|
ix Drawing on work done over many years the book puts together a compact account of the basic principles of the theory of knowledge - a primer, if you will.
x As with all my writings, the book was initially written out by hand.
[JLJ - As with all of my writings, they are done directly to web page, such as this one. My personal books have no underlining.]
xiii The theory of knowledge has to seek for the difficult passage between virtual and absolute certainty, and indeed between mere plausibility and acceptability of any sort.
p.1 The present book will deal specifically with principles of cognition - the rules that govern procedures for the acquisition and management of information.
p.1 The function of procedural principles is to guide the process of decision.
p.3 Principles are instrumentalities and as such their rationale is always functional.
p.3 Not considerations of theory but success in implementing its products provides the proper criterion for the validity of procedural principles.
p.9 Ideas are the building blocks with which mind-endowed beings form their beliefs. They are mental artifacts devised to enable thought about things.
p.10 Ideas do not exist in the physical world: insofar as they can be said to exist they do so in the thought of mind-endorsed beings; and come into being when they are thought of... The mind creates its ideas
p.11 Spinoza's idea of ideas was right on target: "By 'idea' I understand a conception of the mind which the mind forms because it is a thinking being."
[JLJ - The mind forms ideas because the fundamental purpose of cognition is to reduce the complexity of what is perceived to the level of a child playing with blocks, and from there into wise, effective, practical and strategic schemes and plans to 'go on,' which are then executed.]
p.14 What we think to be true, our putative truth, is our surrogate for the actual truth. Our conceptions are the best we can achieve in the line of ideas.
[JLJ - The truth is... there are only truth claims.]
p.17 Abstractions though they are, ideas have a right and proper place in the scheme of things. They are tools of thought, instrumentalities of thinking.
p.18 All the same, the ultimate test of the adequacy of an idea is pragmatic. Whether or not it works out in use.
p.19 The aim of rational inquiry is to secure true information about things.
[JLJ - Here is where I disagree with Rescher. We might aim for the truth of course, but we will eventually settle for anything which lets us 'go on' practically in our current predicament.]
p.23 A presumption is a principle that qualifies claims as good candidates for acceptance, and plausibility is the status of claims that are so qualified.
[JLJ - The principle says no more than the presumptions deserve our time and attention at present - the emergent results from such efforts can effectively steer an investigation into unknown areas and as such are intermediate steps to the truth.]
p.24 Presumptions provide a step towards filling in - at least pro tem - the gaps that may otherwise confront us at any stage of information.
[JLJ - Presumptions, even if they are wrong, let an investigation proceed, where it might possibly stumble upon the right answer, even for the wrong reason. A presumption might even be 'correctable' - that is, not necessarily correct, but close enough to be 'corrected' by later information that is uncovered.]
p.25 Presumption is accordingly an epistemic policy - a general rule of procedure intrinsic to the way in which we construct our cognitive affairs.
[JLJ - ...or it is part of a scheme or strategy for 'going on', adopted because it offers good promise in areas that offer conflicting ways to proceed. Rescher does not address strategy in his writings, and this is unfortunate. Rationality does not offer direction when the way towards goals is unclear or contested, turning the problem into one of strategic maneuver. This becomes clear when you run a business, are at war or participate in sporting events. One adopts a strategy of maneuver, a directed effort that is ready for whatever occurs, and one values an adaptive capacity that one falls back on when surprised by the unforeseen.]
p.28 An unimpeded presumption - one that is not blocked by some conflicting but equally qualified presumption - automatically qualifies for acceptance as a rational conjecture ... Uncontradicted presumptions afford warranted conjectures.
[JLJ - Rescher misses the important result that conjectures work because they can represent intermediate steps to the truth - in effect, they may be wrong but might be 'correctable' in ways that lead toward the truth. Rescher's system does not conceive of emergent effects from intelligent probing efforts, that useful next steps can be obtained from the results of the previous steps.]
p.28 In the end a conjecture is going to turn out to be right or wrong, correct or incorrect, true or false. But in the prevailing state of our information we generally cannot as yet tell how matters will emerge in these regards.
p.29 While conjecture is little more than rationally well-managed guesswork, it is nevertheless one of the inevitable necessities of our cognitive situation.
p.35 even the best of available grounding does not always afford a categorical guarantee [of] the truth of objective factual claims. [JLJ - suspected typo]
p.36 What we accept as knowledge - our putative knowledge - is our surrogate for the truth.
p.37 knowledge calls for having a true belief that is appropriately justified.
p.40 The two key factors for the rational acceptance of claims are their substantiation and coordination. The former is a matter of a claim's evidentiation and credibility on its own merits; the latter is a matter of its fit into the wider environment of what is otherwise accepted - its contributions to the harmonization of our putative knowledge of things.
p.41 the cognitive status of the conclusion cannot outrank that of the weakest premises. The chain can be no stronger than its weakest link.
p.42 what we are warranted in accepting as the product of a properly managed inquiry constitutes the truth of the matter.
