“Following the science”? Some Feyerabendian reflections.
“Follow the science” has become a standard mantra of politicians during the Covid-19 pandemic. A philosopher of science might ask what counts as ‘the science’, who decides this, and what it means to ‘follow’ the science. After all, some of the main themes in science studies of the last four decades has been that what we refer to as ‘science’ is deeply pluralistic and disunified. If so, it isn’t clear what we might mean by that singular term — thescience.
One philosopher of science likely to have questioned the mantra is Paul Feyerabend, who in an influential series of publications in the 1960s and 1970s challenged claims about the unity of science. In his writings, we find useful warnings about how our thinking about science can become badly distorted. If the sciences are to do good in the world, Feyerabend argued, they should be critically understood and appreciated. This means challenging attractive but distorting accounts of its nature and scope — what Feyerabend called ‘myths’.
When it comes to affirmation and appreciation of science, Feyerabend may seem an odd choice. During the 1970s, the heyday of his career, he dubbed himself an ‘epistemological anarchist’ and asked ‘what’s so great about science?’ One book, Science in a Free Society, even defended extreme forms of relativism and criticised scientists who criticised astrology and witchcraft. With his wide readership outside academic philosophy, Feyerabend soon came to the attention of the scientific community, and not always to his advantage — two writers for Nature famously nominated him as ‘the worst enemy of science’.
Today, that bad reputation lingers, even if not everyone regards it as such. Plenty of his fans enjoy the image of Feyerabend as a bold iconoclast, thundering against the dogmatic proclamations of science and preaching a liberatory gospel of radical epistemic and cultural pluralism. In reality, things are more complicated. One has to peels away the layers of rhetoric and set aside the excesses of some of his writings (Science in a Free Society is the worst offender — Feyerabend later refused to allow it to be reprinted). What remains, though, are constructive accounts of the complexity of the sciences.
A wiser way to read Feyerabend is to appreciate his aims, which are often missed by readers delighted by his provocations. Consider his most famous book, Against Method, subtitled ‘Outline of an anarchist theory of knowledge’. It is an engaging read but is more than just an entertaining display of intellectual pyrotechnics. Serious philosophical points are being made about the character of science and its relationship to the institutions and concerns of the social world. Consider the famous slogan of Against Method — ‘Anything goes!’ — which gets dramatically presented as the conclusion someone might reach once they grasp the main thesis of the book: there’s no such thing as the Scientific Method. Many philosophers saw the slogan and thesis as a reckless abandonment of the disciplined intellectual rules that made science successful and distinctive. Others loved what they saw as an insouciant attack on one of our major cultural and epistemic institutions — ones that critics saw as a main engine of environmental destruction, military power-mongering, and Western intellectual imperialism. Feyerabend’s claims resonated with the 1970s counter-cultural mood, ensuring the success of the book. It also helped cement the admirers’ image of Feyerabend as a rebel, a heroic traitor to his class — the bold professor who launched a trahison des clercs, courageously attacking the conceits and dogmas that oppress and dehumanise.
‘Anything goes’ actually meant something quite different. It doesn’t mean scientists can use any methods they like, or none. It doesn’t mean caprice should replace carefulness. It does not mean scientific practice consists of a constant whirl of creativity and innovation. Scientific practice, across its forms, is often ploddingly procedural — something that Feyerabend, as a trained physicist, knew all too well. ‘Anything goes’ was, he explained, the reaction of a methodological monist to the actual history and practice of the sciences. Methodological monism, the doctrine that there’s a single unified set of fully articulated methodological rules, which don’t change over time and apply to all sciences, whether the topic is supernovae or starfish. Feyerabend objected that if monists will insist on identifying some invariant rule, then the only one they can find across the history of the sciences would be that ‘anything goes’. But there’s a more sensible alternative: one can abandon the limits of monism and embrace a more complex and pluralistic image of science that recognises that its methods and goals vary enormously.
