.
..........................................Course Developed by Dr. Sambit Mallick

Paul Feyerabend, in his classic, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975) 1 , repudiates the very idea of scientific method. Both on grounds of logic and history, he calls into question the time-honoured belief that there is something called the method of science which distinguished science from the rest of our cognitive activities. This traditional view, which is called by Feyerabend “law and order” philosophy of science, maintains that there are certain unchanging norms which determine scientific practice.

Though philosophers of science, as we have seen, differ in their account of what they consider to be the method(s) of science, all of them maintain that there are at least two conditions which ought to be met by any theory that is proposed for acceptance. These conditions can be called “consistency condition” and “correspondence condition”. According to the consistency condition, the new theory must be consistent with the already well established theories. According to the correspondence condition, the new theory must correspond to the well established facts. According to Feyerabend, both these conditions are illegitimate in the sense that their acceptance hinders the progress of science. By insisting upon the first condition, the traditional philosophers of science, both positivists and Popperian, overlooked the fact that the so-called well established theories may themselves be faulty. Their faulty character might come to surface only if we allow acceptance of the new theory provisionally. In other words, if a new theory is inconsistent with the existing theories which we believe to be extremely well supported, the fault may not necessarily be with the new theory, but with the latter whose serious limitations may become obvious to us only by adopting an alternative theory. That is to say, by insisting upon the consistency condition, we may be thwarting the chances of a very good theory and remain blind to the serious lacunae of the existing theories which we might miss only because we remain confined to these theories. However, we may never become aware of these new facts unless we transcend these theories and adopt an alternative just as we cannot become aware of all the defects of our society unless we look at it from the point of view of another society.

Notes and References
1 See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge , Verso, London, 1975