Abstract

I offer the suggestion that we replace the concept of method with that of strategy, and advance a case that the justificationist ethic underlying the rationalist philosophy is structurally authoritarian. ;Words such as "objective" and "rational" carry with them implicit but often hidden moral imperatives which arise from what I call a justificationist ethos. This ethos underlies the quest for foundations, and is operant in the rational reconstructions of such philosophers as Israel Scheffler and Imre Lakatos. Paul K. Feyerabend opts for an anarchist position in which no methodological rule is to serve as a standard for either discovery or justification in science. I use some of his arguments against rationality in science to further my arguments against the justificationist ethos that has been presupposed by the previous rational reconstructors. ;Contemporary philosophy of science is presently coping with the difficulties which have arisen from the critical setbacks of early positivism. In the work that follows I investigate a number of the issues which arise as a consequence of the desire on the part of some philosophers to reconstruct rational and empirical foundations for science which take into account these difficulties. ;Scientific method or a reconstructed scientific methodology has been expected to both bear the brunt of providing solid foundations for science as well as providing a moral paradigm for the adjudication of disagreements in and out of natural science. In what follows I expose and explicate methodologies as being primarily bearers of moral injunctions which by their very nature cannot provide grounds or foundations for science. I argue that all methodologies arrive with a set of rules which specify what are the acceptable or "best" sort of results. These rules are always either self-validating or are justified in terms of some other standard embodied by a different methodology