"Pseudoscience after Feyerabend": Chiara Ambrosio and Ian James Kidd (Keywords: Epistemology; Objectivity; Science; Authority; Astrology)

This conversation was taken from our recent book, Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth, edited by Anthony Morgan. If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

Renowned philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend famously defended astrology, voodoo, witchcraft, Chinese traditional medicine, and other ‘non-scientific’ beliefs, practices, and traditions. It is partly for these defences that, during the 1970s, Feyerabend became famous – or, rather, infamous – and they contributed to his now established image as an self-styled “epistemological anarchist”. Critics later called him“the worst enemy of science”. In this conversation, Chiara Ambrosio and Ian James Kidd use Feyerabend as a starting point for thinking through many of the key epistemologicals, ontological, metaphysical, political, and ethical questions raised by pseudoscience. They also explore why pseudoscience became a topic in the history of philosophy of science and how it relates to newer insights into scientific pluralism.

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Ian James Kidd (IJK): I thought I would start by offering some context for today’s conversation. Our title today is “Pseudoscience after Feyerabend” and one might wonder about the after Feyerabend part. What is particularly distinctive about his relationship to pseudoscience and the philosophy of science? The first thing to acknowledge is that pseudoscience is a very vague and all-encompassing term. If you read any of the philosophical literature on pseudoscience, you’ll find an enormous range of positions, addressing everything from metaphysics to epistemology, ethics to sociology, so for our purposes here, we’re going to make it a little more manageable by focusing only on what Feyerabend had to say. I believe that Feyerabend had distinctive ways of thinking about pseudoscience that can be very useful and generative.

Feyerabend was a scholar of the history and philosophy of science. He would always remind us that you cannot do philosophy of science unless you know some of the history. One of the key tasks of the history of science is to track and assess changing understandings of science, and this is always going to be very historically fluid. One way to think about the concept of pseudoscience is that it was, in many ways, an attempt to demarcate the changing borders of science. For example, in the late nineteenth century, scientists like Sir William Crookes were researching psychical phenomena. People at this time were interested in newly reported kinds of psychical and spiritualistic phenomena, and one of the reasons for this interest is that many were intrigued to find out whether these kinds of phenomena could actually be scientifically investigated. It is partly by exploring these borderland areas that you try to get some changing sense of what science is. After all, borders can change. However, the problem with the pseudoscience debate is that you can only really try to mark out the borders of science if you have some criteria for what belongs on each side of the science/non-science border, and, much of the time, these criteria do not exist, or, if they do, they are engaged in a deeply dynamic and change-prone process.

Chiara Ambrosio (CA): At the time, a common discussion in philosophy of science circles was known as the “demarcation problem” – what is science and what is not? Many philosophers have tried to carve more sophisticated distinctions when it comes to the non-science part of the science/non-science distinction. I think Feyerabend was one of the great voices in saying that we must look at the history of science in these discussions: it is one thing to look at science/non-science as it is understood now, but it is quite another to look back and find out, for example, that Newton practiced alchemy, religion was woven into ideas of the scientific revolution, or that astrology was part and parcel of how astronomy was practiced. What philosophers like Feyerabend really brought to the fore was that if we want talk about what counts as science, we need to develop it hand-in-hand with a certain type of historical sensitivity. If you look at the demarcation problem from this perspective, then there is a lot more that you can say – not so much over whether X is or is not science by our current standards, but in regards to the values and commitments that drove scientists towards conceptions of the scientific.

IJK: I think all you’ve just said sets up at least three important points that Feyerabend was trying to teach us about pseudoscience. The first is: when we are trying to seek out the demarcation criteria, are we trying to seek ahistorical criteria? When Newton was undertaking his = mathematical physics he is also working on biblical prophecy, the end of the world, and claims about what angels know about the cosmos. To us, this is very unscientific, but, for him, there was no sense of tension. As conceptions of what science is change over time, so too, presumably, do conceptions of pseudoscience.

The second thing I think Feyerabend would want to emphasize is that whenever we debate pseudoscience, we usually have very specific pseudosciences in mind. There are always certain “hot button” sciences. In the late nineteenth century, we had telepathy and psychical research, but at later stages of history, from the 1950s onwards, ufology starts to come to the fore. Then in the 1970s, psychical phenomena, telepathy, and remote viewing and other forms of extrasensory perception) come into popularity. There is a changing parade of different alleged pseudosciences that become relevant at different times for different reasons.

