Newsgroup sci.philosophy.tech 20926

Directory

Jim Balter wrote:
> In article <32B9FB56.BA1@joyl.joensuu.fi>,
> Marko Toivanen   wrote:
> >What happened went something like this: In the early 70s, one of
> >Feyerabend's best friends, Imre Lakatos, convinced that they should
> >write a book together, Feyerabend criticizing the kind of
> >philosophy of science that Lakatos would defend.
> 
> Do you have any support for this claim?
Preface to the first edition of Feyerabend's _Against Method_ (1975):
"This essay if the first part of a book on rationalism that was to be
written by Imre Lakatos and myself. I was to attack the rationalist
position, Imre was to restate and to defend it, making mincemeat of me
in the process. Taken together, the two parts were supposed to give an
account of our long debate concerning these matters that had started in
1964, had continued, in letters, lectures, telephone calls, papers,
almost to the last day of Imre's life and had become a natural part of
my daily routine. The origin explains the style of the essay: it is a
long and rather personal *letter* to Imre and every wicked phrase it
contains was written in anticipation of an even more wicked reply from
the recipient."
Preface to the second and third english editions (1988 and 1993): "In
1970 Imre Lakatos, one of the best friends I ever had, cornered me at a
party. 'Paul,' he said, 'you have such strange ideas. Why don't you
write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing and I
promise you - we shall have lots of fun.' I liked the suggestion and
started working. The manuscript of my part of the book was finished in
1972 and I sent it to London. There it disappearec under rather
mysterious circumstances. Imre Lakatos, who loved dramatic gestures,
notified Interpol and, indeed, Interpol found my manuscript and returned
it to me. I reread it and made some final changes. In February 1974,
only a few weeks after I had finnished my revision, I was informed of
Imre's death. I published my part of our common enterprise without his
response. ... This history explains the form of the book. It is not a
systematic treatise; it is a letter to a friend and addresses his
idiosyncracies."
Cheers,
Marko
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Marko Toivanen _/_/_/_/_/ co-moderator of bourdieu & feyerabend on
marko@joyl.joensuu.fi _/_/_/  majordomo@lists.village.virginia.edu
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ http://www.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/feyerabend/
For the modern mind doctrine and influence suggest heroes and cults.
Any persistent opinion gets traced back to a personal origin, and we
depend upon history to explode or inflate the myth that results. 
 - Scott Buchanan

Jim Balter wrote:
> In article <5902a4$ltl@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>,
> Greg Diamond  wrote:
> >In article <58rtn4$6r4@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
> >John M. Lawler  wrote:
> >>Of course.  Though, let it be said, only in the usage of the 
> >>term "ironic" which has come to mean "self-demonstrating", which 
> >>is itself ironic in several other senses.  As we are demonstrating > >>daily, English-speaking scientists all speak their own individual
> >>scientific Englishes, with their own etc.  This is part of what 
> >>Feyerabend was saying, to braid a different thread.  Or was it > >>this thread?  I forget.
> >
> >And yet communication takes place, suggesting limitations to our
> >limitations....
>
> I.e., not anything goes, to put the point to Feyerabend's anarchism.
Already in 1970, in a shorter, earlier version of "Against Method"
(_Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science_, Volume 4, 1970),
Feyerabend wrote: "Some of my friends have chided me for elevating a
statement such as "anything goes" into a fundamental principle of
epistemology. They did not notice that I was joking." (n. 38, p. 105). 
In the first (1975) edition of the book, after summarizing the arguments
of the chapters to follow, he writes: "One might therefore get the
impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction
by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical
views, fairy-tales instead of the customary pair theory/observation.
This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to
replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is,
rather, to convince the reader that *all methodologies, even the most
obvious ones, have their limits*" - adding in a footnote, "These
remarks, I hope, will alleviate Miss Koertge's [who reviewed the 1970
version] fear that I intend to start just another movement, the slogans
"proliferate" or "anything goes" replacing the slogans of
falsificationism or inductivism or research-programmism." (p. 32 & 33,
n. 4)
Finally, in the preface of the 1988 and 1993 editions: "[the book] is
... a letter to a friend and addresses his idiosyncracies... Imre
Lakatos loved to embarass serious opponents with jokes and irony and so
I, too, occasionally wrote in a rather ironical vein. And example is the
end of Chapter 1: 'anything goes' is not a 'principle' I hold - I do not
think that 'principles' can be used and fruitfully discussed outside the
concrete research situation they are supposed to affect - but the
terrified exclamation of a rationalist [a la Lakatos] who takes a closer
look at history."
Thus, Feyerabend did not claim that "anything goes" - and there's no
"Feyerabend's anarchism" either: he appropriated the term "anarchism"
from Lakatos. Lakatos, with a rhetorical flavor characteristic of him,
used it to refer to Bohr's post-1925 methodological views (see Volume 1
of his _Philosophical Papers_ (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 59
- 60)  - in relation to which Feyerabend, in the second half of the 60s,
had turned from a stern critic to an even sterner defender (though the
details of the change are somewhat subtler: compare "On a Recent
Critique of Complementarity", _Philosophy of Science_ 1968 & 1969 with
Feyerabend's earlier writings on the topic - and Lakatos' partisan
description of Bohr's views is hardly accepted by Feyerabend: see the
reprint of the last mentioned article as "Niels Bohr's World View" in
the Volume 1 of his _Philosophical Papers_ (1981) (which also contains
most of those earlier articles), addition to n. 100, p. 294).
Cheers,
Marko
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Marko Toivanen _/_/_/_/_/ co-moderator of bourdieu & feyerabend on
marko@joyl.joensuu.fi _/_/_/  majordomo@lists.village.virginia.edu
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ http://www.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/feyerabend/
For the modern mind doctrine and influence suggest heroes and cults.
Any persistent opinion gets traced back to a personal origin, and we
depend upon history to explode or inflate the myth that results. 
 - Scott Buchanan

Knut H=F6gvall wrote:
> =
> Hi!
> =
> I stumbled across an interesting website the other day. I found it
> intriguing. Am I wrong? Search for "Ast Grampa" (sic) and tell me what
> you think. (No, I'm not the author. I'd like to find out who is...)
[snip]
Search where?  Is trying to find it part of the interest?
Could you kindly tell me the URL of this site?
Thanks.
-- =
   Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
   Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Bradford McCormick, Ed.D.
bradmcc@cloud9.net / (914)238-0788
27 Poillon Road, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
----------------------------------------------
Visit my website =3D=3D> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc