Feyerabend’s Criticisms of Kuhn

Abstract

This paper gives an account of Feyerabend’s criticisms of Kuhn. The main exposition of these criticisms is in Feyerabend’s paper in the 1970 collection Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. However, another source consists of two letters from Feyerabend to Kuhn written in the period 1960–1961, which were published by Hoyningen-Huene in 1995. The paper contains a comparison of Feyerabend’s 1970 criticisms with the earlier ones in his letters to Kuhn. Kuhn replied to Feyerabend’s criticisms in his contribution to the 1970 collection. However, I claim that Feyerabend’s criticisms have considerable force, and Kuhn succeeds in answering some, but not all of them. In Section 5 of the paper, I try to answer Feyerabend’s criticisms of Kuhn by reviving the old empiricist idea of the inductive justification of scientific theories by the results of observations and experiments (observation statements). This leads to a position which is called empirical rationalism, and which is perhaps Kuhnian in character without being exactly the same as Kuhn’s own views.