Proliferation is it a Good Thing?

Abstract I served on several panel discussions with Paul Feyerabend. The most memorable occurred in 1970 at the University of Cincinnati. Paul delivered one of his spellbinding lectures in which he talked about Galileo’s tower argument and claimed that Galileo was violating standard rules of logic and methodology. He was practicing “counterinduction” (which, according to Feyerabend, is a good thing to do). He was introducing a hypothesis, namely, that a body falling from a tower has a slanted, not a straight, motion, which is incompatible with highly confirmed theories and indeed is refuted by what we observe when we see the body fall. Galileo was following Feyerabend’s favorite principle: Proliferation I: Invent and elaborate theories that are inconsistent with the accepted point of view, even if the latter should happen to be highly confirmed and generally accepted.