Susan Haack is the current queen of the via media.  Her major epistemological work, Evidence and Inquiry (Blackwells, 1993), presents the usual contrast between foundational and coherence approaches to knowledge and its justification and proposes her own 'foundherentism' as the way to go (fortunately the awful word hasn't been taken up, though the approach it covers has, I hope, had somewhat more success).  The present book takes her beyond general epistemology to encompass the nature of science, and it explicitly positions her between prevalent misconstruals.  She notes, however, that occupying the middle ground is not a matter of principle, but rather what an impartial concern for the truth most often leads her to.

Haack's line on science is that "though scientific theories are sometimes startlingly at odds with commonsense beliefs, scientific inquiry is recognizably continuous with everyday empirical inquiry of the most familiar kind" (p. 97).  There is no special, exclusive scientific method, nothing distinctive about the methodology of the sciences that distinguish them from serious inquiry in other fields.  The extra umph comes from the elaborate instrumentation scientists have created to refine and extend the range of perceptual experience (p. 101), deliberate experimentation (p. 102), the predilection to present ideas in mathematical terms (p. 105), the related prolific invention of new concepts to make sense of our findings (p. 100), and the cumulative historical and social embeddedness of all these extensions (p. 106).  None of these features are intrinsically beyond what ordinary common sense can furnish, so while science as inquiry may require a distinctive social environment to flourish it doesn't have anything special epistemologically, though its methodologies will reflect what we have come to learn about particular topics (e.g., the need for double-blind experiments in some contexts rather than others).  This may well be too negative a construal of Haack's view: she thinks the sheer quantity of these refinements has resulted in something qualitatively different, epistemologically.  Since the identification of common sense or its own refinements over time is no easy matter, there may not be much of an issue here.  Her main point is that science doesn't have a method of a kind that history or detective work lacks.

The present book sets out this "critical common-sensist manifesto" in chapter 1, surveys dismissively the typical concerns of 20^th century empiricist philosophy of science in the next chapter, and then develops a conception of the role of evidence in the third chapter.  Chapter 4 expands on the extras I have already mentioned, that extend "the long arm of common sense" (a phrase she has taken from Gustav Bergmann), and chapter 5 explores issues relating to her kind of realism and emphasizes the importance of explanation as an aim of scientific theorizing.  Thereafter she takes up particular issues: the status of the social sciences in chapter 6; what sensible sociology of science — as opposed to the extravagances of a lot of what has gone on — would contribute to our understanding of science, in chapter 7; the question of rhetoric and the "literature" of science in chapter 8; legal difficulties in deciding when to allow expert evidence, in chapter 9; the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, in chapter 10; the value of science and the values inherent in its practice, in chapter 11; and finally in chapter 12 various thoughts about the "end" of science.  As befits an adherent of common sense, most of what Haack has to say about these various topics is eminently sensible — if you want a balanced, no nonsense take on these various issues you won't go far wrong in believing what Haack offers you.  But one might think that she should have made more of the perhaps perverse demands of those others that have led them to the extremes she rejects.  (She frequently plays an anti-relativist card — you say "X is only acceptable relative to particular assumptions, or is just propaganda, or whatever" but that claim is not meant to be taken just as acceptable relative to particular assumptions etc., it is asserted qua simply true.  I've nothing against insisting on that kind of point, but there are other worries behind a lot of the views Haack rejects that are not defused by this particular strategy.)  Haack emphasises the piecemeal, halting progress of the sciences; she repeats Lakatos' claim that "there is no instant rationality" (p. 47, 118, a variant on p. 52); and so she has to admit that any bit of what we currently believe might have to be given up and radically refashioned, but of course most of it (more carefully, the best established bits) is OK.  She doesn't really address the doubts of those who wonder about the last point because they accept her previous one.

There is then a sense in which her epistemology is more descriptive than justificatory: she describes the procedures we adopt, the qualifications we see the need for, but without doing much to argue that these are in some way privileged, better ways of behaving than others we might concoct.  Of course, she doesn't say they aren't better — that is assumed.  And she makes the useful point that it is difficult to imagine what less controversial premises one might use to establish the very general assumptions she makes such as the existence of a real world or the success of at least some of our investigations (pp. 124-5).  How the logical empiricists and their friends understood themselves, or how they might best be understood now, are somewhat disputed questions, but Haack has little patience with them — they failed to realize (at least before the lessons of Goodman's grue hit home) that what matters is not just logical form but the substantive content of the claims we make. One might, however, take a more charitable line: let us see what attention to deductive logic might give us, idealizing away from some of the other issues and not assuming the existence of non-deductive relations of support.  Then Popper's (or Bacon's for that matter) emphasis on the importance of the negative instance, of the modus tollens form of argument, has a point, even if it has to be watered down when we let in the theoretical nature even of our everyday observation-terms.  Similarly, though more contentiously, one might see more point in the Bayesian exploration of confirmation than Haack is prepared to concede. 

