See the axis · Place of science

Argument

Against method

There is no single method that would guarantee truth: science itself advanced by breaking its own rules, and other paths reach a real it lets slip.

Supports

Feyerabend · · 1975

  1. No set of rules has been followed by all good science and by it alone: the great advances, Copernicus, Galileo, were made precisely by breaking the canons of their day.
  2. If even science does not owe its success to a fixed method, no method can be crowned as the sole gateway to truth: rationality is plural and historical, not a single algorithm.
  3. Moreover, whole swaths of the real, the felt quality of an experience, the meaning of a life, what a tragedy or a rite discloses about the human, are grasped by art, narrative, tradition, and slip through the net of third-person measurement.

Therefore So science is one powerful form of knowledge among others, not the measure of all: to disqualify art, lived experience, or traditional knowledge in advance is a dogmatism, not a result.

How far does this reasoning convince you?

Not at all
Entirely