Date:          Tue, 4 Apr 1995 08:16:16 +0100
Subject:       Re: PKF: Intellectual judo, fly-bottles, etc.


April 4, 1995
Dear Crifasi,
if Feyerabend simply repeated the trick of the sophists, i.e. 
demonstrated that the solid methodologists of science are pressable 
into the awkward situation of having to accept the consequences they 
dreamed of denying, he would be just a chapter in footnotes to 
Socrates (if you let me paraphrase Whitehead who said that the 
whole of the Western philosophy is "just footnotes to Plato").
However, and here we differ, I do think that Feyerabend tacitly 
accepted the ontological definition of a "fact", a construction which 
turns fact into a "fact" by conceiving it as an edifice, a building 
surrounded by the helpful scaffolding of a theory, a vision, a set of 
assumptions. 

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