Feyerabend on Politics, Education, and Scientific Culture Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Abstract The purpose of this paper is to offer a sympathetic reconstruction of the political thought of Paul Feyerabend. Using a critical discussion of the idea of the ‘free society’ it is suggested that his political thought is best understood in terms of three thematic concerns – liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science – and that the political significance of those claims become clear when they are considered in the context of his educational views. It emerges that Feyerabend is best understood as calling for the grounding of cognitive and cultural authorities – like the sciences – in informed deliberation, rather than the uncritical embrace of prevailing convictions. It therefore emerges that a free society is best understood as one of epistemically responsible citizenship rather than epistemically anarchistic relativism of the ‘anything goes’—a striking anticipation of current debates about philosophy of science in society. Keywords Feyerabend, authority, education, free society, political philosophy, scientific culture 1. Introduction. The aim of this paper is to ask what sense, if any, can be made of the various political ideas and proposals offered by Paul Feyerabend and to ask how, if at all, they might relate to contemporary debates about the authority of the sciences in modern societies. The cautious phasing of those two questions is a reflection of the fact that Feyerabend’s political thought is generally poorly regarded by even the more sympathetic commentators and judged to be of less value and sophistication than his contributions to the history and philosophy of science. See, e.g., Oberheim (2006), p. 22f and Preston (1996), ch. 10. Indeed, proposals such as the formation of a ‘free society’ and of the ‘separation of science and the state’ are often taken as self-evident indications of the immaturity, if not irresponsibility, of Feyerabend’s political thought, especially when considered alongside his putative enthusiasm for ‘anarchistic epistemology’. Such concerns naturally motivate sincere worries that the ‘worst enemy of science’ might not have anything sensible to contribute to political philosophy beyond ‘fanciful speculations about a utopia’ in which, epistemically and socially, ‘anything goes’ (Chalmers 1999: p. 159). Although it is easy to sympathise with concerned critics - and often difficult to disagree with them - there still remains the fact that political ideas and concerns were clearly central to Feyerabend’s philosophical interests. An idea like the ‘free society’ may be problematic, but it does seem to express or reflect certain deep concerns and preoccupations that were important to Feyerabend, and, if so, offers a means of identifying and articulating them. Certainly when one looks to his later writings, from roughly the early 1970s through to his death in 1994, a variety of politically charged themes emerge, including the protection of cultural diversity against the predations of Western imperialism, environmental destruction and the ‘homogenisation’ of global cultures, and the social and spiritual alienation of late modern societies – all of which contributed to Feyerabend’s status as ‘a hero of the anti-technological counter-culture’ (Preston 2012, §2.17). Moreover those themes are often clearly related to Feyerabend’s more obviously philosophical concerns about scientific methodology, and also converge, intelligibly if not inevitably, in the narrative of the ‘conquest of abundance’ described in his last, unfinished book. See Feyerabend (2001). There are, then, good reasons to suppose that a study of Feyerabend’s political thought will help us to better understand core themes of his work as a whole, even if the ideas, in themselves, fail to pass muster. My strategy here will therefore be to use a critical analysis of the ‘free society’ as a way into Feyerabend’s political concerns, to identify and articulate his guiding ‘principles’ and themes, and then to examine how those concerns inform his views on education. It emerges that although the political proposals that Feyerabend offered should be rejected as they stand – as critics have suspected – they can still be usefully seen as reflecting an intelligible and, indeed, plausible set of concerns about the authority of the sciences in modern societies. The paper closes by articulating those concerns and placing them in the context of growing contemporary interest in ‘philosophy of science in society’. 2. The free society. The ideal of the free society featured in Feyerabend’s work from the late 1970s through to the early 1980s and was regarded by him during that time as the centrepiece of his political philosophy. The very term – free society – can be understood in terms of, at least, two sets of motivating ideas. The first is the suspicion about what Feyerabend calls the increasingly ‘tyrannical’ character of the modern sciences. Specifically, of their constituting a ‘comprehensive system of thought … that reigns without checks and balances’, being both ‘exempted from criticism’ and prone to employ ‘dogmatic defence’ against any ‘attempted resistances’ (Feyerabend [1975] 1999, pp. 181-182). The studies of the history and philosophy of science that occupied Feyerabend during the 1960s and early 1970s were not simply intended as epistemological correctives – to correct positivist confusions, say – but also as contributions to the identification and exposure of self-serving ‘myths’ about science; the obvious example being the claim that science enjoys a privileged epistemic authority owing to its employment of a distinctive methodology—a ‘frozen image of science’ that distorts our judgments about the proper scope of scientific methods (Feyerabend 1993, p. 2). Such claims were of course hardly original to Feyerabend, being part of the intellectual climate of the mid-twentieth century, and it is worth noting that they were common currency in major Continental European philosophical traditions, perhaps best exemplified by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979). The