A third thing that Feyerabend wanted to emphasize is that, when people criticize pseudoscience, they use a whole range of different arguments that they do not always distinguish. One common argument today against psychical phenomena is a metaphysical argument which claims that “reality is just not like that”: there is no disembodied spiritual realm, no psychical realm, no rebirth, or telepathy. These things cannot be objects of sciences because they don’t exist. This argument is quite different, however, from arguments against cryptozoology, for example. There is nothing metaphysically impossible about large unknown anthropoid ape-like creatures – it is just very unlikely that they still exist. Feyerabend himself briefly discusses so-called “ancient astronaut theory”, the idea that many ancient civilizations have what seems like unusually advanced scientific knowledge, metallurgical skills, construction abilities, and scientific knowledge. What’s the best explanation for this? For a thinker like Erich von Däniken, the best explanation can be found by consulting their mythologies. In a series of books, he argued that there are intelligent extraterrestrials coming from the heavens as culture bearers granting human beings advanced technologies. Question: How do the ancients have this knowledge? Answer: Aliens brought it to earth. One obvious objection to this is that it is an incredibly racist explanation about how ancient Indians and Africans had advanced knowledge.

The criteria we use to discuss science and pseudoscience are incredibly context dependent.

CA: Precisely as you point out, the criteria we use to discuss science and pseudoscience are incredibly context dependent. Sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn, for example, introduced the idea of boundary work. Here, he honed in on historical case studies, asking the questions: What is at stake? What are the scientists trying to secure when they are claiming X counts as science and Y does not? He claimed that it was about securing financial resources, power, the credibility of the field, and, of course, the knowledge that you got out of it. But these are all so entangled. I think this approach is something that may be complementary to Feyerabend.

IJK: There is a good story for us to tell about why Feyerabend is unpopular among some philosophers. A main reason for this is Feyerabend’s relationship to various pseudoscientific practices. There are many reasons that philosophers of science used to dislike Feyerabend. He was provocative, he flirted with cultural relativism for a time, he could be quite aggressive in his writings in ways that did not always help him, he was not wholly innocent when it came to his bad reputation. That said, he started working within a positivistic kind of philosophy of science, collaborating with people like Karl Popper. He did a lot of philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, in which he was very well trained. At least in this sense, he starts off as a very conventional scientist, but this all begins to “go wrong”. Part of this going wrong is, of course, his views on pseudoscience.

CA: One of the things that I think happened was that he started looking into historical case studies and from there he developed views that gradually were misunderstood. One example can be seen in Feyerabend’s comments (found in his 1978 book, Science in a Free Society) on the 1975 statement, “Objections to Astrology” which gathered 186 signatures to express a concern about the increased acceptance of astrology in many parts of the world, aiming to caution the public against the unquestioning acceptance of the predictions and advice given privately and publicly by astrologers. Many famous scientists signed this objection, from Hans Bethe and Sir Francis Crick to Sir John Eccles and Konrad Lorenz. Now, Feyerabend takes issue with this document, citing its “religious and authoritarian” tone and the illiteracy of its arguments. He brings up a textbook on witchcraft from the sixteenth century, showing how even the Catholic Church had engaged with witchcraft in a way that was more open-minded than these 186 scientists arguing against astrology.  This is interpreted as Feyerabend at his most relativistic and postmodern. But he is not exactly claiming that astrology is scientific, but, rather, that if we want to engage with it, we need to do our work properly.  This is about arguments. If you are in a position of authority, it is wrong to assert that there is a concern about astrology and that the uneducated public should not pay attention to it if you have not done the necessary work to warrant making such an assertion.  

IJK: The statement itself, as Feyerabend points out, is not a scientific document but rather a statement of authority. You don’t establish claims in the sciences by gathering signatures. Scientific truth does not work on a petition basis! As Feyerabend points out, in a very funny but also very critically effective fashion, that this is a poor excuse for science. When one of the signatories, a Nobel Prize winner, was later interviewed by the BBC on why exactly astrology is bunk, he replied that he could not say as he did not know anything about it! As Feyerabend points out, these folks do not know the history or methodology of astrology, and so their arguments against it are very weak, if not ridiculous. These scientists are signing the statement by appealing to their scientific authority and yet they display none of the virtues or standards of scientific inquiry. Scientists should not rely upon assertions and appeals to authority; they should systematically offer and assess arguments and evidence.

I think this astrology case goes some way to explaining why Feyerabend acquired this negative reputation, especially as elsewhere in his work in the 1970s, he seems to defend astrology, witchcraft, parapsychology, alternative medicine, and parapsychological phenomena. I can see why people thought that he had lost the plot. Then again, if you do look at what he says about these phenomena it seems to me very clear that he is not making a general claim that “anything goes” – his notorious and much-misunderstood slogan. He displays enormous knowledge of these subfields, but knowing a lot about the history of witchcraft does not mean that you endorse witchcraft, and, in most cases, Feyerabend does not indicate any commitment to them. Once you peel back some of his rhetoric, he’s making far more modest points.

CA: I think what Feyerabend taught me is the ability to listen seriously, because there might be all kinds of reasons why people will espouse ideas that we do not subscribe to. This is one of the things that makes working on Feyerabend especially timely because there is a lot of grandstanding today, but there is very little listening and engaging in meaningful conversation. In our current day and age, discussions can turn violent when they are condensed, say, on social media.

