[2] Stove starts chapter one by clarifying the sort of view that would uncontroversially constitute an irrationalist position regarding science.

So a writer whose position inclined him to deny (A), or even made him at all reluctant to admit it, would almost inevitably seem, to the philosophers who read him, to be maintaining something extremely implausible.Stove then advances his reading of the philosophers he is criticising: "Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend, are all writers whose position inclines them to deny (A), or at least makes them more or less reluctant to admit it.

Popper himself had given a 1963 summary of his thoughts the title "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge", seemingly endorsing (A) in almost identical language.

Nonetheless, the question Stove addresses in the chapter is "How do these writers manage to be plausible, while being reluctant to admit so well-known a truth as (A)?"

Stove claims this tendency is "widely recognized", but waives both this general answer (and its supporters) in favour of seeking a more specific account.

Stove's first step in refining the general answer is observing what he calls mixed strategy writing in the authors he is examining.

What is common to the examples Stove offers is that something well-known is mixed with something extraordinary, without the clash being resolved; the "irrationalism" is introduced simultaneously with orthodoxy, rendering it more plausible to the reader—disbelief is suspended.

Idiosyncratic weak senses of these words are a characteristic of the writing of his subjects that explains clearly how a reader, presuming ordinary use of language, might believe them to be expressing something more orthodox than is, in fact, their intention.

At this point, Stove coins the expression neutralizing success words and provides an uncontroversial example from everyday language to illustrate it.

So a journalist who used "refuted" when all he meant was "denied" has used a success-word, but without intending to convey the idea of success, of cognitive achievement, which is part of the word's meaning.

A schematic example, and one not likely to occur in our authors, is this: instead of saying "P entails Q", which is of course a logical statement, to say "P entails Q according to most logicians, ancient, medieval, and modern".This simple pattern of expression makes historical rather than logical assertions (like an encyclopedia documenting debate, without making any truth-claims about what is said, only that it was said, see de dicto and de re).

However, as he presents the last quote, he appears to experience his astonishment at such a statement as though again for the first time, expressing this via his characteristically barbed wit.

To say of an observation-statement O that it confirms a scientific theory T, entails that those two propositions stand in some logical relation such that O is a reason to believe T. But this cannot be so if deductivism is true.

In other words, he must often sabotage the logical expression "confirms".Stove provides examples and further evidence before finally turning to a brief, common-sense defense of scientific reasoning.

With a combination of dazzling philosophical acumen and scarifying wit, Stove does for irrationalism in the philosophy of science what the Romans did for Carthage in the Third Punic War.