On the Nature of Philosophy and Other Philosophical Essays 9783110320206, 9783110319996

Table of contents :
THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS: Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One: THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY
Chapter Two: PHILOSOPHICAL REFUTATION
Chapter Three: PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
Chapter Four: SELF-CONTRADICTION
Chapter Five: ON ISSUES OF PRIORITY
Chapter Six: THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE
Chapter Seven: COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY
Chapter Eight: INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE
Chapter Nine: ETHICS 101: THE BASICS OF MORALITY
Chapter Ten: THOUGHT FASHIONS
Chapter Eleven: MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION
Name Index

Citation preview

Nicholas Rescher On the Nature of Philosophy And Other Philosophical Essays

Nicholas Rescher

On the Nature of Philosophy And Other Philosophical Essays

Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected] United Kingdom, Eire, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected]

Livraison pour la France et la Belgique: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin 6, place de la Sorbonne; F-75005 PARIS Tel. +33 (0)1 43 54 03 47; Fax +33 (0)1 43 54 48 18 www.vrin.fr

2012 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-137-5 2012 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by CPI buch bücher gmbh

THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1:

The Nature of Philosophy

1

Chapter 2:

Philosophical Refutation

11

Chapter 3:

Pragmatism and Philosophical Inquiry

17

Chapter 4:

Self-Contradiction

27

Chapter 5:

On Issues of Priority

37

Chapter 6:

The Mirage of Immediate Factual Knowledge

43

Chapter 7:

Cognitive Complementarity

57

Chapter 8:

Induction in Pragmatic Perspective

81

Chapter 9:

Ethics 101: The Basics of Morality

99

Chapter 10: Thought Fashions

107

Chapter 11: Multiaspectival Evaluation

111

Name Index

127

Preface

T

he present book continues my longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays. Notwithstanding their thematic diversity, these discussions exhibit a uniformity of method in addressing philosophical issues via a mixture of historical contextualization, analytical scrutiny, and common-sensical concern. Their interest, such as it is, lies not just in what they do but in how they do it. I am grateful, as ever, to Estelle Burris for her conscientious and competent helpfulness in preparing this material for printing. Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA October 2011

Chapter One THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

P

hilosophy is identified as one particular human enterprise among others by its characterizing mission of providing satisfactory answers to the “big questions” that we have regarding the world’s scheme of things and our place within it. And these big issues relate to fundamental of human concern, being universal in dealing with humans at large rather than particular groups thereof (farmers or doctors or Europeans or contemporaries of Shakespeare). Philosophical deliberations must have a bearing—direct or oblique—for the key essentials of the human condition—knowledge and truth, justice and morality, beauty and goodness, and the like. In its dealing with such issues, philosophy principally asks questions having two forms: • Clarifactory questions issuing from the format “Elucidate the nature of X (e.g., of truth, knowledge, justice).” • Explanatory questions issuing from the format “Explain why P is so (e.g., why knowledge is not simply a matter of true belief).” Either way, grappling with those “big questions” seeks to facilitate our understanding of the nature of things. The instruments of philosophizing are ideational resources of concepts and theories, and it deploys them in a quest for understanding, in the endeavor to create an edifice of thought able to provide us with an intellectual home that affords a habitable thought shelter in a complex and challenging world. The history of philosophy accordingly involves an ongoing intellectual struggle to develop ideas that render comprehensible the seemingly endless diversity and complexity that surrounds us on all sides. As a venture in providing rationally cogent answers to our questions about large-scale issues of belief, evaluation, and action, philos-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

2

ophy is a key sector of the cognitive enterprise at large. And since a rational creature acts on the basis of its beliefs—philosophy also has a bearing on action, so as to implement the idea of PHILOSOPHIA BIOU KUBERNÊTÊS—the motto of the American Phi Beta Kappa honorary society which proclaims philosophy to be a guide to life. What is it that makes someone who thinks, talks, and writes about matters of human interest a philosopher? And what is it that defines a body of discourse as philosophical? It is one thing to deliberate about human affairs, and something different and rather distinctive to philosophize about them. The political theorists, the economist, and the theologian all discuss matters of importance for what we humans think and do. But their deliberations do not thereby belong to philosophy as such. Of course, the first requisite for a specifically philosophical deliberation is that it deals with philosophical issues. This means that it must be reliable to resolving those big questions of man’s place in the world’s scheme of things—matters which—like the nature and requisites of truth, knowledge, beauty, goodness, justice, etc.—are of fundamental concern for intelligent beings who live in social interaction. To be sure, philosophical discussions need not always deal with these great matters directly and explicitly. But there must be meansends connectivity; a philosophical discussion that is, it must deal with issues whose resolution facilitates answers to questions which deal with problems whose answer facilitates etc. until at least we reach issues that do deal explicitly and immediately with those big issues themselves. To be sure, many a philosophical discussion does not look to be such but has this status only in a way that is oblique and nonexplicit. It is not directed at three big questions directly but only via chain of means and filiation. For what it does is to address a question whose answer is needed to resolve a question etc. whose answer is needed in its turn to resolve a still further question, until at last a linkage to those big issues is achieved. A second prime requisite relates to the method of procedure. For rational deliberation is crucial to philosophizing: merely giving opinions or proclaiming individual or alternative preferences or condemnations will not qualify as philosophical. The provision of supporting considerations for one’s judgments is crucial to the enterprise.

3

ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

A third definitive feature of philosophical deliberation is its concern for normative issues. For philosophy, properly coordinated, deals not with what people have said in the past or maintain in the present. Its concern, rather, is with what people should think and maintain with regard to these issues. The key concern of the enterprise is with cogent answers to the questions and good reasons for proposing them. In the quest for truth the philosopher’s concern is not with what people do think and say but with what they should think and say if their views are to be substantiated as acceptable to others. To qualify as plausible, a philosophical discussion must develop a case for its conclusion whose cogency in the circumstances could and should be apparent to anyone. The philosopher must provide a rationale for his claims—a manifold of good reasons why anyone, anywhere should accept them. The methodology of philosophy is impersonal reason. And the universality of reasons is crucial here. Philosophy cannot be grounded on individualized predilections or personal preferences. Only what can and should be seen to make sense for anyone in the circumstances will carry philosophical weight. Why is it that philosophy pivots on reasoned inquiry? The answer is that we are homo sapiens, a rational animal. We do not want just answers to our questions, but answers that can satisfy the demands of our intelligence—answers that we can in good conscience regard as appropriate, as tenable and defensible. We are not content with answers people would like to have (psychologism) nor with answers that are theoretically available (possibility mongering). What we want is cogent guidance regarding which answers to adopt—which contentions are correct or at any rate plausible. And reason affords our prime standard in this regard. A further key procedural requisite of philosophizing lies in an engagement with the tradition. The philosopher must take some account of the deliberations of his predecessors of days past and his colleagues of the contemporary scene. To qualify as lying within this field, his discussions must have some enmeshment within the wider discussionsetting of the field. Granted, agreement on this point has not been universal. Basically three positions that have been taken with regard to the relationship between philosophy and its history:

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

4

1. There is no real difference here. The two are coordinated because philosophy is constituted by its own history. To philosophize is simply to consider the history of philosophy in a certain perspective. 2. The linking of philosophy has no more to do with philosophy as such then the history of chemistry (say) has to do with chemistry as such. Any branch of inquiry is best constituted by its present condition—as far as we can ever tell. For sure, any given state of the art in inquiry emerges from its predecessors—no doubt the past plays a developmentally productive role here—but the actual field is best characterized by its present condition and the past is substantively irrelevant. In inquiring where you geographically are how you got there is doctrinally irrelevant. 3. The history of philosophy is hermeneutically crucial for philosophizing. It is an indispensably useful resource for philosophical work. For determining what position one should take on a philosophical issue requires knowing what positions one can take and the history of philosophy is an immensely useful resources here—a treasure house of ideas and possibilities. In comparing these it deserves note that the third, middle-of-the-road position—which sees the history of the subject as neither coordinative for nor yet irrelevant to it—appears to be the most plausible. And there is good reason why this should be so. As already noted above, what marks a question as philosophical— as belonging to this particular discipline (rather than, say chemistry or horticulture)? This is obvious with respect to those “big questions” themselves. And as to other philosophical questions, this emerges from convolutions of means-ends connectivity: we need answers to these questions whose concerns we need to address those questions … and so on until we return to those big questions themselves. And just this means-ends connectivity is the dialectic that the history of philosophy traces out over the ages.1 But why don’t philosophers agree on the issues? The story here is long and complicated. But the short version lies in a difference in pri-

5

ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

orities. The issues of philosophy are convoluted thought-traps and there are different—and circumstantially cogent—ways of resolving them.2 Priorities reflect experiential circumstances. And even as in inductive reasoning our conclusions must (rationally) reflect the state of the evidence, so in philosophy our positions must (rationally) reflect the range and substance of our experience. In giving structure to their thought philosophers are allegiant to the “data” of their subject: the findings of science, the common sense facts of life, the cognitions of their culture-context, the fabric of their personal experience, the ideas of their predecessors. In addressing their questions, they endeavor to construct a systematic structure that accommodates the bearing of this mass of material. The resulting problem is like the constructive of a jigsaw puzzle with extra pieces— the materials being so profuse and decisive that all the pieces simply cannot be fitted in. Some must be sacrificed to others. The resulting situation is aporetic, an apory being a group of individually plausibly but collectively inconsistent beliefs. Thus consider an historical example drawn from the Greek theory of virtue: 1. If virtuous action does not produce happiness (pleasure) then it is motivationally impotent and generally pointless. 2. Virtue in action is eminently pointful and should provide a powerfully motivating incentive. 3. Virtuous action does not always—and perhaps not even generally—produce happiness (pleasure). It is clearly impossible—on grounds of mere logic alone—to maintain this family of contentions. At least one member of the group must be abandoned. But of course if we are going to be sensible about it we will be under the rational obligation to provide some sort of account—some rationale—to justify this step whatever particular exit from inconsistency we adopt will have to be accompanied by a story of science and that justifies this step.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

6

And so with the preceding virtue illustration we face the choice among the following alternatives: 1-Abandonment: Maintain that virtue has substantial worth quite on its own account even if it does not produce happiness or pleasure (Stoicism, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius). 2-Abandonment: Dismiss virtue as ultimately unfounded and unrationalizable, viewing morality as merely a matter of the customs of the country (Sextus Empiricus) or the will of the rulers (Plato’s Thrasymachus). 3-Abandonment: Insist that virtuous action does indeed always yield happiness or pleasure—at any rate to the right-minded. Virtuous action is inherently pleasure-producing for fully rational agents, so that the virtue and happiness are inseparably interconnected (Plato, the Epicureans). When an apory confronts us, a forced choice among the propositions involved becomes unavoidable. We cannot maintain the status quo but must, one way or another, “take a position”—some particular thesis must be abandoned as it stands. In such cases there is always a physicality of avenues to consistency restoration. And with different evaluations and priorities reflecting different courses of personal experience, there cannot but be different ways of proceeding—each of them leading to different morals of doctrinal commitment. It emerges from this perspective that the history of philosophy is a crucial resource for the work of philosophizing (1) because it serves to define the questions at issue since the question agenda of the present is formed and concretized by the discussions of the past, and (2) because it provides the working philosopher with the concepts, ideas, and lines of reasoning that are indispensable resources for his own work. After all, for over two and one-half millennia philosophers have reasoned, speculated, and argued about the “big issues” of the field. The best minds of the race have canvassed the issues from top to bottom. They have created a deposit of thought that our present-day discussions

7

ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

cannot defensibly put aside. After all, almost every inch of the ground has been gone over time and again. To ignore the history of the subject is to commit oneself to re-making the wheel—and in doing this we will generally manage to produce a less perfect wheel than was already there. The past efforts of its practitioners being grist to the mill of our present-day philosophizing that we can neglect only at our own detriment and loss. And so, returning to our main line of thought, we note that philosophizing involves four definitive factors: • A thematic engagement with “the big issues”. • A Methodology of rational substantiation. • A normative erotetic concern not just for possible answers but for good answers to the questions of the field. • An Historical contextualization of the issues through interaction with the field of philosophical discourse as it has unfolded over the ages. But what now of the thinker who says “It is all very well to say that this is the sort of thing that philosophers have traditionally been about? But I just don’t want to play the traditional game.” This calls for the following response: “You are a free being. No-one is going to force you to do philosophy (as standardly understood). There are lots of other things to do: journalism, sociology, mathematics, etc. But if you want to be a philosopher, then this is the sort of venture you have to take in hand because it is just this that defines the nature of the enterprise at issue. To say that people should call philosophy something else is much like saying that they should call cold cuts something else.” And it deserves note that the big stars of the philosophical firmament have generally scored well with regards to those four factors. Granted, some thinkers widely accounted among philosophers have fallen drastically short on one or another of these respects. And some have fallen significantly short in all several respects as for example,

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

8

Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Ayn Rand. There are three possible reactions here • To reject the traditionalistic account of philosophy as mistaken. • To see these people as simply misclassified—as doing interesting things alright but things that don’t qualify their thought as strictly speaking philosophical. • To regard qualifying as a philosopher as a matter of degree (of more or less) and to categorize these people as only remotely or marginally qualified accounted as philosophers. The question comes down to a choice among alternatives. As these people are to be seen as genuine but nontraditionary philosophers, as genuine but nontypical philosophers, or as thinkers who are nonphilosophers engaged in some different albeit remotely related enterprise. This question poses a choice so heavily involved with matters of taste and preference rather than reason that in the end it cannot itself qualify as a philosophical question in the sense presently at issue. And it is just this consideration that suggests those marginal figures to be engaging in philosophical rhetoric rather than philosophizing proper. After all, the question of the nature of philosophy—of what sort of activity can count as philosophizing—is not in the end a philosophical question as much as a lexicographical one, and the ground rules of determining meaning through usage principles here as much as elsewhere. The philosopher is free to write and think as he pleases. But he is not in control of whether the products of his brain are to be characterized as philosophical any more than then the shoemaker or the agonist would be in analogous circumstances. However, the question of whether a discussion qualifies as good philosophizing is something else again. It indeed is a philosophical question. One man’s weird eccentric and extreme position is another’s innovative and illuminating insight. And for some, the value of an intelligent position lies exactly in its departure from well-grounded familiar orthodoxy.

9

ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY

Display 1 Eccentrics

Era-Comparable Traditionalists

F. Nietzsche (11.3)

J. S. Mill (4.7)

K. Popper (2.1)

R. Carnap (0.4)

Ayn Rand (8.5)

W. V. Quine (0.4)

J. Derrida (4.3)

H. Gadamer (0.6)

L Wittgenstein (5.0)

E. Casserer (0.7)

B. Russell (7.7)

E. Husserl (3.1)

NOTE: the numbers indicate Google scores (in millions) as of August, 2011.

Just this, so Karl Popper taught that eccentricity marks the significance of scientific discovery. As he saw it, scientific progress is a matter of conjecture and refutation—and the wilder the conjecture by prevailing standards—the greater (so long as it remains refuted) is its cognitive value. And it seems that for many the same principle is operative in philosophy (where, of course, refutation is more difficult to manage). For such people anything that approaches what is frequently acceptable and common-sensical is anathema. Not just in decoration but in doctrine. They yearn for what is odd, unfamiliar, out-of-the-way. The ironic fact is that the overall response to the work of the eccentrics and the impact they make through the scope of their reception widely outruns and outranks that of their more orthodox and traditionalist compeers. This all too seldom acknowledged fact is vividly brought to light by citation statistics. To all appearances, Conditionalists have to reckon on a statistical bias here. It is in this context to draw the contrast between the professionals and the amateurs, the practitioners and the interested bystanders, with the professoriate of the academic profession as a first-approximation

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

10

to the former. Clearly, the former, the professional practitioners, are more conservative in favoring the plausible-seeming and wellentrenched positions, although the eccentrics also have a following among the professionals. Nevertheless the fact is that on the whole the eccentrics dominate in popularity and that they do so in large measure owing to their popularity among the nonprofessionals and despite their unpopularity among many professionals who would often—without hesitation—decline to see them as colleagues and fellow practitioners at all. For those traditionalistic professionals the greater impact of the eccentrics is virtually unintelligible and thoroughly frustrating. Nevertheless the fact remains that if one makes the presumption that professional dedication is an index of competence, one cannot avoid the conclusion that it would be problematic and questionable that in philosophical matters wide interest and extensive preoccupation can serve as an index of merit. NOTES 1

For further details on this dialectical process see the present author’s The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

2

The author’s The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985) is dedicated to these issues.

Chapter Two PHILOSOPHICAL REFUTATION 1. MODES OF INADEQUACY

I

ssues of significance apart—i.e., of importance, interest, insightfulness, originality, and the like—the critique of a philosophical position can move in three directions, according as the subject of complaint takes the line of: • flawed formulation —inconsistency —uninformativeness: incoherence/unclarity/unintelligibility • inadequate substantiation • problematic tenability Philosophical refutation will in general proceed by fault-finding with regard to one or the other of these critical respects. Let us consider them in turn. 2. CONSISTENCY Consistency—the absence of self-contradiction—is the most obvious requirement of philosophical adequacy. We simply cannot place trust in a discussion whose contentions are so indifferent to the basic ground-rules of rational communication as to abandon a commitment to the rational co-tenability of what is being claimed.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

12

3. INFORMATIVENESS/CLARITY Informativeness, a further cardinal requirement of philosophical adequacy, has two key aspects. The first and most basic is intelligibility, the requirement that something of discernible significance is being said. And the other is the clarity of recognizable precision as to just what is being maintained and what denied. Confusion or unclarity in this regard is obviously a fatal flaw in philosophical exposition. 4. UNTENABILITY/PROBATIVE INDEFICIENCY A further third crucial requirement of philosophical adequacy is tenability. It must be clear that there is no basis for subjecting the position being maintained to out-of-hand rejection on the grounds of inadequate substantiation. Perhaps the most obvious way to call a philosophical claim into questions is to establish its probative indeficiency by showing the inadequacy of its substantiation. After all, philosophy is to be the work of reason and a failure to provide sound reasons for one’s claim is a decisive flaw in philosophizing. But this sort of objection does not of course reach very far. The situation it projects is the following • A philosopher makes the claim that P. • The argumentation he gives for p is insufficient. And this, of course, does not show that there is anything wrong with P itself. It is, at bottom, a critique of the philosopher, as a poor reasoner but does not really touch upon the issue. It critiques the claimant rather than the claim. A position is not shown to be false because its supporters do advance bad arguments in its favor. To address the claim itself we shall have to look elsewhere. Failures of tenability arise when a philosophical contention becomes entangled in unacceptable involvements. This can happen in different ways. Principally it arises when the position and/or some of its evident consequences

13

PHILOSOPHICAL REFUTATION

• are false to fact (run counter to science, or common knowledge), • are inherently implausible (patently absurd, violations of common sense), • run counter to one’s personal experience. Consider the first of these—a clash with acceptable fact. Dr. Johnson sought to refute Berkeley’s immaterialism by changing it with denying that there are rocks in the world. This would indeed have been a fatal flaw, if it held good, though Berkeley’s defenders were quick to respond that Berkeley’s position did not deny the existence of rocks but rather sought to advocate a certain particular (idealistic) view regarding their nature. Or again take implausibility. When the followers of Descartes saw themselves committed to hold that animals were mere mechanisms like clockwork, and thereby incapable of feeling and pain their opponents fixed on the implausibility and counter-intuitiveness of this position as a fatal flaw in Cartesian doctrine. Finally, when Norman Malcolm denied the occurrence of dreams and maintained that there were no dreams as such but only retrospective having-had-a-dream imagining, this was greeted with diversion by many who viewed it as flatly contrary to their own experience. 5. HOW FAILURES OF TENABILITY ARISE The unacceptability entanglement at issue with failures of tenability generally arises in one of two ways: • via untenable consequences and • via untenable analogies. The former case—that of untenable consequences—is a matter of deriving problematic conclusions from the contentions at issue. Clearly,

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

14

if their consequences are untenable then the contentions and doctrine that yield them will themselves be untenable. The second analogical case is more complex and subtle, in that it proceeds not via inference but via the construction of problematic analogies. The reasoning at issue is based on the paradigm: If you say X as you propose to do in the present case, then you would have to say Y in certain cases that are relevantly analogous in this one, and that would be absurd or otherwise problematic.

The following affords an illustration of this sort of refutatory reasoning: If you hold that people who perform, by situational parallelism, evil deeds cannot be held responsible for their actions, then you will have to hold that people who do saintly act cannot be given credit for them, and this would be absurd.

6. FLAWLESSNESS DOES NOT ESTABLISH TRUTH Freedom from flaws does not constitute proof of correctness. A position that fails to exhibit its flaws is not thereby established as correct. This is so because within the overall spectrum of positions there might be a plurality of conflicting alternatives that cannot be eliminated by way of the usual techniques. When we are about to toss a dice the claim that the outcome will be 1 cannot be refuted but it is not thereby established as correct. Non-failure is not the same as success. There is not automatic transit from a lack of flaws to positive adequacy. And this consideration is of special importance in the present context. For it means that a flaw-free position is not thereby established as correct. The philosopher who expects his views to be established has a good deal of positive work to do. Showing that his position can be defended against its critics does not suffice to make good its claims to acceptability. Removing obstacles does not as such produce a successful journey. In matters of belief and inquiry, freedom from flaws does not entail truth and adequacy; it does no more than to betoken possibility. One

15

PHILOSOPHICAL REFUTATION

of the 50 people at the party stole John’s wallet. There is no obstacle to Henry’s having done so—he had the means, opportunity, and motive. But this nowise establishes the conclusion that he did the crime. Establishing the availability of a problem solution is something far short of demanding its truth. And the situation is exactly the same in the context of philosophical problem-solving. Removing the obstacles in the way of philosophical contention does not establish its correctness. Availability is not acceptability. From the fact that a certain position has the finest flaws, we certainly cannot deduce that this position is true. The most we can do is • to see ourselves to be rationally justified to deem this position to be the most tenable, • to take the stance that as a matter of practical rationality our optimal policy is to accept this position as true. But the acceptance at issue is not a matter of demonstration but rather only of practical reasoning which, while it does not prove something, reveals it to be the best available option. But an important point deserves notice here: to wit the great value of obstacle-removal in philosophy. Granted, this does not as such resolve a problem. The negation of a negativity does not yield a positivity here. But since philosophical problems deal with issues so ramified and recondite that virtually all of their solutions face obstacles, it is bound to be informative and constructive to seeing how—and at what cost—these can be removed.

