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IT’S NOT EASY TO EXORCIZE GHOSTS*

PAUL FEYERABEND
Eidgeniissische Technische Hochschule, 8092 Ziirich, Switzerland

Professor Bunge has little love for ghosts and scientific extravaganzas. I share
some of his aversions but I think there are more important matters to worry
about. Parapsychological “quacks” may have stolen a few pennies here and there
but the quacks at the Pentagon “clean out our pockets” much more efficiently.
Creationism may have a few followers-but it did not ruin the material and
spiritual basis of cultures as did the “development” of third-world countries.
Altogether the beliefs that Bunge attacks are rather harmless. Bunge believes
that they are dangerous and tries to remove them by argument. The trouble is
that his arguments would also remove large sections of science.
To see this consider his principle that it would be “foolish, imprudent, and
morally wrong to announce, practice or preach important ideas or practices that
have not been put to the test or, worse, that have been shown in a conclusive
manner to be utterly false, inefficient or harmful” (p. 132). Now how do you test
a difficult idea or procedure? You must apply it to a variety of cases including
cases that seem to contradict it; in other words, you must “practice” it. You must
also “announce” it: the more people help you with the tests, the sooner you will
get (positive or negative) results. Finally, you must convince people that, true or
false, they are dealing with something important which means you must
“preach” it. Advising researchers to “announce, practice or preach” only after
the completion of tests means putting the cart before the horse, especially today,
when research needs large teams and expensive equipment. Scientists never
adopted this self-defeating procedure.
Take the assumption (which underlies the development of science from Pytha-
goras to supergravity) that the world is ordered according to mathematical
principles. When was this assumption tested? The answer is that it is being tested
all the time. Announcement, practice, preaching, and test are inseparable parts
of one and the same historical process. There never existed a period when the
idea was tested, was f-ound to be acceptable, and was “announced, practiced and
preached” only afterwards. Any period one might want to characterize in this
way still left major difficulties. Research went on, the difficulties were resolved
(and new difficulties created) although the enterprise was “foolish, imprudent
and morally wrong” for a Bungean.
The idea that nature is lawful is another example. In his famous letter to
Castelli of 21 December 1613, Galileo writes: “Nature is inexorable and

*Commentary on M. Bunge (1991) A skeptic’s beliefs and disbeliefs, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 131-149.

181
182 P. Feyerabend

immutable and she does not care at all whether or not her recondite reasons and
modes of operation are revealed to human understanding, and so she never
transgress& the terms of the laws imposed on her.” This is an early version of
Bunge’s demands of “realism” and lawfulness. Leibnitz repeats the doctrine
more than two generations later: Nature is a well constructed watch that moves
in accordance with immutable laws. Galileo and Leibnitz “announce” the
doctrine, they “practice” it and they “preach” it. Had they tested it in the manner
suggested by Bunge, by comparing it with experiment? They had not. On the
contrary, they seemed to believe that the doctrine could be defended
independently of any test. (For Leibnitz it was an immediate consequence of the
constancy of God.) Was there recalcitrant evidence? Yes there was, lots of it.
There existed numerous events, comets, new stars, plagues, and popular
uprisings among them, whose behavior could not be explained in a lawful way
(Tycho Brahe regarded some of these events as miracles). Newton added more
technical problems: the disappearance of motion in inelastic collisions and what
was later called the Great Inequality of Jupiter and Saturn. He suggested that
the planetary system was an open system and that God occasionally interfered
with its course. Did Galileo’s and Leibnitz’s untested beliefs affect research?
They did. For example, they encouraged people to work on perturbation theory
in a way that eventually confirmed the doctrine. Would this work have
proceeded without the doctrine? Not a chance!
Or take Copernicus. ‘I‘he theory that he “announced” in the C:otI/nlPllta~io/us,
published in 1543 and which Galileo “preached” with such fervor had some
arguments in its favor, but many “tests” spoke against it; moreover, it was a
dynamical impossibility and remained one for years to come. Cardinal
Bellarmino, here in complete agreement with Bunge, advised the Copernicans
to cool it (letter to Fos&rini). He did not wave the Bible at them for he was ready
to revise its interpretation provided there was suff’icient scientific evidence (the
spherical and freely floating earth had been a matter of course since the 11 th
century--despite all the Bible passages that suggest a tlat earth). But -just this
evidence, Bellarmino said, was lacking. Galileo disregarded the advice, though in
an indirect and underhanded way. Was he wrong?
Modern examples abound. I mention two: the history of the special theory of
relativity in Europe between 1905 and 1930 (cf., Stanley Goldberg’s account-
many &entists who worked as educators opposed it with arguments very similar
to those of Bellarmino and B~tnge) and the history of the photon theory of light
after 190.5 (the theory 1~x1 been tested kfor-e Einstein and “shown in a
conclusive manner- to be utterly false”). And how can you possibly test
psychoanalysis without practicing it? Even the advice to restrict rhe principle to
education or to the commerce between scientists and the general public (onI)
well tested and well confirmed views should enter education and popular science
books) is vicious for it gives LIS a chimera, not the real thing. We learn a few
results; we have no idea how they were obtained, what makes them important,
and why we should take them seriously.
Bunge’s principle seems more plausible in the case of medicine, architeclure,
and technology. Applied to this domain the principle would advise us, for
 It’s not easy to exorcize ghosts 183

