Professor Chris Haufe delves into questions about what knowledge is at its core.

When personal opinions are cast as fact, the concept of “knowledge” may feel like a moving target. 

This phenomenon has shaped societies throughout history as people seek to organize and understand their surroundings—and ask: What is knowledge at its core? 

Chris Haufe, PhD, chair of the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, is on a mission to dig into this and other questions. An accomplished author and philosopher, he has considered them through various lenses, from assessing the role of metaphor in science to deciphering how we understand the humanities.

While the topics are varied, Haufe’s intent with each is the same: “For people to develop a more textured, refined, empirical, realistic and nuanced understanding of what knowledge is.” 

After falling in love with philosophy as a teenager reading works by linguist and academic Noam Chomsky, Haufe built his career on the ability to not just take down arguments—an early passion of his as a scholar—but to contribute intellectually to challenge how people think. 

Chris Haufe published Fruitfulness: Science, Metaphor, and the Puzzle of Promise in 2024.

“I try to look for problems that have a very general scope and could benefit from a historically informed philosophical treatment,” explained Haufe, the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities. “I like assessing the early stages of a theory or discipline to understand their roots and resulting impacts.”

As part of his assessments, Haufe has challenged the belief that the only kind of reliable knowledge is scientific knowledge. Instead, he argues that scientific knowledge begins not with immutable facts but with human judgments and definitions created to make sense of nature and study it.

Consider, for example, how early scholars understood electricity. They had intuitions about how they expected electricity to behave—and the way they thought about it shaped their framework for asking questions and developing theories. 

“You learn a lot more about scientific progress” from studying these early ideas than from the scientific method, Haufe said. “That [framework] only really comes in at the later stages after these concepts have been chosen and applied.” 

With one book set to publish in 2025, Haufe remains committed to pursuing—and reshaping—understandings about the concept of knowledge and how they are applied to both the natural sciences and the humanities.

“Without the guide of history to hone your views about what knowledge is, you’re going to have some really messed-up ideas,” he said. “I aim my work in the general direction of asking people to think about how we arrived at our current conception of knowledge, and whether it’s the conception we want.”

Christopher Haufe’s recent books include:

• Illusory Riches: the False Promise of Evolutionary Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2025)
  
• Fruitfulness: Science, Metaphor, and the Puzzle of Promise (Oxford University Press, 2024)
• Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• How Knowledge Grows: The Evolutionary Development of Scientific Practice (MIT Press, 2022)