Haack presents one moderate prescription for a sociological approach to inquiry; the “good, sober sociology of science”, and three radical prescriptions which, in one way or another, focus on “social acceptance at the expense of warrant” (op.cit.: 99, 110). One of the radical prescriptions spurs us to “play down warrant and […] accentuate acceptance” (my emphasis, ibid.); another (more) radical prescription is to “ignore warrant altogether” and to
“acknowledge only acceptance” (my emphasis, op.cit.: 112); and a third (even more) radical prescription is to replace “the concept of warrant by an ersatz of a purely politicosociological character” (op.cit.: 113), i.e. the approach of the defenders of value-laden justification of theories, such as feminist and other democratic epistemologists.42 Hence, these radical prescriptions all conflict with premises 1), 2) and 3) above. They imply that social acceptance and not (only) significant truth is the aim of theoretical inquiry (thus denying 1), and that whether a theory is justified depends on social acceptance and not (only) on features indicative of its truth (denying 2). Moreover, they imply that one shows that a theory is most probably true – if indeed this is considered something one should try to show – by demonstrating that it is socially accepted, not (only) that it is best supported by independently secure and comprehensive evidence (denying 3). The third and most radical prescription, defended by proponents of value-laden theoretical justification and democratic epistemologies, also contradicts premises 4),43 5) and 6) above: Not only are inquiry (1),
41 Haack (1998: 115). Consider again that Haack dismisses an exceptionalist approach to science. Her dismissal of radical interpretations of ‘science as social’ should therefore be understood as a dismissal of radical sociological approaches to inquiry as such.
42 Haack’s distinction between moderate (i.e. the subtitle of Manifesto) and radical, refers to how far one departs from the Old Deferentialist picture of “the logic of science”; whether one prescribes to moderate or more or less radical transformations of this picture (1998: 105, 106). The distinction is not meant to suggest that moderates are necessarily politically moderate, or that radicals are necessarily politically radical. The distinction is also not meant to suggest that the moderates demand only moderate changes in how contemporary science is organized, or that the radicals demand radical changes. The moderate Haack considers herself, at least occasionally, to be politically more radical than the radicals – for example when she criticizes “the new-fangled feminist ideas of women’s ways of knowing” to reproduce “sexist stereotypes” (op.cit.: x). She is also extremely critical of the pseudo-inquiry and the unmeritocratic recruitment practices of contemporary science.
43 Or at least proceeds as if premise 4 was not the case. Haack seems generally to assume that critics of doctrines of value-freedom share her understanding of values as subjective wishes or desires, even though they, in her view, do not recognize the implications of this understanding properly when prescribing epistemology (if they
theoretical justification (2) and truth-seeking (3) made into “matter[s] of social negotiation”
(ibid.). In addition, the set of values preferred by the pseudo-inquirers – for example the democratic values of feminist pseudo-inquirers – are prescribed a privileged epistemological role in these negotiations.
This additional, normative move of those who subscribe to the most radical prescription, relies, thus, either on the least radical sociological approach to inquiry, making inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking partly a matter of social negotiation, or on the more radical approach, making inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking wholly a matter of social negotiation. Accordingly, any suggestion of a feminist epistemology would be mistaken if the presupposition that inquiry is more or less a matter of social negotiation, is also mistaken: If the context of justification cannot be reduced to a context of social negotiation, it goes without saying that it cannot be reduced to a context of social negotiation where feminist or other values might play a privileged epistemological role. And, this is precisely what Haack argues: The context of justification cannot be reduced to a context of social negotiation. The radicals have not and will not succeed in their endeavor.
1.3.1 Inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking – wholly a matter of social negotiation?
Haack argues that it is “doubly false” to claim that “scientific knowledge is nothing more than the product of processes of social negotiation” (op.cit.: 112). The claim disregards the fact that theoretical justification is a matter of assessing the truth-indicativeness of evidence, and that science as we know it has “succeeded extraordinarily well, by and large” in doing so adequately (op.cit.: 98). It also rests on what she refers to as “the passes for fallacy”; it accentuates “what at a given time passes for scientific knowledge over warrant”, confuses
“what we take as confirmation with what really confirms a hypothesis” (original emphasis, op.cit.: 117), and so completely ignores the crucial distinction between warrant and acceptance:
had, they would have defended a doctrine of value-freedom similar to her own). In some passages, Haack suggests, however, that her difference with the democratic epistemologists might also be a matter of different approaches to what values are: “I began to wonder if the problem might be that to engage in philosophical argument about moral issues puts one in chronic danger of falling into sham reasoning” (1998: 167). Haack recognizes, then, that there is a debate going on in moral philosophy about values, and thus, that her opponents might not share her understanding of values as subjective wishes and desires after all (even if they are wrong in not doing so, and even if philosophical arguments about values often end up in sham reasoning).
[…] not everything that has thus far survived those processes (of seeking out, checking, and assessing the weight of evidence) is knowledge; what survives those processes is what counts as knowledge, what is accepted as knowledge – but not all of it is, necessarily, knowledge.
Some may, despite surviving those processes, not be warranted; some may turn out to be false (original emphasis, ibid.: 112).
This argument relies partly on the presupposition of fallibilism. Even our best theories about the world and ourselves, as well as our best criteria of justification are fallible in principle:
What is accepted as the Final Opinion indicates truth, but does not guarantee it. To uphold the distinction between acceptance and warrant is even more significant if we know – as we do – that existing scientific communities tend to be haunted by sham and fake reasoning: Their opinions are nowhere near Final. There is no reason to consider the conclusions accepted after pseudo-inquiry as warranted.
Hence, Haack maintains premise 1), 2) and 3) in her argument for value-freedom: Inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking are not wholly a matter of social negotiation. By maintaining this, she does, however, not deny that: “Scientific theories are devised, articulated, developed, by scientists; theoretical concepts like electron, gene, force, and so forth, are, if you like, their construction” (original emphasis, op.cit..: 113). She also does not deny that “objects of sociological theories […] social institutions (marriage, say, or banking) and social categories (gender, say, as distinct from sex) are, in a sense, socially constructed; if there weren’t human societies, there would be no such things” (ibid.). These are two examples often referred to by those who try to deconstruct the distinction between warrant and social acceptance. Haack insists, however, that neither electrons, genes nor forces nor the objects of sociological theories “are made real by scientists’ theorizing” (op.cit.: 113). This made-real-approach ignores the causal aspect of justification; the epistemological significance of perception of reality. Foundherentism requires that our descriptions, concepts and theories relate adequately to relevant non-belief input from the real (social and natural) world.
1.3.2 Inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking – partly a matter of social negotiation?
Those who describe inquiry, theoretical justification and truth-seeking partly as an issue of social acceptance, rely, according to Haack, on the presupposition that social evaluations,
interests and structures are “inseparable from scientific inquiry”; they “insist on the underdetermination of theory by evidence and the inextricability of non-evidential factors in theory-choice” (op.cit.: 110).44 Haack presents different interpretations of this presupposition, refuting them all as she goes along.
The first interpretation tells us that social evaluations and interests are inseparable from scientific inquiry because “evidence never obliges us to accept this claim rather than that, and we have to accept something, so acceptance is always affected by something besides the evidence” (op.cit.: 110). This “something besides the evidence” that affects acceptance is assumed to be social evaluations or interests of some kind. Haack admits that we often accept claims that are possibly false. However, this is not necessarily a problem:
Not all scientific claims are either accepted as definitely true or rejected as definitely false, nor should they be; evidence may be better or worse, warrant stronger or weaker, and the acceptance status of a claim can, and should, vary accordingly (ibid.).
Justification is gradual and fallible. We talk about better or worse, stronger or weaker, and we might be wrong. If evidence is worse and the warrant is weaker, we have the choice to simply reject the claim, as scientists often do: “[…] we don’t have to accept something; if the evidence is inadequate, why not just acknowledge that we don’t know?” (original emphasis, ibid.).
The second interpretation presents the underdetermination thesis somewhat differently:
The point […] is not that, in practice, we don’t always have enough evidence to decide whether a theory is true, but that, in principle, even all possible evidence is insufficient to decide, that there is always an incompatible, but empirically equivalent theory (op.cit.: 110).
According to this underdetermination-in-principle argument, “no amount of observational evidence could enable us to tell whether p1 or empirically-equivalent-but-incompatible p2 is true” (op.cit.: 110, 111). Again, under the condition of fallibilism we can never deem p1 or p2 to be definitely true. But one of the propositions might still be more warranted than the other.
If this is not the case, if we cannot say that p1 is more warranted than p2 or the other way around, “the most we could learn from inquiry is that either p1 or p2” (my emphasis, op.cit.:
44 And refer in this connection often to Quine’s underdetermination thesis. Among feminist epistemologists making this move, Haack mentions Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Helen Longino (op.cit.: 121, n. 23).
