Epistemic Responsibilityby Lorraine Code

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Epistemic Responsibility by Lorraine CodeReview by: Susan HaackCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 91-107Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231735 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 91 Volume 21, Number 1, March 1991, pp. 91-108

Critical Notice

LORRAINE CODE, Ejristemic Responsibility. Hanover and London: Brown University Press 1987. Pp. xi + 272.

Among the characters in Arthur Hailey's Strong Medicine are Martin Peat-Smith and Vincent Lord, both chemists working for Felding-Roth Pharmaceuticals, both brilliant and dedicated scientists. Peat-Smith is the scientist-as-hero; though he can seem arrogant - he persists, against the judgment of his colleagues, in believing that his research project can overcome what they, not without reason, think are insuperable obstacles - he is not only brilliant and dedicated, but also impeccably honest intellectually. But Lord's character is flawed; he is brilliant and dedicated, but too anxious to be right, too ambitious for recognition - and he is not quite honest intellectually. When, finally, his project comes to fruition with a dramatic new anti-arthritic drug, he turns a blind eye to the fact that a physician's report of a supposedly successful trial shows signs of being faked; to instigate an investigation would hold up the progress through the FDA of what he is already sure is a safe, successful drug. Then, when the first reports of deaths of patients using the drug come in, he ignores them too; he is already sure the deaths are coinci- dental. 'Lord's reaction was one of annoyance with the two dead people. Why had their damned diseases, from which they would have expired anyway, had to involve Hexin W, even though the drug was clearly not responsible in either case?' The consequences are tragic; for, in reality, Hexin W is interfering with patients' immune systems, making them incapable of defence against what would ordinarily be minor infec- tions.1

1 A. Hailey, Strong Medicine (London: Pan Books 1985), 455



92 Susan Haack

Or consider the eponymous hero of William Cooper's The Struggles of Albert Woods. Cooper draws Albert Woods with a lighter hand than Hailey does Vincent Lord; the reader feels an affection for him not in spite of, but in part because of, his failings. The place is Britain, the time the second world war. Woods is another scientist, talented and dedicated, but also ambitious for recognition, for his own research estab- lishment, for a knighthood. With his assistant, Eli Grevel, he is working on a nerve gas potentially valuable to the war effort. Woods, for all his patience as an experimenter, is given to impulse; and in a fit of 'mad- headedness/ when he and Grevel have produced the gas, but by a process capable of making only tiny quantities, he informs the War Office that the work is close to exploitable results. He half believes it. 'Impelled by a passionate belief that there was a kind of truth that superseded factual veracity, Albert incorporated in his memorandum a summary of some experiments that had not been performed. Albert despatched the memorandum ... in a fit of exaltation.'2 Grevel, on whose theoretical brilliance Woods was relying, breaks off their association. In a fever of obsessive work beyond anything of which he was formerly capable, Albert manages to do the experiments. And so, independently, does Eli, who has not lost his fascination with the work, nor his desire to show that he is quite as good as Professor Woods....

What one might call 'epistemic character7 is not only good material for a novelist, but also potentially a rich and fruitful field of investigation for epistemology : one which, however, epistemologists have up to now, by and large, neglected. All credit, then, to Dr Code for her choice of topic: intellectual virtue.

The more's the pity, though, that her handling of this fascinating topic is so badly flawed. From time to time, to be sure, she has things to say which are true, even things which are true and important. But one can't help suspecting that this may be, as it were, as much by luck as by judgment; for, as a whole, her book is shallow and muddled, marred by pervasive unclarity and damaging tolerance of ambiguity.

On her first page - the first page of the preface, even before the body of the book begins - Code explains that her project arises out of a 'disquiet' about the absence of certain kinds of question from the epistemological tradition (ix); she immediately goes on to quote Wittgen- stein's observation that 'disquiet in philosophy might be said to begin

2 W. Cooper, The Struggles of Albert Woods (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books 1966), 217, in a chapter entitled 'Was He Mad-Headed or Dishonest?'



Critical Notice of Lorraine Code Epistemic Responsibility 93

from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrongly/ But presumably she doesn't seriously mean to tell us that her project is the result of looking at philosophy wrongly. An isolated slip of this kind, of course, would be quite insignificant; but Code, unhappily, seems to have started as she means to go on.

