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International Studies in the Philosophy of Science
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisp20
Feyerabend and the Philosophy of Physics
Jamie Shaw & Michael T. Stuart
To cite this article: Jamie Shaw & Michael T. Stuart (2022) Feyerabend and the
Philosophy of Physics, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 35:1, 1-4, DOI:
10.1080/02698595.2022.2193369
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2022.2193369
Published online: 06 Apr 2023.
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EDITORIAL
Feyerabend and the Philosophy of Physics
In a reference letter for Feyerabend’s application to UC Berkeley, Carl Hempel writes that
‘Mr. Feyerabend combines a forceful and penetrating analytic mind with a remarkably
thorough training and high competence in theoretical physics and mathematics’(Collodel
and Oberheim, unpublished, 80). Similarly, Rudolf Carnap says of Feyerabend that he
‘knows both the physics and the philosophy thoroughly, and he is particularly well versed
in the fundamental logical and epistemological problems of physics’(83). These remarks
echo a sentiment widely accepted amongst Feyerabend’s colleagues that his knowledge of
physics was at an extremely high level. Feyerabend’s acumen in physics goes back to his
youth, when, at the age of 13, he was offered a position as an observer at the Swiss Institute
for Solar Research after building his own telescope (Feyerabend 1995, 27). It is unsurprising,
therefore, that physics played an important and long-lasting role in Feyerabend’s work.
More specifically, Feyerabend’s early work contains several papers engaging with technical
and general issues in physics, mostly quantum mechanics. Here, he provided analyses of
Bohr’s complementarity and its relationship to positivism, von Neumann’s no-go proof,
Bohm’s philosophy of physics, the measurement problem, the relationship between physics
and philosophy, hidden-variable theories and theoretical pluralism, and the use of three-
valued logic in quantum mechanics (to name just a few topics). These continued to play
important roles in his work of the 1970s, although now they appeared alongside more histori-
cal examples, such as Galileo’s work on the rotation of the earth in Against Method.
While scholarship on Feyerabend’s philosophy has been burgeoning, especially over the
past 10 years or so, comparatively little research has delved into his work in the philosophy
of physics. This special issue seeks to ameliorate that gap. The hope is to better understand
Feyerabend’s philosophy of physics, its historical impact and reception, and discern what
fruits Feyerabend’s philosophy of physics may still bear.
This special issue comes in two parts. Here, we introduce only the first half, which contains
four contributions, touching upon different aspects of Feyerabend’s philosophy of physics. It
begins with Flavio Del Santo’s paper, ‘Beyond method: the diatribe between Feyerabend and
Popper over the foundations of quantum mechanics.’Here, Del Santo looks at the relation-
ship between Feyerabend and his mentor and eventual philosophical enemy, Karl Popper
with fresh eyes. Specifically, Del Santo provides a new explanation for the fracture between
Feyerabend and Popper by looking at their recently published correspondence (Collodel
and Oberheim 2020) and focusing on the personal nature of their relationship. Del Santo
shows how Feyerabend’s growing ‘resentment’toward his authoritarian father-figure and
Popper’s growing frustration with Feyerabend centred on disagreements concerning
quantum mechanics: how to interpret it, how to criticize it, and how to teach it. The juicy
details in Del Santo’s paper range from funny to heart-breaking, and we are left to wonder
whether ‘philosophy of science would have lost something without such a conflict.’
Matteo Collodel’s paper, ‘Ehrenhaft’s Experiments on Magnetic Monopoles: Reconsider-
ing the Feyerabend-Ehrenhaft Connection,’presents a newly discovered document from
© 2023 Open Society Foundation
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
2022, VOL. 35, NO. 1, 1–4
https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2022.2193369
Feyerabend’s Nachlass, one that includes a draft translation of Felix Ehrenhaft’s 1947 lectures,
and Feyerabend’s memoir of Ehrenhaft. Collodel shows how significant Ehrenhaft was as a
real-life example of a ‘charlatan’who argued against the orthodox physics establishment.
