From: "Herbert F. Muller" <hmller-AT-po-box.mcgill.ca>
Subject: PKF: RE: intro - Paper Feyerabend
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 07:23:20 -0400



You may be interessted in the discussion attached below - HFJ Muller

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> From: owner-feyerabend-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> [mailto:owner-feyerabend-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of John
> McCaffrey
> Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 2:53 AM
> To: feyerabend-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: PKF: intro
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm not actually sure whether anyone is still using this list as my
> subscription message hinted that it was last updated in 1996!
> Anyway, seeing
> as I'm at work with nothing in particular to do I suppose I'll
> give you the
> introductory spiel...
>
> I first became interested in Paul Feyerabend whilst at University
> studying
> Theology and Religious Studies. One of my lecturers in Islam was,
> strangely
> enough, more interested in 'postmodernism', 'radical constructivism'
> etc..than he seemed to be in Islam. Now this particular lecturer
> was quite a
> charismatic chap given to distinctly 'unacademic' practices, such as not
> caring whether you turned up to his lectures or not. For an
> essentially lazy
> person such as myself, this was a Godsend and, perversely enough, this
> actually encouraged me to attend more lectures!
> Anyway, through developing a passing aquaintance with
> Feyerabend's name by
> grazing the reading lists given to me I decided to give him a
> quick read. I
> started with 'Farewell To Reason' (still the best title of ANY book I've
> ever read) and, thanks to the sheer brilliance of the book, my tentative
> first steps quickly escalated into a veritable orgy of Feyerabend
> readings
> (to the extent that I tracked down some of his published articles amidst
> Kent University library's dusty stock of periodicals).
> No-one (at least no 'mere' author) has affected my thought as much as
> Feyerabend, and despite the various criticisms levelled at him from
> philosphers (and others) I still find his 'thought' both attractive and
> tenable. As far as I can see, many criticisms of PKF's writing manage to
> miss what I think his point (if there is any ONE point) was. This 'point'
> was just that life is incredible and much too complex for any one
> system of
> thought to adequately convey. And although he launched a barrage
> of serious
> criticisms against Science (with a capital 'S') I doubt that he
> intended for
> scientific endeavour to be wholly brought to an end....simply
> curtailed so
> that it serves the needs of people rather than vice versa (which is, I
> think, the current state of affairs....I mean how many times are we told
> about the latest scientific breakthrough and are expected to
> greet it as the
> greatest thing ever? I for one don't particularly care about what's going
> on, or rather what's NOT going on, on the surface of
> Mars....especially when
> new crusades are threatening THIS world right now!)
> And in closing I'd just like to say that his greatest
> philosophical work, in
> my opinion, is 'Killing Time' - his autobiography - in that the 'whole'
> Feyerabend is on display and not just the 'philospher'.
> Ah well, I guess that'll do...erm, if anyone's 'out there' please
> feel free
> to let me know what's going on with the list otherwise I'll
> continue to be a
> lone voice in the wilderness...
> Nice to 'meet' you,
> John McCaffrey
>
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KARL  JASPERS  FORUM
TARGET ARTICLE 31

THE SHAM VICTORY OF ABSTRACTION
     (Review of Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance*),
by Bas C. van Fraassen
23 June 2000*, posted 24 October 2000


[1]
*Conquest of Abundance*, as the late Paul Feyerabend tells us in
his Preface, was the book he promised his wife, Grazia.  He did not
live to complete it.  But Bert Terpstra has ably edited the
manuscript and supplemented it with a selection of Feyerabend's
last publications, and Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend has added a
touching, insightful preface.  The book itself is a work of such
abundance that a review is likely to remain idiosyncratically
selective, pathetically illustrating Feyerabend's theme - the
impoverishing consequences of academic attention.

[2]
The book's announced aim is to show "how specialists and common
people reduce the abundance that surrounds and confuses them",
and to continue the project begun in *Against Method*: "to free
people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract
concepts ... which narrow people's vision and ways of being in the
world".  Naturally a posthumous compilation does not have the
unity of a finished book, and although it is possible to see how
every part was to contribute to the whole, it is almost better to
read the chapters as independent essays.  Collectively they display
Feyerabend's lifelong fascination with transformations in our ways
of seeing: how we see the gods, the world, ourselves, and
everything else there is.  Despite his dismay about the way in
which academic philosophy seems intent mainly to cut things and
to dry them, Feyerabend's writing is essentially optimistic and
hopeful.  He is more intent on bringing us back to the reality than
on lamenting the abstractions of academic discourse.

