A Critique of Paul Feyerabend's Article

"How to Defend Society Against Science"



John L. Waters



April 15, 2002



© Copyright 2002 by John L. Waters. All Rights

Reserved



-----------------------------------------------------



This article is a brief critique of Paul Feyerabend's

article, "How to Defend Society Against Science."  The

main point of this critique is to show that Feyerabend

is really attacking pseudoscience, not science. 

Furthermore, many individuals who wee geniuses in

science would have been labelled insane by modern

psychologists if modern psychologists had been present

to judge them.  In fact, modern psychology is a

pseudoscience and society really needs to be defended

against psychology and other pseudosciences.



To start things out, Paul Feyerabend argues that

science is being taught quite as religion was taught a

hundred years ago.  He says, "Scientific 'facts' are

taught at a very early age and in the very same manner

in which religious "facts" were taught only a century

ago."(1)  Perhaps the error is in education, then, not

in science.  After all, doing research science is very

unlike doing routine teaching work.  To better get the

point, compare your high school physics teacher with

Enrico Fermi.



Paul Feyerabend states that he wants to liberate

society from ideology.  This sounds like Jiddu

Krishnamurti, because Krishnamurti often said the same

thing!  More specifically Feyerabend says,  "I want to

defend society and its inhabitants from all

ideologies, science included."(2)  But what exactly is

ideology?  Isn't ideology just a set of rules that a

person learns to follow without questioning any of

them?  And isn't every little child required to follow

without questioning the many rules of family,

community, and school?  So in all seriousness.  How

can a philosopher honestly aspire to liberate humanity

from idology?  One can't take a man very seriously

when he is that quixotic.  Provocative?  Maybe. 

Profound?  Well.  Perhaps in a limited way.



In all honesty the heart of science and the pioneer

scientist includes the determination to explore a

subject that has been impossible for other people to

explain in a way which enables folks to predict and

manage.  On the other hand, the heart of religion, at

least in most religions, is doing what is required to

please the gods or God.  Thus, in order to be blessed

with good fortune, in the temple all the pious people

offer sacrifices to the gods or to God.  In

Christianity Jesus is regarded as the sacrificial

"Lamb of God."  Through prayers and sacrifices,

religious people expect to control events, and even go

to heaven after they die.  In science, however, the

experts predict or control events by using certain

repeatedly verifiable theories.  For example, using

Newtonian theory scientists predict lunar and solar

eclipses.  Scientists do not believe an eclipse is a

"sign from God," but instead is as regular and as

predictable an event as the falling of a feather

you've just let slip out of your grasp.  Through the

foregoing consideration an essential difference

between a religion and a science is clearly defined. 

This refutes Feyerabend's initial claim that science

is a religion.



Paul Feyerabend objects to the way science is taught

in the schools.  He wants a new school system which

presents a great many belief systems to young people

so that they truly have freedom of choice.  He says

for example, "But science must not be given any

special position except for pointing out that there

are lots of people who believe in it."(3)  He suggests

that science is taught to students who don't question

the teachings and who don't know all the other ways of

explaining a phenomenon.  So let's just take a

specific example.  Consider a chemistry class in which

the teacher is showing students how to balance

chemical equations.  If the teacher understands the

method, soon the attentive, careful, and well-prepared

students will understand it.  The method is

straightforward.  There's really not much to question

about the method itself.  Of course if one wants to

know how the method was devised, then that would be a

research topic in itself.  The method of balancing

equations works, and that's what's important both for

the theoretical chemist and the lab chemist.  One can

ask, in what other mythological system is there a

quantitative explanation given for what happens when

you place a bar of iron in a cup full of sulfuric

acid, for example.  There are hundreds of different

mythologies, fairy tales, and the like.  But these

stories don't explain in detail what happens in

chemical reactions.



