I have finished reading through James F. Harris’s book, Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method.  This provides me with the opportunity to start a new blog category too: Book Reviews!

Sure, it’s older book (written in 1992); but since Harris spends most of the time advocating the position of Charles Sanders Peirce, a 19th century (and early 20th century) philosopher, I think it’s fair :-)

Harris does an admirable job of debunking relativism, with special emphasis on that espoused by Quine, Goodman, Kuhn, Winch, Gadamer, and Laudan (with a final chapter dedicated to feminist philosophers).  His critique is specifically focused on the level of scientific knowledge, and as such it quickly runs to epistemological issues.

Harris’s book is certainly looking at meta-scientific questions in order to justify scientific method, which Harris defines as being primarily induction.  As such, Harris does a wonderful job refuting relativism; yet he does not do a great job at defending his own meta-scientific ideas.  In fact, in the end many of the questions he asks the relativist philosophers could be equally asked of his own position.

For example, in my previous post, I quoted Harris critiquing Quine’s idea of community object sentences.  It concluded with these questions:

What is to count as a member of the language community?  What is to count as the “same” sensory stimulus?  How do we know that people agree or disagree?  At any given point, how are we to trust our records of our earlier interviews with other members of the community?

(Harris, James F. (1992).  Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method, LaSalle: Open Court (p. 139)

Immediately after this, Harris gives us Peirce’s view, which he agrees with, summarized in the following manner:

Science and the scientific method are essentially public just as Wittgenstein argued that language is essentially public.  One can no more play a completely private game with oneself or perform essentially private inferences than one can use a private language.  What would it be like to win or lose?  Or even to make a proper or improper move?  What guarantor would there be of correct inference? …Science and inference and method are as much in need of some public standard and criterion as is language, and the community provides that standard according to Peirce.

(ibid, 153)

At this point, given his attack on Quine’s “community” language earlier, one would expect Harris to answer those questions he asked of Quine: how does one determine what the community is?  How do we determine agreement within the community?  Etc.

Instead, Harris ignores these questions completely!  He instead argues:

[Critics] have ignored the fact that the community provides us with the only possible kind of standard of truth and reality and method.

(ibid, 154)

But why is the appeal to community valid for Harris but not for Quine?  Harris never explains this, which leaves the book sorely lacking.

The end result is that the book is great for exposing relativism, but poor for providing an alternative since the very alternative Harris proposes falls under his same attacks.  Ultimately, this is because Harris is an atheist and does not have an actual self-consistent foundation to start from.

I would still recommend the book, however, because A) it does accomplish debunking relativism and B) it does accomplish debunking secularist responses, if one applies Harris’s arguments against other positions to Harris’s position as well.