Against Method: Galileo didn't follow the scientific method and neither should you
Feyerabend makes the most compelling case against the scientific method that I’ve seen in his book: Against Method. He argues that Galileo himself wouldn’t have been a heliocentrist if he followed the scientific method in the way we’re taught. To get the full argument, you’ll have to read his book. I was convinced after 50 pages in.
The method
The way I’ve understood the scientific method is that you take all the available information, create a hypothesis to explain it, and make a prediction. In doing so, you make it easy to tell if your hypothesis is on the right track. If new information contradicts your hypothesis, you go back to the drawing board. You rinse / repeat enough times and you might get something robust enough to be called a theory.
Galileo worked counterinductively
Heliocentrism didn’t start with Galileo or even Copernicus. “Copernicus's system did not predict the planets' positions any better than the Ptolemaic system.” (Wikipedia). Helicentrism could be traced back to a Pythagorean philosopher in 390 BC. It wasn’t obvious that the earth should orbit the sun, and to most people it still isn’t obvious. Heliocentrism started off in the realm of speculation, and history has proven it out, but this didn’t have to be the case. There’s no a-priori way for them to have known that they were on the side of truth.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of someone who knew only what was known at the time of Galileo. There were a number of problems that Galileo couldn’t explain, and which should have prevented heliocentrism from taking off. First, he couldn’t explain why a stone that is dropped from a tower would land straight below. If the earth was spinning, wouldn’t the stone go sideways and land away from the tower? Another problem was that the brightness of stars didn’t increase and diminish in proportion to how far away they were according to the heliocentric model. He claimed that such evidence only appeared to contradict him, but didn’t have ready explanations.
This brings us back to the scientific method. Heliocentrism was not convincing to Galileo because it could explain all the available information. Its problems also weren’t resolved when he was tried by the Inquisition. He was found to be “vehemently suspect of heresy” and forced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest 1.
Solzhenitsyn who sat in the gulags himself quotes one of his cellmates:
To stand up for truth is nothing!
For truth you have to sit in jail!
It’s not that Galileo didn’t acknowledge issues with heliocentrism — he did. But he also didn’t consider the problems to be deal-breakers. It’s self-evident that all new ideas require evidence. It’s also foolish to disregard all evidence. The question is, what evidence should you accept, and what do you do with evidence that doesn’t fit? In any case, if even evidence can be called into question, how do we know if we’re making progress?
Alternative ways to judge new ideas
In removing consistency with evidence as a criteria, we then need new means of judging new ideas. Some that come to mind:
Beauty
Simplicity
Distance from existing views
Beauty
Judging by beauty doesn’t feel like a serious way to go, but Galileo looked through his telescope, and seeing moons orbit Jupiter, he suspected the earth orbited the sun in a similar fashion. There were many reasons why this shouldn’t be the case. It was a beautiful and interesting idea worth pursuing, but it wasn’t without its flaws.
Simplicity
Simplicity would mean that you prefer a simple theory over a robust one. Heliocentrism didn’t explain everything. The view hadn’t grown hair yet, but geocentrism was quite sophisticated at the time. Maybe the simple theory has edge cases, but instead of having evidence judge the theory, you also allow the theory to judge the evidence. It’s possible that the simple theory will be proven right and contradictory evidence will be shown to have been contaminated.
Distance from existing views
It’s also important that new ideas are sufficiently different from existing views. A proper alternative to evolutionary theory shouldn’t look like evolutionary theory. It might look like creationism, but if creationism can’t hold up, then the next new idea shouldn’t look like either evolution or creationism. Crazy ideas are high risk, high reward. Most crazy ideas are wrong. This makes it even more impressive if someone does manage to find a crazy idea that works.
If we drop the standards, anything goes?
Pretty much, yeah. This is the argument that Feyeraband makes. There shouldn’t be any demand for academics to pursue only well-established ideas. They can if they want. They can pursue completely batshit crazy theories if they prefer those instead.
Knowing which evidence to accept and which to ignore is an art. Galileo’s telescope didn’t contradict the belief that the earth was stationary. However, his telescope did help make heliocentrism more beautiful and attractive. If you ignore the wrong evidence, history will make you out to be a fool. If you ignore the right evidence, you will be remembered for your good judgment.
Instead of looking at academics as purveyors of truth, we should look at them as experts in certain views of the world. We accept or reject these views as we please. After all, we have a right to be wrong. Some ideas might be popular and wrong. Some might even be dangerous. The goal is to always try to make the less popular view more attractive.
So anyone can believe anything that pleases them whether it’s true or not? I don’t know how to answer this. I think we should follow our curiosity. Something that’s hard to argue against is technology. Without the telescope, Galileo wouldn’t have seen the moons orbiting Jupiter. Some progress is nearly impossible to deny.
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei