Science Does Not Know Best

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I will be defending Paul Feyerabend in this paper. I will argue that Peter Godfrey-Smith does not represent Feyerabend charitably or accurately. Godfrey-Smith believes that Feyerabend’s deep conviction was that “science is an aspect of human creativity.” That is partially correct, but Feyerabend was much more concerned with human well-being¬ and against domination and dogmatism. He was also concerned with Western Scientific Imperialism.
I will be referencing a number of articles in this paper. How to Defend Society Against Science, Against Method, Theory and Reality, and On Liberty (to a lesser extent), will be my main background materials. Some mention of Lakatos and Kuhn will also be present. I would like to introduce a bit of each of these, before diving into Feyerabend arguments, because I think they provide an important framework for understanding Feyerabend.
Feyerabend was writing as a contemporary of Kuhn. Kuhn used a historical perspective to evaluate scientific progress, and came to the conclusion that science goes through “normal” periods and “revolutions.” “Paradigm shifts” are what happens during the culmination of a scientific revolution, and these shifts are inevitable. Kuhn is stating that there cannot be one scientific method to be held above others, due to the fact that there is incommensurability between paradigms. Many critics took this as an implication that science is not rational. Kuhn denied this, but Feyerabend went full-tilt with it.
In How to Defend Society Against Science, Feyerabend states that we should not think of science as special, and that it does not deserve the status that it currently enjoys. Science often hurts society, and we ought to be cautious when we engage in it. The most cautious we can...

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...ts to. So it is easy to twist matters and to change allegiance to truth in one's everyday affairs into allegiance to the Truth of an ideology which is nothing but the dogmatic defense of that ideology. And it is of course not true that we have to follow the truth. Human life is guided by many ideas. Truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others. If Truth, as conceived by some ideologists, conflicts with freedom, then we have a choice. We may abandon freedom. But we may also abandon Truth. (Alternatively, we may adopt a more sophisticated idea of truth that no longer contradicts freedom; that was Hegel's solution.) My criticism of modern science is that it inhibits freedom of thought. If the reason is that it has found the truth and now follows it, then I would say that there are better things than first finding, and then following such a monster.”

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