second set of factors informing Feyerabend’s enthusiasm for the idea of the free society are the prevailing cultural conditions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is well-established amongst commentators that Feyerabend adapted easily and intensely to the trends and figures with whom he was engaging; that he was a ‘chameleon’ able to ‘adapt to [the] changing interests and attitudes’ of both academic and popular culture (Oberheim 2006, pp. 15 and 24). The free society is an adaptation to and reflection of a period of recent cultural history that was liberal and pluralistic - of ‘flower power’ and counterculture, ‘free love’ and cannabis. On the cultural and political context of Feyerabend’s philosophy, see Kidd (2014). It also reflects, if imperfectly, a broadly Millian vision of a society that respects and embraces a plurality of different ‘modes of life’ and welcomes ‘experiments in living’ untrammelled by the oppressive constraints and conservatism of entrenched social and intellectual authorities (even if the fidelity of the vision to Mill’s own liberalism is debatable). See Kidd (2010), ch. 5 The impact of the much-misunderstood slogan ‘Anything goes!’ surely owes as much to this cultural mood as it does to the emergence of post-positivist philosophies of science and the lyrical stylings of Cole Porter. On the slogan, see Tsou (2003). The ideal of the free society therefore finds its origins in concerns about the putatively tyrannical character of the modern sciences and a prevailing cultural enthusiasm for the inclusion of a greater diversity of cultures and traditions. Certainly these two themes are visible throughout the characterisations that Feyerabend offers of the free society as one in which ‘all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centres of power’, and which ‘recognises the value of any particular mode of life’ (Feyerabend 1978, p. 106 and [1980] 1999, p. 112). Indeed, a defining feature of a free society is that it is not based on ‘any particular creed’, and which would replace our ‘faith’ in the ‘excellence of science’ with the recognition that it is on a part with ‘all other beliefs’, including ‘astrology and black magic’ (Feyerabend 1993, p. 228 and [1970] 1999, p. 125). The emerging picture is of a society that accommodates a rich plurality of cognitive and cultural traditions, including many that the denizens of late modern societies would regard as metaphysically and epistemologically incredible – an early presage, perhaps, of the ‘abundance’ that would be celebrated some thirty years later in Feyerabend’s last, unfinished book. These ideas and themes can be understood in terms of two principles, implicit in but not articulated by Feyerabend - which I’ll dub the hegemony principle and the liberation principle - which them provide the normative basis for his political thought. Unfortunately each is also untenable – or so I’ll argue. The hegemony principle is the conviction that the predominance or entrenchment of any one tradition - or closely related set of traditions - necessarily constitutes a politically and epistemically restrictive hegemony. This principle manifests itself in different ways throughout Feyerabend’s life and work, including in his enthusiasm for Mill’s liberalism, the obvious dislike of cultural ‘homogeneity’, and the conviction that Homeric polytheism is more attractive and humane than the ‘god-monster’ of Xenophanean monotheism; each of these examples reflects the sense that hegemony necessarily follows when some one society, tradition, or god dominates. Indeed, one might go further and suggest that resistance to hegemony, and to allied traits like dogmatism and constancy, was a powerful conviction definitive of Feyerabend’s character or temperament: a hatred of being ‘nailed down’, ‘confined’ or otherwise trapped within a single fixed scheme of thought or way of life; many passages in his autobiography testify to his being ‘reluctant to be nailed down’ and to an abiding sense of ‘restlessness’ that only passed when he found himself ‘confronted with an outside challenge’ (Feyerabend 1995, p. 105). But though this psychological claim strikes me as plausible, based on Feyerabend’s own autobiographical writings and conversations with his friends and intimates, it is mentioned here speculatively rather than assertively. The liberation principle is the positive counterpoint to the hegemony principle and maintains that political and epistemic freedom requires the presence of a plurality of alternative and equally regarded traditions. ‘The freedom of a society’, argued Feyerabend, ‘increases as the restrictions imposed on its traditions are removed’ (Feyerabend [1980] 1999, p. 220). Again, this principle manifests in diverse ways throughout Feyerabend’s writings, including his vigorous defence of pluralism in both science and philosophy, the hostility towards dogmatism and conservatism, the defences of ‘eccentric’ beliefs and practices like voodoo and astrology, and the constant need to experiment with and shift between different ideas, styles, outlooks. See, e.g., Oberheim (2006), Part III. Clearly enough Feyerabend synonymises hegemony with monism on the one hand and liberation with plurality on the other, and his normative epistemological and political prescriptions—for theoretical pluralism, say, and cultural diversity—are both reflections of the conviction that ‘science, philosophy, and civilization’ require the abandonment of ‘a single theory [or] system of thought’ and the embrace, instead, of ‘a plurality of theories [and] forms of life’, and not just in the ‘rather narrow and technical domain of the philosophy of science’ (Feyerabend 1985, p. vii). These two principles converge in Feyerabend’s conviction that within modern societies the sciences have become ‘hegemonic’ to a degree that requires our ‘liberation’. This claim has a historical aspect. In ‘How to Defend Society Against Science’ he argues that the sciences have, at certain stages in their history, been ‘an instrument of liberation and enlightenment’ – during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, say – but that they came to ‘deteriorate’ over time, owing to changes in both science itself and wider social and political conditions: there is ‘nothing inherent in science … that makes it essentially liberating’ (Feyerabend [1975] 1999, p. 182). But the fact of this deterioration is, however, obscured by prevailing ‘myths’ and by a failure, on our part, of due critical vigilance; for instance because it is ‘very difficult nowadays’ to seriously ask the question of whether the ‘pursuit of science [is] worthwhile’ owing to the intensive authority that science enjoys (Feyerabend 1970, pp. 141-142). Therefore, although the sciences have therefore been emancipatory at certain points in their history, it would, argues Feyerabend, be naïve to suppose that they will continue to be so, especially since there are, in his judgment, good reasons to suppose that has become hegemonic and ‘tyrannous’ in modern societies. It is clear that such remarks, and the wider historical narrative in which they are grounded, are both strong and problematic. The focus here, though, is not on the historical narrative, which is persuasively challenged by Clark (2002) and Preston (forthcoming). Consider, instead, on the philosophical idea, that of ‘the free society’, that it was intended to support. Specifically there are four closely related problems with the free society, that collectively undermine both its plausibility and its attractiveness – enough at the least to justify its rejection, and that the hegemony and liberation principles that constitute it. The first is that the hegemony principle is a gross generalisation that would not survive historical and sociological enquiry. Although there have been, and still are, hegemonic societies of the kind he envisions, the idea that all societies with a single dominant tradition must evince a state of oppressive ‘hegemony’ is far too strong and broad a claim, not least without any supporting evidence, of which Feyerabend, to my knowledge, offers none. This being so, Feyerabend gives us no reason to either adopt the hegemony principle or to find it plausible. The second closely related problem is the predomination of a single tradition does not automatically entail the obviously negative state of hegemony envisioned by Feyerabend. Cases could be imagined, if not cited, in which a society was, in fact, dominated by a single tradition, and yet remained receptive to critical debate. If so, to secure the concern about hegemony, a further caveat is needed: that the predomination of a single tradition only constitutes hegemony – of a ‘bad’ sort – if it includes intellectual or institutional structures that, in practice, degrade or demotivate criticism. At certain times, in fact, Feyerabend recognises this, adding that the ‘idea … of criticism’ can be sustained or suffocated by the particular ‘system of thought’ or ‘institutional framework’ of a given society (1981: p. ix). If so, worries about hegemony only apply within societies where the dominant tradition brings with it intellectual and institutional structures that impair criticism—as with swallows and spring, one tradition does, in itself, make not a hegemony. Including this caveat also adds a further problem for the castigation of ‘hegemonic’ traditions, for by coupling this to institutional formations, it introduces the possibility that hegemony can come in degrees. To take a topical example, Reporters Without Borders produces an annual rating of media freedom, depending, for example, on the extent and intensity of state censorship. See, for 2013, http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html. The hegemonic status of a tradition is therefore a matter of degree, and clearly the epistemically and culturally oppressive societies that Feyerabend envisions are extreme and, for that reason, fairly rare cases (though not rare enough, of course). The third problem with the principle of hegemony is that few societies, if any, actually achieve a state where a single tradition achieves the hegemonic status that Feyerabend describes. There are, of course, candidates—perhaps including modern-day North Korea—but it is plausible to suggest that these are the exception rather than the rule and therefore not a sensible basis for a generalised claim, and at the least, it prevents the hegemony principle being able to function as widely as Feyerabend needs it to. The fourth problem concerns the liberation principle and the possibility – neglected by Feyerabend – that exposure to a diversity of traditions would in fact incapacitate our capacity for decision-making and deliberation. It is a commonplace of social and political philosophy, and not just in their communitarian forms, that the capacity to make judgments, decide priorities, and debate with others is grounded in shared inherited institutions and traditions – for which a classic modern statement is Rawls (1971). Yet a free society of the sort described by Feyerabend would be lacking such preconditions for public cooperation not for the reason that it contains a plurality of traditions – as modern liberal societies anyway do – but because no single tradition is allowed to provide shared means of enabling debate and discussion. The members of a free society will not be ‘left at the mercy’ of the surrounding institutions, but will, instead, appeal to ‘the tradition to which [he or she] belongs’, whether that be Hopi culture or fundamentalist Protestantism, including the ‘epistemic criteria’ peculiar to each tradition (Feyerabend [1980] 1999, pp. 218 and 220). But such a situation would, however, clearly be anarchistic – in an appropriate usage of that term – since it would be extremely difficult for it to evince the sort of foundational epistemological consensus that coordinated public life depends upon. Many moral philosophers, including Bernard Williams (2006) and Alasdair MacIntyre (2007), emphasise that our moral and social life is grounded in, and guided by, an inherited tradition – one that, though contingent and changeable, still is not infinitely malleable, at least not to the extent presumed and required by Feyerabend. This being so, the