Defending Science-Within Reason

by Susan Haack

Sweeping in scope, penetrating in analysis, and generously illustrated with examples from the history of science, this new and original approach to familiar questions about scientific evidence and method tackles vital questions about science and its place in society. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of scientism and cynicism, noted philosopher Susan Haack argues that, fallible and flawed as they are, the natural sciences have been among the most successful of human enterprises-valuable not only for the vast, interlocking body of knowledge they have discovered, and not only for the technological advances that have improved our lives, but as a manifestation of the human talent for inquiry at its imperfect but sometimes remarkable best.
This wide-ranging, trenchant, and illuminating book explores the complexities of scientific evidence, and the multifarious ways in which the sciences have refined and amplified the methods of everyday empirical inquiry; articulates the ways in which the social sciences are like the natural sciences, and the ways in which they are different; disentangles the confusions of radical rhetoricians and cynical sociologists of science; exposes the evasions of apologists for religious resistance to scientific advances; weighs the benefits and the dangers of technology; tracks the efforts of the legal system to make the best use of scientific testimony; and tackles predictions of the eventual culmination, or annihilation, of the scientific enterprise.
Writing with verve and wry humor, in a witty, direct, and accessible style, Haack takes readers beyond the "Science Wars" to a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Society

432 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Haack is a graduate of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. At Oxford, she studied at St. Hilda's College, where her first philosophy teacher was Jean Austin, the widow of J. L. Austin.
She studied Plato with Gilbert Ryle and logic with Michael Dummett. David Pears supervised her B.Phil. dissertation on ambiguity. At Cambridge, she wrote her Ph.D. under the supervision of Timothy Smiley. She held the positions of Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge and professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick before taking her current position at the University of Miami.
Haack's major contribution to philosophy, in the 1993 book Evidence and Inquiry is her epistemological theory called foundherentism, which is her attempt to avoid the logical problems of both pure foundationalism (which is susceptible to infinite regress) and pure coherentism (which is susceptible to circularity). She illustrates this idea with the metaphor of the crossword puzzle. A highly simplified version of this proceeds as follows: Finding an answer using a clue is analogous to a foundational source (grounded in empirical evidence). Making sure that the interlocking words are mutually sensible is analogous to justification through coherence. Both are necessary components in the justification of knowledge. At least one scholar has claimed that Haack's foundherentism collapses into foundationalism upon further inspection.
Haack has been a fierce critic of Richard Rorty. She wrote a play, We Pragmatists ...: Peirce and Rorty in Conversation, consisting entirely of quotes from both philosophers. She performed the role of Peirce. Haack published a vigorous essay[8] in the New Criterion, taking strong exception to many of Rorty's views, especially his claim to be a sort of pragmatist.
Haack (1998) is highly critical of the view that there is a feminine perspective on logic and scientific truth. She holds that many feminist critiques of science and philosophy are overly concerned with 'political correctness'.
She has written for Free Inquiry magazine and the Council for Secular Humanism. Haack's work has been reviewed and cited in the popular press, such as The Times Literary Supplement as well as in academic journals.

Source

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Chess Theory Were Science: A Fable

Chess forms such an important part of modern society that it can be hard to remember how recent an innovation it is; had Isaac Newton never written the Principia Schachistica, history might have taken a completely different turn. Be that as it may, chess is now the essential substrate of our civilization. One may rejoice over this fact, or one may deplore it. For some people, chess theory has become the unquestioned standard of intellectual excellence, and the word "chessic" is often used in what one might call an honorific sense. ("This has been proven with chessic certainty"). Other people have deep misgivings about chess, and there are a growing number of "chess sceptics".

Szusza Hack, in this excellent book, steers a well thought out course between the competing standpoints she calls the "Old Deferentialism" and the "New Cynicism". An Old Deferentialist views chess theory as a kind of logic, and thinks that the core task of the Philosophy of Chess is to explain in formal terms how this logic functions. Early philosophers of chess were puzzled by the "problem of induction"; on what grounds can one say that many successful occurrences of playing an opening demonstrate its soundness? More recently, following Popper's influential Logik der Schachforschung, the mainstream point of view has swung to the opposite extreme; openings, and chess ideas in general, can never be proved sound, but only refuted, and refutability is the hallmark of true chessic thought.