[3]
Feyerabend is generally credited (if that is the word) with
introducing the notion of *incommensurability* - the idea that the
theories held before and after a conceptual revolution, the very
language in which they are stated, and the values they uphold, are
so different that they are literally incommensurable, ie
incomparable.  How can scientists immersed in distinct "paradigms"
(in Thomas Kuhn's terms) even communicate, let alone pass from
one paradigm to another?  In Feyerabend's considered view,
already expressed in *Against Method* and made trenchantly clear
in *Conquest of Abundance*, that puzzle is itself a central example
of how academics, caught up in their own abstractions, become
enmeshed in self generated problems.  The culprit in this case is
their woefully inadequate, oversimplified, 'idealized', distorting
model of language.  Here is the verdict in his own words:  

[4]
=93I agree that if discourse is defined as a sequence of clear and
distinct propositions (actions, plans, etc) which are constructed
according to precise and merciless rules, then discourse has a very
short breath indeed. Such a discourse would be often interrupted
by "irrational" events and soon be replaced by a new discourse for
which its predecessor is nonsense pure and simple. If the history of
thought depended on a discourse of this kind, then it would consist
of an ocean of irrationality interrupted, briefly, by mutually
incommensurable islands of sense.=93  

[5]
What Feyerabend disowns in this passage is of course precisely
what some have read as his position.  But here he is as intent as
ever on highlighting the vast gaps that separate pre- and post-
revolutionary transformations of our view:  What allows for these
transformations, what makes it possible for the past view to be
understood in the new?  And what is it about *real* discourse that
makes it so different from the artificial languages that logicians and
philosophers have allowed to guide their thought?

[6]
When Feyerabend writes about language he is much closer to
literary theory than to analytic philosophy of language.  The latter
tends in any case to ignore the problems of language that
preoccupy philosophers of science, such as the "theory-ladenness"
of terms, "incommensurability" of theories stated in different
vocabularies, the impossibility of understanding discourse
independently of some of the theories it has been fashioned to
express.  There may be good reason for this: philosophers of
science who introduced these issues, Feyerabend included, showed
little inclination to work out a separate theory of meaning in any
detail.  However that may be, in his response to the tangled
"incommensurability" cluster of problems, Feyerabend focuses on
the irremediable ambiguity of real discourse.  Chapter One,
"Achilles' Passionate Conjecture", presents his diagnosis and
solution: a passage in the *Iliad* and its study in academic
philology.  Achilles feels offended and withdraws from the battle
against Troy.  To compensate for the offence Agamemnon offers
rich gifts and his daughter's hand in marriage.  Achilles refuses,
and in a passionate speech says things about honour which stun
the messengers; those same words stun the Greeks when
Odysseus reports them.  

[7]
Scholars have seen here a rupture in the meaning or concept of
honour.  Today we distinguish between someone genuinely
honourable in character and actions and someone honoured in
society for his character and actions.  The claim is that there had
been no such separation in the Homeric world - so that when
Achilles exclaims that now "equal honour goes to the virtuous and
the worthless", the messengers hear something that makes no
sense to them at all.  This moment in the *Iliad* is a moment of
conceptual change, precipitated by Achilles' emotional response to
his treatment by Agamemnon.  But however precipitated, the
change in conception happens; it is intelligible to the later readers
of the epic.  How is such a transition possible, when from the prior
point of view the words make (literally) no sense?  Feyerabend
answers, in effect, that with hindsight we can see the ambiguities
and conflations that were already there (in some way, hidden) in
the earlier discourse, and which became disentangled in Achilles'
emotional crisis.  For in the prior conception there were already, for
example, links between honour and how the gods see the actions,
which may be distinct from how the surrounding humans see them. 
In addition Achilles sees other examples where *in his own view*
actions should have been honoured and were not, as well as
worthless actions that received honours.  These anomalies can then
serve to break apart what was conceived as indissolubly linked in
meaning.