simultaneous dissolution of defined authorities and establishment of a plurality of alternative traditions may therefore incapacitate rather than liberate. Even an anarchist requires a stable tradition against which to rail and rebel, and it will be, in part, the contingencies of that tradition that make rebellion possible, if not compelling. One might, in fact, wonder whether a ‘free society’ of the sort Feyerabend envisions could ever naturally emerge – or whether it would have to be imposed by the sorts of large-scale artificial reordering projects to which he was, of course, temperamentally and philosophically hostile. Rorty (1989), of course, thought such a ‘liberal ironic’ society could—maybe even would—emerge. Considering these four closely related problems it is unsurprising that the ideal of the free society slowly disappeared from Feyerabend’s writings throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Tellingly, too, he grew dissatisfied with Science in a Free Society, where these ideas are expressed in their strongest forms, to that point that he requested that it not be reprinted. Certainly few scholars regard the idea of the free society or the proposal for the separation of science and the state as plausible, and discussions of them by Feyerabend scholars are typically brief, polite, but critical (as, indeed, is this one). But even if the specific ideas and proposals are unimpressive, a critical analysis of them – like the one just rehearsed – can serve to identify certain thematic concerns that run through Feyerabend’s political thought, and which might offer a more promising basis for its interpretation and, perhaps, reconstruction. There are three closely related thematic concerns that run through and find diverse expression in Feyerabend’s political thought and which are connected to wider features of his philosophy. These themes are (first) hegemony, (second) liberation, and the third is, more cumbersomely, the cognitive and cultural authority of science and it is by focusing on the confluence of these themes that Feyerabend’s political thought is best developed and articulated – or so I will argue – and this interpretive strategy has the additional attraction of helping us to situate that thought relative to those many critics of the place of science in modern societies, many of whom invoke Feyerabend’s name in support of their own cause. In the following sections, these thematic concerns will be more closely examined by placing them in the context of Feyerabend’s views on what he called ‘the problem of knowledge and education in a free society (Feyerabend 1993, p. 252). It is my proposal that by focusing on his educational views it becomes possible to reconstruct his political thought in a way that is both coherent and compelling and still sensitive to his thematic concerns about science, hegemony, and liberation. 3. The ‘Berkeley experience’. To understand Feyerabend’s educational views it is useful to focus on a formative episode in their development that took place at the University of California in Berkeley in the mid-1960s. This episode – call it ‘the Berkeley experience’ – is one that Feyerabend identified as having a deep impact upon his philosophical and political view. See, e.g., Feyerabend (1993), pp. 263-5ff) and (1995), p. 47. The significance of the Berkeley experience also marks a rare unanimity among leading commentators, and has attracted recent interest in its own right. For the consensus, see, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene (2000), p. 5 and Oberheim (2006), pp. 21-22, and the recent interest, Kidd (2013a). The origins of the Berkeley experience lay in the reforms of American higher education that were initiated by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as part of their wider project of establishing a more equitable society. A centrepiece of that project was the Higher Education Act of 1964 that was designed to give disenfranchised groups access to higher education, and successfully so. During ‘the years around 1964’, he recalled, ‘Mexicans, blacks, Indians entered the university as a result of new educational policies’, but, though approving of the reforms and the resulting diversification, Feyerabend became increasingly alarmed by his colleagues’ description of them as being a ‘marvellous opportunity for a new wave of enlightenment’ (Feyerabend 1993, p. 263). That alarm reflected two worries. The first was the growing recognition that the ‘arguments and … stories’ reflected in he curricula were, in fact, ‘reflections of the conceit’ of powerful social and political groups rather than of the actual richness of world culture. The second was the worry that the ‘interests [,] feelings [and] fears’ of many of the members of his newly diversified classes – and the ideas and perspectives of their cultures – were being excluded and often derogated (Feyerabend 1993, pp. 263-264). These worries converged in an increasing recognition that the educational curricula that Feyerabend was teaching was being abused to propagate the achievements and perspectives of a specific culture and to prejudicially exclude, without examination, alternative ‘ideals of life and possibilities of human existence’ (Feyerabend 1993, p. 264). This realisation prompted Feyerabend to dramatically reconceive of himself as an agent of hegemony rather than a champion of enlightenment on two counts. The first is that the educational system that he was part of was narrow and unrepresentative of the plurality of human cultures and traditions, and, second, prejudicially and presumptively excluded alternatives. A good pluralist, after all, does not think that ‘Anything goes’, but only that our judgments about what does and doesn’t ‘go’ ought to be determined, properly and fairly, by critical engagement with well-developed alternatives. It is that epistemological conviction that becomes increasingly integrated into Feyerabend’s thought at this point and which, if one distinguished scholar is correct, constituted the stable core of his philosophy. See Oberheim (2006). The emerging idea is that political and epistemic freedom, understood