Thinker · TH-0394
Susan Haack
Susan Haack was a British philosopher who taught at Cambridge and Warwick before a long career at the University of Miami. Her early work…
On the Coordinates: 2.3 Structure of Justification
1945 – 2026 · Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick; Miami
Traditions: Analytic
Susan Haack was a British philosopher who taught at Cambridge and Warwick before a long career at the University of Miami. Her early work examined non-classical logics, and she later became known for foundherentism, a theory of justification combining elements of foundationalism and coherentism. She compared the structure of evidence to a crossword puzzle, where entries are supported both by their clues and by intersecting answers. She also wrote widely on pragmatism, the philosophy of science and evidence in the law.
Key ideas
- Foundherentism: experience gives beliefs some support, and beliefs also support one another.
- Justification works like a crossword: clues correspond to experiential evidence, intersecting entries to mutual support.
- Science is continuous with everyday inquiry, neither infallible nor a mere social construction.
- Deviant and non-classical logics deserve serious philosophical evaluation.
Major works
- Deviant Logic (1974)
- Philosophy of Logics (1978)
- Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993)
- Defending Science — Within Reason (2003)
In the conversation
- Discussion Why debates about first principles never end: notes from the high-school tournament circuit
- Question Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair
- Discussion A delusion can be more coherent than my own beliefs. What does that do to coherentism?
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Susan Haack takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 2.3 Structure of Justification Why do you believe that? And why do you believe that?