Seeing philosophy wrongly, her quotation from Wittgenstein continues, is like seeing it 'as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips ... so we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal.'3 Her

project, Code tells us, the investigation of epistemic responsibility, is to be 'one such cross strip,' cutting across the longitudinal' problems of the epistemological tradition, such as the investigation of the concept of

epistemic justification. One might be led to suppose, therefore, that Code thinks the traditional epistemological concerns are misconceived - that the epistemological tradition results from 'seeing philosophy wrongly.' And indeed she immediately goes on to say that her project 'reflects a disaffection' (x) with standard approaches to epistemology, and a few

pages later, in the introduction, that it 'arises out of a certain disenchant- ment with foundationalism and coherentism,' with the 'aridity7 of the debate between them (7). Only a couple of lines later, however, she is

conceding the 'paramount significance' and even the 'fundamental

importance' of the traditional questions. Perhaps, then, her view is that the traditional questions are important, but the traditional answers -

foundationalism and coherentism - are wrong? This interpretation is

encouraged when she says that Sosa has 'shown that the foundationalist

pyramid has no foundations and that the coherentist raft must inevitably find itself adrift' (37; the point is reiterated on 39-40). But this is hard to reconcile with other remarks that seem to say that foundationalism and coherentism are, after all, both right, in their way, e.g.: 'reasonable foundations ... are a rational requirement of claims to know, as is achieving the best coherence possible' (254; cf.6).4 Then, on the page immediately after the one on which she conceded the 'fundamental importance' of the traditional questions, Code suggests, rather, that the novel questions

3 L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. Von Wright, eds. (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press 1970) section 447

4 It is worthy of note that Code nowhere asks whether foundationalism and coher-

entism are exclusive, nor whether they are exhaustive, alternatives. Cf . my Theo-

ries of Knowledge: An Analytic Framework/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 83

(1982-3) 143-57, which proposes a third option, foundherentism.



94 Susan Haack

with which she will be concerned could be seen as 'central' (8), the implication being that the traditional questions are peripheral; and this suggestion is repeated in her summary statement later in the introduction, that 'the project ... is to develop a perspective in theory of knowledge that is neither analogous in structure nor in function [sic] to foundationalist and coherentist theories, but that sees a different set of questions as central to epistemological [ijnquiry' (13). Since, in the same paper in which he argued that neither foundationalism nor coherentism is satisfactory, Sosa had suggested that the justification of beliefs might be explicated as secondary to the justification of intellectual virtues, 5

one might be led to suppose that Code hopes that the traditional epistemological questions will turn out to be subordinate to the new issues she sees as central. But subsequently she seems to deny any such aspiration: '... no theory of [intellectual virtue] will be able to provide either a solid alternative to traditional foundations or an alternative recipe for coherence to solve coherentist problems. Neither can [it] offer any easy calculus for assessing knowledge and belief claims ...' (63). Her least ambitious description of her project suggests that it will not, after all, supplant or subordinate traditional epistemological concerns, but only supplement them, that it is 'the missing complement' (8) to foundationalism and coherentism.

What is the relation between the questions about justification to which foundationalism and coherentism are candidate answers, and questions about epistemological character? Let me begin to attempt an answer by distinguishing two epistemological enterprises: the project of explicat- ing criteria for appraising how good a person's evidence for a belief is, and the project of giving rules for the conduct of inquiry. Though of course related, these are, I take it, distinct enterprises.6 (Compare: stating criteria for judging roses versus giving instructions for growing roses.) Epistemologists have engaged sometimes in the one, sometimes in the other, and not infrequently, perhaps not fully recognising the distinction, in both at once. There is, or so I suspect, a significant sense in which

5 See E. Sosa, 'The Raft and the Pyramid : Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge/ in Midwest Studies on Philosophy 5 (1980) section 11; but note Sosa's reliabilist inclinations. Cf. J.A. Monmarquet, 'Epistemic Virtue/ Mind 96 (1987) 482-97, who also hopes to subordinate justification to virtue.

6 Cf . my 'Rebuilding the Ship While Sailing on the Water/ in R. Barrett and R. Gibson, eds., Perspectives on Quine (Oxford: Blackwells 1990), 111-27, where it is suggested that this distinction is important to an understanding of how the project of ratifica- tion of criteria of justification can avoid vicious circularity.




the second of these enterprises is often misconceived; I doubt whether it is possible, as some epistemologists may have supposed, to give (non-trivial) recipes or algorithms for inquiry, i.e., routines such that, if one follows them faithfully, one is guaranteed to arrive at beliefs which are true or probably true: as opposed, that is, to guidelines, i.e., recom- mendations which cannot be certified as truth-conducive and the application of which requires judgment or discretion.7 And here, I suggest, is one place where our notions of epistemic character come in; inquirers of good epistemic character have good judgment,8 exercise their discretion appropriately in seeking out and assessing the worth of evidence.

