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Consolations for the Specialist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

By
P. K. Feyerabend
Edited by
Imre Lakatos  and
Alan Musgrave
P. K. Feyerabend
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

‘I have been hanging people for years, but I have never had all this fuss before.’ (Remark made by Edward ‘Lofty’ Milton, Rhodesia's part time executioner on the occasion of demonstrations against the death penalty.) ‘He was’—says Time Magazine (15 March 1968)—‘professionally incapable of understanding the commotion.’

  1. Introduction.

  2. Ambiguity of presentation.

  3. Puzzle solving as a criterion of science.

  4. Function of normal science.

  5. Three difficulties of functional argument.

  6. Does normal science exist?

  7. A plea for hedonism.

  8. An alternative: the Lakatos model of scientific change.

  9. The role of reason in science.

INTRODUCTION

In the years 1960 and 1961 when Kuhn was a member of the philosophy department at the University of California in Berkeley I had the good fortune of being able to discuss with him various aspects of science. I have profited enormously from these discussions and I have looked at science in a new way ever since. Yet while I thought I recognized Kuhn's problems; and while I tried to account for certain aspects of science to which he had drawn attention (the omnipresence of anomalies is one example); I was quite unable to agree with the theory of science which he himself proposed; and I was even less prepared to accept the general ideology which I thought formed the background of his thinking. This ideology, so it seemed to me, could only give comfort to the most narrowminded and the most conceited kind of specialism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge
Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965
 , pp. 197 - 230
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1970

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