Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994)
Lakatos realized and admitted that the existing standards of rationality, standards of logic included, were too restrictive and would have hindered science had they been applied with determination. He therefore permitted the scientist to violate them (he admits that science is not "rational" in the sense of these standards). However, he demanded that research programmes show certain features in the long run — they must be progressive… I have argued that this demand no longer restricts scientific practice. Any development agrees with it.
Comment:
In 1975, Paul Feyerabend published his famous pamphlet Against Method, advocating the equivalence of all the way of knowing [5] (science is more powerful only because it is the wisdom of a more powerful civilization, but this is not due to any methodological superiority).
I think that all these separate cultural trends can be summed up, without to much loss of information, by the following statement: between 1940 and 1980, many educated people found very compelling the arguments in the form “If you really believe in something, that thing is real for you”. The bounds 1940-1980 are very arbitrary, and surely in some academic circles this way of thinking has never fallen out of grace. Postmodernist philosophy would probably not have been possible without this tenet.
–www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Hrd27kEdKHb3Kc6mS/the-maximally-relativistic-zeitgeist
Feyerabend:
[S]cience can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and … non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so … Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science … In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.
–Against Method viii (is this a real quote? I can't believe the last part)