The New Cynics view chess in yet another way; they consider it as no more than another human activity, and prefer to analyse chess theory in terms of power relationships, particularly stressing the fact that successful chess players tend to be white European males. Hack accepts part of each of these accounts. Clearly logic plays an important part in chess, but it is misleading to imagine that chess is just logic; on the other hand, although chess is undeniably a social activity, considering chess theories as no more than socially constructed narratives also misses an essential point. 1 e4 is almost certainly a better opening move than 1 h4 neither because this can be proved logically or because it has been more popular with white male grandmasters, but because experience shows that controlling the center increases one's chance of winning.

In general, Hack argues that experience is the most important part of chess. There is no special "chess logic"; chess thinking, as Lasker pointed out a century ago, is just common sense applied to the chessboard. A move may appear theoretically impeccable, but if it is consistently found to lose then the responsible conclusion is that there must be something wrong with it. In the same way, sociologists of chess who argue that backward pawns are only considered "weak" because of androcentric prejudices need to explain why such pawns are often hard to defend when they occur in actual games. Hack is particularly scathing about chess rhetoreticians. As she says, it is entirely misguided to say that My Sixty Memorable Games was influential because of the author's stylistic flourishes; Fischer's collection was widely read because of the quality of the moves, not the language.

One aspect of the book which I particularly like is the consistent metaphor Hack uses, where she compares chess theory to the popular pastime of natural science. As every science enthusiast knows, there is no "logic of science"; one uses one's imagination to construct hypotheses, deduces consequences, and compares them with the known facts. There are no hard and fast rules, and it is just as foolish to cling to a hypothesis which evidently does not fit the data as it is abandon it at the first sign of possible trouble. The only advice a seasoned amateur scientist can give is to use one's judgement as wisely as one can in weighing the available evidence, and in this respect chess theory is just the same. Indeed, I found Hack's general point extremely convincing: all reality-based reasoning - chessic, scientific, historical or legal - in the end comes down to honestly and responsibly evaluating the evidence to the best of one's ability.

It is depressing right now to hear so many people saying that chess is a fraud and chess theory overrated. If you believe in chess - or any other evidence-based discipline for that matter - I can't recommend this book too highly.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is quark theory or kwark theory politically more progressive?—the question makes no sense.

Ever since I can remember I was fascinated by science and its discoveries. Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, I grew up in New York City going routinely to the Museum of Natural History. I wondered at the lions and elephants in the Hall of African Mammals; I gazed in awe at the massive dinosaur fossils; I spent hours in the Hall of Ocean Life gaping at the dolphins, the sea lions, and the whales. The diorama of a sperm whale fighting a giant squid—two massive, monstrous forms, shrouded in the darkness of the deep sea—held a particular power over my childhood imagination. I must have made half a thousand drawings of that scene, the resolute whale battling the hideous squid in the imponderable depths.

Growing up, I found that not everybody shared my admiration for the process of science and its discoveries. This came as a shock. Even now, no intellectual stance upsets me more than science denial. To me, denying science has always seemed tantamount to denying both the beauty of the world and the power of the human mind. And yet here we are, in a world fundamentally shaped by our scientific knowledge, full of people who, for one reason or another, deny the validity of the scientific enterprise.

The reasons for science denial are manifold. Most obviously there is religious fundamentalism; and not far behind is corporate greed in industries, such as the coal or the cigarette industry, that might be hurt by the discoveries of scientists. These types of science denial often take the form of anti-intellectualism; but what troubles me more are the various forms of science denial in intellectual circles: sociologists who see scientific discoveries as political myth-making, literary theorists who see science as a rhetoric of power, philosophers who see knowledge as wholly relative. Add to this the more plebeian forms of science denial often encountered on the left—such as skepticism about GMOs and vaccines—and we have a disbelief that extends across the political spectrum, throughout every level of education and socio-economic status.

And all this is not to mention the science-worship that has grown up, partly as a response to this skepticism. So often we see headlines proclaiming “Science Discovers” or “Scientists Have Proved” and so on; and time and again I’ve heard people use “because, science says” as an argument. Scientists are treated as a priestly class, handing out truths from high up above, truths reached by inscrutable methods using arcane theories and occult techniques, which must be trusted on faith. Needless so say, this attitude is wholly alien to the spirit of the scientific enterprise, and ultimately plays into the hands of skeptics who wish to treat modern science as something on par with traditional religion. Also needless to say (I hope), both the supinely adoring and the snobbishly scorning attitudes fail to do justice to what science really is and does.

