Essay Review: Rhetorical Vices: Outlines of a Feyerabendian History of Science,Farewell to Reason

Feyerabend Paul , Against method (London, 1975; hereafter Method), 209–10.

Feyerabend Paul , Farewell to reason (hereafter Farewell), 299. Page references in the main text refer to Farewell.

Excluding the collection of essays published in two volumes in 1981 by Cambridge University Press as Philosophical papers.

Cf. Method (ref. 1), 209–10; Farewell, 299.

Feyerabend Paul , Science in a free society (London, 1978; hereafter Science), 102. See also Farewell, 62ff. In Science, Feyerabend writes that maturity “must be learned … by active participation in decisions that are still to be made. Maturity is more important than special knowledge” (p. 87). He claims on several occasions that his notion of the “mature citizen” is heavily dependent upon Mill's On liberty. This participatory model is identical to that put forward for doing history of science. See in particular Farewell, 311 and Science, 171.

In Farewell Feyerabend mentions Andrew Pickering's work on quarks and refers to Michel Foucault without citing any of his writings (pp. 2, 82, 300).

Reprinted in his Philosophical papers (2 vols, Cambridge, 1981), ii, 99–130; see also Science (ref. 5), 129. Feyerabend offers a further account of his war experiences in the revised edition of Method (London, 1988), 272–3 n. 1. Hollitscher almost got Feyerabend the job of production assistant to Brecht, but Feyerabend declined the offer, “one of the biggest mistakes of my life” (ibid., 280).

Philosophical papers (ref. 7), ii, 122–3, 127; Wittgenstein L. , Philosophical investigations (Oxford, 1953), i, secs 199, 454; Method (rev. edition, ref. 7), 229. Feyerabend was to have studied under Wittgenstein at Cambridge, but Wittgenstein died before he could begin. For Wittgenstein's attitude to history, cf. his comment “What is history to me? Mine is the first and only world”, in Notebooks 1914–16, von Wright G. H. and Anscombe G. E. M. (Oxford, 1961), 82, quoted in Janik A. and Toulmin S. , Wittgenstein's Vienna (London, 1973), 243. Toulmin points out (ibid., 244) that Wittgenstein's ‘ahistoricism’ should be contrasted with Mauthner's “feeling for historical and cultural diversity”. Cf. ibid., 121ff., for Mauthner's debt to Mach, although the account of Mach's philosophy and history of science (ibid., 132) suffers from precisely those positivist prejudices which Feyerabend criticizes in Farewell. For Wittgenstein as a conservative, see the essays by Nyiri J. C. and von Wright G. H. in Wittgenstein and his times, ed. by McGuinness Brian (Oxford, 1982). David Bloor applies Wittgenstein insights about rule-following to the sociology of knowledge in his Wittgenstein: A social theory of knowledge (London, 1983).

Science (ref. 5), 117–18, 144; Farewell, 317. The references to criminal skill are taken from Feyerabend's masterful “Consolations for the specialist”, reprinted in Philosophical papers (ref. 7), ii, 131–61, pp. 133, 134 n.7 and 139.

See Philosophical papers (ref. 7), ii, 34–51, pp. 36–37. Cf. Philosophical investigations (ref. 8), i, sec.198, quoted in Philosophical papers (ref. 7), ii, 116: “interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning….” For the sceptical techniques at play here, see in particular Richard Popkin's excellent The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, Calif., 1979).

Philosophical papers (ref. 7), ii, 37–38 and 39–40 n.5. Just as the Wittgenstinian critique of philosophy can be used to lay bare the ‘hidden’ presuppositions of different forms of life, so in analysing the history of science, “a study of religion will … school our eyes and make them prepared for the darkness we are about to encounter” (ibid., 40 n.5).

Ibid., 43, 44 n.9. The Goethe reference is translated by Feyerabend from Goethe's Farbenlehre, ed. by Ipsen (Leipzig, 1927), 393. The account of ‘discovery’ offered here by Feyerabend is discussed later in this essay. An examination of two of Newton's notebooks (CUL Add. mss. 3996 and 3975), and the optical work therein which dates from c.1664–67, indicates the gulf between Newton's research and his account of that research in the 1672 paper. Much of this work is transcribed and published in Tamny M. and McGuire J. E. , ‘Certain philosophical questions’: Newton's Trinity notebook (Cambridge, 1983). Cf. also Shapiro A. (ed.), Newton's optical lectures 1670–1672 (Cambridge, 1984). The phrase ‘literary technology’ is used by Shapin Steven in “Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle's literary technology”, Social studies of science, xiv (1984), 481–520.

Philosophical papers (ref. 7), 50–51; my italics.

