Paul Feyerabend Quotes on Knowledge
Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (1975) is the most provocative work of late-twentieth-century philosophy of science. The principal thesis — sometimes summarized as anything goes — is that the actual history of successful scientific revolutions reveals no single rational method to which working scientists have adhered, and that the prescriptive methodologies proposed by Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn each fail to capture either how science has actually advanced or how it should advance. The constructive corollary is epistemological anarchism: a flourishing scientific culture requires the proliferation of incompatible theories and the rejection of any methodological monopoly, and the elevation of modern science to a privileged position among forms of human knowledge is the kind of dogmatism Feyerabend's free-society pluralism is meant to resist.
Quotes
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Attributed to Paul Feyerabend:
“The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.”
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“Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise.”
p. 9. -
Attributed to Paul Feyerabend:
“There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge.”
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Attributed to Paul Feyerabend:
“A clever individual will always know how to circumvent any rule.”
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Attributed to Paul Feyerabend:
“Reason is one tradition among others; it has no claim to universal authority.”
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“Who's Who in America (1991)”
My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind. -
“One can show the following: given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.”
Pg. 23. -
“Pg iii (Intro to the Chinese Edition of AM).”
First-world science is one science among many; by claiming to be more it ceases to be an instrument of research and turns into a (political) pressure group. -
“Pg. 27 & 28, italics are Feyerabend's”
It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity", "truth", it wi -
“Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress.”
pg. 27. -
“My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits . The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. In the case that induction (including induction by falsification) this means demonstrating how well the counterinductive procedure can be supported by argument.”
pg. 32, Italics are Feyerabend's. -
“pg. 32, Italics are Feyerabend's.”
My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits . The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. In the case that induction (including induction by falsific