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involve emphasising and explicating the novelty and provocative character of Feyerabend's ideas, combined with a careful hermeneufic reading of the text, aimed at understanding the problems Feyerabend tried to tackle and how Feyerabend tried to overcome apparent tensions in those ideas. Instead, Feyerabend is predominately treated as an old-style Popperian, and we are offered authoritative criticisms of Feyerabend's claims (almost every chapter concludes by summarising Feyerabend's failures to establish his claims.) In short, instead of trying to learn something from Feyerabend and explaining why Feyerabend's philosophy is so exciting, and perhaps fruitful, Preston has pointed out apparent tensions which merely serve as the basis of criticisms of Feyerabend's ideas (which are at best only partially understood) in order to reject them.

Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science University of Hanover

Oeltzenstrasse 9, D - 30169 Hanover, Germany

Author's Response By John Preston

M Y BOOK does not allot equal coverage to all parts of Feyera- bend's Oeuvre. In writing a critical introduction to his work, I thought it better to concentrate on earlier and middle-period

material, about which I felt I had most to say. My own list of 'other possible topics' which I would like to have discussed in the book is lengthy. In retrospect, I particularly wish that I had been able to incorporate more on Feyerabend's last work. The important material he published during what I consider to have been something of a renaissance (from 1989 onwards) certainly merits discussion. Although this material is covered at some length (in Preston 1996, 1997a, 1997b, and 1998), it still awaits a full critical evaluation. All my review symposiasts raise excellent issues, and I would like to thank Hoyningen-Huene and Oberheim (henceforth H-H & O) for drawing my attention to some factual errors which will be corrected in the forthcoming Italian edition of the book. Here I will only be able to tackle some of what I perceive to be the most important issues.

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Since I spent the greater part of fifteen years studying and writing about Feyerabend's philosophy, it would be depressing if my book were the hatchet-job H-H & O take it to be. I would be, as English football fans say, 'gutted' if my love for his work was not to shine through my reservations about it. The passage they quote as illustrating the 'very negative' nature of my analysis summarises almost my entire chapter on materialism, wherein the complaints I make are, I hope, substantiated. The character of this, most negative part of the book is partly determined by the fact that I was once a pretty convinced eliminativist myself. Ironically, for philosophers well-acquainted with the views of Kuhn and Feyerabend, H-H & O's account is so heavily slanted by awareness Of some of Feyerabend's later work that their vision of his work as a whole borders on Whig history. What is more, they accept too much of his own self- mythologlsing, little of which stands up to an examination of the actual texts. No one who knows his work in depth can believe that the later Feyerabend was a reliable guide to the productions of his earlier self. As he admitted to many of those who made inquiries (including myself), he hardly cared about his former work, since he considered himself to have moved on from it. Although it has the flavour of yet another piece of self- mythologising, this attitude does demonstrate Feyerabend's unwillingness to consider either the coherence of different phases of his work; or his own 'development' (a phrase on which he poured scorn in his autobiography).

In suggesting, for example, that "even in Feyerabend's early work, it may be a mistake to ascribe any particular position to Feyerabend", H-H & O uncritically swallow his later line (see, for example, Feyerabend 1991a, pp. 127, 149, and 1991b, p. 489) that he did not have, or need, a philosophical 'position'. Although there are philosophers who officially eschew the production of philosophical theories, it is hard to imagine what philosophy without a position (which I just take to mean 'view', and which might be held for no more than a fleeting moment) could possibly be. In earlier work, Feyerabend clearly and repeatedly identifies himself as a realist, a materialist, etc. (as detailed at length in my book). H-H & O make no mention of my demonstration that Feyerabend later doctored his earlier papers, excising many of their important references to Popper, and thereby giving the lie not just to Feyerabend's own claim that he was never a Popperian, but also to H-H & O's eagerness to believe it. While I might agree with the suggestion that the later Feyerabend tried (with a certain amount of success) to eschew philosophical 'isms', I still contend that there can be no understanding of his work as a whole which does not identify his earlier commitment to these views.

