Against Method

Excerpts

Let me therefore warn you that it is not my intention to inform, or to establish some truth. What I want to do is to change your attitude. I want you to sense chaos where at first you noticed an orderly arrangement of well behaved things and processes.

Imre Lakatos, who loved dramatic gestures, notified Interpol and, indeed, Interpol found my manuscript and returned it to me.

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

It is thus possible to create a tradition that is held together by strict rules, and that is also successful to some extent. But is it desirable to support such a tradition to the exclusion of everything else? Should we transfer to it the sole rights for dealing in knowledge, so that any result that has been obtained by other methods is at once ruled out of court? And did scientists ever remain within the boundaries of the traditions they defined in this narrow way? These are the questions I intend to ask in the present essay. And to these questions my answer will be a firm and resounding NO.

we may use hypotheses that contradict well-confirmed theories and/or well-established experimental results. We may advance science by proceeding counterinductively. Examining the principle in concrete detail means tracing the consequences of ‘counterrules’ which oppose familiar rules of the scientific enterprise. To see how this works, let us consider the rule that it is ‘experience’, or the ‘facts’, or ‘experimental results’ which measure the success of our theories, that agreement between a theory and the ‘data’ favours the theory (or leaves the situation unchanged) while disagreement endangers it, and perhaps even forces us to eliminate it. This rule is an important part of all theories of confirmation and corroboration. It is the essence of empiricism. The ‘counterrule’ corresponding to it advises us to introduce and elaborate hypotheses which are inconsistent with well-established theories and/or well-established facts. It advises us to proceed counterinductively.

there is not a single interesting theory that agrees with all the known facts in its domain

An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on)