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Irish Theological Quarterly 74 (2009) 8992 2009 Irish Theological Quarterly Sage Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/0021140008098846
COMMENTARY
n his Quoting Feyerabend on Galileo Ernan McMullin is critical of a speech that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) had given in 1990, in which the Cardinal invoked the views of three writers that included Paul Feyerabends philosophical analysis of Galileos conflict with Pope Urban VIII.1 Feyerabend was an iconoclastic philosopher of science whose theatrical rhetoric and unorthodox ideas made him an easy target for caricature by his scandalized critics. Certainly not everything in his philosophy will endure, but Feyerabend has original and valid philosophical insights into Galileo. Philosophers have noted that eminently successful scientists have at times disregarded falsifying evidence and, to the dismay of many, Feyerabend justified such an apparently irrational practice, since he saw it as a productive strategy in what he termed a pluralistic methodology.2 His philosophy contains two basic principles. They are the principle of tenacity and the principle of theory proliferation. He defines tenacity as: The advice to select from a number of theories the one that promises to lead to the most fruitful results, and to stick to this
1. Ernan McMullin, Quoting Feyerabend on Galileo, Irish Theological Quarterly 73(2008): 164173. Joseph Ratzinger, The Crisis of Faith in Science, in A Turning Point in Europe: The Church and Modernity in the Europe of Upheavals (Rome: Paoline, 1992), 7679. Translated by National Catholic Reporter: www.ncrcafe.org (accessed September 15, 2008). 2. Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1978), 47. 89
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one theory even if the actual difficulties it encounters are considerable.3 Tenacity is an unabashedly prejudicial decision by the scientist on behalf of the theory he selects in utter disregard of contrary evidence. But Feyerabend says it is reasonable, because theories are capable of development, can be improved, and may eventually be capable of accommodating their difficulties.4 On his second principle, theory proliferation, he observes: Having adopted tenacity we can no longer use recalcitrant facts for removing theory, T, even if the facts should happen to be as plain and straight-forward as daylight itself. But we can use other theories, T', T'', T''', etc. which accentuate the difficulties of T while at the same time promising means for their solution. In this case the elimination of T is urged by the principle of tenacity itself.5 He maintains that this interplay between tenacity and proliferation is an essential feature of the actual development of science.6 Application of these two principles in turn enables a practice he calls counterinduction, which he defines as the invention and elaboration of hypotheses inconsistent with a point of view that is highly confirmed and generally accepted. Furthermore he says it is the invention, elaboration and use of theories which are inconsistent, not just with other theories, but even with experiments, facts, observations.7 Feyerabend used Galileos defence of the heliocentric theory to illustrate counterinduction. Quoting Galileo, Feyerabend observes: the Copernican view at the time of Galileo was inconsistent with facts so plain and obvious that Galileo had to call it surely false.8 But by practising counterinduction Galileo used the Copernican theory to detect the geocentric semantics in the apparently obvious facts and to reinterpret those observations that were marshalled to refute heliocentrism. Thus Feyerabend points out that Galileo introduces a new observation language.9 In this way Galileo reconceptualized observations so as to transform them from a falsifying to a corroborating role.
3. Paul K. Feyerabend, Consolations for the Specialist, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1970), 203. 4. Ibid., 204. 5. Ibid., 205. 6. Ibid., 209. 7. Feyerabend, Against Method, 55. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Ibid., 79.
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The members of the Physics Faculty at Romes La Sapienza University, who recently wrote a letter of protest to Pope Benedict about his 1990 speech, should note that the Nobel laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg practised counterinduction in his development of the revolutionary indeterminacy relations. Heisenbergs description of his thinking is to be found in his autobiographical writings: It must have been one evening after midnight when I suddenly remembered my conversation with Einstein and particularly his statement: It is the theory which decides what we can observe. We had always said so glibly that the path of the electron in the cloud chamber could be observed. In fact, all we do see in the cloud chamber are individual water droplets which must certainly be much larger than the electron. The right question should therefore be: can quantum mechanics represent the fact that an electron finds itself approximately in a given place and that it moves approximately with a given velocity, and can we make these approximations so close that they do not cause experimental difficulties?A brief calculation showed that one could indeed represent such situations mathematically, and that the approximations are governed by what would later be called the uncertainty relations.10 Galileo exploited the empirical under-determination in the celestial observations by letting the heliocentric theory decide what the physicist can observe, thereby neutralizing their potentially falsifying effect when they are conceptualized from within the geocentric theory. Similarly Heisenberg exploited the empirical under-determination in the cloud chamber observations by letting the quantum theory decide what the physicist can observe, thereby neutralizing their potentially falsifying effect, experimental difficulties, when they are conceptualized from within the Newtonian theory. Both scientists introduced a new observation language. Thus Heisenbergs counter-induction led to one of the greatest theoretical developments in the history of physics. Furthermore, exploiting the observational ambiguity, Bohr and Heisenberg propagandized their interpretation no less strenuously than Galileo had propagandized his own. In his 1990 speech Cardinal Ratzinger quoted Feyerabend as saying that the Church of Galileos day was much more faithful to reason than was Galileo himself and took into consideration additionally the ethical and social consequences of Galileos doctrine.11 The consideration of ethical and social consequences, which is of principal interest to the Cardinal,
10. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 7778. 11. Ratzinger, The Crisis of Faith in Science, 7679.
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reflects Feyerabends generalist tradition and corresponds to the then Churchs wider view over against Galileos more specialist position. Thus Feyerabend asked rhetorically: Now if it is legitimate to hold on to and to defend refuted views within the sciences, if such a procedure can lead to scientific progress, why, then, does the Church hesitate to do the same thing from outside?12 And about such a wider application of tenacity he says: The Churches have many reasons to support such a view [i.e., tenacity] and to use it for a criticism of particular scientific results as well as of the role of science in our culture.13 McMullin believes that Galileo scholars may find Feyerabends assessment of Galileo to be simplistic and historically unsound.14 Feyerabends philosophical analysis of Galileo is neither simplistic nor historically unsound. It is an insightful and original contribution to the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of science and philosophy of language. Feyerabend, the agnostic philosopher of science, concluded to what the Catholic Church and other churches have long recognized: that the scientistic world view is a myopic conceit. And the Cardinal referenced Feyerabend in order to illustrate the passing of modernisms complacency about science and its distorted stereotyping of Galileo. THOMAS J. HICKEY is a retired research econometrician. His publications include Introduction to Metascience: An Information Science Approach to Methodology of Scientific Research (1976) and History of TwentiethCentury Philosophy of Science (1995). Address: P.O. Box 5051, River Forest, IL 603055051, USA. thickey3@hotmail.com
12. Feyerabend, Paul K. Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987), 263. 13. Ibid., 262. 14. McMullin, Quoting Feyerabend on Galileo, 172.