This is where Susan Haack comes in. In this book, Haack attempts to offer an epistemological account of why the sciences have been effective, as well as a critique of the various responses to the sciences—from skepticism, to cynicism, to paranoia, to worship, to deference—to show how these responses misunderstand or mischaracterize what science is really all about. Along the way, Haack also offers her opinions on the relation between the natural and the social sciences, science and the law, science and religion, science and values, and the possible "end of science."

She begins, as all worthy philosophers must, by criticizing her predecessors. The early philosophers of science made two related errors that prevented them from coming to grips with the enterprise. The first was assuming that there was such a thing as the “scientific method”—a special methodology that sets the sciences apart from other forms of inquiry. The second mistake was assuming that this methodology was a special form of logic—deduction, induction, probability, and so on—used by scientists to achieve their results. In other words, they assumed that they could demarcate science from other forms of inquiry; and that this demarcation was logical in nature.

Haack takes issue with both of these assumptions. She asserts that, contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a special “scientific method” used only by scientists and not by any other sort of inquirer. Rather, scientific inquiry is continuous with everyday inquiry, from detective work to historical research to trying to find where you misplaced your keys this morning: it relies on the collection of evidence, coming up with theories to explain a phenomenon, testing different theories against the available evidence and new discoveries, using other inquirers to help check your judgment, and so on.

Because of this, Haack objects to the use of the adjective "scientific" as an honorific, as a term of epistemological praise—such as in “scientifically tested toothpaste”—since “scientific” knowledge is the same sort of knowledge as every other sort of knowledge. The only differences between scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge are, most obviously, the subject matter (chemistry and not car insurance rates), and less obviously how scrupulously it has been tested, discussed, and examined. To use her phrase, scientific knowledge is like any other sort of knowledge, only “more so”—the fruit of more dedicated research, and subjected to more exacting standards.

What sets the natural sciences apart, therefore, is not a special form of logic or method, but various helps to inquiry: tools that extend the reach of human sensation; peer-reviewed journals that help to check the quality of information and to pool research from different times and places; mathematical techniques and computers to help deal with quantitative data; linguistic innovations and metaphors that allow scientists to discuss their work more precisely and to extend the reach of the human imagination; and so on.

Haack’s most original contribution to the philosophy of science is her notion of ‘foundherentism’ (an ugly word), which she explains by the analogy of a crossword puzzle. Scientific theories have connections both with other scientific theories and with the observable world, in much the same way that entries in a crossword puzzle have connections with other entries and with their clues. Thus the strength of any theory will depend on how well it explains the phenomenon in question, whether it is compatible with other theories that explain 'neighboring’ phenomena, and how well those neighboring theories explain their own phenomena. Scientific theories, in other words, connect with observed reality and with each other at many different points—far more like the intersecting entries of a crossword puzzle than the sequential steps of a mathematical proof—which is why any neat logic cannot do them justice.

It is possible that all this strikes you as either obvious or pointless. But this approach is useful because it allows us to acknowledge the ways that background beliefs affect and constrain our theorizing, without succumbing to pure coherentism, in which the only test of a scientific theory’s validity is how compatible it is with background beliefs. While there is no such thing as a “pure” fact or a “pure” observation untainted by theory, and while it is true that our theories of the world always influence how we perceive the world, all this doesn’t mean that our theories don’t tell us anything about the world. Observation, while never pure, still provides a real check and restraint on our theorizing. To give a concrete example, we may choose to interpret a black speck in a photograph as a weather balloon, a bird, a piece of dirt that got on the lens, or a UFO—but we can’t choose not to see the black speck.

Using this subtle picture of scientific knowledge, Haack is able to avoid both the pitfalls of an overly formalistic account of science and an overly relativistic account of science. There may be revolutions when the fundamental assumptions of scientists radically change; but the test of a theory’s worth is not purely in respect to these assumptions but also to the stubborn, observed phenomenon—the black speck. Scientific revolutions might be compared to a team of crossword puzzle-solvers suddenly realizing that the clues make more sense in Spanish than in English. The new background assumption will affect how they read the clues, but not the clues themselves; and the ultimate test of those assumptions—whether the puzzle can be convincingly solved—remains the same.