Since theories of justification, foundationalism and coherentism among them, surely belong to the first enterprise, if I am right in thinking that accounts of epistemic character belong, albeit somewhat obliquely, to the second, then it is Code's most modest conception of her project which is most nearly correct (though 'the missing complement7 is still overdoing it a bit). No doubt it is in part because Code is so unclear which of several more and less ambitious projects she is undertaking that she doesn't manage even the most modest of them at all satisfacto- rily. No doubt, also, it is in part because Code has some aspirations in the direction of the more ambitious projects that she takes so dismissive an attitude to the epistemological mainstream. And this, as it turns out, proves something of a handicap in the pursuit of even the most modest

project. For, as Code's discussion proceeds, it becomes more and more

apparent that an understanding of the intellectual virtue on which she concentrates - epistemic responsibility - requires a grasp of the notion of evidence, a notion to which the mainstream of epistemology concerned with questions of justification has devoted much time and atten- tion; but, denying herself these resources, Code has no serious account of these notions to offer.

7 I should not disguise the fact that this is quite a radical conjecture, since, if true, it threatens the feasibility of the search for 'the scientific method/ at least as construed

by not a few philosophers of science. They have, I suspect, failed to distinguish the two projects distinguished here.

8 'Error is ... a mistake of our judgment ... Those who cannot carry a train of

consequences in their heads, nor weigh exactly the preponderance of contrary

proofs and testimonies, may easily be misled to assent to positions which are not

probable/ Hailey's Peat-Smith is an admirer of Locke, and this passage from the

Essay Concerning Human Understanding plays a key role in the development of the

plot (Strong Medicine, 255).



96 Susan Haack

Code's discussion of intellectual virtue opens with a case-study: the case is that of Philip Gosse, the nineteenth-century biologist who, as she puts it, 'chose to discount the findings of the new biology because of their incompatibility with his belief in the literal truth of the creation story as set forth in the book of Genesis' (17). The suggestion is that, in view of this choice, Gosse must be judged as lacking in what Code takes to be 'the most central of the epistemic virtues': epistemic responsibility (23). Why so? Code seems to offer several, apparently incompatible, diagnoses. Initially, she suggests that it is 'because of his conviction that there can be only one Truth,' which meant, she says, that he was 'restricted to trun- cated categories of understanding and interpretation'; she comments that 'it is one thing to profess a profound regard for truth, but quite another to insist that, if a point of view is important and valid, then it must be literally and exclusively true' (21). This could perhaps charitably be interpreted as suggesting that Gosse should have reconciled the biblical and the evolutionary stories by construing the former metaphorically. But a few pages later Code offers what seems to be a quite different diagnosis: 'It might seem/ she writes, 'that epistemic responsibility is a matter of tenacity: of affirming one' s position and holding to it, come what may7; but 'Gosse's case makes plain,' she continues, 'that this virtue, like the Aristotelian virtues, is located at a mean' (32). Why anyone should have supposed that epistemic responsibility is to be identified with tenacity in sticking to one's beliefs is a bit of a mystery; but let us put that aside. Codehadalreadygotherselfintodifficultieswiththedoctrineofthemean (' ... it is not clear that devotion to truth should be characterized as a virtue best possessed in moderation. ... Yet Gosse's case is particularly successful in bringing the implications of "excessive" ... truthfulness to light' [18]). By page 23, however, epistemic responsibility is being represented as located at a mean on the scale of tenacity; Gosse's failure, we are told, was a matter of excessive rigidity or unwillingness to change his beliefs. There is plausibility in this diagnosis; only, however, if it is understood in such a way that what is at issue is not a matter simply of excessive tenacity, but of inappropriate tenacity - that Gosse's failing was a matter of his disinclination or inability to modify his beliefs when the evidence available to him indicated that he should. One would hardly count as epistemically virtuous, after all, merely because one was moderately dis- posed to change one's beliefs when intellectual fashions changed, or if it becomepolitically convenient. Anappraisalofthejustifiability of therival belief-sets (the evolutionary and the biblical) is covertly presupposed. And indeed Code herself concedes as much when, in a footnote to the passage cited above, she comments that 'the problem with Gosse's resolution of his dilemma is that he seems not to have paused sufficiently to consider whether the new theory is more rational than the old' (23, n. 8, my




italics). The point is confirmed in another passage later in the book, where epistemic responsibility is said to require 'a balance ... between dogma- tism ... where cognitive agents cling to cherished beliefs and defend them against contradiction [sic] or refutation despite all evidence, and, at the other extreme, indifferent shifting to and fro' (144, my italics).

Not unexpectedly, however, despite these acknowledgements that epistemic responsibility requires a disposition to accommodate one's beliefs appropriately to the evidence available, Code prefers to present her concept of epistemic responsibility as underpinned by 'a respect for the normative force of "realism"' (20), a notion later abbreviated to 'normative realism.' But her account of this notion wavers unsteadily between the absurd and the anodyne. At first she hints that, unlike a correspondence, coherence, or even a pragmatist conception, hers is a new style of realism which will achieve the remarkable task of accommo- dating the truth of incompatible propositions (128); later, however, she seems to tell us that to construe realism normatively is just to acknowledge 'that the value in knowing and understanding how things are is greater than, and subsumes [sic], the value of holding to favored theories and cherished views of how things must be' (136). In between, she ges- tures at something more promising: that the world is independent of us, constraining inquiry, but that it is knowable by us only in virtue of our creative attempts to make sense of our experience (135). But the discussion keeps faltering as Code tries, and fails, to get to grips with what she calls 'perspectivalism/ e.g.: 'A privileged knowing cannot be designated ... within knowledge in general' (136), suggesting at once the true but

unexciting thesis that there may be different but compatible truths about the world, and the exciting but untrue thesis that there may be different and incompatible truths about the world. Code devotes a substantial part of a chapter to explaining her concept of normative realism; her most

revealing statement of it, however, is to be found in the introduction, where, significantly, she calls it 'empirico-realism' and acknowledges its affinities with foundationalism: 'responsible knowledge claims can only arise out of investigations, in part empirical and inductive, that attempt to discover how things really are. ... the goal is to ensure that knowledge claims are well-grounded in the world' (6, my italics). Code is surely right to suggest that it is a necessary condition of responsible inquiry that one aim at discovering 'how things really are.' She is right also to acknowledge that 'aiming to discover how things really are' can be given content only in terms of 'aiming to accommodate one' s beliefs appropriately to the best and most comprehensive evidence available' ('well-grounded'). But she hasn't the resources to develop these insights into something substantial.

Our vocabulary for the appraisal of subjects qua inquirers is rich and complex. Some expressions represent a general assessment of intellec-



98 Susan Haack

tual strength or weakness - 'intelligent/ 'brilliant/ 'stupid/ dim/ etc. Some attribute specific talents or failings - 'innovative/ 'rigorous/ 'pedestrian/ 'sloppy/ etc. And a particularly important group of expressions indicate how good or bad the subject's judgment is, how well or badly he assesses evidence and how appropriately or inappro- priately he reacts to new information9 - 'objective/ 'discriminating/ 'open-minded/ 'partial/ 'credulous/ 'dogmatic/ etc. It is worth noting the way in which the vocabulary of evidence-related terms of epistemic character discriminates appropriate from inappropriate tenacity, appropriate from inappropriate openness to change of belief, and the way in which this creates a structure which could be mistaken for a simple matter of moderation versus extremes. Along the lines of the familiar joke, 'I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed/ one might come up with 'I am discriminating, you are partial, he is prejudiced/ or 'I am eclectic, you are undiscriminating, she is of easy epistemic virtue/

'Responsible/ the key term in Code's project, belongs to this evidence- related vocabulary - as, indeed, her discussion from time to time covertly suggests, despite her aspirations to marginalise such old-fash- ioned notions as evidence or rationality. Were it not for those aspirations, she might have come to recognise the fact - to which expressions like 'shrewd/ 'circumspect/ 'gullible/ 'nitpicking/ as well as 'responsible/ attest - that the assessment of evidence calls for good judgment rather than mechanical rule-following; and this might have enabled her to get clear about how her project relates to traditional concerns. Or she might have asked what the connection between epistemic responsibility and respect for the evidence tells us about why bias or partiality is often served by self-deception. (Suggestion: one cannot acknowledge that one holds a belief simply because it is convenient or flattering to one's vanity, and continue to hold that belief; for to believe something is to believe that it is true, but that it would be convenient or flattering to one's vanity if something were true is no reason to suppose that it is true; so there is pressure to conceal from oneself the real causes of one's belief, by, for instance, exaggerating the significance of marginal evidence.) And this could have given some depth to her true and important but undevel- oped observations (e.g., on 57-8, 85-6, 222-3) about the relevance of self-knowledge to epistemic responsibility.

9 I have tried, I am not sure how successfully, to avoid suggesting that 'accepting a belief is appropriately conceived as straightforwardly voluntary action on the subject's part. Contrast L. Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985) 8, 42, 151.




Though Code is pessimistic about what can be learned from the mainstream of epistemology, she is optimistic about the potential of a different kind of resource; the concept of epistemic responsibility is to be illumi- nated, she hopes, by appeal to work in ethics. One is entitled to feel some unease initially at the implied suggestion that ethics is in better shape than epistemology, and entitled subsequently to feel outright bafflement at what Code has to say about the relation between the two disciplines.