as ‘the attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life, and … discover the secrets of nature’, requires, if not demands, ‘a pluralism of ideas and forms of life’ achieved, in no small part, to the rejection of ‘rigid traditions’ which promote some one set of ‘ideas and forms of life’ to the ‘exclusion of all else’ (Feyerabend 1993, pp.12-13 and 31). Here, again, are the themes of hegemony and liberation. It is important to make two clarifications of the content of these concerns. The first is that Feyerabend was not opposed to the teaching of the achievements and perspectives of ‘Western’ culture – its science, philosophy, and art, say – for the reason that such inverted prejudice could hardly be reconciled with his pluralism, on the one hand, and his obvious enthusiasm for that culture, on the other. The second is that Feyerabend did not suppose that other traditions and cultures were uniformly or even necessarily valuable, such that the sign on the door ought to read ‘All welcome!’ Instead, Feyerabend’s call is for a careful and unprejudiced survey and scrutiny of the diversity of achievements and perspectives of the world’s cultures – a determination of what, in fact, ‘goes’ – and an obvious way to do this was to encourage students to critically challenge core tenets of their own culture and to sympathetically consider those of others cultures, so that the ‘experiences of people from other cultures [could be] discussed … authentically’ (Hoyningen-Huene 2000, p. 5). Central to Feyerabend’s emerging conception of education was the conviction that an educator should not reiterate or reinforce dominant beliefs and convictions – prejudicially and propagandistically – but should critically challenge them. In a stirring remark, Feyerabend suggested that the aim of teaching was not to ‘embellish a subject, or to construct a system, or to cultivate ideas … but to provide … a survey of the possibilities of human existence’, inclusive of, but not confined to, one’s ‘home’ culture (Feyerabend 1991, p. 495). A system of education so conceived would not simply survey these different possibilities by lining them up for dispassionate viewing, but should be a basis for critical discussion, and hence for rejection and modification as well as contemplation and acceptance – and so ensuring that society is not populated by citizens who are ‘unable to imagine or to comprehend alternatives’ to their own attitudes, beliefs, and convictions (Feyerabend [1961] 1999, p. 384). The Berkeley experience was instrumental in Feyerabend’s development of a conception of education focused on freeing students from uninformed and uncritical adoption of prevailing beliefs and convictions by introducing them to the diversity of ‘possibilities of human existence’ offered by the histories of the world’s cultures. It is clear enough that this conception was shaped by the themes of hegemony and liberation - but not yet clear what relation it has to the cognitive and cultural authority of science. 4. The authority of science. A distinctive theme of Feyerabend’s later philosophy is the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences in modern societies. This theme shifted, however, over the course of his career. In earlier works, such as the neglected 1968 paper ‘Science, Freedom, and the Good Life’, the sciences can increase ‘human happiness’ by enhancing ‘the powers of human beings to become what they are capable of becoming’ (Feyerabend 1968, p. 134). But by the early 1990s, the sciences are implicated in the ‘degradation’ of both ‘nature and society’ due to their being a main engine of the ‘conquest of abundance’ that, claims Feyerabend, ‘dominate[s] Western civilization’ (Feyerabend 2001, pp. 4 and 241). Such shifts often reflect changes in polemical strategy as well as maturing philosophical judgment – not to mention a fair degree of shadowboxing – but there are at least three features which consistently contributed to the radical character of Feyerabend’s work from the mid-1970s onwards and which are worth taking seriously still. These features are exemplified in section seven of ‘Consolations for the Specialist’ – a ‘Plea for Hedonism’ – although they manifest elsewhere in Feyerabend’s writings, too. The first was a willingness to challenge foundational presuppositions about the sciences – its history, scope, and value – by suspending ‘ennobling’ estimations and placing it within ‘domain of critical discussion’ (Feyerabend 1970, p. 209). The second was a related insistence that the answers to such questions about the value of science were not obvious and therefore a matter for serious enquiry rather than cursory discussion; for instance, by taking seriously the question of whether the ‘presence [of science is] beneficial to us, or … perhaps liable to corrupt our understanding’ (Feyerabend 1970, p. 209). The third and final was Feyerabend’s suggestion that the asking and answering of such foundational questions may be hindered or restricted by the very fact of their being raised within a scientific culture. ‘It is very difficult’, he complained, ‘to approach such questions in the right spirit’ because the fact of the presence and prestige of scientific value and institutions impairs our efforts to achieve a ‘proper evaluation’ of them (Feyerabend 1970, p. 209). These factors come together in the judgment that taken-for-granted claims about the beneficence of the modern sciences – or even of ‘scientific culture’ – are, in many cases, results of presumption rather than reasoning, and so are suspect, and may in fact not survive critical enquiry. Although it may seem clear that such claims might seem to reinforce the sense of Feyerabend as a radical critic of the sciences, this judgment would be too hasty. The nuanced claims being made are that our estimations of the value of the sciences are often corrupted by false accounts of their history and methods – ‘myths’ like methodological monism, say – or reliant upon prejudice and presupposition rather than patient and prolonged enquiry. Correspondingly, the call that Feyerabend issued is for sustained and systematic critical enquiry into the history, methods, and value of science – or what he called a ‘critique of scientific reason’ – which would focus on two closely related questions: ‘What is science?’ and ‘What’s so great about science?’ (Feyerabend 1976, p. 109). The term ‘critique’ should be understood in the Kantian sense of the critical project of rejecting extravagant claims made on behalf of reason—scientific or otherwise—that indicated that it was being pushed beyond its proper limits. Although the first of those questions was well served by the history and philosophy of science, the second question was neglected, such that the ‘excellence of science is assumed [but] not argued for’ (Feyerabend 1976, p. 112). This is not to say that Feyerabend doubted the epistemic and practical efficacy of the sciences – for to ask a radical question is not necessarily to expect a radical answer – but rather to insist that our estimations of the merits of the sciences are grounded in informed deliberation rather than ‘myth’, presumption, and false expectations. At the very least the members of a scientific culture should be protected against false accounts of the sciences that impair the capacity to developed informed views about the cognitive and cultural authority of science: ‘we can agree’, emphasised Feyerabend, ‘that scientific products may be given a special status’, but only on the condition that such judgments are made in awareness of the ‘complexities of research’ and not ‘simpleminded and … vapid myths’ (Feyerabend 2001, pp. 159-160). If it is the case that ‘decisions concerning the value and use of science are … existential decisions … to live, think, feel [and] behave in a certain way’, then educators are especially beholden to ensure that students can engage with them in an informed manner (Feyerabend 1987, p. 30). The call for critical enquiry with the sciences at both the academic and educational levels therefore reflects a grounding concern that people ought to be capable of assessing and adopting authorities using their own capacities. The Kantian motto ‘Sapere aude!’ rings clear, of course, and Feyerabend’s concern was to apply the critical principles captured in that motto to the modern sciences. Since scientific knowledge, practices, and institutions enjoy a privileged authority within modern societies—affecting education, healthcare, agriculture—it is important that the members of those societies are not befuddled by ‘myths’, and that we see our authorities aright, as it were. Otherwise the authority of science is invested in unstable foundations – ‘myths’ that would dissolve under scrutiny, say, or exaggerated claims that science cannot fulfil – and these encourage the widespread ‘anti-science’ attitudes that, for Philip Kitcher, are contributing to the ‘erosion of scientific authority’ and generating an urgent need for ‘a theory of the place of Science in a democratic society’ – that being an ‘urgent task’ for contemporary philosophy of science (Kitcher 2012: Ch1 passim). Clearly enough, Kitcher echoes Feyerabend’s call for a system of education that can ‘prepare citizens’ to come to informed judgements on the place of science within ‘a society that contains groups committed to various standards’, including many either orthogonal or opposed to the epistemic standards of scientific enquiry (Feyerabend 1993, p. 162). Indeed, similar testimonies could be cited, including John Dupré’s praise of Feyerabend as an ‘oasis of serious critical analysis’ of a topic – the social and political authority of science – that the philosophy of science has, ‘astonishingly enough’, so far largely neglected. When Dupré goes on to emphasise Feyerabend’s concern to challenge the ‘antidemocratic and oppressive consequences of the monopoly of epistemic authority sustained by science’, it is easy enough to spot the thematic concerns of liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science (Dupré 1993, pp. 262-263). A central purpose of the conception of education that Feyerabend began to develop into the early 1970s was therefore to ensure that citizens could come to an informed critical judgment on the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences. Such an educational system would not be intended to displace science, but rather to ensure, as best as possible, that the ‘decision to work in accordance with the canons of science [is] the result of examination and choice’, rather than the unreflective adoption of prevailing convictions which one can neither articulate nor defend (Feyerabend 1993, p. 162). Or in the terms introduced earlier, education ought to guard both science and society against the perpetual risk of a lapse into hegemony by liberating citizens from ‘myths’ that would encourage uncritical and unreflective commitment to authorities that, if left unchecked, could deteriorate into ‘tyrannies’. Put another way, though science is not intrinsically tyrannous, it can become a tyranny if the citizens and scholars of scientific cultures fail in their critical vigilance and allow ‘myths’, confusions, and other epistemic bugbears to compromise our capacity to understand, and hence to profitably direct, the scientific enterprise. 5. An objection. The foregoing account of Feyerabend’s educational views has been largely sympathetic because, in my judgment, one can identify in the mass of his remarks a set of coherent and compelling ideas about the purposes of education within modern societies. Even if so, however, a critic might point to various remarks that Feyerabend makes about education that, so far, my discussion has omitted and which, for critics, give cause for concern—enough, perhaps, to dent any confidence in my talk of a compelling conception of education. Specifically, a critic might point to two specific remarks on education that, between, them, seem to reinforce the idea that the political and educational institutions of a society ought to nullify any commitment to any cognitive authority at all (whether science, or voodoo, or whatever). My aim in this section is to use these as problematic ‘test cases’ for my sympathetic interpretation of Feyerabend’s educational views – and show