---
title: "Paul Feyerabend"
chunk: 8/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:08:21.037257+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Departure from Popper ====
Beginning in at least the mid-to-late 1960s, Feyerabend distanced himself from Popper both professionally and intellectually. There is a great amount of controversy about the source and nature of Feyerabend's distancing from Popper. Joseph Agassi claims that it was caused by the student revolutions at Berkeley, which somehow promoted Feyerabend's move towards epistemological anarchism defended in the 1970s. Feyerabend's friend Roy Edgley claims that Feyerabend became distanced from Popper as early as the mid-1950s, when he went to Bristol and then Berkeley and was more influenced by Thomas Kuhn and the Marxism of David Bohm.
Feyerabend's first paper that explicitly repudiates Popper is his two-part paper on Niels Bohr's conception of complementarity. According to Popper, Bohr and his followers accepted complementarity as a consequence of accepting positivism. Popper was the founder of the theory of falsification, which Feyerabend was very critical of. He meant that no science is perfect, and therefore cannot be proven false. Once one repudiates positivism as a philosophical doctrine, Popper claims, one undermines the principle of complementarity. Against this, Feyerabend claims that Bohr was a pluralist who attempting to pursue a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics (the Bohr-Kramer-Slater conjecture) but abandoned it due to its conflict with the Bothe-Geiger and Compton-Simon experiments. While Feyerabend concedes that many of Bohr's followers (notably, Leon Rosenfeld) accept the principle of complementarity as a philosophical dogma, he contends that Bohr accepted complementarity because it was entangled with an empirically adequate physical theory of microphysics.

==== Anarchist phase ====

In the 1970s, Feyerabend outlines an anarchistic theory of knowledge captured by the slogan 'anything goes'. The phrase 'anything goes' first appears in Feyerabend's paper "Experts in a Free Society" and is more famously proclaimed at the end of the first chapter of Against Method. Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism has been the source of contention amongst scholars. Some claim that epistemological anarchism is not a positive view of scientific method, but the conclusion of a reductio ad absurdum of 'rationalism' (the view that there are universal and unchanging rational rules for scientific reasoning). In Feyerabend's words, "'anything goes' is not a 'principle' I hold... but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history." On this interpretation, Feyerabend aims to show that no methodological view can be held as fixed and universal and therefore the only fixed and universal rule would be "anything goes" which would be useless.
On another interpretation, Feyerabend is claiming that scientists should be unscrupulous opportunists who choose methodological rules that make sense within a given situation. On this view, there are no 'universal' methodological rules but there are local rules of scientific reasoning that should be followed. The use of the phrase 'opportunism' comes from Einstein which denotes an inquirer who changes their beliefs and techniques to fit the situation at hand, rather than pre-judge individual events with well-defined methods or convictions. Feyerabend thinks that this is justified because "no two individuals (no two scientists; no two pieces of apparatus; no two situations) are ever exactly alike and that procedures should therefore be able to vary also."
On a third interpretation, epistemological anarchism is a generalization of his pluralism that he had been developing throughout the 1950s and 1960s. On this view, Feyerabend did not have an anarchist 'turn' but merely generalized his positive philosophy on a more general view. Epistemological anarchism is synonymous with a pluralism without limits, where one can proliferate any theory one wishes and one can tenaciously develop any theory for as long as one wishes. Relatedly, because methods depend on empirical theories for their utility, one can employ any method one wishes in attempt to make novel discoveries. This does not mean that we can believe anything we wish – our beliefs must still stand critical scrutiny – but that scientific inquiry has no intrinsic constraints. The only constraints on scientific practice are those that are materially forced upon scientists. Moreover, Feyerabend also thought that theoretical anarchism was desirable because it was more humanitarian than other systems of organization, by not imposing rigid rules on scientists.

For is it not possible that science as we know it today, or a "search for the truth" in the style of traditional philosophy, will create a monster? Is it not possible that an objective approach that frowns upon personal connections between the entities examined will harm people, turn them into miserable, unfriendly, self-righteous mechanisms without charm or humour? "Is it not possible," asks Kierkegaard, "that my activity as an objective [or critico-rational] observer of nature will weaken my strength as a human being?" I suspect the answer to many of these questions is affirmative and I believe that a reform of the sciences that makes them more anarchic and more subjective (in Kierkegaard's sense) is urgently needed. Against Method (3rd ed.). p. 154.
According to these "existential criteria", methodological rules can be tested by the kinds of lives that they suggest. Feyerabend's position was seen as radical, because it implies that philosophy can neither succeed in providing a general description of science, nor in devising a method for differentiating products of science from non-scientific entities like myths.
To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend analyzed counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to the methodological standards invoked by philosophers during Feyerabend's time (namely, inductivism and falsificationism). Starting from episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress (e.g. the Copernican Revolution), he argued that these episodes violated all common prescriptive rules of science. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution. His primary case study is Galileo's hypothesis that the Earth rotates on its axis.

==== Metaphysics of abundance ====