Feyerabend Quote on Method: Anything Goes

Quote

"My thesis is that anarchism helps to achieve progress in any one of the senses one cares to choose. Even a law-and-order science will succeed only if occasional and temporary steps into anarchism are allowed. The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes." — Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)

Author

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science. He studied physics and astronomy at the University of Vienna, served in the German army during the Second World War (an experience that left him with a lifelong distrust of authority), and then turned to philosophy, working first with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and later holding positions at Berkeley, London, and Zurich. His major works — Against Method (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), and Farewell to Reason (1987) — made him the most provocative and, to his admirers, the most liberating philosopher of science of his generation.

Source

The quotation comes from the opening chapter of Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975). The book was written in part as a reply to the way Karl Popper's falsificationism and Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions had framed the question of scientific method, and its subtitle announces its argument: knowledge is best served, not by a fixed method, but by what Feyerabend calls an "anarchistic" openness to every approach.

Context

Feyerabend wrote Against Method against the background of the philosophy of science's most productive period. Popper had argued that science progresses by conjecture and refutation — a clear, if demanding, method. Kuhn had argued that science proceeds through normal science under a paradigm, punctuated by revolutions. Both assumed that science has, or should have, a method. Feyerabend's thesis is that the history of science refutes this assumption. Galileo succeeded by breaking the methodological rules of his day: he appealed to the telescope, whose reliability was itself contested, and he advanced a theory that contradicted the best available evidence. The church, Feyerabend wryly notes, behaved more "rationally" than Galileo by the standards of method. Science progresses, he concludes, not because scientists follow a method but because they violate every method whenever it obstructs them.

Meaning

The slogan "anything goes" is the most misunderstood phrase in the philosophy of science. Feyerabend did not mean that every claim is as good as every other, or that science is irrational. He meant two more precise things. First, descriptively: there is no universal rule of method that the successful sciences have actually followed; the history of science is a history of rule-breaking. Second, prescriptively: the demand that science conform to a single method — Popperian, Kuhnian, or any other — would inhibit progress, because progress has always depended on the freedom to try approaches that violate the reigning rules. "Anything goes" is thus the answer to the question "what is the method of science?" once the historical evidence is taken seriously: there is no such thing, and pretending there is one only serves to exclude alternative traditions — including, for Feyerabend, traditions outside Western science. The claim is anarchistic in the etymological sense: no single rule rules.

Related Wisdom

Feyerabend's critique belongs to the philosophical exploration of knowledge and its limits. His historical case against method parallels the skeptical tradition in epistemology — the tradition that asks whether any foundation for knowledge can survive scrutiny — and it connects to the wider question of truth: if there is no method that guarantees truth, what status do scientific claims have? Feyerabend's defense of pluralism and of traditions marginalized by mainstream science also raises the question of whether the standards of science are themselves culturally specific — a question that has made him a reference point in debates about the politics of knowledge.