While critics contend that the views expounded upon in Against Method are tantamount to scientific anarchism, its author Paul Feyerabend maintains that his views stem not from a desire to promote scientific chaos so much as from a recognition that many of the fundamental tenets of science—rationality, empiricism, and objectivity, for example—are as seriously flawed as the "subjective" paths to truth that scientists are quick to repudiate. Feyerabend goes further by arguing that many methods that are now condemned in the scientific community played a critical role in historical moments of scientific progress.

Much of Against Method is a case study of the events surrounding Galileo's singlehanded rejection of the geocentric cosmological model in favor of the updated heliocentric model. Feyerabend goes to lengths to point out that what ultimately allowed Galileo to succeed in convincing the Western world that the earth revolved around the sun was the use of methods most modern scientists would deem highly suspect. For example, in attempting to explain why the rotation of the earth did not cause a rock dropped from a tower to follow a curved, rather than a straight, path, Galileo relied on several as-yet unproven hypotheses about the laws of motion, essentially begging the question for his own position. By showing that these methods were critical to a crucial scientific advancement, Feyerabend casts doubt on whether these "unscientific" practices really deserve the criticism they so often garner.

Replacement of the word "repudiate" with which of the following words would result in the LEAST change in meaning in the passage?

(A) overrule
(B) embrace
(C) underscore
(D) decry
(E) debate



The passage implies that Feyerabend makes use of a case study primarily in order to
(A) demonstrate that since a canonical example of scientific progress itself made use of practices now deemed unscientific, scientists ought to revise their account of what is and is not acceptable scientific practice
(B) show that Galileo, in his attempt to prove that a rock dropped from a tower followed a straight, not a curved, path, was guilty of many of the same errors in reasoning that make science controversial today
(C) underscore the notion that if science wants to keep thinking of itself as a field that is open to "subjective," as well as "objective," paths to truth, it needs to adopt some of the techniques that were prevalent in Galileo's time