The ‘Optimum’ Aim for Science

Abstract

In his book Science and Scepticism ¹ John Watkins proposes to defeat the ‘rationality-sceptic’ within the limits defined by Humean scepticism about the possibility of knowledge of the world of external objects and of future events. Rationality-scepticism is according to Watkins (p. 59) that view — advocated perhaps and if so most prominently in recent discussions by Paul Feyerabend² — that “we never have any good reason to adopt a hypothesis about the external world” — or, perhaps more clearly, that we never have any good reason to adopt from amongst those available any particular hypothesis.