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Feyerabend
on Relativism, Historicism, and Realism
The consequential outcome of the lengthy
debate between Hanson and Feyerabend resulted less
from their discussion about current quantum theory
than from their discussion about the future of
microphysics, if not also the future of Feyerabend's
philosophy.
Feyerabend found himself in the position of
having to wait for some future physicist to produce
a future scientific revolution in future
microphysics that would obligingly comply with his
current philosophical specifications; and it may
have occurred to Feyerabend that he might have to
wait a very long time, even assuming that future
physics were ever to accommodate him at all.
In any event he was led to reconsider his
agenda for a realistic microphysics, and so instead
of philosophizing to accommodate future physics to
his universalist-realist agenda, he decided to
philosophize to accommodate realism to the current
quantum theory. Therefore he accepted Hanson's
conviction that any future microphysics will very
likely contain duality.
But Feyerabend construed this to mean that
duality must be expressed by complementarity, and in
making his accommodation he did not cut away the
Bohr interpretation and proceed with a liberalized
Copenhagen interpretation Hanson had advocated.
Instead Feyerabend drew upon Bohr's thesis of
the relational nature of quantum states, which
Feyerabend saw as contradicting universalist
realism, and then generalized on Bohr's relational
thesis to affirm a nonuniversalist, relativized
realism.
Just as either the wave or particle
manifestations of microphysical reality are
conditioned upon either one or another experimental
arrangement, so more generally scientific knowledge
is conditioned upon the historical situation and
regional circumstances of the scientist.
And even more generally he maintains that all
truth and knowledge including the particular Western
tradition known as science, must be viewed in this
historicist perspective.
It may be noted that Feyerabend had
apparently been sympathetic to relativism even
before his views on quantum theory had been
influenced by Hanson.
In 1962 he proposed his thesis of semantic
incommensurability at the same time that Kuhn had
used the idea to describe scientific revolutions.
When critics pointed out the historical
relativism implied in Kuhn's use of the
incommensurability thesis, Kuhn began to modify the
concept so as to evade the relativistic
implications.
But Feyerabend made no such concession, when
he defended use of the idea.
In "Consolations for the
Specialist" (1971) he defended the relativistic
implications of Kuhn's use of incommensurability,
saying that the choice between incommensurable
cosmologies is a matter of taste.
In 1978 in his Science in a Free Society Feyerabend references Bohr's relational
interpretation of the quantum theory, which Bohr had
devised in response to the criticism of Einstein,
Podolsky and Rosen, as an example of an
incommensurable theory relative to classical
physics.
In this context he says that the change from
one world view described by a theory to another
world view described by another theory that is
incommensurable with the first, is a change in
universal principles, such that one no longer speaks
of an objective world that remains unaffected by
one's epistemic activities, except when moving
within a particular world view.
In this 1978 work Feyerabend continues to
invoke universal principles.
Bohr's relational thesis is referenced merely
as an example of incommensurability, and seems not
yet to have become integral to Feyerabend's cultural
relativism.
Later in his "Introduction" to his Realism,
Rationalism and Scientific Method (1981)
Feyerabend states that quantum theory offers good
reason to resist the universal application of his
Thesis I and its realistic metaphysics.
Logically to reject Thesis I is to reject
common sense, and to announce that objectivity is a
metaphysical mistake.
But what physicists have actually done in
effect is to reject the universal application of
Thesis I, while still retaining in quantum theory
some fundamental properties of common sense.
In all but Bohm's hidden-variables quantum
theory, a universal, realistic interpretation of the
quantum theory has been replaced by a partial
instrumentalism.
He explains that the transition to a partial
instrumentalism contains two elements that are not
always clearly separated.
The first element is the existence of
multiple metaphysical traditions.
One tradition usually associated with
common-sense arguments in physics is the fact that
there actually are relatively isolated objects in
the world, and that physicists are capable of
describing them.
But there are also other metaphysical
traditions, such as the Buddhist exercises, that
create an experience which neither distinguishes
between subject and object nor recognizes distinct
objects.
The second element in the transition to a
partial instrumentalism is the choice by the
physicist of one or another of these metaphysical
traditions, and then the turning of the choice into
a boundary condition for research.
And this choice of metaphysical traditions,
furthermore, is one between different sets of facts,
because there are no tradition-independent facts.