One of the more frustrating things I’ve heard science skeptics assert is that science requires faith. Granted, to do science you do need to take some things for granted—that there is a real world that exists independently of whether you know it or not, that your senses provide a real, if imperfect, window into this world, that the world is predictable and operates by the same laws in the present as in the past and the future, and so on. But all this is also taken for granted when you ruffle through your bag to find the phone you dropped in there that morning, or when you assume your shoelaces will work the same way today as they did yesterday. Attempts to deny objective truth—very popular in the post-modern world—are always self-defeating, since the denial itself presupposes objective truth (it is only subjectively true that objective truth doesn’t exist?).

We simply cannot operate in the world, or say anything about the world, without presupposing that, yes, the world exists, and that we can know something about it. Maybe this sounds obvious to you, gentle reader, but you would be astounded how much intellectual work in the social sciences and humanities is undermined by this inescapable proposition. Haack does a nice job of explaining this in her chapter on the sociology of science—pointing out all the sociologists, literary theorists, and ethnologists of science who, in treating all scientific knowledge as socially constructed, and therefore dubious, undermine their own conclusions (since those, too, are presumably socially constructed by the inquirers)—but I’m afraid Haack, in trying to push back against attempts like these, is pushing back against what I call the “Lotz Theory of Inquiry.”

(The Lotz Theory of Inquiry states that you cannot be a member of any intellectual discipline without presupposing that your discipline is the most important discipline in academe, and that all other disciplines are failed attempts to be your own discipline. Thus, for a sociologist, all physicists are failed sociologists, and so on.)

Because I am relatively unversed in the philosophy of science, I feel unqualified to say anything beyond the fact that I found Haack’s approach, on the whole, reasonable and convincing.

My main criticism is that she puts far too much weight on the idea of “everyday inquiry” or “common sense”—ideas which are far more culturally and historically variable than she seems to assume. This is exemplified in her criticism of religious inquiry as “discontinuous” with everyday forms of inquiry, since it relies on visions, trances, supernatural intervention, and the authority of sacred texts—normally not explanations or forms of evidence we use when explaining why we got food poisoning (the Mexican restaurant, or an act of God?).

While it is true that, nowadays, most people in the ‘developed’ world do not rely on these religious forms of evidence and explanation in their everyday life, it was not always true historically (think of Luther explaining the creaks in the walls as prowling demons), nor is this true across cultures. One has only to read Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande to see a society in which even simple explanations and the most routine decisions rely on supernatural intervention. In cultures around the world, trances and visions, spirits and ghosts, are not seen as discontinuous with the everyday world, but a normal part of sensing and explaining the world around them.

Thus Haack’s continuity test can’t do the trick of demarcating superstitious or theological inquiry from other (more dependable) forms of inquiry into the observable world. It seems that something like Popper’s falsificationism (if not exactly Popper’s formulation) is needed to show why explanations in terms of invisible spirits and the visions caused by snorting peyote don’t provide us with reliable explanations. In other words, I think Haack needs to say much more about why one theory ought to be preferred to another in order to provide a fully adequate defense of science.

This criticism notwithstanding, I think this is an excellent, refreshing, humane book—and a necessary one. It is not complete (she does not cover the relation between science and philosophy, and science and mathematics, for example), nor is it likely to appeal to a wide audience—since Haack, though she writes with personality and charm, is prone to fits of academic prolixity and gets into some syntactical tangles (such as when she begins a sentence “It would be less than candid not to admit that this list does not encourage…” This, by the way, only supports what I call the “Lotz Theory of Academic Writing"—that the quality of prose varies inversely to the number of years spent in academe—but I digress.) Yet for all its flaws and shortcomings, this book does an excellent job of capturing what is good in science and defending science from unfair attacks, without going into the opposite extreme of deifying science.

As the recent withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement shows, science denial is an all-too-real and all-too-potent force in today’s world. Too many people I know—many, smart people—don’t understand what scientists do and misconstrue science as a body of beliefs, with scientists as priests, rather than a form of inquiry that rests on the same presuppositions they rely on every day. Either that, or they see science is just a “matter of opinion” or as a bit of arm-chair theorizing. Really, there must be something terribly wrong with our education system if these opinions have become so pervasive. But perhaps there are some reasons for modest optimism. The United States shamefully backed out of the Paris Climate Agreement, but nearly every other country in the world signed on.

So maybe we naive people who believe we can know something about the world need to take a hint from the sperm whale, with its enormous head, preparing to descend to the black depths of the ocean to battle the multi-tentacled squid: hold our breath, have patience, and buck up for a struggle. We may get a few tentacle scars, but we've pulled through before and we can pull through again.

