Feyerabend and Mill on Transformative Experience and Science's Authority.

It’s Feyerabend’s centenary. And I have been asked to comment on a paper by Stephen Turner (USF) that is forthcoming in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 2024. More than twenty years he ago drove me around Tampa in his Alfa-Romeo (or perhaps a Lancia) during an ill-fated campus visit. They preferred not to fill the line that year rather than hiring me. Make of that what you will, but I read Spinoza’s Ethics for the first time on the flight down in preparation for my mock class (which, as it turned, was an actual class meeting that week on Spinoza’s Ethics). It’s hard to feel bitter if one’s intellectual life has been enriched eternally.

For most of my life I heard that Feyerabend was a terrible philosopher of science. And it’s true that most of his arguments are pretty crummy, and that many of his works post Against Method have a rather self-referential quality to them. (He would have been an excellent blogger!) Yet, the older I get the more often I catch myself thinking that if I had ‘stayed’ in philosophy of science professionally I would have ended up concluding Feyerabend got many of the big issues right. After all, Feyerabend’s best arguments (which are immanent critiques) are devastating.

Anyway, in the paper sent to me, Turner cites Feyerabend’s (1978) Science in a Free Society, so while I am mulling my response, I have been reading around in this collection of essays when I have a spare moment.

In the earlier Against Method, Feyerabend repeatedly draws on Mill often explicitly quoting On Liberty (and the Autobiography), including the memorable footnote, “There is no Harriet Taylor in Popper's life.” Feyerabend summarizes the key take-home message as follows, “pluralism of ideas and forms of life is an essential part of any rational inquiry concerning the nature of things,” (p. 31; see also the reiteration at the end of the chapter on p. 38.) At one point, Feyerabend also exhibits familiarity with Mill’s System of Logic (p. 260, n. 8).

This has generated something of a specialist literature on using Mill’s On Liberty to interpret Feyerabend and, how exactly, Feyerabend’s use of On Liberty can be reconciled with Mill’s account of science in System of Logic (see Elisabeth A. Lloyd 1997 here; Kent W Staley 1999 here; Stuan Jacobs 2003 here).

What’s peculiar about the passage from Against Method that I quoted is that pluralism of ideas and — echoes of Wittgenstein — forms of life are treated as ingredients and so a means toward rational inquiry. To put this in quasi-Kantian terms, this seems to make practical knowledge widely understood subservient to theoretical knowledge. Or to put it differently again, the justification for (let’s stipulate) our good ways of living is the advance of knowledge. I don’t want to call this a barbaric view, but there is something decidedly anti-humanistic about it. It’s an open question to what degree this is really Mill’s position, but I found it surprising if it were Feyerabend’s all things considered view.

Perhaps, the previous paragraph is all too highfaluting. So, let me rephrase the point. Feyerabend seems to treat political life as subservient or a subset of scientific life. And this is at odds with his wider program of what we may call disestablishing science from its political pre-eminence and epistemic monopoly position in society.

So much for set up.

This made me think that there is something odd about Feyerabend’s use of and appeal to Mill. In fact, upon closer inspection, Feyerabend is also a fierce critic of Mill. The criticism seems to have escaped notice (although I would love to hear otherwise). At one point Feyerabend makes the following distinction:

There are therefore at least two different ways of collectively deciding an issue which I shall call a guided exchange and an open exchange respectively.

In the first case some or all participants adopt a well-specified tradition and accept only those responses that correspond to its standards. If one party has not yet become a participant of the chosen tradition he will be badgered, persuaded, 'educated' until he does and then the exchange begins. Education is separated from decisive debates, it occurs at an early stage and guarantees that the grown-ups will behave properly. A rational debate is a special case of a guided exchange. If the participants are rationalists then all is well and the debate can start right away. If only some participants are rationalists and if they have power (an important consideration!) then they will not take their collaborators seriously until they have also become rationalists: a society based on rationality is not entirely free; one has to play the game of the intellectuals.10

An open exchange, on the other hand, is guided by a pragmatic philosophy. The tradition adopted by the parties is unspecified in the beginning and develops as the exchange proceeds. The participants get immersed into each other's ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world-views may be entirely changed - they become different people participating in a new and different tradition. An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual or an entire culture, while a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange has no organon though it may invent one, there is no logic though new forms of logic may emerge in its course.—Against Method, 227-228; see also Science in a Free Society, p. 29, which omits the next paragraph which starts with “An open exchange establishes connections between different traditions and transcends the relativism [of points iii and iv]…”

Now, it is worth noting, first, that Feyerabend has moved here from philosophy of science to political theory. We are in the realm of all collective decision making. Scientific decision making is merely a subset of wider decision-making. So, this reverses the impression one gets from the use of Mill at the start of Against Method.