that, in fact, they reflect an ideal of ‘epistemic responsibility’ that honours the themes of liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science. The first: ‘[S]cience should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality’ (Feyerabend 1993, p. viii) And the second: ‘[C]hoosing one tradition [like science] as a basis of a free society is an arbitrary act that can be justified only by resorting to power’ (Feyerabend 1993, p. 228) These remarks seem to express the sorts of claims about science that were inflamed by the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, including the reliance of science on sociological ‘power play’ and the unattractive sort of epistemically relativism with which Feyerabend has often been charged. For a discussion, see Kusch (forthcoming), How, then, might these two problematic claims best be interpreted? Regarding the first claim, education ought to liberate students from uncritical commitment to the sciences by presenting them as what they are – as being one set of the very many ways of conceiving of and comporting ourselves within the world that communities of human beings from different times and cultures have developed. Feyerabend consistently argued that students should be ‘informed that there are alternatives’ to prevailing late modern beliefs and convictions – magical, theistic, and so on – and that those alternatives ought, in many cases at least, be recognised and respected rather than derogated and dismissed as ‘rather silly’ (Feyerabend 2011, pp. 127 and 14). The point that Feyerabend was urging upon us is that it is quite natural for those with modern sensibilities to regard such beliefs as ‘silly’ or plain incredible; however, those cultures who took them seriously often had excellent reasons for doing so – even if it takes intellectual and imaginative effort on our part to appreciate and understand those reasons. See Kidd (2012a).. It is, of course, not easy to recognise that ours is ‘not the only possible approach’ to conceiving of and living within the world - to appreciate ‘that there are alternatives’ which ‘may lead to different conclusions’ – but, for Feyerabend, this difficulty is demanded of us by an appreciation of the ‘abundance’ of the world (Feyerabend, 2001, p. 87). The ideal that guides his conception of education is a society populated by citizens with cultivated capacities for ‘choosing, imagining, criticising’ who are ‘master of the myth’, or worldview, that ‘guides’ their conception of, and comportment within, the world (Feyerabend 1984, pp. 140 and 145). The claim that the sciences are therefore ‘one view among many’ and one ‘road to truth and reality’ is, then, a reflection of a properly humble attitude towards the history of world cultures. Most of these, after all, have had very different conceptions of reality and of the sorts of life that human beings can intelligibly and meaningfully live within it; but this appeal is neither crass relativism nor a call for unreflective tolerance of such pluralism, of a sort that would simply point to the fact of alternative forms of life and suspend all critical enquiry. Instead, the purpose was, as Feyerabend put it, to inspire and enable ‘passionate argument’ rather than to encourage ‘detachment or cynicism’ (Feyerabend 2001, p. xi). True to his pluralistic epistemology, the aim was to bring late modern scientific culture into critical contact with well-developed alternative cultural and intellectual traditions, albeit in a way that avoids ‘dogmatic assertions’ by critics who have ‘no knowledge whatsoever’ either of scientific culture or of the mature alternatives to it that mature human beings have, and often still do, find both intelligible and compelling (Feyerabend 1991, p. 92). This entails that even very heterodox topics, such as creationism, could be taught in public schools, but with the proviso – admittedly not stated by Feyerabend – that it be subjected to robust critical scrutiny, such that it might, in fact, be rejected. The purpose of education ought to be to enable critically informed reflexive stances towards prevailing beliefs and convictions, not to promote or propagandise, and there is no reason to suppose that everything survives such a process; for instance, Feyerabend agreed that astrology was ‘junk’, but insisted that critics who think that must give reasons and evidence for their conviction. For Philip Kitcher (2012: ch. 6), this requires a robust conception of public reason, which sadly Feyerabend does not provide. My suggestion, in brief for now, is that Kitcher is right about the need for public reason, but wrong to define it in terms of scientific reason. The reason is that, as Rawls (1999, p. 124) recognized, doing so prejudges public reason in favour of a given ‘comprehensive doctrine’—specifically secularism—thereby undermining its capacity to act as an arbiter between social groups with competing convictions and commitments. See, further, Kidd (MS), and, for an interesting discussion of related educational implications, Cooper (2008). Regarding the second claim, this is best interpreted as an epistemic claim about the procedural basis for privileging certain authorities or traditions. Specifically, it is only if commitment to a cognitive and cultural authority is established through critical deliberation and decision that one can ensure that its privileged status is neither an ‘arbitrary act’ nor achieved through ‘resorting to power’. It is clear that Feyerabend is hostile to unreflective dogmatism and to the uncritical adoption – whether of scientific theories or of ‘forms of life’ – and these epistemic aversions manifest in the call for a strong form of epistemic responsibilism; namely, that our beliefs and convictions ought to result from carefully informed and critically vigorous processes of enquiry – rather than dogmatic adoption of prevailing beliefs. Clearly enough, such epistemic responsibilism is a rosy ideal, and one that few can or could fulfil, and not least because public education, at least in the US and UK, is not fit to fulfil the critical purposes that Feyerabend requires. Certainly many studies