Feyerabend’s humanitarian pluralism and its relevance for science-based policy

Abstract

A strong commitment to pluralism on multiple levels (methodological, theoretical, ontological as well as political) is a defining feature of Paul Feyerabend’s philosophical corpus. However, for Feyerabend, pluralism is not just an epistemologically preferable account within the philosophy of science. He also believes that pluralism is the only account of science that is compatible with a humanitarian outlook.

In the first part of this paper, I will reconstruct Feyerabend’s theoretical pluralism in the context of his criticism of Thomas Kuhn’s account. I will show that Feyerabend’s critical engagement with Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions in the early 1960s was crucially important for the development of his own pluralistic account of science. In the second part, I will discuss and critically analyse the ethical-political stance that underlies Feyerabend’s pluralism. In the final part, I briefly summarize a series of papers that I have published together with Simon Lohse, in which we apply Feyerabend’s pluralism to current discussions about the role of evidence-based policy advice during the COVID-19 pandemic.