attack on Aristotle is due to a misreading of the passage just quoted from De Anima. Aristotle does not say that the sense is "the power of the sense-organ to change" as Slakey puts it, but rather that it is "the power of discerning the objects in that field." Thus Aristotle's distinction between sense and sense-organ is quite marked. The sense-organ is that which takes on the form of the object that is acting upon it, whereas the sense is a "mean" between two extremes which can "perceive" (measure) the change that occurs in the sense-organ. In the case of Bob, when Bob's eye (the sense-organ) takes on the form of the orange, the sense "perceives" (measures) this change in the eye. How are intellectual curiosity, honesty, and modesty able to fortify our sense of philosophizing? These ways of conducting philosophy will enable one to have a grasp of a genuine arrival into truth which philosophy itself adheres. It will be a force that will strengthen the claim of a particular philosophy.