Of course, if Feyerabend would suggest that the

teaching four  weeks of evolutionary biology be

balanced by spending four weeks teaching creationism,

then four weeks of teaching of chemical reactions and

balancing chemical equations should be balanced by

teaching four weeks of pure alchemy from out of the

Middle Ages.  The trouble is that not only are there

other theories of life development including

Empedocles' theory of life's development and there are

other theories of interaction of substances, so that

many a young scholar would consider that he or she was

being cheated out of an education that prepares a

modern student to compete in the modern job market. 

After all, none of the modern industrial labs or other

research labs use any of the antiquated theories.  So

one needs to wonder what Feyerabend considers

education to be FOR.



Aside from the above question concerning a student

revolt over the relevance of antiquated and obsolete

course material, the general following question

arises.  If we are going to allow one or two or three

alternative systems of explanation to be taught in

school as alternative explanations for a certain

natural phenomenon, or for the existence of the whole

universe, why  should we stop at three alternative

mythologies?  Who is going to say how many or how few

alternative stories are going to be taught in school? 

There are in fact hundreds of alternative mythologies

including astrology, numerology, the control of

natural phenomena by spirits or gods, and the fairy

tales of other nations and ethnic traditions, which

truly number in the hundreds if not in the thousands.



Furthermore, it remains a fact that whether the

teacher is teaching The Bible or Algebra, the good 

student will remember the rules in the lessons and

follow them.  The poor student will forget many rules

and not show mastery of the subject.  If algebra is

used by scientists and The Bible is used by religious

workers, Feyerabend is right in his assertions about

science being taught dogmatically.  But what's

different about science is the attitude of curiosity

in scientists and the verification procedures that

scientists use.  These attitudes and procedures are

taught by the general science teachers and the

professors who teach a specialized branch of science. 

It's this "heart" of science that Feyerabend glosses

over.  He expects his readers to be naive and not

notice this flaw in his argument.



In his book, "The Scructure of Scientific Revolutions"

and in his article entitled "Objectivity, Value

Judgment, and Theory Choice" The writer Thomas Kuhn

presents the idea that science advances when an old

theory is shown to be inadequate and a new theory is

shown to explain what the old theory could not

explain.(4)  The new theory  is advanced despite the

efforts of normative science to explain everything

while ignoring certain anomalous events.  Thus, for

example, for centuries the movements of the planets

was explained by resorting to epicycles and pericycles

in Ptolemy's old system with the Earth at the center

of the universe.  Normative science worked to explain

(or explain away) certain celestial movements of a

baffling nature.  The revolution or paradigm shift

came through the efforts of Copernicus, Galileo,

Brahe, Kepler, and Newton.  Now we are pretty much

back to normative science in astronomy.



In physics there was the normative science of

Aristotle, which was overthrown by the work of Galileo

and Newton.  This work produced a paradigm shift. 

Furthermore, there were those curious lodestones that

picked up pieces of iron, and there were those curious

substances that produced crackles and shocks when

rubbed together.  There was magnetism and

electrostatics but there was no electromagnetic

science.  Then Galvani, Franklin, Faraday, Oersted,

and Maxwell came along.  There was another paradigm

shift.  Radio and television came later.  Transistors,

lasers, and microchips came even later.



Centuries ago in medicine there was bloodletting to

cure disease.  This was normative science for many

generations.  With Pasteur, Semmelweis, and Lister

came the paradigm shift towards cleanliness in

bacteriological research in medicine.  Then came

antibiotics, Salk vaccine, and other blessings from

medical science.  One hopes that society doesn't want

to be protected from these healing innovations!  So

what is Feyerabend really talking about in this

article "How to Defend Society against Science"?



Perhaps instead of science, Feyerabend has in mind

objecting to the pseudoscientific professions which

are so very dogmatic in their teachings and which,

like religions, often presume to stand in moral

judgment over a person who is called into question. 

These professions are identified below.  Certainly

society needs to be defended against these dogmatic

moralists!  But they aren't really scientists at all. 

They are pseudoscientists.  This is where Feyerabend

goes wrong.  The error is serious.  He's been careless

with language.



