Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture -- Essays on Science, Religion, Law, Literature, and Life - Softcover

Haack, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616144939 ISBN 13: 9781616144937

Publisher: G38-Prometheus, 2013

Synopsis

This engaging and wide-ranging collection of essays is informed and unified by the conviction that philosophy can, and should, engage with real-world issues. Susan Haack's keen analytical skills and well-chosen illustrations illuminate a diverse range of cultural questions; and her direct style and wry sense of humor make complex ideas and subtle distinctions accessible to serious readers whatever their discipline or particular interests. Putting Philosophy to Work will appeal not only to philosophers but also to thoughtful scientists, economists, legal thinkers, historians, literary scholars, and humanists. This new, expanded second edition includes several previously unpublished essays: a devastating critique of Karl Popper's highly (and dangerously) influential philosophy of science; a searching and thought-provoking analysis of scientism; and a groundbreaking paper on "academic ethics in a preposterous environment" that every professor, and would-be professor, should read.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Haack is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Science, and Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Miami.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PUTTING PHILOSOPHY TO WORK

INQUIRY AND ITS PLACE IN CULTURE: ESSAYS ON SCIENCE, RELIGION, LAW, LITERATURE, AND LIFE

By SUSAN HAACK

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2013 Susan Haack
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61614-493-7

Contents

Preface to the Expanded Edition............................................
11
Acknowledgments............................................................
15
Introduction: Putting Philosophy to Work...................................
21
1. Staying for an Answer: The Untidy Process of Groping for Truth..........
35
2. The Same, Only Different................................................
47
3. The Unity of Truth and the Plurality of Truths..........................
53
4. Coherence, Consistency, Cogency, Congruity, Cohesiveness, &c.: Remain 
Calm! Don't Go Overboard!..................................................
69
5. Not Cynicism, but Synechism: Lessons from Classical Pragmatism..........
83
6. Science, Economics, "Vision"............................................
97
7. Six Signs of Scientism..................................................
105
8. The Integrity of Science: What It Means, Why It Matters.................
121
9. Scientific Secrecy and "Spin": The Sad, Sleazy Saga of the Trials of 
Remune.....................................................................
141
10. Truth and Justice, Inquiry and Advocacy, Science and Law...............
153
11. Trial and Error: The Supreme Court's Philosophy of Science.............
165
12. Just Say "No" to Logical Negativism....................................
179
13. An Epistemologist Among the Epidemiologists............................
195
14. Fallibilism and Faith, Naturalism and the Supernatural, Science and 
Religion...................................................................
199
15. The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and Literature............
209
16. After My Own Heart: Dorothy Sayers's Feminism..........................
221
17. Worthwhile Lives.......................................................
229
18. Why I Am Not an Oxymoron...............................................
233
19. Formal Philosophy?—A Plea for Pluralism................................
235
20. Out of Step: Academic Ethics in a Preposterous Environment.............
251
Notes......................................................................
269
Index......................................................................
319

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

STAYING FOR AN ANSWER

The Untidy Process of Groping for Truth

Some years ago now, I heard my then-dean, a physicist by training, expresshis unease at the suggestion that the mission statement for the College ofArts and Sciences include the phrase, "concern for truth." The word makespeople nervous, he warned, and they're bound to ask, "whose 'truth'?" A sociologistcolleague, seconding the dean's reservations, remarked that, while ofcourse his research advances knowledge, he isn't concerned with "truth." Acouple of us pointed out that, unless your conclusions are true, they aren't reallyknowledge, only purported knowledge; and I did my best to explain that itdoesn't follow from the fact that people disagree about what is true that truth isrelative to perspective. But in due course a Strategic Plan for the college specifiedcurricular innovations required by the "fundamental questions" that havebeen raised "about the presumed universality and objectivity of 'truth.'"

Probably most of you have heard, not exactly this story, but other storiesessentially similar, only set in other places and with different characters; for theideas my dean had picked up are by now almost an orthodoxy in academia, takenin some quarters—admittedly, more often in the humanities and the social sciencesthan in the physics department!—as indications of intellectual sophisticationand moral rectitude.