For a while it seems that her concept of epistemic responsibility is an ethical, and not after all an epistemological, concept. Not only do the examples with which she opens her introduction suggest this; she also seems to say so explicitly. A North American driver rents a car in Britain, and proceeds to drive on the right-hand side of the road (1); Germans claim not to have known what was going on in Nazi concentration camps (1); a drug is marketed after only inadequate testing (2). 'In each case/ Code tells us, 'a responsibility to know is at issue' (2). This encourages the idea that the examples are meant to illustrate that one often faces a moral obligation to ensure that one is adequately informed. By the next page, however, things start to sound a bit different: '... knowing well [sic] is a matter of considerable moral significance; hence [sic] moral issues and questions of "character" are often integral aspects of epistemic evalu- ation'; and then a lot different: 'I shall maintain that one is frequently in a better position to understand how, or what, a person knows, and to understand the implications of that presumed knowledge, when it can be placed in the context of the putative knower's character' (3). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Code is running together two distinct sorts of question: about the moral responsibilities of agents not to act, or speak, on the basis of inadequate information; and about the epistemic responsibilities of inquirers not to believe unless they have adequate evidence. It is somewhat startling, then, to find Code insisting, subsequently, that the two kinds of question are distinct, that epistemological inquiry is 'analogous to but not identical with moral [i]nquiry' and that 'neither subsumes the other,' and proposing 'that we acknowledge and learn from the similarities between the two modes of [i]nquiry without conflating them' (49). At the beginning of the next chapter, curiously entitled The Ethics of Belief,' Code continues to insist that 'these domains of [i]nquiry must remain separate,' but instead of appealing to an analogy between them now stresses 'their evident overlap' (68). By the next page, however, referring back to her example of the drug marketed without adequate research into its safety, she comments that 'in such instances ... moral and epistemicconsiderationsare so interwoven thattheycannotbeabsolutely separated'; but immediately goes on to insist that 'principles of responsible [i]nquiry have evidently been violated, quite apart from the moral consequences [sic] to which they gave rise' (69).



100 Susan Haack

Code holds that epistemology should not be impersonal, in the sense of concerning itself only with propositions and their logical relations, but should focus on the knowing subject (99 ff.). In this she is, I believe, quite right10 - though she is quite wrong to suggest that the epistemological mainstream tends to neglect the knowing subject. Popper, to be sure, anxious to avoid what he sees as the dangers of 'psychologism,' urges the claims of an 'epistemology without knowing subject/11 but many other epistemologists (Russell, Lewis, Ayer, Quine, Sellars, Le- hrer, Goldman, etc.) put the knowing subject centre stage; indeed, it is precisely because of the importance the knowing subject has enjoyed from Descartes and Hume to the present that Popper feels the need to inveigh against 'belief philosophies/ Now, Code endorses an observation of Mary Midgel/s to the effect that 'all moral doctrines ... depend on some belief about what human nature is like' (116).12 And the same, she holds, goes for epistemological theories. This relates directly to her most substantial application of the analogy, or overlap, or whatever she thinks it is, between epistemology and ethics; the assumptions about human nature explicit or implicit in moral theories could, she thinks, with advantage be adopted by epistemology.

The chapter entitled 'Epistemic Community' opens with the observation that 'human beings, who are the agents in moral theory and the knowledge-seekers in theory of knowledge, are [sic; presumably, are taken to be] curiously different creatures in each domain of [ilnquiry' (166). In ethical theories, the suggestion is, agents are (at least usually) conceived as social beings; in epistemological theories, as solitary. Code urges, however, that 'human beings are social creatures as much in knowledge seeking as in moral [sic] activity' (167). She is right to stress that much of what we take ourselves to know, we have learned from

10 As I argued with specific reference to Popper in 'Epistemology With a Knowing Subject/ Review of Metaphysics 33 (1979) 309-35, and from the perspective of my foundherentist theory of justification in 'Rebuilding the Ship/ section I. Though Code refers to 'Epistemology With a Knowing Subject7 (32, n. 21), I have the

impression that she fails to appreciate that the concern of that paper was to argue rather that an adequate theory of justification must focus on the knowing subject than that the need to focus on the knowing subject shows that questions about epistemic character are more important than questions about justification.

11 K.R. Popper, 'Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject/ in Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972) 106-52

12 The quotation is from M. Midgely, Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1978) 166.




others. She is partly right to suggest that epistemology has traditionally been quite strongly individualistic in its approach - only partly, though; one of Peirce's criticisms of the Cartesian model, after all, was that it was 'most pernicious' in making single individuals absolute judges of truth;13 and the social aspects of inquiry have also been stressed by other epistemologists as diverse as Annis and Popper.14 But she is quite wrong to imply that the tendency to regard second-hand knowledge as second rate is a mere prejudice; for if one holds - as I do, and as, qua 'empirico-realist,' Code does too - that our knowledge of the world depends on our experience of it, then, since it is individuals who have experience, second-hand knowledge is bound to be, in a significant sense, more indirect than first hand knowledge.