Even so, with his professional writing skill,

Feyerabend influenced a lot of young, gullible persons

who hadn't carefully examined any one of the

pseudoscientific professions.  Consequently these

students or recent graduates bought into Feyerabend's

argument even though it is seriously flawed.  What

Feyerabend should have done is focus his considerable

literary talent on examining the pseudoscientific

professions of psychology, psychiatry, and educational

psychology.



The fact is, that psychology and psychiatry just set

themselves up as experts worthy of standing in moral

judgement over children and adults, so that the

normative standards in education and in other social

realms may be upheld without question.  There!  This

is the dogmatic authoritarianism that Feyerabend wants

to protect us from.  This is the fanatical zeal which

with a religious fervor can break into the life of a

child and force the child to take medications against

his or her will, just because the child is spending a

lot of time acting strangely and causing other

children to feel that he or she isn't "normal."



An example of an eccentric young person of genius

caliber is a boy who plays with fire and burns down a

barn by accident.  The same boy is found keeping a

chicken company for three days without eating a

morsel.  At school this boy asks so many questions

that he distracts everyone else from the teacher's

main lesson.  The medicating moralists are called in

and they start prescribing.  "It's for everyone's

good," they say.  That's what would happen to the

young Thomas Edison of today.  As it was, little Tommy

Edison went to school for five days and after that his

mother taught him at home.  He got beaten at school

for his eccentricity.  Edison simply couldn't have fit

into a school designed to focus on the

mean/median/mode child- the so-called "average" child.

 Nor did Edison the adult man do normative science. 

He was just a very curious and inventive person all of

his life.



Even though the young Edison exhibited eccentric

behavior, he wasn't really a psychotic, but other

geniuses in science definitely  behaved in ways that

the medicating moralists would insist should  be

evidence for a need to medicate.  For example,

Leonardo Da Vinci was often by himself creating

fanciful drawings of flying machines but also he

engaged in extreme flights of fancy into other realms,

and he had a decidedly flighty nature so that many of

the works he started he never actually finished.  In

today's especially moralistic and medication-oriented

places of employment, a flighty worker is considered a

very unsafe bet, and in fact is likely to be labelled

a manic-depressive.  But Leonardo da Vinci had many

redeeming qualities.  Without his emotional highs,

though, would Leonardo have produced such a vast body

of works?  Is medicating creative geniuses a really

good idea?  If so, what is the scientific evidence

that medicating creative geniuses is a good idea?



Another example of a creative genius who showed

decidedly eccentric behavior is Isaac Newton.  Isaac

Newton withdrew into  social isolation for long

periods and performed his now famous researches in

physics.  He had no trust in people and was paranoid. 

His life's devotion was to decipher the language that

God had written throughout the universe.  Furthermore,

Newton spent more time in studying holy writ than he

did studying nature.  To the modern psychiatric social

worker or psychiatrist, a man like Newton would be

classed as a potentially dangerous paranoid

schizophrenic.  The doctor would advise both

incarceration and medication.  This makes the point

again, that to the pseudoscientific modern

psychologist or psychiatrist, the eccentric behaviors

of a genius are easy to identify as evidence of

insanity.



What is really wrong with the psychoanalytic

establishment?  It's not that they diagnose certain

mental disorders and dispense medication.  In most

cases, if not all, the medications are of some help

both to the patient and to the patient's family.  What

is basically wrong with the psychoanalytic

establishment is that the psychologists and the

doctors are just an adjunct to the law enforcement

agencies.  They are an extension of the  police force.

