My Methodological Turn
From Epistemology to Methodology
This substack is now "For Methods", in a nod to Feyerabend's classic "Against Method".1
Like Feyerabend, I want to dispel the specters of the one true method, be it the Popperian "scientific method"or Bayes. Such fake ideals miss all the weird little pieces, all the gleaming details that make the methods live and breathe and succeed and fail gloriously. It replaces the complexity of the living techniques of real people with the sterile monorule of the unimaginative philosopher.
Unlike Feyerabend, I don't love anarchism to the point of claiming there is no sense to be made of the plethora of existing methods. The beauty lies not only in the freedom, but also in the structure underlying the variation, in the patterns which summarize, reduce and all around compress.
So I'm for methods, for their study, exploration, and analysis. And I'm for the plural, methods instead of method, because I refuse to deny the bewildering and intoxicating diversity of tricks and techniques we use.
Not just in physics, this favorite of philosophy of science. Not just in the hard sciences, the top of the pyramid. Methods abound and succeed in evolutionary sciences, in social sciences, in engineering, in crafts and arts, in games and sports, in every single activity where human beings reliably do difficult things.
What does it change for you, dear readers?
Nothing but a clarification: this is what I care about. Where I want to go. What makes my heart and brain sing in unison.
Whereas before I was claiming that epistemology was the focus, and notably epistemic regularities, now I have realized that methods are my phenomena. Then epistemology, to the extent that it appears again, is but an explanation, a reduction, a model that can compress and explain methods. But the focus is not anymore on the process of learning about the world, and rather on the techniques themselves, and making sense of them.
I'm already digging into my first big cluster of methods, the tree reconstruction of genealogy shared by both phylogenetics and historical linguistics (and surprisingly, stemmatology!). This will culminate into a series of posts.
In the meanwhile, I have a handful of books to review that reveal rather than obscure the subtle intricacies of methods, and attempt what I really care about — making sense of them.
See my old book review.