Naturally, proponents of this new almost-orthodoxy—the "Higher Dismissiveness,"as Anthony Gottlieb calls it, or in my terminology, the "New Cynicism"—differamong themselves on the finer points. But they agree that the supposedideal of honest inquiry, respect for evidence, concern for truth, is a kind ofillusion, a smoke-screen disguising the operations of power, politics, and rhetoric;and that those of us who think it matters whether you care about the truth, whofeel no need for precautionary scare quotes when we write of fact, knowledge,evidence, etc., are hopelessly naive. As if this weren't bad enough, the feministsand multi culturalists among them suggest that in our naiveté we are complicit insexism and racism, and the sociologists and rhetoricians of science among themsuspect us of reactionary conform ism with the military-industrial complex.

Faced with such an intimidating double accusation of naiveté and moralbackward ness, many take the ostrich attitude, apparently hoping that if theyignore the New Cynicism hard enough, it will go away. But an old-fashioned priglike myself begins to feel—well, rather like the proverbial cannibal among themissionaries.

A thoughtful cannibal will notice, at the heart of the New Cynicism, a profoundintolerance of uncertainty and a deep unwillingness to accept that the lessthan perfect is a lot better than nothing at all. And so again and again true, fallibilistpremises are transmuted into false, cynical conclusions: what is accepted asknown fact is often enough no such thing, therefore, the concept of known factis ideological humbug; one's judgment of the worth of evidence depends onone's back ground beliefs, therefore, there are no objective standards of evidentialquality; science isn't sacred, therefore, it must be a kind of confidence trick;and so on.

But there's really no need to give up on the objectivity of truth, evidence,etc., provided you're fallibilist enough. What is most urgently needed is a realisticunder standing of our epistemic situation, of how complicated evidence canget and how difficult serious inquiry can be. Of course, this will be only thebeginning of the work, for then there will be the questions of the place of the scienceswithin inquiry generally, of the differences between science and literature,of the roots of relativism, and of the claim of the New Cynicism to represent theinterests of the oppressed and marginalized.

* * *___

Evidence is complex and ramifying, often confusing, ambiguous, or misleading.Think of the controversy over that four-billion-year-old meteorite discovered in1984 Antarctica, thought to have come from Mars about eleven thousand yearsago, and containing what might possibly be fossilized bacteria droppings. Somespace scientists thought this was evidence of bacterial life on Mars; others thoughtthe bacterial traces might have been picked while the meteorite was in Antarctica;and others again believed that what look like fossilized bacteria droppings mightbe merely artifacts of the instrumentation. How did they know that giving offthese gases when heated indicates that the meteorite comes from Mars? that themeteorite is about four billion years old? that this is what fossilized bacteria droppingslook like?—like crossword entries, reasons ramify in all directions.

How reasonable a crossword entry is depends on how well it is supported byits clue and any already completed intersecting entries; how reasonable thoseother entries are, independent of the entry in question; and how much of thecrossword has been completed. How justified a belief is, similarly, depends onhow well it is supported by experiential evidence and by reasons, i.e., backgroundbeliefs; how justified those background beliefs are, independent of thebelief in question; and how much of the relevant evidence the evidence includes.

The quality of the evidence for a claim is objective, depending on howsupportive it is of the claim in question, how comprehensive, and how independentlysecure. A person's judgments of the quality of evidence, however, areperspectival, depending on his background beliefs. Suppose you and I areworking on the same crossword puzzle, but have filled in some long, much-intersectedentry differently; you think a correct intersecting entry must have an"F" in the middle, while I think it must have a "D" there. Suppose you and I areon the same appointments commit tee, but you believe in graphology, while I thinkit's bunk; you think how the candidate writes his gs is relevant to whether he canbe trusted, while I scoff at your "evidence." Or, to take a real example: in 1944,when Oswald Avery published his results, even he hedged over the conclusion towhich they pointed, that DNA is the genetic material; for the then-acceptedwisdom was that DNA is composed of the four nucleotides in regular order, andso is too stupid, too monotonous, a molecule to carry the necessary information.But by 1952, when Hershey and Chase published their results, the tetra nucleotidehypothesis had been discredited; and then it could be seen that Avery already hadgood evidence in 1944 that DNA, not protein, is the genetic material.