Feyerabend was remarkably understated when describing his main thesis in the opening sentence of Against Method:
The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research.
Rejecting methodological monism, isn’t the same as rejecting any and all structured processes of investigation. Denial of an allegedly single method doesn’t entail denial of methods, plural. Feyerabend endorsed the positive thesis that serious attention to the actual scientific practice confirm the fact and the necessity of a pluralism of methods What we will find — in the laboratory, at the workbench, or in the field — is that scientists use a whole range of methods. Some are highly formalised; others are more ad hoc. Some are very general; others are specific to their own disciplines. Some scientific work is creative and innovative and exciting. Some is very plodding and repetitive, involving the diligent performance of routine tasks. Indeed, if we study the history, then the methods of science can be as much as object of research as the world itself. We can learn more about the world and more about our ways of learning about the world.
In the 1970s, this pluralistic account of science was novel and given dramatic presentation as ‘epistemological anarchism’. These days, though, philosophers of science cheerfully talk of scientific pluralism, even if few modern advocates of pluralism in science note Feyerabend as a precursor. Maybe they are put off by the bad reputation. Interestingly, many of the other claims that helped make Feyerabend the ‘worst enemy of science’ forty years ago are nowadays received common wisdom of the philosophy of science. Against Method, for instance, emphasises that ‘science’ is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous array of different methods, practices, investigative projects, and styles of reasoning guided by all sorts of values and goals that are messily tied up with social and practical concerns and interests. This messier vision of science was quite different from the earlier positivist image of science — as cool, neutral, and objective by virtue of its alleged exclusion of ‘all-too-human’ biases and interests. But scholarship in the history and the sociology of science soon made it difficult to resist the messier and more pluralistic image.
If Feyerabend’s ideas correspond so well with what has come to be the best modern accounts of the nature of science, then why did it arouse such furore at the time? Part of the answer is that the defences of pluralism offered in Against Method were seen to lead to the apparent defences, by Feyerabend, of such heterodox ‘non-scientific’ practices and traditions as astrology and parapsychology — which critics naturally saw as reckless defences of pseudoscience, unworthy of a serious philosopher of science. But this doesn’t work as an explanation of the furore for one simple reason: he was not defending astrology and the rest of it at all.
A look at Feyerabend’s actual remarks about those heterodox practices shows that he was not defending their truth or efficacy. Maybe he did in live talks, fuelled by adrenaline, but the written remarks should be taken as the record of his actual views. What he actually does in those ‘defences’ is criticise groups of scientists who dismiss or derogate those traditions with weak arguments and in obvious ignorance of the actual details of what they are criticising. Feyerabend then skilfully exposed the poverty of their arguments and understanding — calling them out, in effect. In the case of astrology, the guilty party were the various eminent scientists who signed a statement in The Humanist which roundly condemned astrology. The problem is that, as Feyerabend bluntly put it, though they are clearly sincere in their concerns, they do not know what they are talking about. Their arguments were weak, and they were deeply ignorant of the details of astrology. They also got the history of science badly wrong and in these, and other ways, were conducting themselves very badly.
What irritated Feyerabend, I think, was the wilful failure by those scientists to exercise the intellectual virtues that are integral to the authority they enjoy. Such virtues would include carefulness, intellectual discipline, self-restraint, sensitivity to evidence, and a proper sense of humility. None of these virtues were on display in the Humanist statement. What its signatories manifested as an arrogant determination to criticise from a position of ignorance, a willingness to make assertions without a supporting argument, and a failure to do the work needed to make good on their claims. Feyerabend agreed with their conclusions but criticised their many culpable intellectual failings. Scientists ought to do better than to dismiss and derogate from a position of power — we should expect nothing less of our culture’s preeminent epistemic authorities. The ‘defence’ of astrology was, then, really a defence of the intellectual virtues that are integral to the authority of the sciences. We should and must expect better of scientists, says Feyerabend. Our respect for their expertise is consistent with — and, indeed, entails — that we hold them to the high standards to which they are trained.
