Feyerabend in Against Method (quoted, of all people by McCloskey in The Rhetoric of Economics, Jnl of Economic Literature, 1983) has this to say:
Had the modernist criterion of persuasion been adopted by Galileo’s contemporaries, the Galilean case would have failed. A grant proposal to use the strange premise that terrestrial optics applied also to the celestial sphere, to assert that the tides were the sloshing of water on a mobile earth, and to suppose that the fuzzy views of Jupiter’s alleged moons would prove, by a wild analogy, that the planets, too , went around the sun as did the moons around Jupiter would not have survived the first round of peer review in a National Science Foundation of 1632.After all, they were Aristotelians back then (as most village-idiot evolutionists today are too).
