ABSTRACT
I spent the academic year 1975/76 as a Guggenheim scholar at the Centre for Environmental Studies in London. It was there I came across Paul Feyerabend’s polemical study in the philosophy of science, Against Method, which had just been published (Feyerabend 1975). This book gave me the idea to explore more deeply the epistemological assumptions of transactive planning (see Chapter 1). A former student of Sir Karl Popper, doyen of philosophers of science, Feyerabend argued against the monistic theories of his teacher under the provocative slogan “anything goes”. There was to be no single scientifi c method, no single truth revealed by bona fi de scientists who had meticulously sifted through experimental results, systematically eliminating all challenges to a formally stated hypothesis, but an open-ended pursuit of knowledge claims and counter-claims. Feyerabend’s was a radical manifesto, creating a philosophical space for multiple knowledges, a concept which, nearly a quarter century later, Leonie Sandercock incorporated into her path-breaking book, Towards Cosmopolis (1998).