The defences of astrology and other heterodox traditions are best understood as defences of the intellectual virtues of those we recognise as epistemic authorities. The virtues might sound boring: carefulness, respect for evidence and argument, the disciplined restraint needed to ensure that our manage our confidence, and a proper sense of humility in the sense of intelligently conforming to the current limits of what’s known. But boring virtues can still be vital to our personal and collective epistemic life.
We can also think of these intellectual virtues are converging into a wider set of sensibilities. What we see in Feyerabend’s many remarks on science is a clear sense of the complexities of scientific practice, a sense of our susceptibility to crude caricatures, and that very clear sense that we need to be constantly warned about ways of falling victim to the temptations to overgeneralisation and abstractions. Against Method’s critique of methodological monism was an effort to overcome the suspiciously tidy models of science promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by positivist philosophers of science. Bad models make for bad understanding, but, if applied, they can also be disastrous for scientific research and for our efforts to intelligently organise science for the human good.
Feyerabend wanted to restore a sense of the messiness of scientific activities to celebrate it, rather than demean it. If science becomes conceived as a mechanical enterprise, where unblinking automatons feed raw data into automated theoretical models that pump out predictions, then we do scientists an injustice. We omit the uncertainties of scientific research — the unforeseen outcomes, the surprises and novelties, the experiments that unexpectedly fail. Once these are out of the picture, we then lose sight of the roles of adaptability and creativity, of ad hoc experimental adjustments or on-the-hoof technical innovations. A scientist may sometimes follow standardised routines and rules, but they may also be forced to suddenly adapt and innovate. For Feyerabend, all this is obvious to anyone who attends to the actual history and the practice of science. Attention to actual arrangements is the guard against excessive abstraction. What one philosopher calls ‘the lure of the simplistic’ is very powerful. Many people naturally prefer to rely on easy explanations and simple stories, including ones about science — and sometimes easiness and simplicity are the right values to privilege. But not always. We need to become able to balance those values with others that matter to us — accuracy, comprehensiveness, fidelity to our actual social practices, and a disciplined sense of the complexity of the world and our ways of trying to make sense of it. For Feyerabend, if science is a search for truth, then we ought to strive to be truthful about science, too.
Criticism and conservatism
A punchy statement of Feyerabend’s attitudes to science is a 1975 essay titled ‘How to Defend Society Against Science’. Like many of his writings during this period, there’s plenty of hyperbole but also a clear statement of the very sensible thesis that there is ‘nothing inherent’ in scientific institutions and their products that make them ‘essentially liberating’. First, the methods and social arrangements of the sciences change over time, not always in ways that were decided after careful deliberation. Contingency plays a major role. Second, the development and direction of the sciences is shaped by industrial, commercial, cultural, and political interests, ranging from agribusiness to the tobacco industry to the military. Such external agencies introduce other aims and values, like profit and the monopolisation of knowledge, which are not necessarily ‘liberating’. Third, scientific resources are finite, so decisions must be made about where to concentrate them, which creates roles for all sorts of values. Unfortunately, there are many kinds of values and they all influence the direction, assessment, and application of scientific knowledge in ways both obvious and obscure. The whole subdiscipline of philosophy of science concerned with ‘science and values’ explores those complexities — in contexts ranging from the role of science advisors to our understanding of objectivity to the expert communication of scientific results. Obviously, all of this will make our thinking about science much more difficult. But that is a consequence of the complexity of the topic.
These days Feyerabend’s essay about defending society from science is reproduced online by anarchist and radical philosophy blogs who enjoy its strident call for defiant resistance to dominant ideologies. (Presumably they skip over the remark that Marxism ‘deteriorated’ into a ‘stupid religion’). But they only appreciate one half of Feyerabend’s stance on science, the one marked by radical questioning, defiant resistance and permanent criticism. But that’s only half of Feyerabend’s message. The other half — to be provocative -reflects a more conservative sensibility, not in a political sense, but, rather, a set of dispositions or values.
