A Critique of Paul Feyerabend's Article
"How to Defend Society Against Science"
John L. Waters
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John L. Waters
April 15, 2002
Copyright 2002 by John L. Waters. All Rights
Reserved
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This article is a brief critique of Paul Feyerabend's
article, "How to Defend Society Against Science." The
main point of this critique is to show that Feyerabend
is really attacking pseudoscience, not science.
Furthermore, many individuals who wee geniuses in
science would have been labelled insane by modern
psychologists if modern psychologists had been present
to judge them. In fact, modern psychology is a
pseudoscience and society really needs to be defended
against psychology and other pseudosciences.
To start things out, Paul Feyerabend argues that
science is being taught quite as religion was taught a
hundred years ago. He says, "Scientific 'facts' are
taught at a very early age and in the very same manner
in which religious "facts" were taught only a century
ago."(1) Perhaps the error is in education, then, not
in science. After all, doing research science is very
unlike doing routine teaching work. To better get the
point, compare your high school physics teacher with
Enrico Fermi.
Paul Feyerabend states that he wants to liberate
society from ideology. This sounds like Jiddu
Krishnamurti, because Krishnamurti often said the same
thing! More specifically Feyerabend says, "I want to
defend society and its inhabitants from all
ideologies, science included."(2) But what exactly is
ideology? Isn't ideology just a set of rules that a
person learns to follow without questioning any of
them? And isn't every little child required to follow
without questioning the many rules of family,
community, and school? So in all seriousness. How
can a philosopher honestly aspire to liberate humanity
from idology? One can't take a man very seriously
when he is that quixotic. Provocative? Maybe.
Profound? Well. Perhaps in a limited way.
In all honesty the heart of science and the pioneer
scientist includes the determination to explore a
subject that has been impossible for other people to
explain in a way which enables folks to predict and
manage. On the other hand, the heart of religion, at
least in most religions, is doing what is required to
please the gods or God. Thus, in order to be blessed
with good fortune, in the temple all the pious people
offer sacrifices to the gods or to God. In
Christianity Jesus is regarded as the sacrificial
"Lamb of God." Through prayers and sacrifices,
religious people expect to control events, and even go
to heaven after they die. In science, however, the
experts predict or control events by using certain
repeatedly verifiable theories. For example, using
Newtonian theory scientists predict lunar and solar
eclipses. Scientists do not believe an eclipse is a
"sign from God," but instead is as regular and as
predictable an event as the falling of a feather
you've just let slip out of your grasp. Through the
foregoing consideration an essential difference
between a religion and a science is clearly defined.
This refutes Feyerabend's initial claim that science
is a religion.
Paul Feyerabend objects to the way science is taught
in the schools. He wants a new school system which
presents a great many belief systems to young people
so that they truly have freedom of choice. He says
for example, "But science must not be given any
special position except for pointing out that there
are lots of people who believe in it."(3) He suggests
that science is taught to students who don't question
the teachings and who don't know all the other ways of
explaining a phenomenon. So let's just take a
specific example. Consider a chemistry class in which
the teacher is showing students how to balance
chemical equations. If the teacher understands the
method, soon the attentive, careful, and well-prepared
students will understand it. The method is
straightforward. There's really not much to question
about the method itself. Of course if one wants to
know how the method was devised, then that would be a
research topic in itself. The method of balancing
equations works, and that's what's important both for
the theoretical chemist and the lab chemist. One can
ask, in what other mythological system is there a
quantitative explanation given for what happens when
you place a bar of iron in a cup full of sulfuric
acid, for example. There are hundreds of different
mythologies, fairy tales, and the like. But these
stories don't explain in detail what happens in
chemical reactions.
Of course, if Feyerabend would suggest that the
teaching four weeks of evolutionary biology be
balanced by spending four weeks teaching creationism,
then four weeks of teaching of chemical reactions and
balancing chemical equations should be balanced by
teaching four weeks of pure alchemy from out of the
Middle Ages. The trouble is that not only are there
other theories of life development including
Empedocles' theory of life's development and there are
other theories of interaction of substances, so that
many a young scholar would consider that he or she was
being cheated out of an education that prepares a
modern student to compete in the modern job market.
After all, none of the modern industrial labs or other
research labs use any of the antiquated theories. So
one needs to wonder what Feyerabend considers
education to be FOR.
Aside from the above question concerning a student
revolt over the relevance of antiquated and obsolete
course material, the general following question
arises. If we are going to allow one or two or three
alternative systems of explanation to be taught in
school as alternative explanations for a certain
natural phenomenon, or for the existence of the whole
universe, why should we stop at three alternative
mythologies? Who is going to say how many or how few
alternative stories are going to be taught in school?
There are in fact hundreds of alternative mythologies
including astrology, numerology, the control of
natural phenomena by spirits or gods, and the fairy
tales of other nations and ethnic traditions, which
truly number in the hundreds if not in the thousands.