I therefore fred Couvalis' critique the more powerful for not relying on Feyerabend's retrospective comments on and accounts of his own earlier

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work. Couvalis and Mun&ar have a good idea of 'where I 'm coming from', and I like the former's final summing-up of our different approaches very much indeed. I agree completely that mine is not an ' immanent critique', since not only do I depart fundamentally from some of Feyerabend's presuppositions, but I have (relatively recently) come to think well of entire kinds of philosophy for which he had little time. I am very much alive to Mun&ar ' s complaint that my more linguistic approach keeps me from fully grasping Feyerabend's vision. But I can' t help finding the presuppositions of that vision deeply problematic, so I still think it worth explaining how they can be critiqued. Let 's not forget, though, that such clashes and interactions of ideas and world-views are exactly what Feyerabend always treasured. In this respect, I own up to being a genuine fan. But the kind of hagiographic reverence which H-H & O seem to want to exhibit would, I am confident, have made an on-form Feyerabend puke.

Mun&ar ' s animus against my concern with language and meaning derives recognisably from comments Feyerabend himself made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, comments which to me have a certain irony in light of the importance attached to language and meaning in his earlier work. I just don ' t see how one can both have one's cake (meaning is determined by theoretical context; language is the crucial determinant of our conceptual scheme(s)) and eat it (don' t press merely 'linguistic' objections to my philosophy, I don ' t really care about language; scientists don ' t care about meaning or incommensurability) in this respect. I am with Feyerabend all the way when, in his autobiography (Feyerabend 1995, p. 75), he regrets once having exclusively lavished attention on language at the expense of practice, but I still think one thing philosophers can usefully do is to try to get clear about the ways we talk, for that does, I still believe, tell us a lot about our concepts.

Couvalis' identification of the major respect in which I disagree with Feyerabend is problematic. My appeal is to conceptual truths, not to metaphysically necessary ones. I think conceptual truths have a relatively a priori status, and that they can be distinguished (albeit sometimes with great difficulty) from empirical truths by the test of normativity. I there- fore make a lot of the distinction between conceptual and empirical (or theoretical) change. But I totally repudiate the Quinean idea that this must involve me in dubious metaphysics, and this repudiation covers not just classical Platonism but also the modified Platonist view inscribed in Popper's ' three worlds' picture. My view is no museum myth at all, but simply that one can, through a dialectic, elicit answers to questions such as "Could further experience actually refute the idea that As are B?% and "What would you think if I could show you an A which wasn't B? ~ which

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will allow one to tell whether a person who says "All As are B" means that to be an empirical claim, or a conceptual one. Human decisions and linguistic norms are what I ultimately appeal to, and the existence of norms, unlike that of gods, is only problematic to Quineans. The arguments of Quine's "Two Dogmas" seem to me to have been (rather casually) construed as refuting all attempts to discern a conceptual/ empirical divide, where in fact they refute only some.

H-H & O joke that my book "lacks sufficient citations", when I give up to eight citations for almost everything I quote. It will be interesting to see them apply the same criteria for fullness of citations when they come to write about Feyerabend himself. Just for the record, then, Feyerabend's eschewal of the analytic-synthetic distinction occurs both in "Diskussion" (Feyerabend et al. 1966, p. 362, for example), and in "Concluding Un- philosphical Conversation" (Feyerabend 1991b, p. 525), the passages which definitively demonstrate that his realism goes beyond anything H-H & O perceive occur in his review of Bohm (Feyerabend 1960a), and the relativism with respect to logic which A M contains isn't all that hard to find. My reluctance to actually tackle the latter in my book, or to substantiate my claim that it is indefensible, was merely another function of the fact that one can't discuss a/ /Feyerabend's views in one little book. Plausible arguments against pluralism (and therefore against relativism) about logic can be found, for example, in Feyerabend's own early article on Reichenbach (Feyerabend 1958c).