of the public understanding of science indicate woeful public ignorance of both general scientific methodology and specific sciences, such as climate science. See, e.g., Coady and Corry (2013), McCright and Dunlap (2011), and Oreskes (2007). This is, in fact, a typical focus of current talk of a ‘crisis’ in modern education, offered by distinguished commentators such as Martha Nussbaum (2010) and Stefan Collini (2012), so at least Feyerabend is in good company. The modest and plausible point to take from Feyerabend is that it is an ideal to which the members of late modern scientific culture can - and should - approximate to far better than they tend to. This requires the support of scholars, including historians and philosophers of science, who can inform and inspire the public in their efforts; for instance, by challenging distorting ‘myths’ about science, by better understanding the institutions that structure modern life, or by becoming capable of critically engaging with disputes and controversies in which science is implicated. The scope of this activity includes ensuring that participants in enquiry honour the epistemic standards of mature debate and enquiry, and refrain from prejudicial derogation of topics of which the critic is, in fact, quite ignorant. Many of Feyerabend’s defences of practices and traditions deemed eccentric, such as astrology and Chinese traditional medicine, are, in fact, primarily defences of the epistemic norms of enquiry—to be informed and critical, rather than ignorant and dogmatic. For a discussion of Feyerabend’s defence of alternative medicine, see Kidd (2013b). The cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences should therefore be grounded in a historically informed and philosophically robust understanding of those sciences. If so, its authority would not be a result of arbitrary selection or power play, as some postmodernist critics have argued, but arise in an epistemically responsible manner. Education can serve this aim, suggests Feyerabend, by ensuring that ‘people [do not] just … accept [it as] a form of life’, but are, through careful instruction, capable of ‘seeing it in perspective’ – especially in relation to ‘other ways of living in [the] world’ - and so judging that it ‘should retain its exception role’ (Feyerabend 1991, pp. 75 and 516). This ideal is, then, not ‘anti-science’, but, on the contrary, ‘pro-science’ insofar as it aspires to do justice to the complexity of science and to provide secure epistemic grounds for our acceptance of its cognitive and cultural authority. IJK: perhaps reference my ‘Reawakening to Wonder’ paper if its fate is determined by time of final submission to SHPS. The two problematic test cases can therefore be positively interpreted as an ideal of epistemically responsible commitment to the cognitive and cultural authority of science. Central to this ideal is the conviction that education ought to present modern scientific culture within the context of the plurality of ways of conceiving of and comporting oneself within the world, faithful to both history and culture, and ensure, as best as possible, a capacity for informed engagement with it. See further Kidd (2012b). It is plausible to suppose that Feyerabend judged that few students, if any, might seriously choose to adopt alternative forms of life, few of which anyway survive, but his primary concern is, in my judgment, with the processes of deliberation and decision-making rather than in their outcomes. The foregoing account of course requires the abandonment of literal interpretations of some of Feyerabend’s remarks on education, but given the often intensely rhetorical and polemical character of his writing that is hardly unreasonable. Interpreting Feyerabend after all requires both judicious exercise of the principle of charity and vigorous exercise of one’s critical sensibilities – and, of course, these are quite in line with the emphasis on personal intellectual autonomy which lies at the heart of his conception of education, and indeed of the wider conception of philosophy into which it comfortably fits. See Oberheim (2006), pp. 30-38ff. 6. Conclusions. This purpose of this paper was to offer a critical assessment of Feyerabend’s political thought by focusing on how it informs his various remarks upon education. Using a critical analysis of the idea of the ‘free society’ it emerged that his political thought is best understood in terms of three thematic concerns (namely hegemony, liberation, and the authority of science). Those three themes each recur throughout the conception of education that arose as a result of the Berkeley experience and they converge in the conviction that commitment to prevailing cognitive and cultural authorities – specifically of late modern scientific culture – ought to be the result of informed critical deliberation rather than unreflective embrace. Although it is clear that this reflects a demanding ideal of epistemic responsibility that few, if any, might ever fulfil, but it has the merits of being both intelligible and defensible and strikingly prescient of contemporary developments within the philosophy of science. The most obvious examples are the complex and challenging issues concerning the relations between science, policy, values, expertise, democracy, and the public. See, inter alia, Douglas (2009), Kincaid, Dupré, and Wylie (2006), Kitcher (2012), and Longino (2002). The ‘free society’ that Feyerabend describes should, perhaps, be understood in terms of these contemporary concerns: a society which has come to elevate an historically contingent tradition into a cognitive and cultural authority through an ongoing epistemically responsible process of critical deliberation. If so, then Feyerabend has good claim to have presaged contemporary calls for a robust ‘philosophy of science in society’. On this conception, a free society is founded not on epistemically anarchistic relativism—of a sort that Feyerabend polemically proposed but could not seriously defend—but rather on epistemically responsible citizenship. Acknowledgements. 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