[JLJ - This is the best that Rescher can do since he does not agree with my perspective that the primary function of cognition is to develop a way to 'go on' in the present predicament, and that accomplished, to prepare likewise for future ones. A court proceeding or investigation produces a result (not necessarily the truth) and both sides have to go on with it. The human mind looks at the cat on the mat and simply decides to 'go on' as if there is truly a cat on the mat. Whether or not a true cat is on a true mat is important only if you would be harmed by an imitation of sorts. Rescher's example would change dramatically if he used instead a gun in a hand pointed at you. Would you now care if it was in fact a true gun? I think so.]
p.47 there just is no one single proper way of fixing upon an acceptability threshold in cognitive matters.
p.49 Cognitive importance... is an index of the extent to which one thing deserves more attention (time, effort, energy) than another.
p.50 An extremely interesting subject can be relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things. (The prominence of sporting competitions or games like chess or contract bridge, for example - shows that things can be extremely interesting to people without being very important in themselves.)
p.50 knowledge development is a practice in which we engage with respect to [ends] in view. [JLJ - corrected apparent typo]
p.61-62 Oversimplification always leads to errors of omission. It occurs whenever someone ignores features of an item that bear upon a correct understanding of its nature... some oversimplification is inevitable for limited intelligences seeking to come to grips cognitively with an endlessly complex world.
p.63 The great benefit of imprecision is that it enables us to convey information much more readily... Precision is simply unachievable in certain matters.
p.64 Precision is not needed for most practical purposes... In practical contexts of action and decision, precision need [not] be of concern beyond the needs of the immediate situation at hand.
p.65 Whether or to what extent detail matters critically depends upon just exactly what the issue under consideration happens to be... Achieving exactness and enhancing precision is not a cost-free enterprise... Imprecision is a natural response to the demands of economy and conservation of effort.
p.66 The dispensability of precision in matters of life-sustaining action is essential to our viability as the sort of intelligent beings we humans are.
p.66 Aristotle tells us in the Nichomachaen Ethics that "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of thing just insofar as the nature of the subject admits" (1094b-24-26)... the present analysis... argues for the futility of requiring precision beyond the limits of utility. For in virtually all contexts, theoretical and practical alike, there is only so much precision we can use... there is no point to carrying matters beyond this.
p.69 here two approaches toward those proportionately obvious intuitive facts are available. The one is to accept them at face value as facts with which our cognition has to come to terms... The other approach is to see those evident commonplaces as true and correct not categorically but only presumptively... Accordingly, what we take to be so on the basis of sight would be seen not [as] a matter of fact but one of presumption.
p.70 We are certainly prepared to accept presumptive claims as true. But not unconditionally and without question. Rather their acceptance is tentative, provisional, qualified.
p.79 With inquiry the very process of accession enlarges the scope of the work that is yet to be done... Epistemic growth over time accordingly relates not only to what is "known" but also to what can be asked.
[JLJ - ...which is also why we need to constantly ask ourselves, "how much should I care about that?", and we need to develop heuristics which tell us when we can ignore certain things or sequences, or when it is likely safe to throw away information.]
p.87 The important things are clearly those that count and the unimportant ones those that don't. But how is the score to be kept?
p.88 The pivotal question is: How large a penalty in reduced resources - lost time, money, understanding, or the like - would be entailed by the loss or neglect of the item whose importance is under consideration? ... information we currently deem unimportant may well eventually emerge to be otherwise.
p.88 Things do not become important merely because people attach importance to them.
p.89 The importance of a cognitive issue is thus measurable by the comparative volume of resources that its cultivation merits.
p.89 the crucial determinative factor for increasing importance is the extent of seismic disturbance of the cognitive terrain.
p.90 Importance is, or should be, [an] indispensable guide to the alternatives [JLJ - allocation?] of scarce resources - time, effort, and treatise - in managing our cognitive affairs.
p.91 the predictive enterprise conducted at any given juncture inevitably reflects the prevailing state of knowledge.
p.94 Prediction, in sum, is a cognitive venture process whose successful pursuit is inseparably bound up with factual matters regarding the nature of the world's modus operandi... Admittedly, prediction is always to some extent a leap into the unknown.
p.96 Our epistemic situation is such that there is no categorical and automatic guarantee that objective factual claims for whose acceptance we have warranted evidentiation are in fact true.