Feyerabend then states that the choice of
metaphysical traditions is a choice of forms of
life.
Realism itself is thereby relativized to
prior choices proceeding from cultural and social
values.
This is because a people decide to regard
those things as real, which play an important role
in the form of life they prefer.
Thus the decision about what is real and what
is not, begins with a choice of one or another form
of life, and a people reject a universal criticism
affirming a realistic interpretation of theories not
in agreement with their chosen life form.
Conversely realism merely reflects the
preference for ideas accepted as foundational for
their civilization and even for life itself.
In this context instrumentalism is incidental
to the choice of one or another theory for realistic
interpretation.
Instrumentalism is what is not culturally
agreeable, and it no longer has the characteristics
of a failure or defect.
What has failed is not realism, but
rationalism with its universalist criterion for
realism.
Feyerabend welcomes the failure of
rationalists to explain science in terms of
tradition-independent standards and methodologies,
because it is a failure to put an end to attempts to
adapt science to chosen forms of life.
The failure of rationalism has freed science
from irrelevant restrictions.
He adds that it is furthermore in agreement
with the Aristotelian philosophy, which also limits
science by reference to common sense, except that in
Feyerabend's philosophy the conceptions of the
individual philosopher are replaced by the political
decisions emerging from the institutions of a free
society.
This is Feyerabend's thesis of democratic
relativism.
Feyerabend's most mature and elaborate
statement of his historicist and relativist
philosophy is set forth in his Farewell
to Reason (1987).
In the "Introduction" to this book
he says that science has undermined the universal
principles of research, and he asks rhetorically:
who would have thought that the boundary between
subject and object would be questioned as part of a
scientific argument, and that science would be
advanced thereby?
And yet, as he notes in his next sentence,
this is precisely what happened in the quantum
theory.
Feyerabend explicitly states that he does not
deny that there are successful theories using
abstract concepts.
What he denies is that knowledge should be
based on universal principles or theories.
Echoing Conant, perhaps without even
recognizing so, Feyerabend says that science is a
living enterprise as opposed to a body of knowledge,
and that it is a historical process, although unlike
Conant, Feyerabend's view is not only historicist
and relativist, but also realist.
An important distinction that emerges from
Feyerabend's historical relativist philosophy, is
his distinction between historical or empirical
traditions on the one hand and theoretical
traditions on the other.
This distinction is made in "Historical
Background" in Problems
of Empiricism and later in "Knowledge and
the Role of Theories" and in "Trivializing
Knowledge" in Farewell to Reason.
His earlier philosophical views are clearly
in the theoretical tradition, while his later views
are clearly in the historical tradition.
However, the distinction is not a fundamental
one, because the thesis of his later view is that
modern science with its theoretical tradition is
really just a new historical tradition.
All theoretical traditions are really
historical traditions according to Feyerabend's
later view.
On the one hand the members of a theoretical
tradition identify knowledge with universality, and
they attempt to reason by means of a standardized
logic.
They distinguish the real world from the
world of appearances, because they identify the
reality with what their universal theories can
describe as law-like and stable.
And when their universal laws fail, the
members of the theoretical tradition issue the
battle cry stating: "we need a new
theory!"
As it happens, this is exactly what
Feyerabend had previously said in response to
quantum theory.
In theoretical traditions true knowledge and
logic are viewed as universal and independent of
cultural traditions or regional circumstances.
On the other hand the members of a historical
tradition emphasize what is particular including
particular regularities such as Kepler's laws.
It produces knowledge that is restricted to
certain regions, and which depends on conditions
specifying the regions.
And this knowledge is relative knowledge of
what is true or false.
Instead of using a standardized logic, they
organize information by means of lists and stories,
and they reason by example, by analogy, and by free
association.
They emphasize the plurality of knowledge,
and consequently the history dependence and culture
dependence of knowledge and of all logical
standards.
Feyerabend notes in this context that the
complementarity thesis in modern quantum theory even
contains the idea of relative knowledge, due to the
relational character of quantum states.
In a discussion on the semantical
interpretation of theories in his "Knowledge
and the Role of Theories" Feyerabend bases his
historical relativism on an artifactual theory of
the semantics of language.
He rejects the idea that there is any truth
that is capable of superseding or transcending all
traditions and cultures, an idea that he traces to
Parmenides.