Chapter Three PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY 1. THE NEED FOR PHILOSOPHY

A

t the heart of the cognitive enterprise lies the human curiosity rooted in the need-to-know of a weak and vulnerable creature emplaced in a difficult and often hostile environment in which it must make its evolutionary way by its wits. For we must act—our very survival depends upon it—and a rational animal must align its actions with its beliefs. We have a very real and material stake in securing viable answers to our questions as to how things stand in the world we live in. The discomfort of unknowing is a natural human sentiment. To be ignorant of what goes on about one is unpleasant to the individual and dangerous to the species from an evolutionary point of view. As William James wisely observed: The utility of this emotional affect of expectation is perfectly obvious; “natural selection,” in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects that surround him.1

There is good reason why we humans pursue knowledge—it is our evolutionary destiny. Humans have evolved within nature to fill the ecological niche of an intelligent being. We are neither numerous and prolific (like the ant and the termite), nor tough and aggressive (like the shark). Weak and vulnerable creatures, we are constrained to make our evolutionary way in the world by the use of brainpower. It is by knowledge and not by hard shells or sharp claws or keen teeth that we have carved out our niche in evolution’s scheme of things. The demand for understanding, for a cognitive accommodation to one’s environment, for “knowing one’s way about,” is one of the most funda-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

18

mental requirements of the human condition. Addressing our questions constitute a substantial part of our life’s agenda, providing the impetus that gives rise to our knowledge—or putative knowledge—of the world. Our species is Homo quaerens. We have questions and want (nay, need) answers. In situations of cognitive frustration and bafflement we cannot function effectively as the sort of creature nature has compelled us to become. Confusion and ignorance—even in such “remote” and “abstruse” matters as those with which philosophy deals—yield psychic dismay and discomfort. The old saying is perfectly true: philosophy bakes no bread. But it is also no less true that man does not live by bread alone. The physical side of our nature that impels us to eat, drink, and be merry is just one of its sides. Homo sapiens requires nourishment for the mind as urgently as nourishment for the body. We seek knowledge not only because we wish, but because we must. For us humans, the need for information, for knowledge to nourish the mind, is every bit as critical as the need for food to nourish the body. Cognitive vacuity or dissonance is as distressing to us as hunger or pain. We want and need our cognitive commitments to comprise an intelligible story, to give a comprehensive and coherent account of things. For us knowledge itself fulfills an acute practical need. And this is where philosophy comes in, in its attempt to grapple with our basic cognitive concerns. Philosophy seeks to bring rational order, system, and intelligibility to the confusing diversity of our cognitive affairs. It strives for orderly arrangements in the cognitive sphere that will enable us to find our way about in the world in an effective and satisfying way. Philosophy is indeed a venture in theorizing, but one whose rationale is eminently practical. A rational animal that has to make its evolutionary way in the world by its wits has a deep-rooted need for speculative reason. For, on the one hand, knowledge is its own reward. And on the other hand, knowledge is the indispensable instrument for the more efficient and effective realization of other goals. We accordingly engage in philosophical inquiry because we must; because those great intellectual issues of man and his place in the world’s scheme, of the true and the beautiful and the good, of right and wrong, freedom and necessity, causality and determinism, and so on, matter greatly to us—to all of us some of the time and to some of us all of the time. We philosophize

19

PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

because it is important to us to have answers to our questions. After all, a philosophical work is neither a work of fiction nor a work of history. Its mission is not so much to enlighten or to inform as to persuade: to convince people of the appropriateness of a certain solution to a certain problem. What is at issue is, at bottom, an exercise in question resolution—in problem solving through reasoned inquiry. For we are homo sapiens, a rational animal. We do not want just answers, but answers that can satisfy the demands of our intelligence— answers that we can in good conscience regard as appropriate, tenable, and worthy of acceptance. We are not content with information about which answers people would like to have (psychologism), nor with information about what sort of answers are available (possibility mongering). What we want is cogent guidance regarding which answers to adopt—which contentions are correct or at any rate plausible. And reason affords our prime resonance in this regard. Philosophy, then, is an inquiry that seeks to resolve problems arising from incoherence in our extraphilosophical commitments. And to abandon philosophy is to rest content with incoherence. One can, of course, cease to do philosophy (and this is what sceptics of all persuasions have always wanted). But if one is going to philosophize at all, one has no alternative but to proceed by means of arguments and inferences, to the traditional vehicles of human rationality. Yet why pursue such a venture in the face of the all too evident possibility of error? Why run such cognitive risks? For it is only too clear that there are risks here. In philosophizing, there is a gap between the individual indications at our disposal and the answers to our questions that we decide to accept. (As there also is in science—but in philosophy the gap is far wider because the questions are of a different scale.) Because of this, the positions we take have to be held tentatively, subject to expectation of an (almost certain) need for amendment, qualification, improvement, and modification. Philosophizing in the classical manner—exploiting the available indications of experience to answer those big questions on the agenda of traditional philosophy—is predicated on the use of reason to do the best we can to align our cognitive commitments with the substance of our experience. In this sense, philosophizing involves an act of faith: when we draw on

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

20

our experience to answer our questions we have to proceed in the tentative hope that the best we can do is good enough. The salient point was already well put by Aristotle: “[Even if we join those who believe that philosophizing is not possible], in this case too we are obliged to inquire how it is possible for there to be no Philosophy; and then, in inquiring, we philosophize, for rational inquiry is the essence of Philosophy.”2 To those who are prepared simply to abandon philosophy, to withdraw from the whole project of trying to make sense of things, we can have nothing to say. (How can one reason with those who deny the pointfulness and propriety of reasoning?) But with those who argue for its abandonment we can do something—once we have enrolled them in the community as fellow theorists with a position of their own. F. H. Bradley hit the nail on the head: “The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is impossible … is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles.”3 One can abandon philosophy, but one cannot advocate its abandonment through rational argumentation without philosophizing. The question “Should we philosophize?” accordingly receives a straightforward answer. The impetus to philosophy lies in our very nature as rational inquirers: as beings who have questions, demand answers, and want these answers to be as cogent as the circumstances allow. Cognitive problems arise when matters fail to meet our expectations, and the expectation of rational order is the most fundamental of them all. The fact is simply that we must philosophize; it is a pragmatic imperative inherent in the situation of a rational creature such as ourselves. 2. THE IMPETUS OF PRAGMATISM Pragmatism plays a crucial role in the rational pursuit of knowledge. It does not, however, do so because knowledge exists only for the sake of practical applications. It is, clearly, a great value for its own sake. After all, irrespective of its applications, knowledge as such is a human need. Man, homo sapiens, is a creature for whom cognitive orientation in the world is a critical requirement. The defeat of cognitive vacuity and dissonance is as important to us as the defeat of thirst and hunger.

21

PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

How do we secure knowledge? How are we to answer the question “How do you know?” There are clearly many different ways to gaining knowledge. The prime possibilities are: •

Particular personal observation. (“I saw it,” “I heard it myself.”)

•

Systemic (general) personal observation. (“She always starts her meals with a prayer.”) This mode of knowledge-acquisition includes language learning by habituation. (In English, “cat” means cat.)

•

Vicarious experiences: reliable reports of individuals or groups. (“Bombay is in India.”)

•

Inference by deductive or inductive reasoning, from what we already know. Thus if people come into the house unfurling wet umbrellas one can readily and unproblematically infer that it is raining. Substantiation is here generally a matter of harmonization—of fitting in pieces of information that accord smoothly with the rest.

•

Cognitive insight into abstract relations—including basic mathematico-logical facts.

It is clear that all of these represent productive pathways to knowledge. The crux of rational cognition is systemic harmony, unity, and coordinated fit. Our knowledge as a whole must—if adequate—form an organic system where everything meshes and matches with everything else to form an architectonically well-coordinated unity. Systematization is the key test of cognitive adequacy. There are two different sorts of things that can be known about: contingent facts about the world’s arrangements and world-indifferent facts regarding general relationships. Facts of the former sort we learn about through episodic observation when they are particular facts, and through systemic observations when they are general facts. However,

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

22

those latter, necessary and world-abstractive facts admit of only two modes of access: • Reasoning. These facts have a conditional if-then structure. Given that, in English, “cat” describes an animal of a certain sort (one of the feline species), we have it that “If Felix is a cat, he is an animal” stands secure as a world-indifferent, necessary fact. • Cognitive Insight. This provides access to such facts as 2 + 2 = 4 which represents structural relationships among abstract objects and structures. Both sorts of facts—concrete/contingent and abstract/necessary—play a crucial role in the constitution of knowledge overall. But they differ radically both in their nature and in the ways in which we gain access to them. Since human thought is always conducted by symbolic-linguistic means, any access to facts of any sort is in a way experientially mediated. The person who has not learned by experience what “two” means, cannot understand “two plus two is four” and so cannot access this general and world-indifferent fact as so expressed in English. However, no experience above and beyond mastery of how a certain fact is linguistically formulated may—as in this case—be needed to ascertain its truth. Such facts are characterized as necessary and cognitive insight is to be credited with providing access to them, this being required for their ascertainment. And such insight covers a wide range. We are entitled to claim unqualified certainty in self-referential matters of purely subjective experience. “I see a cat on the mat” is defeatable since I can be mistaken about it. But “I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat” (or “I am under the impression of seeing a cat on the mat”) is something else again. The Cartesian “I think therefore I am” is perfectly safe on this basis if construed as “I take something to be the case and therefore am a being able to take things to be the case.” However, an objective claim like “I see a cat on the mat” which makes a claim about the world’s actual arrangements, is—at least in theory—subject to certain vulnerabilities (illusion, delusion, post-hypnotic suggestion, etc.)

23

PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

Granted, the specter of scepticism will raise its ugly head at this point. After all, it makes no sense to say “I know something to be so but may possibly be wrong about it.” To know something is to know it for sure—i.e. to be fully entitled by the ground-rules of cognitive procedure to claim it to be so. If there were the least doubt about it, one would have to say “I believe that” or “I am confident that …” One then would not—could not—frame one’s conviction in the language of knowledge. All this is simply a matter of definition, of usage, of how the language works. But if knowledge must be certain, then is it not automatically doubtful that it can be achieved at all? It is, after all, questionable if certainty in regard to matters of objective fact is ever actually warranted. There are, however, two crucially distinguished aspects to linguistic usage. On the one hand, there is what follows from a languageformulated claim. And on the other hand, there is what entitles the claimant to make it. And here there is almost always a gap. Take something as simple as an apple. The object before me looks like an apple, feels like an apple, comes from the fruit bowl—as apples do. And all this being so there is no questions but that I am rationally entitled to call it an apple. But when we now consider what follows from that claim itself we confront another story altogether. Apples have to grow on trees (and not transmute from squirrels tapped by a magic wand) they have to contain apple cores (and not wooden boxes), they have to internalize apple seeds (and not having bird eggs), etc. These consequences simply have to obtain if that thing actually is an apple. But these consequences are not things that one must ascertain to justify the claims that an apple is at issue. Authorization to characterize something a certain way is one thing, and consequences to this characterization is quite another that runs well beyond. And this is true not only of apple talk but of knowledge talk as well. The use-conditions of our talk discourse inevitably fall far short of its truth-conditions enormously. And of course this has to be so for language to do its intended communicative work. For if applehood claims were only licit after one has ascertained and that whole manifold of truth-requisites for being

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

24

an apple, then the term would become unusable. The practicalities of language require one to be realistic about its applications. And just this holds good for knowledge talk as well. Once I have done all that one reasonably be expected to do in the circumstances to determine that your item is an apple I am entitled so to characterize it, and exactly the same is the case with claims to knowledge once I have done what can reasonably be expected of one to ascertain the fact at issue. The crux is that language is a practical resource for communication. And for the accomplishment of its work, its ground-rules have to be governed by pragmatic considerations. Scepticism takes root in the fallacious idea that justified claims to certainty must themselves be absolutely certain—that with certainty there is no possible gap between justification and fact. This contravenes the pragmatic recognition of a practical certitude that falls short of absolute certainty. And in doing so it runs afoul of the actualities of the situation by simply ignoring the condition under which we do and must operate in this context. Then too there is the fact that knowledge is in general the fruit of practical endeavor. It does not come ready-made, like raindrops falling from the sky. By and large it is the fruit of activity and effort—of inquiry that substantiates our claims to knowing. And inquiry involves the deployment of methods, processes, and procedures. Knowledge is not something transcendental. The critical fact is that knowledge talk and knowledge claims are practical resources conducive to the management of human communication. The ground-rules of this discourse—and thereby the very conception of knowledge—is a human artifact devised for the realization of human purposes. After all, there are two sorts of errors, viz. those of commission and those of omission. And in its eagerness to avoid errors of the first kind, scepticism maximizes those of the second. For a knowledgerequiring creature which, like homo sapiens, governs its actions by thought, scepticism is ruled out by pragmatic considerations of costeffectiveness. There is, moreover, the critical question of the validation of those methods, processes, and procedures. Clearly the proper criterion here is that of achieving the aims of the enterprise. So here too pragmatic

25

PRAGMATISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

considerations of functional effectiveness and efficiency become paramount. And this is particularly so because the adequacy of knowledge-providing methods cannot be assessed by the seemingly natural standard of its success in producing knowledge. This would be vitualizingly circular because, by hypotheses, it is by those methods that knowledge is to be constituted. At this point the issue of the practical applications and implementations of our knowledge talk comes to the fore. For it will now have to be this issue—viz. how effectively the putative “knowledge” that the method provides can be put to work— that will have to be the operative criterion of methodological effectiveness. So here, once again, pragmatic considerations will come into the foreground. The overall situation of rational inquiry is readily summarized. Knowledge meets human needs. And our standards and criteria of cognition are conditioned by this fact, with the adequacy of our cognitive proceedings themselves monitored by the effective applicability of their authorizations. The knowledge achieved in our theorizing— philosophy included—in in the end validated as such—that is, as actual knowledge—by its capacity systematically to provide the materials needed for successful operation in the domain of practice. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. NOTES 1

William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality”, in The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans Green, 1897), pp. 63–110 (see pp. 78–79).

2

Aristotelis Fragmenta Selecta, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. vii; for the text see p. 28. But see also Anton-Hermann Chroust, Aristotle, Protrepicus: A Reconstruction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 48–50.

3

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897; 2nd ed.), p. 1.

Chapter Four SELF-CONTRADICTION

I

n the context of these deliberations the talk of self-contradiction is in one way somewhat loose and figurative. For the “self” at issue need not be an individual but could be a group or even an impersonal theory or system. For example consider the following three propositions to which various philosophers have been inclined to subscribe: (1) All human acts are causally determined. (2) Men can and do make free acts of choice. (3) A genuinely free act cannot be causally determined (for if it is so determined then the act is not free by virtue of this very fact). These three theses represent an inconsistent triad in which consistency can be restored by any one of three distinct approaches, depending on which theses we are prepared to drop: Deny (1): “Voluntarism”—the exemption of free acts of the will from causal determination (Descartes). Deny (2): “Determinism” of the will by causal constraints (Spinoza). Deny (3): “Compatibilism” of free action and causal determination—for example, via a theory that distinguishes between inner and outer causal determination and sees the former sort of determination as compatible with freedom (Leibniz).

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

28

1. There are always alternatives in matters of consistency restoration. For as such examples show, any particular way out of an inconsistent cluster is bound to be simply one way among others. The single most crucial fact here is that there will always be a variety of distinct ways of averting the inconsistency at issue. For in general if we drop our allegiance to sufficiently many of the contentions of an inconsistent cluster. And this situation is pervasive in philosophy, where all too often inconsistencies arise because the plausible contentions regarding virtually any of the complex matters at issue come into conflict. For example, the theory of knowledge of the ancient Greeks revolved about the following quartet of collectively incompatible contentions: (1) We do have some knowledge about the world. (2) Whatever knowledge we have about the world must come via the senses (i.e., ultimately roots in what the senses deliver). (3) There is no genuine knowledge (episteme) without certainty. (4) The senses do not yield certainty. A positive inclination toward these theses—a tendency to see them each as plausible and seemingly acceptable—sets the stage for philosophical controversy. For a (limited) variety of exits from the inconsistency is available: Deny (1): Maintain that we cannot have authentic knowledge about the world (Pyrrhonian or Extreme Sceptics). Deny (2): Maintain that genuine knowledge about the world can come from reason alone (Pythagoreans, Plato). Deny (3): Maintain that adequate knowledge need not be based on the certain but can be based on the plausible—to pithanon (Academic or Moderate Sceptics).

29

SELF-CONTRADICTION

Deny (4): Maintain that the senses do yield certainty in some casesthose that result in the so-called “cataleptic” perceptions (Stoics). Confronted with that inconsistent cluster, one must make up one’s mind among between these alternatives, and different schools of thought take different positions here. 2. In purely theoretical disciplines—preeminently pure mathematics and formal logic—contradiction is seen as an absolute and alldestructive catastrophe and accordingly self-consistency becomes an indispensible requisite. For these disciplines insist upon closure under deduction and in taking a classical view of deductively—according to which any proposition whatsoever follows from a contradiction— make this condition into an all-destructive superbomb. The rigorous exclusion of contradictions has accordingly been seen as essential to the very life and being of such theoretical disciplines, with contradiction viewed as a disaster that must be excluded at all costs. 3. By contrast, non-classically inclined theorists—and, above all, theorists of knowledge who are prepared to take a less rigoristic approach—have taken a more relaxed view of contradictions. As they see it, contradictions need not be seen as disaster absolute but as mere anomalies within a coherent wider field of meaning. Contradiction, so regarded, is not a catastrophe but a mere annoyance. In many real-life contexts we take inconsistency in ready stride. One seemingly reliable witness reports the thief to be “A black-haired white male in mid-forties.” A second witness offers “A dark-brownhaired white male in his mid-thirties.” Clearly, we here would not react to the contradiction by abandoning those claims altogether. Instead we compromise and blend, arriving at “A dark-haired while male around 40 years of age.” By shifting and imprecise reformulations we correlate our sources of information in a way that compromises those contradictions. We certainly do not follow the traditionalistic logician into his instance that insistence of now anything goes.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

30

4. To motivate a more relaxed approach it is instructive to consider some of the main ways in which contradiction can manifest itself. These would include: 4a. Blatant self-contradiction. It is unusual to find a flat-out contradiction in a single sentence. Perhaps someone’s dating an event on 30 February 1903 would be an example, given the fact that February cannot possibly have more than 29 days. Then too an outright contradictio in adjecto might serve as an example, as when one would refer to a simple conundrum or a level mountain-range. 4b. Overt self-contradiction, as when an historian gives one date for an event on page 5 and another on page 136. Novelists are especially given to this sort of self-contradiction, as when they characterize their villain as deft in one passage as awkward in another. 4c. Covert self-contradiction. This occurs when information is so presented that an elaborate cause of convoluted reasoning is required to bring out the contradiction at issue. (Section 6 below will offer an example.) 5. How can self-contradiction be “fixed” and consistency restored? Only a few alternatives are available here: 5a. Theses abandonment. One of the theses that plays an essential role in creating the contradiction can be given up with some sort of ground for doing so provided. Perhaps it is less wellattested than the others, or perhaps it is less inherently plausible. 5b. Theses qualification. One of the theses that plays an essential role in the contradiction can be subject to a serving qualification. Perhaps this theses p should be replaced by usually-p or generally-p or the like. Closely akin to this is—

31

SELF-CONTRADICTION

5c. Range restriction. The theses involved in the contradiction can be range-restricted with some obtaining in A-type cases and others in duly distinguishable B-type cases, so that a collision can be averted. Thus instead of maintaining both p and not-p one could maintain that the one obtains in one family of cases and the other in another, where the relevant family-defining conditions cannot be concurrently realized. 5d. Compromise. Confronted with contradictory statements, one plausible tactic is to search for the compromise afforded by a compromise proposition that “splits the difference” among those combinatory claims. Specifically when p and q are incompatible this would mean searching for a proposition such that •p→r •q→r • (∀s) ([p → s & q → s] → [r → s]) Thus let p = “there were 8,000 people in the crowd” q = “There were 12,000 people in the crowd” And now consider s = “there were roughly 10,000 people in the crowd,” here understanding roughly to mean “within 20 percent” Note that now the three mini-defining requirements are indeed satisfied via this s. For example consider the obvious common consequence: t = “There were not less than 8,000 people in the crowd.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

32

And now note that while both p and q entail t, so does s. And, clearly, my other common consequence will be in the same boat. So there exists a contradiction-repair kit of processes by which outright self-contradiction can in principle be eliminated. However, none of these procedures is entirely cost-free. In each case something that one was initially minded to maintain has to be sacrificed in the interests of consistency restoration. 6. Once it is acknowledges that contradiction can be “fixed” and overcome in various ways, it becomes clear that contradictions are not created equal. Self-contradictions can now be seen as a matter of degree and extent: Not all have the same degree of seriousness and gravity. 7. Contradictions can differ in these matters of extent or degree, of severity in several ways—three in particular: • manifestation obscurity/obviousness • removal costliness/ease • occurrence rarity/frequency Let us briefly examine these in turn. (1) Manifestation obscurity stands correlative with “computational complexity.” This is a matter of how much sophisticated reasoning is needed to bring the contradiction to view. Thus consider the following illustration. On a train operated by three men, Jones, Smith, and Robinson, as engineer, brakeman, and fireman (but not necessarily respectively), are three passengers: Mr. Jones, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Robinson. The following information is given:

33

SELF-CONTRADICTION

(a) Mr. Robinson lives in Detroit. (b) Mr. Jones receives a salary of $4,000 a year. (c) Smith beat the fireman at billiards. (d) The passenger whose name is the same as the brakeman’s lives in Chicago. (e) The brakeman lives halfway between Chicago and Detroit. (f) The brakeman’s nearest neighbor, one of the passengers, earns a salary exactly three times as large as the brakeman’s. (g) The engineer is older than Smith. The question now is: “Who is the Engineer?” However, the given information is in fact inconsistent and self-contradictory. And yet this fact is far from obvious, and can only be extricated by a careful process of logical analysis. (For details see the Appendix.) (2) Removal costliness inheres in the process of eliminating contradictions by abandoning some of the contentions by which they are generated. There will, of course, always be various ways of accomplishing this. Thus consider the following four claims: • Every person has some weight or other. • The weight of a person is given by a particular mathematically measures quantity. • Every particular mathematical quantity is accurate to 10 decimal places. • The weight of a person is accurate to 10 decimal places.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

34

• Human weight cannot be projected with great accuracy.

