“What’s So Great About Science?” Feyerabend on Science, Ideology, and the Cold War

Abstract

From the late 1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences, as well as radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies—for instance, by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate human societies. This chapter explores why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Located in their historical and political context, science was a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards—of tolerance, critical enquiry—which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy.