'The World and How We Know It: Stumbling Towards an Understanding' by Susan Haack in (2018) LXVII(196)
Estudios filosóficos 549-61 comments
Haack’s main purpose is to spell out the key ideas — Innocent Realism, Laconicism, Critical Common-sensism, neo-classical legal Pragmatism — of the understanding of the world and our real but very imperfect knowledge of it that she has developed over the decades. She begins, however, by explaining what attitudes and predilections — especially, her distaste for false dichotomies — she brought to philosophy from the beginning, and what new ideas gradually evolved; and concludes with some wry reflections on the condition of professional philosophy today.
Haack states
It has taken decades to build, and it’s still a work in progress. But I won’t dwell on the sometimes painful stretching and strengthening of intellectual muscles that was needed, or on all the dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns I took; instead, I’ll sketch some core themes of the understanding of the world, our place in it, and our always-fallible efforts to figure it out that was the result of these efforts.
But perhaps, first, I should say a few words about the attitudes and predilections I brought to philosophy at the outset, and the new interests, methods, and ideas to which they led. From the beginning, I hoped to do useful, constructive work. But I never thought in terms of finding the one Big Idea that could form the basis of a philosophical system; and even when a problem proved beyond my powers at the time, I never doubted that there were genuine philosophical problems, or that they could eventually be solved — by someone, if not by me. From the beginning, too, I was very leery of anything pretentious or unnecessarily obscure; and temperamentally disinclined to jump on fashionable philosophical bandwagons. And — most, as it turns out, to the present purpose — I was always acutely aware of the dangers posed by ambiguities and false dichotomies.
But the very young, very inexperienced philosopher of those early days had a long intellectual road to travel. Although Deviant logic and Philosophy of logics were unusually broad for their time, they were pretty thoroughly analytic in orientation; and their agenda was set largely by the work of Frege, Russell, Quine, Tarski, et al. Even a little later, when I started writing on epistemology, I still set out from familiar problems and familiar seams of literature.
Prompted in part by my reading of the old pragmatists, however, I soon began to chafe against the limitations of the analytic approach in which I was trained, and the narrowness of the highly specialized, technical issues on which it focused. I began to notice serious ambiguities masked by Quine’s smoothly flowing prose and hard philosophical questions left untouched by Tarski’s ingenious formal results. I began to suspect that the reason the epistemological work with which I was struggling was bogged down in fruitless disputes was that everyone concerned took false dichotomies for granted. I grew bolder, braver, and more flexible: I recognized that, the analytic preoccupation with precision notwithstanding, it was sometimes helpful to begin with a vague but plausible idea — provided you could then make it less vague without at the same time making it false; I began to think in terms of continuities as well as distinctions; I became readier to say, “no, sorry, I wouldn’t start from here; we need a different point of departure altogether.” And naturally, as I trod new paths, I found much higher ground and much broader vistas.
This wasn’t a sudden conversion, but a gradual evolution. Those early books on logic were already implicitly epistemological; and there were already glimpses of broader horizons in some early papers: e.g., “Fallibilism and necessity,” arguing that fallibilism is a thesis about people, not propositions, and so couldn’t be expressed in formal-logical terms, and “Epistemology with a knowing subject,” arguing that epistemology couldn’t be, as Popper supposed, simply a matter of logical relations among propositions but must involve knowing subjects and their cognitive capacities and limitations. And then there was “Descriptive vs. revisionary metaphysics,” exploring the rationale for metaphysicians’ going beyond our everyday concepts and categories. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I soon found myself thinking, not just about our language or our concepts, but about the world; transgressing the boundaries of the conventional philosophical sub-specialties; and eventually — prompted by the response of physicists, economists, legal scholars, and literary theorists to my work — venturing outside philosophy into the sciences, the law, literature, and beyond.
The upshot has been a huge, but of course still only partially-completed, crossword. Much is filled in only in pencil; much has been revised many times. Nothing, still, is perfectly formulated; everything, still, is potentially open to revision. Nonetheless, some key ideas have proved their worth, and seem to interlock appropriately with each other. My hope is that they reflect something of the enormous complexity both of the world and of our real, but very limited and imperfect, knowledge of it.
