I came to this book after hearing about Haack’s essay “Six Signs of Scientism” online. That essay is included here along with nineteen others, some longer, some shorter, laying out Haack’s answers to the questions What is Science? and What is Philosophy? in commonsense prose that should appeal to anyone interested in the Philosophy of Science and the History of Ideas.

Haack is straightforward in discussing the evolution of her own thinking. She was educated in the 1960s and 1970s in the then-dominant linguistic-conceptual-analytical style revolving around specialized issues in semantics and logic. Then, while the Logical Positivists repudiated metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics, disconnecting themselves from the world as it is, Haack found inspiration in classical pragmatism, especially the work of C.S. Peirce, which opened her eyes to a broader and more flexible conception of philosophy. She says that she grew “uneasy about the implied conception of philosophy as a clearly distinguishable ‘discipline’ with a unique ‘proper role’ in relation to other disciplines”—a conception that seemed to disregard the vague, permeable boundaries and multifarious connections between philosophy and other fields (“Not Cynicism, But Synechism: Lessons from Classical Pragmatism”). Now she insists upon “a tolerantly expansive view of the scope of philosophy and a flexibly pluralistic attitude to its methods” (“Formal Philosophy? A Plea for Pluralism”).

For Haack, then, philosophy is not a sharply delineated and tightly specialized discipline, but “a loose federation of inquiries into a characteristic, but constantly evolving, class of questions.” She would place philosophy on a continuum with other kinds of empirical inquiries—the sciences, history, legal and literary studies, etc. All rely upon the hypothetico-deductive method, but philosophical questions are characterized by a peculiar kind of abstraction and generality, though they still must use the method of experience and reasoning.

Like philosophy, science is a special class of inquiry. Inquiry in the sciences is distinctive because of the contrivances that science has developed over the centuries: “models and metaphors to aid the imagination, instruments of observation to aid the senses, intellectual tools like numerals, the calculus, statistics, computer programs, etc., to extend reasoning powers, …and so on.” There is no single scientific method, Haack reminds us. But successful empirical inquiry, scientific or otherwise, is possible only because we and the world are a certain way. Both pragmatic philosophy and scientific claims must be anchored in experience. The intelligibility of the world suggests a hypothesis linking the orderliness of the universe and the evolution of the human mind—an idea shared by Plato, Spinoza and Peirce.

The most entertaining and enlightening bits here are Haack’s refutations of the key contentions of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. While Haack emphasizes the fallibilism inherent in the scientific enterprise—the willingness to revise even the most firmly accepted claims should the evidence require it—she has little patience for Popper’s notion of ‘falsifiability.’ Popper’s philosophy—shunning verifiability, inductive logic, confirmation, supportive evidence, and reliability—was thoroughly negative (“Just Say ‘No’ to Logical Negativism”). Popper’s criteria for science was not what had been tested and proven, but what had been shown to be false, except in those instances (Haack parses footnotes and the introductions to various editions of Popper’s works) when he tries to take it all back.

Rorty’s neo-pragmatism fares even worse in Haack’s treatment. Repudiating the idea that beliefs are objectively true or false, evidence objectively better or worse, Rortyism abandoned the metaphysical and epistemological concerns at the heart of philosophy in order to insist that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones. Rorty and his admirers “kidnapped” pragmatism, says Haack, and disassociated philosophy from the scientific attitude, in an attempt to remake it as a genre of literature. In dismissing Rorty’s radical relativism, she calls again upon Peirce (“The Unity of Truth and the Plurality of Truths”) to argue in favor of a single “truth-concept” but “many different but compatible truths.” (The point is also well made by Ben-Ami Scharfstein in The Dilemma of Context). Haack also makes note of, though she does not need to deploy, the well-known anti-relativist paradox: a philosopher claiming that truth is relative to culture, or that there are no beliefs, undermines his own assertion just by making it. ( )