[JLJ - The truth is... there are only truth claims.]
p.98 there are many questions which can be answered with confident assurance, only when approximation is accepted and imprecision admitted.
p.100 the greater our informative need... the greater the risk of error that we are rationally entitled to run.
p.101 The crucial fact is that inquiry, like virtually all other human endeavors, is not a cost-free enterprise. The process of getting plausible answers to our questions also involves costs and risks. Whether these costs and risks are worth incurring depends on an assessment of the potential benefit to be gained.
p.108 Our putative knowledge, the claims for whose acceptance we have adequate rational warrant, is not thereby a body of categorically assured truth. In matters of cognition, as elsewhere, we can be mistaken.
p.110 We proceed in cognitive matters in much the same way that banks proceed in financial matters. We extend credit to our informative sources and resources, doing so first to only a relatively modest extent. When and if they comport themselves in a manner that shows that this credit was well deserved and warranted, we proceed to give them more credit and extend their credit limit, as it were. They improve their credit rating in cognitive contexts much as people and institutions do in financial contexts.
p.119 No resolution has been turned out as its imaginators foreshaped.
p.121 we can only obtain information about the real world through the experience of interacting with it, by observing what happens be it the natural course of events or in the wake of experimental interactions.
p.123 if there are interactions to which we have no access, then there are bound to be phenomena which we cannot discern.
p.126-127 The history of science is the story of the replacement of one defective, over-simple theory by another... at no actual stage does natural science yield a firm, final, unchanging result... there is no justification for viewing our science as more than one imperfect stage within an ongoing sequence of development... what we proudly vaunt as scientific knowledge is a tissue of hypotheses - of tentatively adopted contentions of many or most of which we will ultimately come to regard as requiring serious revision or perhaps even abandonment.
p.137 In thinking about what I know with regard to matters of fact I am invariably brought face-to-face with my ignorance - with what I do not know.
[JLJ - Yes, but a human is not designed to know everything (sorry Nicholas this includes you) - just what is needed to "go on." The rest can wait if we have a degree of adaptive capacity, ignorance of course is bliss, until it starts to impact the ability to "go on." We can wisely conduct or construct diagnostic tests of emerging situations and determine what we would have liked to have known but didn't - then we can go out and learn that.]
p.150 Instead of merely representing a facet of the organization of our (otherwise preexistent) knowledge, systematicity is to provide an operative force in the very constituting of this knowledge... In sum, systematization provided not just an organizer of what we accept, but an effective criterion of acceptability.
p.152 alignment with the best-available systematization is, in the prevailing circumstances, bound to afford our best realizable estimate of the truth of the matter.
p.156 I take myself to be looking at a cat on the mat.
[JLJ - Truly, what harm would result is there was a grand scheme to replace the cat on the mat with a cleverly designed and implemented mechanical imitation? Would you suffer serious and unrepairable harm? I think not. This is why to go on as if there was truly a cat on the mat is a practical way to resolve the question.]
p.162 Virtually every step in the history of human innovation and invention has come about in the wake of someone asking about imaginary possibilities, speculating about what would happen if and reflecting on yet-unrealized and perhaps unrealizable possibilities.
p.162 Sometimes we endorse the fiction that something is what it is not and we imagine real things to be what they actually are not so as to have an X that is not Y serve symbolically as a Y-proxy.
[JLJ - Yes, this is why we search and evaluate to great depths when 'playing' a game of chess... the future that emerges is always unclear, but our search-and-evaluate represents a proxy for what we cannot see, and it is okay for this to be wrong as long as we use it to diagnose artifacts of interactions that are not clear in the present, in order to position ourselves accordingly.]
p.163 The purposive nature of surrogacy makes it clear that the equivalency-range at issue is going to have a decidedly limited scope... Surrogacy involves what is literally false (fiction) but is not a matter of lying. Surrogacy is not falsification: there is no misleading about its involvement with a fully acknowledged fiction... surrogacy makes it possible to deal on a here-and-now basis with something that is distant... or absent... or abstract... or too cumbersome... or otherwise unavailable. Often an effective and efficient pursuit of our ends and purposes in the domain of fact proceeds by judicious use of patent fictions... the validation of surrogacy lies in considerations of convenience and practical utility.
p.164 The main function of symbolic surrogacy [is] to create access and [to make] practices easier and more convenient. For surrogacy can... lay claim to justification on grounds of functional utility
[JLJ - Does Rescher miss the important fact that surrogates can stand in for actuals when constructing diagnostic tests? For example, one takes practice SAT tests not only to be ready for the actual SAT, but more importantly, to point out specific areas where you are likely not ready, and need more study. A fire drill is a surrogate for an actual emergency evacuation, where lessons learned can prepare for an actual emergency. An "evaluation" performed by a computer "playing" chess is likely of a position that will never be reached in the actual game being played, but nevertheless helps (with the whole set of other evaluations) to diagnose or estimate the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion.]
p.166 The reality of it is that knowledge about the world does not fall into our brains, unasked for, like rain from the heavens. We have to produce it by inquiry, by means of observation, speculation, verification... The validation of our cognitive proceedings ultimately lies in the effectiveness of our putative knowledge in providing us with effective guidance through the shoals and narrows of a challenging world.
|
