Feyerabend and Mach

Of all the influences on the work of Paul Feyerabend, Ernst Mach’s was probably the most long-standing, and undoubtedly among the most important. I first show that Feyerabend’s earliest mentions of Mach are heavily under the influence of Karl Popper. Early Feyerabend characterises Mach in traditional terms as a positivist whose philosophy is flawed in comparison with critical rationalism. Next, in the papers Feyerabend published during the early and mid-1960’s, Mach appears in two main guises: not only as an anti-realist, but also as an anti-pluralist. I show that while there are some flashes of insight about Mach here, by and large Feyerabend sticks to the traditional way of reading him as aligned with the logical empiricists. Feyerabend did, however, come to change his mind about Mach. He eventually came to be at the forefront of those who initiated a re-evaluation of Mach, thereby beginning to move opinion away from the ‘received view’. Feyerabend’s published struggle on Mach’s behalf began in earnest around 1970. From this point onwards, his attitude to Mach was relatively constant. While endorsing several of the ways in which Feyerabend came to characterise Mach’s thought, I take issue with some other themes in these publications. I suggest that we should not follow Feyerabend’s mature reading of Mach in its entirety, since he had turned away from certain sensible aspects of Mach’s ideas. Most notably, Feyerabend misinterpreted what Mach said about world views, he wrongly imagined that Mach endorsed the ‘constructivist’ ideas that human cognition transforms (non-cognitive) facts, and that facts themselves get adapted, and he fancifully ascribed to Mach his own view that all concepts are ‘theoretical’ concepts.