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Essay / Science does not know what is best - 1801
I will defend Paul Feyerabend in this article. I will argue that Peter Godfrey-Smith does not represent Feyerabend charitably or accurately. Godfrey-Smith believes that Feyerabend's deep conviction was that "science is an aspect of human creativity." This is partly correct, but Feyerabend was far more concerned about human well-being and against domination and dogmatism. He was also worried about Western scientific imperialism. I will refer to a number of articles in this article. How to defend society against science, against method, theory and reality, and against freedom (to a lesser extent), will be my main reference documents. A few mentions of Lakatos and Kuhn will also be present. I'd like to introduce a little about each of these, before diving into Feyerabend's arguments, because I think they provide an important framework for understanding Feyerabend. Feyerabend wrote as a contemporary of Kuhn. Kuhn used a historical perspective to evaluate scientific progress and came to the conclusion that science goes through "normal" periods and "revolutions." “Paradigm shifts” are what happens at the culmination of a scientific revolution, and these shifts are inevitable. Kuhn asserts that there cannot be one scientific method above others, due to the fact that there is incommensurability between paradigms. Many critics have interpreted this as an implication that science is not rational. Kuhn denied this, but Feyerabend went all in on it. In How to Defend Society Against Science, Feyerabend states that we should not view science as special and that it does not deserve the status it currently enjoys. Science often harms society and we must be careful when engaging in it. As careful as possible ... middle of paper ... is to. It is therefore easy to distort things and change allegiance to the truth in daily affairs into allegiance to the Truth of an ideology which is nothing other than the dogmatic defense of that ideology. And it is of course not true that we must follow the truth. Human life is guided by many ideas. The truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others. If Truth, as some ideologues understand it, comes into conflict with freedom, then we have a choice. We can give up freedom. But we can also abandon the Truth. (We can also adopt a more sophisticated idea of truth that no longer contradicts freedom; this was Hegel's solution.) My criticism of modern science is that it inhibits freedom of thought. If the reason is that he found the truth and is now following it, then I would say there are better things than first finding and then following such a monster..”