Adam Mastroianni on Feyerabend’s Against Method, a landmark work in the philosophy of science.

I’m sympathetic to both of them, and disagree with both as well. Feyerabend did veer into irrationalism, or anti-rationalism, and that’s wrong. Not because rationalism is right! But because none of these are accurate explanations for how science is done well.

Mastroianni believes that the scientific progress demonstrates that there is a The Scientific Method, although we don’t (yet) know what it is. I’m confident there isn’t one. There are many scientific methods, and no The Method. And, none of them are entirely reliable, and no method ever can be.

And, different sciences have no essential property in common. They only bear a “family resemblance” to each other. Relatedly, there is no solution to the “demarcation problem,” of finding a bright-line criterion for what is science and what is not.

These opinions put me in the camp of the Stanford Disunity School of science studies. But I came to them long before I encountered the Disunity School. They are the result of having studied many different types of science at the graduate-school level, and worked professionally in a few.

What counts as a theory, as a hypothesis, as a method, as an experiment, as evidence, as a result—these are qualitatively dissimilar in different sciences.