To grasp that sensibility, we can look to Michael Oakeshott, the British philosopher — and, incidentally, no fan of British political conservatism of the Thatcherite sort — for whom being a conservative should be understood as a set of dispositions, not doctrines. For Oakeshott, conservative dispositions include an appreciation of the actual arrangements of human life, a sceptical attitude towards abstract schemes, and a cautious diffidence about the radical and the rapid. Integral to a conservative stance is a deep hostility to determinations to zealously impose substantive visions onto the world without due appreciation of the limiting forces provided by the habitual and traditional structures of human life (Oakeshott’s bête noire was ‘the politics of abstract principle’, those efforts to impose abstract models onto the social world, without due sensitivity to its actual arrangements and complexities).
Conservatives, argued Oakeshott, should not oppose change tout court. On the contrary, they are obliged to actively pursue the ‘intimations’ inherent in their inherited ways of life, like the political enfranchisement of women, in his favourite example. Conservatism is therefore a strategy of change marked by a spirit of cautiousness and prudence — a precautionary awareness of the risks inherent in radical reform and a humble recognition that our best efforts can backfire unless we proceed with circumspection. Oakeshott warns that much harm in the world is done by those in a rush to do good. For an earlier conservative, Edmund Burke — reflecting on the terror of the French Revolution — it’s only with ‘infinite caution’ that one ought to ‘venture upon pulling down’ the organically evolved ‘edifice’ of a society. A conservative disposition, then, involves a set of unexciting-sounding moral-intellectual virtues — diffidence, cautiousness, humility, self-restraint, reticence, a respectful sense of history. But how does all this relate to Feyerabend the self-styled epistemological anarchist who celebrates creativity, condemns dogmatism, and celebrates a technicolour pluralism?
A crucial point is that Feyerabend’s celebrations of pluralism, creativity and the rest must be set in historical context. The mainstream mid-C20th philosophy of science was centred around what we can call a positivist conception of science — science as the preeminent intellectual and social authority was vouchsafed by its special features — some main ones being its superlative rationality, methodological unity, and value-freedom. Unlike the ideologically and subjectively contaminated arenas of art, politics, and perhaps philosophy, science reliably delivered neutral facts about the natural world through impeccable procedures which systematically nullified biases and other distorting factors. Science is rational, objective, and also critically self-correcting — a solid foundation, then, for deciding the best ways of organising the social world and so conducting human life. A stirring statement of this vision was the ‘Scientific World-Conception’ developed and promoted by the Vienna Circle during the 1930s. Later versions emerged, though, as cultural and political conditions changed: the value-free ideal became salient during the 1950s when McCarthyism made it prudent to protect the sciences from hostile scrutiny. If science is by its nature immune to political and social values, then it need not be subjected to the ideologically charged tensions of the period. Philosophers of science, too, could retreat to ‘the icy slopes of logic’ to carry on their work unmolested (a strategy that worked, insofar as American philosophy of science survived what could have been an existential threat).
Unfortunately, the value-free ideal became entrenched, such that when conditions did change for the better, it remains in place. By the 1960s, when Feyerabend appears on the scene, it had clearly become necessary to try and restore a more complicated account of science. This meant putting back into the picture those aspects of science that become occluded which, in turn, meant enriching the methodology of philosophy of science. History and sociology of science turned out to be crucial, hence the importance of the work of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. Others contributed their own restorations, like the nowadays-neglected British philosopher, Michael Polanyi, and the first generation of feminist philosophers of science.
