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4. What are your views on science?
I have frequently attempted to align myself with a scientific perspective. My first book was an essay on the history of science, and I subsequently formulated an unofficial science of culture in an early manuscript that was published several years later. The essay on the history of science conflicted in the closing pages with the relativism expressed by Paul K. Feyerabend (1924-1994), a philosopher of science who had created a strong academic controversy in this respect. I argued for method against Feyerabend’s “anything goes,” and this was considered unusual for a writer outside the academic career zone.
I believe in a form of empiricism such as the Club of Rome furthered, i.e., discovering what is actually happening, as distinct from what is commonly believed. Science is often delimited by pedantic arguments from one quarter, though another camp have become reckless in disavowing all “method,” leading to the postmodernist situation of “anything goes” in which many distractions have been let loose for the unwary. I am not a rigid processualist, but far less am I a new age subjectivist. The controversy surrounding Feyerabend can illustrate some aspects of contrast in assessing science. Scientific discovery does not always occur when or where it is expected, and as in the instance of ecology, the effort to probe obscure complexities can take time to seep through into the consensus of validation.
To illustrate one aspect of my contention: the method involved in the ecological research was intense; it was the reception of findings that was so discrepant with empirical priorities and relevant validation. In his basically anti-Popper argument, Feyerabend missed the crux of the ecological method that was in process during the 1970s. So did many other academics and far too many politicians.
In deference to Professor Feyerabend, he knew that the “closed ranks” tendency of academe was no answer to human needs, but I believe that he got his “grassroots” recipe wrong. He was said to take up both sides of an argument in contrasting papers, as though each side was equally valid. That strategy ran the risk of appearing superficial, as it did to me. Yet Feyerabend is more famous for promoting an epistemological anarchy, and he became known as the “anti-science philosopher,” maintaining that the rationality of science is a myth. He caricatured science in terms of “anything goes.” It is true enough that scientific discoveries have often been resisted by establishment science, a notable fact in itself, but the relativist counter was flippant in the resort to such measures as the aesthetic Dadaist strategy. Feyerabend’s provocative book Against Method (1975) was translated into nineteen languages, a fact which dismayed some critics. Less widely known was his Philosophical Papers (2 vols, 1981).
Born in Vienna, Feyerabend was originally a student of Karl Popper, another Austrian, though he later refuted Popper’s critical rationalism (see no. 17 below), moving at an acute tangent while he taught at the University of California from 1959. Feyerabend’s sequel to his anti-method bombshell was Science in a Free Society (1978), which some assessors regarded as being even more anarchistic. That sequel aroused different forms of response, including my own comments at the end of Psychology in Science (1983). Feyerabend often extended his nuances, and so I adopted the tactic of pushing to an extreme the implications drawn by various parties about “anything goes.” My retort was considered by some approving academic analysts to be one of the most pointed expressions of riposte visible in this problem sphere. Indeed more so than the standard Popperian reflections and even the rebuttal contributed by Marvin Harris, the advocate of cultural materialism (see no. 6 below) who was no fan of Paul K.
Of course, there can always be different views, and one new age academic accused me of misinterpreting the anti-science exponent, the implication here being that Feyerabend was ushering in a glorious new age without science or barbed wire academic exclusionism, and where factors like Jung would reign supreme. Sadly, the barbed wire fence continues to be erected against non-academics even by new age academics, as some recent documents have attested (here basically meaning the Scientific and Medical Network and their allies known as the Alister Hardy Trust). All you have to do is disagree with them, and up goes the new age barbed wire.
Paul K. Feyerabend
The subtitle of Against Method was quite graphic in stating Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Professor Feyerabend told his readers that the epistemological anarchist “has no compunction to defend the most trite or the most outrageous statement,” and that his aims “remain stable, or change as a result of argument, or of boredom, or of a conversion experience, or to impress a mistress” (Against Method, p. 189). In other words, such an anarchist is a creature of mood, and would be less likely to distinguish between truth and falsity.
Such considerations emerged in my further comments on the epistemological anarchist (The Resurrection of Philosophy, 1989, pp. 45-51). “The answer is to educate them (the public), and not to confuse the public milieu even further by a tolerance towards all idiocies and social bruises and expenses” (ibid., p. 50). However, I did also comment that “much of Feyerabend’s plea (whether serious or no) for a grassroots democracy is commendable from a serious point of view” (ibid., pp. 47-8). His version of democracy was hindered by flippancies. A later work of Feyerabend bore yet another provocative title, namely Farewell to Reason (1987), in which relativism was again advocated as a means of solving social or ideological problems. Some problems will not solve other problems. The autobiography of Paul Feyerabend has the rather flippant title of Killing Time (1995). See also John Preston, “Paul Feyerabend,” in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend.
The anti-science philosopher had his moments. He could agilely slide about between contrasting points of reference and convince many of his readers that he was not really leading them “by the nose” in a deceptive exercise of superficial logic. Deception was his underlying accusation against the critical rationalism of his former mentor Karl Popper. The Feyerabend strategy is one way of “doing philosophy,” to use an academic phrase. Yet it is not the best way. An effective empirical method in words and shades of meaning is elusive in the postmodernist milieu. Feyerabend jettisoned that method, and some urge that Popper also fell short of the mark, though from a rather different angle.
The postmodernist orientation is strongly associated with an aspect of Feyerabend’s reasoning, and is currently said to have strongly infiltrated universities in America. That orientation frequently believes that there is no universal standard of truth, that worldviews are determined by the culture in which they are expressed. Another ingredient of this orientation is the view that universal standards can lead to the oppression of dissidents. There are both truths (or half-truths) and confusions here. For instance, the facts of ecological drawback are global, whether anyone likes that thought or not. The attempt to disown and ignore those facts became an almost universal standard amongst defective governments, whose version of science is so often a slave to economic considerations. America is no exception to the factor of deficient components of education, based upon national assumptions about democracy and prowess. The scientific (and philosophical) search for globally valid truths should continue regardless of nationalist horizons.
Professor Feyerabend was an obvious feature of discrepancy in the academic landscape, and there are other less profiled matters causing confusion. It is evident that there are conflicting views having the same repute as being scientific. For instance, scientists who pressed for the early ecological arguments were opposed by scientists who maintained that those arguments were alarmist, distorting the data. Some of the opposing scientists were in league with the oil companies who had vested interests in minimising the ecology probe.
In other sectors of the same basic phenomenon, we find scientists like the biologist Richard Dawkins pressing for a materialist worldview, while other scientists like the neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick urge themes like survival after death. All these people are scientists, with varied technical and professional abilities. It is obvious to onlookers that they cannot all be right. The strong differences of viewpoint would imply that some theories are inadequate, or that some findings are incomplete or misinterpreted. So, in the final analysis, what is really scientific? Do some theories become premature scientific dogmas? Do such dogmas mislead politicians and the public?
Those scientists who argued against global warming were the vehicle of an inadequate method. Too many representatives of the scientific establishment allowed the lethargy of politicians to continually endanger the planet and the population. That situation was a severe instance of “anything goes.”
One of my own recourses was to skirt the relativist “arguing for both sides” tactic by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that charted a “science of culture” on different lines to those found in conventional social science. Culture is an elastic word meaning different things to different assessors. We have to get the concept in perspective, instead of taking it for granted. Culture, for instance, should not be reduced to those technological clichés epitomised by “increased standards of living” or a “wide range of choice.” That commercial option may merely amount to the casual selection of television channels, which might all be showing crass forms of entertainment at the same time.
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