As ever, contradiction can be overcome by abandoning one or more of the contradicting-engendering thesis. But of course they differ in point of tenability/plausibility. In the present instance the best policy would probably be to abandon that third theses, and distinguish between abstract mathematical quantities which must always be exactly detailed, questionable measurements which can be roughly and approximate. In such cases we would want to resolve consistency in the least problematic, the most plausible way. And a grounding of contradiction in terms of removal costliness would use as its standard the minimum contention of the (least) costliness of the least costly way of eliminating the contradiction. (3) Occurrence prominence is a matter of the manifestation frequency of contradiction—i.e., the comparative magnitude of the range of cases where contradiction will arise. Thus consider the following situation: A B

Let it be that we are informed that throughout region A, p holds and throughout region B, not-p holds. And let it be that their intersection A ∩ B is non-vacuous. The comparative extent of this overlap region is yet another way of assessing degrees of self-contradiction. If this region is comparatively minimal—that is if the ratio of the area of A ∩ B both to A and to B is minuscule—then that inconsistency, albeit real, is nevertheless very minor and virtually negligible. 8. Tolerating Inconsistency When a contradiction is obscure in manifestation, costly in removal, and unprominent in occurrence, then it just may not be worth bother-

35

SELF-CONTRADICTION

ing about. In such circumstances we may want to tolerate the inconsistency—at least until further notice. One classic illustration of inconsistency tolerance is represented by the perplex known as the Preface Paradox. This arises when some author of some work apologizes in the preface for the errors that have crept into his work. But it is clear that he cannot with logical consistency maintain in the text that P1, P2, …. Pu obtain and on the other hand concede that some Pi are false. In making the fallibilistic—but all too correct—concession that some of our claims are false we immediately plunge into inconsistency. All the same, there can be little doubt that self-inconsistency is an unhappy and decidedly negative situation. Consistency is certainly more than “a hobgoblin of little minds.” But nevertheless there will be circumstances where the most of consistency-restruction is so high that it simply isn’t worth it. And from an epistemological point of view we can treat certain cases of inconsistency as simply another aspect of the risk of error that prevails throughout the realm of rational inquiry. Appendix To exhibit the inconsistency at issue consider the following reasoning, where we shall use the abbreviations: R = Robinson

e = the engineer

J = Jones

b = the brakeman

S = Smith

f = the fireman

We can reason as follows (using ≠ to mean “is not the same as”): FACT

REASON

(1) S ≠ f

(c) *

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

(2) Mr. R is not b’s neighbor

(a), (e)

(3) Mr. J is not b’s neighbor

(b), (f)

(4) Mr. S is b’s neighbor

(2), (3), (f)

(5) Mr. S doesn’t live in Chicago

(e), (4)

(6) Mr. R doesn’t live in Chicago

(a)

(7) Mr. J does live in Chicago

(5), (6), (d)

(8) J = b

(7), (d)

(9) J ≠ f

(8)

(10) R = f

(1), (9)

(11) S = e

(8), (10)

(12) S ≠ e

(g)

36

The given information is clearly not self-consistent. And yet it’s being so is far from obvious and requires some ingenuity to bring its recognition.

Chapter Five ON ISSUES OF PRIORITY 1. WHY PRIORITIES

T

he main object of the paper is to elucidate how and why prioritization is necessary for a being such as ourselves, and to show how this circumstance illuminates some key features of ourselves as the sorts of beings we humans are. Priorities matter because desiderata are not created equal. Of course outright needs will come first, simply because catastrophe results from their going unmet. But mere wants follow on, and they are—in general—sufficiently numerous and diverse that priorities must be assigned in the presence of limited resources. For we prioritize because we are creatures of limited resources. In the setting of our lives virtually any asset is of limited supply for us—time, energy, money. Priorities are reference points (decision factors) in identifying a rationally appropriate course of action in the pursuit of goals under conditions of limited resources. The key principle of rational belief is • make your beliefs as extensive, coherent, and consistent as possible By contrast, the key principle of rational agency is: • In your pursuit of aims and goals (1) be governed by the appropriate priorities—i.e., invest your (limited) resources as effectively and efficiently as possible. On this basis, prioritizing is one of the most useful and necessary but yet complex and sophisticated proceedings in the management of human affairs.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

38

Not only will different people have different agendas but one and the same person can be subject to divergent pulls and pushes. And here priorities will come into it. They represent the resolution of such practical dissonance. People who are “conflicted” have not yet got their priorities worked out. 2. STABLE VS. FLUCTUATING PRIORITIES Only the things for which we have a pressing need at all times and those securing can never be long postponed—have absolute priority. Air to breathe is a prime example. But in general priorities are not absolute and unconditional. They vary with circumstances and reflect the requirements and needs of the moment. The priority of peace and quiet is greater when we have need for sleep. The priority of food is great when we are hungry. The conditions of human life are such that time is sometimes of the essence. Something must be attended to here and now in the urgency of the moment—irrespective of issues which have greater significance in the larger scheme of things. Accordingly, priorities are time-correlative and thereby timevariable. When we are hungry, food is a high priority; when we are tired, peace and quiet. But priorities can be amalgamated over time as well. They reflect only the needs of the moment but the systemic dispositions of individuals as well. The valetudinarian prioritizes what promotes his health, the gastronome what pleases his palate. 3. THE TAXONOMY OF PRIORITIES Priorities—like the limited resources they reflect—can be either material or immaterial. Time, attention, and psychic energy are immaterial resources; money and scarce physical resources are material. Priorities can also be classified: • By the nature of the resource-item being prioritized (monetary expenditure, time allocation, effort investment, etc.)

39

ON ISSUES OF PRIORITY

• By the condition of the person whose priorities are at issue (the working physician, the planting farmer, the burnt-out householder, etc.) Moreover, priorities admit of two main modes of evaluation: the moral/ethical and the practical/functional. In the former mode they are evaluated as good or bad according to the ethical/moral status of the aims and goals under whose ageist they are instituted. In this mode, for example, the priorities of the educator are of a different status from those of the cat burglar. The functional mode of evaluation is something quite different. For fundamentally the cat burglar can be effective and efficient—as when he prioritizes stealth or speed—or counterproductive and ill-advised (or when he does the reverse). Then too, prioritization can look to different dimensions of concern. One can speak of priority in point of urgency, interest, importance, value, or any other parameter that can be invoked in justifying the alternation of resources of limited availability. 4. ACTUAL VS. RATIONALLY VALID PRIORITIES It was said of someone that he knew the actual cost of everything but the true value of nothing. The distinction at work here reflects that between preference and preferability (preference worthiness), between what people do prefer and what they should prefer. Improper priorities can arise in two ways. On the one side they can root in imperfect information: in a lawed grasp of matters of fact. (The person who is concerned over a spilled glass of milk when the house is on fire does not have his priorities straight). But there is also the prospect of inappropriate evaluations (as with the person who sets immediate gratification above long-range well-being.) With prioritization errors of judgment can be as damaging as errors of fact. Correct priority should reflect actual value, actual importance, actual significance. The person who values things to an extent they do not deserve—whether lesser or greater—is going to get his priorities wrong. Evaluative accuracy is the key to proper prioritization and people’s priorities can accordingly be poorly arranged.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

40

The question of a match-up alignment between the actual (de facto) priorities of an individual and those that are appropriate for him/her given their situation in the world’s scheme of things. The extent of this match-up (or, equally, misalignment) is a crucial indication of the extent to which this agent is rational in the practical (rather than purely theoretical sense of the term). The crux here relates to the matter of good sense and reason. Priorities are rational insofar as they reflect the real needs and best interests of the individual. As instruments of deliberation and decision their appropriateness is determined by their efficiency in an individual’s appropriate objectives. Viewed in this instrumental light, prioritization is a matter of practical reasoning. It exists for the sake of grounding the decision of agents—beings who can and must do something, But rationality is an inevitable part of the picture because there has to be a cogent reasonguided decision to have one thing give way to another in point of fundamentality or urgency. 5. PRIORITY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION: PRIORITIZATION AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY As these deliberations indicate, prioritization only comes into operation when a large number of factors come into play. Specifically, prioritization requires: • needs and wants • aims, goals, and objectives • agency • selection answering alternatives • courses of action • rational choice • limitations of resources

41

ON ISSUES OF PRIORITY

The modus operandi of priorities in the management of our affairs shows us to be creatures in whose life this array of factors plays a definitely characteristic role, comprising of features that play an essential part in defining us as the sorts of beings we are. Accordingly, prioritization is a very complex conception in whose composition encompasses a substantial variety of sophisticated considerations. And it represents a sphere in which error and inconsistency can be every bit as prominent as it is in matters of factual belief. David Hume wrote: It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is as little contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin … It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my won acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and to have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.1

Now indeed if rationality were entirely a matter of mere logical consistency and issues of evaluation and action lay entirely outside the sphere of reason, then this situation might indeed obtain. But without this absurdly blinded conception of the matter which does violence to the very concept of reason as it function in the real world. 6. ON FAILURE IN APPROPRIATE PRIORITIZATION Cognitive irrationality notably occurs when an agent does not invest his (limited) quota of probabilities (which must sum to 1) across the spectrum of alternatives, instead investing too much or too little. In this situation the irrational believer’s limited investment of cognitive resources (credence) are inappropriately allocated. Analogously, practical irrationality occurs when an agent fails to invest his limited resources in line with appropriate priorities as best he can discern them. In all practical matters of decision and action, failing to be grounded in proper priorities is simply counterproductive. It may be difficult to make valid evaluations, but once one has done so as best one can it would be absurd to reject this guidance.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

42

7. WIDER VISTAS The conception of priority is an indispensible tool of practical reason with creatures who function in the presence of resource limitation. And this serves to show that practical reason—the rational attainment of action to a proper evaluation of ends and means—far outruns the limits of the mere cognitive inconsistency that is paramount in theoretical reason. Cognitive inconsistency does not have the field to itself. Any failing in the practical domain to maintain rational consonance between evaluation decision and action is as grave an inconsistency as there is. Correctness in point of belief about facts constitutes knowledge; appropriateness in point of having proper priorities constitutes wisdom. And the fact of it is that our human lives proceed under conditions where we are called upon to exhibit not just for smarts but for sagacity as well. NOTES 1

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: A Muller, 1738). Bk. 2, Pt. 3, sect. 3.

Chapter Six THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

I

dealist philosophers seems to take the view that the ordinary knowledge we secure regarding everyday affairs belongs entirely to the physical and material side of things and that idealism only comes into it at the extra-ordinary and supra-mundane level. The aim of this discussion is to exhibit the falsity of this conviction, arguing that even the mundane factual knowledge that is at the core of classical empiricism has a transcendental component which is only to be adequately accounted for on idealistic principles.

1. Empiricism affords the starting point for getting a firm grip on the nature of knowledge. Homo sapiens is an intelligent being—a creature that guides its actions on that basis of thought (rather than automaticity, instinct, or the like). As such, we must form beliefs about how matters stand in the world and how its processes work. And to this end, cognitive interaction with nature—experience in short—is an indispensible requisite, affording our prime access-way to information about our environment and our place within it. But what exactly can direct, cognitively unaugmented, immediate experience do for us in this regard? 2. The idea that immediate (i.e., self-contained and cognitive unmediated) experience yields assured knowledge of objective fact is an illusion: immediate experience does not suffice to yield factual knowledge on its own. For it is always subjective and thereby cognitively insufficient with regard to matters of objective fact. Consider the contrast between (I) I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat. (Or again, “I am under the impression that I see a cat on the mat.”)

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

44

What is at issue here is immediate, alright, but thereby occurrent, personal and subjective—exactly the sort of thing that immediate experience always involves. And just herein lies its shortfall in comparison to (II) I see a cat on the mat. In order for this second, far more ambitious thesis to be true a great many requisites must obtain. Specifically: (1) there must actually be a cat, (2) a mat and (3) said cat must be emplaced on that mat, and (4) I must make a visual determination that this is so. None of this is assuredly provided for by my immediate experience alone. Kant’s dictum should be amended: perception without conception are not merely blind, it is empty as well in point of objective informativeness. The fact is that those experiential type-(I) statements are purely subjective as mere experiential reports on my own state of mind/ thought. None of those objective facts involucrated in (II) need obtain here because (I) is no more than a purely phenomenological report on my own subjective experiential condition. By contrast, (II) begins when (I) leaves off and to stake a great many more objectively factual claims. And immediate experience alone is unable to establish any of these: their inherent substance is far too enterprising for that. An automatic transit from taking something to be so to its actually being so is certainly possible in some cases. But this prospect only obtains within the realm of subjectivity itself. If it is indeed the case that I am under the impression that p is so, then it is indeed bound to be true that I am under this impression. The transit from (I) to (II) is going to work whenever p itself is a matter of what X believes to be so, takes to be true, accepts as fact, etc. Being under the impression regarding what one accepts as fact stands coordinate with that acceptance itself. Some theorists have taken the view that objective facts are sometimes evident to people in presenting themselves with unquestionable authenticity in experience. But this view founders on the fact that objectively invariably outruns the limits of what mere experience affords. For experience is always someone’s experience and thereby a matter how things appear to an observer. And the move from appear-

45

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

ance to reality—from X takes p to be the case, to X actually knows that p is the case—can hold unproblematically within the realm of subjective experience itself. Thus when p is something like “X feels queasy” or “X thinks that he is under the impression that your hand is horseshoe-shaped” then that is the end of it. A transit impression to fact will succeed when only impressions themselves are at issue, for these are locked into the realm of subjectivity. But this sort of thing will not work with objective matters where objective arrangements outrun the reach of experience. 3. The problem with immediate experience lies exactly in its personal immediacy. For on this basis it can never reach beyond the restricted feature-specificity of here-now-this-for-me. And objective factuality always reaches further. Seeing or looking to be an apple is subjectively restricted, while actually being an apple always reaches out through the realm of space, time, and causality. (Something that does not behave like an apple in these regards just isn’t one.) Immediate experience can only offer suggestions regarding the realm of objective fact; it cannot deliver arithmetic knowledge about it into our hands. For immediate experience does no more than to provide its recipient owner with subjective authorization that he TAKES TO BE ADEQUATE for a factual claim. But this subjectively geared first-person impression is taken by its owner as sufficient to provide for objectively valid facticity. Experience itself is always owned by its possessor—it is always someone’s possession: personal episodic and subjective. It is a matter of what someone undergoes or enjoys—of personal involvement that is accepted as indicative of an objective condition of some sort, with the whole question of authenticity actually remaining unresolved. For this critical issue of authenticity is never something that lies entirely under the control of the agent. Immediate experience lies with the agent, but the issue of its objective bearing is not: perceptual authenticity does not lie in the eyes of the beholder. The immediacy of experience—what the perceiver sees (views, takes) himself to be perceiving is something entirely at his disposal. There is no possibility of error here—no prospect of a slip between the lip of thought and the cup of reality. But the issue of objectively in-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

46

formative perception with its linkable to objective fact is always something that goes beyond this. Roderick Chisholm, who among recent epistemologists has been the most dedicated to the idea of immediate factual knowledge, cultivates and favors the locution “It is evident to X that p.”1 But due stress must be placed on the equation that prevails here. For this locution can bear two instructions: • X regards (or takes) it as evident that p. • It is (objectively and impossibly) evident that p, and X realizes it. The first proceeds squarely in the language of subjectivity. The second is, however, impersonal and objective. And never the two shall meet, because there is, once again, no secure transit from the first to the second. A creature that determines (many of) its actions in the world by thought must obviously secure information about what’s going on there. And our only pathway of such information is through interaction—i.e., through experience. But “pure” experience unmediated by the reflexive thought-modes that biological and optimal evolution have impacted in the human mind/brain need not (and will not) be required here. Even as in natural science all observation is theory-laden so in ordinary life all sense-provided knowledge about objective matters will be cognitively mediated. Cognitive theorists have it that sense-perception is “intentional” in its orientation to the objective order of real world conditions. And it is unquestionably correct that this is how we see it—that we do and cannot but talk in the now standardly objectivistic manner of “seeing the cat on the mat”. But although we base that claim solidly upon “our immediate experience of seeing,” there is a good deal of mere presumption at work here. 4. The step from the experiential report “I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat” to the objectively factual claim “I see a cat on the mat” is not cost free—and its price is not payable in the coin of occur-

47

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

rent experience alone. Additional issues above and beyond the experiencing agent’s reach are unavoidably needed. But what are they? That is it that legitimates and validates the step from the subjectivity of what one takes oneself to be realizing and what one actually does realize? When a fact or putative fact is accepted on the basis perception a series of decidedly different questions will arise. (1) What actually is it that leads the perceiver to accept it? (2) What is it that leads the perceiver to feel entitled to accept it (i.e., to deem himself duly authorized to do so)? (3) What is it that does actually and objectively entitle the perceiver to accept it? When X tells us that he sees a cat on a mat, what is it that leads him to claim this to be so? As far as the perceiver himself is concerned it is simply that he is having a “seeing-a-cat-on-the-mat experience.” But while this is an unquestionable fact, it does not settle the issue of actual (as opposed to subjective) entitlement. For what has actually led the perceiver to make that claim may well be done with smoke and mirrors—or may be a matter of post-hypnotic suggestion. From a thirdperson perspective, the circumstances that lead the perceiver to make that claim may root not in this own experiences at all, but in eventuations about which he may by totally unaware. When X takes himself to be seeing a cat on the mat [positive component] and is unaware of any counter considerations—any impediment to the authenticity of this experience of actually seeing—[the negative component] then there is no room for reasonable doubt on X’s part regarding the presumptive fact at issue, and X is rationally justified in staking a claim to knowledge here. However, while having that experience leads the perceiver to maintain that putative fact nevertheless the question of whether such a conviction of entitlement is actually appropriate—i.e., whether a third party can endorse the claim that X sees a cat on the mat and not just that X takes himself to be see-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

48

ing a cat on the mat—will depend on a great many other factors beyond the reach of the cognizing agent. 5. Two importantly distinct issues are critically in play with the move from subjectivity to objectivity, its validation itself splits into a subjective and an objective component. For the question of what justified a person in a given subjective circumstance (such as “I am under the impression that I see a cat on the mat”) to accept a certain objective claim (“I actually do see a cat on the mat) divides into two parts: 1. The personal and subjective component: What specifically is that individual’s own justification for taking this step—what is it that, as he then and there sees it, justified his taking it? 2. The impersonal and objective component: What is it generally and systematically that actually justified anyone in his position in taking this step? We must, that is to say, distinguish between against-perspectival and generic justification. The one is a matter of personal motivation, the other one of an objective rationale. 6. In first-person cases, the gap between subjectivity and objectivity is invisible. From the first-person perspective of the agent himself, there simply is no visible gap between: • I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat and • I (actually do) see a cat on the mat. And the situation is much the same as that of • I deem it to be true that p • It is actually true that p

49

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

Whatever gap there is, is invisible to the agent himself. But with others it is clear as day. The first-person perspective involves a “blind-spot”—a mental (rather than optical) illusion that renders the difference between subjectivity and objectively invisible. Contrast “I have learned that” with “I have been taught with” or again “I remember that” with “I seem to remember that.” The very language involucrates factuality and truth. With first-person cases, the gap between subjectively and objectively becomes invisible: one that the cognizer himself cannot possibly spot. The challenge “Give me an example of a statement that you think to be true but that actually is not so” is one that is, in principle, unanswerable. And the same is true in all first-person cases of a “gap” between appearance and reality. The challenge to a perceiver “What entitles you to account as veridical those perceptions you take to be so?” As far as the perceiver himself is concerned, the entitlement to what is taken is encompassed in the very taking of it. But of course what is invisible to the subject himself here is all too clear to others. For over and above this first-person perspective there is the question of epistemic justification from the perspective of a third-person, perceiver-external agent. Objective factuality is never given in experience; it is always taken—a matter not of actuality but of presumption. 7. What enables one to claim knowledge? When asked for the authorization for my claim that p how can I meet the challenge? Sometimes I can “pass the buck” to other pieces of knowledge. I know that Brixton is in England because it is in London and London is in England. In securing some items of knowledge one can and often will invoke others. This sort of thing is called discursive knowledge. But if we are ever to get started here, some knowledge must be nondiscursive, which is to say immediate (i.e., not informatively mediated with reference to other bodies of knowledge). Thus I can also know a certain fact when • I see it to be so (e.g., the cat is on the mat) • I remember it (e.g., what I had for breakfast)

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

50

• I have learned it (e.g., that in French chat means [not conversation but] cat) To be sure, none of these cognition-yielding processes are themselves failproof—all can go amiss. But usually they succeed—and there is a general presumption in their favor. Realizing that subjectivity is just that, we nevertheless give its deliverances the “benefit of doubt.” We so—and must—do this because factual knowledge demands an objectivity that is more than immediate experience can possibly provide for. And here empiricism has it right. In the end we do and must have our factual claims upon immediate experience. But in the realm of objective fact such experience in and of itself never provides us with certifiable knowledge of objective facts. What it provides us with may well in the end prove to be no more than a mirage. To ascertain that your oasis is something more requires a systemic coordination of experience at the hands of reason—something that goes beyond the immediacy of any or all particular experiences and embeds those experiences in a wider context of presupposition. 8. The history of philosophy has afforded a great many possibilities for validating an objectifying transit from immediate personal experience to impersonal fact. Let us examine some of main prospects: INFERENTIALISM Obviously, one cannot effect a deductive transit from phenomenal appearance to objective reality—from what people take themselves to see (etc.)—what they are “under the impression of seeing”—to what they actually do see. However, a kindred approach—let us call it inductive—envisions straightforward argument by induction to arrive at the desired conclusion. The reasoning at work here would run as per: • In this case (case number N, say) I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat. • Previously, in Case 1 when I took myself to be seeing a cat on the mat it turned out to be true.

