Susan Haack's Evidence and Inquiry

Susan Haack is a British philosopher who was born in 1945 in Burnham, England. (She is a citizen of the United Kingdom, but has been a permanent U.S. resident since 1990). She studied at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, earning her PhD in philosophy at Cambridge in 1972, with a dissertation that later became her first book, Deviant Logic. She served as Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, and later as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Since 1990, she has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where she is currently Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law. 

      She has written on many subjects, including philosophy of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophical and legal pragmatism, feminism, and social philosophy.

      Her many books have included Deviant Logic (1974), Philosophy of Logics (1978), Evidence and Inquiry (1993), Defending Science--Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (2003), Pragmatism, Old and New (2006), Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and its Place in Culture (2008), and Evidence Matters: Science, Proof and Truth in the Law (2014).

      In Evidence and Inquiry (1993), she offers a theory of epistemic justification that is neither foundationalist nor coherentist, but "foundherentist." She seeks to transcend what she calls the false dichotomies of foundationalism vs. coherentism, externalism vs, internalism, evidentialism vs. reliabilism, and apriorism vs. scientism.¹ She also aims to show that satisfaction of foundherentist criteria is an indication of the truth of beliefs.² She uses the analogy of a crossword puzzle to describe the true structure of relations of evidential support, and to indicate that beliefs can mutually support one another without being logically circular.³ Below is a brief outline of the first chapter.

      Haack describes foundationalism as the theory that (1) some justified beliefs are basic (justified independently of the support of other beliefs), and (2) all other justified beliefs are derived (justified via the direct or indirect support of basic beliefs).⁴ Coherentism is the theory that a belief is justified if and only if it belongs to a coherent set of beliefs.⁵ Foundationalism is a one-directional model of justification (basic beliefs are required to support derived beliefs, and never vice versa), while coherentism is not. Coherentism holds that justification is exclusively a matter of relations, while foundationalism does not.⁶

      Varieties of foundationalism include experientialist (or empirical) foundationalism, which holds that basic beliefs are justified, not by being supported by other beliefs, but by being supported by experience. The extrinsic version of empirical foundationalism holds that basic beliefs are justified by being causally connected to the state of affairs that makes them true, while the intrinsic version holds that basic beliefs are justified by their intrinsic nature and content.⁷

      Strong foundationalism, which holds that basic beliefs are decisively, conclusively, or completely justified, independently of the support of other beliefs, may be distinguished from weak foundationalism, which holds that basic beliefs are only prima facie, defeasibly, or to some degree justified, independently of the support of other beliefs.⁸

      Pure foundationalism, which holds that derived beliefs are justified wholly via the support of basic beliefs, may also be distinguished from impure foundationalism, which holds that derived beliefs are justified at least in part via the support of basic beliefs.⁹

      Haack notes that contextualism (which she describes as the theory that justification is a matter of conformity to the standards of an epistemic community) may be a third alternative theory of epistemic justification. Contextualism, like foundationalism, may posit certain basic beliefs by which all other justified beliefs are supported, but rather than seeing those beliefs as being supported in some other way than via the support of other beliefs, it may see them as not standing in need of justification at all for the epistemic community in question.¹⁰ A weakness of contextualism, however, is that it may lead to the impression that epistemic standards are merely conventional rather than objective, which may undermine the legitimacy of the project of ratifying certain beliefs as justified.¹¹

      Haack describes and evaluates some of the arguments for and against foundationalism and coherentism. According to the infinite regress argument for foundationalism, a belief can't be justified if it requires support via other beliefs, which then require support via other beliefs, which then require support via other beliefs, in an infinite regression. Some beliefs must be justified, independently of the support of other beliefs. But she contends that this argument makes the false assumption that the reasons for a belief must constitute a chain, rather than a pyramid or some other supporting structure.

      Another argument against extrinsic foundationalism is the evidentialist objection, that this theory of justification seems to claim that a basic belief is justified if there's an appropriate connection between a belief-state and a state of affairs that makes it true, even when the subject has no other evidence for the belief or has evidence against it.¹²

      An argument against coherentism is the too much to ask objection, that consistency is assumed to be a necessary condition of coherence, and that a subject who has inconsistent beliefs can't therefore be justified in any of their beliefs (which makes consistency seem like too demanding a requirement).¹³

      Another argument against coherentism, however, is the consistent fairy story objection, which says, not that consistency is too strong a requirement for epistemic justification, but that it's too weak.¹⁴

      Still another argument against coherentism is what Haack calls the drunken sailors argument, which takes its name from an observation by C.I. Lewis that the coherentist claim that empirical beliefs can be justified by nothing other than relations of mutual support is like suggesting that two drunken sailors can support each other by leaning against each other, even when they have nothing to stand on.¹⁵ According to the drunken sailors argument, justification can't depend solely on relations between beliefs, and unless there's some role for empirical testing of our beliefs, we can't have any guarantee that our beliefs are justified.

      Haack describes foundherentism as the theory that (1) "a subject's experience is relevant to the justification of their beliefs, but there need be no privileged class of beliefs justified exclusively by the support of experience, independently of the support of other beliefs," and (2) "justification is not exclusively one-directional, but involves pervasive relations of mutual support."¹³ Since beliefs are seen to be justified partly by experience and partly by other beliefs, justification is gradational rather than categorical.¹⁶ Foundherentism may therefore be a middle ground between foundationalism and coherentism.

      Haack explains that foundherentism survives the decisive argument against coherentism, the drunken sailors argument. It also survives the evidentialist objection to extrinsic foundationalism, and "its superiority to even weak and impure forms of experientialist foundationalism is exhibited by its ability, and their inability, to accommodate the up and back all the way down arguments" for abandoning the one-directionality of justification. So foundherentism survives the strongest arguments against both foundationalism and coherentism.¹⁷

FOOTNOTES

¹Susan Haack, "Not One of the Boys: Memoir of an Academic Misfit," Against Professional Philosophy, August 3, 2020, online at https://againstprofphil.org/2020/08/03/susan-haacks-not-one-of-the-boys-memoir-of-an-academic-misfit/.

²Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 7.

³Ibid., p. 2.

⁴Ibid., p. 14.

⁵Ibid., p. 17.

⁶Ibid., p. 19.

⁷Ibid., p. 15.

⁸Ibid., p. 16.

⁹Ibid., p. 17.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 20.

¹¹Ibid., p. 20.

¹²Ibid., p. 28.

¹³Ibid., p. 25.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 26.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 19.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 20.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 33.