Method (ref. 1), 296, 66–67.

Ibid ., 11. Note the reference to Rudwick's remarks on history of science as narratology in his The great Devonian controversy: The shaping of scientific knowledge among gentlemanly specialists (Chicago, 1985), quoted in Farewell, 115 n.20. Compare with the perceptive treatment of this issue in Jonathan Rée, Philosophical tales: An essay on philosophy as literature (London, 1987).

Method (rev. edition, ref. 7), 58–59, 124 and 203. For an extended analysis of this kind of work, which he likens to the skill of putting ships in bottles, see Collins H.M. , Changing order: Replication and induction in scientific practice (London, 1985).

Method (rev. edition, ref. 7), 59.

ibid., 229, 62, 59, 61.

Method (ref. 1), 89, ibid. (rev. edition, ref. 7), 61–62, 73–75, 125. Feyerabend's remarks here should be contrasted with those on ‘incommensurability’ (e.g. ibid., 170–226). For a similar but extended treatment of Galileo's rhetorical prowess, see Finochiarro M. , Galileo and the art of reasoning: Rhetorical foundations of logic and scientific method (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, lxi; Dordrecht, 1980).

For the perceptual correlate of this disappearance, see Method (rev. edition, ref. 7), 174–5. Compare with Method (ref. 1), 91–92 n.19.

Method (ref. 1), 17, 175. There are now many examples of this genre; cf. in particular the essays and citations in Barnes B. and Edge D. (eds), Science in context (Milton Keynes, 1982); Shapin S. , “History of science and its sociological reconstructions”, History of science, xxii (1982), 157–211; idem and Schaffer S. , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985) and Latour B. and Woolgar S. , Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts (Beverly Hills, 1979).

Method (ref. 1), 250, 258, 260, 269.

Farewell, 75, 88–89.

Natural philosophers and astronomers routinely drew upon scripture, and the problems with maintaining social order and solutions to those problems were intimately intertwined with questions about the nature of priestcraft. Negotiations over what was to count as natural knowledge and the conduct of the business of natural philosophy could even provide solutions to problems of social order, or so some apologists claimed. Natural philosophers or mathematicians also claimed the authority to interpret certain passages in the Bible, or to be the solely legitimate guardians of information considered unsafe to be entrusted to undesirables. These stories usually required accounts of the ‘vulgar’ and their bodies; for a good treatment of the permanent appearance of the vulgar in élite discourses, see Stallybrass P. and White A. , The politics and poetics of transgression (London, 1986).

For relevant texts, see Richard Ashcraft's excellent Revolutionary politics & Locke's Two treatises of government (Princeton, 1986), esp. chs 1–3; Shapin and Schaffer, op. cit. (ref. 21); Wood P. B. , “Methodology and apologetics: Sprat's History of the Royal Society”, The British journal for the history of science, xiii (1980), 1–26; Fisch Harold , “The scientist as priest: A note on Robert Boyle's natural theology”, Isis, xliv (1953), 252–65; Newton to Oldenburg, 26 April 1676, in The correspondence of Isaac Newton , ed. by Hall A. R. Turnbull H. W. and Tilling L. (7 vols, Cambridge, 1959–77), ii, 1–2 and to Burnet Thomas , Dec./Feb. 1680/1, in ibid., 319–35; Cohen I. B. , “Isaac Newton's Principia, the Scriptures, and Divine providence”, in Morgenbesser S. Suppes P. and White M. (eds), Philosophy, science, and method: Essays in honour of Ernest Nagel (New York, 1969), 523–48. See also Farewell, 249.

ibid., 130–1.

Ibid ., 137–8, 135–6, citation translated by Feyerabend from Mach E. , Erkenntnis und irrtum (Leipzig, 1917), 327. Amongst recent critiques of discovery and creativity in the fields of art and science, see in particular Brannigan A. , The social basis of scientific discoveries (Cambridge, 1981); Wolff J. , The social production of art (London, 1987); and Schaffer S. , “Discovery stories and the ends of natural philosophy”, Social studies of science, xv (1986), 387–420. These can be fruitfully contrasted with the ethnomethodological approach adopted by Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingston in their treatment of the ‘discovery’ of the pulsar in “The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar”, Philosophy of the social sciences, xi (1981), 131–58. Garfinkel has also edited a significant series of related texts in his Ethnomethodological studies of work (London, 1986). Feyerabend argues that methodological stipulations are expressions of “party line” — i.e. “propaganda”. Newton's “idealizations” do not refer to an event but are simply reconstructions embodying moral and procedural instructions for replication. In the case of Mach and Einstein, Einstein looks to Feyerabend to be dabbling in epistemology since we have it from Einstein's own pen that “[the scientist] must appear to the systematic epistemologist as an unscrupulous opportunist” (Farewell, 189 and passim). Feyerabend argues that Einstein's apparent actual “research procedure” (in so far as the historian can reconstruct it from Einstein's scientific papers) corresponds far more closely to Mach's recommendations than either previous historians or Einstein himself would have us believe. For evidence of a closer relation between Einstein and Mach than is assumed by Feyerabend, see Hentschel K. , “On Feyerabend's version of ‘Mach's theory of research and its relation to Einstein”’, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xvi (1985), 387–94.