[WarpDrive · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by philosopher of science Susan Haack develops, in its main sections, a nuanced analysis of the epistemological foundations of science, and of the distinctive character of its mode of inquiry.

The author steers a moderate, eminently commonsensical and well-argued path between what she terms the old-fashioned “deferentialist approach” (also commonly called “scientism”), and the subjective-relativistic perspectives held by a few post-modern philosophers of science (whose positions she addresses and debunks with very compelling arguments, based on actual examples of historical scientific developments).

Our cognitive situation, she suggests, is usefully construed as similar, in some respects, to the situation facing a person trying to solve a crossword puzzle, with experiential evidence acting as clues, and the mutual interlocking and cross-supporting of scientific theories similar to the mutual interlocking of crossword entries.

The author demonstrates a good understanding and knowledge of the nuances and complexities of the process of scientific inquiry. She does not idolize science as a pure exercise in human rationality developed in an ivory tower: she correctly highlights the inter-dependency of theory and observation, the deeply human and social nature of the scientific enterprise, the interaction of observational interpretation with background beliefs and assumptions, the fact that the evidence is often bound to be complicated, usually mediated by instrumentation, ambiguous and even potentially misleading, and the fact that experimental results are not transparently self-presenting, but need interpretation.

However she does not use these interpretative and potentially problematic aspects of the scientific mode of inquiry to jump to the arbitrary conclusion that science is an exercise of myth-making, or epistemologically on a par with other human enterprises such as art, literature or philosophy: she highlights how a complex network of mutually supporting and tightly interlocking mesh of theoretical results, well anchored in comprehensive experimental results, while by definition not providing “definitive” confirmation in any meaningful sense, do provide a high degree of epistemological warranty. Science is epistemologically distinguished from the other modes of inquiry, is the conclusion to which the author arrives – science is far more constrained by the demands of evidence than what she calls “the New Cynics” dream when theorizing from their desks. Moreover, she stresses the point that there is a significant methodological difference between “observation” and “perception”, and confusing the two aspects in order to stress the subjective aspects of science is quite misguided.

The author also makes a very good point when she highlights the epistemological significance of the interconnectdness of the natural phenomena, which lies in the way each new step in scientific understanding potentially clarifies and enables others.

While there is no guarantee, by definition, that currently accepted theories, even in “mature” sciences, are true, on the other hand it must be highlighted that massive predictive and technological successes, their cumulative nature, and their increasing mutual support and interconnectdness, constitute unquestionable evidence that, as Putnman argues “unless theories in mature sciences were at least approximately true, their predictive successes would be miraculous”.

Claims by some cultural relativists, such as Collins insistence that “the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge”, or Yearley's insistence that “all cultural enterprises have the same epistemological warrant”, makes you wonder if any of these philosophers have ever trusted a computer when carrying out their work, or flown somewhere and in doing so implicitly entrusted their lives to the epistemological warrant of the aeronautical sciences.

The author also highlights the “mathematical character” as one of the most striking features of much natural-scientific inquiry; unfortunately she does not develop this very important point to any significant depth: she does make examples of the strange effectiveness of mathematics in the understanding of the natural world, and of specific cases where pre-existing mathematical discoveries (often accomplished for quite different reasons/areas) proved vital to the development of new theories, but she does not develop any serious analysis of this important aspect of the scientific inquiry, nor does she address the important element of mathematical consistency in scientific theories.
It must also be said that the examples made by the author are primarily from the biological sciences, with only few examples from the physical sciences - I would have appreciated a treatment of the important philosophy of science implications of some aspects of quantum mechanics, for example.

On the other hand, I appreciate that the author does not fall into an over-simplistic formal logically-deductive approach based on a clearly delimited and fixed scientific/observational vocabulary: she highlights that “proof” in science is not just a sequence of logical statements linked in a deductive chain of reasoning, but it also depends on explanatory integration, which is not straightforwardly atomistic but a matter of inter-meshing of evidential and theoretical results; and it is not purely syntactic, but sensitive to the content and expansion of predicates.
And she makes the very valid point that scientists engage in linguistic innovations and shift of meaning because they seek categories that match “kinds”: sciences aspire to kind-expressions representing “law-cluster concepts” - bunches of properties the co-occurrence of which is mandated by the laws of nature. The definition of such clusters, or “entities”, is part and parcel of science and an important constituent of scientific theories: they are not pure conventions, but they are supported and support the corresponding scientific theory that imply and require them. In fact, one task of science is to discover categories and classifications matching law-clusters in the world.