On a more positive note, H-H & O quite properly stress the importance of the Kantian influence on Feyerabend, and of Feyerabend's related apprehension about what I have called ' the myth predicament' . My book made enough of the latter, but not of the former. Further investigation of the KantJFeyerabend relationship might have interesting repercussions for Rudolf Haller 's interesting thesis that 'Austrian philosophy' can be characterised as anti-Kantian. As for the myth predicament, pointing out that it can be discerned in "Complementarity" (1958b) is hardly news, since I already claimed that it runs through "An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience" (1958a). What would be interesting would be to find it in earlier material, although this would not be unexpected, given that the latter was itself a by-product both of Feyerabend's 1951 doctoral dissertation, and of the discussions of the Kraft Circle.

Meaning and incommensurability are areas where I particularly sought to avoid relying too much on Feyerabend's own post-hoc pronouncements. I cannot see any evidence that the origin of his incommensurability thesis lies, as H-H & O suggest and Feyerabend would at one time have liked us to believe, in features of actual science. That is precisely why I cite (p. 102) Feyerabend's own account of the meeting at which (it seems to

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me) Anscombe socraticaUy helped him give birth to the idea. Although Feyerabend gives no date for this event, his references to it put it during his stay in London in 1952, namely, well before his published accounts of the features H-H & O have in mind. To acquiesce in Feyerabend's own later insistence that incommensurability was not a consequence of the contextual theory of meaning is to forget that at that same later time he was concerned to deny (utterly implausibly) that he had ever held such a theory, as well as to minimise the impact of Wittgenstein(ians) on his thought. In his last work, however, Feyerabend himself recognised that the incommensurability thesis, which by then he was having doubts about, could not have been the result of a study of 'actual science'. He insisted that transition between incommensurables is =not what we find when we look at history" (Feyerabend 1993, p. 7). The transition from classical physics to the quantum theory, for example, ~one of the most radical transformations in the history of science" (Feyerabend 1993, pp. 7-8) did not proceed in this way. As a result, Feyerabend concluded, "the conversion philosophy does not make sense" (Feyerabend 1993, p. 8).

Pace Munrvar, Feyerabend's later explanations of incommensurability still seem both vague and problematic to me (and to many others), since they all rely on metaphors which haven't been cashed out. How does our using the concepts of one theory preclude our being able to use the concepts of another? Since the theory of relativity presupposes or implies that mass is relative to velocity, why doesn't this straightforwardly contra- dict what classical mechanics says about mass? And how do the concepts of the new theory 'exclude' those of the old one? It cannot be just in virtue of their being different concepts, for then the concepts of rest mass and proper mass (within relativistic physics) would be incommensurable, which they are not. Having said all this, I still think incommensurability significant, because I do still hold out hope that it, and the kind of conceptual relativism which embraces it, can be made sense of (the most promising recent attempt, for my money, coming from within 'Oxford philosophy': Hacker 1996).

H-H & O take me to task for producing arguments too hasty to dismiss Feyerabend's ideas. I may be guilty of this, but not in the places they cite. First, when I say that our material-object language is here to stay, I am not simply asserting but, as Couvalis and Munevar recognise, am stating the conclusion of a (thoroughly Kantianl) argument borrowed from Strawson, one of the most important arguments in twentieth-century philosophy (set out at some length in the preceding pages). But this Strawsonian argu- ment doesn't seem to me to make a merely philosophical point: there are perfectly good scientific reasons for the conceptual centrality of material things, some of which (for example reasons deriving from our biological

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nature and evolutionary history) should appeal to Mun6var. However, his contention that even if material objects were the basic particulars in our conceptual scheme, the linguistic means we use to identify them would have no claim to conceptual priority only makes sense if we can drive the sort of wedge between conceptual schemes and languages which neither Feyerabend nor I think can be driven.

