The Tyranny of Science [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Although I'm giving this book a high rating, this is not the best representation of Feyerabend's thought. The text is taken from a series of lectures he gave in 1992, in Italy, to a public audience, with a question and answer section at the end of each lecture. Although Feyerabend never, on principle, constructed and delivered arguments in the standard style and technical precision of academic philosophy, these lectures lack the sustained development and argumentation that you see in, for example, Against Method.

The positions Feyerabend takes in this book are familiar ones -- he argues that there are many legitimate ways of acquiring knowledge about the world, with "scientific method" providing only one, limited way (often with its practitioners holding gross misconceptions of their own methods). He argues against both scientific reductionism and, within science itself, slavish adherence to "method."

Feyerabend was a historian as well as a philosopher of science, and he could call upon a detailed knowledge of how science actually happens in order to develop his arguments and convince his readers. Much of that detail is missing in this book -- we get much more of what Feyerabend thinks than we get of why he thinks it. Hopefully, readers who are intrigued by what he does say here will be motivated to read his other work, especially Against Method, to find out why he thinks what he thinks.

All of that said, I think that one story that Feyerabend tells more effectively in this book than in others is the continuity between the scientific worldview and the attacks on experiential knowledge in the pre-Socratics. He deftly ties Parmenides' argument denying the reality of change, despite appearances, to the scientist's dismissal of all the messy details that get in the way of observing and describing the real phenomena behind appearances -- the abstractions necessary to give us a view of only the details that count to the scientific mind. As he says (p. 40), "We have to conclude that science did not start from experience; it started by arguing against experience and it survived by regarding experience as a chimera."

For anyone who finds this book interesting and enjoyable, I'd also recommend that they read more from Feyerabend to get a fuller picture of his thought -- Against Method, for sure, and possibly Science in a Free Society or the much later Conquest of Abundance as well.

I'm not sure what to make of this book. It contains four themes "condensed" from a set of lectures the author gave in 1992, and have now been published in 2011. They were recorded, and the author edited them at the time - but not the point of betraying his straying thoughts. They intermittently retain the oral feel, which makes for lively reading. As often happens in a lecture hall, however, where one speaks without notes, a clear structure is lacking. In an oral setting, this is OK: charisma and rhetorical brilliance (and the author is brilliant) paper over the thin structure. On paper, the text reads confused, however, with lots of leads leading nowhere.

Indeed, it seems as the author, lost in his thoughts, had tried to find his way forward by "going Greek" - spending a lot of time on what the old Greek philosophers meant on this or that. Thus half the first lecture - and even larger parts of the remaining ones - is devoted to a review of some aspects of Greek philosophy and derivative schools. On page 112 he is asked by one of the participants why he is telling the story of Greek philosophy - to which he replies: "My aim was to tell a story that would not be too boring and enlightening to some extent." I'm not sure that he has succeeded on either count, and that this cameo treatment of the history of epistemology, once set in print, does justice to the subject. There are far more thorough treatments of Greek philosophy on the shelves.

The first chapter: "Conflict and harmony" deals with the question whether the material world is structured harmoniously or not. This would be a terrific subject. Some see "intelligent design" throughout, others "chaos" or maybe "lack of purpose" (and I'd add a position in between: there may be local systems, some spiced with complexity, haphazardly connected). The author choses to tackle the subject from a hermeneutic point of view: "What I am interested in is how, under what circumstances and in what personal ways, people acquired a liking for certain patterns. Why, for example, do so many people believe in a reality that not only remains unmoved by their actions but controls every detail of their behavior?" (pg. 13). Note the term: "many people" - we should be talking here of what Richard E. Nisbett calls "folk metaphysics" or "silent culture". The interaction between ecology, geography, and social systems would be indeed an interesting take on how certain scientific worldviews of ancient people emerged. Alas, having posited the question, the author ends up discussing a few Greek philosophers - mainly Thales, Xenopahnes, and a bit of Plato - elite all, with reflections on the Greek theatre thrown in at the end.

Jumping now to the third chapter: "The abundance of nature" tackles a very important issue. Knowhow is embedded in people. If we want to make it "portable" we need to transform it into "knowledge" - discover "underlying principles" that can be applied independently of the "knowhow bearer". The price of such an extractive process of abstraction is loss of information - particularly of the material context in which the knowhow was gathered- and of the skill in dealing with the latter. In engineering or astronomy this may not matter too much. In the social sciences this process might be deadly (as a rule of thumb, if a social system has a history, abstraction is not the way to go. My pet "hate" is the economists who took history out of economics and pretended - on the basis of a short time series - that they could successfully condense a living economy into a "rational expectations" model.) How much abstraction one would allow is a matter for topical accommodation, not principle discussion. Again, after having posited the subject in the first few pages, the author spends the rest of the time on Pythagoras, and the discovery of irrational numbers.