111). We have no reason to infer from this fact that something other than evidence, such as social evaluations or interests, should decide whether we opt for p1 or p2.
The third interpretation tells us, however, that this is not a viable solution, because “we have to act, and so we have to accept some theory as the basis on which to act” (op.cit.: 111). But Haack does not consider this a problem: “We often decide to act as if a theory is true. From this it does not follow that we have to commit ourselves to the truth of the theory” (ibid.).45 Haack maintains thus premises 1), 2) and 3) in her argument for value-freedom. Whether a theory is justified depends on its truth-indicativeness (2). This is not even partly an issue of social negotiation. Whether a theory indicates truth depends exclusively on whether it is supported by independently secure and comprehensive evidence (3). Whether the theory is socially acceptable or not is irrelevant. And inquiry as such should not, at least not unconditionally, be conceptualized as partly a matter of social negotiation. The context of discovery and the context of practical application allow for social negotiation, but the context of justification does not. This is to maintain that to end up with theories that are significantly true is the sole aim of inquiry (1), without which genuine inquiry will degenerate into pseudo-inquiry.
1.3.3 The good, sober sociology of science
Haack recommends instead a moderate interpretation of science as social that does not conflict with 1), 2) and 3) above. This interpretation does not consider the context of justification partly or wholly as equivalent with a context of social negotiation, although it admits that justification takes place in a community of inquirers. Indeed, Haack considers with Peirce the Final Opinion not as “the ultimate representation” produced by an ideal individual knower, but by an ideal knowledge community (op.cit.: 162). To organize inquiry as a social enterprise in this sense, to institutionalize inquiry as an “engagement, cooperative and competitive, of many persons, within and across generations” will not undermine its potential for “epistemological distinction”, but rather contribute to it (op.cit.: 107). For one
45 In such cases “it is wise to take whatever precautions feasible”, if the theory turns out in fact to be false (1998:
111).
thing, the fact that there is a cooperative community of inquirers “help[s] to compensate for individuals’ weaknesses and idiosyncrasies” (ibid.):
I doubt that criteria of better and worse evidence will yield a linear ordering, and I am sure that no mechanical decision-procedure for theory-choice is to be anticipated. But a community of inquirers will usually, and usefully, include some who are quick to start speculating towards a new theory when the evidence begins to disfavor the old one, and others who are more inclined patiently to try to modify the old. And though real, imperfect inquirers are seldom, if ever, altogether free of prejudice and partisanship, a community of inquirers will usually, and usefully, include partisans of one approach keen to seek out and expose the weaknesses which partisans of a rival approach are motivated to neglect (op.cit.:
107-108).
Genuine inquiry is further facilitated by division of labor: Subcommunities of the scientific community should work on different problems, and members of the different subcommunities on different parts of “their” problems: “It is as if different subgroups, and different persons within them, worked on different parts of a crossword puzzle” (op.cit.: 107). The benefits of specialization are cognitive advance, if the inquirers specialize on the basis of talent and merit, and if “each individual and each subgroup has access, as needed, to the work of others”, making it possible to check “the consistency of their entries with other, distant but still obliquely interconnected, areas of the puzzle” (ibid.). Finally, the competitive character of genuine inquiry ought to be appreciated: “competition between partisans of rival approaches or theories, and […] between rival or research teams hoping to be the first to solve this or that problem” (ibid.: 108), will contribute making the cognitive outcome optimal.46 That is: To recognize that the better scrutiny of evidence takes place in a community of virtuous inquirers where “the internal organization […] and the external environment” spur the proper mixture of “cooperation and competition”, is not to focus on social acceptance at the expense of warrant (op.cit.: 108). It is rather a matter of appreciating a decisive condition for the “more or less and by and large and in the long run” appropriate correlation between
“the descriptive notion of acceptance” and “the normative notion of warrant” (my emphasis, ibid.). It is the task of the good, sober sociology of science to trace empirically how the internal organization and the external environment of science contribute to successful inquiry (that is, when the well-warranted and the accepted correlate), but also how the internal organization and the external environment of science might “hamper progress, […]
46 In accordance with Haack’s rational-choice theory of action, where the actors typically strive for “utility”,
“fame or fortune” (1998: 8, 9).
discourage good, honest, thorough, scrupulous inquiry, [and] […] encourage fraud and fakery or pointless busywork” (ibid.); when the accepted is not the well-warranted, or the truths revealed are not significant.