This blog post is inspired by a training I attended on Academic writing. During the training, our linguistics trainer quoted Karl Popper, and referred to Noam Chomsky to back up his arguments about how scientific writing should be done. To my surprise, he had never heard of Paul Fayerabend - a student of Popper, who nonetheless had a completely opposite view of how science should be conducted. Because Popper seems to be popping off … and is being mentioned in almost all trainings I attended on science-related topics, I want to write a bit about how I feel about his views on science. I plan to read his book On , but before I do, I will foolhardly put forward an uninformed opinion, which I allow to be refuted after having read the man.

Currently, invigorated by the lack of awareness of Fayerabend’s work of the people around me, I started reading his ‘Against Method’. What strikes me in the first few pages is how humanistic, humorous and invigorating his writing and appraoch to science are. I laughed out when I read this in the introduction:

None of the ideas that underline my argument is new. My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond reconginition by rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of ‘critical’ rationalism

All great writers in philosophy seem to have a way with words, especially when criticizing others - for example when Kant says in a footnote in Critique of Pure Reason, B173 “A lack of power of judgement is in fact what we call stupidity, and for such a handicap there is no remedy” - and I am all here for it!

Coming back to Fayerabend, I believe the ideas he puts forward - scientific ‘anarchism’, freedom from methodological thinking, liberty of expression and ideas - are not only fresh, but essential for having fun in science. Too many times good academics can get bogged down in trying to support their findings by anchoring them to the works of others, searching for agreement with literature, or thinking how to ‘make a story’. Science is difficult, it is chaotic and controversial, and is a deeply human endeavour. Structuring, pre-planning and meticolousness can be used as helpful tools, but avoided at all costs as guides to how research is done. Otherwise, we are no longer human scientists, but cogs in a machine.

Another great point that Fayerabend makes, which deeply resonates with me, is about the damage caused to science by the sequestration of its different disciplines. I am a firm believer that partaking in the full gamut of positive human endeavours and knowledge can only be enriching (even Spinoza agrees in his ‘Ethics’, where in the last chapters he says that a wise man is not one who avoids any physical joys, but one who indulges moderately in all). However, I feel much of the zeitgeist of the current world is about specializing, or concentrating into a singular endeavour, chasing perfection or self-improvement. I say, stay open, be surprised, explore tangential interests, and never lose your curiosity about the world - it is a mysterious, full-of-suprises, chaotic place, not to be organized into neat boxes and examined as something granted, foreign and outside of us. After all, as Kant absolutely nails it on the head, understanding is legislative for nature - how we see the world and how we understand it depends on our own subjective experience, and not on any out-of-us objective reality which is only to be consumed and fed into us like a diquette of empirical observation.

Stay wild, let your ideas run freely, and see how far they take you.

On a tagential note, recently I read an inspired blog post about the peer review process and ideas in science. I should review it in a separate blog post and structure my thoughts about it. The article is by Valerio Olevano posted on his personal website (I stumbled on his blog by reading a recent paper of his “Local Field Effects in the Electron Energy Loss Spectra of Rutile TiO 2”). This is the link to the blogpost: Peer Review - Valerio Olevano. I really enjoyed how human it felt to read, and I think the ideas put forth could be developed further. With some points I did not agree, and I felt, rising up in me while reading, some epistemological disagreements with the author - for example, thinking in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is not to my taste. But the examples are fascinating, and the sincerity of the writing is endearing.

References

[1] I. Kant, W. S. Pluhar, and P. Kitcher, Critique of Pure Reason, Unified ed (Hackett Pub. Co, Indianapolis, Ind, 1996).
[2] B. de Spinoza and E. M. Curley, Ethics, New edition (Penguin Books, London, 1996).
[3] P. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, 4. impr (Verso, London, 1982).