SUSAN HAACK
405
good," here, does
not
mean "how good by the standards of community
c."
But of course inquirers are not always perfectly objective, that is,
they do not always seek out all the evidence they can, nor assess the
worth of their evidence fairly.
"In order to reason well . . . , it is absolutely necessary to possess .. .
such virtues as intellectual honesty and . .. a real love of truth."
C.
s.
Peirce distinguished genuine inquiry from "sham reasoning," that is,
pseudo-inquiry aimed not at finding the truth but at making a case for
some conclusion fixed in advance. And if sham reasoning becomes com–
monplace, he predicted, people come "to look on reasoning as mainly
decorative," and "man loses his conceptions of truth and of reasoning."
And that, it seems to me, is the philosphical
debacle
taking place before
our eyes; genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy
"research" has become so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts
of truth and reason is being loosened - as the ubiquitous "passes for"
fallacy, and all those dismissive sneer quotes, suggest.
This is to be much regretted; and not least because honest, thorough
inquiry - reasoned pursuit of the truth - is the best defense against racist
and sexist stereotypes. To the anticipated objection that reasoned pursuit
of the truth is a "Western" ideal, I shall say only that, "Western" or not,
it is an ideal of nearly incalculable value to humanity.
The appropriate philosophical response (after, of course, patiently
pointing out that one could not discover by honest inquiry that there is
no such thing as honest inquiry, that it could not be really-and-truly true
that "truth" is no more than ideological humbug, etc .), is to try to ar–
ticulate an epistemology which can recognize the subtleties of the struc–
ture of evidence and the complexity, revisability, and fallibility of inquiry.
That, at any rate, is what I have tried to do .