Inquiry can be difficult and demanding, and we very often go wrong. Sometimesthe obstacle is a failure of will; we don't really want to know the answerbadly enough to go to all the trouble of finding out, or we really don't want toknow, and go to a lot of trouble not to find out. I think of the detective whodoesn't really want to know who committed the crime, just to collect enoughevidence to get a conviction, of the academic who cares less about discoveringthe causes of racial disharmony than about getting a large grant to investigate thematter—and of my own disinclination to rush to the library to check out thearticle that might oblige me to redo months of work.

Other things being equal, inquiry goes better when the will and the intellect,instead of pulling in different directions, work together; that's why intellectualintegrity is valuable. But even with the best will in the world, even when wereally want to find out, we often fail. Our senses, imaginations, and intellects arelimited; we can't always see, or guess, or reason, well enough. With ingenuity,we can devise ways of overcoming our natural limitations, from cupping our earsto hear better, through tying knots in rope or cutting notches in sticks to keepcount, to highly sophisticated electron microscopes and techniques of computermodelling. Of course, our ingenuity is limited too.

Everyone who looks into how some part or aspect of the world is—thephysicist and the detective, the historian and the entomologist, the quantumchemist and the investigative journalist, the literary scholar and the X-ray crystallographer—workson part of a part of the same vast crossword. Since they allinvestigate the same world, sometimes their entries intersect: a medical researcherrelies on an amateur historian's family tree in his search for the defective generesponsible for a rare hereditary form of pancreatitis; ancient historians use atechnique devised for the detection of breast cancer to decipher traces on the lead"postcards" on which Roman soldiers wrote home.

So successful have the natural sciences been that the words "science" and "scientific"are often used honorifically, as all-purpose terms of epistemic praise. (Tomake sure we get the point, the television actors who promise that new, scientific,Wizzo will get our clothes cleaner wear white coats.) Unfortunately, thishonorific usage disguises the otherwise obvious fact that not all, or only, scientistsare good, honest, thorough, imaginative inquirers. Some scientists are lazy,some incompetent, some unlucky, a few crooked; and plenty of historians,journalists, detectives, etc., are good inquirers.

Science is neither sacred nor a confidence trick. Standards of stronger andweaker evidence, better and worse conducted inquiry, are not internal to the sciences;and there is no mode of inference, no "scientific method," exclusive to thesciences and guaranteed to produce true, or probably true, or more nearly true, ormore empirically adequate results. Nevertheless, as human cognitive enterprisesgo, the natural sciences have been remark ably successful; not because they use auniquely rational method of inquiry, unavailable to other inquirers, but in partbecause of the many and various "helps" they have devised to overcome naturalhuman limitations. Instruments of observation extend sensory reach; models andmetaphors stretch imaginative powers; techniques of mathematical and statisticalmodelling enable complex reasoning; and the cooperative and competitiveengagement of many people in a great mesh of subcommunities within andacross generations not only permits division of labor and pooling of evidence butalso—though very fallibly and imperfectly, to be sure—has helped keep mostscientists, most of the time, reasonably honest.

Science, like literature, requires imagination. Scientists, like writers of literature,stretch and amplify the language they inherit: a non-proteinous substancein the nucleus of cells is dubbed "nuclein," and later comes to be known as"nucleic acid"; then we have "deoxyribose nucleic acid"; then "ribonucleicacid," subsequently acknowledged to be "ribonucleic acids," in the plural; andthen—almost a century after "nuclein" was coined—"transfer RNA," "messengerRNA," and so on. Scientists, like writers of literature, rely on metaphors: thechaperone molecule, the Spaghetti Hypothesis, the uncles-and-aunts experiments,parental investment, and so forth. But it doesn't follow, and it isn't true,that science is indistinguishable from fiction. The distinction between the imaginativeand the imaginary is key.

Scientists engage in writing, and writers of literature engage in inquiry; butthe word "literature" picks out a bunch of kinds of writing, while the word "science"picks out a bunch of kinds of inquiry. A scientist dreams of structures,classifications, and laws that, if he is successful, are real, and explanations that,if he is successful, are true. Imagination, and imaginative exploration of imaginedexplanations, comes first; but to go beyond mere speculation, appraisal ofthe likely truth of the imagined conjecture, itself often requiring imagination inthe design of experiments, instruments, etc., must come after. And this requiresthat serious scientific metaphors, those that are not just picturesque speech butworking intellectual tools, eventually be spelled out in literal detail: what, literally,is invested in reproduction? what constitutes maximizing return?