[8]
The New Criticism is not well regarded these days and certainly out
of fashion, although its focus on vagueness, ambiguity and
unresolvable tensions presaged the more deconstructively critical
approaches to come.  William Empson's *Seven Types of
Ambiguity* is still a pleasure to read and, I would suggest, is more
likely to be instructive when it comes to Feyerabend's intentions
than a reading of W. V. Quine or Donald Davidson.  At the end of
the last chapter Feyerabend suggests a striking analogy with
quantum mechanics: we should try to see the old (now diagnosed
as ambiguous) term as a superposition rather than mixture of its
disambiguations.  We have no theory of language available that
could make something of this suggestion, nor has Feyerabend
provided one.  Perhaps our problem is just that the history and
philosophy of science gets us interested in the idea of languages
that are imperfect or defective but of real use in practice, while in
philosophy of language it is just the other way around.

[9]
The more familiar example comes from science and concerns mass
as understood before and after Einstein.  Imagine Newtonian
scientists to whom it is suddenly suggested that perhaps mass
varies with velocity.  That is absurd in their terms.  In their models,
mass varies only when material is added or lost, and while velocity
varies from one frame of reference to another, mass does not.  All
of this is so basic to their way of thinking that they are just
completely puzzled by the suggestion.  It makes no sense.  So far
this story seems to bear out our impression of incommensurability. 
There is nowhere to go, at this point, if we think of the Newtonian's
language on the model of some logician's ideal.

[10]
But while these Newtonians do not realize it yet, there are such
ambiguities in their speech that any three different logicians would
likely construe it (extrapolate it to a less ambiguous formalism) in
three different ways.  For in the Newtonian tradition, mass can be
equally well characterized in three different ways.  For our
anachronistic convenience, we can give them different names.  The
proper mass ("quantity of matter", a certain constant value
assigned to eg each [classical] atom); the inertial mass (a measure
of its resistance to motion); and the gravitational mass (evident in
the mutually induced acceleration of bodies at a given distance
from each other).  Logically speaking it is quite remarkable that
these three values would coincide.  So a logician would construe
the word "mass" as standing for only one of them, but conclude
that a physicist's talk would use the word ambiguously for all three.

[11]
In Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity light has a constant
velocity, the same in every inertial frame of reference.  The velocity
of a body in constant motion is different from frame to frame (zero
in its own rest frame) but cannot exceed that of light, as measured
in any frame.  Is that idea consistent?  Not in Newtonian terms. 
Suppose the same force is applied repeatedly to a body so as to
increase its velocity.  This process must have diminishing returns,
as seen in any inertial frame, if the body is never to go faster than
light.  Thus it appears that the resistance to motion is increasing as
the velocity increases.  Although I am simplifying, we get an inkling
here of how the first and second senses are separated, so to speak. 
The proper mass (mass in the first sense, "rest mass") does not
vary, and we are therefore able to discern this common concept of
mass in both theories.

[12]
Feyerabend predicts in effect that later scientists will find it hard to 
understand how their predecessors could have experienced such
epistemic trauma: today the disentanglement seems so natural! 
And this prediction is easily verified in our own case (don't we all
see our way of construing things as natural and the past view as
almost wilfully defective, almost culpably ambiguous?) as well as in
the writings of scientists like Steven Weinberg (here discussing
Kuhn in *The New York Review of Books*, Oct 1998):  

[13]
=93It is true that there was a good deal of uncertainty about the
concept of mass *during* the Einsteinian revolution .... But this has
all been resolved ... and in fact the term "mass" today is most
frequently understood as "rest mass", an intrinsic property of a
body that is not changed by motion, which is much the way that
mass was understood before Einstein.  Meanings can change, but
generally do so in the direction of an increased richness and
precision of definition, so that we do not lose the ability to
understand the theories of past periods of normal science.=93  

[14]
This is exactly right as an expression of the *posterior* view, and it
bears out Feyerabend's own conclusion when he remarks that "we
are a long way from the disaster announced by [the philologist A.]
Parry and systematized by the champions of incommensurability". 
But it seems also to display the puzzlement that arises when the
prior discourse structure is forgotten - puzzlement about how we
could possibly see our present view as a *revolutionary* change.   
Feyerabend's main writings about art and its relation to science
appeared in German, and it is good that *Conquest of Abundance*
contains the chapter "Brunelleschi and the Invention of
Perspective", a case study of a revolutionary change (conceived as
akin to revolutionary change in science) that pays more attention to
how such changes can diminish as well as enrich, and how
abstractions can 'conquer abundance'.