It is at this point that the conservative aspects of Feyerabend start to come into view. Three stand out: the emphasis on what we might call the wisdom of practice, respect for the historical and traditional character of projects of enquiry, and hostility to the imposition by philosophers of abstract models underinformed by attention to actual arrangements. The wisdom of practice is shown in Feyerabend’s constant emphases on the varied activities that constitute ‘doing science’ — measuring, observing, testing, digging, weighing — as well as more abstract ones, like theorising and modelling. Through vivid case studies, we see how just complex the tangible work of science is from the perspective of those doing it. For that reason, history and sociology of science are vital sources of knowledge for serious philosophers of science. ‘Science’ emerges as a very complexly evolving tradition encompassing a motley of activities, institutions, and projects. A new scientist gets initiated into a whole structure of habits, skills, and customs, too tacit and complex to be systematically articulated in a set of tidy rules. Moreover, the tacit and traditional aspects of science are always evolving according to their own rhythms.
Confronted with this rich understanding of scientific life, the idea that one could in the abstract generate some workable model of effective enquiry and then impose it and expect results seemed absurd. Feyerabend was more than happy to make that point and do so in extremely provocative terms. Put more soberly, the useful point is that serious interventions into the work of scientists should be based on an informed understanding of the practical and social realities of what they do. Abstractness becomes a failing when it is not tempered by attentiveness to facts on the ground. Confidence in the advantages of one’s proposed reforms must be balanced by careful study of potential risks and backfires. Feyerabend was temperamentally hostile to the impulse to interfere with ways of life from afar — whether abstract models of ‘scientific method’ or whole ways of life. From the 1970s onwards, he was increasingly critical, in ‘postcolonial’ spirit, of the displacement and destruction of aboriginal ways of life, a main theme of his 1987 collection of essays, Farewell to Reason.
I see Feyerabend as urging us to abandon overly abstract, confining models of ‘science’ in favour of a far messier conception. The colourful ‘anarchist’ side of this is expressed in the calls for the radical challenging of boringly tidy positivist accounts of science. If that succeeds, it restores the more romantic vision of scientific activity as a vigorous arena of creativity and imaginativeness. There is also, though, the conservative side — the appreciation of tradition as a limiting factor on radical impulses, an emphasis on organically evolved practices that ought to be respected, and the principled reticence about the dangers of imposing abstract visions onto messy realities.
Obviously the ‘anarchist’ and ‘conservative’ sides must both be in the picture. Feyerabend emphasised the former, since he felt it fitted with the cultural mood and philosophical needs of the time and it anyway fitted his temperament. As he says in the opening pages of Against Method, the books’ claims should be understood as a medicine to cure the acute bout of monism currently afflicting the philosophy of science. If, at a later time, the anarchism became too pronounced, the relevant medicine would then be a healthy dose of sober conservatism. Whatever the medicine, the continual aim was to try to ‘cure’ the excesses and deficiencies which emerge in our efforts to understand the sciences. Sometimes, the medicine was unwelcome and efforts to administer it were difficult, requiring us to push back against entrenched habits of thought.
I’m not pretending Feyerabend always played the role of the doctor well. There’s too often too much rhetoric and he was often oddly reluctant to draw on relevant resources, like American pragmatism and feminist philosophy of science. But this is a failure of execution on his part, rather than a problem with the philosophical goals. Feyerabend urged us to attend to the realities of the history and practice of science, to acknowledge the complexities of what confronts us, and to actively resist failings like over-abstraction and over-generalisation. Inspired by J.S. Mill, Feyerabend was more than willing to play that crucial, if rarely rewarded role of Defender of Unpopular Opinion, at least in those cases where making a defence meant procedural discussion rather than mere provocative raillery.
Feyerabend was very aware of our tendencies to narrow vision and our susceptibility — as individuals and groups — to drift into badly simplified accounts of complicated and complicating realities. This awareness reappears throughout all of his work. It is there in the hostility to dogmatism, the insistence on proliferating and tenaciously generating alternative theories, and the insistence on maintaining an epistemically diverse community. It shows up in his annoyance at those willing to use lazy arguments because they think they are authoritative enough to get away with it. It also plays out in his criticism of the philosophy of science for methodological narrowness and his efforts to expand its resources. Taken together, the anarchist and conservative dispositions need to be harmonised so that we can sustain a pluralism based on respect for the history and practice of science just as much as vibrant creativity or radical diversification.
