Paul Feyerabend - Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

In 1970 Imre Lakatos, one of the best friends I ever had, cornered meat a party. Paul, he said, you have such strange ideas. Why dont youwrite them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing andI promise you - we shall have lots of fun. I liked the suggestion andstarted working. The manuscript of my part of the book was finishedin 1972 and I sent it to London. There it disappeared under rathermysterious circumstances. Imre Lakatos, who loved dramaticgestures, notified Interpol and, indeed, Interpol found my manuscriptand returned it to me. I reread it and made some final changes.In February 1974, only a few weeks after I had finished my revision, Iwas informed of Imres death. I published my part of our commonenterprise without his response. A year later I published a secondvolume, Science in a Free Society, containing additional material andreplies to criticism.

This history explains the form of the book. It is not a systematictreatise; it is a letter to a friend and addresses his idiosyncrasies. Forexample, Imre Lakatos was a rationalist, hence rationalism plays alarge role in the book. He also admired Popper and therefore Popperoccurs much more frequently than his objective importance wouldwarrant. Imre Lakatos, somewhat jokingly, called me an anarchistand I had no objection to putting on the anarchists mask. Finally,Imre Lakatos loved to embarrass serious opponents with jokes andirony and so I, too, occasionally wrote in a rather ironical vein. Anexample is the end of Chapter 1: anything goes is not a principle Ihold - I do not think that principles can be used and fruitfullydiscussed outside the concrete research situation they are supposedto affect - but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes acloser look at history. Reading the many thorough, serious,longwinded and thoroughly misguided criticisms I received afterpublication of the first English edition I often recalled my exchangeswith Imre; how we would both have laughed had we been able to readthese effusions together.

The new edition merges parts of Against Method with excerpts fromScience in a Free Society. I have omitted material no longer of interest,added a chapter on the trial of Galileo and a chapter on the notion ofreality that seems to be required by the fact that knowledge is part of acomplex historical process, eliminated mistakes, shortened theargument wherever possible and freed it from some of its earlieridiosyncrasies. Again I want to make two points: first, that science canstand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists,secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and,secondly, that non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptionscan also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so, if thisis the wish of their representatives. Science must be protected fromideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must beprotected from science. This does not mean that scientists cannotprofit from a philosophical education and that humanity has not andnever will profit from the sciences. However, the profits should notbe imposed; they should be examined and freely accepted by theparties of the exchange. In a democracy scientific institutions,research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjectedto public control, there must be a separation of state and science justas there is a separation between state and religious institutions, andscience should be taught as one view among many and not as the oneand only road to truth and reality. There is nothing in the nature ofscience that excludes such institutional arrangements or shows thatthey are liable to lead to disaster.

None of the ideas that underlie my argument is new. Myinterpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality forphysicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideasof these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodentsof neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of criticalrationalism. Lakatos was, after Kuhn, one of the few thinkers whonoticed the discrepancy and tried to eliminate it by means of acomplex and very interesting theory of rationality. I dont think he hassucceeded in this. But the attempt was worth the effort; it has led tointeresting results in the history of science and to new insights intothe limits of reason. I therefore dedicate also this second, alreadymuch more lonely version of our common work to his memory.

Earlier material relating to the problems in this book is nowcollected in my Philosophical Papers. containshistorical material, especially from the early history of rationalism inthe West and applications to the problems of today.

Berkley, September 1987

{Preface, 1} 2 vols, Cambridge, 1981.

{Preface, 2} London, 1987.