He argues that this belief confounds the
properties of ideas with their subject matter.
The subject matter remains unaffected by
human opinions, and the erroneous implications is
that scientific statements describing the subject
matter are supposed to be expression of facts and
laws, which exist and govern events no matter what
anyone thinks of them.
He maintains that the statements themselves
are not independent of human thought and action;
they are human products.
They were formulated with great care to
select only the objective ingredients of our
environment, but they still reflect the
peculiarities of the individuals, groups, and
societies from which they arose.
For example the validity of Maxwell's
equations is independent of what people think about
electrification.
But it is not independent of the culture that
contains them; it needs a very special mental
attitude inserted into a very special structure
combined with quite idiosyncratic sequences of
historical developments.
Theoretical traditions are opposed to
historical traditions in intention, but not in fact.
Scientists trying to create a knowledge that
differs from merely historical or empirical
knowledge, succeeded only in finding formulations
which seemed to be objective, universal and
logically rigorous, but which in fact are used and
interpreted in use in a manner that conflicts with
the properties the formulations only seem to have.
Modern science is a new historical tradition
that has been carried along by a false
consciousness. Feyerabend similarly criticizes the
metaphysics of scientific realism of the theoretical
traditions of science.
Scientific realism accepts as real only what
is lawful or may be connected by laws, and thereby
regards the real to be what exists and develops
independently of the thoughts and wishes of
researchers.
Feyerabend argues that connecting reality
with lawfulness is to define reality in a rather
arbitrary manner.
Moody gods, shy birds, and people who are
easily bored would be unreal, while mass
hallucinations and systemic errors would be real.
The success of science cannot be a measure of
the reality of its ingredients.
Feyerabend notes that to support their view,
the scientific realists say that while scientific
statements are the result of historical processes,
the features of the world are independent of those
processes.
But he argues that we either consider quarks
and gods to be equally real, or we cease to talk
about real things altogether.
And he adds that to say that quarks and gods
are equally real is not to deny the effectiveness of
science as a provider of technologies and of basic
myths; he intends only to deny that scientific
objects and they alone are real.
And he adds that the equal reality of quarks
and gods does not mean that we can do without the
sciences; he acknowledges we cannot.
Feyerabend's
Criticism of Popper
Consider firstly Feyerabend's general view
toward Popper's philosophy.
Initially sympathetic to Popper's philosophy,
Feyerabend became one of its most relentless and
truculent critics.
In Against
Method he rhetorically describes Popper's views
as “ratiomania" and "law-and-order
science".
As his historical relativist philosophy
became more mature, Feyerabend described the
technical procedures of Popper's critical
rationalism - the hypothesizing, testing,
falsification, and new hypothesizing to produce new
theories having greater empirical content - as
merely rules of thumb that cannot be taken as
necessary conditions for science.
Contrary to Popper, Feyerabend takes sides
with Kuhn by maintaining that science is a
historical tradition having practices that are not
always recognized as explicit rules, and that may
change from one historical period to the next.
He compares understanding a period in the
history of science to understanding a stylistic
period in the history of the arts.
In both science and the arts periods have an
obvious unity, but it is one that cannot be
summarized in a few simple rules, and the practices
that guide it must be found by detailed historical
studies.
The general notion of such a unity, which
Kuhn calls a "paradigm" and which Lakatos
calls a "research programme", will
therefore be poor in content.
Feyerabend rejects the demands for precision
made by some technical philosophers, saying that
they are on the wrong track.
Presumably this would include the criticisms
by Shapere.
Consider secondly Feyerabend's specific
criticisms of Popper's views on quantum theory.
Feyerabend seems never to have been
sympathetic to Popper's propensity interpretation,
which represents the participation by the
philosopher in the work of the physicist.
Even while he was sympathetic to Popper's
general philosophy, Feyerabend preferred to
encourage physicists rather than to join them, as
Popper did.
Later when Feyerabend reconciled himself to
the Copenhagen interpretation, he became explicitly
critical of Popper's propensity interpretation.
His criticisms of Popper are set forth in his
"On A Critique of Complementarity" in Philosophy of Science (1968-1969), which he later had reprinted as
"Niels Bohr's World View" in Realism,
Rationalism, and Scientific Method (1981).
Popper had offered two interpretations of the
statistical quantum theory during his career.