example, to release drugs only after they had been carefully tested. That is
sound advice, but it has exceptions: patients who want to have a drug at once or
who offer themselves for tests, as many AIDS patients do in the United States,
should be warned, but not refused. Conversely, there exist so far hardly any
comparative tests of competing medical systems such as Western medicine-
if there is one such system-and, say, the complex of procedures and ideas
surrounding the practice of acupuncture. All we can say is what orthodox
medical treatment does to a patient; we can report some anecdotic (positive or
negative) evidence for both sides, but we have no overall view. Would Bunge
have us stop medical treatment until the relevant comparisons have been made?
To sum up: Bunge’s principle is disastrous for research, bad for education and
scientific PR. It makes some sense in special areas but this sense has to be
carefully circumscribed, taking political institutions, personal needs, social
circumstances, existing laws, etc., into account.
The consequence for ghosts, creationisim, psychoanalysis, psi-fields is clear:
there is no simple way of combating these beliefs. Any argument that seems to
work against ghosts will hit scientific ideas of a similar generality and any move
that lets such ideas survive will also save ghosts. Bunge’s objection to dis-
embodied souls is an example. “There is no way minds can be detached from
their brains, just as movement cannot be separated from moving things, wind
from air, respiration from lungs, punches from fists, or smiles from faces . .
Belief in the possibility of such separations is not just an ordinary mistake: it is
basic conceptual error” (p. 133). The objection has much in common with early
philosophical arguments against the special theory of relativity. “According to
the theory of relativity” some philosophers wrote around 1910, “c + v equals c.
Hence the theory of relativity contains a basic and very simpleminded
conceptual error and must be removed.” What is the reply? That the addition of
velocities in relativity is an operation that differs from the addition of numbers;
the mistake lies in assuming that theoretical change leaves basic terms
unaffected. But this explanation also defuses Bunge’s argument. The remark
that relativity is confirmed by experiment while the belief in disembodied souls is
not is removed by the further comment, amply supported by scientific practice,
that test procedures have to be adapted to objects and not the other way around.
What works for alpha particles does not work for neutrinos, what works for
neutrinos does not work for quarks (confinement), what works for quarks does
not work for the ‘lost matter’ of the universe-and so on. Assuming a dis-
embodied soul exists-is it not clear that we shall have to use special methods to
identify it? Some people-exceptional observers-think they can sense ghosts.
Objecting that they did not use standard experimental equipment makes as
much sense as objecting that the W and Z particles were not discovered by using
litmus paper.
Bunge often refers to scientific laws (“energy would have to be created out of
nothing”) or he simply says that “science as we know it would have to be thrown
overboard.” But “science as [scientists like Planck and Lorentz] knew it” was
“thrown overboard” by quantum physics, and energy conservation was
suspended by the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory and, later, by the steady state
184 P. Feyerabend

cosmologies. True, both theories were defeated-by “controlled experiments,”

