ANYTHING GOES: FEYERABEND AND HOW SCIENCE REALLY WORKS

Somewhere in the popular imagination there lives a tidy little robot called The Scientific Method. It wears a lab coat, it never guesses, it never sulks, and it grinds out truth by turning a logical crank. Paul Feyerabend spent his life arguing that this robot is a fairy tale-and that the real story of how we come to know things is far stranger, far messier, and far more human than anyone wants to admit. Anything Goes follows the most provocative philosopher of science of the twentieth century-a former soldier who took three Soviet bullets and walked on crutches for the rest of his days, a man who declared that in science "anything goes"-as our guide through the genuine machinery of discovery. Here is penicillin found in a contaminated dish, uranium glowing on a cloudy day, continents that refused to stay put, and a famous eclipse expedition whose inconvenient photographs were quietly set aside. Here, too, is the darker register of human knowledge: science conscripted as a weapon, dressed up as ideology, gamed by metrics, and occasionally faked outright. >Keywords: philosophy of science, Paul Feyerabend, scientific method, epistemology, discovery, skepticism, knowledge

Pages: 270, Paperback, Independently published