
Against Method - MichaelAO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
======
tmalsburg2
I love Paul Feyerabend. I believe that the titel "Against Method" was mainly
supposed to be provocative. His main point really is to remind us that
Popper's view of science is an idealization and that the process of scientific
discovery is much more messy in reality. In other words, he is mainly stating
facts about the history of science. Very interesting read with great examples.
I also highly recommend his book (actually a set of lecture notes) "Science as
an Art" in which he dicusses the similarities and the shared history of
science and art.

~~~
nickbauman
It has always surprised me that the scientific method begins only _after_ a
hypothesis is chosen. Forming a hypothesis is often based on inference, even
instinct, that has little science behind it. The work of Barbara McClintock
comes to mind.

~~~
pacaro
Also worth reading Peter Lipton's "Inference To The Best Explanation" [1] then
:)

Peter Lipton was my advisor for an undergraduate thesis in HPS at Cambridge,
sadly he died quite young

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Inference-Explanation-International-
Li...](http://www.amazon.com/Inference-Explanation-International-Library-
Philosophy-ebook/dp/B000OI15SY)

~~~
osullivj
I did Philosophy of Science as a 2nd and 3rd year option in the late 80s at
Cambridge. I remember Redwood, but not Lipton. When did you do your thesis?

~~~
pacaro
I graduated in '93 - I loved the course, but definitely butted heads (to the
detriment of grades) with the Marxist tendency of the faculty

I have found the History and Philosophy of Science, to be s great preparation
for a career as a developer, unfortunately the US CIS trends to disagree
making visa/green-card stuff harder than it should have been

------
joe_the_user
I remember taking a class from Feyerabend years ago. Similar to what Wikipedia
describes, his basic argument, his only argument really, was starting with a
certain form of rationalism and showing that it didn't work or couldn't exist.

I felt like his entire deal was supremely boring. Take anything interesting,
whether a scientific theory, a poem, a piece of music or a religious text. The
interestingness of any of these things comes from there being layers of
meaning and a structure one has to spend time learning.

If someone's only activity is putting together a straw version of science and
knocking it down, again and again and again, there's nothing interesting (even
if the rationalism isn't entirely "straw" in the sense that some philosophers
of science have pretty rigid schemas, the process of merely saying "no that
wrong" remains dull).

People compared Thomas Kuhn's work to Feyerabend and I think that's a
disservice to Kuhn. Kuhn's work, correct or incorrect, involved a broad effort
to draw a picture of what actually scientists actually does. Feyerabend's work
seemed to me to be little more than a sort of act of petty vengeance, endless
effort to tell STEM people "ha, you're not so smart after all".

~~~
foldr
As you say, the straw version of science doesn't come from Feyerabend, it
comes from the scientists and philosophers of science who he's criticizing.
It's true that the observation that there is no such thing as the scientific
method is boring in and of itself (probably about as interesting as the
observation that there's no single method for writing a novel or composing a
symphony). However, I think there's a bit more to Feyerabend's critique than
that. It's ultimately a challenge to the prestige and power currently enjoyed
by the scientific establishment. Feyerabend is attempting to show not merely
that this or that conception of the scientific method is flawed, but to
establish the much more discomfiting conclusion that scientific progress has
frequently been driven by _non-rational_ considerations, so that there is no
hope of showing that science is in any sense intellectually superior to
competing purported sources of reliable knowledge. This claim might be true or
false but it's certainly not boring. If you ask a typical scientist why
science ought to get lots of prestige, money and power, the answer will
typically depend on the claim that science is in some sense intellectually
superior.

~~~
joe_the_user
_It 's ultimately a challenge to the prestige and power currently enjoyed by
the scientific establishment._

Indeed, it seems to mainly be that. The funny thing was that back in Berkeley
circa 1982, philosophy professors had about the level of prestige as chemistry
professors, possibly a significant amount more. Chemistry indeed had a bigger
building but philosophers seemed to get more invites to the cool parties.

Which is to say that Feyerabend's critique of science was something that
resonates with the people wanting to critique this society's values, wanting
to critique a society which values what science can accomplish more than say,
the activity of carefully contemplating and observing life. But the problem is
this approach is really poor and confused place to begin such a critique. We
should be directly saying that things that don't advance technology should be
valued rather than engaging in "attacking the prestige of science". But of
course this kind of irrationalism-as-radicalism has only continued in today
world of "call-out culture" and such.

