Abstract
In Defending Science I developed what, borrowing from Peirce, I called a “Critical Common-Sensist” account of the character of the core business of the special sciences—an intermediate position between the logical imperialism of the Old Deferentialism and the sociological imperialism of the New Cynicism. As Fischer and Jung appreciate, this intermediate position is synechist in spirit, stressing the continuity of scientific inquiry with everyday empirical inquiry, such as investigation of the cause of a bad smell, spoiled food, a delayed flight, etc. Perhaps—after decades of competing formal models of the supposed “scientific method” (inductive, deductive, probabilistic, etc.)—this synechistic approach sounds radical; but the underlying idea has a substantial and distinguished history, from Thomas Huxley to Albert Einstein, Percy Bridgman, John Dewey, James Conant, and Gustav Bergmann. As Huxley put it, the man of science “uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all … use carelessly.”
… the philosophy which performs its analyses with an axe, leaving as its ultimate elements, unrelated chunks of being, this is most hostile to Synechism. —C. S. Peirce
C. S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893), in Peirce Edition Project, ed., The Essential Peirce (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, vol. 2, 1998), 1–4, 2.
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Notes
- 1.
W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 69–90. Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (1993; 2nd ed. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), chapter 6.
- 2.
Otto Neurath, “Anti-Spengler,” in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, eds., Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel, 1973), 159–213, 161.
- 3.
I describe the relevant linguistic history in “Six Signs of Scientism” (2010), in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008; 2nd ed., 2013), 105–20, 278–83, footnotes 5 and 6.
- 4.
See., e.g., C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and (vols. 7 and 8), Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 1.126 (c.1905).
- 5.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 35–42.
- 6.
Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).
- 7.
Peirce, Collected Papers (note 5 above), 5.438–537 (1905).
- 8.
See, e.g., Id., 6.102-63 (1892); 5.4 (1902). See also Susan Haack, “Not Cynicism but Synechism: Lessons from Classical Pragmatism” (2005), reprinted in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work (note 4 above), 83–96, 276–77 pp.92–94.
- 9.
Not, however, the continuity of scientific with common-sense knowledge.
- 10.
See Defending Science (note 7 above), 93–95 and accompanying notes.
- 11.
The word is borrowed from Bacon. Francis Bacon, The New Organon (1620), Aphorism II, trans. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Doublas Denon Heath, in The Works of Francis Bacon (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863).
- 12.
But only up to a point: as I argued in “The Integrity of Science,” as science has grown larger and more expensive, those social helps are coming under severe strain. Susan Haack, “The Integrity of Science: What it Means, Why it Matters” (2006), reprinted in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work (note 4 above), 121–29, 283–93.
- 13.
See Haack, Defending Science (note 7 above), chapter 7.
- 14.
Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida” (1978–79), in Consequences of Pragmatism (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), 90–109.
- 15.
Peirce, Collected Papers (note 5 above), 5.383 (1877).
- 16.
The analogy is Bacon’s. See Bacon, New Organon (note 12 above), Aphorism XCV.
- 17.
Peirce, Collected Papers (note 5 above), 5.522 (c.1905).
- 18.
Susan Haack, “Brave New World: On Nature, Culture, and the Limits of Reductionism,” in Bartosz Brozek and Jerzy Stelmach, eds., Explaining the Mind (Kraków, Poland: Copernicus Center Press, forthcoming 2016).
- 19.
See, e.g., Defending Science (note 7 above), 125.
- 20.
Susan Haack, “Formal Philosophy? A Plea for Pluralism” (2005), reprinted in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work (note 4 above), 235–50 and 310–13.
- 21.
Note 2 above.
- 22.
Note 4 above.
- 23.
Note 19 above.
- 24.
Note 12 above.
- 25.
See, e.g., Susan Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences” (1996), reprinted in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 188–208, 92 (where I complain about the prevalence in our profession of “fad, fashion, obfuscation, and fear of offending the influential”).
- 26.
Indeed, not even X-Phi-1.0 was entirely new. As I point out in “The Fragmentation of Philosophy” (this volume, 3–32), Arne Næss had done the same kind of survey work (in his case focusing specifically on the concept of truth) in the 1930s—and survey work apparently a good deal more rigorous, I might add, than Joshua Knobe’s.
- 27.
C. S. Peirce and Joseph Jastrow, “Small Differences in Sensation” (1884), in Peirce, Collected Papers (note 5 above), 7.21–48.
- 28.
Evidence and Inquiry (note 2 above), 162–63.
- 29.
Peirce, Collected Papers (note 5 above), 7.587 (c.1866-67), 2.303 (c. 1895).
- 30.
Haack, Defending Science (note 7 above), 129–35, 225–26 See also Susan Haack, “The Growth of Meaning and the Limits of Formalism, in Science and Law,” Análisis filosófico 29, no.1 (May 2009): 5–29.
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Haack, S. (2016). The Continuum of Inquiry: Response to Christoph Fischer and Eva-Maria Jung. 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_13
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