A hundred years or so ago, C. S. Peirce, a working scientist as well as the greatest of American philosophers, distinguished genuine inquiry from "sham reasoning," pseudo-inquiry aimed not at finding the truth but at making a case for some conclusion immovably believed in advance; and predicted that, when sham reasoning becomes commonplace, people will come "to look on reasoning as merely decorative," and will "lose their conceptions of truth and of reason."

This is the very debacle taking place before our eyes: genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy "research" and politically-motivated "scholarship" have become so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, inquiry has been loosened. I want to talk about how this disaster came about, and the role played by the phenomenon Barzun calls "preposterism" in encouraging it.

Susan Haack Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
, Skeptical Inquirer magazine : November/December 1997