Haack's famous analogy, anticipated briefly by Einstein, though he never elaborated upon it in the way Haack has, is with crossword puzzles.  Our cognitive situation, she suggests, is usefully construed as similar in some respects to the situation facing a person trying to solve a crossword puzzle.  There are of course many disanalogies — she notes that in real life or real inquiry we hardly ever have the bit that corresponds to the answers in the next day's paper.  Nor do we have the usual assurance that the language of the clues is the same as the language of the answers.  One respect in which the analogy may distort her position is that it offers us a binary contrast: clue and solution.  Haack can then take clues as "given" in a way the solutions clearly aren't, and go on to say that "perceptual … events and states, like clues in a crossword, neither have nor stand in need of warrant" (p. 61).  But this soon comes under strain, since Haack admits the element of theory, of going beyond anything that can be given directly in experience, in even the most ordinary of claims about such events.  An account of how such claims are connected to the way we typically learn how to use them allows her to say that "seeing the thing can partially, though only partially, warrant the claim that there's a glass of water present" (p. 63).  The other part will connect with our theories, and thus there will be an interaction between solution and clue in even identifying the clue — not exactly the normal situation for a puzzle-solver.  Haack avoids this by insisting that what correspond to clues are the non-propositional experiences of a scientist making observations.  But, even with the route through typical ways of learning the use of the words such scientists employ to report their experiences, it does seem odd to conceive scientific theory as accounting for someone's, or even many people's, non-propositional experiences, rather than the phenomena those experiences might bear witness to.  (Newton, as far as I know, never even gestured at the physiology that would be needed to connect his seeing what he saw with the optical theories he put forward.  Those theories explain the optical phenomena, not his experiencing them.)  She avoids this awkwardness, I think, by admitting that a person's evidence is both their experiences and their reasons, so in the end what theory explains are the judgments people make on the basis of their experiences, modulated by their background beliefs, and various other factors.  But probably I have misunderstood exactly what Haack would have us believe here.

Of Haack's attempts to extricate science from popular or academic misunderstandings, perhaps the most interesting is her chapter on religion, since it displays one rare example of her actually drawing boundaries around common-sense.  Theology, she tells us, is "discontinuous with everyday empirical inquiry, both in the kinds of explanations in which it traffics and in the kinds of evidential resource on which it calls" (p. 267).  It supposes a disembodied being can and does bring things about in this world and it appeals to peculiar forms of experience and the authority of supposedly revealed texts.  As she comments on the explanations, or "explanations," offered by "intelligent design", it is not that they appeal to intentions or to unobservable entities but rather "that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put Its intentions into action by any physical means, they fail to explain at all" (p. 279).  While religion and its associated theologies remain the most egregious failures of common sense to prevail, I think it would have been apposite for Haack to have given us a few more examples of demarcation.  Popper's early concern to distinguish science/common-sense from pseudo disciplines surely remains an important business, as recent controversies over supposed psychological matters ("recovered memories", Rohrschach testing, etc.) reveal.  Her own preferred approach — "rather than criticizing work as "pseudo-scientific," it is always better to specify what, exactly, is wrong with it" (p. 116) — is obviously necessary, but may underplay the power of institutionalized interests. 

So far I have dealt with a book that Haack published in 2003.  What I have before me is a second edition, in paperback, for which she has written a new preface.  In it she comments on other reviewers' misunderstandings — a third edition may well allow her to add me to the list: I must acknowledge some helpful comments by Haack on an earlier version of this review, though since I have not responded to every critical comment I am sure I will be found guilty of continuing misrepresentation  — and follows up on some of the legal and scientific issues she discussed in the text, giving considerable space to the distortions and duplicity involved in some tests of new drugs.  She also comments on the ruling in the first case brought to refuse the place of "intelligent design" in the school curriculum, and updates her account of our faltering steps towards discovering whether Mars or other parts of the solar system ever had, or have, organic life forms.  One comment on one of her replies to misunderstanding: some thought she wasn't offering anything new; she says in effect "if you read carefully what others have said, in the cases in point they were committed to something very different from me." I suspect what has happened to many readers is a kind of careless charity: for instance, when Popper says that we just decide which observation statements to regard as true, with no concern about our perceptual experiences, one takes him not to be committed to such an absurdity but just unable to come out and say the sensible commonsensical things Haack offers.  He did it himself later, as she notes, but she doesn't allow Popper the option of changing his mind.  Her critical common-sensism allows her to avoid the doctrinaire commitments of so many philosophers; they may feel her victories are a little too easily won.

© 2007 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical