A Comparison of Paul K. Feyerabend’s and Thomas Kuhn’s Notions of Scientific Progress: Implications for African Philosophical Eclecticism

Abstract

Western civilization prides itself in having offered humanity a canon of institutionalized rationality namely, science. Consequently, scientists attribute to their discipline a bogus epistemological success. Regrettably, their failure to adopt a consistent method for doing science, questions the credibility of their superiority claims. Ceding ultimate epistemic authority to science therefore becomes increasingly difficult for disciplines like the humanities. This multiplicity of scientific methods manifest in different conceptions of scientific progress, which the post modernists perceive as methodologies. Against this backdrop, this essay undertakes a comparative examination of the notions of scientific progress in Paul K. Feyerabend and Thomas S. Kuhn. However, the aim is to identify the implications of such multifarious methodologies on the knowing process, and scientific progress generally and, also to show how African philosophical eclecticism represents a richer paradigmatic approach to knowledge acquisition. This particularly brings in the desired mark of novelty in this paper. The author adopts comparative analysis to arrive at its conclusion.