Abstract
Feyerabend maintains that in our world a falsificationist methodology meets insurmountable obstacles. Every hypothesis in science encounters empirical deviations big enough to falsify it. Therefore a falsificationist methodology would destroy science without giving us any substitute.1
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Notes
Paul K. Feyerabend, Der wissenschaftstheoretische Realismus und die Autorität der Wissenchaften (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1978), 227.
Ibid., 310.
Paul K. Feyerabend, “More clothes from the emperor’s bargain basement: A review of Laudan’s Progress and its Problems”, reprinted as chapter 11 in: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Problems of Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 246.
Nicholas Copernicus, Commentariolus, in Three Copernican Treatises, ed. Edward Rosen, 3d ed., rev. (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 57.
Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975), Appendix, 109–11.
Ibid., 102.
Ibid., 142.
E. J. Dijksterhuis, Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes (Berlin: Springer, 1956), 425–26.
Feyerabend, Against Method, 155.
Hans Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft, 3d ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973), §5.
Feyerabend, Against Method, 155.
Dijksterhuis, Mechanisierung des Weltbildes, 425–26.
Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1957), 91. There Koyré also discusses other similar contradictions.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 223.
Ibid., 202–3.
Paul K. Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), 287.
Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 511.
Cf. Gunnar Andersson, Kritik und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Kuhns, Lakatos’ und Feyerabends Kritik des Kritischen Rationalismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), ch. 6.
Dijksterhuis, Mechanisierung des Weltbildes, 72.
Feyerabend, Against Method, 98.
Ibid., 93.
Ibid., 179.
Dijksterhuis, Mechanisierung des Weltbildes, 71
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 120.
Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), ch. 3–4.
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 115–17.
Cf. Dijksterhuis, Mechanisierung des Weltbildes, 198–208 and 243–47.
Ibid., 334–35.
Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), §19.
Ibid., §20.
Cf. Andersson, Kritik und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 134–44.
Copi, Introduction to Logic, 452–53.
Andersson, Kritik und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 140.
Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2d ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 241.
Ibid., 143–44.
Feyerabend, Against Method, 112.
Andersson, Kritik und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 190–91.
Cf. Paul K. Feyerabend, “Consolations for the specialist”, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 229, on epistemological anarchism as an attractive courtesan. The philosophical basis of this mistress is a pragmatic theory of truth according to which that is true which satisfies in the widest sense of the word. Cf. “a plea for hedonism”, ibid., 209–10. As Sancta Claus this courtesan is the product of wishful thinking. Cf. Bertrand Russell, History Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 2d ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961,), 772: “I have always found that the hypothesis of Sancta Claus ‘works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word’”.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Andersson, G. (1991). Feyerabend on Falsifications, Galileo, and Lady Reason. In: Munévar, G. (eds) Beyond Reason. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 132. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3188-9_12
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