In the epistemological tradition, learning from others is standardly discussed - not always, admittedly, very adequately - under the rubric 'testimony/ This, Code claims, 'overintellectuali[zes] the relation-

ship in question' (169).15 A better approach, she thinks, would acknow-

ledge that 'trust shapes epistemic communities and binds their members

together' (172, my italics). Code's 'trust,' however, seems as slippery as her 'normative realism'; and her discussion here veers unsteadily between hints that co-operative inquiry requires that one take others'

knowledge claims on trust, and proposals about what is involved in

judging another epistemically trustworthy (cf. 172 with 173-4). The former seem to be pretty straightforwardly false. The latter seem more or less unobjectionable, but also more or less familiar: that someone's

reliability as an informant depends on (his sincerity and) his competence. To believe [sic; presumably, to believe justifiably] that you are ... believable, hence that the knowledge that you purport to impart can be taken as such, I must make a just estimate of your epistemic "qualifica- tions" '(174). Rather as what was defensible about Code's concept of normative realism seemed to amount, on critical analysis, to little more than a traditional notion of respect for evidence, so what is defensible about her concept of trust seems to amount, on critical analysis, to little more than a traditional notion of appraisal of the worth of testimony.

13 C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, C Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1931-58) 5.265

14 D. Annis, 'A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification/ American Philosophical

Quarterly 15 (1978) 213-19. Popper, in Objective Knowledge likens scientific know-

ledge to a medieval cathedral, built by generation after generation (121).

15 She is quoting A. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers (London: Duckworth 1982) 67.



102 Susan Haack

And when Code goes on (178) to suggest a contract model of co-operative inquiry, it begins to seem that there is, after all, nothing so distinctively social about her conception; for contract theories, as Code had conceded in an allusion to Hobbes at the beginning of the chapter (169), represent the most individualistic end of the spectrum of moral and political theories.

The notion of epistemic character could, I believe, make a significant contribution to our understanding of what is involved in learning from others; for one is often in the position of needing to judge the competence of another with respect to some matter where one is not oneself compe- tent to form an opinion; and in making this kind of judgment one's assessment of the other's epistemic character - an assessment one is sometimes in a position to make on other grounds than his competence on the matter at issue - may be crucial. And, to be fair, Code does touch on this point (174-5). Just as one is hoping she will develop it, however, one finds her, instead, introducing, side by side with the contract model, a proposal that epistemic community be conceived in terms of 'forms of life' (178-80).

Her hope seems to be that, in this context, Maclntyre's account of virtue can be adapted to an epistemic application. Though, as we saw, Code tries, with rather curious results, to apply the Aristotelian idea that virtues are located at a mean, she doesn't wish to adopt Aristotle's account of virtue as it stands, because she rejects the essentialist conception of human nature on which it relies (52). Maclntyre's account appeals to her, presumably, because of the way it replaces the metaphysical biology of Aristotle's approach by an emphasis on the role of virtues in co-operative human practices. She quotes (183 and 184) Maclntyre's characterisation of virtues, as:

..Mcquired human qualifies] the possession of which tends to enable us to achieve the goals which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goals

and his correlative characterisation of a practice, as:

...any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are achieved in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and potentially definitive of, that form of activity....16

16 A. Maclntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth 1981) 178, 175




Undeterred by the opacity of these definitions, or by the difficulties and dangers of applying them outside the context of Maclntyre's philosophical sociology of moral discourse, Code uses them as a starting point for a discussion apparently intended to show how inquiry is inherently social in a stronger sense than is required by traditional accounts of testimony or suggested by the contract model. She begins by commenting that not all knowledge-seeking is a practice in Maclntyre's sense, that 'undifferentiated [sic], individual knowledge-seeking' doesn't qualify (185). This, of course, though true, has no tendency to show that individual knowledge-seeking isn't knowledge-seeking. On 189, apparently on relying on the argument that knowledge can only properly be attributed to language-users and that language is essentially social, she claims that 'solitary knowers ... are not properly knowers.' Though, if true, this would show that sociali- sation is a necessary condition of the possession of knowledge, it has no tendency to show that only co-operative inquiry is genuine inquiry. On the same page she urges that 'altruism' underlies human cognitive interactions; initially this thesis is associated with the responsibility of

truth-telling in cooperative inquiry, but by the next page it seems to be identified with nothing stronger than the repudiation of solipsism. And so it goes on. It could scarcely be less clear what - over and above the interdependence of individual inquirers acknowledged in traditional conceptions of testimony - Code's thesis that inquiry is social should be taken to amount to. It is little consolation to be told, by way of conclusion to the chapter, that 'to hold that knowledge is commonable ... shows [sic] something about the limitations of autonomy, the scope of commonability, and the need to become clearer about the interaction between the two' (196, my italics).