One might call Feyerabend a very early troll of science but with all the
weaknesses of trolling-pretending-to-be-politics.

~~~
foldr
I don't follow you. Perhaps his critique was driven by petty jealousy -- who
knows? But if he's right about what has actually driven scientific progress
then his point stands.

------
raldu
A detailed discussion of the book at SEP can be found here:

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#2.13](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#2.13)

------
api
In modern terms I think you could make this critique from a perspective of
learning theory and combinatorics. Methodological monism implies that the
fitness landscape being explored by science is "well behaved" and can be
traversed using a simple stepwise or gradient descent function. We have no
reason to believe this, and many reasons to believe that "unjustified leaps"
and other heresies may be required to escape local maxima or traverse
unconnected regions of state space.

There is probably no deterministic "for(;;) { do X }" formula for learning in
complex real-world domains. You could make an anthropic argument here: if
there were, life and intelligence would not exist since whatever
thermodynamically-favored auto-catalytic processes life does could be replaced
by non-living systems of lower entropy and higher probability. The existence
of life as the chaotic, ever-changing, evolving system that it is is itself
evidence for the non-closed-form nature of evolutionary learning.

I've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that
some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result
of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and
thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or
Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-
positivist Skeptics.

It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe
2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and
secular... maybe due to an emotional desire for the comfort of absolute
certainty in the face of rapid dislocating change.

There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning
can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an assembly
line process that can be run by bureaucracies, scaled as needed, and in which
individual workers can be treated as a 'human resource' commodity.
Bureaucracies cannot deal with multi-modality, unpredictable and eccentric
'genius,' etc., so to admit that these things are required for the progress of
science is to admit that bureaucracies are inherently limited.

Of course this being startup central, we all know this. If learning could be
systematized and bureaucratized, there would be no startups. Big companies, VC
funds, and banks would just execute whatever deterministic steps are required
to yield progress and maintain 100% ownership of everything.

~~~
darkmighty
First of all, I think you're claiming a little too much about science from.

> the fitness landscape being explored by science is "well behaved" and can be
> traversed using a simple stepwise or gradient descent function

This is false! Non-obvious I know, but it was experimentally shown and holds
for a wide class of high dimensional landscapes. It was well explained here
(he talks about several novel ideas/insights actually, worth watching):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCWcx-
YIRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCWcx-YIRI)

> There is probably no deterministic "for(;;) { do X }" formula for learning
> in complex real-world domains

This is true in a rather straightforward manner when limited to mathematics,
from the halting problem (and some mild computational assumptions about the
universe): if no finite algorithm can solve arbitrary instances of the halting
problem, clearly no finite algorithm can solve arbitrary problems (that
includes algorithms that try to "self-improve", of course).

I think this bit of scientific realism is indeed very important to those in
the field.

> There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning
> can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an
> assembly line process...

I tend to think of the opposite; the more we're able to replace humans with
machines the more power we get to the whatever we want. We just have to make
sure this surplus power is made widely available.

~~~
api
That talk looks fascinating... bookmarked it for a later read. Quite a few
people in all kinds of areas would benefit from a study of machine learning
theory -- I think some of these findings are philosophically profound.

~~~
darkmighty
The idea that simple descent (in this case a modified Newtons Method) works is
very simple... the curvature of fitness the across at each point across
dimensions are mostly uncorrelated; a local minimum occurs when the curvature
across all dimensions are positive, which is exponentially unlikely in the
dimension. I hadn't heard of such a simple and useful insight in a while...
this is exactly what theory is for! Anyway, that talk is very interesting.

------
sthatipamala
This PBS Idea Channel video discusses some of Feyerabend's ideas in the
context of pop culture (specifically "Is Rick from Rick & Morty The Ideal
Scientist?")
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZLN1PN3L4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZLN1PN3L4I)

It's a little hand-wavy for HN and the conclusions can be contrived, but Idea
Channel overall is an interesting entry point to a lot of serious topics.

~~~
derrickdirge
That's interesting, because reading about Feyerabend immediately reminded me
of Rick.

"Sometimes science is more art than science, Morty. A lot of people don't get
that."

------
kriro
"For and Against Method" which outlines the discourse between Feyerabend and
Lakatos is an excellent book that collects their debates and private
correspondence in a well editorialized way. Highly recommended for anyone with
the slightest glimmer of interest in science theory. It remains one of my
favorite random pickups. It's a very interesting friendship between academics
with rather different views.

On a related note, Lakatos is fairly underrated. Everyone knows Popper but
Lakatos extended his ideas beautifully.

------
bra-ket
the actual text:
[http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf](http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf)

~~~
capnrefsmmat
This isn't the full text. _Against Method_ is a full book; it's rather
interesting if you're interested in the philosophy of science.

