[hammock]

It’s funny because those with a mindset - probably mostly unconscious and deeply engrained - that science (or scientism) is the one true method will feel “trolled” by these ideas and that feeling is apparent in the comments…

When really the intention comes from a different place and requires a slightly more open mind to grok

[didericis]

There’s a more practical and tragic reason to desire a “one true method”.

Imagine spending your whole life working under method X. You study its precepts, gain practical knowledge, go out into the field and test your assumptions. Your desire is to end human suffering using method X, and build a better world where good triumphs over evil and everyone can pursue their bliss.

But you must sacrifice in order for method X to work. The precepts demand you honor the gods. If you are an Aztec, you end up with pyramids covered in blood and tens of thousands dead, but are still woefully unprepared for disease and Europeans, your people suffer immensely and are virtually extinguished, and you die realizing your method was wrong and your sacrifices were in vain.

You can avoid that with a meta method that helps you select proper methods.

The amount of human suffering that can be avoided if people are able to distinguish the effectiveness of method X from method Y is extreme. That is where the hard earned victories of modernity come from. Science is the preeminent comparative meta method that identifies which methods are most effective at alleviating human suffering and people are right to uphold it (and to distinguish it from scientism/confusion with scientific bureaucracy)

There is no universal, rule based, propositional method of betterment, but to give up on the idea of any method being objectively better than another is to give up on the idea of meta negotiation and the pursuit of universal peace and prosperity. The pursuit is worthwhile, even if it may not be fully achieved in billions or trillions of years and may be more of an art than a system of computation.

[blululu]

It's important to understand this in the context of the cultural and political fights of the American academy as well. Feyerabend's position is very reasonable, but the straw-man treatment went both ways. It also played to the biases of people who felt that they were/are being marginalized by the evolution of the academy into a more scientific/technical institution. (For most of History, Stanford's number one major was History. This is one no longer the case and the degree has lost a lot of its former prestige). These factions routinely took his work to then argue that all science is irrational or baseless or incorrect as if it were a logical either or proposition. This is also absurd and not really what Feyerabend was going for, but the debate is maybe not really about method as much as it is about the political concerns of academics.