To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon for proposing that there is no such thing as a universal one-size-fits-all scientific method:
> Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.
He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered interesting or provocative?"
I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with his orneriness as with his science.
> Our sophistication increases with every choice we make, and so do our standards. Standards compete just as theories compete and we choose the standards most appropriate to the historical situation in which the choice occurs. [...] It forces our mind to make imaginative choices and thus makes it grow.
He often gets lumped together with continental thinkers and post-modernists like Foucault that he has nothing to do with.
Against Method is a very short and simple book and I suspect that if you'd get a physicist, a chemist, a linguist, an engineer, a mathematician, an economist and so on to read it, they'd all be extremely underwhelmed and would just say "yeah, sounds about right, what's all the fuss about and why is this even considered interesting or provocative?"
I also don't understand the other comments who say it's full of sophistry. There's a couple of "discussion" chapters at the end that maybe you will like or maybe you won't, but the bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of famous theories and experiments in physics such as those of Galileo, which he handles with much more attention to detail than the idealized versions you get from Popper and the like. He has a completely fascinating account of why the church didn't like Galileo, which had as much to do with his orneriness as with his science.