51

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

• Previously, in Case 2 when I took myself to be seeing a cat on the mat it turned out to be true ——— ——— ——— • Previously, in Case N – 1 when I took myself to be seeing a cat on the mat it turned out to be true • Therefore, it is highly likely that in this case also (case number N) my seeing a cat on the mat will turn out to be true. What is at issue here, then, is simply a matter of straightforward inductive reasoning—from past cases (no doubt only generally recommended) to the situation at hand. To be sure, this line of reasoning is not how people actually think about such matters themselves. They do not reason from personal cases; they do not even recall them. Our present concern is with thirdparty validation. And this—as we shall see—holds with the other approaches as well. We are concerned with validation from an external (third person) point of view, and not with characterizing any process of thought going on in people’s minds. CONSTRUCTIVISM Another approach to third-party validation is a Constructionism which sees a factual claim that P is indeed so as a complex structure built up by a combination or amalgamation of subjective experiential claims. That phenomenal claim is thus simply a part—albeit in distinctive part—of a larger complex that it betokens, even as the pig’s tail betokens the entire pig, On this view objectivity is a construction (an “Aufbau” as some German philosophers put it.) from subjective constituents—the move from part to whole being validated by the specific and characteristic unity of the part, much as the finger identified the whole individual.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

52

But constructions from what? Various ideas are on offer: sensedata, personal presumptions of other elements of personal experience or the like. What renders this view problematic is not only the somewhat far-fetched nature of the construction it envisions, but also the problem that if X’s experience is objectivity-compelling and Y’s is also to be so, then the puzzle arises of how this could possibly be so— i.e. how one individual’s experience could be determinative for another’s. INTUITIONISM A further alternative is afforded by an Intuitionism that credits individuals with a securely determinative access to (i.e., “intuitive contact with”) to an impersonal state of affairs. It holds, in effect, that an individual could not possibly have the experience he does if the objective circumstances of the world were not consonantly constituted—i.e., that subjectivity is in a certain way determinatively coordinate for objective arrangements. We are entitled, in appropriate circumstances, to take our experience as objectively inductive. The problem here lies in the unique (sui generis) nature of the compulsion at issue. It is certainly not conceptual (necessitation), for were it so, then error by way of illusion or delusion could not possibly occur. But if all that is at issue is a merely factual (rather than conceptually necessary) coordination—then our only cognitive access to it would have to be by way of empirical-inductive generalization, and this would simply carry us back to inductivism. PRESENTATIONISM AND THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN Yet another position—let us call it Presentationism—has it that reality is self-revelatory in openly presenting itself to experience. Thus various aspects of reality—various facts about it—are simply given in experience, overly manifesting themselves in experiential transactions. We came here to a position that has been widely reviled in recent decades as “The Myth of the Given.” And rightly so, seeing that the only uncontestably true givens lie in the realm of the subjective. Objective factuality as such is not given in actual experience but is al-

53

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

ways taken (presumed), no instance of an objectively fictional given having ever been produced. Objective information about factual matters is never given within immediate experience but is only to be taken from it. Such taking however is not—or should not be—a matter of feckless theft. Instead it is to be purchased—paid for in the labor of bringing an entire course of hard-won systemic experience to bear. 9. The only sensible way to decide among these alternatives for validating the transit from immediate experience to objectivity is by means of SYSTEMIC experience (Erfahrung) over and above merely occurrent experience (Erlebnis). For by its very nature this transit is a leap beyond the information actually at hand. This step from experiential impressions to factual commitments simply reflects a policy of presumption that we standardly accept in communicative contexts. It is a “leap in the dark” across an information gap that reflects a practical policy of information management that we accept because experience teaches that “we can generally get away with it”—a practical policy retrovalidated by experiential efficacy.2 As the English neo-Hegelians discovered—no doubt to their surprise and chagrin—the transit from personal (and thereby subjective) experience to objective knowledge of impersonal fact leads straightway to idealism. For this transit is only possible via mind-supplied resources (and hence idealism) that are consolidated and substantiated by the collective and systemic experience of the wider community. The connection between the personal experience of individuals (the Erlebnis of the German thinkers) and the general experience (Erfahrung) of a larger group spread through time and space is critical to the acquisition of objective knowledge of impersonal fact. 10. The generality involved here is grounded in a policy of Social Conventionalism is operative via a conventional presumption of adequacy. We standardly concede to the perceiver by an epistemic courtesy that acknowledged virtual (rather than actual) veracity to perceivers where this encounters no discernable obstacles. This policy takes

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

54

the position that by a tacit convention of communication generosity that whenever • I take myself to be seeing X is literally correct characterization of the actual solution • I (actually) see X. We authorize it by cultural convention. By this sort of custom we see it as authorized to substitute (2) for (1), and see people as entitled to make this substitution. The matter is not so much one of validation as of culturally authorized entitlement—a communicative connection guided in social norms stand. We may initially operate on the basis of a Principle of Generosity inherent in the presumption that in the absence of substantial counterinteractions that people do in fact see what they take themselves to see as with most any other source of information credit must earned in the course of experience. It is pragmatic efficacy that in the end validates this social convention and validates the standard cognitive policy of letting appearance count as reality in the absence of counterindications. And there is good reason behind such a policy. For empiricism holds good. If perception does not provide us with information about “the real world” then nothing can: and perception can only inform us when we accept its deliverances as giving signs and signals as to how things actually stand. So in the end, that policy is justified by this-ornothing considerations. 11. The infinite regress objection that cognitive mediation must end in immediacy can be defeated. The regress objection turns on the problem that if objective knowledge of factual matters is always cognitively mediated by something which itself is factual in nature, then how can the process ever start? The answer to this objection lies in the consideration that such a regress is just not at issue. For while temporal and causal antecedence would indeed be problematic, antecedence in the probative order of cognitive

55

THE MIRAGE OF IMMEDIATE FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

substantiation is something else again. Here circularity is not a problem because in the order of cognitive substantiation there is a need for a presupposition of prior knowledge, since presumption, plausibility, and rational surmise can now come into the operation.3 The instrumentalities of tentative surmise and cognitive upgrading preclude any self-presuppositional viciousness here. Factual cognition is not a mere exponential given but something taken as product of implementing a manifold of presumptions and presuppositions evidence things the systemic care of experience at work in the biological evolution of the human beings and the rational evolution of human communities. Such knowledge is not the gift of experiential immediacy but the hard-won product of systemic cognitive labor. Those data of personal experience speak only for themselves in their full subjectivity. Outright objectivity comes only through the mediation of thought via the deployment of mind-supplied resources whose validation is not immediate but mind-mediated in ways whose validation ultimately rests on considerations of pragmatism efficacy. Only the deployment of idealistic resource renders possible the achievement of knowledge regards of even the most commonplace and mundane objective facts. NOTES 1

See Roderick Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), pp. 73–75; and Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 44–49.

2

At this point German usage is constructive in its distinction between occurent experience (Erlebnis) and the larger course of systemic experience (Erfahrung).

3

On these issues see the author’s Infinite Regress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010) and Presumption (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Chapter Seven COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY WHAT IS COMPLEMENTARITY?

C

omplementarity exists whenever two factors are so related that one of them can only be increased at the cost of diminishing the other. It is a phenomenon of great importance both in science and in ordinary life! With humans, life expectancy is complementarily related to over-weight, with automobiles, the resale value is complementarily related to the age of a (non-antique) vehicle. Our desiderata often stand in competing opposition. One may want a residence to be both spacious and easily maintained, but the one is clearly at odds with the other. In many cities the cost or land is complementarily related to convenience of access to the town center. It lies in the nature of things that their desirable features are in general competitively interactive. A conflict or competition among desiderata is a familiar fact of life, because positivities are in many instances such that more of the one can only be realized at the expense of less of the other. As many a homilist has failed to learn, comprehensiveness is at odds with memorability. What can be characterized as desideratum complementarity arises when two (or more) parameters of merit are linked (be it through a nature-imposed or a conceptually mandated interrelationship) in a complementary see-saw or teeter-totter interconnection. Such desideratum complementarity is pretty well inevitable with any complex, multidimensional good whose overall merit hinges on the cooperation of several distinct value-components. For beyond a certain point, augmentation of the one is simply incompossible with augmentation of the other (to use Leibniz’s terminology), so that a decrease in one parameter of value is the unavoidably exacted price for an increase in the other.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

58

DISPLAY 1 COMPLEMENTARY QUANTITATIVE FACTORS ↑ y = Factor No. 2 (increasing)

Feasible Combinations

x = Factor No. 1 → (increasing)

The conception of complementarity became prominent in science through the influence of the Copenhagen School of quantum physics centering on the work of Niels Bohr. The pivotal idea here was that subatomic particles like the electron fail to have status condition of the classically determinate sort in that it is impossible for such a particle to have a fixed position in space-time. Either one can accordingly determine the position of the particle or its velocity, but not both together. We would like detail on both sides, but the reality of it is that a more exact determination of the one can only be achieved at the price of greater inexactness regarding the other. Throughout such cases of complementarity there is something of a teeter-totter, see-saw relationship.1 Accordingly, complementarity between two factors is based on a trade-off interlinkage of the generic format depicted in Display 1. Instances of this relationship are provided by such equations as xy = c and x + y = c, where x, y > 0 and c is a constant.2 In such situations the bigger the one factor the less the other. When shifting from a quantitative to a merely comparative perspective, we arrive at the less detailed situation depicted in Display 2, which presents a more rough-and-ready way of depicting complementary factors when a quantitative measurement seems to be impracticable.

59

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

DISPLAY 2 NON-QUANTITATIVE (COMPARATIVE) COMPLEMENTARITY H* H

Infeasible Combinations are darkened

L L* L* NOTE:

H* H L L*

L

H

H*

very high/large big/large low/small very low/small

Specifically cognitive complementarity arises in the special case of a desideratum conflict, arising whenever two desirable features of cognition are at odds with one another. Thus as you focus your camera for a photo you can obtain either a larger scene with less detail about its components or else great detail about one component at the expense of losing sight of its relations to the larger scene. But the conjoint combination of comprehensive depiction and fine photographic detail is something you cannot achieve in the circumstances. This sort of situation pervades the domain of information management. For example, we want the answers to our questions to be both informative (comprehensive and detailed) and comprehensible (readily grasped and retained) but here too the one is clearly at odds with the other. The cognitive complementarity relation that obtains between novelty/innovativeness and systemic-fit/coherence is especially instructive. On the one hand we are eager for novel discoveries because new truths are important in serving to reorient and modify our understanding of how things work. On the other hand we want our understanding of affairs to be unified and coordinated—rounded off in a systemic

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

60

Display 3 TWO COMPLEMENTARY COGNITIVE VIRTUES MODES OF SECURITY

MODES OF INFORMATIVENESS

•

tenability/certainty

•

detail

•

plausibility

•

precision

•

evidentiation/substantiation

•

generality

•

verisimilitude

•

range and scope

•

probability and likelihood

cohesion where what we know fits together. Here too we cannot concurrently have it both ways. TENABILITY VS. INFORMATIVENESS It is a basic principle of epistemology that increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be secured at the price of decreased accuracy. For in general an inverse relationship obtains between the definiteness or precision of our information and its substantiation: detail and security stand in a complementary and competing relationship. We estimate the height of the tree at around 25 feet. We are quite sure that the tree is 25x5 feet high. We are virtually certain that its height is 25x10 feet. But we can be completely and absolutely sure that its height is between 1 inch and 100 yards. Of this we are “completely sure” in the sense that we are “absolutely certain,” “certain beyond the shadow of a doubt,” “as certain as we can be of anything in the world,” “so sure that we would be willing to stake your life on it,” and the like. For any sort of estimate whatsoever there is always a characteristic trade-off relationship between on the one hand the evidential security and tenability of the estimate (as determinable on the basis of its probability or degree of acceptability), and on the

61

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

Display 4 DUHEM’S LAW THE COMPLEMENTARITY TRADE-OFF BETWEEN SECURITY AND DEFINITENESS IN ESTIMATION increasing security or tenability (s)

s x d = c (constant)

increasing detail or informativeness (d) NOTE: The shaded region inside the curve represents the parametric range of achievable information, with the curve indicating the limit of what is realizable. The concurrent achievement of great detail and security is generally impracticable. The quality C will differ over various settings. (In quantum electrodynamics statistical prediction can achieve adequacy with many decimal places of accuracy.)

other hand its informative detail (definiteness, exactness, precision, etc.). (The failures at issue are listed in Display 3.) And so a complementarity relationship of the sort depicted in Display 4 obtains as between detail and security. The former (tenability) relates to the comparative extent to which we can have confidence in the truth of a claim. The latter (informativeness) relates to the extent to which that claim “sticks its assertoric neck out” so to speak. And the situation is that every mode of tenability stands in complementary conflict with every mode of informativeness. After all, it is always safer to say “There are roughly 4000 people in the crowd” than it is to say “There are 3548 people in the crowd.” The road to assertoric safety lies in vagueness, and—contraries—precision makes for assertoric risk. The Display 4 relationship was adumbrated in the ideas of the French physicist Pierre Maurice Duhem (1881–1916) and may accordingly be called “Duhem’s Law.”3 For in his classic work on the aim and structure of physical theory,4 Duhem wrote as follows:

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

62

A law of physics possesses a certainty much less immediate and much more difficult to estimate than a law of common sense, but it surpasses the latter by the minute and detailed precision of its predictions … The laws of physics can acquire this minuteness of detail only by sacrificing something of the fixed and absolute certainty of common-sense laws. There is a sort of teeter-totter of balance between precision and certainty: one cannot be increased except to the detriment of the other.5 Moreover, the circumstance that in the specific case of predictions high informativeness makes a higher reach of refubilia plays a key role in K. R. Popper’s theory of scientific method. The principle at issue did not elude Niels Bohr himself, the father of complementarity theory in physics: In later years Bohr emphasized the importance of complementarity for matters far removed from physics. There is a story that Bohr was once asked in German what is the quality that is complementary to truth (Wahrheit). After some thought he answered clarity (Klarheit). 6

As Bohr thus has it, these two factors—security and detail—stand in a relation of inverse proportionality. And an analogous relationship of cognitive complementarity functions along many dimensions of cognitive desirability. Duhem’s Law of Cognitive Complementarity means that it is going to be a fact of life in the general theory of estimation that the harder we push for certainty—for security of our claims—the vaguer we will have to make these claims and the more general and imprecise they will become. And so if we want our scientific claims to have realistic import—taking them to provide an account of how matters actually stand—we have to reconstrue them loosely. Take the atomic theory. We should not—cannot—say that atoms are in every detail as the science of the day holds them to be: that the “Atomic Theory” section of our Handbook of Physics succeeds in every jot and title in characterizing reality as it actually is. But if we “fuzz things up”—if we claim merely that physical reality is granular and that atoms exist and have

63

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

roughly such-and-such features—then what we say is no longer subject to (reasonable) doubt. The relation of quantity and quality accordingly provides yet another important entryway to cognitive complementarity; quality and quantity complementarity in cognition because they are complementary almost everywhere. As long as human capacities are distributed along the statistically commonplace of normal distribution, this complementarity relationship is bound to obtain. And so, in matters of cognitive performance ranging from mathematical acuity to mnemonics the same general situation prevails. There is always a rapid quantitative decent from superior ability to sub-mediocre performance. COGNITIVE RISK AND RATIONAL INQUIRY Two fundamentally different kinds of misfortunes can arise in cognitive situations where risks are run and chances taken: 1. Omission errors: One fails to accept something which, as it turns out, we should have accepted. We decline to take the chance and avoid running the risk at issue, but things turn out favorably after all, so that we lose out on the gamble. 2. Commission errors: One accepts something which, as it turns out, we should have rejected. We do take the chance and run the risk at issue, but things go wrong, so that we lose the gamble. It is only too clear that errors of commission are not the only sort of misfortune there are. Ignorance, lack of information, cognitive disconnection from the world’s course of things—in short, errors of omission—are also negativities of substantial proportionism, and this too is something we must work into our reckoning. Both are negativities and obviously need to be avoided insofar as possible in any sensible inquiry process. If we are risk seekers, we will incur few misfortunes of the first kind, but, things being what they are, many of the second kind well befall us. On the other hand, if we are risk avoiders, we shall suffer few misfortunes on the second kind, but shall inevitably incur many of

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

64

Display 5 THE COST OF RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACHES misfortunes of kind 1

↑

misfortunes of kind 2

Number of Significant misfortunes

0

50

100

Increasing risk acceptance (in % of situations) Risk Avoiders

Cautious Calculators

Risk Seekers

the first. In cognitive matters, mistake and delusion is the penalty of carelessness) while ignorance is the inevitable price of over-caution. (The situation has the general structure depicted in Display 5.) As already noted, one way of insuring against error is to “hedge one’s bets” by vagueness. “How old was George Washington when he died?” If I answer “seventy years” my response is at risk, but distinctly less so if I answer “around seventy,” and less yet if I say “over sixty.” Two sorts of cognitive complementarity are at work here: epistemic caution diminishes mistakes but augments ignorance, while incaution diminishes perplexity but invites mistakes. To be sure, agnosticism is a sure-fire safeguard against errors of commission in cognitive matters. If you accept nothing then you accept no falsehoods. All ventures in claiming knowledge about objective reality carry some risk of cognitive error in their wake: it is unavoidable companion of the enhancement of knowledge. And so we have it that “to err is human.”

65

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

To be sure, being mistaken is unquestionably a negativity. When we accept something false, we have failed in our endeavors to get a correct view of things—to answer our questions properly and grasp how matters actually stand. Moreover, mistakes tend to ramify and infect neighboring issues. If I (correctly) realize that p logically entails q but incorrectly believe not-q, then I am constrained to accept not-p, which may well be quite wrong. Error is fertile of further error. So quite apart from practical matters (suffering painful practical consequences when things go wrong), there are also the purely cognitive penalties of mistakes—entrapment in an incorrect view of things. All this must be granted and taken into account. But the fact remains that errors of commission are not the only sort of misfortune there are. Ignorance, lack of information, cognitive disconnection from the world’s course of things—in short, errors of omission—are also negativities of substantial proportions. This too is something we must work into our reckoning. For as the diagram of Display 5 has graphically indicated, errors of omission are the price of averting errors of commission and the matter is one of errors of one kind for those of another. The by now familiar teeter-totter relationship obtains here once more. For unfortunately the reality of it is that any given epistemic program—any sort of process or policy of belief formation—will answer to the situation of complimentarity between the two modes of error. The question accordingly arises: How much gain in one is needed to compensate for how much loss in the other? Are we prepared to run a significantly greater risk of mistakes to secure the potential benefit of a significantly enlarged understanding? In the end, the matter is one of priorities—of safety as against information, of ontological economy as against cognitive advantage, of an epistemological risk aversion as against the impetus to understanding. The issue, in the end, is one of values and priorities, weighing the negativity of ignorance and incomprehension against the risk of mistakes and misinformation. In claiming that his position wins out because it makes the fewest mistakes, the sceptic uses a fallacious system of scoring, for while he indeed makes the fewest errors of one kind, he does this at the cost of proliferating those of another. Once we look on this matter of error realistically, the sceptic’s vaunted advantage vanishes. The sceptic is

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

66

simply a risk avoider, who is prepared to take no risks and who stubbornly insists on minimizing errors of the second kind alone, heedless of the errors of the first kind into which he falls at every opportunity. Ultimately, we face a question of value trade-offs. Are we prepared to run a greater risk of mistakes to secure the potential benefit of an enlarged understanding? In the end, the matter is one of priorities—of safety as against information, of ontological economy as against cognitive advantage, of an epistemological risk aversion as against the impetus to understanding. The pivotal issue is one of values and priorities, weighing the negativity of ignorance and incomprehension against the risk of mistakes and misinformation. The sceptic succeeds splendidly in averting misfortunes of the second kind. He makes no errors of commission; by accepting nothing, he accepts nothing false. But, of course, he loses out on the opportunity to obtain any sort of information. The sceptic thus errs on the side of safety, even as the syncretist errs on that of gullibility. The sensible course is clearly that of a prudent calculation of risks. As this situation indicates, averting error is not enough. After all, resolutions that succumb to imprecision, vagueness, indefiniteness, and the like, need not be erroneous, but yet are apt to be unhelpful and uninformative. Accordingly, averting error by vague and insufficient answers to our questions does not offer a very satisfactory route to knowledge. To realize one does not make pancakes from sand, from mercury, from butterfly wings, etc. etc. is certainly to have a great many correct beliefs about the matter. But all such error avoidance does not bring one much closer to knowing how pancakes are actually made. The aims of inquiry are not necessarily furthered by the elimination of cognitive errors of commission. For if in eliminating such an error we simply leave behind a blank and for a wrong answer substitute no answer at all we have simply managed to exchange an error of commission for one of omission. Clearly, the reasonable thing to do is to adopt a policy that minimizes misfortunes overall. And this means that a rigidly one-sided policy of avoiding all errors of one particular type (be it omission or commission) will fail to be rationally optimal. Both approaches engender too many misfortunes for comfort. The sensible and prudent thing is to adopt the middle-of-the-road policy of risk calculation,

67

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

striving as best we can to balance the positive risks of outright loss against the negative ones of lost opportunity. The rule of reason calls for sensible management and a prudent calculation of risks; it standardly enjoins upon us the Aristotelian golden mean between extremes of gullibility and ignorance. THE VAGARIES OF VAGUENESS A fallibilism of the contemplated sort certainly provides no basis for a radical scepticism. For they do not take the pessimistic line of a cognitive negativism to the effect that knowledge about the world is unachievable. On the contrary, the present approach is one of cautious optimism, arguing that while reliable information is often not as readily achievable as people incline to think, nevertheless the cognitive enterprise can successfully come to terms with this fact. Evolutionary considerations afford us good reason to think that we exist in a world that is sufficiently “user friendly” that we need not exactly be right about things for opinion-guided action to succeed in “the struggle for existence”. And even in purely cognitive matters we can—strange to say—manage to extract truth from error. The complementarity of detail and correctness has important ramifications in this context. For one fundamental feature of inquiry is represented by the following observation: THESIS 1: Insofar as our thinking is vague, truth is accessible even in the face of ignorance. Consider the situation where you correctly accept P-or-Q. But—so let it be supposed—the truth of this disjunction roots entirely in that of P, while Q is of otherwise undetermined truth-status. You yourself, however, accept P-or-Q only because you are convinced of the truth of Q whereas P is something about which you have no information at all. Nevertheless, despite your crucial ignorance, your belief is entirely true and appropriate.7 This example illustrates a far-reaching point of cognitive complementarity:

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

68

THESIS 2: There is in general an inverse relationship between the precision or definiteness of a judgment and its security: detail and reliability stand in a competing relationship. Increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be purchased at the price of decreased accuracy. We can be reasonably certain of how things “usually” are and how they “roughly” are, even when unsure not of how they always and exactly are. The moral of this story is that, insofar as our ignorance of relevant matters leads us to be vague in our judgments, we may well manage to enhance our chances of being right. The fact of the matter is that we have: THESIS 3: By constraining us to make vaguer judgments, ignorance enhances our access to correct information (albeit at the cost of less detail and precision). Thus if I have forgotten that Seattle is in Washington State, then if “forced to guess” I might well erroneously locate it in Oregon. Nevertheless, my vague judgment that “Seattle is located in America’s Pacific northwest” is quite correct. This state of affairs means that when the truth of our claims is critical we generally “play it safe” and make our commitments less definite and detailed. Vagueness clearly provides a protective shell that safeguards a statement against falsity. Irrespective of how matters might actually stand within a varied range of alternative circumstances and conditions, a less definite statement can remain secure, its truth unaffected by which possibility is realized. Our claims regarding reality generally fall short in point of accuracy and detail for reasons ultimately rooted in our human condition as beings whose knowledge is mediated by language. A descriptive term is equivocal when its application invites the question: “In what sense?” (Example: gay or crooked). A descriptive term is vague when its application invites the question: “Of what sort or kind?” (Example: vehicle or metal.) A descriptive term is ambiguous when its application invites the question: “In what mode, respect, or manner?” (Example: instructive or incompetent.) A term is inexact or imprecise when its application invites the question: “In what degree or to what ex-

69

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

tent?” (Example: large or old.) Moreover, a descriptive term is figurative when it is in some respect metaphorical or analogical, so as to invite the question “just how is this so?” As such cases indicate, human communication is replete with unclarity and inexactness, ever admitting further questions about the purport or what has been said. While reality itself is interrogatively complete, our thought and discourse about it certainly is not: we are constantly constrained to use loose terminology and fill our discourse with expressions on the order of “roughly,” “approximately,” “something like,” “in the neighborhood of,” “in his 70s,” “some six feet tall,” and so on. This prominence in our discussions of indecisiveness—of vagueness, equivocation, and the rest—is a key fact of epistemic life that guards us against falsity. COGNITION IN SCIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Natural science eschews the security of indefiniteness. In science we strive for the greatest realizable universality, precision, exactness, and so on. The law-claims of science are strict: precise, wholly explicit, exceptionless, and unshaded. They involve no hedging, no fuzziness, no incompleteness, and no exceptions. In stating that “the melting point of lead is 327.545 degree centigrade at standard pressure,” the physicist asserts that all pieces of (pure) lead will unfailingly melt at exactly this temperature; he certainly does not mean to assert that most pieces of more-or-less pure lead will probably melt at somewhere around this temperature. By contrast, when we assert in ordinary life that “peaches are delicious,” we mean something like “most people will find the eating of suitably grown and duly matured peaches a relatively pleasurable experience.” Such statements have all sorts of builtin safeguards like “more or less,” “in ordinary circumstances,” “by and large,” “normally,” “if other things are equal,” and the like. They are not laws but rules of thumb, a matter of practical lore rather than scientific rigor. In natural science, however, we deliberately accept risk by aiming at maximal definiteness—and thus at maximal informativeness and testability. The theories of natural science have no case for what happens ordinarily or normally; they seek to transact their explanatory business in terms of high generality and strict universality—in terms of what happens always and everywhere and in all

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

70

circumstances. In consequence, we must recognize the vulnerability of our scientific statements. The fact that the theoretical claims of science are actually “mere estimates” that are always cognitively at risk and enjoy only a modest life span has its roots in science’s inherent commitment to the pursuit of maximal definiteness. Its cultivation of informativeness—of definiteness of information—everywhere forces science to risk error. Display 7

Security

Detail

Display 7 depicts the by-now familiar complementarity relation between detail and security. Any tenable fallibilism must take this relationship into careful account. Consider the “atomic theory,” for example. It has an ancient and distinguished history in the annals of science, stretching from the speculations of Democritus in antiquity, through the work of Dalton, Rutherford, and Bohr, to the baroque complexities of the present day. “It is surely unlikely that science will ever give up on atoms!” you say. Quite true! But what we are dealing with here is clearly not a scientific theory at all, but a vast family of decidedly different scientific theories, a great bundle loosely held together by threads of historical influence and family resemblances. The “atomic theory” as it has evolved over the ages is no more than a rough generic schema based on the more or less metaphorical intuition that “matter is granular in the small, composed of tiny structures separated in space.” This is surely incomplete and indeterminate—a large box into which a vast number of particular theories can be fitted. It claims that there are atoms, but leaves open an almost endless range of possibilities as to what they are like. This sort of contention may

71

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

well be safe enough; at this level of schematic indiscriminateness and open-endedness, scientific claims can of course achieve security. But they do so only at the expense of definiteness—of that generality and precision which reflect what science is all about. The quest for enhanced definiteness is unquestionably a prime mover of scientific inquiry. The ever-continuing pursuit of increasing accuracy, greater generality, widened comprehensiveness, and improved systematicity for its assertions is the motive force behind scientific research. And this innovative process—impelled by the quest for enhanced definiteness—drives the conceptual scheme of science to regions ever more distant from the familiar conceptual scheme of our everyday life. For the ground-rules of ordinary life discourse are altogether different. Ordinary-life communication is a practically oriented endeavor carried on in a social context: it stresses such maxims as “Aim for security, even at the price of definiteness,” “Protect your credibility,” “Avoid misleading people, or—even worse—lying by asserting outright falsehoods,” “Do not take a risk and ‘cry wolf.’” Scientific “knowledge” at the level of deep theory is always purported knowledge: knowledge as we see it today. In our heart of hearts, we realize that we may see it differently tomorrow—or the day after. We must stand ready to acknowledge the fragility of our scientific theorizing. All we are ever able to do in natural science is to select the optimal answer to the questions we manage to formulate within the realm of alternatives specifiable by means of the conceptual machinery of the day. And we have no reason to doubt—nay, have every reason to believe—that the day will come when this conceptual basis will be abandoned, in the light of yet unrealizable developments, as altogether inadequate. The relationship of “our (putative) scientific knowledge” to “the (real) truth” has to be conceived of in terms of estimation. At the frontiers of generality and precision, “our truth” in matters of scientific theorizing is not—and may well never actually be—the real truth. Science does not secure the truth (deliver it into our hands in its definitive finality). We have no alternative to acknowledging that our science, as it stands here and now, does not present the real to provide us with a tentative and provisional estimate of it. However confidently it may affirm its conclusions, the realization must be maintained that the

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

72

declarations of natural science are provisional and tentative—subject to revision and even to outright rejection. The most we can ever do is to take our present-day science as the imperfect best we can do here and now to conjecture “the real truth.” After all, in intent and in aspiration science aims to characterize nature as it really is. And since (as we certainly believe) the make-up of nature is fully definite and detailed, science endeavors to infuse these characteristics into the claims it stakes regarding the world. It scorns the very idea of claiming that matters stand roughly thus-wise or that things function something like such-and-such. Unlike everyday-life communication, the exact sciences stand committed not just to truth but accuracy and exactness as well. And this, their seeming strength, is their Achilles’ heel as well. By contrast, the situation of ordinary life is very different when we here assert that “peaches are delicious” we are maintaining something like “most people will find the eating of suitably grown and duly matured peaches a rather pleasurable experience”. Such a statement has all sorts of built-in safeguards on the order of “more or less,” “in ordinary circumstances,” “by and large,” “normally,” “when all things are equal,” “rather plausible,” and so on. They are not really laws in the usual sense, but rules of thumb, a matter of practical lore rather than scientific rigor. But this enables them to achieve great security. For there is safety in vagueness: a factual claim can always acquire security through inexactness. Take “there are rocks in the world” or “dogs can bark.” It is virtually absurd to characterize such everyday-life contentions as fallible: Their security lies in their very indefiniteness and imprecision. And there is good reason for adopting this resort to vagueness in everyday life. For protecting one’s claims to reliability and trustworthiness becomes crucial in personal interactions. We proceed in cognitive matters in much the same way that lenders such as banks proceed in financial matters. We extend credit to others, doing so at 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. By responding to trust in a responsible way, one improves one’s credit rating in cognitive contexts much as in financial contexts. The

73

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

same sort of mechanism is at work on both sides of the analogy: creditworthy comportment engenders a reputation on which further credit can be based; earned credit is like money in the bank, well worth the measure needed for its maintenance and for preserving the good name that is now at stake. Thus we constantly rely on experts in a plethora of situations, continually placing reliance on doctors, lawyers, architects, and other professionals. But they, too, must so perform as to establish credit, not just as individuals but, even more crucially, for their profession as a whole.8 And much the same sort of thing holds for other sources of information. (The example of our senses is a particularly important case in point here.) In everyday life, in sum, we prioritize correctness over accuracy. Because the aims of the enterprises are characteristically different, our inquiries in everyday life and in science have a wholly different aspect; the former achieves stability and security at the price of sacrificing definiteness, a price that the latter scorns to pay. ON PROGRESS AND DIMINISHING RETURNS Cognitive complementarity has yet another variant form, this one relating not to the quality of items of knowledge, but to their quantity. Here quantity is a matter of the informative extent of reliable claims, while quality, by contrast, relates to the depth (profoundly, significance) of the information at issue. The combination calls for knowing a good deal about really important matters. And the tradeoff between these two factors lies in the conceptually unavoidable fact that the possibility-range of a claim is widened by vagueness and narrowed by precision. Quantitative complementarity is inherent in the contingent fact of human limitedness—namely that limited time and effort are at the disposal of any given individual. There are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a lifetime. An individual can be well informed in a great many fields or expert in a few. In the preliminary circumstances one cannot have it both ways. There is only so much that any of us can do and we are consequently forced to choose between the hedgehog and the fox—between knowing a great deal rather superficially and knowing little that is deep and profound. The range and depth of a

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

74

Display 8 PERSONAL MASTERY OF INFORMATION 100 % of available information that a single individual can master 0 Total volume of available information

person’s knowledge thus stand in a situation of cognitive complementarity. So in this regard there is bound to prevail the situation of cognitive complementarity depicted in Display 8. And specialization and division of labor accordingly constitutes an ineliminable feature of the overall growth of knowledge. This state of affairs has an important bearing on the resource of cognitive progress. This roots in the palpably plausible idea that: In order to function in a field of inquiry so competently as to be able to make a significant contribution to it one must know 20 percent of the literature of the field. (For present purposes the exact quantity at issue here is immaterial.) But 20 percent of a field that is ever growing is a quality which itself is ever growing and which in due course will exceed the limits of human imaginability. The only solution then is to shift to an ongoingly smaller, more narrowly constituted manifold of inquiry. In sum—increasing specialization. Granted, in an improved state of the art to increase concurrently both the precision and the reliability of our substantive claims. However, cognitive complementarity is not overcome and abolished: even with qualitative progress it prevails after as before. For the crucial fact is that such improvement is always possible only up to a point. The fundamental fact of complementarity remains unchanged.9 Cognitive complementarity in its quantitative dimension betokens the inevitable

75

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

Display 9 DIMINISHING RETURNS ON EFFORT IN INQUIRY Additional progress secured via a fixed volume of resources investment Progress already achieved

reality of human finitude. There is only so much that human individuals can accomplish in a lifetime, and in cognitive matters we must choose between narrower specialization and broader superficiality. THE UNREALIZABILITY OF PERFECTION: A PATH TO PRAGMATISM Throughout our cognitive endeavors we must negotiate situations of complementarity between various desiderata. And finding the proper middle way here is a matter of considering our judgment to the specific characteristics of the problem-situations at hand. With desideratum complementarity of any sort we have the situation that to all intents and purposes realizing more of one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways, so that ideal of achieving the absolute perfection of a concurrent maximization of every parameter of merit at one and the same time lies beyond the possibility of realization as a matter of principle. For it is the fundamental fact of axiology that every object has a plurality of evaluative features some of which will in some respects stand in conflict. And consequently in any setting of multicriterial complementarity, “absolute” perfection is simply a pie-in-the-sky impossibility. What we need to do here is look at the exact picked situation in where we find ourselves, and, given its nature, to seek to identify the least acceptable value of our merit-parameters d1 and d2. What we then have on our hands is not a problem of maximization as such, but rather a problem of optimization, i.e. of maximization subject to con-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

76

straints. And of course one must expect the same sort of situation to prevail further along the line. When (a value) V fissions apart into components V1 and V2, then it must be expected that these themselves will in their turn fission in the same way, respectively splitting into V11/V12 and V21/V22 in a way that once again calls for contextual optimalism rather than absolute maximization. The problem of complementarily conflicting desiderata becomes insuperable. Thus consider an automobile. Here the parameters of merit clearly includes such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated and it is unavoidable that they trade off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridiculous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Again, in designing a car you cannot maximize both safety and economy of operation (which demands lightness of weight). And analogously, the world is not, and cannot possibly be, absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfection is in principle impossible of realization. Invariably, perfection—an all-at-once maximization of every value dimension—is inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evaluative parameters. And of course, it makes no sense to ask for the impossible in these matters. It is an inherently inevitable feature of the nature of things— a logico-conceptually inevitable “fact of life”—that with the complexity of a world at issue, value realization will always be a matter of balance, of trade-offs, of compromise because value factors always compete in matters of realization. Concurrent maximization in every relevant positivity is simply unavailable in this or indeed any other realistically conceivable world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an auspicious combination of values—an overall optimal profile. And in the cognitive domain too the matters are just the same. The overall situation that confronts us is as follows: • The information we achieve through rational inquiry is subject to many desiderata.

77

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

• These desiderata do not accord in lock-step coordination but often stand in a situation of complementarity-induced conflict. • This means that achieving a resolution in cognitive matters is inevitably a matter of compromise and trade-offs. • And here there is no uniform, one-size fits all, optimal resolution, but that the requisite approach is one of a functionalistic contextualism that attunes the resolution to the goals, aims, and purposes of the particular situation at hand. Whenever a desideratum has features of value that are complementarily related we have a situation where perfection—the all-as-once combined realization of every aspect of positivity—is simply impossible as a matter of principle. In every circumstance there must now be a compromise among those possibilities—a reasonable adjustment to a balancing mixture among them. But how are we to transmute a diversified value aspect of a plurality of desiderata into a single overall assessment of merit? The fact of it is that no general, overall determination is available here. We cannot but proceed on a case-by-case basis. And in the case of knowledge, in specific, the appropriate assessment is bound to depend on the particular substantive-context that is at issue. We do not need to know how much it will rain—do not need precision in the amount of rainfall— when the issue is that of determining whether or not to take an umbrella. The unavoidable intrusion of desideratum complementarity in cognition requires us to negotiate acceptable combinations of desiderata that are only suboptimally attainable. And this can never be done in a once-and-for-all manner, but demands a contextualized attainment to the problem situation at hand, with the aims and purposes at issue serving as guiding determent. The fact of it is that the complementarity-inherent decision of how much of desideratum A can be traded off against how much of B is an invariably pragmatic question that must be addressed in terms of the aims and purposes at issue in the prevailing circumstances. And so, in

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

78

matters of cognition, too, a functionalistic and pragmatic approach is called for. Whenever unqualified perfection is unachievable we cannot avoid the problem of how good is good enough. And this is something that must inevitably hinge in the aims and aspirations of the specific enterprise at issue. Even in paradigmatically theoretical matters of cognition, the practicalities of the situation are bound to play a crucial role, and the pragmatic issue of the specific ends and uses of the information at issue will have to govern the operative ground-rules of our cognitive proceedings. NOTES 1

In their interesting 1974 paper on “Generalizations of Complementarity” (Synthese, vol. 28 (1974), pp. 117–39), Seigwart Ludendberg and Paul Oppenheim consider a generalization of complementarity based on the idea of an “Assignment paradox” arising when items can be assigned with apparently equal justification to one or another of two exclusive and exhaustive categories (corpuscle/unedited, physical/mental, living/imagine, or the like). It should already be clear that this sort of “complementarity” is not at issue in the present discussion. Our present concern is not with classifactory but with cognitive issues.

2

This means that the trade-off between the factors at issue need not take the exact form of the Display 1 curve, seeing that a proliferation of alternatives will leave basic principle intact.

3

It is alike common and convenient in matters of learning and science to treat ideas and principles eponymously. An eponym, however, is a person for whom something is named, and not necessarily after whom this is done, seeing that eponyms can certainly be honorific as well as genetic. Here at any rate eponyms are sometimes used to make the point that the work of the person at issue has suggested rather than originated the idea or principle at issue.

4

La théorie physique: son objet, et sa structure (Paris: Chevalier and Rivière, 1906); tr. by Philip P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1954.) This principle did not elude Niels Bohr himself, the father of complementarity theory in physics: “In later years Bohr emphasized the importance of complementarity for matters far removed from physics. There is a story that Bohr was once asked in German what is the quality that is complementary to truth (Wahrheit). After some thought he answered clarity (Klarheit).”

5

Duhem, op. cit., pp. 178–79. Italics supplied.

79

COGNITIVE COMPLEMENTARITY

NOTES 6

Stephen Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], p. 74 footnote 10.

7

Examples of this sort indicate why philosophers are unwilling to identify knowledge with true belief.

8

Compare H. M. Vollmer and D. L. Mills, eds., Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966). This credit, once earned, is generally safeguarded and maintained by institutional means: licensing procedures, training qualifications, professional societies, codes of professional practice, and the like.

9

On the factors at work here see the author’s Scientific Progress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

Chapter Eight INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE 1. THE NATURE OF INDUCTION

O

lder textbooks on reasoning processes characterize induction as a mode of inference from the particular to the general. But this characterization is clearly overly restrictive. When I surmise that Henry is presently home because his car is in the driveway, I am for sure reasoning inductively, and yet my inference is obviously particular and not general. Hume-influenced theorists often characterize induction as a matter of inference from the past to the future. But the preceding car-indriveway illustration shows that this need not be the case at all. Induction is sometimes described as inference from a part to the whole—from a sample to an entire population; for example from a few test-driven autos of a certain model to the whole population of this type of auto. But when I surmise that on the next occasion you will select an action film because that’s what you did the last few times we went to the movies together, I need not endorse the idea that you will always and invariably prefer action films. The sort of thing at issue in the preceding modes of thought as per particular → general past → present-or-future sample → population examined cases → as-yet unexamined cases

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

82

do indeed represent particular kinds of inductive reasoning. But these particular modes are neither typical nor universal with regard to induction in its entirety. A comprehensive characterization of induction must be sought elsewhere. Advancing along these lines, one might say that induction, on the whole and in general, is a mode of reasoning that moves from premisses that present presumably acceptable data to conclusions that make claims whose information extends above and beyond what those premisses provide for. What induction thus does is, in effect, to outrun the information-at-hand in an endeavor to enlarge the range of knowledge, by answering questions that information at hand does not resolve in a decisive way. Induction, so conceived, is a very diversified and much-inclusive mode of reasoning that admits of a wide variety of realizations as regards the cognitive transition at issue: particular to general, past to future, sample to population, instance to type, etc. The generic function common to all of these instances is the transition from given premisses taken as established to conclusions that transcend the limitations of their informative range. What is, from the standpoint of deductive logic, a blatant fallacy of reasoning defines the very nature and constitutes the very reason for being on inductive inference. The salient point here is that in its reliance on information above and beyond anything that the premisses provide for means that inductive reasoning is a matter not really of inference but of plausible conjecture. A being in total possess of the facts—never beset with information gaps that needed to be followed through running cognitive risks, would never need to venture into inductive inference. God has no need to reason inductively: not for him are the challenges of cognitive estimation. 2. INDUCTION AS TRUTH ESTIMATION For the sake of concreteness let us consider a typical (albeit supersimple) inductive issue. Let it be that we have before us the following inductive arguments (among others):

83

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

(a) There is smoke there (and suitable background considerations)

(b) There is smoke there (and suitable background considerations)

(c) There is smoke there (and suitable background considerations)





There is fire there.

There is a smoke-flare There.