In the end, Feyerabend was convinced neither by Ehrenhaft nor by his critics, but he
learned important lessons about the tentative, complex, and historically contingent relation
between theory and experience, as well as the importance of first-hand participation in
science.
Collodel then turns to Eric Oberheim’s account of Ehrenhaft’sinfluence on Feyerabend.
According to Oberheim, Feyerabend’s experiences with Ehrenhaft grounded his ‘entire phi-
losophical outlook’(Oberheim 2006, 116). Ehrenhaft’s presentation of recalcitrant exper-
iments did not convince rival physicists, not because of any flaw in the experiments, but
because he did not have a competing theoretical perspective to back them up. This
grounds Feyerabend’s view that scientific progress requires competing theories. Collodel
draws attention to the virtues of this explanation, but ultimately rejects it for several
reasons, including the fact that Feyerabend does not reference Ehrenhaft where we would
expect him to, and Oberheim’s interpretation conflicts with Feyerabend’s own account of
his evolving thinking. Instead, Collodel proposes a new interpretation, according to which
Feyerabend’s work in the 1960s, which was characterized by skepticism and pluralism and
then anarchism, gave Feyerabend the framework he needed to go back and make sense of
his experiences with Ehrenhaft. The story finishes with a twist: even if Ehrenhaft was not
the inspiration for Feyerabend’s‘entire outlook,’he was nevertheless a major inspiration
for Feyerabend’s famous teaching style, which adopted aspects of Ehrenhaft’sflamboyant
charlatanism.
Rory Kent’s paper, ‘Paul Feyerabend and the Dialectical Character of Quantum Mech-
anics: A Lesson in Philosophical Dadaism,’emphasizes that Feyerabend’s Dadaism was not
a mere presentation device, provocation, or fun exercise, but a serious position concerning
seriousness itself. Kent’s goal is to say just what Feyerabend’s Dadaism was and how it devel-
oped, and then develop it further, via a close reading of Feyerabend’s short article ‘Dialectical
Materialism and the Quantum Theory,’published in 1966.
According to Kent, Dadaism is a core methodological feature of Feyerabend’sphilosophy.
The Dadaist must be ready to take any human position or practice seriously (especially those
that are outside the mainstream), and put it into dialogue with others. A central aim of
employing this methodology is to develop openness, humility and readiness, and become
more epistemically responsible citizens (Kidd 2016). The point, and this coheres nicely
with Collodel’s article, is to allow oneself to be provoked, and find value in traditionally mal-
igned places. This is precisely what Feyerabend does with the Marxist philosophy of dialec-
tical materialism. A popular criticism of dialectical materialism was that governments should
not interfere with science. But why not, especially if the government has the best interests of
the people in mind? Feyerabend presents dialectical materialism as a number of ‘pieces,’
including mandates to see science as fallible, historically contingent, and to overcome the dis-
tinction between theory and practice. Feyerabend then analyzes Bohr’s changing views on
quantum mechanics from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Using this framework, he is
able to capture the mainstream judgment of physicists and philosophers concerning Bohr,
but also to go beyond them in interesting ways. Kent finishes by pointing out that merely
pointing out a problem is not enough for progress. To avoid making the same mistake as
Feyerabend, Kent then outlines a set of strategies that a Dadaist could use to make people
minimally open-minded, which is required to get Dadaism itself offthe ground in the first
place.
2EDITORIAL
Finally, we have Daniel Kuby and Patrick Fraser’s paper entitled ‘Feyerabend on the
Quantum Theory of Measurement: A Reassessment.’This paper has a historical dimension,
which is to unearth and present Feyerabend’s only technical contribution to physics, ‘On the
quantum-theory of measurement,’delivered at the Colston Research Symposium in Bristol in
1957. It has a philosophical dimension as well, which is to relate this paper to Feyerabend’s
famed theoretical pluralism. And it also has a contemporaneous physics dimension, which is
to look at the ways in which Feyerabend’s theory anticipates modern theories of quantum
decoherence. Kuby and Fraser reconstruct Feyerabend’s paper as an attack on the philosophi-
cal positivism he saw in von Neumann’s wave function collapse account of measurement.
