ABSTRACT
In her Preface Susan Haack says that she lacks the ostrich temperament and so ‘could scarcely ignore a great revolutionary chorus of voices announcing that disinterested inquiry is impossible, that all supposed “knowledge” is an expression of power, that the concepts of evidence, objectivity, truth, are ideological humbug.’ Haack then turns her attention to conceptual relativism, the thesis of which is that how many and what kinds of objects and properties there are in the world depend on one’s conceptual scheme or one’s vocabulary. In ‘Dry truth and real knowledge’ and ‘Puzzling out science’ Haack argues that all genuine inquiry is committed to scrutinizing results for error and that scientific inquiry is ‘the same, only more so.’ Science is more systematic than, say, history but it has no uniquely rational method and its practitioners are not uniquely rational human beings.
