1998 Reviews

Review of Susan Haack, Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism [Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996]

Varzi, Achille C.

This book has three main parts. As a defense of a philosophical position, Deviant
Logic retains its significance. But to the extent that Haack’s position combines a commitment (in principle) to the revisability of classical logic with a reluctance (in practice) to endorse any deviant system available on the market, to that extent the thesis itself calls for an update. The 1996 introduction goes a few steps in this direction. There is a brief dismissal of such new forms of “Logical Extremism” as dialethic logic and “feminist logic”. And there is, by contrast, a suggestion that some revision of classical logic might eventually come from “the efforts to achieve a better understanding of the propositional attitudes and modality, on the one hand, and explorations and reinterpretations prompted by the desire to overcome the restriction of quantification to individual variables, on the other”. But such remarks are dropped without elaboration, and the light they shed on Haack’s views is barely enough to make one wish she had gone on and said more.