first stab at 'against method'

I call it the first stab, but I'm not sure if there will be any more than one. I've made a start with Feyerabend's Against Method, and the first impressions are not promising. Two issues which struck me are, one, the claim that the history of a science should be an inseparable part of the science itself, and two, that the way we interpret information from our senses is more of a prejudice than anything else.

As to the first, from what I can gather, he's saying that our knowledge is not a collection of theories which you can patch together to get a partial-but-accurate picture of how things really are in the world. Instead, he says, it's more like 'an ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives', where every theory that anyone has ever come up with is part of the mix - whether the theory was put forward by scientists, cranks, or liars - this mix is what constitutes "knowledge". In this case, "the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself."

But: I don't share the re-definition of knowledge. I would say that our knowledge is, admittedly and self-evidently, partial - but it can still be accurate, as far as it goes. And evaluating the accuracy of ideas and understandings is done with respect to the real world out there (or, the real world which we're a part of, depending on your perspective I suppose) - a) there are objective realities, and b) we are capable of grasping them, and c) we are reasonable beings, and d) we are capable of using reason to compare the-way-things-are with the-things-we-believe. In this case, the history of science (or, the history of a science) is the history of what different people have thought at different periods in time about a particular empirical issue or phenomenon. It is not necessarily the same thing as the current thinking on that issue or thing, and neither does it tell you anything about the goodness of fit between people's ideas at any given time and the way things really are - the way we would see things if we knew/understood everything there was to know/understand. That has to be evaluated rationally.

The other issue was the conclusion he drew from this example: when we look at a table in normal circumstances, we can say 'The table is brown.' When we look at a table in poor lighting, though, we would say, 'The table seems to be brown.' His comment on this is that it expresses a variety of different assumptions - that some of our sensory impressions coincide with reality while others don't, that the medium between the object and us doesn't distort anything, and that the light 'carries a true picture'. These, he says, are all "abstract and highly doubtful assumptions which shape our view of the world without being accessible to direct criticism."

Well, for one thing, what has he done with these assumptions if not accessed them and criticised them. But for another thing, I don't see why these assumptions deserve to be disparaged under the label of "doubtful." Rather than being highly doubtful, I would suggest, they are highly useful and reliable. We know by down to earth day to day experience that it is worth our while to rely on just such assumptions. That's why we say "is" sometimes and "seems to be" other times - we know that some of our sensory experiences match with reality and others don't. We take such things for granted because we know they can be taken for granted, and we know too that it's in our interests to take them for granted.

I haven't finished the whole book as yet, but if I can crystallise any more of these issues as I go along, I'll try and let you know.