Furthermore, it remains a fact that whether the
teacher is teaching The Bible or Algebra, the good
student will remember the rules in the lessons and
follow them. The poor student will forget many rules
and not show mastery of the subject. If algebra is
used by scientists and The Bible is used by religious
workers, Feyerabend is right in his assertions about
science being taught dogmatically. But what's
different about science is the attitude of curiosity
in scientists and the verification procedures that
scientists use. These attitudes and procedures are
taught by the general science teachers and the
professors who teach a specialized branch of science.
It's this "heart" of science that Feyerabend glosses
over. He expects his readers to be naive and not
notice this flaw in his argument.
In his book, "The Scructure of Scientific Revolutions"
and in his article entitled "Objectivity, Value
Judgment, and Theory Choice" The writer Thomas Kuhn
presents the idea that science advances when an old
theory is shown to be inadequate and a new theory is
shown to explain what the old theory could not
explain.(4) The new theory is advanced despite the
efforts of normative science to explain everything
while ignoring certain anomalous events. Thus, for
example, for centuries the movements of the planets
was explained by resorting to epicycles and pericycles
in Ptolemy's old system with the Earth at the center
of the universe. Normative science worked to explain
(or explain away) certain celestial movements of a
baffling nature. The revolution or paradigm shift
came through the efforts of Copernicus, Galileo,
Brahe, Kepler, and Newton. Now we are pretty much
back to normative science in astronomy.
In physics there was the normative science of
Aristotle, which was overthrown by the work of Galileo
and Newton. This work produced a paradigm shift.
Furthermore, there were those curious lodestones that
picked up pieces of iron, and there were those curious
substances that produced crackles and shocks when
rubbed together. There was magnetism and
electrostatics but there was no electromagnetic
science. Then Galvani, Franklin, Faraday, Oersted,
and Maxwell came along. There was another paradigm
shift. Radio and television came later. Transistors,
lasers, and microchips came even later.
Centuries ago in medicine there was bloodletting to
cure disease. This was normative science for many
generations. With Pasteur, Semmelweis, and Lister
came the paradigm shift towards cleanliness in
bacteriological research in medicine. Then came
antibiotics, Salk vaccine, and other blessings from
medical science. One hopes that society doesn't want
to be protected from these healing innovations! So
what is Feyerabend really talking about in this
article "How to Defend Society against Science"?
Perhaps instead of science, Feyerabend has in mind
objecting to the pseudoscientific professions which
are so very dogmatic in their teachings and which,
like religions, often presume to stand in moral
judgment over a person who is called into question.
These professions are identified below. Certainly
society needs to be defended against these dogmatic
moralists! But they aren't really scientists at all.
They are pseudoscientists. This is where Feyerabend
goes wrong. The error is serious. He's been careless
with language.
Even so, with his professional writing skill,
Feyerabend influenced a lot of young, gullible persons
who hadn't carefully examined any one of the
pseudoscientific professions. Consequently these
students or recent graduates bought into Feyerabend's
argument even though it is seriously flawed. What
Feyerabend should have done is focus his considerable
literary talent on examining the pseudoscientific
professions of psychology, psychiatry, and educational
psychology.
The fact is, that psychology and psychiatry just set
themselves up as experts worthy of standing in moral
judgement over children and adults, so that the
normative standards in education and in other social
realms may be upheld without question. There! This
is the dogmatic authoritarianism that Feyerabend wants
to protect us from. This is the fanatical zeal which
with a religious fervor can break into the life of a
child and force the child to take medications against
his or her will, just because the child is spending a
lot of time acting strangely and causing other
children to feel that he or she isn't "normal."
An example of an eccentric young person of genius
caliber is a boy who plays with fire and burns down a
barn by accident. The same boy is found keeping a
chicken company for three days without eating a
morsel. At school this boy asks so many questions
that he distracts everyone else from the teacher's
main lesson. The medicating moralists are called in
and they start prescribing. "It's for everyone's
good," they say. That's what would happen to the
young Thomas Edison of today. As it was, little Tommy
Edison went to school for five days and after that his
mother taught him at home. He got beaten at school
for his eccentricity. Edison simply couldn't have fit
into a school designed to focus on the
mean/median/mode child- the so-called "average" child.
Nor did Edison the adult man do normative science.
He was just a very curious and inventive person all of
his life.
Even though the young Edison exhibited eccentric
behavior, he wasn't really a psychotic, but other
geniuses in science definitely behaved in ways that
the medicating moralists would insist should be
evidence for a need to medicate. For example,
Leonardo Da Vinci was often by himself creating
fanciful drawings of flying machines but also he
engaged in extreme flights of fancy into other realms,
and he had a decidedly flighty nature so that many of
the works he started he never actually finished. In
today's especially moralistic and medication-oriented
places of employment, a flighty worker is considered a
very unsafe bet, and in fact is likely to be labelled
a manic-depressive. But Leonardo da Vinci had many
redeeming qualities. Without his emotional highs,
though, would Leonardo have produced such a vast body
of works? Is medicating creative geniuses a really
good idea? If so, what is the scientific evidence
that medicating creative geniuses is a good idea?