------
rndn
Some see it differently:
[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/optimalscientist.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/optimalscientist.html)

But it would still be anarchic (without the laws of human psychology and
social interactions at least). However, it would be an algorithm, and thus, in
its broadest sense, a method.

~~~
joe_the_user
From your link: _" Check out the formal theory of creativity (1990-2010) which
explains science, art, music, humor, and describes the simple algorithmic
principles of artificial scientists & artists."_

I think most scientist would agree that science involves _method_ , indeed
most science involve multiple, nested methods.

But I think most scientists would be very skeptical of any claim to have fully
codified a _single_ scientific method, much less a theory of all creative
endeavors.

So your link seems like bending the stick way too far the other way.

~~~
rndn
That's right, I should've written "diametrically different".

------
eternalban
Read this a few days ago since Paper's We Love will have a meetup on this
work. A strong element of his critique is the consideration of the
psychological aspect of ideation. Since then have been bouncing in the
background the idea of validity (or nature) of this thesis in context of
(hypothetical) machine intelligence (Strong AI) and discovery.

------
paulpauper
the critics of string theory need to consider this, instead of just dismissing
the theory as un-testable

~~~
api
I agree. The thing that makes me critical of string theory isn't that it's (so
far) difficult to test, but that it's been The Thing in certain quarters for a
long time and has yet to yield much (unless something's happened I'm not aware
of).

It also seems to get more complex over time.

------
seliopou
Those interested in the philosophy of science should be aware of Karl
Popper[0], and his view that what makes a theory scientific is its
falsifiability: If a theory can be false in some way, then you must be able to
construct some sort of empirical experiment which could demonstrate its
falsehood. This is in contrast to the verificationism that was popular in the
Vienna Circle during during his time, which took the view that positive
experimental results was evidence towards the truth of a theory. So in his
view, science is a process that produce theories that converge on the truth,
but never quite get there. For him, "scientific fact" is an oxymoron.

He also famously got into a heated debate with Wittgenstein over the nature of
philosophical inquiry. So heated, that Wittgenstein almost beat Poppers ass
with a fire poker, or so the story goes[1].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmt2sCdd5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmt2sCdd5E)

~~~
nerd_stuff
It's a good approximation but it misses the mark. String Theory is not
verifiable but it's still a scientific theory. Bohmian Mechanics is, some say,
by definition not verifiably different from Quantum Mechanics but it's a
scientific theory. You might call them "speculative" scientific theories to
save the idea but at the end of the day the Popperian [sic?] view of science
is a bit too simplistic to be useful.

~~~
asgard1024
I don't understand why should String Theory be labeled as "scientific". Can
you explain? Why cannot we be happy just calling it philosophy?

To me, "scientific" means "uses scientific method", which in turn is a set of
tools that are pretty successful in understanding universe. Scientific method
is certainly not fixed set of tools - for example, computer simulation became
very useful only recently.

Maybe doing whatever string theorists are doing will become useful in the
future, and as such their method will become part of scientific method; but
since we aren't really sure if string theory itself is true, we can't consider
their methodology to be useful (or useless) and so part of scientific method.

~~~
nerd_stuff
It's a good question that I wish I could answer.

For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a
good way to learn that the Popperian view of _falsifiable==scientific_ is a
bit too simplistsic and that classifying things as scientific/not-scientific
may not even be a productive activity. It's just not that simple.

In the meantime it's generally best to listen to scientists talk about it to
get a feel for its standing:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28pzc1/string_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28pzc1/string_theory_what_is_its_status_as_of_now/?ref=search_posts)

A good quote from that thread which may answer your question: _" Anyways, my
point is that String Theory is not just some whacky idea "what if everything
was strings" that exists in a vacuum, but is rather a very natural and
conservative extension of Quantum Field Theory to a more general and less
arbitrary framework."_

And here's a blog post (series of posts) linked from that discussion which may
also help: [http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/09/23/quantum-field-
theory...](http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/09/23/quantum-field-theory-
string-theory-and-predictions/)

------
ivoras
The fact that in certain times there are popular and less popular areas of
study, or topics, has nothing to do with the scientific method.

At any time, anyone, could posit any kind of idea, like "the Moon is made of
cheese", and the whole scientific method boils down to basically everyone else
demanding "prove it."

The fact that at times people might be afraid or uninterested in testing ideas
which seem far-fetched or unpopular in their community, is another thing
entirely.

