|
p.2 Facts can lie outside a person's cognitive reach for various reasons. These include:
- The individual just is not smart enough to figure it out.
- The information needed for its determination simply is not available.
[JLJ - or society has not yet developed a practical-and-affordable way for a consultant to be hired to provide simplification-based test results which can be interpreted as facts. For example, I recently purchased an inexpensive subscription to Consumer Reports and used the information it contained to evaluate, then purchase a new car.]
p.14-15 It is a key fact of life that ongoing progress in scientific inquiry is a process of conceptual innovation that always places certain developments outside the cognitive horizons of earlier workers... The major discoveries of later stages are ones which the workers of a substantially earlier period (however clever) not only have failed to make but which they could not even have understood, because the requisite concepts were simply not available to them.
p.15 An ironic but critically important feature of scientific inquiry is that the unforeseeable tends to be of special significance just because of its unpredictability.
p.15 A.N. Whitehead has wisely remarked... that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
p.15 Before the event, revolutionary scientific innovations will, if imaginable at all, generally be deemed outlandishly wild speculation - mere science fiction, or perhaps just plain craziness.
p.16 we cannot hold the science of tomorrow bound to the standards of intelligibility espoused by the science of today. The cognitive future is inaccessible to even the ablest of present-day workers.
p.24 Different cultures and different intellectual traditions... are bound to describe and explain their experience - their world as they conceive it - in terms of concepts and categories of understanding substantially different from ours. They would diverge radically with respect to what the Germans call their Denkmittel - the conceptual - instruments they employ in thought about the facts (or purported facts) of the world.
p.25 Different cognitive perspectives are possible, not one of them more adequate or more correct than any other independently of the aims and purposes of their users.
p.26 It is a key fact of life that progress in science is a process of ideational innovation that always places certain developments outside the intellectual horizons of earlier workers. The very concepts we think in terms of become available only in the course of scientific discovery itself... The most characteristic and significant difference between one conceptual scheme and another arises when the one scheme is committed to something the other does not envisage at all - something that lies outside the conceptual range of the other.
p.29 Minds with different concerns and interests and with different experiential backgrounds can deal with the selfsame items in ways that yield wholly disjoint and disparate result because different features of the thing are being addressed.
p.30 the corpus of scientific information - ours or anyone's - is an ideational construction. And the sameness of the object of contemplation does nothing to guarantee the sameness of ideas about it.
p.34 The point of these deliberations is straightforward. The facts about the world that are available to an intelligent creature within it will depend upon the resources at its disposal for observational experience in the nature of its embedding in the future of regularity that makes for the systemic "concern of experience" that grounds its conceptualizations. And the facts that are accessible to a given species in its contexts will not be - and cannot be expected to be - available to another.
p.47 It must be recognized that each of these solutions exacts a price. Each calls on us to abandon a thesis that has substantial prima facie plausibility and appeal. And each requires us to tell a fairly complicated and in some degree unpalatable story to excuse (that is, to explain and justify) the abandonment at issue.
p.57 After all, reality, so we must suppose, is inexhaustibly complex. Its detail (as Leibniz was wont to call it) is bottomless.
p.62 while the rules of chess and the defining specifications of the pieces will very much restrict how games are played, nevertheless... they depend upon the decisions of the players and are not necessitated by reasoning from the situation at hand via the operative generalities.
p.62 What might be called the "Musical Chair Principle" plays a key role in the context of unknowability... While any one of the players can be seated, some must remain unseated.
p.64 So here, as elsewhere, the details of our ignorance are hidden from our sight.
p.71 To count things is to apply a sort of mental tag to them... in counting you can't count what you can't identify. [JLJ - or my version: you can't count what you can't categorize.]
p.84 So viewed, the ultimate responsibility for the indefiniteness of vagueness thus lies not with what is at issue in our discourse but in the imperfection of our knowledge... in that our very vocabulary precludes exact knowledge.
p.86 human communication is replete with unclarity and inexactness, ever admitting further questions about the purport of what has been said... We are constantly constrained to use loose terminology and fill our discourse with expressions on the the order of "roughly," "approximately," "something like," "in the neighborhood of," "in his seventies," "some six feet tall," and so on. This prominence in our discussions of indecisiveness - of vagueness, equivocation, and the rest - has larger ramifications.
p.87 The fact of it is that reality is so vastly complex in its mode of operation that a shortfall of detail in our description of it is an inevitable reality. In characterizing the real, the indecisiveness of vagueness is not a failing but an inevitability... And so in the final analysis we tolerate vagueness because we have no choice, and we do so gladly not just because it is convenient, but also because greater detail is generally not needed in the relevant contexts of operation. [JLJ - we tolerate vagueness because the mind does not need specifics in order to determine how to "go on" - only cues and subtle evidence we take delight in piecing together - reasons we also have for enjoying gameplaying.]
p.89 The universe contains intelligent beings... How did such beings get to be there? Essentially by evolutionary processes... Evolution is nature's innovator. Cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution all bring massive novelties in their wake.
|