‘Following the science’
Feyerabend recognised that our attitudes towards science tend to become more distorted under certain conditions. It is always going to be difficult to maintain a properly complex understanding of the sciences — they are complex and changing. It often requires careful training to think through the messiness of science and, moreover, a lot of what is said about science fails to pass scholarly muster. An obvious task for the philosophy of science, then, is to try and help people to think critically about the sciences. Feyerabend called this a critique of scientific reason — an attempt to discern the changing limits of scientific knowledge and methods, to ensure we use them wisely. In practice, that critique orbited around two ‘fundamental questions’ — ‘what is science?’ and ‘what’s so great about science?’
The questions might be radical, but to ask a radical question is not necessarily to expect (or demand or even want) a radical answer. Feyerabend judged that, in the mid-20th century, philosophy of science had become too concerned with the first question to the neglect of the second. Claims about the ‘excellence of science’ should not be justified by appeal to the special methods of science — certainly not by appeal to some special thing called The Scientific Method, for there is no such thing, except in the pages of scientific textbooks and philosophy of science journals. Appeal to the special results of science should be cashed out with concrete case studies. After all, the automatic presupposition that scientific methods — whatever they might be — will always be better than existing alternatives has led to a lot of harm.
Obviously, it’s not just philosophical conceptions of science that can undermine our efforts to understand and use the scientific resources available to us. Some real-world social events could also work to shortcut our critical sensibilities. Moreover, our abilities to engage critically and carefully with scientific knowledge can be least attractive when they are most needed. Feyerabend, to be fair, was less interested in exploring social and political developments. But modern science and technology studies scholars emphasise that attitudes towards and judgements about science (or specific sciences, or specific scientific theories or specific techniques or specific applications) are invariably entangled with moral, cultural, and political events and concerns. For that reason, it can be unwise to speak in very general terms about ‘Science’.
A ‘critique of scientific reason’, of the sort Feyerabend urged, should therefore rely on those more plodding intellectual virtues — carefulness, thoroughness, attention to actual arrangements, and diligent scrutiny of particular cases. Feyerabend, when he wanted to, could put these points very clearly. In the preface to the Chinese edition of Against Method, he says that ‘simple solutions, whether of a dogmatic or a more liberal kind, have their limits. There are no general solutions.’ Consequently, insensitively imposed rules often do ‘more damage than good’, especially if we fail to pay serious attention to ‘social circumstances’ or omit public participation in cases where ‘scientific decisions affect public life’.
It is true that Feyerabend did not provide detailed proposals to cash out his convictions about the social and policy dimensions of science. It’s also clear that his own models of scientific expertise and his ventures into political philosophy are sub-par. Still, we can focus on the better-developed aspects of his work — the conviction that our collective thinking about how best to use science wisely for the human good should be informed by critical appreciation of its complexity and messiness. Avoiding abstract models, removing distorting ‘myths’, and encouraging informed appreciation of what science work is like — all these play a role. One can overcome myths like ‘science’ is singular, unified, methodologically monistic, value-free and so on. Granted, myths can serve certain useful functions at certain times under certain conditions. But as the philosopher of science Mary Midgley eloquently warned, myths about science are dangerous and should be handled with extreme carefulness. The temptations of simplistic distorted accounts of science are hard to resist and simplistic myths, once entrenched, are hard to uproot or replace with more complex alternatives.