Second, to Feyerabend's eliminative materialism I object that recon- ceptualisation does not solve philosophical problems (p. 152). Reconcep- tualisation, I agree, is common in the sciences. In fact, one of Feyerabend's great virtues is his realisation of the enormity of its role. Couvalis' point that conceptual re-tooling can facilitate development of a new approach to empirical problems, like "How do vacuum pumps work?", is well-taken. And I would agree with the suggestion that some problems scientists address are philosophical (and therefore, on my view, conceptual). But let's not pretend that the kind of wholesale exchange of one set of concepts by another envisaged in eliminative materialism would constitute a 'dissolution' of the problems associated with the former set: that would be to make problem-dissolving too easy. If the mind/body problem is conceptual, it can only be ignored, not solved, through a change in concepts. Perhaps that is its rightful fate. This kind of change might constitute progress, and it may have happened throughout intellectual history, but it 's not progress through problem-solving, since it neither solves nor dissolves philosophical problems, it just replaces one set of problems (by another, I suspect). If, as H-H & O claim, by 'progress' Feyerabend just meant (this kind of) reconceptualisation, then his work would be wide open to David Stove's criticism.

I find what H-H & O say about the thorny question of Feyerabend's realism more interesting and, in essence, a starting-point for discussion too lengthy to take place here. We all agree, I think, that the exact nature of his realism is an issue about which there can certainly be different interpretations. While I would again deny that the medicine they prescribe for me, the introductory essay in Feyerabend's 1981 Philosophical Papers, allows us accurately to identify his earlier views, I would agree wholeheartedly that his realism is by no means an orthodox version of what is now called 'scientific realism' in the philosophy of science. I tried to make this clear in my book by distinguishing (following Bill Newton- Smith) the component parts of Feyerabend's 'realist' view(s), and by emphasising the role of what Feyerabend calls 'Thesis I ' , that the meaning of our observation terms is fixed by our theories. However, as against H-H & O, ! believe that this thesis was not intended to be a denial of realism (as usually understood), but an inversion of the positivist view that meaning seeps 'upwards' from observation-statements to theories. Feyerabend, on

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my view, thought of this inversion as a central component in the realism which he claimed to have inherited from some of those he admired most, for example Boltzmann. Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps it is an alternative to both positivism and realism.

An equally important issue is whether Feyerabend's realism ever embraced what we think of as the typical realist conception of reality, as a set of mind-independent things, events, and processes. H-H & O deny that it did. There is certainly a plausible argument for this view, running through Feyerabend's 'super-realist ' attitude to the quantum theory: if we take the quantum theory literally, there are simply no such things as objects as they are ordinarily conceived. The existence of microphysical 'objects' depends on processes such as measurement, and macrophysical objects are illusions which result from combinations of microphysical objects. This, I am inclined to think, makes the most sense of the passage H-H & O quote in which Feyerabend declares that his realism implies that the idea of objective reality is a metaphysical mistake. I am confident that this view is one Feyerabend held at some point during the mid-1960s.

But I am still not convinced that this is what his realism always amounted to. In particular, when I think of what I call the 'ontological' ingredient in Feyerabend's early realism (here I mean 1958), I am still persuaded that he believed in a mind-independent reality. I think of his liberal use of the realist concept of truth, for example (see, for example, Feyerabend 1957, p. 182; Sections 3 and 7 of 1958a; 1958b; Section 6 of 1958c; 1960a; and perhaps even in the difficult last section of 1960b). But most of all I think of his passionate rejection, in his review of David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modem Physics, of what he perceived to be that book's Hegelian relativism. Bohm's (instrumentalistic) principle that we ought to react to impending falsifications by restricting the range of our theories, rather than by conceding their falsity, Feyerabend wrote, would have the corollary that

every description of nature that has ever been uttered is true within its domain, and conversely . . . . exhibits the existence of a domain to which it properly applies. There does not exist any description that is wholly mistaken and without a corresponding reality. Or, to express it differently, when describing our surroundings we always speak the truth (relative truth, that is), and we are also always in contact with some part of reality. (Feyerabend 1981, p. 232. Italics in the original.)

