Talk:Against Method

Reception section needs expansion?
I'm reluctant to make meaningful changes to a cited claim, especially not having the John Preston book to check, but this is flat-out wrong: "The publication of Against Method led to Feyerabend's isolation from the community of philosophers of science, who objected to his view that there is no such thing as the scientific method."

For one thing, "the community of philosophers of science" is not and was not monolithic, they didn't all object to AM (though most did.) They especially did not all object to the view that "there is no such thing as the scientific method"(emphasis mine), because so many of them actually agree with that much.

The existence of a singular scientific method is a belief that primary and secondary school teachers dump on kids. Science proceeds by many methods, and you can find working scientists today who will disagree vociferously with one another over which methodologies(plural) make for good science. The disagreement is still-more pronounced amongst philosophers of science.

For another thing, it wasn't so much AM or the views therein that isolated poor P.F. from his peers, but his insistence on taking negative reviews personally. I sympathize.

Anyway, if someone with access to the John Preston book could check out the cited page, just see whether this section provides an accurate paraphrase, because being charitable to Preston's scholarship I must assume his meaning has been mangled.

A few detailed accountings of the circumstances surrounding AM's publication and reception can be found in the book The Worst Enemy of Science?: Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend, which I do not have with me tonight, but could be mined by some diligent Wikipedian for additional material for this stubby section.

2601:9:2C80:C7CE:81C7:7A79:CBC6:1B91 (talk) 07:33, 7 June 2015 (UTC)


 * The above commenter is absolutely spot on. Formalising "the scientific method" is a sure-fire way to end up with egg on your face, as the next revolution (erm, paradigm shift, a term which has degenerated into a hackneyed buzzword) will entail the breaking of at least one "rule." There seems to be a deplorable tendency to replace one religion by the other. All the same, creationists, Flat-Earthers, circle squares, free-energists and the like are wrong because their reasoning is crooked. But I for one do not believe FR meant this when he said ""anything goes" - perhaps he should have said "anything goes but not everything works" 137.205.101.81 (talk) 09:15, 23 March 2018 (UTC)