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methods in general relativity. He needs the aid of a fellow scholar, a certain Mr. Kirk to say what is perfectly obvious and was never contested by me; viz., that we cannot do physics without approximations. What I do say is that there is a great difference between the approximations used in nineteenth- century celestial mechanics and some relativistic approximations and that the latter constitute a difficulty for rationality theories in which new theories, such as relativity, are said to reproduce all the results of their predecessors: relativity, in many cases, does not reproduce these results, it assumes them.

Hellman hints darkly at some “embarrassing” logical blunders of mine, but he keeps a discreet silence as to their nature. The one case he does mention reveals the prudence of the procedure for here we see the enormous gulf between science (which I discuss) and pidgin logic (which inspires Hellman’s obser- vations): contradictions in science can hardly ever be recon- structed as contradictions between the elements of a conjunction of statements.

I would have liked to cmclude these remarks by saying that I learned some tiny little thing from the review. But alas, the only lesson I learned is that reviewers d o not read large parts of what they are reviewing, that they cannot read other parts, that they do not understand what they can read, that they write about things they have neither read nor understood and that professional opinions arise in this way. But this I already knew. After all, one of the main points of my book is that scientific (philosophical) “knowledge” arises only rarely in a rational man- ner, that large parts of it are gossip created by people who are either incompetent or prejudiced and that one need not take it too seriously. I t is somewhat ironical that evidence for this point should turn up in almost every review of my book.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY AND F.I.T., ZURICH

REPLY TO FEYERABEND: FROM BAD TO WORSE GEOFFREY HELLMAN

Invincible method : write a lengthy, polemical tract, thick with pronouncement, thin in argument, elusive in its vacillation between the trite and the absurd, and then counter criticism which charitably reconstructs a chain of reasoning aimed a t winnowing a kernel of insight (the requirement of “historical

REPLY TO HELLMAN’S ‘REVIEW’ 207 relevance”) by saying, “But I never wrote anything of the kind!” Clearly, this is a game in which the cards are stacked, and I can see no point in playing. It should at least be evident that, first of all, I could not-not even in ten typed pages and twenty- three notes (some of them long)-treat all banalities that might be present in Against Method and consequently did not con- sider the reconstruction according to which (even relativized) rationality principles are revisable in the light of new evidence. Surely virtually all our beliefs and principles are thus revisable. Secondly, Feyerabend’s newly proferred tolerance for multiple, competing, relativized theories of rationality extends only to impotent theories because, on his view, they cannot justifiably be used to rule anything out. This merely invites a parenthetical remark on my part to the effect that, in the context of my discus- sion, “impotence” is a sufficient condition for “worthlessness”. As to whether, in fact, Feyerabend has dealt seriously with any of the significant issues raised in my review, readers may judge for themselves. * INDIANA UNIVERSITY

*[EDITOR’S NOTE: The present review and replies were received in spring 1976. They may, therefore, be rather dated. We apologize to the authors for editorial delays that kept these materials out of print a bit longer than usual.]

G MPH