Feyerabend and philosophy

A long back-and-forth I was having at 2Blowhards the other day prompted Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata to nominate one of my postings as "the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002". His problem was that I suggested that Michael Blowhard read more Feyerabend, and he considers Feyerabend (or me, it's not entirely clear) to be an "anti-philosopher of anti-science".

At the same time, I was having a hard time with the Blowhards. Friedrich seemed to be lumping Feyerabend in with Nietzsche, while Michael went one better and started comparing him to Foucault, of all people. Then, a few days later, 2Blowhards printed a guest posting by the more philosophically adept Chris Bertram, who mentioned Feyerabend in the same breath as David Hume.

Now it's unclear whether Mr Bertram considers Feyerabend to be a philosopher in the same tradition as Hume, or whether he believes the opposite. But certainly there seems to be a general perception that Feyerabend is a crazy continental type who doesn't belong in the tradition of analytic philosophy. And I just wanted to use my baby pulpit, here, to assert that he is, indeed, a very rigorous analytical philosopher, who very much works in the tradition of Hume.

The reason I say this is not necessarily because I agree with everything he says, and it's certainly not because Feyerabend was a very good physicist before he became a philosopher. (Many physicists display distressingly woolly thinking when it comes to disciplines outside physics.) Rather, I consider Feyerabend to be at the forefront of the single most important project in philosophy: to defeat skepticism.

What I'm talking about here is philosophy in the tradition not only of Hume, but also of Descartes or Wittgenstein. Each of these people carried the skeptical position further than it had been taken before, in attempt to find out exactly what we can be sure we know about the world. Hume addressed inference: how can we know the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, because it always has in the past, and the future will be like the past. But how can we know the future will be like the past? Well, because it always has been in the past. The question just circles back onto itself, and never gets answered. So far, no one has managed to really solve this paradox which lies at the heart of all science, and indeed of all our everyday behaviour.

Descartes addressed not our expectations of what will happen in the future, but our experience of what is happening in the present: what if all our senses were being tricked by some evil demon? What if this is all some kind of dream? Can we really trust the evidence of our senses?

And Wittgenstein addressed not what we perceive, but how we think: since we think in language, and no one can be entirely sure exactly what we mean by anything, can we even rely on our own thought processes as Descartes proposed?

OK, these are Philosophy 101 oversimplifications of great philosophers. Wittgenstein, especially, is a lot more complex and nuanced than I'm giving him credit for here. (If you want, you can dump the "real" Wittgenstein for Saul Kripke's "Kripkenstein": he fits my thesis a bit better.) But you get the general idea: the way that philosophy is advanced is by philosophers setting out a skeptical stall, and then trying to find solutions to how we can still arrive at life and knowledge despite the nihilistic attraction of the skeptical position.

And Feyerabend fits very easily into this tradition. For sure, he attacks science as we know it, and sets out a position which basically says it's no better than witchcraft. But that's what philosophers do: they advance the skeptical position so that those who believe in science (which is most of us) are forced to construct with much more rigor and clarity the argument for exactly why we do.

So feel free to disagree with Feyerabend: most of us do. But don't dismiss him as an "anti-philosopher": he deserves a lot more respect than that.

Posted by Felix at 13:54 EST

Comments

Who are you? But the bizarre thing is - I halfway understood what you just wrote. God I hate philosophy.

Posted by: Michelle at 23:01 EST, December 20, 2002

Look, obviously science progresses in the sense that it creates a more accurate, usable picture of the real world over time, and art progresses in the sense of accumulated experience, like history. While we use the same word--progress--they mean completely different things. Philosophers are clever to the extent they realise this. Why do we have to bring in big names into these arguments anyway--are they mean to bolster our respective positions?

Posted by: Stefan at 6:45 EST, December 21, 2002

No, Stefan, the philosophers are meant to make us defend our positions: make us reconstitute them from first principles, as it were, rather than just think we know them without ever really addressing the issue. You can assert that science uniquely "creates a more accurate, usable picture of the real world over time", but the point of reading Feyerabend is to make you doubt that, and to articulate clearly exactly why you do believe it.

Surely you can see the Hume-style paradox here: the only way to prove your assertion true is, essentially, by saying that science says shows it to be so.

Posted by: Felix at 8:02 EST, December 22, 2002

How do you arrive at the conclusion that Feyerabend's philosophy is a project to defeat skepticism?

My own reading of Feyerabend is that he tries to defeat extremism in any direction. This means that skepticism can be useful at one time and fruitless another.

Posted by: Chris at 2:49 EST, February 17, 2003