Other sections of the book, competently written but unfortunately not inspirational and lacking real depth, deal with the much debated relationship between the natural and social sciences, and between science and religion. The last section examines the future medium and long-term prospects of scientific research, with interesting and well-argued (although not very original) insights. What I found really missing was a separate, dedicated chapter about the mutual relationship between science and philosophy - beyond the sub field of philosophy of science - this left me disappointed.

Overall I have found it a pleasant read, a pretty good, quite informative introductory book about some aspects of philosophy of science. 3.5 stars (rounded up to 4).

[Andrew]

As you might expect, a well-written defense of science, written in the pragmatist tradition. Simply put, there is no one "scientific method," but rather science is the expansion and refinement of very everyday empirical tools of awareness, and this is something that she claims Rortian philosophers and large swaths of the sociology-of-science movement as being unable to grasp. Now, as is all too common with "defense"-type books, a few too many straw men are put forth, and the whole science-and-religion framework she puts up is some embarrassing Dawkins-type shit, but large sections of the book are almost an archetypal example of well-written, well-argued analytical philosophy, at points chatty enough to be an article in the Atlantic or some such thing.

[Stephie Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Presented a reasonable view of science. She wrote that science was not necessarily in a league by itself. That it was a more rigorous deduction and used more penatrating observations than other forms of inquiry. She tries to steer a middle road between old school scientific method philosophers, and the science as social product. The first is to limited, and the latter makes science a fairy land. I would say overall her arguments are plausible, and at the very least she gives an intereating take on the philosophy of science. Defintely worth the read.

[Lisa Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haack offers a carefully written understanding of what science does and what it "is." It is not intended to be "another salvo in the so-called 'Science Wars,'" however (9). Her aim is to deconstruct the "pretensions" of science and place that in relation to the benefits we garner from scientific inquiry.

[Katrinka]

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 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.

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another book that starts with a decent premise that science should be rational and follows rules for establishing the truth or falsehood of its theories. But then the author ping-pongs through philosophy of science attempting to bamboozle her reader into believing she has knowledge far beyond to discern the silly inane pseudoscience from the real. Like most academic, the author looks down her nose at us and scoffs at the junctures of science with religion (her definition of which is a personal god). Then, the author bypasses the biggest take downs of today's science by arguing it's Likely Science will need to Continue to become More Expensive without mention of how corrupting politics and policy has been to the goals of science. The author is clearly Not an expert at the science she believes is true Nor the pseudoscience she believes is false But like every other Big Book of an Academics Opinions, she doesn't mind telling you that it's Wrong for Science to make judgements about the differences between men and women (and other social norm bs you've heard in the news). So call social science exalts such "reasoned opinions"... I don't.

[Dave Peticolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully clear-sighted account of science, what it is, how it is distinguished (but not separate) from other sorts of inquiry, and why it can (but isn't guaranteed to) produce real knowledge of the world.

[Julia L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

La combinación de la herencia pragmática y metafísica de Haack dan lugar a un análisis muy acertado y propio de la Teoría del Conocimiento que, si bien roza la sociología en muchas ocasiones, describe las posiciones actuales tanto del público en general como del mundo académico ante la ciencia y sucesos globales.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book begins rough, with unnecessarily difficult prose and insufficient engagement with the breadth of the scientific enterprise — types of questions, types and motives of actors, types of fields — before setting out its own model of scientific evidence that seeks to both include and exclude with odd boundaries. I was an engineer before becoming a biologist, and the thought processes and treatments of evidence were similar in some ways but quite different in many others, and it took a few years for me to “get it” enough to contribute productively to the science I wanted to do. Not all would have my difficulties of course but the belief in rough equivalence of the two reflects a physics and molecular biology bias that predisposes one towards idiotic counterarguments of the “what is the feminist mass of an electron?” type. A dismissive attitude from the start towards Sandra Harding et al and a Jacques Barzun blurb on the dust jacket doesn’t help, in my view.

Haack does not actually engage with any of the work bundled under her “New Cynicism” label. There are many substantial critiques of science from within science which appeared well before this 2003 book, such as the Gowaty-edited 1997 volume on evolutionary biology. Why not deal with it? It is clear Haack expects her audience to be sympathetic with her from the start, so perhaps she thought a blanket dismissal would suffice. OK then.

The book — and prose — gets better in ch 8 and especially ch 9 through 11. I think these can be read without slogging through the earlier chapters.