Feyerabend immediately feels the need to say something in defence of this corollary, because it has, he notes, so little primafacie plausibility! Later in the same section, he says that

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It is well-known that refuting instances can always be turned into confirming instances, and that there exist theories which perform this transformation almost automatically. Such theories cannot be said to be in contact with reality. (Feyerabend 1981, p. 233).

And at the end of the review, he remarks that

Bohm's idea of the self-correcting character of knowledge doesn't help us distinguish truth from falsehood: for all we know all our ideas may be quite thoroughly mistaken. (Feyerabend 1981, p. 235).

While I would agree completely if H-H & O were to suggest that Bohm's Hegelian ideas later seeped into Feyerabend's point of view, I still insist that they contain enough important uses of the idea of truth as correspondence with a mind-independent reality to make it profitable to compare Feyerabend's early realism with Popper's. This is in no way to deny the Kantian strand in Feyerabend's thinking, which H-H & O rightly stress. I am willing to be persuaded that, later on, he thought through the implications of his voluntarism and his realism about the quantum theory, making them compatible by jettisoning the orthodox conception of reality, but I think that needs more argument than H-H & O have space to give here. In sum, I am not as optimistic as H-H & O are that Feyerabend's 1981 distinction between 'scientific' and 'philosophical ' realism sheds light on his previous views.

Mun6var raises good questions about my response to Feyerabend's critique of methodological monism, although I 'm not sure how much we actually disagree. In the final analysis, I find methodological pluralism both intuitively compelling, and licensed by my own acquaintance with science. Unlike Feyerabend and Mun6var, I think there is still one more step the methodological monist can make, by appealing to inductive, rather than exceptionless, rules. However, not only do I agree with Mun6var that this is only a promissory note, I emphasise, in the book, that it will not really get the monist where he wants to go. One of my points was that although there can be plausible inductive rules governing 'rational' activities, these rules will not constitute anything anyone thinks of as a distinctively scientific rationality. Instead, they will be commonsensical rules of thumb, like "It 's usually advisable to take account of the evidence" and "Try to replace a view plagued by contradictions with a consistent view".

I can't see that Mun6var's account of Galileo casts doubt on such rules, or that Feyerabend himself need have opposed my perspective here. One

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of Newton-Smith's points is that to refute (what we both think of as) a reasonable inductive methodology requires something far more demand- ing than what is required to refute a non-inductive methodology. It requires a demonstration that such rules would have led scientists wrong more often than they would have led them right. But our grasp of the idea of how many times a rule is applied, and of on how many occasions it would have been possible to apply it, are too slight to set up such a test, making it wholly unsurprising that Feyerabend nowhere conducts or refers to the test in question. (Note that his own later critique of claims for the superiority of Western science is framed in just these terms.) If Munrvar knows of somewhere Feyerabend did this in his published writings, I 'd be interested to hear of it.

Finally, I agree with Munrvar that one can take Feyerabend's Galileo case study not just as a challenge to methodological monism, but also (and very importantly) as a challenge to empiricism. Side-stepping that case study by addressing what I perceived to be the general form of the first challenge had the result that I did not meet the second challenge head-on. My stance on the conceptual centrality of our material-object language suggests the line I would take: Feyerabend has not shown that this basic part of our conceptual scheme is 'theoretical', or that there was no way of describing the apparent motion of objects which Galileo could have shared with his opponents. Thus I have grave reservations about Munrvar 's contention that "modern science has changed radically our understanding of material objects and their behaviour". While science has changed our views (and sometimes given us views where we had none before) about the constitution of material objects, it has done nothing to affect the way we identify them, what we mean by expressions which we use to pick them out, or the primacy of such objects in our conceptual scheme.

Department of Philosophy, The University of Reading,

Reading RG6 6AA, England.

References

Feyerabend, P. K. (1957) "Discussion Comments", in S. Krmer (ed.), Observation and Interpretation. London: Butterworth.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1958a) "An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 58.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1958b) "Complementarity", Aristotelian Society, Supplemen- tary, 32.

