Susan Haack

Quite a good overview of what is at stake and at issue in philosophical discussions of logic. Above all, Haack clearly shows that traditional, formal logic is not quite the language of the universe, one by which all truth may be derived. Logic is a tool designed to do a job, which it more or less does well and consistently. However, it is important to recognize that logic is normative (i.e., defines how valid arguments should look) and it sets the boundaries about what can be conclusively show more reasoned. As a structured technique for reasoning, logic is also a way of making reasoning visible and shareable and for making us accountable to others for the conclusions that we reach. For these reasons, logic is supposed to be a system of thinking that is applicable across and capable of structuring different domains of content. But in adapting logic to variations of content (about which our experiences, intuitions, certainty, and situated access differ) applies stress to formal logic that require the creation of extended logics, restricted logics, and fuzzy logics.

Through sections on inductive/deductive/abductive reasoning and through a great chapter on theories of truth, including correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, semantic, and redundant truth models, Haack shows that the truth conditionality of statements derived from logic are problematic. For example a correspondence theory of truth, which holds that true statements are those that correspond to the world, becomes problematic if we start to think about what “correspond” means. Does it mean isomorphic correspondence in that there is a similarity or resemblance to reality? Does it means that there is agreement? Does it mean that there is a direct referential link between a thing we talk about and a thing in the world? And aren’t there things that we talk about as if they were real, like The Economy, which is really just an abstraction and a set of conventional and functionally related statements and observations about data points that we take, holistically, to be a thing in the world about which we can make reasoned assertions? In that sense, The Economy looks true because is corresponds to reality but we allow that correspondence because we also tacitly accept that The Economy is a set of relatively stable statements that are coherent in their association. There are then similar breakdowns between other models of truth and the logics associated with them. And what models of logic are most appropriate for these models of truth?

I appreciate the thinking that has gone into the logics that Haack identifies but I do wonder if the complexity of the situations and positions and topics that models of logic are attempting to describe are really making logic complex to the point that, to the extent to which we can even understand a system of logic, it may fit and work as an explanation of reason but the model becomes so complex and specialized in its use that it stops being a useful and accessible tool for mediating reason and guiding reason intuitively. Another way to put this is that a basic Aristotelian logical form like modus ponens (i.e., [1] If P then Q; [2] P; [3] therefore Q) makes intuitive sense; it guides intuition in the way that some of the more complex, multivalent logics and fuzzy logics that Haack discusses are not. They are complex models of reasoning and perhaps accurate but are they generative? Are they better at describing reason than guiding it? It certainly seems so.

There is a lot to appreciate in this book, not the least of which is Haack’s writing, which is really superb, clear, and direct. I also appreciate Haack’s summary of the problems and challenges of logic to underscore that logic is a tool designed to correspond to a particular way of organizing and categorizing things in the world and to accommodate science and the regularity with which we are able to do science. But there are gaps and paradoxes and situations in reasoning when we get too far away from what can be experienced, intuited, referenced, predicted, and proven. Logic cannot critique itself and so a book like this is valuable for pointing out where systems of logic work and where we just accept that they work because we overlook limitations of scope, generalizability, contingency, and uncertainty. show less

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 show more 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. show less

It took everything I had to get all the way through this one, and I'm pretty sure it all comes down to style. My guess is you'll both understand and/or enjoy Defending Science depending on your degree of familiarity with and enjoyment of the style and conventions of analytic philosophy (and probably the terms used in formal logic). My beef was more with the sorts of self-congratulatory barbs of "wit" this style often entails—maybe what's meant as an attempt to be funny, but which winds up show more just being needlessly insulting. I've no idea, in other words, how to rate this one—only that I wouldn't hand it to a layperson interested in examining what science is or why it's valuable, etc.

Incidentally, I started this book after having enjoyed a shorter journal article by Haack on the same subject. show less

With so many people citing science as Truth and telling us we have to believe something because "science says so" and other's rejecting long-established scientific knowledge for little more than superstitious reasons, this book comes as a breath of fresh air.