Reddit reviews Against Method
We found 6 Reddit comments about Against Method. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews Against MethodWe found 6 Reddit comments about Against Method. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
So this is a very, very, very tricky question, because when we get right down to it, we still don't have a very rigorous definition of "science" today. That is, we don't have a clear way to say, "this is science" and "this is not science." This is known as the Demarcation problem and after several decades of no progress made, most historians and philosophers of science have simply abandoned the project altogether as a badly thought-out one, even in the cases of outright silly nonsense.
(Now I know a lot of people out there who don't study this stuff for a living are probably saying, but what about Karl Popper? What about falsifiability? Etc. Let me just say that it doesn't really work out very smoothly along those lines and that has been known for many decades now. Falsifiability is a nice way to attack Creationism but as a rigorous means of sorting out science from non-science it falls flat when you start trying to apply it widely.)
It gets much worse if we take philosophical standards of the day (be they Popper's or Merton's or whomevers) and try to apply them backwards in time. We find that most of those heralded as the "first" or "great" scientists break ever rule in the book, routinely. (Galileo is such an offender that Paul Feyerabend wrote an entire book about it.)
So this gets tricky as an historical question, and historians of science are prone to debate with each other just how unclear it is that there, for example, was any kind of "Scientific Revolution" ("There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.") at all, or whether the evolving professionalization, practices, and mindsets were something both more gradual and as-of-yet-still-unfinished than most people realize.
But that's probably not the answer you're interested in. I think what you're probably going for is a history of professionalization of science, the latter loosely defined as systematic inquiry into nature.
Peter Dear, an historian of science at Cornell, has argued quite persuasively in my mind that the real distinguishing feature of the "Scientific Revolution" of the 15th-16th century (e.g. Galileo et al.) is not that they came up with brand new ways of thinking about the universe, or that Galileo himself was any kind of real outlier here (he did not pop out of nowhere and there were, indeed, plenty of other astronomers and philosophers and etc. running around at the same time as him, though we tend to ignore them), but that they started on a very regular basis merging quantitative studies of nature with philosophical ideas about nature. That is, they started integrating mathematics into their empirical observations, and using these to develop better theoretical models for big questions like "how is the universe run." That, he argues, is somewhat different than what came before, though even then, there are always antecedents. But there are plenty who would even disagree and argue with him on that apparently simple point.
If you want to talk about the professionalization of this kind of inquiry, the early 18th century is when it starts to really become considered almost a "profession" in some parts of the world.
If you want to ask, when does it start to look like what we would today call "science" — with the university positions, industrial cooperation, little boys (and later, girls) saying "daddy I'd like to be a scientist when I grow up," foundations giving grants, people having regular educational and career paths, not just something for rich elites, research published in journals, etc. — that's the mid-to-late 19th century. Obviously bits and pieces of that are present earlier, but prior to the 19th century it still looks, largely, like an informal thing that mostly is done by rich men in their spare time.
Sorry for such a long answer that is probably not what you wanted! I hope, at the minimum, it impresses upon you the fact that historians of science consider this to be a not very easy question to answer, and generally regard the flip answers provided by scientists ("Galileo! Newton!") as being horribly inadequate, if not outright propaganda of a sorts.
So you think you can argue by giving me links to a book on amazon.com? And, its not such an open and shut case as you'd hope, and I highly doubt this solves the problem of induction. I'm not going to argue this here, but I think if you're going to link to a book on amazon I'm entitled to link to another.
http://www.amazon.ca/Enquiry-concerning-Human-Understanding/dp/0199549907/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398018671&sr=1-1&keywords=hume
And because I'm a jackass. one more
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/1844674428/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398018826&sr=8-1&keywords=against+method
I've posted this before but I'll repost it here:
Now in terms of the question that you ask in the title - this is what I recommend:
Job Interview Prep
Junior Software Engineer Reading List
Read This First
Fundementals
Understanding Professional Software Environments
Mentality
History
Mid Level Software Engineer Reading List
Read This First
Fundementals
Software Design
Software Engineering Skill Sets
Databases
User Experience
Mentality
History
Specialist Skills
In spite of the fact that many of these won't apply to your specific job I still recommend reading them for the insight, they'll give you into programming language and technology design.
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/1844674428/ref=la_B000AQ77O6_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395516922&sr=1-1
There is no scientific method
I have serious doubts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/1844674428/