Feyerabend and World-Views

Abstract

I believe that the picture of tightrope-walking rationality, based upon values, is a profoundly interesting picture of rationality which, moreover, deserves to be further developed so as to fully explicate its potential. But there are some criticisms of Feyerabend’s views which, if valid, would undermine the plausibility of tightrope-walking rationality: both of the criticisms of Feyerabend’s views offered by Achinstein (2000) and Preston (2000) question the desirability, plausibility and credible extent of the key Feyerabendian notion of proliferation. Since my construction of tightrope-walking rationality is crucially dependent upon proliferation, both methodological and theoretical, this questioning of proliferation by Achinstein and Preston also calls into doubt the notion of tightrope-walking rationality.