ABSTRACT. Paul Feyerabend’s widow, Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, wrote a brief piece called “Preface and Acknowledgements” for her husband’s posthumously published book, Conquest of Abundance.   There she said: “In the last decade of his life, … Paul was not at all pleased with Science in a Free Society, which he did not wish to see reprinted.”  (p.xi) 

We will, of course, never know how Feyerabend would have reacted to a conference like this one had he risen from the dead.  There is a good chance he would have hated it.  I shall argue, however, that he almost certainly would have enjoyed learning about the rediscovery of the “First Vienna Circle” and the impact it has had on our discipline.  He might also have learned something important about the role of women in the early history of logical empiricism.

ABSTRACT. Science in a Free Society (SFS) represents a seemingly abrupt shift in the issues Feyerabend was concerned with. While there were inklings of the political and ethical implications of methodology in his earlier papers, these did not constitute a central theme of focused discussion as they do in SFS. In my paper, I will focus on a particular aspect of this shift, namely, its effect on Feyerabend’s pluralism. Feyerabend had previously defended theoretical pluralism but extends pluralism to cultures in SFS. He does so without providing any explicit justification for the extension. I will examine this shift with an eye to understanding why Feyerabend thinks the extension is legitimate.

Prima facie, theories are nothing like cultures. Feyerabend’s primary argument for theoretical pluralism is that maximizing the number of theories maximizes the testability of a theory. This seems like a strange argument to apply to cultures. What I will show is that in SFS, Feyerabend uses the same justification for both theoretical pluralism and cultural pluralism. He does so by implicitly conceiving of cultures as the kinds of things that can be tested. Cultural pluralism is therefore not simply valued in itself, for Feyerabend, but because of the mutual benefits from the critical interaction among distinct cultures. In this paper, I detail Feyerabend’s conception of cultures and demonstrate that it has its roots in J.S. Mill’s ‘experiments of living’, where concrete ‘ways of living’ act as tests of conceptions of the good, an idea that has recently garnered some attention (Muldoon 2015). This clarifies something Feyerabend never explicitly argued for: why theoretical pluralism should be extended to cultures. I conclude by suggesting the implications this has for understanding Feyerabend’s relativism and how his claim that “any culture is potentially every culture”, while not enunciated until Conquest of Abundance, was implicit in SFS.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I want to highlight one understudied rationale behind Feyerabend's plea to "defend society against science", namely, to give a resolute response to the real possibility of a clash between the results of science and the moral demands of a community.

The political and social philosophy presented in Science in a Free Society is often understood as a consequence of his analysis of science put forward in Against Method. While I agree with this assessment, it is also true that the ethical underpinnings of Feyerabend's analysis of science reach back long before his "epistemological anarchism", to a time when he wasn't onboard with methodological pluralism (roughly pre-1964) and still subscribed to a strong prescriptivism in philosophy of science. On my view, Feyerabend upheld this prescriptivism on the assumption that methodology would give the means to rationally intervene (in principle and de facto) in the process of scientific development in order to direct the course of scientific research. In particular, by an entailment of moral and epistemic norms, this intervention would allow to "inject" moral demands in the stipulations of the epistemic aim(s) of science, thereby securing (in principle) a development of science in accordance with the moral demands of a community.

According to my reading of Feyerabend's turn to methodological pluralism, it was this assumption enabling his strong prescriptivism that was given up, and also, by association, the possibility of moral intervention in the course of science by rational means. Surprisingly, Feyerabend's methodological pluralism then coincides with a methodological laissez-faire attitude towards the inner-workings of the sciences. But, if the in principle "injection" of moral demands into science is no longer warranted, it is possible (in principle and de facto) that the development of moral demands and scientific research go separate ways. More than that, it follows that science can justifiably move along completely different lines, adopting morally objectionable epistemic values that may be the right move in a given scientific context. Science may not contribute to the moral flourishing of a community after all and justifiably so from the perspective of scientific progress. But then, so Feyerabend's famous conclusion goes, it is up to the moral community viz. society to protect its moral demands-against scientific freedom if necessary.

ABSTRACT. 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of Paul Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society, Feyerabend’s second major book-length work in English. It is probably his least well-regarded work, disliked even by its author. But the book is in many respects ahead of its time, asking normative questions about the place of science in democracy that have only come into fashion more recently. I interrogate the central argument of SFS in the context of contemporary discussions of science, values, and democracy, and attempt to recover a (potential) radical lesson from Feyerabend’s argument. In particular, Feyerabend provides several arguments against the ineliminability of expert judgment from decisions to accept or reject policy-relevant scientific hypotheses, or more broadly, from value-laden policy decisions to which scientific information is highly relevant. This ineliminability thesis (which I [and several others] have defended elsewhere) undermines the attempt to keep policy-relevant science value-free, and demands that we preserve the authority and role of experts in democratic society despite the value-ladenness of science. Feyerabend’s powerful challenge to this thesis problematizes assumptions on both sides of contemporary debates, and his challenge has yet to be reckoned with.

ABSTRACT. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) calls on non-Indigenous Canadians to build equitable, respectful and transparent partnerships with Indigenous Peoples as the primary means for advancing reconciliation. In this spirit a UBC-based research cluster, Indigenous/Science, is building collaborative partnerships designed to bring the tools of archaeological science to bear on Indigenous-led research questions in a way that embodies a “practice of reconciliation.” These raise challenging issues that have been central to the philosophical literature on values in science: questions about what divisions of cognitive labor are productive and what cross-training is necessary to establish sufficient common understanding to sustain collaborative projects, as well as how best to navigate differences in ethical/epistemic commitments and the asymmetries of power and hierarchies of expertise that underpin them.

In this keynote address I compare the trajectory of three projects that are taking shape under the rubric of the Indigenous/Science cluster: one centered on the use of geochemical analyses to trace trade networks in the Pacific Northwest; a second that makes use of DNA and stable isotope analysis to model Indigenous resource management; and a third survey project the purpose of which is to locate grave sites related to a residential school. Each requires considerable translational expertise on the part of all partners, and each integrates the resources of archaeological science and traditional Indigenous knowledge in quite different ways. I identify points of divergence in the goals and norms of inquiry that partners bring to these projects with the aim of delineating strategies for productively engaging these differences. I consider, too, questions about what we philosophers can contribute to such ventures: do we have a useful translational role to play, and what is required of us when called upon to bear witness to the real-world conflicts and consequences of scientific inquiry?