Abstract
As I wrote in the Foreword to the second edition of Evidence and Inquiry, I was delighted by how warmly this book was received in many circles—both inside philosophy and, outside, among scientists, legal scholars, historians, etc. I was especially glad that so many of these readers had found my ideas helpful in their fields. But somehow I wasn’t greatly surprised that—despite Hilary Putnam’s comment on the back cover that Popper, Quine, Rorty, Goldman, the Churchlands, etc. “will have to reply”—none of the cynics I had criticized so comprehensively, and none of the epistemologists whose theories I had examined in careful detail, offered any relevant response. Nor was I greatly surprised that some mainstream epistemologists thought I was just willfully blind to the epistemological power of Bayes’s Theorem, or the importance of “refuting the skeptic,” or the relevance of “context,” or of gender, …, or, etc. But I was surprised, and more than a little disturbed, by how many seemed primarily concerned to show that my foundherentist theory was really just a variant of one or another more familiar approach.
First, you know, a new theory is dismissed as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. —William James
William James, Pragmatism (1907), eds. Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 95.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (1993: second, expanded edition, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009). (Hereafter E&I.)
- 2.
Rorty was (so far as I know) the only one who said anything; and all he really had to say (in his usual world-weary way) was that it was “pointless” to try to show that our standards of better and worse evidence have any connection with truth. Richard Rorty, “Response to Haack,” in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Richard Rorty: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 148–53.
- 3.
C. I. Lewis, who was no longer around when I wrote the book, and Karl Popper, who died the same year the first edition of E&I appeared, had cast-iron alibis; the others, not so much!
- 4.
Paul Thagard, Coherence in Thought and Action (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2000), pp. 41 ff. See also Susan Haack, “Once More, With Feeling: Response to Paul Thagard,” in Cornelis de Waal, ed., Susan Haack: A Lady of Distinctions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2007), 294–97, p. 294.
- 5.
So Goldman didn’t get the one point that Rorty did understand; though, having got it, Rorty casually dismissed it.
- 6.
See Laurence BonJour, “Haack on Justification and Experience,” Synthese 112, no.1 (1997): 13–23, and my response, “Reply to BonJour,” Synthese 112, no.1 (1997): 25–35.
- 7.
E&I, second ed., p.22.
- 8.
Ryszard Wójcicki, “Foundationalism Coherentism, and Foundherentism: The Controversies from an Alternative Point of View,” in De Waal, ed., Susan Haack (note 5 above), 57–68. See also my reply, “Of Chopin and Sycamores: Response to Ryszard Wójcicki,” id., 69–72.
- 9.
E&I, second ed., p. 23. At the time I wrote in this new Foreword, I hadn’t read Anil Gupta’s Empiricism and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). If I had, however, I would also have said how very disappointing it was that, having reached the conclusion that we needed an intermediate theory between foundationalism and coherentism—and despite his referring to two papers in a volume in which a piece of mine on foundherentism also appeared!—Gupta apparently had no inkling that I had provided precisely such a theory more than a dozen years before. A friend tells me that he had mentioned to Gupta that he should look at E&I; but as of 2013 (when I heard him speak on this subject), he apparently still hadn’t done so.
- 10.
- 11.
In E&I I called this “FD1EX,” to distinguish experientialist versions of foundationalism from others. But in the present context, the superscript isn’t necessary.
- 12.
In hindsight, I wonder if I might have forestalled this kind of barrack-room-lawyer’s maneuver by building a requirement of at least minimal one-directionality into my generic characterization of foundationalism (along the lines of FD3: relations of evidential support never run from derived to basic beliefs). But at the time I thought this unnecessary, since I had already described the foundationalist as conceiving of basic beliefs as “privileged” epistemologically, and would go on to conclude from the “Up and Back All the Way Down” Arguments that the basic-derived distinction on which the foundationalist depends is not well-motivated.
- 13.
- 14.
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and (vols. 7 and 8), Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58) 2.224 (1903).
- 15.
Popper et al., I assume, probably realized how startlingly implausible a conclusion this is, but saw no way to avoid it.
- 16.
Indeed, in early drafts I called my theory “causical foundherentism.”
- 17.
I was also able to separate out the causal and the quasi-logical elements, characterizing the degree to which a claim is warranted for a person at a time in terms of the quality of the evidence available to him, and the degree to which he is justified in believing it at that time in terms of the quality of the evidence that actually moves him to accept it.
- 18.
See Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 62–63.
- 19.
E&I, pp. 94–95.
- 20.
Susan Haack, “Dry Truth and Real Knowledge: Epistemologies of Metaphor and Metaphors of Epistemology” (1995), reprinted in Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 69–89.
- 21.
See Susan Haack, “Belief in Naturalism: An Epistemologist’s Philosophy of Mind,” Logos & Episteme 1, no.1 (2010): 1–22; “Brave New World: On Nature, Culture, and the Limits of Reductionism,” in Bartosz Brozek and Jerzy Stelmach, eds., Explaining the Mind (Kraków: Copernicus Center Press, forthcoming 2016).
- 22.
Susan Haack, “Fallibilism and Faith, Naturalism and the Supernatural, Science and Religion” (2005), reprinted in Susan Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008; expanded second edition, 2013), 199–208 and 306–307.
- 23.
See e.g., “Epistemology and the Law of Evidence: Problems and Projects,” in Haack, Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–26 (showing that foundherentism provides plausible answers to some questions about legal degrees of proof, and suggesting other potential applications); “Proving Causation: The Weight of Combined Evidence” (2008), id., 208–38 (using the foundherentist theory to show when, and why, combined evidence has more weight than any of its components alone); “Legal Probabilism: An Epistemological Dissent” (2013), id., 47–77 (using the foundherentist theory to show that degrees of warrant don’t fit the logical profile of the mathematical calculus of probabilities).
- 24.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (1843), 8th ed., London, 1970, p. 5.
- 25.
Susan Haack, “Epistemology: Who Needs It?” (first published in Danish in 2013), Cilicia Journal of Philosophy 3 (2015): 1–15
- 26.
“Trammel” is an old word for a type of fishing net; now, it survives mainly in the metaphorical “trammeled,” meaning “ensnared.”
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Haack, S. (2016). The Role of Experience in Empirical Justification: Response to Nikolai Ruppert, Riske Schlüter, and Ansgar Seide. In: Göhner, J., Jung, EM. (eds) Susan Haack: Reintegrating Philosophy. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24969-8_10
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