Second, before we misunderstand Feyerabend, he is clearly using the two kinds of decision making as Weberian ideal types. In practice, there is a lot more diversity within them and hybrids among them.

Third, notice that in ‘open exchange’ something like transformative experience (in L.A. Paul’s sense) occurs: “they become different people participating in a new and different tradition.” (emphasis added.) The significance of this for political ontology (and perhaps political philosophy) is rather far-reaching. I return to this some other time, but use it below. The main present point is that open exchange is a process of intense hybridization—both sides end up radically altered.

Fourth, and crucially, while contemporary readers (alerted by Iris Marion Young) may assume that something like Habermas’ account of deliberative democracy is Feyerabend’s intended target (as the exemplar of guided exchange). Feyerabend’s actual target is explicitly Mill! (That’s note 10.) For, he sees Mill as the advocate of guided exchange. In fact, the note reads: 'It is perhaps hardly necessary to say', says John Stuart Mill, 'that this doctrine (pluralism of ideas and institutions) is meant to apply only to human beings in the ‘maturity of their faculties' - i.e. to fellow intellectuals and their pupils. 'On Liberty.'” (emphasis added to Feyerabend’s footnote).

Feyerabend seems to have been unfamiliar with Maurice Cowling’s (1963) Mill and Liberalism, which drawing on such passages and especially Mill’s System of Logic, treats Mill (quite plausibly), as advocate of technocracy and epistemocracy. (Because of Cowling’s own illiberalism, this work is not especially popular; see my work with Nick Cowen for an echt liberal version of the argument.) As an aside, that’s to say, the way to reconcile On Liberty and Mill’s Logic hinges on political philosophy common to both not through the scattered remarks on philosophy of science in On Liberty.

In fact, in wider context of Feyerabend’s argument it’s also quite clear that Feyerabend is picking up on the cultural superiority that Mill exhibits about which peoples have such maturity (for the wider argument see J. Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France and this paper by Duncan Bell).

This becomes quite clear in the material in Science in a Free Society that goes beyond the argument of Against Method, but clearly echoes it and simultaneous reveals Feyerabend’s reliance on Millian assumptions. At one point in responding to Agassi, Feyerabend writes:

The effect is that scientists and 'liberal' rationalists have created one of the most unfortunate embarrassments of democracy. Democracies as conceived by liberals are always embarrassed by their joint commitment to 'rationality' - and this today means mostly: science - and the freedom of thought and association. Their way out of the embarrassment is an abrogation of democratic principles where they matter most: in the domain of education. Freedom of thought, it is said, is OK for grownups who have already been trained to 'think rationally'. It cannot be granted to every and any member of society and especially the educational institutions must be run in accordance with rational principles. In school one must learn what is the case and that means: Western oriented history, Western oriented cosmology, i.e. science. Thus democracy as conceived by its present intellectual champions will never permit the complete survival of special cultures. A liberal-rational democracy cannot contain a Hopi culture in the full sense of the word. It cannot contain a black culture in the full sense of the word. It cannot contain a Jewish culture in the full sense of the word. It can contain these cultures only as secondary grafts on a basic structure that is constituted by an unholy alliance between science, rationalism, and capitalism. This is how a small gang of so-called 'humanitarians' has succeeded in shaping society in their image and in weeding out almost all earlier forms of life.—Science in a Free Society, pp. 135-136

First, Feyerabend relies on Millian assumptions in order to reveal a deep tension within contemporary accounts of liberal democracy. I have three things in mind: (i) Feyerabend stipulates a kind of stadial conception of human cultures. The special cultures are “earlier formers of life.” And (ii) the essentialism in which whole cultures are treated. Finally, the idea that (iii) only the grownups (members of a particular culture, and within them those that have special intellectual status) can really participate in political life.

Second, Feyerabend clearly rejects (iii). I also doubt Feyerabend himself accepts (i) and (ii) because his normative account of ‘open exchange’ implies, as noted above, that such essentialism is wholly inadequate normatively as a treatment of culture and individuals (which are intrinsically hybrids).

Third, from the perspective of political decision-making Feyerabend throughout treats scientists and their intellectual champions as rent-seekers (notice that use of ‘capitalism’), who use their privileged access to state violence to silence others. (This violence is initiated with mandatory early education.) By contrast, Feyerabend’s own position is that all individuals and their collectives have the liberty to turn their backs on science and may well be carriers of traditions of knowledge very much worth preserving (his favorite example is Chinese medicine).

To be continued…