Consider a topical example: the recent responses across most countries to the Covid-19 pandemic. No serious person doubts the important role of scientific expertise, even if there are many people who promote absurd worries about 5G phone masts spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But there are also contributions that philosophy of science can make to public discourses about the pandemic, too. Some of these rely on specific areas of expertise– from explaining the ethical complexities of clinical decision-making under crisis to explaining the epistemology of epidemiological modelling. But let me focus on a more general issue: interrogating the conceptions of science invoked by governments to justify their responses to the pandemic. After all, those responses are unprecedented, contrary to established practice and precedent, and also entail severe disruptions to the habits and relationships of social life. Moreover, responses like lockdowns and other extreme social restrictions cause enormous suffering and death and incur massive social, health, educational, and economic costs. Many of these costs will only become clear in the long-term and also disproportionally affect more vulnerable groups in the developed world and in the Global South. Given all these radical measures, an extremely strong justification is needed and it has come mainly from claims about ‘following the science’.
Some of the questions we could ask about the mantra include: which sciences are being followed? how are those sciences being represented to political decision-makers? what does it mean to ‘follow’ a science? if sciences disagree in their advice, how do we decide which to prioritise? The answer to these questions are not obvious. There’s no such thing as ‘science’ in the singular. There are different scientific disciplines with their own methods, evidential standards, theories, and hypotheses with their own internal varieties of opinion and perspective. Moreover, which sciences are included in the relevant decision-making processes? In the United Kingdom, the official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) tends to consist of mathematical disease modellers and behavioural psychologists. But pandemic policies, like lockdowns, impact on every aspect of life. Extreme social restrictions have profound effects on physical and mental health, the wellbeing of vulnerable groups, and the emotional and cognitive development of children. Would SAGE have been so enthusiastic about those restrictions if it had proper representation of child psychology or geriatric care or other expert specialisms?
Moreover, alongside medical and psychological sciences, we could ask about the inclusion of other disciplines that offer expertise relevant to assessment of pandemic policies. Some candidates include sociology, anthropology, and other social-scientific disciplines that call our attention to the wider impacts of these measures and put them in historical and political context. And why not also include disciplines not usually classed as ‘sciences’, but could still offer expertise of their own, like educational research, logistics, and economics? After all, the moral and political significance of lockdowns are enormous and cry out for sustained multidisciplinary attention rather than myopic focus on a handful of sciences. For instance, when the Global North locked down and sealed its borders, the effects on the Global South were enormous. In July 2020, the United Nations reported that ‘decades of work on poverty, healthcare, and education’ were being undone — with 71 million more people pushed into extreme poverty, with the main impacts on women and children. It may be that, after due reflection, most people would still judge this to be an acceptable outcome. But that’s far from clear and it seems these costs are ignored or seem to generate far less moral concern than one might expect.
Structural inequalities in the global economy and the international plight of women and children should command the concern of many of those who now proudly support lockdowns, border closures, travel bans, and other measures that systematically and disproportionally hurt vulnerable groups. It may be that these costs are judged to be acceptable and proportionate even after careful scrutiny of the data and even after sustained discussion and debate. But a properly informed debate of that sort would need a far more plural body of expertise. And anyway, many of the health, economic, and social costs are only just starting to become more apparent — and they are, of course, concentrated among populations who generally escape sustained notice and attention.
A further problem about justifying public policy by ‘following the science’ is that even very robust scientific evidence does not always point unambiguously to specific policy measures. Policies must be based on a combination of goals, costs, and facts and considered in the light of social values and the ways that policies would impact on different communities. The idea that science delivers neutral facts which should then determine policy obscures the trade-offs, differential impacts of policies, and the delicate balancing of competing values. It is vital to be informed by scientific research, but also by a range of other perspectives. It is also vital that we resist simplistic conceptions of science and to ensure that proper standards are being upheld. We must also avoid crude polarisations (like health vs. economy) and understand the complex networks of scientific advisory systemsthrough which politicians get advice. We should also scrutinise the ways that politicians can cherry-pick evidence and call them out if they do. We can ask about the best ways to compare different sorts of costs — tangible ones (like deaths due to Covid-19 or heightened rates of child abuse) and intangible ones (like lost life opportunities or loss of trust in the world). We can interrogate the connections between models and decision-making and the ability of models to accommodate impacts on interpersonal relationships, social inequalities, cultural practices, the economy, and the norms and precedents governing political life (assuming these things matter to us). As one critic of the ‘follow the science’ mantra put it, science could help quantify the effect of school reopening on SAR-CoV-2 spread and to quantify the educational losses from school closure, but no amount of ‘the science’ can tell us whether to open or close public schools. That depends on ‘values, principles, a vision of the type of society we want to be’.
