Discussion On Feyerabend’s Critique Of Scientism

Science has been occupying an important position in Western thought, made brilliant achievements in ancient Greece, and even got comprehensive development after modern science and technology revolution. Science precipitate human society has undergone a fundamental change, established a more orderly modern social system and political structure, while broke the domination of the ancient theological religious. At the same time, the rise of scientism also made modern human society sink into existence crisis.For scientism, Feyerabend made deeply analysis in his book "Against Method" and "Farewell to Reasonableness". He pointed out that modern scientific development has been increasingly showing a hegemonic tendency, scientific attempts to rule everything in human society in a dogmatic way that science can solve all the problems of human society. Scientism attributed the development of science to purely rational activity, negating the value of every irrational factor and trying to control humanities and social science by the norm of science. Feyerabend considered that the mindset of scientism must cause human society controlled by scientific rationality, the freedom of human spirit will be detained, become rigid and inflexible, human will become the slaves of scientific, as a result trigger the survival crisis of the whole human society. In order to get out the crisis from the mindset of scientism, the science must be pulled down from the altars, revalued of the status of science and human values.Feyerabend scan science based on the relativism, he opposed scientific criteria and scientific authority and considered that there are no demarcation between science and non-science, opposed scientific rationalism and raised scientific irrational, the paradigm of "incommensurability", opposed the superiority of scientific technique and advocated the methodology of pluralism, that is "do as one please ". Feyerabend has been looking for the value of scientific and the true meaning of humanities from the critical scientism and rationalism, thereby he prompted the radical discourse of pose modernity for opposing anti-science centrism and proposing the idea of culture pluralism.