Student Independent Projects Humanities 2017:Ideology in Paul Feyerabend's Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The question of ideological1 and political influence on science occasionally recurs in philosophy of science and scientific journalism, usually to attack pressure groups compromising the objective work of scientists or to describe the consequences of a given ideology–often religious–"winning" against scientific knowledge. However, to even enter a laboratory is to participate in ideological assumptions and material conditions–this point has also been discussed at length, usually by postmodern critics to "problematize" the sociological consequences of scientific findings. Between these poles a host of questions are raised which typically preoccupy philosophers of science, who have historically tried to give a prescriptive method for determining which scientific findings are "scientific" and which are not. Another perspective is that the approaches described above are simply not sufficient to describe the degree to which science in 20th and 21st century industrialized democracies is shaped by political, socioeconomic and ideological factors, and for this reason the late-20th century philosopher Paul Feyerabend and others2 attempted to work out just what the relationship between ideology and science is, in practice.