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11. Truth and Progress in the Sciences: An Innocent Realist Perspective
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310 Susan Haack 11 S Truth and Progress in the Sciences An Innocent Realist Perspective Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. —C. S. Peirce1 Introduction Old Deferentialists in the philosophy of science, rightly taking for granted the rationality of the scientific enterprise, and rightly impressed by the power of the new, modern logic, assumed that the epistemology of science could be articulated in logical terms. Believing, rightly, that the Old Deferentialism had proven unable to give an adequate account of scientific knowledge, New Cynics concluded, wrongly, that the epistemological pretensions of the sciences are indefensible. The success of the sciences, they maintained, was to be explained in terms, not of logic, structure, form, but rather of power, politics, rhetoric.2 In Defending Science—WithCopyright © 2002 Susan Haack. 1. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 2.265 (references are by volume and paragraph number). 2. The distinction between the Old Deferentialism and the New Cynicism was first introduced in my “Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist,” Partisan Review 60, no. 4 (1993): 556–63, reprinted in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 123–36; and developed in “Puzzling Out Science,” Academic Questions 8 (Spring 1995): 25–31, reprinted in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, 90–103. Truth and Progress in the Sciences 311 in Reason,3 I propose a “Critical Common-sensist” approach which acknowledges the rationality of the scientific enterprise, but understands that rationality not in narrowly logical, or even in narrowly semantic, but in worldly terms, as essentially involving both scientists’ interactions with, and the relations of scientific language to, the world. My purpose here is to explore the interconnections between the worldly epistemology of Critical Common-sensism, and the metaphysical theory, Innocent Realism , that I began to articulate in “Reflections on Relativism.”4 In brief, then: there is one, real world; and the sciences aim to discover something of how this world is. Of course, human beings intervene in the world, and we, and our physical and mental activities, are part of the world. The world we humans inhabit is not brute nature, but nature modified by our physical activities and overlaid by our semiotic webs, including the imaginative constructions of writers and artists, and the explanations, descriptions, and theories of detectives, historians, theologians , etc.—and of scientists. The imaginative constructions of novelists —fictional characters and events—are at once imaginative and imaginary . But, when they are successful, the imaginative constructions of inquirers, their theoretical entities and categories, are not imaginary but real, and their explanations true. Successful scientific inquiry, like successful empirical inquiry of any kind, is possible only because we, and the world, are a certain way. Even the most routine empirical inquiry would be impossible if we didn’t have sense organs competent to detect information about particular things and events around us, and the intellectual capacity to make generalized conjectures and devise ways to check those conjectures against further evidence , or if the particular things and events in the world of which we can be perceptually aware were not of kinds and subject to laws. Otherwise, we could not categorize things or discover useful generalizations about them; nor could the natural sciences—deeper and more detailed than everyday empirical inquiry, far better unified, more accurate, yet still thor3 . Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst , N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003). 4. See my “Reflections on Relativism: From Momentous Tautology to Seductive Contradiction ,” in Philosophical Perspectives, edited by James Tomberlin, vol. 10, Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 297–315, and in the Supplement to Noûs (1996): 298–314; reprinted in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, 149–66. The theory is developed further in my “Realisms and Their Rivals: Recovering Our Innocence,” Facta Philosophica 4 (2002): 67–88. [54.152.216.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:08 GMT) 312 Susan Haack oughly fallible, imperfect, and incomplete—gradually have managed to identify real kinds of thing or stuff, discern their inner constitution, and discover laws of nature. My approach is realistic about perception, about kinds and laws, about the world, about truth. But though my Innocent Realism is extensive , it is quite modest. Our sensory organs put us in touch with things and events in the world, but our senses are limited, imperfect, and...