How To Feyerabend

How To Feyerabend: Against Guided Tours In Science

slides from 2007 UQ talk are at ftp://xeny.net/How-to-Feyerabend.pdf.

#Against guided tours - a trip to Kettle’s Yard

You enter. A volunteer greets you and tells you a couple of rules. On the way out, she makes sure you haven’t stolen anything larger than you could conveniently fit under your shirt. In between, she leaves you alone.

- a trip to Falling Water

You enter, having been told to book in advance and having done so. A receptionist makes you wait for your guide. When the guide is free, they gather you into a group with a couple of dozen other visitors, and begin to talk loudly to you all. You wander to another part of the room in the hope of looking at the house for yourself, making sure to stay visible so that it’s obvious that you’re not stealing anything. The guide notices that you’re not paying attention to her spiel and tells you to leave. You wait in the caf’ until your friends are ready to drive home.

A guided tour creates a simple, fixed image of a place.

More generally, a guided tour, as I use the term, shows you something at the same time as giving you a complete, oversimplified interpretation of it.

Obviously guided tours are bad. I made sure of that by using the word “oversimplified” when defining them.

Feyerabend was opposed to guided tours of science. A large part of his work shows this, both in principle and in detail: for example, his work on quantum mechanics [check this!] and on Galileo.

I speculate that Feyerabend’s opposition to guided tours was a large part of the motivation for his dadaism. This is wild speculation, but that’s OK. He would have liked that.

#Guided tours in contemporary science - EBM as a case study

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“You have your life and your work, and you should get the two as confused and mixed up as possible. Make it all one fabric. Vincent van Gogh did that. Hank Williams did it, Allen Ginsberg, Bukowski, those kinds of people.  Anne Frank, of necessity, did it.”

Kinky Friedman, quoted in Lone Star: Kindy Kriedman on the campaign trail Dan Halpern New Yorker, August 22, 2005: p.26—32

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Justin says that C. Wright Mills, in “The Sociological Imagination”, talks about using the dadaist method of throwing up the cards from his card file into the air to get random connections between them.