Relative Knowledge in Paul Karl Feyerabend

Abstract

The scientific development achieved by Western civilization as a result of elevating the authority of reason and experiment over what is religious and superstitious strengthened the status of the experimental method in all fields of human life, to the extent that experimentation became a real criterion for accepting any human knowledge. Without it, other types of knowledge that do not accept scientific experimentation cannot be accepted. Under this total dominance of experimentation, contemporary philosophers of science emerged, such as Gaston Bachelard through his philosophical view of applied rationalism, Karl Popper through the principle of falsifiability, Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Imre Lakatos in his theory of scientific research programs, and finally Paul Karl Feyerabend who presented a critical view of science in order to reconsider the truth of science. The critical revolution of research in Feyerabend arose through several influences from philosophers such as the Sophists regarding the issue of the relativity of human knowledge, John Stuart Mill through the idea of human freedom, Ludwig Wittgenstein concerning language games, Karl Popper in his criticism of the principle of induction, the influence of Brownian motion from the biological scientist Robert Brown regarding random motion in physical phenomena, and also the Dadaist movement in art. Here exactly the theory of the relativity of knowledge crystallized in Feyerabend’s thought and he became a critical contemporary philosopher of science in the twentieth century without rival.