Another example of a creative genius who showed
decidedly eccentric behavior is Isaac Newton. Isaac
Newton withdrew into social isolation for long
periods and performed his now famous researches in
physics. He had no trust in people and was paranoid.
His life's devotion was to decipher the language that
God had written throughout the universe. Furthermore,
Newton spent more time in studying holy writ than he
did studying nature. To the modern psychiatric social
worker or psychiatrist, a man like Newton would be
classed as a potentially dangerous paranoid
schizophrenic. The doctor would advise both
incarceration and medication. This makes the point
again, that to the pseudoscientific modern
psychologist or psychiatrist, the eccentric behaviors
of a genius are easy to identify as evidence of
insanity.
What is really wrong with the psychoanalytic
establishment? It's not that they diagnose certain
mental disorders and dispense medication. In most
cases, if not all, the medications are of some help
both to the patient and to the patient's family. What
is basically wrong with the psychoanalytic
establishment is that the psychologists and the
doctors are just an adjunct to the law enforcement
agencies. They are an extension of the police force.
Their job is to keep the standards of the old society
intact, and preserve the old society, which is the
society that Feyerabend must be objecting to if he is
objecting to dogmatic authoritarian socio-political
regimes. This does in fact sound like what Feyerabend
is objecting to, because on page 55 of the book
"Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science,
third edition" where he says, "I want to defend
society and its inhabitants from all ideologies,
science included." This is where Paul Feyerabend
sounds exactly like Jiddu Krishnamurti. However, if
Krishnamurti had been examined by a licensed
psychiatrist, the doctor would have had to conclude
that Krishnamurti was a psychotic. After all, in the
book "Krishnamurti's Notebook" and in other places
Krishnamurti talked or wrote about the hallucinations
he had many times each day! He describes his sense
of "the other," "the immensity," and "the
benediction." The medicating moralists just regard a
sense like Krishnamurti's as something bizarre for
them to eliminate. Like the fanatical religious
fundamentalists, these psychologists and psychiatrists
preoccuppied with conventional perception and
conventional ideation tend to think alike. Moreover,
some of them have invested in pharmaceutical
companies, and when one is an investor, one's heart is
more on drumming up business and making money than on
doing real science. This then is a false science or
psuedo-science that society needs to be defended
against, not the physics, chemistry, biology and other
real sciences that have produced so many different
breakthroughs in understanding so many different
natural phenomena. The human phenomenon moves ahead
not by conventional perception and conventional
thinking, but by means of visions, dreams, and
intuitions often concealed by the creative person
until long after the novelty has been
accepted...because of the pseudoscientific nature of
today's conventional psychology and educational
psychology.
A reference to future science helps us understand how
psychology and psychiatry will become more scientific
and less oriented to making a profit and/or acting as
an adjunct police force. A true science is
non-judgemental. The true science of humanity won't
enforce some antiquated social standard of thinking,
feeling, and acting. The true science of humanity
will study individual human brain activity and
individual human behavior not for the purpose of
trying to force the person to return to his or her
former state but instead for the purpose of exploring
and understanding the atypical behavior and brain
activity, so that at least in some cases, the
productivity of atypical children and adults can be
increased and improved, rather than eliminated.
From which discipline should society be defended- the
first discipline, which takes the brain of a
developing atypical child-genius and works to subdue
the youthful brain activity so that the child is more
docile, and more easily dominated in the classroom
environment, or the second discipline, which takes the
brain of a developing child-genius and treats it so
that this brain is helped to grow naturally and
develop to its full potential? Why most sensible
people would say that society needs to be defended
against the fake science that disables brains, not the
real science that enables brains. But in reality the
first discipline, the disabling discipline, is modern
academic culture backed up by the police and by the
medicating moralists. The second discipline hasn't
yet been created. It is the true science of
identifying special talent in atypical children and
nurturing that talent with care so that it develops
and grows to mature productivity.
In the preceding paragraphs, certain well-known
creative geniuses in science have been shown to
exhibit eccentric behavior sufficient to suggest a
manic-depressive disorder or some other
psychopathology. It's natural to conclude that a
certain number of young persons who think, feel, and
act in unusual ways are of genius caliber rather than
insane. The authorities in educational psychology,
psychology, or psychiatry, however, aren't able to
distinguish the potential creative geniuses from the
potentially dangerous persons, quite possibly because
scientifically there is no distinction. Rather than
nullifying the process of creative genius with
medications, the doctors need to understand the
process of creativity itself and this is future
science. The trouble is that right now psychology
and psychiatry are not yet true science. They attack
develop into creative geniuses. In this respect
psychology and psychiatry are pseudosciences and until
psychology and psychiatry become true sciences society
truly needs to be defended against them.
Notes
1. Klemke, E.D., Hollinger, Robert, Rudge, David
Wyss, with Kline, A. David "Introductory Readings in
the Philosophy of Science" Prometheus Books Amherst,
New York 1998 page 56
2. ibid page 55
3. ibid page 62-63
4. ibid pages 435-450
John L. Waters
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