In A War A Totalitarian State Has

My Intention Is Not To Replace One Set Of General Rules By Another Such Set: My Intention Is, Rather, To Convince The Reader That All Methodologies, Even The Most Obvious Ones, Have Their Limits.

Given Any Rule, However "fundamental" Or "necessary" For Science, There Are Always Circumstances When It Is Advisable Not Only To Ignore The Rule, But To Adopt Its Opposite. For Example, There Are Circumstances When It Is Advisable To Introduce, Elaborate And Defend Ad Hoc Hypotheses, Or Hypotheses Which Contradict Well-established And Generally Accepted Experimental Results, Or Hypotheses Whose Content Is Smaller Than The Content Of The Existing And Empirically Adequate Alternative, Or Self-inconsistent Hypotheses, And So On.

Early Chinese Thinkers Had Taken Variety At Face Value. They Had Favored Diversification And Collected Anomalies Instead Of Trying To Explain Them Away.

Knowledge Is Not A Series Of Self-consistent Theories That Converges Toward An Ideal View; It Is Rather An Ever Increasing Ocean Of Mutually Incompatible (and Perhaps Even Incommensurable) Alternatives, Each Single Theory, Each Fairy Tale, Each Myth That Is Part Of The Collection Forcing The Others Into Greater Articulation And All Of Them Contributing, Via This Process Of Competition, To The Development Of Our Consciousness.

Taking Experimental Results And Observations For Granted And Putting The Burden Of Proof On The Theory Means Taking The Observational Ideology For Granted Without Having Ever Examined It.