Code had insisted earlier in the book (67) that scientific knowledge should not be thought of as the paradigm for knowledge in general -

this despite the fact that she had conceded, just the page before, that the

'extraordinary reliability' of scientific knowledge 'is a consequence, in

part, of a peculiar and highly successful methodology that, in as impersonal a way as possible ... shapes the ensuing product.' In her discussion of epistemic community, however, she suggests that co-operative in-

quiry is especially important in science (227 ft.); so that science begins to look, after all, like a paradigm of knowledge-seeking by 'responsibilist' as well as reliabilist standards. But there may perhaps be an explanation - if not a justification - for Code's evident feeling that science should not be allowed to take too prominent a place in epistemology: her

emphasis on the importance of learning from literature. The suggestion, not unexpectedly, is that a responsibilist epistemol-

ogy is especially hospitable to an acknowledgement of the epistemic



104 Susan Haack

importance of literature. Now there is , I think, a sense in which this is true: namely, that literature is a fertile source of knowledge of the vagaries of human character, so that what we can learn from literature is especially interesting to an epistemologist concerned with epistemic virtue. The examples with which this review opened testify, I hope, to precisely this point.

17 And one might reasonably have expected that this is the point Code would emphasise, expecially since it is the specifically epistemic version of a point on which Maclntyre insists, viz., the value of narrative, historical or fictional, in depicting character and illuminat- ing the concept of virtue. Code had mentioned this point early in the book (28), but in her chapter on 'Literature, Truth and Understanding' she makes only the briefest reference to it (201). Instead this chapter is largely concerned with a quite different, and much less plausible, thesis: that a responsibilist epistemology can allow that we learn from literature, whereas, the implicit suggestion is, more traditional approaches encounter difficulty in acknowledging this.

Certainly the superiority of responsibilism in this regard is unproven by anything Code has to say. The problem, she tells us, derives from the 'outright falsity' of literature: 'how can knowledge come,' she asks, 'from what is avowedly and unabashedly not true?' (202)18 The solution, apparently, is supposed to be that whereas the epistemic mainstream concentrates on knowledge, responsibilist epistemology can accommodate understanding as well, and so can allow an epistemic role to literature as a source of understanding. This move seems, on the face of it, pretty uncompromising. After all, Code had told us in the introduction that she proposed to use the terms 'knowledge' and 'understanding' 'somewhat loosely and often interchangeably' (11). True. Despite this, she devotes part of a subsequent chapter to discussion of the concept of understanding; but this discussion doesn't leave one much the wiser, since it veers unsteadily between the modest suggestion that understanding is a matter of possessing, not just isolated bits of knowledge, but knowledge systematically interconnected, plus, perhaps, the knowledge that it is so

17 I hope I may be excused from the obligation to inquire whether the books from which my examples are taken count as literature or only as fiction, for nothing in Code's discussion seems to turn on the distinction. If the point is felt to be important, perhaps I may allude to Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (New York: Signet 1960 [1903]), as a work of literature offering an extraordinarily shrewd portrayal of the epistemic vice of self-deception.

18 In this context it would have been desirable for Code to have shown some appre- ciation of the possibility of distinguishing what is false and what is not true.




interconnected, and the baffling suggestion that understanding is a 'foun- dationless, criterionless, essentially puzzling something' (156). Certainly this leaves it no clearer how one could hope to gain understanding than how one could hope to gain knowledge from something untrue.

And as Code's chapter on literature proceeds, her opening move amply fulfils its lack of promise. On 204 it is suggested that literature gives us an understanding of particulars which 'has the capacity to go beyond itself.' On the next page the understanding derived from literature is described as a matter of 'knowing something about' what it is like to be in a certain sort of situation. On the next page it is claimed that literature 'creates a genuine semantic beyond discursive language [sic] where much of human affective experience can find expression/ And immediately after this Code extrapolates a distinction of Russell's to

propose that what is gained from literature is 'knowledge by second- hand acquaintance.' Code has virtually nothing to say about how all these proposals are supposed to fit together, nor about why they are supposed to be distinctively responsibilist, nor about how they are

supposed to overcome what she took to be the main obstacle to acknow-

ledging the epistemic value of literature. Of course, we can learn from literature. So how is this obstacle to be

