Conflict and Harmony
摘要
Feyerabend offers a pluralistic, emancipatory, and humanistic approach, not to simply resolve the conflict between scientists and laypeople, between theorists and practitioners, or to force it into an outdated pseudo-harmony, but to transform it into forms in which the conflict can move. This offer is by no means as self-evident as it may appear. Feyerabend neither privileges practice (whether everyday practice or experimental practice) over theorizing, nor does he express aversions to scientific abstractions. Admittedly, he does criticize, in his usual manner, the “ideology” of those scientists who claim that only scientific methods are the royal road to knowledge. Certainly, he also sympathizes with practice, which appears to him more democratic, but he considers the relationship between theory and practice to be a complicated matter, and science to be a craft that connects theory and practice in a dialectical way. In this respect—and this is the core of Feyerabend’s offer—one can (must?) also criticize science without becoming a scientist oneself. A critique of science is appropriate when dealing with the findings of psychology, cancel culture, crises, catastrophes, wars, and much more. “A democratic critique of science is not only not an absurdity—it belongs to the nature of knowledge.” Ultimately, it is about the extent to which, through the conflict between social communities, through the diversity of their bodies of knowledge, traditions, conventions, and myths, and through the dispute over this diversity, new questions and perspectives for engaging with the world can be raised. “Anything goes: that’s true!”