Epistemological Anarchism

Epistemological anarchism is the position, associated principally with Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (1975), that there is no single scientific method — no universal set of rules or procedures — whose application reliably produces knowledge. The slogan is "anything goes": not as a positive recommendation to abandon standards, but as a descriptive finding that every methodological rule science actually uses has been successfully violated in cases that produced genuine advances.

Feyerabend's argument is historical. The Galileo case is his central example: Galileo adopted Copernicanism against the available observational evidence (telescopic observations were ambiguous and contested), against the dominant theoretical framework, and against proper philosophical method — and he was right. Had he followed Popperian falsificationism and abandoned the theory when it conflicted with observation, heliocentrism would have died in its cradle. The lesson Feyerabend draws: methodological constraints imposed in advance can and do suppress correct theories. The constraint should come from specific problem situations, not from universal rules.

The anarchism label is deliberately provocative. Feyerabend did not think that scientific judgments were arbitrary — he thought they required richer contextual judgment than any method codifies. His deeper target was the claim that scientific knowledge deserves epistemic authority over other forms of inquiry — indigenous knowledge, traditional medicine, astrology — because science follows the one correct method. Remove the method, and that authority claim collapses. This made Against Method indispensable to the Science Wars and to critiques of scientism, often in ways that went further than Feyerabend intended.