Introduction: Reappraising Paul Feyerabend

This volume is devoted to a reappraisal of the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It has four aims. The first is to reassess his already well-known work from the 1960s and 1970s in light of contemporary developments in the history and philosophy of science. The second is to explore themes in his neglected later work, including recently published and previously unavailable writings. The third is to assess the contributions that Feyerabend can make to contemporary debate, on topics such as perspectivism, realism, and political philosophy of science. The fourth and final aim is to reconsider Feyerabend's place within the history of philosophy of science in the light of new scholarship.     

Overlapping ontologies and Indigenous knowledge. From integration to ontological self-determination

Current controversies about knowledge integration reflect conflicting ideas of what it means to “take Indigenous knowledge seriously”. While there is increased interest in integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in various disciplines such as anthropology and ethnobiology, integration projects are often accused of recognizing Indigenous knowledge only insofar as it is useful for Western scientists. The aim of this article is to use tools from philosophy of science to develop a model of both successful integration and integration failures. On the one hand, I argue that cross-cultural recognition of property clusters leads to an ontological overlap that makes knowledge integration often epistemically productive and socially useful. On the other hand, I argue that knowledge integration is limited by ontological divergence. Adequate models of Indigenous knowledge will therefore have to take integration failures seriously and I argue that integration efforts need to be complemented by a political notion of ontological self-determination.     

A tale of three theories: Feyerabend and Popper on progress and the aim of science

In this paper, three theories of progress and the aim of science are discussed: (i) the theory of progress as increasing explanatory power, advocated by Popper in The logic of scientific discovery (1935/1959); (ii) the theory of progress as approximation to the truth, introduced by Popper in Conjectures and refutations (1963); (iii) the theory of progress as a steady increase of competing alternatives, which Feyerabend put forward in the essay “Reply to criticism. Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam” (1965) and defended as late as the last edition of Against method (1993). It is argued that, contrary to what Feyerabend scholars have predominantly assumed, Feyerabend's changing attitude towards falsificationism—which he often advocated at the beginning of his career, and vociferously attacked in the 1970s and 1980s—must be explained by taking into account not only Feyerabend's very peculiar view of the aim of science, but also Popper's changing account of progress.     

A pragmatic account of mechanistic artifact explanation

A mechanistic artifact explanation is an explanation that accounts for an artifact behavior by describing the underlying mechanism. The article shows that there are different kinds of mechanistic artifact explanation: top-down and bottom-up explanation, and I also distinguish between less and more inclusive top-down explanations. To illustrate these different kinds of explanation, the behavior of a simple, fictional artifact is explained in different ways. I defend that which explanation is ideal, depends on pragmatic factors (e.g., the background knowledge of the explainee and the specific goal for which the explanation will be used). For each kind of explanation, the situations, goals and interests for which it is most appropriate are specified, resulting in a pragmatic theory of mechanistic artifact explanation. This theory is compared to Jeroen de Ridder’s account of the pragmatics of mechanistic artifact explanation.