Chapter four bears the title: Dehumanizing Humans. It begins with the assertion that a "chasm [has grown] between nature and feelings". He continues on pg. 95: "Because experience and experiment have been successful. Successful at what? Successful at bringing peace, or at making people more loving? Not a chance!" I'm puzzled by this outburst. If the author argues that science has wrong priorities, I'll second the motion. If he thinks we should change method so as to create biological research that gets "scientific" results but also (collaterally?) makes "people more loving" as well, I must ask how he intends to achieve this. "Will to result" has even less of a track record than "will to power". To my knowledge ethically-driven and greed-driven research do not differ in method - just in results (and the benefits accruing to the power structure). After this outburst the author gets lost in Plato's Euthydemus. His thoughts surface briefly to advise us that practice better not be separated from theory - I'd fully agree on pragmatic grounds: too many avoidable errors derive from lack of skills in handling "context" (but this applies just as much to philosophy as it does to engineering, or science: we elide the material context at our peril). The end of the lecture is on the small problems Galileo had with the Inquisition.

A word on the title: I've found nothing in the book to justify such an insult to "science" - whatever "science" maybe. It may be the publisher trying to trade on the author's reputation after his death. As I said in the beginning: I'm not sure what to make of these lectures, which have been published 20 years after being given.

Paul Feyerabend's last book is based on transcripts of a series of lectures he gave in 1992.

The book is divided up into four sections: 'Conflict and Harmony', 'The Disunity of Science', 'The Abundance of Nature' and 'Dehumanizing Humans'. At the end of each lecture, there is a question and answer session.

What Feyeraband attempts to do over the course of the lectures is unpack the largely unspoken assumptions that go with our conventional view of science. By science here is meant all science - not just sub-atomic physics, but the 'scientific enterprise' as a whole.

The book starts with 'the Divine Plato'. The 'realm of ideas' as an absolute reality is where it all started to go wrong. The world is split in two - one, this ideal realm, the other our imperfect material reality:

'...human affairs and divine affairs, or human lives and the rest of the world, now have very little to do with each other...Later philosophers, Parmenides especially, went much further. They explicitly asserted that compared with Being...human existence is a chimera.' (P18-19)

And science is concerned with this 'higher' world, not the mere epiphenomena that we commonly experience:

'The world at large as seen by scientists is separated from the insignificant events on this planet and even humans, as seen by scientists (molecular biologists in particular) are separated from what they experience themselves as being.' (P19)

So science manages to not only transcend base existence but also the scientists who construct it. It creates laws that are timeless and spaceless:

'Now the laws to be obeyed both by gods and by humans form a perfect abstract order. Again human life and reality are separated by an abyss: stupidity and disorder here, a perfect but inhuman order there.' (P25)

Moving on, we might accept these contradictions because of the 'success' of science:

'Why should a depressing [scientific] reality like this 'command recognition'? Because of 'it's prodigious power of performance'; performance now being defined in terms of scientific results. Science is successful; all we can do is shut up and pay attention to its ideology.' (P35)

Scientists have access to a 'deeper reality' and we should accept this because of the results that this access provides:

'So we have here a philosophy that is entirely up in the air and yet survives and millennia later shows a 'prodigious power of performance'. Are there ideas which have similar features?

There are. Christianity is an example.' (P94)

It seems, then, that science and religion have more than a little in common. Not simply a 'search for truth' or the attempt at identifying 'timeless values' but even possibly ontologically:

'Not uncontrollable changes of the body but clear directives of the mind constitute knowledge and decide about truth and falsehood. Or, to use modern terms,: knowledge comes from theories, not from experience.' (P106)

This is an extremely short summary of some of the ideas that Feyerabend presents here. They are interesting, they are certainly thought-provoking, but, in some ways, they are almost banal. I think most people are aware, even in some sort of superficial relativist sense, that 'science' is not everything.

I have really mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, if you google the title of this book, you will almost certainly find an 'intelligent design' site referring to it in mildly critical terms. On the other, it is difficult to not agree with John Gray when he says:

'Science is like religion, an effort at transcendence that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding. All our enquiries come to rest in groundless facts. Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is a revelation of the absurd.' (The Immortalization Commission (P227)

But it seems to me that science has one thing that no other 'system' has - an overt (ad)mission that, if the observed facts no longer fit the theory, then the theory will unceremoniously be dumped. Science is always provisional. Of course, science is created by human beings, of course it cannot be 'objective' - humans are in and of the universe and cannot abstract themselves from it. But, at its best, it will not be dogmatic.

In his desire to be iconoclastic, Feyerabend perhaps sets himself targets that are not as 'scientific' as he would have us believe. But, there again, I'm neither philosopher nor scientist.