The earlier interpretation offered in Logic
of Scientific Discovery involved a variation on
the frequency interpretation of probability, and the
later interpretation first advanced in his
"Quantum Mechanics without the Observer"
(1967) was based on his propensity interpretation of
probability.
Feyerabend criticizes both these
interpretations. Feyerabend rejects Popper's
frequency interpretation of Born's statistical
quantum theory.
He admits that it is not unreasonable, if
physicists already know what kinds of entities are
to be counted as the elements of the collectives,
and if they know that those elements are classical
entities.
And he agrees with Popper that one cannot
draw inferences about the individual properties of
the elements.
But Feyerabend argues that Popper's view that
the elementary particle always posses a well defined
value for all its magnitudes, i.e. position and
momentum, is precisely what has been found to be
inconsistent with the laws of interference and of
the conservation laws.
He therefore maintains that a new
interpretation of the elements of quantum-mechanical
collectives is needed, and that what is being
counted as elements is not the number of systems
possessing a certain well defined property.
Rather what is counted is the number of
transitions from certain partly ill defined states
into other partly ill defined states, as Bohr had
maintained.
Feyerabend's criticism of Popper's propensity
interpretation is similar.
Popper viewed probability as a propensity, a
physical property comparable to physical forces, and
pertaining to a whole experimental arrangement for
repeatable measurements.
The wave function determines the propensity
of the states of the particle, in the sense that it
gives weights to its possible states.
Thus in the two-slit experiment a change in
the experimental arrangement such as shutting one of
the slits, affects the distribution of the weights
for the various possibilities, and thus produces a
different wave function.
Such a change in the experimental arrangement
is analogous to tilting a pin board with the result
that a new distribution curve of the rolling balls
will differ from the distribution prior to the
tilting of the pin board.
Popper therefore views quantum mechanics as a
generalization of the classical statistical
mechanics of particles together with the propensity
interpretation of probability.
Feyerabend says that Popper's propensity
interpretation is much more similar to Bohr's view,
which Popper attacks, than to Einstein's view, which
Popper attempts to defend.
He says that Popper's thesis that the
experimental conditions of the whole physical setup
determine the probability distribution, is precisely
Bohr's relational thesis, when Bohr proposed
defining the term "phenomenon" to include
the whole experimental arrangement.
But Feyerabend's thesis is furthermore that
Bohr's idea of complementarity goes beyond the
propensity interpretation by attributing to the
experimental arrangement not only probability but
also the dynamical variables of the physical system,
notably position and momentum.
Therefore Popper's thesis that a change in
experimental conditions implies a change in
probabilities alone, is not adequate to account for
the kind of changes involved in the two-slit
experiment.
In other words complementarity asserts the
relational character not only of probability, but
also of all dynamical magnitudes.
Feyerabend agrees with Popper that a change
of experimental conditions changes probabilities,
but he also says that what led to the Copenhagen
interpretation is not merely the fact that there is
some change in distribution with a change of
experimental arrangement, but the kind of change
encountered: trajectories which from a classical
view are perfectly feasible, are forbidden to the
particle.
This is because the conservation laws apply
not only on the average, so that one could postulate
a redistribution without asking for some dynamical
cause, but furthermore they apply in each single
interaction.
Thus a purely statistical redistribution is
inadequate; each single change of path must be
accounted for.
Bohr's resolution consists of the
renunciation of particle trajectories, the denial
that particles posses well defined position with
well defined momenta according to the indeterminacy
relations.
Feyerabend maintains that Popper confused
classical waves with quantum waves, because he
neglected the dynamics of the individual particle
and construed quantum theory as pure statistics.
Popper's claim that the reduction of the wave
packet is not an effect characteristic of quantum
theory, but rather is an effect of probability in
general, is incorrect in Feyerabend's view.
And Popper's claim that duality is the great
quantum muddle is in Feyerabend's words nothing but
a piece of fiction.
Feyerabend also has a number of other
specific criticisms of Popper's philosophy of
science, which are summarized in "Historical
Background" in
Problems of Empiricism, the second volume of
Feyerabend's collected papers.
There are eight such specific criticisms,
which may be summarized as follows:
1.
Feyerabend notes that theory exchange has not
always proceeded by falsification.
