Product Description

Philosopher Susan Haack deploys her analytic skills on some highly charged cultural and social debates, such as relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action, pragmatisms old and new, science , literature, the future of the academy and of philosophy itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237764 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

A fine work of "public philosophy"
I've been enjoying Susan Haack's very lucid exposition of technical subjects since I stumbled on her "Deviant Logic" at a used bookstore, followed by "Philosophy of Logics". (The University of Chicago Press has also recently published a reissued/expanded edition of the former, now titled "Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism".)

This new book is a collection of essays on topics which, while clearly still belonging under the broad umbrella of the label "philosophy", have generated considerable interest, and sometimes controversy, in more public spheres. In a few cases, the issues are matters of public policy -- affirmative action via group-based preferences, for example -- and the link to philosophy is just that it's "applied ethics", with Professor Haack acknowledging to the organizers who had invited her to speak that she doesn't count herself a specialist in ethics. In most of the essays, the philosophy is plonk in the middle of one of the areas of her deep expertise: logic, epistemology, and the writings of Peirce.

Like everyone else, I sure do enjoy a good taxonomy! :) Yes, really ... One of the pleasures of Haack's books on alternative logics was her fine touch with taxonomy, and it's a very welcome element in the new book as well. For instance, she makes it clear that there's little point in declaring oneself for or against relativism without pinning down what *kind* of relativism you're weighing in on; and that obviously requires an enjoyable discursus through what kinds there are and who fits where.

One of the primary targets of her disagreement, or even ridicule at times, is Richard Rorty, whom she skewers for his attempt to position his (as she sees it) mostly nihilistic view of truth and inquiry as a continuation and successor to the Pragmatism (or Pragmaticism) of Peirce and James. She also, as an "old feminist" and a philosopher, looks with interest on the various positions which have been called "feminist philosophy"; but finds with some distress that the ones which seem to have won control of that label suffer from being based on a disastrous epistemology -- "women's ways of knowing" and the like.

For both of those targets, as well as the sort of "social constructionism" which leads to an utter distrust of science, she identifies and explains the "passes for" fallacy. "If something awful like this," pointing to a (now seen to be false) manifestly sexist or racist view at one time promulgated by some scientist as demonstrated fact, "is what passes for truth, fact, science -- then I'm not having any of it!" Rather than this turning away, Haack sees a more appropriate response in engaging and rebutting the falsehoods, as Carol Tavris did with "The Mismeasure of Woman". Rejection of a genuine true/false distinction and of disinterested inquiry is not only bad epistemology, Haack points out, it's also bad feminism. Faced with a belief like "men are smarter than women", we want to be able to say not just that so-and-so holds that belief because of certain causative factors in his social conditioning, nor even a widely applicable causal explanation of that sort, but in fact that it's mistaken ... wrong ... *false*. And we can't maintain that without a solid notion of truth and falsity.

Other positive contributions are Haack's coinage of "fake inquiry" as a variant missed by Peirce's identification of "sham inquiry"; and the brilliant metaphor of the crossword puzzle for how scientific inquiry works, in place of the over-conservative tendency of seeing it as like a proof, and the over-radical tendency of seeing it as just a matter of persuasion. Interestingly, she places herself not terribly distant from Kuhn, or her reading of him (though many of his interpreters put him in a far more radical corner).

Without simply subscribing as a follower of Peirce, Haack is very much in sympathy with his outlook, and seems to be mining his work for elements to adapt to her "critical common-sense-ism" (his term). Among prominent contemporary philosophers, the one she seems most related to is 90s-Putnam.

(Disclaimer: I work for the University of Chicago, but am not connected with the University Press, which is the publisher of this book.)