John Preston - Feyerabend Philosophy, Science and Society

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Geoff Stokes, Popper: Politics, Epistemology and Method

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FEYERABEND:

Philosophy, Science and Society

John Preston

Polity Press

Copyright John Preston 1997

The right of John Preston to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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For my parents

Preface

Paul Feyerabend, whose productive career lasted forty-five years, wrote on a plethora of philosophical issues. He was no narrowly-trained or narrowly-focused academic. His time as a student was divided between the study of singing, stage-management, theatre, Italian, harmony, piano, physics, mathematics, astronomy, history and sociology. He became a student of philosophy only after having received his doctorate in the subject. His career as a philosopher was an accident, and he did not see himself as a philosopher. Rather like his one-time mentor Karl Popper, Feyerabend seemed to hold the interest and opinion of those who are not professional philosophers in higher regard than those of his academic peers.

This book focuses primarily on Feyerabends philosophy of knowledge. His work in this area is exciting and important not just because it constitutes a running critique of other philosophical approaches to science, but also because of its aim. Feyerabends philosophy of knowledge suggests the possibility of freeing our intellectual lives from irrelevant constraints. It urges us to use our cognitive resources to the full, to realize the human potential that once drove the scientific revolution. In this respect, Feyerabends work both drew from and contributed to the heady climate of conceptual radicalism and social permissivism which bathed the 1960s.

Because Feyerabend wrote so much, and because this book is conceived as a critical introduction to his thought, I have concentrated almost entirely on his own writings, rather than the secondary literature, flagging the latter in footnotes where appropriate. Although Feyerabends philosophical work is founded upon the extensive study of quantum theory which he made in the early 1950s while he was one of Poppers students, I deal with this material only peripherally because it is impossible to do so in any more depth in an introductory book.

I would very much like to thank the following for their help in various respects: Andrew Wright and Jim Duthie of the University of North London, for encouraging my interest in Feyerabend; Bill Newton-Smith of Balliol College, and Kathy Wilkes of St Hildas College, Oxford University, for much inspiration, argument, criticism and help; Professor Paul Churchland of the University of California at San Diego, for answering my questions on the contextual theory of meaning and on his own intellectual relationship to Feyerabend; and my colleagues Hanjo Glock and David Oderberg, for reading parts of later drafts of this book. Finally, I would like to thank my department, the University of Reading, and the British Academy for giving me the time to complete work on this material, Martin, for his friendship, and Debbie, for her companionship and encouragement.

Professor Feyerabend was very helpful in giving me references to several of his articles. I like to think that his later self might have enjoyed, and perhaps even endorsed, my critical evaluation of his earlier self in this book.

John Preston

Reading

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Grazia Borrini Feyerabend for permission to quote from Paul Feyerabends work; to Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from his Philosophical Papers; to Verso (New Left Books) for permission to quote from Against Method (1st and 3rd editions), and Science in a Free Society; and to the University of Pittsburgh Press for permission to use excerpts from the essay Problems of Empiricism, published in