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Feyerabend, P. K. (1958c) "Reichenbach's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", Philosophical Studies, 9.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1960a) "Professor Bohm's Philosophy of Nature", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, I0.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1960b) "Das Problem der Existenz theoretischer Entit~iten', in E. Topitsch (ed.), Probleme der Wissenschaftstheorie. Vienna: Springer-Verlag. (English translation forthcoming in Feyerabend 1999).

Feyerabend, P. K. (1961) Knowledge Without Foundations: Two Lectures Delivered on the Nellie Heldt Lecture Fund. Oberlin College: Oberlin.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1962) "Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism", in Scientific Explanation, Space and Time. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 3. Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1964) "Realism and Instrumentalism: Comments on the Logic of Factual Support", in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy: In Honor of Karl R. Popper. Mario Bunge (ed.), New York: Free Press.

Feyerabend, P. K et al. (1966) "Diskussionen", in P. Weingartner (ed.), Deskription, Analyticittit und Existenz, Publications of the Salzburg Institute for the Philosophy of Science. Salzburg & Munich: Anton Pustet.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1968) "On a Recent Critique of Complementarity: Part I", Philosophy of Science, 35.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1969a) "On a Recent Critique of Complementarity: Part II", Philosophy of Science, 36.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1969b) "Linguistic Arguments and Scientific Method", Telos 2. Feyerabend, P. (1970) "Consolations for the Specialist", in I. Lakatos, A. Musgrave,

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1972) "Von der beschriinkten Gtiltigkeit methodologischer Regeln", Neue Hefte flit Philosophic, 2-3.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1981) Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1991a) Three Dialogues on Knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell. Feyerabend, P. K. (1991b) "Concluding Unphilosophical Conversation", in

G. Mun6var (ed.), Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1993) "Intellectuals and the Facts of Life", Common Knowledge, 2. Feyerabend, P. K. (1995) Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1999) Knowledge, Science and Relativism: Philosophical Papers.

Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacker, P.M.S. (1996) "On Davidson's Idea of a Conceptual Scheme",

Philosophical Quarterly, 46. Hoyningen-Huene, P. (1997) "Paul K. Feyerabend', Journal for General Philosophy

of Science, 28. Oberheim, E. and Hoyningen-Huene, P. (1997) "Incommensurability, Realism and

Meta-Incommensurability", Theoria, 12.

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Preston et aL (eds.), (1998): Papers on Feyerabend (working title). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Preston, J. M. (1996) "Frictionless Philosophy: Paul Feyerabend and Relativism", History of European Ideas, 20.

Preston, J. M. (1997a) "Feyerabend's Final Relativism", The European Legacy, 2. Preston, J. M. (1997b) "Feyerabend's Retreat from Realism", Philosophy of Science,

64. Preston, J. M. (1998) "Science as Supermarket: 'Post-Modern' Themes in Paul

Feyerabend's Later Philosophy of Science", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 29.

Stove, D. C. (1982) Popper andAfier: FourModern Irrationalists. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Picturing Biology Nicolas Rasmussen, Picture Control: The Electron Microscope

and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940-1960. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 338.

A$55 HB.

Author's Outline

I N wRrrrNG/~'cture Control, I had two distinct though related sets of purposes---one historical, one philosophical. The historical mission was relatively straightforward: to discover why the electron micro-

scope (EM) was adopted by its earliest biologist users, how they used it, what they used it for, and what came of its use. In other words, I sought to learn what made this ins t rument a successful innovat ion for biology, and what difference the ins t rument made to biological knowledge and to the organisation of that knowledge in disciplines. The philosophical mission was more challenging. I wanted to use the E M in biology as a generalisable specimen case to learn about how scientific instruments, and technologies in general, play a role in informing our unders tanding of the world. Because of the vastness of this issue and the specificity of one case, I did not expect to arrive at a final conclusion. But it still seemed worthwhile to see how far one could get toward an answer with this particular case, and

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