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I know he criticized Popper's critical rationalism as limited and dogmatic, but critical rationalism isn't like that, because critical rationalism does accept ideas which at first sound illogical and out of tune with accepted knowledge. If those ideas survive scrutiny, they are incorporated into or even change the existing body of scientific knowledge?
Did Feyerabend really understand Karl Popper?
I recently got thinking what would have happened if Popper had been an art critic instead of philosopher of science; how would he have applied his method to art?
Perhaps he would have said lets begin by looking at all the art in the world; when we look at every painting, he says, we see what they all have in common is that they're set in a frame; thus, I deduce that art is defined by that which can be framed; its the frame that is the key to art; it sets its limit and its boundary, anything outside of the frame is not art.
Of course, this is something of a parody - no art critic (pace Duchamp) - thinks like this; but there is something in common with this and with his characterisation of science as being limited or bordered by the falsifiable; anything outside of that - the unfalsifiable - is not science.
Feyerabend, argued for a more organic understanding of method in science; which is why his book is called against method.
Feyerabend didn't understand Popper. The standard philosophy of science, then and now, claims that there is a process called induction that somehow makes observations into scientific theories and then makes them true or more probable or something like that through more observation.
As Popper pointed out, this process as described by its advocates is impossible to follow. And you can't do something impossible, so nobody actually does induction. Rather, all knowledge arises by evolutionary processes involving variation and selection. The only role experiments can play in this process is to provide problems for theories that currently seem unproblematic. Theories are created by guessing not by any process that involves deriving them from experimental data. A person might be reminded of something by looking at experimental data and he might pursue that idea and come up with an explanation. But a dream, or eating some yoghurt or whatever might play the same role in his creative process. This doesn't mean yoghurt contains the secrets of the universe. Popper then makes methodological suggestions of things that scientists could do to improve their ideas, e.g. - avoid ad hoc theories and only propose ideas that can be tested independent of the problem they were invented to solve.
Feyerabend didn't understand any of this and didn't have anything relevant to say about Popper, or about anything else. He was just another relativist.
