I found Against Method to be intellectually dishonest. Feyerabend cherry picks anecdotes from history, and distorts history, to support his pet idea that there is no such thing as the scientific method or falsifiability.
I read this book in college (1970s), but the bit that sticks in my memory was his discussion of observations through Galileo's telescope. His observation, and others' confirmation, of Jupiter's moons, the phases of the planets, and other phenomena helped end the Ptolemaic era, and had a profound effect on the development of science. Feyerabend starts with the idea that "anything goes" and tries to support it by describing some anecdotes of people who looked through Galileo's telescope and said they couldn't see anything. He thinks these anecdotes should be weighted equally with the body of detailed astronomical observation, and thinks it was arbitrary to base scientific models on observations of what, after all, were real things. He starts with his conclusion and finds anecdotes to support it. I suspected at the time that he wasn't even taking himself seriously, but plenty of other people seem to have been.
You're missing the point of the discussion. The point is that observation is a far less straightforward thing than it's sometimes made out to be. It is clear with hindsight that Galileo was indeed observing the moons of Jupiter, but it was far from clear at the time. The reports of people who didn't see anything are no more "anecdotal" than Galileo's reports that he did see something, and there is little reason to doubt the veracity of either set of reports. It is well known that there's a certain knack to seeing things through telescopes and microscopes, and if you look through one for the first time you may simply fail to see what a trained observer sees. Neither the telescope nor human visual perception were well understood at the time, and it must have been difficult to know what to make of the conflicting reports. Feyerabend's entire argument depends on the assumption that Galileo was - at least in retrospect - doing the right thing. However, the right thing in this instance turned out to require the violation of pretty much every prescription of the "scientific method".
If that were the point, it's unlikely that I missed it, because it was a commonplace before Feyerabend wrote his book, and I was and am steeped in the idea.
Feyerabend's position was far more radical. He (and, again, I'm trying not to misrepresent him, but I haven't read any of his stuff in decades) was trying to show that science is no more rational than anything else that people do, that scientists accept or ignore evidence arbitrarily, and that the existence of a scientific method is a myth. He was wrong, and the Galileo stuff is a good example. On the one hand, you have, not just Galileo himself, but a bunch of other people, observing very specific things, and the same things, repeatably; things that have natural physical explanations. On the other hand, you have some people who didn't see anything, or just a blur. You're right that there was little experience of looking through telescopes. But the failure to make an observation is not an observation. That scientists were influenced, in their model building, by observations, even in the face of the inability of some people to make them, does not mean that science is irrational. That the course of science is complex and mired in politics doesn't mean that there is no such thing as a scientific method.
Again, you're analyzing what Galileo did with the benefit of hindsight. With hindsight, we know who was using the telescope correctly and who wasn't. At the time, you had a complex set of rather fuzzy observations made using a poorly understood instrument, and some of these observations were in conflict with arguably more reliable observations. Feyerabend is pointing out that Galileo wasn't right because he was more scientific and more rational than his critics. In that sense, his decisions to accept certain bits of evidence and ignore others (e.g. the apparently obvious fact that the Earth is not in motion) were arbitrary. That is, these decisions did not follow from (and in fact sometimes went against) the scientific method as it is typically enunciated. With hindsight, we can offer a post-hoc rational reconstruction of each decision, but that can't be taken seriously as an account of what Galileo was actually doing. So yes, the scientific method is a myth if understood as a set of guidelines the following of which has been a major cause of scientific progress.