[15]
The received view of medieval art as defective in comparison to
that of the Renaissance ?  initially put forward by Vasari, but
persisting for centuries ?  offers another illustration of the sense of
progress of later generations, as well as their oblivion to the past
"as it was", and the development of perspective and chiaroscuro
provides Feyerabend with an opportunity to analyse representation
(art as representation, science as representation) in relation to
imitation, resemblance, distortion, and appearance-creation versus
copying.  Central to the chapter is his exposition of Brunelleschi's
famous demonstration of perspective in 1425, with his painting of
the Baptistery.  Feyerabend considers it first as following precisely
the format of a scientific experiment, and then as a theatrical stage
setting and performance.  We have to wonder whether the diagram
can be completed - the scientific experiment being viewed as itself
a dramatic production, or the theatrical event as itself an
experimental demonstration.

[16]
Here we have a valuable but neglected background for the
discussion of realism and anti-realism; and this is how Feyerabend
treats it.  The various "realist" and "relativist" positions share
certain assumptions, even certain uncritical views of what it is to
represent (whether artistically or scientifically), and the debates
have been hamstrung by oblivion of the long history of reflection
on that very question.  This chapter, the last of the book
manuscript itself, returns briefly -- all too briefly -- to the examples 
of Galileo on motion and of Achilles' passionate conjecture to
underline Feyerabend's undermining of the realism debates.  But
even as supplemented by some of the published essays, this theme
is not sufficiently developed, at this point, to convince.

[17]
What kind of a reader does this author have in mind? An educated
one, clearly, as interested in the sciences and the arts as in
religion, mythology, literature, history; a reader with knowledge of
the several main Western European languages and a passing
acquaintance with Latin and Greek.  Feyerabend does not
condescend to his readers, and wears his learning lightly; but what
of the impoverishing victory of academic abstraction that he
describes?  The fact is that lamentation is not at all the tone of the
book.  Feyerabend does not hold up the conquest of abundance
which he sees as happening now as a lamentable "sign of the
times".  On the contrary, he shows it at work at the very beginning
of Western civilization, as well as in the Renaissance and in the
seventeenth century, in just the same way that it operates now. 
We could conclude that this process has never yet succeeded in
replacing our real world with its pale abstractions.  The conquest is
a sham conquest, an illusory victory for the forces of abstracting
intellect.  When Paul Feyerabend, this most consciously and clearly
self-reflective writer, writes here of Xenophanes as "one of the first
Western intellectuals" it is hard not to see a resemblance between
author and subject:  

[18]
=93Although dealing with topics that soon became the exclusive
property of a new profession, philosophy, he often behaved in a
thoroughly unprofessional way.  He used epigrams, one-liners, he
imitated, mocked, or repeated popular profundities to reveal their
shallowness.=93  

[19]
Xenophanes, Feyerabend, ... these are the saints of our culture:
difficult, obstructive, provocative.  They bring not peace but the
sword; they have charm, charisma, appeal, and they are too
bloody-minded for comfort.  We can't ignore them as mavericks,
for their brilliance just won't let us pass by. But quite apart from
that, they themselves are the proof that the conquest of
abundance, the replacement of reality by abstract simulacra,
bloodless ballets of categories (or, for that matter, of gene
frequencies) fails in the end.

-------------------------------

*Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction
Versus the Richness of Being. Ed. Bert Terpstra. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999.
*Review published in Times Literary Supplement 5073: 23 June
2000.

-------------------------------

Bas C. van Fraassen
Philosophy Dept., Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
     http://webware.princeton.edu/vanfraas
     e-mail<fraassen-AT-Princeton.EDU>


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