Feyerabend Quote on Method: Anything Goes

Quote

"The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."

— Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975, Chapter 18)

Context

This notorious sentence appears in Chapter 18 of Against Method (1975), the book in which Feyerabend launched his most sustained assault on the philosophy of science. Feyerabend, who had been a colleague and sparring partner of Popper and Kuhn at the London School of Economics, argued that the attempt to prescribe a scientific method — whether inductivist, falsificationist, or any other — was both historically false and practically harmful.

Against Method was written in part as a counterpoint to Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Where Kuhn had described normal science as paradigm-governed puzzle-solving, Feyerabend argued that the actual history of science reveals no stable method at all. Great scientists — Galileo, Newton, Einstein — regularly violated the methodological rules that philosophers of science proposed as essential. They used propaganda, ignored counterevidence, introduced ad hoc hypotheses, and borrowed from discredited traditions. If science has progressed despite (or because of) these violations, Feyerabend reasoned, then no fixed method can be a necessary condition of scientific progress.

The "anything goes" slogan is the punchline of this argument. Having examined the historical record and found that every proposed methodological rule has been broken to good effect, Feyerabend concluded that the only "principle" consistent with the actual practice of science is the absence of principle — a methodological anarchism that leaves scientists free to use whatever works.

Meaning

Feyerabend's dictum is deliberately provocative, and its meaning requires careful unpacking. It is not a recommendation that scientists behave arbitrarily or that "anything goes" in the sense of intellectual irresponsibility. It is a claim about the impossibility of a universal scientific method — a fixed set of rules that, if followed, guarantees scientific progress.

The argument is empirical and historical. Feyerabend examines case studies — most famously, Galileo's defense of heliocentrism — and shows that the methods Galileo actually used violated the standards that philosophers of science would prescribe. Galileo relied on thought experiments that contradicted the available evidence, used rhetorical persuasion to win acceptance for ideas he could not fully prove, and introduced concepts (like the relativity of motion) that were unintelligible within the Aristotelian framework of his time. If a rule-governed method were necessary for science, Galileo would not count as doing science — yet he is the paradigm of the scientific revolutionary.

From such cases, Feyerabend generalized: there is no idea, however ancient or absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge. Astrology, acupuncture, voodoo — all may contain insights that, in the right circumstances, contribute to understanding. The attempt to demarcate science from non-science by methodological rules is, for Feyerabend, a form of intellectual imperialism that closes off potentially fruitful avenues of inquiry. The history of science shows that progress often comes from violating the rules, not from following them.

"Anything goes" is thus not a normative prescription but a descriptive conclusion: given that every methodological rule has been productively broken, the only "rule" that accurately describes the practice of successful science is that there are no fixed rules. Scientists should be free to invent and adopt whatever methods, theories, and sources of inspiration prove useful, unconstrained by philosophical legislation about what counts as "scientific."

Philosophical Significance

Feyerabend's anarchism provoked one of the great controversies in the philosophy of science:

The attack on method: Against Method directly challenged the project, shared by logical positivists and Popperians alike, of identifying the scientific method. Feyerabend argued that the project was chimerical: there is no method common to all good science and absent from all bad science. This radical challenge forced philosophers of science to defend or revise their methodological commitments and helped shift the field toward a more historically informed, descriptive approach to science.

Pluralism and theoretical tolerance: Beneath the provocativeness, Feyerabend's view embodies a serious methodological pluralism. He argued that the best way to test a theory is not to isolate it but to confront it with alternatives — including theories that are currently unfashionable or "unscientific." The proliferation of theories, even incompatible ones, is a condition of critical inquiry, because only against alternatives can a theory's strengths and weaknesses be revealed. This "principle of tenacity" (stick with a theory even when it faces anomalies) and "principle of proliferation" (invent new theories regardless) together constitute Feyerabend's positive proposal.

The science wars and relativism: Feyerabend was widely accused of relativism — the view that all theories are equally good, or that there are no objective standards of truth. He denied this charge, insisting that he was not denying truth but attacking the claim that science has a privileged method for finding it. Nevertheless, his work became a touchstone in the "science wars" of the 1990s, cited by sociologists and cultural critics who challenged the authority of science, and attacked by scientists and philosophers who saw in it a dangerous undermining of rationality.

The legacy of epistemological anarchism: Feyerabend's anarchism remains a provocative and influential position. It has been read as a defense of scientific creativity, a critique of scientism (the uncritical deference to scientific authority), and a call for the democratization of knowledge. Whether one agrees with "anything goes" or sees it as reductio ad absurdum of anti-methodological thinking, Feyerabend's challenge has permanently unsettled the comfortable assumption that science is defined by a single, specifiable method — and that assumption has never fully recovered.

Sources

1. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (New Left Books, 1975), Chapter 18. Context in: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
2. "Paul Feyerabend," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
3. "Paul Feyerabend," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/feyerabend/
4. "Scientific Method," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-falsifiability/
5. Preston, John. Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society (Polity Press, 1997).