Eric Oberheim - Paul Feyerabend: From the Limited Validity of Falsificationism to ‘Anything Goes!’

Recorded as part of the CFvW Colloquium on June 26, 2024
Paul Feyerabend: From the Limited Validity of Falsificationism to ‘Anything Goes!’ - Dr. Eric Oberheim (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Talk abstract:
The lecture explains Paul Feyerabend’s peculiar views on meaning and method and how they developed from the early 1950s into Feyerabend’s mature early philosophy of science in his landmark essay “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism” (1962, henceforth /ERE/), where Feyerabend criticizes Carl Hempel on “Explanation”, Ernst Nagel on “Reduction” and Karl Popper on “Empiricism” (hence the title ERE); and then, how this conclusion was generalized to ‘Anything goes!’ on the 17th December 1967, when Feyerabend explicitly announced his break from Popper’s school in two histrionic letters sent on the same day (one to Imre Lakatos and one to John Watkins) that explain his epiphany and how he had ‘awoken’ from his “Popperian slumber”. Feyerabend outlines his new “‘position’” (in ‘scare quotes’), which is “anything goes” except what is compatible with “hedonism”, to be entitled “Against Method” (following Susan Sontag). This marks the transition from his early to his later philosophy in a /reversal on realism/: from recommending correcting common knowledge with science to recommending protecting common knowledge from scientism in a ‘historical turn’.
The lecture begins when Ludwig Wittgenstein attended a meeting of the ‘Third Vienna Circle’ (the Viktor ‘Kraft Circle’) to discuss a problem with Popper’s account of ‘basic statements’ at Feyerabend’s invitation (Popper considered Wittgenstein to be his archrival.) Feyerabend attempted to combine Wittgenstein’s insight that one sentence can make two incompatible statements (like a duck-rabbit, for example, ‘the ball fell’ meant it was pushed by its impetus before it meant it was pulled by gravity) with Popper’s ‘critical rationalist’ maxim to increase testability. About a decade later, Feyerabend finally explicitly tried to criticize the worst in both (Wittgenstein and Popper) while developing the best in each. He tried to explain how Wittgenstein’s genuinely philosophical problems arise from ‘grammar’ (as antiquated scientific principles) and explained their role in science, while criticizing Wittgenstein’s ‘quietism’. Feyerabend also argued, within Popper’s critical rationalist framework, against Popper’s account of ‘basic statements’ and concluded that falsificationism has only a limited validity (/ERE/ 1962). It is limited to modeling testing commensurable theories within a shared framework (normal science), because it cannot take scientific revolutions into account. Falsificationism fails in scientific revolutions because meaning variance in the (non-logical) terms used to state the competing theories renders them incommensurable (deductible disjoint), so that while there can be crucial experiments between incommensurable theories, general theories cannot be /falsified/ in Popper’s sense. Instead, Feyerabend proposes a new model for the empirical justification of replacing an established theory with an incommensurable alternative based on David Bohm’s example (Einstein’s prediction of Brownian motion). Feyerabend’s test model is conjectures and /novel/ (theory-loaded) corroborations in contrast to Popper’s conjectures and refutations by falsification. The lecture then briefly explains two significant events that took place after /ERE/ (1962), which led Feyerabend to generalize from the limited validity of falsificationism to the limited validity of all methodological rules (“/Against Method/” and ‘anything goes’), before the lecture concludes by characterizing Feyerabend’s reversal on realism from recommending correcting common knowledge to recommending protecting common knowledge from scientism, as a lesson learned from Wittgensteinian belatedly finally sunk in - science contains not only formulae and rules for their application but entire traditions.
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