There is a smokedischarging storage container there

The inductive task is to determine which one of these alternative answers to the question “What does yonder smoke portend?” is to qualify as the “most promising” in the sense of identifying the particular addendum Ei that is, relative to the given data of K, the plausibilistically optimal alternative at our disposal—where the “plausibility” at issue turns on the matter of “best fit” with respect to the information at hand. The inductively appropriate answer to the question at issue corresponds to the outcome of this search for the enthymematic premiss that is plausibilistically optimal—namely that premiss which (relative to the information in hand) represents the smoothest enthymematic supplementation of the background information. On this enthymematic analysis, inductive argumentation involves a characteristic two-step process: (1) possibility-elaboration, that is, the conjectural proliferation of the spectrum of alternative possible answers accompanied by a process of finding the appropriate enthymemes for each such answer by determining the best ways of closing the “epistemic gap” that separates those answers from the given “data of the problem.” (This survey need not include all theoretically available alternatives, but can merely span them by some suitable covering process.) (2) possibility-reduction, that is, the reduction of these alternatives through elimination of some of them. This is to be done by assessing the relative plausibility of the materials needed to close

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

84

the enthymematic gap encountered en route to the solution in question. That is, we use an analysis of comparative plausibilities as a reductive device for seeking out the plausibilistically optimal alternative(s) within this manifold of possibilities.1 Induction leaps to its conclusion instead of literally deriving it from the given premisses by drawing the conclusion from them through some extractive process. Whewell put the point nicely. “Deduction,” he wrote, “descends steadily and methodically, step by step: Induction mounts by a leap which is out of the reach of method [or, at any rate, mechanical routine]. She bounds to the top of the stairs at once …”2 We cannot pass by any sort of inference or cognitive calculation from the “premisses” of an inductive “argument” to its “conclusion” because (ex hypothesi) this would be a deductive non sequitur—the conclusion (in the very nature of the case) asserts something regarding which its premisses are altogether silent.3 Clearly the paradigm mode of inference—of actually deriving a conclusion from the premisses—is actual deduction,4 and this paradigm does not fit induction smoothly. As one recent writer has felicitously put it, our inductive “conclusions” are “not derived from the observed facts, but invented in order to account for them.”5 Induction is thus not so much a process of inference as one of estimation—its conclusion is not so much extracted from data as suggested by them. With inductive reasoning there is always an epistemic (or conjectural) gap between the premisses and the conclusion, a gap that is large or small depending on the information required as supplement to the premisses to guarantee the conclusion: is it minimum in scope— small, trivial, plausible, will established—or is it the opposite, ambitious and extensive? Clearly, we want to accomplish this gap-filling step in the least risky, the minimally problematic way. Induction, on the present approach, is seen as a method (or family of methods) for arriving at our best estimate of the correct answer to questions whose resolution transcends the reach of the facts in hand. In view of the unescapable equation of “correct” with “true” we may characterize induction as a process of truth-estimation. Given the in-

85

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

formation transcendence at issue in such truth-estimation, we know that induction does not guarantee the truth of its product. Indeed, if the history of science has taught us anyone thing, it is that the best estimate of the truth that we can make at any stage of the cognitive game is generally to be seen, with the wisdom of hindsight, as being far off the mark. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the inductively indicated answer does in fact afford our best available estimate of the true answer—in the sense of that one for whose acceptance as true the optimal overall case be constructed with the instruments at hand. The need for such an estimative approach is easy to see. Pilate’s question is still relevant. How are we humans—imperfect mortals dwelling in this imperfect sublunary sphere—to determine where “the real truth” lies in matters of scientific fact? The consideration that, at the level of matters of generality, we have no direct access to the truth regarding the world, that, indeed, it is doubtful if one can make any sense at all of the notion of “direct access” here—is perhaps the most fundamental fact of epistemology. The demand for necessitarian certainty is pointless here—hyperbolic assurance, precision, accuracy, etc. are simply unavailable in matters of scientific inquiry. We have no lines of communication with the Recording Angel. We live in a world not of our making where we have to do the best we can with the means at our disposal. We must recognize that there is no prospect of assessing the truth—or presumptive truth—of claims in this domain independently of the use of our imperfect mechanisms of inquiry and systematization. And here it is estimation that affords the best means for doing the job. We are not—and presumably will never be—in a position to stake a totally secure and unblinkingly final claim to the truth in matters of scientific interest. But we certainly can indeed make our best estimate of the truth of the matter. We can and do aim at the truth even in circumstances where we cannot make fail-proof pretentions to its attainment, and where we have no alternative but to settle for the best available estimate of the truth of the matter—that estimate for which the best case can be made out accordingly to the appropriate standards of rational cogency. And systematization in the context of the available background information is nothing other than the process for making out this rationally best case. In the enthymematic circumstances of the case we have and can

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

86

have no logically airtight guarantee that the “inductively appropriate” answer is true. The inductively appropriate answer is the correct one, not categorically, but “as best we can determine it”—true according to the best available judgment of the matter.6 Induction is and remains an estimation procedure. The fact that we have an inductively warranted answer in hand must never be taken as a basis for shutting the door to further inquiry. It is in just precisely this sense of affording the best attainable assurance of rational cogency that we propose to “justify” induction in this discussion. It is certainly not a fail-proof, sure-fire instrument for generating certified correct answers, something which would in the very nature of the case be infeasible in these information-transcending cases. Rather, it is a method for doing the job at issue—that of truth estimation—as well as it is possible to do in the epistemic circumstances of the case. Since a process of truth-estimation is at issue, inductive cogency as such is not purported to provide a theoretically fail-proof basis for answering our questions about how things stand in the world. Indeed, the history of our cognitive endeavors shows the fallibility of induction only too clearly. There is no justification—and no need—for maintaining that induction is an inherently idyllic mode of truthestimation—all that need be argued is that it’s the best one we’ve got. The accuracy or “validity” (as it is generally called) of an estimation process—its capacity in general to yield estimates that are close to the true value—cannot in the present case be assessed directly but will reflect itself in our confidence in the estimates it yields, a confidence which, in the context of a “best fit” process, will turn on the issue of the tightness of fit. Such a view of induction as a procedure for truth-estimation contrasts importantly with certain alternative approaches. For one thing, it rejects the notion that induction is a theory about the constitution of nature. (How, save inductively, could such a theory ever be substantiated?) And, as we have said, it denies that induction is a process of estimation that moves ampliatively from lesser premisses to larger conclusions. For the legitimation of such a rule would call for a rulewarranting thesis whose status would be vitiatingly problematic. As will be seen, its avoidance of such difficulties yields important ad-

87

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

vantages for the estimative approach to induction from the standpoint of justificatory argumentation. With inductive reasoning our cognitive proceeding conforms to the pattern • There is some reason to think that p • There is within the range of present cognition no visible reason of countervailing weight to think that ~p ∴ It is reasonable to maintain p The guiding idea is that since there is some cogent ground for supposing p to obtain and no impeding obstacle thereto—and since p meets our cognitive needs of the moment—we are entitled to give it the “benefit of doubt” at least pro tem, until cogent counterindications come to view. Induction is not a fail-proof and perfect procedure for obtaining certifiably correct knowledge. A certain amount of cognitive risk is always run. It is a matter of this-or-nothing with respect to answering a question we are determined to resolve. To be sure, given that estimation involves us in making a conjectural erotetic leap, we cannot avoid occasional mistakes. However, it is a key task to minimize this negativity. This means that induction is less a process of inference than a process of rational conjecture—a methodology of answering our questions in a way that runs the least contextually achievable cognitive risk. Any step beyond the information securely at hand involves the risk of error. But the mission of inductive reasoning is to provide us with a means for constituting a body of information that combines the maximum amount of issue-required correct information with the minimum amount of incorrect misinformation. In its move beyond the deductive reach of secured information induction runs the risk of error. But the aim of the enterprise is to minimize this risk while yet providing answers to our questions. By its very nature induction seeks to be a risk-of-error minimizing erotetic (i.e., question-resisting) process. Induction represents a cognitively serious effort at closing an information-gap in such a way that—everything considered—we can

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

88

regard it as epistemically well-advised to accept the indicated results. This quest for a cognitively optimal answer makes induction a matter of systematization geared to considerations of best fit within the framework of our cognitive commitments. The widespread, indeed virtually universal tendency among theorists is to think of induction as a process of inference—a matter of characteristic modes of ampliative inference for drawing larger conclusions from informatively lesser premisses. The present approach is very different in its orientation. It sees induction not as a characteristic mode of drawing conclusions, but as an estimation technique, a methodology for obtaining answers to our factual questions through optimal exploitation of the information at our disposal. Thus regarded, induction is at bottom an erotetic (question-answering) rather than an inferential (conclusion-deriving) procedure. Instead of inferring “All X’s are Y’s” from premisses of the form “X, is Y”, we take the line that the former is the best available answer to the question “What is the Ystatus of the X’s?” given the epistemic situation created by the premisses. Induction thus conceived is the methodology of ampliative reasoning for securing the “best available answer” to our questions—for rational optimization in our quest for information that transcends the “materials in hand.” It accordingly represents a method of estimation—specifically a method for estimating the correct answer to a question as well as this can be done through cognitive systematization on the basis of the (inherently insufficient) information in hand. 3. INDUCTION: A MATTER OF DOING THE BEST WE CAN AT QUESTION-RESOLUTION Induction, then, is an instrument for question-resolution in the face of imperfect information. It is a tool for use by finite intelligences, intended to secure not the best possible answer (in some rarified sense of this term), but the best available answer, the best we can manage to secure in the existing conditions in which we do and must conduct our epistemic labors then and there. Of necessity, its reach will be restricted to what lies within our cognitive range: it obviously cannot deal with issues that might lie outside our conceptual horizons (as quantum electrodynamics lay beyond those of the physicists of Newton’s day).

89

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

The “available” answers at issue have to be found among some limited family of alternative possibilities within our cognitive reach. Induction is not an occult mode of intellectual alchemy that transmutes ignorance into knowledge; it is a mundane and realistic human instrumentality for doing the best we can in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Consider a question of the form: “Are the F’s also G’s?” such as “Are elm-trees deciduous?” The situation here is akin to that of a multiple-choice examination, where one can respond: (1) Yes, all of them are. (2) Never—none of them are. (3) No, some are and some aren’t. (4) Don’t know; can’t say. This pretty well exhausts the range of alternatives. Now when in fact all of the observed F’s (over a fairly wide range) are indeed G’s, our path seems relatively clear. Alternative 4 is not an answer—it is a mere evasion of the question, a response of last resort, to be given only when all else has failed us. Alternative 2 is ex hypothesi ruled out by the information at hand in the circumstances. The choice we have is that between 1 and 3. And we naturally opt for the former. The governing consideration here is the matter of plausibility—specifically that secured via uniformity. For 1 alone extends the data in the most natural way, seeing that this response alone aligns the tenor of our general answer with the specific information we actually have in hand. It is, accordingly, this resolution that affords the “inductively appropriate” answer in the postulated circumstances. To be sure, to say that induction represents the search for plausibilistically optimal answers, is not to deny that it (like all questionanswering devices) enjoys the privilege of maintaining silence, and responding “can’t say” as the proper reply in certain circumstances. Quite the reverse. If we ask, “Which side of this (fair) die will come up?” this is exactly what induction would reply: we just cannot effect

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

90

a rationally defensible resolution here. No inductively appropriate answer is available. (And this situation would still obtain even if the die were loaded in favor of one side.) Yet this sort of negativity is something the inductive enterprise seeks to minimize. But why not always opt for safety in answering our questions, systematically selecting the noncommittal pseudoalternative “none of the above”? Why not decline all risk of error and simply follow the path of scepticism? The answer is simple: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The object of the cognitive enterprise is clearly to secure truth (and not simply to avert error!). This, after all, is a definitive task of inquiry, the venture of cognitive gap-filling—of securing information insofar as possible.7 Nevertheless, the “best available answer” at issue here is intended in a rather strong sense. Its claims to acceptability must not only be stronger than those of the alternatives, but this difference in comparative strength must be substantial—and, in particular, more substantial than is reflected in any mere difference in probability, since the most probable cannot be automatically accepted as true for this reason. The quest for information hinges on the distinction between good and bad answers, and we want not just an “answer” of some sort, but a viable answer—an answer to whose tenability we are willing to commit ourselves. Induction is not to be a matter of “mere guesswork” but of “responsible estimation” in a serious sense of the term: it is not just an estimate of the true answer that we want, but an estimate that is sensible and defensible: tenable, in short. The provision of a convincing warrant of rational assurance is the object of the enterprise. With valid deduction we are in the fortunate position of having premisses that provide conclusive grounds for our conclusions: we have situations of fully supportive pro-information. Induction effectively inverts this proceeding, resolving the questions we face correlatively with the minimum of contra-indications. We seek to minimize the overtly visible risks in the inevitably risky venture of cognitive gap-filling. The informative insufficiency of the premisses means that induction always to some extent involves a leap in the dark. And we make such a leap not fecklessly “for the fun of it,” but because there is no way to avoid doing so if answers to our questions are to be obtained.

91

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

Induction, thus regarded, is a purposive device for the realization of particular cognitive ends. The rationale of the venture roots in the fact that we have questions and seek for answers to them. Induction is, accordingly, an erotetic procedure—a process for securing answers to questions on the basis of issue-resolvingly insufficient information— i.e., answers that range beyond the deductive reach of information at hand. 4. INDUCTION AND SYSTEMATIZATION This “best available answer” approach to induction bears some points of kinship to the “inference-to-the-best-explanation” approach (seeing that in many cases the route to the best answer is bound to proceed via the best explanation).8 However, the two approaches are by no means identical, and the advantages lie with the former. Thus suppose, for example, that we want to know “Is p the case or not?” in a circumstance where Smith, a generally reliable source, reports that p (and where no other significant information regarding the truth status of p is otherwise available). Our present, enthymematic-plausibilistic approach would lead us to maintain that p is true—which is clearly the inductively appropriate answer to the question at hand. Its reasoning would run roughly along the lines of the enthymeme: Smith generally speaks the truth [ex hypothesi]

∴Smith speaks the truth in this case (In this case) Smith says that p [ex hypothesi] ∴ p is the case The enthymematic premiss at issue (“This case conforms to the general run”) is clearly more plausible than its alternatives in the circumstances assumed to be operative—including the absence of counterindications of any sort. And so, given the conditions of the problem, the argument runs a smooth course to the desired conclusion. By contrast, however, an “inference to the best explanation approach” would not enable us to get past “Smith believes that p”—which is, after all, a

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

92

vastly better explanation of Smith’s saying that p than p’s being the case would be.9 Again, suppose it to be known that someone won a prize for good work in language-study at an American school early in the present century. The question is: What sort of prize was he awarded? Given the circumstances, the inductively indicated answer is clearly a book, considering their predominant popularity for this sort of purpose. But there is no “inference to the best explanation” operative here. For what is being explained? That he was given a book? But this is the very item in question and not a given fact in need of explanation. That he won a prize? Surely the best explanation of this is that he did superior work. While the model of inference to the best explanation works splendidly in some inductive contexts (the move from the smoke to the fire, for example), it simply does not work in general. Accordingly, induction is on our approach rather a matter of “inference to the best systematization” than one of “inference to the best explanation.”10 Throughout inductive contexts, plausibility is a matter of cognitive systematicity: the standards of inductive plausibility inhere in the parameters of cognitive systematization. We must accordingly undertake a brief examination of the ideas at issue in the traditional concept of a system as an “organic unity” of mutually collaborative units. The principal factors at issue here—the parameters of systematicity, as we may dub them—include preeminently the following items: (1) Completeness: comprehensiveness, avoidance of gaps or missing components, inclusiveness, unity and integrity as a genuine whole that embraces and integrates all its needed parts. (2) Cohesiveness: connectedness, interrelationship, interlinkage, coherence (in one of its senses), a conjoining of the component parts, rules, laws, linking principles; if some components are changed or modified, then others will react to this alteration. (3) Consonance: consistency and compatibility, coherence (in another of its senses), absence of internal discord or dissonance;

93

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

harmonious mutual collaboration or coordination of components, “having all the pieces fall into proper place.” (4) Functional regularity: lawfulness, orderliness of operation, uniformity, pattern conformity, normality (conformity to the “usual course of things”). (5) Functional simplicity and economy: elegance, structural economy, tidiness in the collaboration or coordination of components, harmony and balance, symmetry.11 (6) Functional efficacy: efficiency, effectiveness, adequacy to the common task, versatility and range and power of operating principles. These are some of the characterizing parameters of systematization. After all, systematization is not just a matter of constructing a system, however jerry-built it may prove to be, but of constructing it under the aegis of certain standard criteria. A system, properly speaking, must exhibit all of these various parameters. (Think, for example, of the control system for a manufacturing process or the life-support system of a space capsule.) But a system need not exhibit all these facets of systematicity to an equal degree—let alone perfectly. They reflect matters of degree, and systems can certainly vary in the extent to which they embody these characteristics, and in the manner of their embodiment as well, since the rather schematic nature of these “parameters” leaves a good deal of context-specific detail to be filled in. But no system can be found or constructed that lacks a substantial combination of these desiderata, simply because they constitute the guiding standards which do and must govern the process of systematization and determine the claims of its products to be characterized as a “system.” If a system (an economic or social system, for example) were to lose one of these characteristics in substantial measure—if its coherence, or harmony of functioning, or end-realizing effectiveness were substantially diminished—then its very existence as a system would be compromised.12

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

94

To be sure, our present concern is not with systematicity per se, but specifically with cognitive systematicity as based on the conception that our information about the world is to constitute part of a system of knowledge. Accordingly, the parameters of systematicity must, in this present context, be construed in a specifically cognitive sense. And the key fact for our purposes is that, thus construed, they afford our criteria of inductive plausibility—of the acceptability-qualifications of our answers to information-transcending questions. 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 what we count as knowledge. While inquiry is a process of enlarging the information at our disposal, of yielding new items to be added to the stock of our acceptances, such questionanswering is not just a matter of getting an answer, but a tenable answer—one the merits acceptance within that body of “already established” information that provides the materials for our further systematizations. And systematicity itself furnishes us with the operative norms here, so that inductive acceptability becomes a matter of systematic fit—and indeed a matter of the tightness of that fit. In sum, we use system not just as organizer of what we accept, but as a Bradleian arbiter of acceptability—a standard of what we are to accept, or at any rate endorse pro tem until such time as discordant counter-indications come to view. One very important point must be stressed. To someone accustomed to thinking in terms of a sharp contrast between organizing the information already in hand and an active inquiry aimed at extending it, the idea of a systematization of conjecture with experience may sound like a very conservative process. However, this impression would be quite incorrect. The systemic approach to induction must not be construed to slight the dynamical aspect. The present analysis sees systematization itself as an instrument of inquiry—a tool for aligning question-resolving conjecture with the (of itself inadequate) data at hand. The factors of completeness, comprehensiveness, inclusiveness unity, etc. are all crucial aspects of system, and the ampler the information-base, the ampler is the prospect for our systematization to attain them. The drive to system embodies an imperative to broaden the range of our experience, to extend and expand the data-base from

95

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

which our theoretical triangulations proceed. In the course of this process, it may well eventuate that our existing systematizations— however adequate they may seem at the time—are untenable and must be overthrown in the interest of constructing ampler and tighter systems. Cognitive systematization is emphatically not an indelibly conservative process which only looks to what fits smoothly into heretofore established patterns, but one where the established patterns are themselves ever vulnerable and liable to be upset in the interests of devising a more comprehensive systematic framework. 6. THE PRAGMATIC DIMENSION In sum, then, induction is not really a mode of inference, strictly speaking, but rather one of estimation. It is a tool of inquiry designed for settling our questions within some particular context of inquiry. We are driven to truth-estimation because we cannot get by some direct pathway at “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But with any such estimation we cannot avoid the question: “How good is good enough?” And this issue of “good enough” is inseparably linked to the issue of the purpose at hand. And this too—the matter of adequacy of our truth estimates if the needs of the situation are to be met—marks induction as a resort within a setting of particular purposes. Moreover, the presence of cognitive risk is inevitable in induction if the erotetic aims of the enterprise are to be realized by resolving our questions. And the now-inevitable issue of risk acceptability contextualizes the issue to the purposes at hand. All of these considerations continue to show that induction is, in the final analysis, a venture in practical/purposive rather than one lying within the confines of strictly theoretical/illuminative reasoning. Its very reason for being marks induction as an instrumentality of practical reason. NOTES 1

This perspective indicates that it is desirable to distinguish between an inductive argument (which is simply an enthymematic argument whose factual conclusion outruns the information provided by its premisses), and inductive argumentation

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

96

NOTES

considered as the general procedure of inductive reasoning, a complex process in the course of which very different sorts of reasonings—including not only deductive inference but also conjectural and plausibilistic argumentation—will enter in. 2

William Whewell, Novum Organon Renovatum (London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1858), p. 114.

3

The force of Dickinson Miller’s principle must be acknowledged: “There are no intermediate degrees between following from premisses and not following from them. There is no such thing as half-following or quarter-following.” (Dickinson S. Miller, “Professor Donald Williams vs. Hume,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 44 [I 947], pp. 673–684 [see p. 684].)

4

This perspective supports F. H. Bradley in his critique of J. S. Mill’s view of induction on the basis of the consideration that inference as such is impotent to accomplish the move from particulars to universals: that it is only legitimate to argue from some to all if it is premissed that the particulars at issue share some universal character.

5

Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966), p. 15.

6

Of all writers on induction, it is Hans Reichenbach who has come closest to taking this line. He writes: The inductive inference is a procedure which is to furnish us the best assumption concerning the future. We do not know the truth about the future, there may be nonetheless a best assumption about it, i.e., a best assumption relative to what we know. (Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937], pp. 348–349.)

7

Stephen Barker has formulated the point at issue clearly and cogently: Of course it is true that further observations would be bound to eliminate many of these competing hypotheses; but to say that we ought to suspend judgment and wait for more data is to miss the point, for our problem here is to use the data that we have got and in the light of them make a reasonable judgment about which hypothesis we should accept. It is inappropriate to appeal to data that are not yet obtained, for our decision always has to be based upon the evidence that we have got, not upon evidence that we have not got. We never obtain more than a finite quantity of data, and no matter how excellent these data may be there will remain always innumerable different hypotheses consistent with them. We cannot forever defer our choice among the competing hypotheses, forever waiting for more data to be collected; we must be able to come to some reasonable decision in the light of a finite collection

97

INDUCTION IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

NOTES

of evidence. (“Formal Simplicity as Weight in the Acceptability of Scientific Themes,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 28 [1961]. pp. 162–171 [see p. 164].) 8

As far as I know, this approach was first formulated by Max Black as a (mis-?-) interpretation of Popperianism: “Those who agree [with Popper] would rewrite putatively inductive inferences to make them appear explicitly as [optimal] hypothetical explanations of given facts.” (Art. “Induction” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by P. Edwards. vol. 8 (New York, 1967], p. 173.) Its rationale is given fuller articulation by Gilbert Harman in “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” Philosophical Review, vol. 63 (1966), pp. 241–247; and also in “Knowledge, Inference, and Explanation,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5 (1968), pp. 164–173.

9

To be sure, p’s being the case may well in its turn form part (but only part) of the best explanation of Smith’s believing that p. But that’s another matter.

10

For a more detailed account of what is at issue throughout the plausibilistic deliberations of this chapter, see the author’s Plausible Reasoning (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976).

11

On the range of considerations at issue here see Elliot Sober, Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

12

For a further development of these issues, and a fuller exposition of the parameters of systematicity, see the author’s Cognitive Systematization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).