overcome? One might start by considering fictional discourse from a

pragmatic perspective: a novel tells a story, but doesn't purport to be

fact-stating - as if it began, 'Imagine ....' The story a novel tells doesn't

purport to be true; indeed, if it is, as usually it is, peopled by fictional characters, it couldn't be true. But it supplies us with, so to speak, a story framework the sinews of which are hypotheses about human character and motives, hypotheses which could be true of real people. The reader of fiction thus taps a rich source of potentially explanatory hypotheses - and, if the novelist is a shrewd observer of human nature, of actually explanatory hypotheses.19 Inquiry involves coming up with hypotheses which, if true, would explain the truth of other things one believes; literature is a source of such hypotheses, which may - it they are

suitably supported by the inquirer's experience and his other beliefs -

constitute knowledge. This account accommodates the plausible idea that literature is a source of knowledge of a kind which might be

especially interesting to an epistemologist concerned with epistemic

19 Of course, fiction may also be a good source of potentially explanatory hypotheses about other matters besides human character. Cf. my allusion to Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City in 'Rebuilding the Ship/ section II.



106 Susan Haack

character, but offers no encouragement to the dubious suggestion that an acknowledgement of the possibility of learning from literature is feasible only if one adopts a responsibilist approach to epistemology.

I have taken Code to task for her inexactness, her disregard for clarity, for the unresolved ambiguities with which her book abounds - and for the confusion and muddle that results. She, however, more than once hints that the desire for precision, for clarity, for resolution of ambiguity in these matters is somehow misplaced or inappropriate. But these hints are themselves, I fear, indicative of confusion. Part of what Code has to say is that cognitive activity is often untidy and equivocal, and that traditional epistemological theorists represent it as more clear-cut and straightforward than it really is. And I'm sure there is some truth in this; perhaps, indeed, Code is expressing, albeit in a very unspecific way, something like the doubts about the feasibility of rules for the conduct of inquiry which I raised earlier. But it certainly doesn't follow that one shouldn't seek rigor in epistemology to the extent and in the respects in which it is feasible. Yet Code herself seems, not only not to aspire to much in the way of rigor or exactness, but almost to congratulate herself on avoiding the lures of what she apparently regards as a kind of intellectual snobbery.

Code refers approvingly to the 'cliche' that 'clarity is not enough' (203). I agree, of course, that clarity is not enough; indeed, I would add that it is commoner than one would like to encounter in contemporary analytic philosophy a kind of pseudo-precision which is no less regret- table than simple inexactness. But of course it doesn't follow from any of this that clarity is not desirable, let alone that fuzziness is any indica- tion of subtlety or profundity. Code also refers approvingly to Aristotle's observation that 'an educated person will expect accuracy in each subject only so far as the nature of the subject allows' (67). Again, I agree; indeed, I would add that it is salutary to recognise, also, that in the initial stages of an inquiry one may be obliged to settle for a lesser degree of precision than may become possible as the inquiry proceeds - for instance, to begin with metaphorical explanations which one is only later able to spell out literally.20 But of course it doesn't follow from any of this that one should settle, in any subject, for less accuracy than that subject allows, nor that one is relieved of the obligation to investigate

20 A point I develop in 'Surprising Noises: Rorty and Hesse on Metaphor/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87 (1987-8) 179-87.




just where, and how, the nature of a subject might limit what degree of clarification, refinement and disambiguation is possible.

Contrasting psychology and the other social sciences with literature, Code comments that 'the process I am concerned with here is directed towards coming to terms with ambiguity rather than achieving clarity' (204). But 'coming to terms with ambiguity7 is itself ambiguous. In one sense, coming to terms with ambiguity is desirable: in the sense that, faced with incomplete, inconclusive, perhaps conflicting evidence, a responsible inquirer should acknowledge that unless and until better evidence can be had he is not entitled to believe one way or the other. In this sense, there is no contrast with achieving clarity. In another sense, however, the sense in which it really is contrasted with achieving clarity, coming to terms with ambiguity is not desirable: in the sense that, faced with an ambiguous thesis or question, a responsible inquirer should not tolerate or ignore, but should try to resolve the ambiguity. If argument is needed, it is this: inquiry aims at the truth; so, since an ambiguous claim can be true in one sense and false in another, tolerance of ambiguity is apt to block the road of inquiry.21 As, in Code's case, I fear it has.22

Received: February, 1 989 ! SUSAN HAACK

University of Miami Coral Gables, FL 33124

USA

21 I allude, of course, to Peirce's slogan, 'Do not block the way of inquiry/ Collected

Papers, 1.135. This seems particularly appropriate in view of the fact that Code not

only expresses sympathy with pragmatism (27, n.ll), but even seems to congratulate Peirce on having anticipated a central strand of her position (50).

22 I wish to thank A. Phillips-Griffiths for comments on a draft, M.M. Warner for

discussion of Maclntyre, and L. Floridi for a conversation which prompted me to

try out the conjecture about the relation between questions of justification and

questions of epistemic character suggested above.



Documents

Epistemic Responsibilityby Lorraine Code