Feyerabend’s “Against method” (1975) promoted “epistemological anarchism” and the “terrified exclamation”: “Anything goes!” It meant the huge gap of real scientific practice versus the norms of internal consistency and experimental (or empirical) corroboration of all theories. The theories succeed somehow though being both internally inconsistent and experimentally uncorroborated according that viewpoint.
Feyerabend’s position can be grounded and therefore verified by linguistic practice:
Scientific theory is a text including “neologisms” or new meanings of well-known words such as ‘notions’. Theories are the good texts, i.e. those, which are “read” and thus “used” for generating new “good texts”. “Anything goes” for creating a good text such as a literary fiction, and the “scientific text” is not more than one literary genre, among which the masterpieces are called “theories”. Their verification consists in that they are read and continued in new texts. The “impact factor” is a quantitative measure right for the “proliferation” of a certain text-parent into new texts. Then the concept of truth only tries to fix normatively, but also dogmatically, the correct usage and rules of genre being broken again and again in the real proliferation in the genre of science right by the “anti-rule”: “Anything goes!”
The same viewpoint corresponds to a collection of nonstandard (“not-Saussurean”) semantics sharing modifications, generalizations or replacements of the classical triadic scheme: sign, signifier, and signified. The border between a word and a text (such as a theory) is then clear and fussy both being meanings, the latter of which usually much more specialized. The usage of words or texts (theories) separates the most useful ones therefore constituting the corpus of language or knowledge.
The common place of those nonstandard semantics is the rejection of representationism: language and any text (theory) or word in it does not represent, reflect, or repeat reality, but it is reality in itself by itself in one or another sense according each separated nonstandard semantics accepted.
One of the simplest nonstandard semantics, in which one adds only complementarity of signified and signifier in Niels Bohr’s sense can illustrate very well the relevancy of that class of semantics to Feyerabend’s “anarchistic epistemology”:
Language as the set of signifiers and reality as the set of signified are also complementary rather than linked to each other somehow. Any theory as a subset of language is thus complementary to its corresponding reality as well. It cannot relate to that reality in principle, and the correspondent kind of truth is impossible as a principle.
All meanings as well all signs consist of inseparable “ontological quanta”, each of which is both signified and signifier, however appearing only disjunctively. One or ontological quanta can be used or not, they can occur or not, and as more often as they are “truer”. The criterion of truth is right their usage or occurrence, which obeys the probabilistic distribution of “proliferation”: all theories are welcome for anything goes, but usage as experience will separate only a few of them.
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