Paul Feyerabend argued for 'Epistemological Anarchism,' that in order to do truly good science, one can't rule out alternative methods, ad hoc hypotheses, mythology, religion and wishful thinking. Using the example of Galileo, he shows how science's greatest strides are made by deliberately being "unscientific" in the way that court scientists tend to think nowadays.
https://notrelated.xyz/https://notrelated.xyz/rsshttps://lukesmith.xyz/donate0:00 Intro
1:29 Logical Positivism and The Demarcation Problem: Science vs. Pseudoscience
3:35 Scholastic Holism
4:21 The Rise of "Scientism"---the Positivist rejection of metaphysics (and ethics and religion)
5:00 Ludwig's Cabin and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Positivist minset.
8:03 Popper (Conjectures and Refutations) and Falsificationism as the standard for "science"
9:09 Marxism and Freudianism as non-falsifiable
11:22 Black Science Man and Pop-Science
12:20 Issues with Falsificationism
17:52 Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
20:41 Paradigm Shifts, not "facts"
25:30 Feyerabend's "Against Method" and Epistemological Anarchism
27:50 The False and True Galileo: Galileo was a Fraud and Troll
31:13 Why Galileo was "wrong"
35:36 Galileo's "pseudoscientific" instruments and methods
38:19 Science needs "pseudoscience," Descartes also destroyed
40:15 Feyerabend on Galileo's methods
41:40 Donations and On a Not Related! book? On mp3, ogg, opus.
45:54 Irme Lakatos and on "For and Against Method" (1999)
48:02 Should it be that "Anything Goes?"
49:27 Boomer Hindu Cremo and Deep History
52:17 The 't Hooft paper against "fringe science"
54:40 "ACADEMIA IS UNIFORMITY!"
57:40 They're wrong because they're different? Luke says one good thing about linguistics.
1:00:24 Steven Crothers and Relativity
1:01:27 They must be wrong because we exclude them and because they think we're wrong.
1:02:55 Is it fringe and pseudoscience if they win?
Reading list:
Main content: Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. New Left Books. 1975. Lakatos, Irme. Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge University Press. 1976. Motterlini, Matteo. For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. University of Chicago Press. 1999.
Mentioned content (in approximate order): Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Popper, Karl R. Conjecture and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Harper Tochbooks. 1965. Kuhn Thomas Samuel. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. 1962. Gerard 't Hooft on "Fringe Science": http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/fringe-oct-2017.pdf A talk by Steven Crothers, whom I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev10ywLFq6Ehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zWy6_Mog70
A blog post I wrote a long time ago on this topic which talks about some other examples I didn't bring up in this episode:
https://lukesmith.xyz/blog/in-defense-of-pseudoscience.html
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