Chapter Nine ETHICS 101: THE BASICS OF MORALITY 1. OBLIGATIONS

W

e have many moral duties and obligations in this world, being truthful, honest, and law-abiding among them. Whether we actually honor these obligations and “play by the rules” is something else again—but obligations they are: obeyed or not. Moral obligations are a matter of someone’s being required to act in a certain sort of way for the sake of safeguarding somebody’s interests. Accordingly, obligations have three crucial features: • The bearer: the person who has the obligation. • The beneficiary: the person or persons who are the intended stakeholders in relation to the bearer’s obligation. • The modus operandi: the way of proceeding that the delegation calls for the bearer’s part. Seemingly there is another factor: the requirer who imposes the obligation—often by way of a contractual relation of some sort. But this is an iffy matter. For while some obligations indeed are imposed (e.g., those mandated by an employer or by a public authority of some sort) other obligations are require-free. (No-one requires you to maintain your health or your humanity.) And those specifically moral obligations that concern us here belong to this latter inherently requirer-free category. That you keep your promises is a generic obligation that you meet Tom for lunch upon having promised to do so is a specific one from generic ones. Specific obligations are always derivative and moral obligations qualify as such only when they instantiate or implement a generic moral obligation.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

100

Display 1 SANCTIONS Legal obligations

Legal sanctions: fines, imprisonment

Social obligations

Social sanctions: disapproval, constrain

Professional obligations

Professional sanctions: penalties, license suspensions

Some obligations are action-specific in requiring a particular action such as keeping a particular appointment or returning something borrowed at the agreed time. The implementation of a generic obligation is sometimes optional—as being charitable which leave open a vast range of alternatives. Obligations are enforced by sanctions: defaulting on one’s obligations generally brings some sort of penalty in its wake—as per Display 1. And this sort of thing holds for ethical and moral obligations as well, for here violations are likely to produce condemnation and perhaps even ostracism. No doubt the best way to enforce obligations is to have defaults of duty penalized not by the presumptive beneficiaries themselves—that is to self-interestingly retaliatory—but by the otherwise uninvolved bystanders whose sole interest in the matter inheres in a right-minded commitment to the generic idea that moral obligations should be honored. 2. UNIVERSAL OBLIGATIONS Most of the obligations we have are specifically limited as regards bearers and beneficiaries, relating (say) to spouses towards their partners or employees towards their employers. These arise from a contract between the parties involved. However the present discussion will focus on those particularly interesting obligations which—like moral obligations are unlimited in these respects. An obligation is bearer-universal when every individual who is capable of bearing ob-

101

ETHICS 101

ligations at all (i.e., who is not an obligation-bereft condition such as infancy or mental incapacity) is a bearer of this particular obligation. The obligation not to inflict needless injury on others is paradigmatic of a bearer-universal obligation. One is tempted to say that only ethical and moral obligations can be bearer universal. And on this basis the universally binding injunction “Cultivate your talents” is not just self-oriented but has an ethical bearing as well.1 Moreover, an obligation is beneficiary-universal when every individual falls within the range of intended beneficiaries. The obligation at issue with the Mosaic injunction “Thou shalt not kill” is an instance of a beneficiary-universal obligation since it serves to guard everyone against undeserved harm. However, many bearer universal obligations are not beneficiary universal. For example: “Honor thy father and they mother.” Many obligations are limited in both in the range of these bearers and in that of the beneficiaries. Some obvious examples include: the captain and his passengers, the teacher and her pupils, the gardener and his customer. An obligation is beneficiary reciprocal if whenever Y benefits from X’s having the obligation then X also benefits from Ys having it as well. The obligation to treat strangers kindly affords an illustration. An obligation is bearer reciprocal if whenever X bears it to Y, then Y also bears it to X. The obligation to treat others courteously is of this sort. But various bearer universal obligations are nowise reciprocal. One circumstance that prevents this from being so is that we have obligations to beneficiaries who, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated, are deemed obligation-free in virtue of their condition. However, all universal obligations are obviously bearer reciprocal among those who are capable of having obligations at all. It is not the case that only ethical obligations are authentically bearer universal. For prudential obligations can be so as well—as per the aforementioned example. “Cultivate some of your talents: do not let them all lie fallow.”

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

102

3. SELF-DIRECTED OBLIGATIONS Many of our obligations are directed to specific beneficiaries, and sometimes the beneficiary can even be ourselves. Among these selforiented obligations there is the ethical duty to self-development: to seize the opportunities to make the most and best of ourselves, to be all that we can be, to capitalize upon our opportunities for the good. This obligation is every bit as compelling at the rest irrespective of whether we acknowledge and honor it or not. Their presence in this world’s scheme of things puts at people’s disposal manifold beneficial opportunities—for enjoyment, for socialization with fellows, for self-development, for satisfying accomplishments. Life affords people all sorts of opportunities for personally rewarding and communally beneficial activities—for pursing their own personal happiness and for promoting the good of others. The essentials of well-being—health, happiness, productivity are things we can pursue on our own behalf and that of others—to their benefit and concurrently our own. All this, however, represents a somewhat distinctive and nonstandard sort of obligation. For obligations are usually conceived with beneficiaries other that the agent: it is for the benefit of others that we are mandated to be honest, truthful, courteous, and the like. But with selfoptimization it is we ourselves that are quite overtly being advantaged. Here the bearer and the beneficiary of the obligation are one and the same. And so, the obligation at issue looks to be prudential—egocentric and even selfish and thereby looks to be the sort of thing that proper obligations really should not be. But in this regard, appearances are deceiving. To act prudently—do so “what one is well-advised to do”—is to do what is in one’s own best or real interests. Prudence is thus a matter of rational egoism. Egoism is the doctrine that enjoins the pursuit of one’s wants—one’s desires, preferences, wishes, and the like. By contrast rational egoism enjoins the pursuit of one’s best interests—of which it is that one should desire if one were sensible about things— that one would be well advised to prefer, that one ought to wish for. Moral obligation, by contrast, relates not to self-interest but to the demands of ethics and morality. It requires us to do what is morally and

103

ETHICS 101

ethically right—to respond and protect the interests of people irrespective of “what’s in it for us.” These two—prudence and morality—may at first sight seem disjoined and disconnected. However, any right-minded view of the matter will have to see these two things as coordinate. Taking the line that virtue is the best policy, it will agree with Plato’s analysis in the Ring of Gyges episode of the Republic, acknowledging that moral comportment as such is in our best and real interests. But if being moral is itself something that is in our best and real interest, then will we not have morality = prudence, equating morality with (enlightened) egoism? Not really! The same items can be the target of very different modes of indication. For as Frege insisted, identity of applicative reference (Bedeutung) does not ensure identity of conceptual sense (Sinn). All (plane) triangles are trilaterals but this equivalency of application does not invoke an equivalency of implication. We consider figures trilateral because they have three sides (and the issue of angles is incidental). And we consider figures triangular because they have three angles (and the issue of sides is incidental). In such a situation the other-involvement (however inevitable) is not essential but merely collateral. And just this same situation obtains with regard to moral obligation and personal best-interest. The demands of rational self-interest and morality may well stand coordinate. But the projects involved are decidedly different. The decisions and actions these positions endorse will be the same. But the considerations by which their deliberations reach this common destination are quite different. In the language of logical semantics, they are extensionally equivalent but intentionally distinct. There is no question that acting morally is what is best for us in point of our real and true interests. But you will never gain moral credit by making decisions on the basis of “what is best for me.” Granted this will lead you to do what is right. But morality demands more than this, namely that one does it for the right reason (i.e., because it is right). Self-referential considerations will not take you there.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

104

4. MORAL OBLIGATION AND SELF-INTEREST And so, at this point an important distinction enters in. The obligations of self-optimization are clearly prudential. But they are emphatically not thereby also selfish. For “the best” that is at issue here is a matter of what is objectively for one’s true/best/real interests and not what is subjectively at one’s apparent interests. It can call for self-sacrifice. And so there is no selfishness involved in the rational egoism of self-optimization, because the self-concern at issue is not one that calls for self-advancement at the expense of other people’s interests, but on the contrary sees the advancement of their true interest as a part of what one’s own commitment to the good. The way to achieve what is best conducive to one’s own real and proper interests and thereby realize what is best for oneself to strive for a life-environment where the best interests of people-in-general, oneself included, is adequately provided for. And so while doing the morally right thing is always to our real and best interest, this consideration does not constitute the basis of which moral credit is accrued. For morality is not in the end merely a matter of enlightened self-interest. What is crucial for moral credit is motivation (as Kant rightly emphasized). Moral credit does not accrue simply from doing the right thing. Instead, the crux of moral credit lies in doing the right thing because it is right, and not because it serves our interests. (That second factor is there alright, but only as a collateral benefit and not as the appropriate motive.) The ethically most worthy and morally most good individual is one who does the morally proper thing out of recognition and for the reason that this is the right thing to do. In assessing an act we look simply to its own status. But in assessing the agent rather than the act, we proceed by motives, interactions, aims and objectives. But what we ideally want is for people to do good things for good reasons. Appropriate actions issuing from appropriating motivations are the pivot of moral propriety and the ultimate basis of moral credit. The only thing we are in full control of is ourselves: the principal thing that is substantially up to us is what we ourselves do. The key ethical question is: What is it that we make of ourselves via our ac-

105

ETHICS 101

tions? Every one of us is an artist, for even as the sculptor creates a statue, or novelist a novel, so we create the life-story of a person: ourselves. Fate has placed a life at our disposal—but only one. And the question is: what do we make of it? How did we use the opportunities at our disposal? Did our actions make of us the person we could— retrospectively—be pleased and proud of having been? With regard to our choices there are two very different questions: (1) Whether our choices are the proper ones to make in the circumstances. (And propriety is here a matter of acting with due care for the general interest, preeminently including the interests of others along with one’s own.) (2) Whether our options actually work out as intended. This second item—actual results—is something that lies largely outside of our control. But the first item—intentions and motives—is what pivotally matters from an ethical/moral point of view. So what is decisive for morality is not results but (reasonably formed) intentions and motives. The stress on reasonably formed intentions is not superfluous. The person who “means well” but creates foreseeable disaster by stupidly doing obviously inappropriate things cannot get much moral credit. Proper motives must be (1) directed to appropriate ends, (2) not unintelligently counterproductive as to means. (The person who benignly aims to aid another by proceeding in ways that any sensible individual would realize to be obviously injurious cannot be credited with proper motivation.) To be appropriately motivated a decision must envision sensible means to benign ends. Interpersonal exchangability is the test here, based on the pivotal question: if you were reading your life-story as it actually unfolds via your decisions, what would you think of someone who acted like that? Would you think well of this individual? Would you want this person for a friend? Would you find it necessary to make excuses for him? How do we come to be under this obligation. What is the legitimating basis of its mandate?

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

106

Some obligations are imposed by an external agent or agency— some mandating authority with authority over us: legal obligations, say, or socially-impersonal ones. Others are voluntarily assumed—as with the captain of a ship or the host of guests. But some just inhere in the prevailing conditions—they root in factors and circumstances that obtain without anyone in particular being responsible (as with “acts of God.”) The obligation to honesty, for example, belongs to this last category. It is neither externally imposed nor freely assumed: it simply roots in the condition of things. Being human is not a demand somehow imposed upon a preexisting being. We did not somehow step forward to volunteer to be so. The correlative obligations were neither imposed nor assumed: they lie directly and immediately in one’s very identity and nature as a free rational agent. A distinct and sui generis obligation is thus at issue here—one that is in some respects significantly different from all the rest. It is the existential obligation to make the most and best of the opportunities afforded to us by what we are. SUPEREROGATION One important aspect of morality related not to the blame and discredit arising from failure to honor obligations but to the praise and predicts arising from going above and beyond what is required. Such credit-worthy “works of supererogation” as they are called serve to define the positive side of morality which is often under-appreciated by moralists and moral theorists alike. Historically it is religion rather than moral theory that has stressed the important point that “Do good” is, if anything, more important in the larger scheme of things than “Avoid evil.” NOTES 1

And so—as the next section will show—the prudential-funding injunction “Cultivate your interests,” provided that the interests at issue are taken to be one’s best or real interests, with which being a normal person is encompassed.

Chapter Ten THOUGHT FASHIONS

F

ashion is an ubiquitous phenomenon. It occurs not only in dress, in music, in games, in building, but also in matters of thought. Here topics of discussion, styles of exposition, and modes of reasoning are all subject to its pervasive pressure. With fashion of all sorts the ruling impetus is to be “with it,” to be au courant avec le dernier cri, not to miss out on what is needed to make good in one’s claims to be avant garde. The very language of fashion makes manifest the French origins of the phenomenon. The ebb and flow of fashion is one of history’s most striking lessons. Reputations bob up and down like logs in a turbulent sea. At one time George Washington is the greatest of men, at another a hollow mannequin. At one time Robert E. Lee is a peerless paragon, at another a cold-blooded defender of slavery. And exactly the same phenomenon functions in the domain of thought. At one time Freud is the master cartographer of the human psyche, but another he is virtually a charlatan ideologue. At one time historians may be largely preoccupied with the causes of a war, at another time with its battlefield operations, and at another time with its societal consequences. The focus of attention and ways of its bestowal provide ever-changing foci of paramount concern. William James brilliantly distinguished between live and dead options in matters of belief—convictions that are realistically available for endorsement in the former case, but psychologically unavailable— “outside the pale of credibility”—in the latter. But this holds not only for beliefs but for topics of serious deliberation and questions for serious investigation as well. People of one era often simply cannot bring themselves to take seriously issues which were of life-and-death concern to those of another. Some issues “catch on” to enlist the interest and approbation of people, while others fall by the wayside— unnoticed and unconsidered.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

108

Thought fashions are even more pretentious than fashions in general. The aficionados of a fashion in intellectual orientation or belief are deeply persuaded that there is not a matter of just more and different, but see it as something deeper and better than what has gone before. They view themselves as processual of a profoundly significant truth that has somehow eluded them less insightful predecessors. The idea that their stance to their predecessors is simply a restriction of the stance of those predecessors to their predecessors so that what is at issue is little better than simply “more of the same” is not just unacceptable to them but unavailable. The quest of novelty for novelty’s sake is an interesting feature of fashion. It is seldom more prominent than in the sphere of art. Modern art is the history of zigs and zags from the way of established patterns with éparter les bourgeois as its ruling principle. In style of dress and—above all—in style of music the adolescent young exhibit the same tendency. Who controls fashion, and how is its orientation decided? The fact of it is that no-one controls and no-one decides. The drift of fashion is spontaneous, unplanned, and uncontrolled. Its orientation is the work of the impersonal and intractable “Zeitgeist”—the “spirit of the times.” People can exclaim, contrive, “boost,” and “hype.” But whether the interested beneficiary of such efforts catches on or not is one of those unpredictable imponderables. But is fashion not subject to the “swing of the pendulum”? Not only that but much more! For unlike a barometer which can move only up or down, a pendulum can sway in many directions and move among many points of the compass. The vagaries of fashion are unfathomable. What can be said of those who simply ignore the fashions—who let the wind of fashion blow as it lists. Such hold-outs proceed at their own peril. They are disdained as eccentrics, oddballs, feckless people. The acolytes of fashion do not look with favor on the nonconformists who tries to stand apart. The fashion-resister lays himself open to the charge of being wiser-than-thou of the arrogance of thinking himself superior to the common herd. The very term “unfashionable” resists service as an adjective of approbation.

109

THOUGHT FASHIONS

To go against the fashion of the time is seldom pleasant and generally frustrating. Yet it is not moral failing to swim against the tide of fashion, nothing more serious is involved but what is at worst a social failing. The thinker who defies the fashions of the time is doomed to frustration. Whatever the intrinsic interest, originality, or merit of the ideas, they are bound to neglect. Criticism, counter-argumentation, even rejection could be accepted, but utter indifferent—what is the far move likely response—is the bitter pull that is the unfashionable writers likely fate. To be out of sync with the fashions of the day is to condemn oneself to live Robinson-Crusoe-like on an island of utter isolation. Yet perhaps even worse is the fate of the thinker who has outlived the era of his own success. Earlier on, when his ideas were in fashion, his work was “all the rage” and he was the darling of his readers. But now when the tide of fashion has shifted he lies like a beached whale conspicuous but inert—the ineffectual reminder of a bygone era. Does fashion serve a useful function? Certainly not insofar as it brings to greater prominence alternatives no more meritorious and deserving of attentive than others. Only when fashion has a “rational” foundation in promoting a focus in quality can it be credited with a productive role. And only rarely does this seem to be the case. On the other hand, the very phenomenon of fashion provides some impetus to innovation and creativity in luring people into almost inevitably forlorn hope of launching a new fashion.

Chapter Eleven MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION 1. THE PROBLEM

D

ecision theory as it has evolved in recent decades standardly deals with issues of rational decision and choice in conditions of uncertainty. However, quite interesting and challenging theoretical problems can already arise with selection made under conditions of certainty, where definitive objects of choice are at issue. It is such choices under conditions of all-in information regarding the objects available for selection that will be are issue here.1 We shall accordingly be concerned with the choice between definite objects as such, not such abstracta as “a 50% chance of getting” an object. After all, when shopping for a car, people set out to buy one definite sort of vehicle or another: they are simply not prepared to conjure with probabilistically varying choices of obtaining different sorts of vehicles. One isn’t going to persuade them to fill in the blanks in a statements like “I am going to pay $X to get a 50% chance of car A and a 50% chance of car B; whereas I am going to pay only $Y for a 50% chance of A and a 60% chance of B.” The probabilistic approach decision theorists would like people to take just isn’t acceptable to them in matters of this sort. When car shopping they have definitive alternatives in view. Accordingly, the discipline we cultivate here is evaluation theory and not the probabilistic decision theory for which it serves as a prerequisite. In evaluating objects of choice, the first step is to define the range of available options—be it affordable passenger cars or domestic residences. Whatever lies outside this range—such as houses and cars that we simply cannot afford—will thereby also have to remain outside the horizon of consideration. In virtually every range of practicable alternatives different aspects of value will have to be brought into consideration. Again, consider automobiles. In evaluating items with a view to their selection preferability many different evaluative factors will have to be taken into ac-

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

112

count: economy of operation, mechanical soundness, driving maneuverability, rider comfort, crash safety, and many others. Or again, consider meals, where one can be superior to another in point of: ingredient availability, palatability, nourishability, presentation, economy, convenience (ease of preparation). Throughout such cases of preferential evaluation we find that they have different features or aspects that stand in a potentially conflicting discord. Auto B in point of operating economy, Auto C in point of crash safety. Different items invariably include different desiderata in discordant ways. After all, a car that is easier/simpler to manufacture is not necessarily one that is easier/simpler to operate; one that offers crash safety features may be less economical in fuel usage. Moreover, even these factors themselves proliferate further out into further subordinately implementing factors of merit. The “easier to drive” will split apart into “cross county,” “on smooth and well-maintained roads,” “on superhighways,” etc. The merits of automobiles are almost endlessly multi-aspectival. In theory such ongoing exfoliation can go indefinitely, without ultimate termination. In practice however, it soon reaches a stage where rough-and-ready assessments meet the needs of the situation because further microdetail will no longer have a significant impact upon the ultimate outcome. In real-world situations, evaluation will involve trade-offs that balance advantages regarding one desideratum against disadvantages regarding another. In effecting an overall evaluation those various factors must be coordinated. But just how is such a blending of different issues to be accomplished. How is one to effect an overall evaluation when different and potentially competing aspects of advantage are at issue? 2. QUANTIFICATION: IMPOSING NUMBERS To simplify the problem—and perhaps even to oversimplify it—let us take a quantitative approach to evaluation. In assessing the status of a factor one might accordingly use a zero-to-ten scale along the lines of Display 1. This coordination of quality with quantity implements the instructive and advantageous verbal shift made by contrasting evaluation

113

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

________________________________________________________ DISPLAY 1 EVALUATIVE GRADATIONS 10

altogether satisfactory

9

highly meritorious: strongly positive

8

superior: rather positive

5

average: middlingly meritorious

2

inferior: rather negative

1

strongly negative: very low in merit

0

totally unacceptable

________________________________________________________ with valuation, subject to the idea that only when numbers are introduced do we have the latter—i.e., valuation. Suppose we are looking to rent an apartment, and let it be that within the range of affordable alternatives three factors are of paramount concern to us: size, condition, and convenience of location to be represented by A, B, and C, respectively. And let us further suppose that four alternatives (a-d) stand before us, as shown in Display 2. If we rate the evaluative factors at issue (A-B-C) as having altogether equal significance, then item d wins out (with its overall total of 16). However, if we only rate A as half as significant as the others, then alternative C will win out (with its then total of 14.5). In situations of this sort, comparative evaluation is automatic within columns simply in virtue of the way in which those numbers are assigned. However, row comparisons are another matter altogether, because further and potentially intractable considerations can be involved. Those factor-internal comparative numbers just do not automatically provide for the prospect of compatibility across different value factors. They do not as such indicate a is superior to b in that B is a far more critical factor than A—that it would take a great deal of B to

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

114

________________________________________________________ Display 2 A HYPOTHETICAL CASE VALUE FACTORS

ITEMS

A

B

C

a

3

4

8

b

4

4

4

c

1

7

7

d

9

2

5

________________________________________________________ outweigh a small advantage in A. This issue of noncomparability is critical, and it cannot be overemphasized that those factor-correlative valuations do not provide any means for factor-comparative evaluation. Thus in renting a flat, proximity to one’s workplace (near, rather distant, quite far) will be one key consideration, as will the modernity of the kitchen (“state of the art,” modern, rather old-fashioned). But while comparison, within these dimensions is straightforward, comparisons between them can be rather a puzzle. Just this issue of determining the role of various factors in effecting an overall comparison is the paramount challenge to rational evaluation. Here an economist might well at this point propose addressing the issue in economic terms via questions of the format “How much money would you demand in exchange for settling for your nth choice in place of your first?” But this sort of thing might well fail us. The impracticability of trading so much of one positive feature against so much of another can lead to a breakdown in monetary comparability as well. The cynical dictum: “Every man has his price” is presumably false and its analogue “Every feature of advantage has its price” presumably does so as well. The ardent suitor who wishes to marry Mary will presumably find it infeasible to specify an amount X such that “Marrying Jane and receiving $X ” is an equivalent.