IJK:  One thing I appreciate in Feyerabend’s work is that there is a sort of double principle of humility at work. For example, people might look back and think: “What morons those Victorians were! How could they believe in this?” But there’s a kind of arrogance there, the arrogance of thinking “if I’d have been there – in that environment, in that context, with those influences – I would have been able to rise above it; I would not have been fooled”. The idea that we have a direct line to the truth is immensely arrogant, and Feyerabend was deeply engaged in trying to break this sort of conceit. A second kind of humility is recognizing that there are deep contingencies to what we count as science. Saying that history is contingent does not mean that you throw your hands up in the air and say it is all relative; we can still work hard and engage our epistemic virtues and do good research, but we should do so with an awareness of contingency. Maybe something seems ridiculous to us now, not because we have brilliant arguments against them, but because history took us in a direction where these things seem obvious to us. But if history had unfolded differently, these same things would seem obviously wrong. One point about pseudoscience is that whatever scientists and philosophers think about it, a lot of people are interested in it, so why go for this attitude of dismissal? That is a terrible way to engage with the public and there are better ways to do it.

Maybe something seems ridiculous to us now, not because we have brilliant arguments against them, but because history took us in a direction where these things seem obvious to us.

CA: We have agency in deciding what kind of world we want to live in, and I think science is a big part of that conversation. With Feyerabend we can see, in some ways, the beginning of this. Thomas Kuhn also talked about values from a epistemological perspective, and philosophers of science now work from a more fully fledged account of the impossibility of removing values from science. From the vantage point of an approach to science as a kind of social construction which cannot be separated from other modes of culture, does the label “pseudo” presuppose a metaphysical notion of science as a privileged method of access to truth, relative to other cultural discourses? I personally do not like using the word pseudoscience precisely because of this. Creating this pseudoscience container is problematic precisely because it puts one in the position of deciding where to draw the boundary between science and non-science.

IJK: One of Feyerabend’s signature claims is that there is no one thing called the scientific method. Feyerabend pointed out that anyone who has done any science or knows anything about the history of science, knows there is not a single scientific method. Science is extremely pluralistic. In fact, there is no single thing called ‘the sciences’, and if this is the case, then this also means that there cannot be any single demarcation criteria. But then Feyerabend will say: it’s science, it’s human inquiry into reality. Humans are complex, reality is complex, and therefore it’s going to be much messier and more complicated and more work than is represented, for example, in the “Objections to Astrology” document.

CA: How would you say that the various versions of the demarcation problem are reflective of their political context?

IJK: One easy example is the idea that dialectical materialism is a pseudoscience – this is a popular example. But crucially, it was a popular example whilst the Soviet Union and Marxism were considered a powerful, threatening cultural and ideological forces. It was very important for the enemies of Communism and Socialism to show that dialectical materialism is bogus because that was the alleged science at the heart of a certain emerging political vision of the world. I think this would be a classic example of a politicized pseudoscience.

CA: In addition to pseudoscience, deviations from the scientific ideal that come to mind are so-called “anti-science” or “bad science”. Do you think there are any interesting crossovers between pseudoscience, anti-science, and bad science, and do you think there are other categories for deviations that you can think of in addition to these three?

We need ways of educating people about science that includes history and philosophy, that will help to insulate them against different excesses, and encourage a much more sensible attitude towards the sciences.

IJK: One term that’s often used in these debates is “scientism”, a very difficult term to get a grip on. The bland definition is that scientism involves exaggerated accounts of the nature, scope, and power of science. If you defend pseudoscience, you are sometimes accused of being anti-science, but then again, these same people also get accused of being too supportive and interested in science – they are scientistic, they have absurdly inflated ideas about the sciences. Some people that champion scientism do so because they believe it is the best way to defend the sciences. They see pseudoscience and anti-science as excesses in the negative direction, so they support the excesses in the positive direction in the hope that what will result is a sort of equilibrium in the middle. Then again, as was pointed out by Feyerabend, if you try to proceed in a debate by pushing things to the extreme, you are going to end up with polarization from one extreme position to another. Instead, what you really want is a much more sensible middle course which will lack all the drama and the excitement. Feyerabend himself, of course, often got this wrong by being excessively provocative and temperamental! Another thing that makes people more vulnerable to pseudoscience is a general ignorance about science, which is, at least in part, a problem of science education. We need ways of educating people about science that includes history and philosophy, that will help to insulate them against different excesses, and encourage a much more sensible attitude towards the sciences.

Further Resources:

Chiara Ambrosio, “Feyerabend on art and science”. In K. Bschir, & J. Shaw (Eds.), Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays. Cambridge University Press, 2021

Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society. Verso, 1978

Ian James Kidd, “Feyerabend, science and scientism”. In K. Bschir & J. Shaw (Eds.), Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical essays. Cambridge University Press, 2021

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