Wave function collapse is supposed to make sense of the transition between quantum and
classical phenomena and allow for a clean separation between theoretical and observational
terms (a central goal of positivism). Wave function collapse chafed against Feyerabend’s
realism, as that it was postulated to be fundamentally non-knowable. Feyerabend argued
that collapse can occur in a quantum system before that system is observed by humans,
and such a system would now be classical (because collapsed), yet still necessarily described
at least partially in quantum terms. The existence of such ‘incomplete’measurements tells us
that whether something counts as classical or quantum depends not only on that thing itself,
but on our epistemic relation to it. In response, Feyerabend presents an account of measure-
ment without a collapse process.
Ultimately, Kuby and Fraser think that Feyerabend’s approach to the measurement
problem fails on several fronts. This is not too worrisome for Feyerabend fans, since Feyer-
abend not only never even mentions this attempt again in subsequent papers on adjacent
topics but eventually came to abandon the view himself. In any case, Kuby and Fraser specu-
late that Feyerabend wasn’t particularly invested in the solution itself but was more concerned
with raising red flags with quantum orthodoxy to open the door to alternatives. In other
words, the paper was principally an exercise in proliferation. Still, Feyerabend’s failure is
interesting not only for historical reasons but also as it substantially anticipates and finds
stronger motivation in more recent research on decoherence theory.
Overall, these four papers build on and complicate earlier work on Feyerabend’s philos-
ophy of physics (e.g., Del Santo 2019; Kuby 2021; van Strien 2020). Through them, we
learn more about Feyerabend’s changing relationship with Popper in terms of their work
on quantum mechanics, we see an early exemplar for Feyerabend’s charlatanism (via
access to a new original document and interpretation of that document), we better under-
stand Feyerabend’s Dadaism in view of an exercise using Marxism to analyze Bohr, and we
get the first serious attempt to understand Feyerabend’s only technical contribution to
physics. Stay tuned for the second iteration of this special issue on Feyerabend and the phil-
osophy of physics for more!
References
Collodel, M., and E. Oberheim, eds. 2020.Feyerabend’s Formative Years. Volume 1. Feyerabend and Popper:
Correspondence and Unpublished Papers (Vol. 5). Cham: Springer Nature.
Collodel, M., and E. Oberheim. unpublished.Feyerabend’s Formative Years: Correspondences and Unpublished
Papers (Volume 2): Logical Empiricism. Bohm: Springer Press.
Del Santo, F. 2019.“Karl Popper’s Forgotten Role in the Quantum Debate at the Edge Between Philosophy and
Physics in 1950s and 1960s.”Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and
Philosophy of Modern Physics 67: 78–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2019.05.002
Feyerabend, P. 1995.Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kidd, I. 2016.“Feyerabend on Politics, Education, and Scientific Culture.”Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science Part A 57: 121–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2015.11.009
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 3
Kuby, D. 2021.“Feyerabend’s Reevaluation of Scientific Practice: Quantum Mechanics, Realism, and Niels
Bohr.”In Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays, edited by K. Bschir, and J. Shaw, 132–156.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oberheim, E. 2006.Feyerabend’s Philosophy. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
van Strien, M. 2020.“Pluralism and Anarchism in Quantum Physics: Paul Feyerabend’s Writings on Quantum
Physics in Relation to his General Philosophy of Science.”Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part
A80: 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2019.03.006
Jamie Shaw
Leibniz Universität Hannover
Michael T. Stuart
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
London School of Economics, University of York
jamieco.shaw@utoronto.ca
4EDITORIAL