115

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

3. MULTIPLE AND CONFLICTING VALUE ASPECTS The question of the way in which different value-factors play off against each other in evaluation renders this project a complex and challenging issue.2 Consider an automobile. Here the parameters of merit clearly includes such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, roadhandling ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated and it is unavoidable that they trade off against one another. They are complementary desiderata: more of A means less of B. Now it would be ridiculous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Invariably, perfection—an all-at-once maximization of every value dimension—is inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evaluative parameters. The reality of it is that in designing a car one cannot maximize both safety and economy of operation (which demands lightness of weight). Accordingly, an automobile—however splendid—is not, and cannot possibly be, absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfection at issue with the concurrent realization of every relevant parameter of merit is in principle impossible of realization. What might be termed desideratum complementarity arises whenever different sorts of merit stand in a teeter-totter relationship it is clearly inevitable that they cannot both achieve a maximal degree at one and the same time. This sort of situation is a clear indication that the idea of absolute perfection is simply inapplicable and inappropriate in many evaluative situations. A concurrent maximization in every relevant positivity is simply unavailable in this or indeed any other realistically conceivable world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an auspicious combination of values—an overall optimal profile. But how is such a profile to be established?

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

116

4. DIFFERENT ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGIES In the overall evaluation of things different modes of merit will come into play. But just how is one to go about the prospect of combining these value parameters into an overall result—a single, everything considered, synoptic “bottom line”? How is this pivotal problem of factor comparison to be addressed? In general, things have many different value aspects Vi, and we have no function of combination V to extract a single, all-embracing measure of overall value from them. We have to deal with a plurality of distinct “parameters of value.” Even if we assume (perhaps rashly) that measurability is unproblematically possible within each of these parameter dimensions, there need be no way of making quantitative comparisons across different value parameters by way of weighing them off against each other in a common scale. There is no avoiding the fact that inter-thematic comparisons of value or “utility” are just as problematic as inter-personal ones in welfare economics. It is clear that with multi-parametric evaluations a wide variety of assessment methods can be envisioned, specifically including the inventory of Display 3. (And of course other possibilities can also be conceived.) In this light it is instructive to consider the choice between two alternatives (a and b) regarding three evaluative factors (A, B, C), subject to the following evaluations: A

B

C

a

3

5

7

b

3

λ

6

And let us now ask: How large need λ be to render alternative b superior to a? It is clear that different evaluation procedures will yield very different answers here.

117

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

________________________________________________________ DISPLAY 3 ASSESSMENT METHODS Dominance. The value of the whole is the value of its priority-designated aspect. Maximim. The value of the whole is the value of its hightest-value aspect. Simple Average. The value of the whole is the average of the values of its aspects. Weighted Average. The value of the whole is the appropriately weighted average of the values of its aspects. Product Maximization. The value of the whole is the (normalized) product of the values of its aspects. Relationship Accommodation. The value of the whole is determined via some specified relationship among the values of its aspects—for example, by the quantity: max[0, (# > 7) - (# < 3)] Satisficing. Having a level above which alternatives meet all the needs of the situation and “improvements” no longer matter, so that values beyond this level can be treated as equal. Regret minimization. Fixing a profile of minimal-adequacy levels for the various valueaspects and determining the value of an alternative via the extent of its shortfall from these levels (e.g. by minimizing the standard deviation).

________________________________________________________ 1. Dominance. If C dominates over A, then clearly no value for λ will render alternative b superior. 2. Maximax. Only if λ > 7 will b be superior to a. 3. Maximin. If λ < 3, alternative a will now automatically be superior. 4. Simple Average. Here b will prevail as long as x + 6 > 5 + 7, that is, as long as λ > 6.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

118

5. Weighted Average. If we assign weights x, y, z to A-C, respectively then b will prevail as long as λy + 6z > 5y + 7z and so as long as λ > 5 + (7z ÷ y) 6. Product Maximization. Here b will prevail as long as 6λ > 35, that is, as long as λ > 35 ÷ 6 7. Relationship Association. If (for example) we require that the overall value is determined by the maximum of the B and C values, then λ must be at least 7 for b to prevail. 8. Satisficing. With (say) 3-5-6 as the minimal adequacy level, alternative a is bound to prevail whenever λ ≤ 5. There is also the prospect of using a mixed evaluation strategy, as for example, • to insist on a minimum for some functions, eliminating all alternatives that do not meet this requirement. • then to use (say) the product criterion to effect a choice among the remaining prospects. Such a mixture of standards may be realistically attuned to how we actually operative in most cases. It illustrates the difference between desiderata and requirements. Appropriateness will depend on the exact nature of the evaluative situation at hand. Thus consider the issue of comparing five alternatives described in Display 4.

119

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

________________________________________________________ Display 4 AN ILLUSTRATION A

B

C

a

9

1

1

b

7

2

2

c

5

4

4

d

3

6

3

________________________________________________________ Note now that with simple averaging, C will prevail. However, if A is seen as the lexically dominant value parameter, alternative a will prevail. If maximim is the standard, alternative c wins out. If A and C are seen as equi-significant but B twice as significant as either, alternative d will prevail by the weighted average standards. And finally, if the product standard is employed, alternative c will prevail. Obviously the mode of assessment will make a decisive difference for the result. It is thus clear that different procedures are available for obtaining an overall resolution with multiparametric evaluations, and thus that different methods will be appropriate in different sorts of situations. Sometimes dominance may be appropriate and sometimes averaging. No one-size-fits-all evaluation process is available to us here. It might seem on casual thought that a process of weighted averaging is all that is ever needed. But this idea is not tenable. For there is sometimes just no way of assigning weights that will give the right answers to problems of multi-factor evaluation. This circumstance is manifested by so simple a requirement as that to be acceptable both the A-rating and the B-rating must exceed 2. And now consider the situation of a choice between three alternatives as per Display 5. Here c is the only acceptable option, since here alone both the Arating and the B-rating are larger than 2. However, there is no possible assignment of weights that can yield this result. For this would require having weights x and y such that both

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

120

________________________________________________________ Display 5 AN ILLUSTRATION A

B

a

8

2

b

2

8

c

3

3

________________________________________________________ 8x + 2y < 3x + 3y (or equivalently 5x < y) and 2x + 8y < 3x + 3y (or equivalently 5y < x) But the simplest algebra shows that there just cannot exist weights x and y which allow these conditions to be realized concurrently. Clearly, weighted averaging is not going to be sufficient by itself to meet the needs of rational evaluation. Note that in cases of this sort preferential judgment among alternatives is possible notwithstanding the lack of comparability among the constituent value factors.3 The philosophical literature makes this seem paradoxical, but it is in fact a familiar commonplace, redescribed and recast in eccentric guise by those theorists. The multiplicative approach stresses evenness of distribution, that is, minimal “spread.” Thus consider 3, 3, 3 7, 1, 1 Both distribute 9 units across the three possibilities and therefore are equivalent by the additive criterion. But the first multiplies to 27 and

121

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

the second only to 7. So the first is decidedly superior by the multiplicative standard. (Indeed even 2, 2, 2 would be superior to 7, 1, 1 by this standard.) This evaluation process also looks to special conditions. Averaging, weighted averaging, and multiplicativity, all require the actual commensurability of different modes of value. Irrespective of the value parameter at issue, equal values make equal contributions to the ultimate overall result with these modes of assessment. However, this condition imposes a very special (and restrictive) requirement that often cannot be met. Further resources are needed. This consideration opens up another line of thought. The economist Kenneth Arrow’s classic Impossibility Theorem was designed to show that there is no satisfactory general procedure for combings the personal preferences of the various individuals of a community into a single, overall communal preference ranking. On this basis the question at once arises whether Arrow’s argument might carry over to show that there is no satisfactory general procedure for combining the aspectival preferentialities of the various value-aspects of an item into an integrated all-included preferentiality ranking.4 The answer to this question is negative. Arrow’s argumentation does not carry over from personal preferences to aspectival preferentialities. The reason for this lies in the fact that some of Arrow’s persongeared requirements fail to hold when aspect-geared considerations are at issue. For example consider Arrow’s “Nondictationship” postulate: “There is no individual sense that whenever he prefers x to y, then society does likewise, regardless of the preference of the other individual” This clearly fails in the case of lexically operative preferentiabilities, where the preferability of one paramount aspect can, quite appropriately, decide matters for the whole complex. In a way the present deliberations lead in a direction that is the very opposite of Arrow’s. He argues that there just is no acceptable way to integrate personal preference—a death of possibilities. We, on the other hand, envision a situation where there is a surfeit of different ways of integrating aspectival preferentiabilities.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

122

5. THE INDISPENSIBLE GUIDING ROLE OF INTUITION Given the various different ways of fusing plural value factors into an overall result, which approach is the proper one to apply in the given case? Upon the reflection it becomes clear that this is not something that can be resolved in abstract generality on considerations of general principle. There is no one-size-fits-all selection: there is little choice but to resolve the issue on a case-by-case basis with reference to the specific features of particular conditions. Nor can considerations of abstract general principles resolve the matter. Our intuitions about particular cases will have to come into it. The key points are: (1) that very different alternative possibilities for factor-amalgamation—some “proper” and some “mixed”—are available, with the outcome depending in a very critical way upon which alternative is selected, and (2) that the proper selection of a particular alternative will depend critically upon one’s informal, presystematic resolution of some particular cases of the type at hand. The process is such that, in effect, we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. For we begin with a group of test cases whose resolution is intuitively clear. We then examine these cases in the light of the general procedures that are potentially available as candidates for their resolution. Whatever rule best accommodates the rulings of intuition in those test cases is taken to be validated thereby. And this rule is accordingly taken as appropriate for addressing the broader run of cases at large. We thus begin with a family of hypothetical test cases in which we have a strong intuitive sense as to that the proper resolution would be. And we can then generalize beyond this, inductively as it were, by assessing which general method yields results that best harmonize with the intuitively natural resolution for the range of cases at issue.5 Life often presents circumstances in which our intuitive capacity to make judgments about concrete cases is more reliable and secure than our capacity to make judgments about general principles. In such situations it will even be the case that the determination of what principles are the appropriate ones and how they are to be applied will depend on how they deal with those “unproblematic” cases. In the circumstances we do not propose always to resolve cases on principles (as seems on-

123

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

ly too natural in abstract) but instead sometimes to assess the appropriateness of principles by how they deal with relevant cases. On this basis the quest for appropriate evaluations come down to the quest for optimally intuition-accommodating resolution procedures. For we here propose to proceed by a two stage, cyclic process that effects case-resolutions via general methods and methodresolutions through their accommodations of particular issuecorrelative cases whose intuitive resolutions are clear. Formalization in matters of preferability assessment is all well and good. But in the end, intuition is indispensable for the rational determination of its appropriate modus operandi. But why should we trust intuition in these matters? Whence does intuition obtain its credibility—why accept it as reliable? This opens up a large and deep-reaching question area with which we can only deal rather superficially. To begin with, there will be the issue of when and where to trust intuition. Clearly we can expect greater reliability when practical and utilitarian matters are at issue than when dealing with theoretical and purely cognitive ones. And we may well do better to rely on intuition in evaluative rather than factual matters. At any rate we are, in the final analysis, well advanced to rely on whatever in this region has “experience” on its side—for three reasons in particular. • It has the support of (as least tacit) inductive reasoning via the idea that what has worked in the past will do so in the future, • It has the backing of “natural selection” via our deliberate abandonment of things that don’t work. • It has the backing of our being what C. S. Peirce termed “conatured with reality” in that it has paid its evolutionary dues. To be sure, it must be conceded that intuition is fallible—like any other of our informative resources—even “the testimony out our own eyes”. But the crux of the issue is not only the matter of faute de

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

124

mieux but also that in the stern school of prolonged experience we can learn that, and above all where it is that intuition can be relied upon. 6. A LARGER LESSON The present deliberations carry a larger lesson. For they illustrate and instantiate an important and useful modus operandi in the quest to identify and validate a wide range of problem-solving procedures. What is at issue here is the following generic mode of procedure. We confront an issue-domain—a certain range of problems or questions that need to be resolved. And we begin with a variety of plausible and potentially promising alternative methods (procedures, processes) for addressing these. To decide among these we next identify a family of particularly simple and straightforward cases when the correct or appropriate resolution is “intuitively” and pre-systematically clear. In sum we begin with the obvious. We then investigate how those alternative methods handle these straightforward cases, looking to identify those procedures which arrive at the intuitively correct solution in these simple cases in the most effective, efficient, and convenient way. This done, we then proceed to use this optimal method for resolving those further problematic issues where the correct solution is just not obvious. In sum, what we have here has the cyclic structure of a process of assessing methods in terms of cases and cases in terms of methods. Its hearing to the pragmatism dimension of functional efficacy entitles this sort of proceeding to be characterized as a methodological pragmatism. However, in proceeding in this way we do not rely on intuition as such for issue resolution. Rather we use it as a touch-stone for determining the relevantly optimal resolution method. The point here is not to place reliance on intuition across the board seeing that the intuitive assessment of some cases is to be used only as a means for identifying the appropriate methods. In this way, intuition is deployed not as a universally serviceable case-resolution resource, but rather as a test criterion for case-resolving procedures. If this approach has any merit—and it is hard to conceive of a promising alternative to it—then intuition is bound to play a signifi-

125

MULTIASPECTIVAL EVALUATION

cant and indeed indispensable role in rational evaluation. For principle-driven ratiocution cannot have the field all to itself. Eventually those principles must rest on a rationale that is outside the realm of principle itself. And when it some to this, intuition is the only place to go. And seen in this perspective, evaluative formalism is no substitute for unformalized intuition. Indeed its applicability will have to rely upon our informal, intuitive assessments. In this regard the situation of evaluative deliberation is paralled to that of cognitive deliberation. As Aristotle already observed, our reasoning in cognitive matters cannot be discursive “all the way through.” Ultimately such reasonings will need to rely on nondiscursive, nonderived observational inputs. And the situation is just the same on the evaluative side. For not all our evaluations can issue form a discursive rationale: eventually there will have to be a nondiscursive, demonstration-independent, intuitive input. Yet while a recourse to nondiscursive intuition may be arational it is not nonrational. There has to be some basis of validation for these underived and intuitive starting-point materials. But this is not a matter of discursive reasoning from yet more fundamental premisses. Instead it is a matter of harmonization with an entire course of experience—of the lessons a value-sensitive individual can draw from the instructive lessons taught by his interactions with a complex world.6 7. CODA In closing one final observation is in order. A salient feature of modern decision theory is the disdaining critique of untutored intuition projected in the work of Kahneman and Tversky. However the problem of multiaspectival evaluation is something where standard decision theory is unavailing, and which, on the whole, decision theorists have simply ignored. But if the present deliberations are on the right track, it is an issue for whose solution a recourse to intuitive assessments is unavoidable. It would seem, accordingly, that despite their distrust of intuitive judgment that we have here a problem area where rational decision theory cannot manage to do without it.

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

126

NOTES 1

One of the few studies dealing with the sort of cases examined paper is Ralph Keeney and Howard Raiffa, Decisions with Multiple Objectives (New York, etc.: John Wiley, 1976). However its close gearing to classical utility theory soon enmeshes this book in a concern with risks and probabilities that leads it outside evaluation per se.

2

It is not that economists have not recognized the problem, but just that they have no workable handle on its solution. As Kevin Lankaster put it in one of the few attempts “we shall make some assumptions which are, in balance, neither more nor less heroic than those made elsewhere in our present economic theories.” (See his “A new Approach to Consumer Theory,” The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 74 (1966), pp. 132-57; see p. 135.) On the scale of admissions of defeat this ranks close to the emperor Hirohito’s statement that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

3

See for example A. M. Williams, “Comparing Incommensurables,” in The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 45 (2011), pp. 267-77.

4

On the relevant issues of decision theory see R. D. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957).

5

What happens when there are several decidedly different modes of procedure that achieve an equally adequate accommodation to the entire range of substantially clear resolutions? At this stage—which is rarely reached in practice—principles of inductive simplicity and economy of operation would have to come into play.

6

I am grateful to Niels-Erik Sahlin for constructive comments on a draft of this paper.

Name Index Aristotle, 20, 125 Arrow, Kenneth, 121 Barker, Stephen, 96n7 Berkeley, George, 13 Black, Max, 97n8 Bohr, Niels, 58, 26, 70, 78n4 Bradley, F. H., 20, 25n3, 96n4 Carnap, Rudolf, 9 Casserer, Ernst, 9 Chisholm, Roderick, 46, 55n1 Chroust, Anton-Hermann, 25n2 Dalton, 70 Democritus, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 9 Descartes, René, 13, 27 Duhem, Pierre Maurice, 61-62, 78n5 Epictetus, 6 Frege, Gottlob, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 107 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9 Harman, Gilbert, 97n8 Hempel, Carl G., 96n5 Hirohito, 126n2 Hume, David, 41, 42n1, 81 Husserl, Edmund, 9 James, William, 17, 25n1, 107

Nicholas Rescher • The Nature of Philosophy

Johnson, Samuel, 13 Kahneman, Daniel, 125 Kant, Immanuel, 44, 104 Keeney, Ralph, 126n1 Lankaster, Kevin, 126n2 Lee, Robert E., 107 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 27, 57 Luce, R. D., 126n4 Ludenberg, Seigwart, 78n1 Malcolm, Norman, 13 Marcus Aurelius, 6 Mill, J. S., 9, 96n4 Miller, Dickinson, 96n3 Newton, Isaac, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8-9 Oppenheim, Paul, 78n1 Peirce, C. S., 123 Plato, 2, 6, 103 Popper, Karl, 9, 62, 97n8 Quine, W. V., 9 Raiffa, Howard, 126n1, 126n4 Rand, Ayn, 8-9 Reichenbach, Hans, 96n6 Russell, Bertrand, 9 Rutherford, Ernest, 70 Sahlin, Nieles-Erik, 126n6 Sextus Empiricus, 6 Shakespeare, William, 1

128

129

Sober, Elliot, 97n11 Spinoza, Baruch, 27 Tversky, Amos, 125 Washington, George, 107 Weinberg, Stephen, 79n6 Whewell, William, 96n2 Williams, A. M., 126n3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8-9

NAME INDEX

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Philosophical Episodes Philosophical work comes in different sizes: there are systemic treatises, monographic surveys, philosopher-expanding texts. But there is also room for smaller studies that focus on highly particularized ideas and issues: studies that deal not with entire continents but with mere reefs and estuaries. The present assays are of this limited nature. Their aim is less to give a view of the overall lay of the land than to give a tranistic view of the diversity of the landscape. The present book continues Rescher’s longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays that originated in occasional lecture and conference presentations. Notwithstanding their topical diversity the essays exhibit a uniformity of method in a common attempt to view historically significant philosophical issues in the light of modern perspectives opened up thorough conceptual clarification.

About the Author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“. In 2011 Rescher receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (First Class Order of Merit) of the Federal Republic of Germany.

ontos verlag

Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2011. 210 pp., Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover, EUR 89,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-123-8

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Productive Evolution On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design A doctrine of intelligent design through evolution is not going to find many friends. It is destined to encounter opposition on all sides. Among scientists the backlog of evolution will have little patience for intelligent design. Among religiousists, many who form intelligent design have their doubts about evolution. In the general public’s mind there is a diametrical opposition between evolution and intelligent design: one excludes the other. This book will argue that this view of the matter is not correct, and that in actuality one can regard evolution itself as a pathway to intelligent design. We would do well to go beyond The Origin of Species and—taking as our guide such works as W. Wentworth Thomson’s On Growth and Form acknowledging that evolutionary adaptation can result in solutions of a sort that intelligence could readily ratify. Accordingly, what the present book seeks is a naturalization of Intelligent Design that sees such design as itself the result of natural and evolutionary processes.

About the Author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“. In 2011 Rescher receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (First Class Order of Merit) of the Federal Republic of Germany.

ontos verlag

Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2011. 127 pp., Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover, EUR 69,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-124-5

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Free Will An Extensive Bibliography With the Cooperation of Estelle Burris

Few philosophical issues have had as long and elaborate a history as the problem of free will, which has been contested at every stage of the history of the subject. The present work practices an extensive bibliography of this elaborate literature, listing some five thousand items ranging from classical antiquity to the present.

About the author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Americna Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“

ontos verlag

Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2009. 309pp. Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 119,00 ISBN 13: 978-3-86838-058-3 Due December 2009

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Autobiography Second Edition

This revised edition of his Autobiography brings up-to-date Rescher’s account of his life and work. The passage of years since the publication of an autobiographical work makes for its growing incompleteness. Moreover, the passage of time is bound to bring some new perspectives to view. This new edition comes to terms with these circumstances. Since the publication of the previous version Rescher’s philosophical work has made substantial progress, betokened by the publication of over a score of new books that mark an ongoing expansion of his philosophical range. Then too, the internet has brought to light interesting new information about Rescher’s family background and antecedence. Overall the book affords a detailed, vivid, and highly personalized picture of the life and work of someone who counts as one of the most prolific and many-sided contemporary thinkers.

ontos verlag

Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2010. 419 Seiten Format 14,8 x 21 cm Paperback EUR 49,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-084-2

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34

Ontos

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Collected Paper. 14 Volumes Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received seven honorary degrees from universities on three continents (2006 at the University of Helsinki). Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. ontos verlag has published a series of collected papers of Nicholas Rescher in three parts with altogether fourteen volumes, each of which will contain roughly ten chapters/essays (some new and some previously published in scholarly journals). The fourteen volumes would cover the following range of topics: Volumes I - XIV STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-937202-78-1 · 215 pp. Hardcover, EUR 75,00

STUDIES IN VALUE THEORY ISBN 3-938793-03-1 . 176 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN PRAGMATISM ISBN 3-937202-79-X · 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-04-X . 221 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN IDEALISM ISBN 3-937202-80-3 · 191 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LOGIC ISBN 3-938793-19-8 . 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY ISBN 3-937202-81-1 · 206 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ISBN 3-938793-20-1 . 273 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN COGNITIVE FINITUDE ISBN 3-938793-00-7 . 118 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHYSICAL OPTIMALISM ISBN 3-938793-21-X . 96 pp. Hardcover, EUR 49,00

STUDIES IN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-01-5 . 195 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN LEIBNIZ'S COSMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-22-8 . 229 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-02-3 . 165 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-23-6 . 180 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

ontos verlag Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2006. 14 Volumes, Approx. 2630 pages. Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 798,00 ISBN 10: 3-938793-25-2 Due October 2006 Please order free review copy from the publisher Order form on the next page

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34