Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Haack (Coral Gables, FL) is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami. She is the author of numerous highly acclaimed books, including Defending Science-Within Reason; Philosophy of Logics; Evidence and Inquiry; Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism; and Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays; and the editor of Pragmatism, Old and New. She is one of the handful of living philosophers in Peter King's 100 Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers, and she was included in the Sunday Independent's 2005 list of the ten most important women philosophers of all time.

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Defending Science

Prometheus Books

Chapter One

The Critical Common-Sensist Manifesto

That men should rush with violence from one extreme, without going more or less into the contrary extreme, is not to be expected from the weakness of human nature. -Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers

Attitudes to science range all the way from uncritical admiration at one extreme, through distrust, resentment, and envy, to denigration and outright hostility at the other. We are confused about what science can and what it can't do, and about how it does what it does; about how science differs from literature or art; about whether science is really a threat to religion; about the role of science in society and the role of society in science. And we are ambivalent about the value of science. We admire its theoretical achievements, and welcome technological developments that improve our lives; but we are disappointed when hoped-for results are not speedily forthcoming, dismayed when scientific discoveries threaten cherished beliefs about ourselves and our place in the universe, distrustful of what we perceive as scientists' arrogance or elitism, disturbed by the enormous cost of scientific research, and disillusioned when we read of scientific fraud, misconduct, or incompetence.

Complicated as they are, the confusions can be classified into two broad kinds, the scientistic and the anti-scientific. Scientism is an exaggerated kind of deference towards science, an excessive readiness to accept as authoritative any claim made by the sciences, and to dismiss every kind of criticism of science or its practitioners as anti-scientific prejudice. Anti-science is an exaggerated kind of suspicion of science, an excessive readiness to see the interests of the powerful at work in every scientific claim, and to accept every kind of criticism of science or its practitioners as undermining its pretensions to tell us how the world is. The problem, of course, is to say when the deference, or the suspicion, is "excessive."

Disentangling the confusions is made harder by an awkward duality of usage. Sometimes the word "science" is used simply as a way of referring to certain disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth, usually also anthropology and psychology, sometimes also sociology, economics, and so on. But often-perhaps more often than not-"science" and its cognates are used honorifically: advertisers urge us get our clothes cleaner with new, scientific, Wizzo; teachers of critical thinking urge us to reason scientifically, to use the scientific method; juries are more willing to believe a witness when told that what he offers is scientific evidence; astrology, water-divining, homeopathy or chiropractic or acupuncture are dismissed as pseudo-sciences; skeptical of this or that claim, people complain that it lacks a scientific explanation, or demand scientific proof. And so on. "Scientific" has become an all-purpose term of epistemic praise, meaning "strong, reliable, good." No wonder, then, that psychologists and sociologists and economists are sometimes so zealous in insisting on their right to the title. No wonder, either, that practitioners in other areas-"Management Science," "Library Science," "Military Science," even "Mortuary Science"-are so keen to claim it.

In view of the impressive successes of the natural sciences, this honorific usage is understandable enough. But it is thoroughly unfortunate. It obscures the otherwise obvious fact that not all and not only practitioners of disciplines classified as sciences are honest, thorough, successful inquirers; when plenty of scientists are lazy, incompetent, unimaginative, unlucky, or dishonest, while plenty of historians, journalists, detectives, etc., are good inquirers. It tempts us into a fruitless preoccupation with the problem of demarcating real science from pretenders. It encourages too thoughtlessly uncritical an attitude to the disciplines classified as sciences, which in turn provokes envy of those disciplines, and encourages a kind of scientism-inappropriate mimicry, by practitioners of other disciplines, of the manner, the technical terminology, the mathematics, etc., of the natural sciences. And it provokes resentment of the disciplines so classified, which encourages anti-scientific attitudes. Sometimes you can even see the envy and the resentment working together: for example, with those self-styled ethnomethodologists who undertake "laboratory studies" of science, observing, as they would say, part of the industrial complex in the business of the production of inscriptions; or-however grudgingly, you have to admit the rhetorical brilliance of this self-description-with "creation science." And, most to the present purpose, this honorific usage stands in the way of a straightforward acknowledgment that science-science, that is, in the descriptive sense-is neither sacred nor a confidence trick.

Science is not sacred: like all human enterprises, it is thoroughly fallible, imperfect, uneven in its achievements, often fumbling, sometimes corrupt, and of course incomplete. Neither, however, is it a confidence trick: the natural sciences, at any rate, have surely been among the most successful of human enterprises. The core of what needs to be sorted out concerns the nature and conditions of scientific knowledge, evidence, and inquiry; it is epistemological. (No, I haven't forgotten Jonathan Rauch's wry observation: "If you want to empty the room at a cocktail party, say `epistemology'"; but the word is pretty well indispensable for my purposes because, unlike "theory of knowledge," it has adjectival and adverbial forms.) What we need is an understanding of inquiry in the sciences which is, in the ordinary, non-technical sense of the word, realistic, neither overestimating nor underestimating what the sciences can do.

What we have, however, is a confusing Babel of competing, unsatisfactory accounts of the epistemology of science. How did we come to such a pass?

FROM THE OLD DEFERENTIALISM TO THE NEW CYNICISM

Once upon a time-the phrase is a warning that what follows will be cartoon history-the epistemological bona fides of good empirical science needed to be defended against the rival claims of sacred scripture or a priori metaphysics. In due course it came to be thought that science enjoys a peculiar epistemological authority because of its uniquely objective and rational method of inquiry. In the wake of the extraordinary successes of the new, modern logic, successive efforts to articulate the "logic of science" gave rise to umpteen competing versions of what I call the "Old Deferentialism": science progresses inductively, by accumulating true or probably true theories confirmed by empirical evidence, by observed facts; or deductively, by testing theories against basic statements and, as falsified conjectures are replaced by corroborated ones, improving the verisimilitude of its theories; or instrumentally, by developing theories which, though not themselves capable of truth, are efficient instruments of prediction; or, etc., etc. There were numerous obstacles: Humean skepticism about induction; the paradoxes of confirmation; the "new riddle of induction" posed by Goodman's "grue"; Russell Hanson's and others' thesis of the theory-dependence of observation; Quine's thesis of the underdetermination of...