Progress in the sciences is ragged and uneven, and each step, like each crosswordentry, is fallible and revisable. But each genuine advance potentiallyenables others, as a robust crossword entry does; "nothing succeeds like success"is the phrase that comes to mind. Think of Watson and Crick checking theirmodel of DNA using only a ruler and a plumb line, and then of Max Perutz,years later, checking his structure for the far more complicated hemoglobin moleculeusing a complex computer program; or of how, starting with the (relatively)simple X-ray, eventually we had the PET-scan, the CAT-scan, MRI.

Just about every inquirer, in the most mundane of everyday inquiries,depends on others; otherwise, each would have to start on his part of the crosswordalone and from scratch. Natural-scientific inquiry is no exception; in fact,it is more so—the work, cooperative and competitive, of a vast intergenerationalcommunity of inquirers, a deeply and unavoidably social enterprise. But itdoesn't follow, and it isn't true, that scientific inquiry is nothing more than aprocess of social negotiation in which scientists trade their theoretical loyaltiesfor prestige, or that the entities postulated in scientific theories are nothing morethan social constructions.

It is true, however, that both the internal organization of science and itsexternal environment can affect how well or how poorly scientific work getsdone. As ever more elaborate equipment is needed to make ever more recherchéobservations, scientific work tends to get more expensive. When only governmentsand large industrial concerns can afford to support science, when some scientistsare tempted to go prematurely to the press, some find it possible to makefortunes from their work, the expert witness business booms, there is no guaranteethat mechanisms that have thus far proven more or less adequate to sustain intellectualintegrity will continue to do so. There are no grounds for complacency.

Some of the knowledge the natural sciences have achieved has the potentialto cause grave harm—knowledge brings power, and power can be abused. Ofcourse it doesn't follow, as some proponents of the New Cynicism are temptedto conclude, that the natural sciences haven't achieved genuine knowledge afterall. But difficult moral and political questions about the distribution of resources,the applications of scientific knowledge, etc., cannot responsibly be left toscientists alone to settle. Again, there are no grounds for complacency.

In scientific inquiry, and in inquiry of every kind, what we take to be legitimatequestions sometimes turn out to be flawed. Questions about the properties of phlogiston,for example, turn out to rest on a false presupposition, and so have no trueanswer; some texts turn out to be ambiguous in ways of which the author isunaware, and so have no uniquely correct interpretation; and so on. None of this hasany tendency to undermine the objectivity of truth. Sometimes, speaking carelessly,we say that something is true for you, but not for me. But this has no tendency toundermine the objectivity of truth either; what we mean is only that the something—likingchocolate chip cookie ice cream, say, or being over six feet tall—is true ofyou but not of me; or else that you believe whatever-it-is, but I don't.

A statement or belief is true just in case things are as it represents them tobe; so everyone who believes anything, or who asks any question, implicitlyacknowledges—even if he explicitly denies it—that there is such a thing as truth.Truth is not relative to perspective; and there can't be incompatible truths (this isa tautology, since "incompatible" means "can't be jointly true"). But there aremany different truths—different but compatible truths—that must somehow fittogether. It doesn't follow that all the truths about the world must be unified inthe logical positivists' strong sense of that term, that they must be reducible to aprivileged class expressed in a privileged vocabulary; nor, in particular, that allthe truths about the world must be expressible in the language of physics. Rather,physics supplies a contour map on which the social sciences, history, etc.,superimpose a road map—the superimposed maps each representing, in its own"vocabulary," the same one, real world.

Though what is true is not relative to perspective, what is accepted as trueis; though incompatible statements can't be jointly true, incompatible claims arefrequently made. But a dreadful argument ubiquitous in the New Cynicism confuseswhat is accepted as true, what passes for truth, with what is true. From thetrue, fallibilist premise that what passes for truth, known fact, strong evidence,well-conducted inquiry, etc., is sometimes no such thing, but only what the powerfulhave managed to get accepted as such, the Passes-for Fallacy moves to thefalse, cynical conclusion that the concepts of truth, fact, evidence, etc., are ideologicalhumbug.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from PUTTING PHILOSOPHY TO WORK by SUSAN HAACK. Copyright © 2013 by Susan Haack. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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Edition details

• Publisher: G38-Prometheus
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616144939
• ISBN 13: 9781616144937
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 346