Noteworthy examples include the transition
from the celestial theory of Ptolemy and Aristotle
to that of Copernicus, and the transition from
Lorentz's theory to Einstein's theory of special
relativity.
In these cases there were no refuting facts
to explain rejection of the preceding theory.
2.
The meaning of a hypothesis often becomes
clear only after the process that led to its
elimination has been completed.
The force of this objection seems to be that
falsification brings about meaning change, that the
decision to accept a test outcome as a falsification
is also a decision that affects the semantics of the
language involved in the test.
Feyerabend elaborates on this thesis in his
"Trivializing Knowledge" in Farewell
to Reason, a paper criticizing Popper's
philosophy.
In this paper Feyerabend says that the
content of theories and experiment are constituted
by the refutations performed and accepted by the
scientific community, rather than being the basis on
which falsifiability can be decided and refutation
determined.
He exemplifies this point with the
stereotypic theory "all ravens are black",
and he says that while a white raven falsifies this
theory, the refutation depends on the reason for
whiteness.
A decision must be made as to whether a raven
whose metabolic processes make it white, or whose
genetic make up has been altered to make it white,
or which has been dyed white, constitutes a
falsifying instance.
Feyerabend says that such decisions are not
independent of falsification.
He also uses this example to illustrate
Lakatos' philosophy of science in "Popper's
Objective Knowledge" a critical review of
Popper's book in Problems
of Empiricism.
Here he states that what is needed is some
insight into the causal mechanism that brought about
whiteness, a theory of color production in animals.
He also notes that this illustration shows
the need for alternative theories in the process of
testing.
3.
The transition to a new theory may involve a
change of universal principles, which breaks the
logical links between the theory and the content of
its predecessor.
This break produces the semantic
incommensurability that Feyerabend has discussed at
length in Against
Method and earlier papers. Incommensurability is
not only the principal basis for his historical
relativism, which Popper opposes, but it is also
inconsistent with Popper's thesis of scientific
progress through increasing empirical content and
verisimilitude.
4.
Feyerabend rejects Popper's thesis of
increasing content for reasons in addition to the
occurrence of semantic incommensurability.
This is a criticism that Feyerabend discusses
at length in Against
Method, where he states that a new period in the
history of science commences with a backwards
movement to a theory with less empirical content
that gives scientists the time and freedom needed
for developing the main thesis of the new theory in
greater detail, and also for developing related
auxiliary sciences.
Scientists are persuaded to follow this
backward movement by such irrational means as
propaganda and ad
hoc theories that sustain a blind faith in the
new theory until it turns into what comes to be
regarded as sound knowledge.
This is what Feyerabend saw in Galileo's
defense of the Copernican theory, where the relevant
auxiliary science needing further development at the
time was optics.
5.
A closely related criticism of Popper's
philosophy is Feyerabend's thesis that ad
hoc adaptation of a theory may be the right step
to take.
The ad
hoc adaptation may be made either to the theory
or to the statements of observation.
In Popper's philosophy these ad
hoc adaptations are objectionable as
content-decreasing stratagems.
But Feyerabend maintains that they disguise
the inadequacy of a new theory until the relevant
auxiliary sciences can be developed, so that
refutation ultimately might not occur.
6.
The demand that the scientist look for
refutations and take them seriously, will lead to an
orderly development only in a world in which
refuting instances are rare and turn up at large
intervals.
But this is impossible since theories are
surrounded by an ocean of anomalies, unless we
modify the stern rules of falsification using them
only as rules of thumb, and not as necessary
conditions for scientific procedure.
Feyerabend frequently states elsewhere in his
literary corpus that strict falsification would wipe
out science as it presently exists, and would never
permit it to have come into existence.
7.
Popper's demand for increasing content makes
sense only in a world that is infinite both
quantitatively and qualitatively.
On the other hand in a finite world
containing a finite number of basic qualities or
elements, the aim is firstly to find these elements,
and then secondly to show how novel facts can be
reduced to them with the help of ad
hoc hypotheses.
He adds that genuine novelty counts as an
argument against the methods that produce it.
Feyerabend gives no further explanation of
what he means by this peculiar criticism, nor does
he give any reference to any other part of his
corpus for explanation.
8.
Finally
Feyerabend objects that content increase and the
realistic interpretation of the idea that brings it
about, restrain human freedom.
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