Back to Feyerabend
I suspect Feyerabend would endorse this point. The sciences offer a remarkable range of cognitive and practical tools which can substantially improve many aspects of human life. But the sciences are also complex and often structured by uncertainties and they’re entangled with social and political institutions and the values and ideals of our culture. Science must therefore be used wisely, where that means realising that they are not mechanical sources of crisp, value-free prescriptions to be automatically implemented in public policy. The sciences can inform and illuminate, but there are other forms of expertise and understanding, too.
When Feyerabend made these points, he was not being ‘the worst enemy of science’ or being provocative for its own sake. What he was really ‘against’ were distorting conceptions of the nature of the sciences — ‘myths’ that tended to inflate its epistemic credentials in ways that interfered with our abilities to make proper judgments about the significance and authority of the sciences in our live. What’s so great about science? Well, it depends on what you mean by science and what the criteria of excellence are and who you are interested to benefit and who you are willing to harm or neglect. There are many forms of epistemic excellence and some of them are also found in humanistic disciplines, too. Science, by many criteria, will be great — but then we should ask whom our scientific knowledge is great for within a world so systematically unjust and inegalitarian and where so much of the existing scientific infrastructure is biased in ways revealed by feministand postcolonial science studies.
Above all, our engagements with the sciences should honour those unexciting conservative dispositions, like carefulness, fidelity to established precedent, and appreciation of the many and messy ways that scientific knowledge and institutions relate to the wider schemes of human life. It is precisely during times of crisis and fear that such virtues become all the more paramount, for it is then that we the risks become all the more acute. A critic might rely that the urgency of spring 2020 meant that we had to suspend some of our standards and precedents to take the necessary, radical action. But this should not be seen as a choice between carefulness or action, but something more difficult: the constant, delicate negotiation of competing moral, prudential, and epistemic values. That will never be easy but — as a trio of philosophers argued — it’s a task made all the more difficult by the politization and polarisation of public and political debate about the pandemic. Some things are difficult, but some things are needlessly made more difficult.
Feyerabend’s own writings can be understood as an attempt to clear away some false and distorting accounts of the nature and scope of science, so that we might be better placed to organise and direct is for the human good. Unfortunately, a deep cause of those misconceptions are an entrenched set of recurrent epistemic failings, that repeatedly play out at the individual and collective level — dogmatism, polarisation, invidious moralisation of debate, a preference for simplistic but convenient accounts of complicated realities, and other epistemic vices. Such vices will tend to flourish under acute conditions of uncertainty, urgency, fear, and distrust — contexts where we crave a world of clarity, certainty, and a clear sense of what must be done to ensure that life can go on. But such contexts also tempt us to succumb to conceptions of science that reflect those desires. In that case, we should learn to resist those temptations.
A good way of doing that is by engaging in a critique of scientific reason. It won’t yield an account that provides definite and unambiguous answers of the sort we crave. But it could offer more nuanced accounts of the ways that scientific, political, and cultural realities can be negotiated. Deference to science should be tempered by critical scrutiny — which can become much harder in cases where prevailing social conditions favour the former at the expense of the latter. Science is not inherently beneficial; it is really contingently beneficial. If and how it does good, and for whom and to what extent, will depend, among other things, on our success in recognising and overcoming the misconceptions manifested in the crass claims about ‘following the science’.
