The Coherence of Feyerabend’s Pluralist Realism
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In this paper I argue that Feyerabend cultivated a pluralist realism in a sustained way over his long academic career. The coherence of his evolving position is often ignored due to the common prejudice that pluralism cannot be compatible with realism, leading to the assumption that Feyerabend must have discarded realism as he became more flamboyantly pluralist in his later years. Rather than abandoning the realism that he advocated in the early years, he made it stronger by articulating a metaphysical layer of pluralist realism to add to the longstanding epistemological layer. The later development also resolved some tensions in his earlier views, which were interestingly revealed in his mid-career attempt to distinguish different meanings of “realism”.