 Their job is to keep the standards of the old society

intact, and preserve the old society, which is the

society that Feyerabend must be objecting to if he is

objecting to dogmatic authoritarian socio-political

regimes.  This does in fact sound like what Feyerabend

is objecting to, because on page 55 of the book

"Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science,

third edition" where he says, "I want to defend

society and its inhabitants from all ideologies,

science included."  This is where Paul Feyerabend

sounds exactly like Jiddu Krishnamurti.  However, if

Krishnamurti had been examined by a licensed

psychiatrist, the doctor would have had to conclude

that Krishnamurti was a psychotic.  After all, in the

book "Krishnamurti's Notebook" and in other places

Krishnamurti talked or wrote about the hallucinations

he had many times each day!   He describes his sense

of "the other," "the immensity," and  "the

benediction."  The medicating moralists just regard a

sense like Krishnamurti's as something bizarre for

them to eliminate.  Like the fanatical religious

fundamentalists, these psychologists and psychiatrists

preoccuppied with conventional perception and

conventional ideation tend to think alike.  Moreover,

some of them have invested in pharmaceutical

companies, and when one is an investor, one's heart is

more on drumming up business and making money than on

doing real science.  This  then is a false science or

psuedo-science that society needs to be defended

against, not the physics, chemistry, biology and other

real sciences that have produced so many different

breakthroughs in understanding so many different

natural phenomena.  The human phenomenon moves ahead

not by conventional perception and conventional

thinking, but by means of visions, dreams, and

intuitions often concealed by the creative person

until long after the novelty has been

accepted...because of the pseudoscientific nature of

today's conventional psychology and educational

psychology.



A reference to future science helps us understand how

psychology and psychiatry will become more scientific

and less oriented to making a profit and/or acting as

an adjunct police force.  A true science is

non-judgemental.  The true science of humanity won't

enforce some antiquated social standard of thinking,

feeling, and acting.  The true science of humanity

will study individual human brain activity and

individual human behavior not for the purpose of

trying to force the person to return to his or her

former state but instead for the purpose of exploring

and understanding the atypical behavior and brain

activity, so that at least in some cases, the

productivity of atypical children and adults can be

increased and improved, rather than eliminated.



From which discipline should society be defended- the

first discipline, which takes the brain of a

developing atypical child-genius and works to subdue

the youthful brain activity so that the child is more

docile, and more easily dominated in the classroom

environment, or the second discipline, which takes the

brain of a developing child-genius and treats it so

that this brain is helped to grow naturally and

develop to its full potential?  Why most sensible

people would say that society needs to be defended

against the fake science that disables brains, not the

real science that enables brains.  But in reality the

first discipline, the disabling discipline, is modern

academic culture backed up by the police and by the

medicating moralists.  The second discipline hasn't

yet been created.  It is the true science of

identifying special talent in atypical children and

nurturing that talent with care so that it develops

and grows to mature productivity.



In the preceding paragraphs, certain well-known

creative geniuses in science have been shown to

exhibit eccentric behavior sufficient to suggest a

manic-depressive disorder or some other

psychopathology.  It's natural to conclude that a

certain number of young persons who think, feel, and

act in unusual ways are of genius caliber rather than

insane.  The authorities in educational psychology,

psychology, or psychiatry, however, aren't able to

distinguish the potential creative geniuses from the

potentially dangerous persons, quite possibly because

scientifically there is no distinction.   Rather than

nullifying the process of creative genius with

medications, the doctors need to understand the

process of creativity itself and this is future

science.  The trouble is that right  now psychology

and psychiatry are not yet true science.  They attack

the eccentric children who have the potential to

develop into creative geniuses.  In this respect

psychology and psychiatry are pseudosciences and until

psychology and psychiatry become true sciences society

truly needs to be defended against them.



Notes



1.  Klemke, E.D., Hollinger, Robert, Rudge, David

Wyss, with Kline, A. David "Introductory Readings in

the Philosophy of Science" Prometheus Books Amherst,

New York 1998 page 56



2.  ibid page 55



3.  ibid page 62-63



4.  ibid pages 435-450



John L. Waters





The information on this page represents that of John Waters and not 

necessarily that of Humboldt State University. John Waters takes full 

responsibility for the information presented.





This page is maintained by: John Waters



  

TOP