Edward Tenner: Rick Perry: Scientific Relativist?

Edward Tenner is a historian of technology and culture. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center and holds a Ph.D in European history

Historians of science have weighed in on Texas Governor Rick Perry's invocation of Galileo to support his skepticism of the scientific majority opinion on climate change, as reported in the New York Times. And the scholars cited correctly observe that Galileo, like the theorists of global warming, had the majority of contemporary scientists behind him.

But the Times and other commentaries ignore a great philosopher of science who objected not to Galileo's ideas, but to the dismissal of theological and other objections to his theories. (A few blog comments, like one on a Village Voice post, are exceptions.)

The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) proudly called himself an "epistemological anarchist."...

Rick Perry and New Left Books! And who knows what Feyerabend, who rejected all rigid systems, would have thought about Perry and other Republican candidates. Maybe he would have apologized to Galileo. For in defending the lay person's right to choose minority views in science (including alternative medicine), and in asserting the rights of non-scientific belief systems vis-à-vis laboratory science, Perry was unintentionally joining the philosophical left.

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