Cf. Farewell, 157: “In fact, we can say that the battle between alternative quantitative points of view, being redefined whenever new ideas and instruments of combat (experimental procedures, mathematical techniques) enter the scene, never really comes to an end, and that support for one side of the battle can never be shown to be ‘objectively misguided’”.

For a revealing account of Eddington's eclipse expedition of 1919, see Earman J. and Glymour C. , “Relativity and eclipses: The British eclipse expeditions of 1919 and their predecessors”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, xi (1980), 49–85. Whatever the interests of the authors of this article, they show that Eddington manipulated the Principe and Sobral data at almost every stage of the interpretation process so as to attain the result that he desired long before he actually made the measurements.

Cf. Mach , Erkenntnis und irrtum (ref. 26), 318ff., 107.

Mach E. , The science of mechanics (New York, 1974), 587, although I have again used Feyerabend's translation. Mach's pronouncements on science are deeply indebted to the work of Kant and Darwin; in this instance, these remarks could have come straight from Kant. See, for example, the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that can qualify as a science, ed. by Gray-Lucas P. (Manchester, 1978), 38, 128, 145.

Mach , Science of mechanics (ref. 30), 93–94, and Erkenntnis und irrtum (ref. 26), 237, trans. by Feyerabend.

Translations from Mach , Science of mechanics (ref. 30), 577ff., 589.

Here Feyerabend follows the position taken up in “Classical empiricism” and Method.

See Method (ref. 1), 296, and ibid. (rev. edition, ref. 7), 137.

Science (ref. 5), 139–40; cf. also Farewell, 28.

Walking on the Moon becomes the modern instantiation of angels dancing on a pin: “It needed billions of dollars, thousands of well trained assistants, years of hard work to enable some inarticulate and rather limited contemporaries to perform a few graceless hops in a place nobody in his right mind would think of visiting — a dried out, airless, hot stone” (Science (ref. 5), 31; see also ibid., 139 and 122).

The citation from Nietzsche is from Menschliches, Allzumenschliches of 1878, translated by Stern J. P. in his A study of Nietzsche (Cambridge, 1979), 57. See also Science (ref. 5), 84–85.

Ehrenburg I. , People and life, memoirs of 1891–1917 (London, 1961), 8; Farewell, 76, 108.

Cf. “Classical empiricism”, in Philosophical papers (ref. 7), 41–45, nn. 6–9.

Der Wille zur Macht (translated by W. Kauffmann as The will to power (New York, 1968)), sec.617, quoted in Stern, op. cit. (ref. 37), 118. Note in particular Feyerabend's deployment of the Goethe quotation in “Classical Empiricism”, 47, n.17, from Ipsen (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 12), 614. Compare with Feyerabend's only reference to the ‘hermeneutic school’ in his English works: [this school] tries to show that even the most ‘objective’ written presentation is comprehended only by virtue of a process of instruction that conditions the reader to interpret standard phrases in standard ways and would collapse without a community of thinkers arguing in this manner: There is no escape from history and personal contact, though there exist powerful mechanisms creating the illusion of such an escape (Farewell, 111; my italics). For a fine example of a hermeneutic application of anthropology and sociology of science which draws upon the work of Collins, Pinch, Pickering and Latour, see Rouse Joseph , Knowledge and power; Toward a political philosophy of science (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987).

Examples of this kind of study are Secord's Jim Controversy in Victorian geology: The Cambrian–Silurian dispute (Princeton, 1986) and Desmond's Adrian The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London (Chicago, 1989).

See the exchange with Machan Tibor in Philosophy of the social sciences, xii (1982), partially reproduced in Farewell, 301–3 where Machan's name is misspelled as “Macham”. This is by no means the only printing error; cf. in particular pp.164 and 208, and a series of irritating spelling mistakes in the chapter entitled “Trivializing knowledge”. Of course, many of these could well be the supremo's ‘jokes’.

Cf. Science (ref. 5), 181 n.49.

For a related project, see Giedymin J. , Poincaré and conventionalism: Essays on Henri Poincaré's philosophy of science and the conventionalist tradition (Oxford, 1982).