"Lord of the Fleas: Science, Monsters, and Political Fraud"

2014

This chapter argues that Paul Feyerabend's philosophical views on the relationship between science and society, and his conception of the purposes of the discipline of philosophy of science, was shaped by the Cold War in two ways. First, Feyerabend was reacting against the artificial confinement of the agenda and professional identity of the philosophy of science that the Cold War had imposed; the exclusion of the socially engaged aspects of that discipline prompted Feyerabend to engage, albeit dramatically and hyperbolically, with questions about the value and authority of science that had, alas, been stifled. The second way reflected the role that science played in the ideological ‘clash of ideas’ that marked the intellectual dimension of the Cold War. Feyerabend argued that ideological struggles for the honorific status of being a scientific society were premature in the absence of robust answers to the question what science is, and what’s so great about it, but that insistence provided the foundations for a much wider claim. Feyerabend steadily expanded the scope of critical citizenship to encompass not only science, but any other intellectual, cultural, or political traditions, values, and ideals one might consider. Taken together, these point to what one might call 'critical citizenship' - a conception of political and epistemic freedom in terms of informed consent to a cognitive and cultural authority, rather than to zealous adoption of whatever ideology happened to prevail in one’s society at the time—even the liberal democratic ideology of a scientific culture. To ask 'what's so great about science' is therefore not the motto of an anti-science radical, but a invitation to critically reflect upon the dominant cognitive authority of late modern cultures.

The Review of Politics, 1975

It is by now a commonplace among American political scientists that the philosophical grounding of political inquiry is in dire need of critical reflection and serious repair, if not radical reconstruction. The sources of this widespread recognition are no doubt diverse, but not the least resides in the impact of the key ideas of Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For, although Kuhn's work was narrowly interpreted by Almond, Truman, and other key figures in the behavioral elite corps to conform to their image of science (basically a naive positivist image), the very breadth and subtlety of Kuhn's work, his commitment to formulating his conception of science from the history of science as practiced, and his ultimate antagonism to that tradition of the philosophy of science (logical positivism/empiricism) which behavioralists have embraced ensured that a lively and contentious debate would ensue.

Logical Empiricism in North America, 2003

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2012

Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 2018

I raise two challenges for scientific realists. The first is a pessimistic meta-induction (PMI), but not of the more common type, which focuses on rejected theories and abandoned entities. Rather, the PMI I have in mind departs from conceptual change, which is ubiquitous in science. Scientific concepts change over time, often to a degree that is difficult to square with the stability of their referents, a sine qua non for realists. The second challenge is to make sense of successful scientific practice that was centered on entities that have turned out to be fictitious.

Isis, 2008

Looking in particular at the Scientific Revolution, this essay argues that, for all their differences, positivist commentators on science and contextualist historians of science ought to be committed to the view that counterfactual changes in the history of science would have made no significant difference to its historical development. Assumptions about the history of science as an inexorable march toward the truth commit the positivist to the view that, even if things had been different, scientific knowledge would still have ended up where it is. Perhaps surprisingly, the move away from "great man" history and the increasing emphasis among contextualist historians on the broad cultural influences on scientific thought and practice also imply that changes of a restricted or specific nature ought to have no significant effect on general outcomes. Unlike the positivist, however, the contextualist is willing to concede that things might have been different if the entire cultural background had been different. But in such cases the effect of such sweeping changes would be impossible to conceive and so deprive counterfactual history of any useful insights it might be supposed to offer.

Government and Opposition, 1975

FOR CONVENIENCE, I HAVE CHOSEN THE CONCEPT ‘SCIENCE’, ALTHOUGH the phrase ‘science policy’ would have expressed more clearly the relationship between scientific activity and its political causes and effects. The term ‘science’ is generally taken as free of any axiological or ontological value. The ‘liberal’ tradition assigns it an objective and neutral character, a point of view defended for instance by Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi whose search for truth and scientific work is situated above the political or ideological planes. Marxist ideology, however, places science on the level of beliefs, thus perpetuating 19th century ‘scientism’ and the vast positivist movement which, in a teleological way, bases the hope of a solution to all human problems on the development of science. ‘Objective Science’, ‘Scientism’, ‘Scientific Socialism’ are brand labels. But in all political systems, the combination of ideologies and of the resources created through scientific research confers a sym...

History and Theory, 2002

Metascience, 2012

The term 'ideology' often carries negative connotations, but when introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, it simply meant the 'Science of Ideas'. There is some oscillation in different parts of Biology and Ideology between the neutral and the derogatory use of ideology. In their introduction, the editors discuss the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, Robert M. Young and of sociology of scientific knowledge school. These recall the influence that society has in constructing scientific knowledge and argue that ideology is ubiquitous in intellectual life. Ideology, as such, is not reprehensible, it is inescapable.