not by using energy conservation as a criterion of elimination.
“Methodological sceptics” says Bunge “disbelieve whatever clashes with logic
or with the bulk of scientific knowledge and its underlying philosophical
hypotheses” (p. 146). One of Einstein’s discoveries was that the “bulk of scientific
knowledge” of his time was incoherent and that the “underlying philosophical
hypotheses” were untenable. What are the “underlying philosophical
hypotheses” of today? Naive objectivism, rather similar to what we find in
Lucretius, in the case of molecular biology, a mixture of mentalism and wholism
in the quantum theory, slavish attention to the evidence in some areas of
statistical sociology, a mocking disregard for such slavery in the branch of high
energy physics called “high theory”-and so on. What is the “bulk of [modern]
scientific knowledge ?” It contains basic space-time theories and matter theories
together with the less basic assumptions of hydrodynamics, aerodynamics,
elasticity theory, plate geology, chemistry, meteorology, and so on; strictly
speaking this “bulk” is incoherent and thus should be dropped, according to
Bunge’s own principle. We have here a striking similarity between Bunge and
Fundamentalism. Fundamentalists disbelieve whatever clashes with the Bible.
But the Bible consists of various layers, written at different times, by different
authors, and contradicting each other. Bunge disbelieves what clashes with “the
bulk of scientific knowledge.” But this “bulk,” too, consists of various layers,
produced at different times by different research communities, and
contradicting each other. Fundamentalists, referring everything back to God,
smooth out the basic incoherences of their authority. Bunge who calls himself a
“methodological skeptic” does the same. Can I be blamed when suggesting that
he gives skepticism a bad name?
Bunge says he “trusts research.” That is fine until we realize that for many
problems there e&St different research teams with different results. In the
United States there is the saying that you can buy any evidence you need, not
because people lie but because there are cases where even the most careful
evaluation of the evidence depends on judgments that may be deflected by the
task at hand. What is a definitive refutation for one group is a minor difficulty
for another (early example: Kaufmann’s experiments convinced PoincarC and
Lorentz; they did not convince Einstein and Planck).
Making these observations I do not want to denigrate the sciences. On the
contrary, I want to show what a delicacy of mind is needed to participate in the
scientific enterprise. Viewed from the outside and in the light of simplifying
philosophies, science seems to be a monolith of procedures and result-a
changing monolith, true, but a monolith nevertheless. Watched from nearby,
one notices that contrary to what Duhem (1953/1914) suggests (p. 60 f, following
Pascal) the best scientists combine a certain strength and narrowness of mind
with a sensitivity or “weakness” that is capable of freely roaming over vast areas
of thought and experience. It is this feature that puts science side by side with
the arts as a way of familiarizing ourselves with the world and what attracts us to
it. And it is this feature that makes it difficult to use science as a hammer for
knocking out alternatives. So, what do we do with ideas and procedures we detest?
 It’s not easy to exorcize ghosts 185

We argue against them, naturally; however instead of quoting nonexisting

authorities we should explain the personal reasons for our dislike. Using
personal reasons we should be aware of the “fact” (“well established” by historical
and anthropological research and especially by what biology says about evolu-
tionary niches) that there is not just one type of experience that has survival
value but that there are many and that these different types support different
ontologies: the Greek gods and their followers, the Roman gods, were not
chimeras, they were not fantasies perceived by weak-minded contemporaries
either, they were realities that turned up in the midst of battle and affected the
most hardheaded Roman soldiers (details in ch. 4 of Pagans and Christians by
Robin Lane Fox). The same is true of the Christian saints and divinities and, to a
perhaps larger extent, of the entities that constitute “primitive” world views.
What disturbs me about creationism, etc., is not that they are “unscientific,” but
that they have only the most superficial connection with the lives of their
defenders who depend not on them, but on the products of the same sciences
they argue against. In this sense they are truly hot air.
I agreed with many of the remarks Bunge made about scientific extrava-
ganzas. I especially liked his attack on neoclassical economics. This theory which
disregards the “viability of the society and the natural environment in which the
‘rational economic man’ is embedded” was one of the main motive forces behind
ruthless developmental policies and it contributed much to the mess we now
have in this area. I accept Bunge’s brief and decisive arguments against selfish
genes and sociobiology. Of course, nobody knows what will happen in the future
but it is to be hoped that sociobiology with not play a major role in it. The
quantum theory of measurement as proposed by von Neumann did one thing: it
showed that a certain abstract procedure (the “cut” in Heisenberg’s terminology)
could be applied with consistent results at arbitrary stages of the development of
combined systems. This was a “fiction” of the same kind as the use of masspoints
in mechanics. Unfortunately it was taken to be the real thing. On the other hand
there exists now a new version where the transition occurs independently of
measurement, depends on the complexity of the system (SchrGdinger’s cat
materializes almost immediately while a lone electron takes much longer) and is
Lorentz invariant. 1 don’t think that the anthropic principle is as empty or as
false as Bunge makes it out to be. In one of its versions (and there are many) it
simply says that the laws we have found are the laws of a particular universe and
not the laws of everthing there is. I have no interest in catastrophe metaphysics
and general chaos and I agree with Arnold’s criticism of the first (it is shared by
many biologists); I would add Prigogine’s theory of self-organizing systems
insofar as it is extended to cultural change. This is not much better than the
number magic which Kepler criticized so well in his remarks on Fludd.
I welcome it that Bunge plays with open cards; he says that he is a materialist, a
realist, and empiricist, and a rationalist of sorts. I agree that this faith-and it is a
faith-conflicts with a variety of popular views. My point was that scientific
practice does not and is in this respect much freer than any philosophical
summary of it.
186 P. Feyerabend

REFERENCES
Duhem, P. (1953). Aim and structure of physical lhmy (Trans. P. Weiner). Princeton, NJ
Princeton University Press. (Original work published 19 14)
Fox, R. L. (1987). Pnguns and Chri.kms. New York: Alfred Knopl.