QuestionsCan science explain everything?Against Method: no rule made science progress
Can science explain everything?A human construction

Against Method: no rule made science progress

"Anything goes": Feyerabend's theoretical anarchism

Paul Feyerabend 1924 · 1994The language of mental states is a theory, which science can correct or replace.
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What it claims

No fixed rule of method should be imposed on science: the only principle that does not inhibit progress is "anything goes", and science has much less theoretical authority than is said.

Why

Every rule of method has been broken at some point, and those violations were necessary for science to progress.

The same idea through history
John Stuart Mill1859Feyerabend draws on Mill's On Liberty: for knowledge to progress, rival opinions must be allowed to live, even those that seem false. He applies this idea to scientific method and uses it to defend the proliferation of theories.
Galileo Galilei1632Galileo is Feyerabend's central example. To get people to accept that the Earth moves, an idea contrary to the experience of his time, Galileo did not only argue: according to Feyerabend, he also used propaganda and stylistic tricks, and that is what made him win.
Paul Feyerabend1975Against Method (1975, revised editions 1988 and 1993) puts forward a historical thesis (every rule was violated by great discoveries) and a slogan, "anything goes". Feyerabend himself says that the slogan is an irony (see the 1993 preface below).
In short

"Against Method: no rule made science progress" is an argument by Paul Feyerabend (Against Method, 1975, 3rd ed. 1993, 1975) on the question "Can science explain everything?" (answer: a human construction). Its claim: No fixed rule of method should be imposed on science: the only principle that does not inhibit progress is "anything goes", and science has much less theoretical authority than is said. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 3 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Against Method, 1975, 3rd ed. 1993
Valid

It is often said that science advances thanks to a method: observe, form hypotheses, test them, drop those that experience contradicts. Paul Feyerabend, an Austrian philosopher, looked closely at the history of discoveries. He finds that there is no rule of method that was not violated at some point by the great scientists, and that these departures were sometimes necessary for progress. Galileo, for example, defended a moving Earth when everyday experience seemed to say the opposite, and he succeeded by means that were not all arguments. Feyerabend concludes that no fixed rule should be imposed on science, and that science does not have the theoretical authority it is credited with. He sums this up in the slogan "anything goes", which he himself says is an irony, not a principle he would defend. We list the argument under "A human construction" because it makes human choices and circumstances the engine of science. Many philosophers judge that the conclusion goes too far compared with what history shows.

P1There is no rule of method, however plausible and however well grounded it seems, that was not violated at some time or other in the history of science.
P2These violations are not accidents or lapses of attention: they were necessary for progress (so Galileo, who defended an idea contrary to common experience by means that were not all arguments).
P3 · implicit premiseA fixed rule that forbids what was necessary for progress hinders progress; only a principle that forbids nothing in advance, "anything goes", never hinders it.
P4The belief in a unique set of rules that has always led to success is a chimera; without it, the theoretical authority of science is much smaller than is supposed.
So no fixed rule of method should be imposed on science: the only principle that does not inhibit progress is "anything goes", and science has much less theoretical authority than is said.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, one could accept P1 and P2 and say that method is a working rule, not a law, which one can follow in general and break knowingly, like a traffic code. One would not conclude that "anything goes".
The argument is valid. P1 and P2 give the historical thesis: rules were violated, and rightly so. P3 draws from it that fixed rules hinder progress. P4 links this to the authority of science. The debate is about P1 (is the historical thesis true for every rule, and not only for a few too-simple ones such as immediate refutation?) and about P3: can one go from "simple rules failed" to "no rule is worth anything", or is a more refined method needed?
Analogy. A coach gives his team rules of play. The history of football shows that the greatest goals were often scored by breaking them. Feyerabend concludes that the best advice is not to fix a rule; his opponents would say it only shows that rules must be intelligent advice.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

I
Imre Lakatos 1970 · attacks premise 3

Lakatos admits that naive falsificationism ("a contrary experiment refutes the theory") does not hold, but he proposes a finer method: whole "research programmes" are judged. A programme is progressive if it predicts new facts, and degenerating if it merely makes adjustments after the fact. History can thus be rationally reconstructed, without "anything goes".

Feyerabend replies
Feyerabend Feyerabend (Against Method, 3rd ed., note to ch. 15)
Feyerabend answers that Lakatos's method forbids almost nothing: it only forbids describing a degenerating programme as progressive, not using it. His standards allow a criminal to commit as many crimes as he wants, provided he never lies about them.
The debate goes on (our summary) Lakatos died in 1974, before the book was published, so the answer has no reply from him. Lakatos's followers answer that the criteria for a progressive programme are not empty, since they allow programmes to be compared over time.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: a disagreement of substance about what a rule of method is. For Lakatos flexible criteria are enough to keep science rational; for Feyerabend a criterion that forbids nothing in advance is no longer a rule.
Karl Popper 1963 · attacks premise 3

For Popper, what makes science is the demand for criticism: every serious test of a theory is an attempt to refute it. This demand is the rule of method that Feyerabend attacks first.

Feyerabend replies
see the argument
Feyerabend Feyerabend (Against Method, 3rd ed., ch. 15)
Feyerabend writes that a strict principle of falsification would wipe out science as we know it and would never have permitted it to start. He explains that new theories are at first limited to a small domain of facts and extend only slowly.
The debate goes on (our summary) This confrontation is our putting two texts side by side: Feyerabend also writes against Popper in this book, but we found no direct reply by Popper to this argument.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Feyerabend's objection mostly targets the simple version of refutation. Popperians hold that a finer version of refutation escapes it; Feyerabend judges that the rule is then lost.
A
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont 1997 · attacks the conclusion

Sokal and Bricmont judge that Feyerabend mixes accurate remarks about the limits of too-simple rules with much stronger, relativist conclusions that history does not allow. For them one can recognise that science has no single mechanical method while holding that its results have greater value than those of other traditions, because experience checks them.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1997, after the author's death (1994).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Feyerabend died in 1994, before the book by Sokal and Bricmont appeared. For his part he writes that science is "only one of the many instruments" (3rd ed.), but also that he is not against a properly understood science. The debate on the value of science compared with other traditions remains open.
Paul Feyerabend (1993 preface) 1993 · attacks the conclusion

Feyerabend himself specifies the scope of the slogan: "anything goes" is not a principle he holds (he thinks principles cannot be used outside the concrete research situation), but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history. He explains that his friend Lakatos loved irony and that he too sometimes wrote in that vein.

no reply
Feyerabend never answered this objection.
The debate goes on (our summary) This clarification changes how the book is read: the "principle" is the conclusion of a rationalist who finds that his rules are not enough, not Feyerabend's own thesis. The question remains whether the underlying thesis, that no fixed rule is valid, is right; that is the subject of the other objections.