|
p.1 It is misleading to call cognitive theory at large "epistemology" or "the theory of knowledge." For its range of concern includes not only knowledge proper but also rational belief, probability, plausibility, evidentiation and - additionally but not least - erotetics, the business of raising and resolving questions. It is this last area - the theory of rational inquiry with its local concern for questions and their management - that constitutes the focus of the present book. Its aim is to maintain and substantiate the utility of approaching epistemological issues from the angle of questions.
p.1 As Aristotle already indicated, human inquiry is grounded in wonder.
[JLJ - This was the inspiration for my comment on p.3, 'Questions are inspired articulations of wonder'. I'm thinking now of changing the word 'articulations' to 'expressions'.]
p.2-3 Only as we come to realize that there are questions that we cannot answer does the reality of ignorance confront us... questions are epistemologically crucial... What people know - or take themselves to know - is simply the sum-total of the answers they offer to the questions which they can resolve... our answers to questions will, where correct, represent available items of knowledge. Any accepted item of knowledge p is, in the end, no more than an answer to the question, "Is it p or is it not-p that is the case?" Such an approach effectively coordinates the conception of knowledge with that of appropriate question resolution.
[JLJ - A question that occupies our attention (or comes to mind) indicates an information need related to 'going on', and an answer to the question perhaps meets the need, or moves us indirectly in that direction. Our scheme for 'going on' should tell us what to do if we do not have an answer to the question - that is the nature of a scheme.]
p.3 Questions are effectively requests for information.
[JLJ - Questions can be further divided into the trivial and the non-trivial. Trivial questions often can safely be ignored with little consequence. Non-trivial questions can produce answers which help us determine how to 'go on.' Questions are inspired articulations of wonder. We as humans are "programmed" by our human nature with a sensitivity to wonder at certain things in our environment related to our survival, our social order, and reproduction. But in order to 'go on' effectively we need to do something about this wonder. Some of it is crucial to the predicament we are in and needs our attention, right now. If this is the case, other articulations of wonder will just have to wait until later, when things are less hectic, perhaps when we are relaxing. We might even develop a scheme of some kind where we constantly ask ourselves, 'How much should I care about that?' - to whatever we are wondering about. That might even help us to 'go on.' Effective questions can be used to produce information that is timely, relevant and actionable - otherwise known as knowledge.]
p.4 When an answer to a question is offered, the questioner need not, of course, be in a position to recognize whether or not this answer is correct.
p.5 It is important in this connection to note that statements of probability do not answer questions about matters of fact... The shift from statements of fact to statements of probability is a fallback position that we take when we cannot answer the question at hand and propose to substitute another that lies in its neighborhood... To be sure, probability statements can certainly provide practical guidance... For the purpose of planning and action, probabilistic information is eminently useful, but... probabilities do not settle matters.
p.9 knowledge in the wider sense is not something static - an unchanging set of known truths. It is the changeable product of an ongoing process. And inquiry is exactly that - a process that transforms one state of things into another.
[JLJ - Perhaps knowledge is born as a trick that works for 'going on'. It is then revised again and again and may change significantly.]
p.9 as answers come to light our questions themselves change - and the range of possibilities also changes. Inquiry, in sum, is a transformative process that changes one state of knowledge into another.
[JLJ - As we answer a pressing question, either new questions may arise, or an old question - initially less pressing - rises to the surface and now demands our attention.]
p.9 Questions always reflect the prevailing cognitive "state of the art" and arise in the setting of an existing body of putative knowledge.
p.10 The presuppositions of our questions reflect their precommitments... A presupposition of a question is a claim (a thesis or contention) that is implicitly inherent in - and therefore entailed by - each and every one of its possible fully explicit answers... The presuppositions of a question always engender yet further presuppositions lying "further down the road" as it were.
p.11 The propriety of a question is accordingly predicated on the availability of its presuppositions: a question whose presuppositions are not satisfied simply "does not arise." ...To pose or otherwise endorse a question is to undertake an at least tacit commitment to all of its presuppositions. Basing it on a false presupposition is just about the only way in which we can go wrong in asking a question.
p.11 It is a key fact that all questions have presuppositions.
p.11 Every question presupposes that it itself arises appropriately.
[JLJ - For a question to occupy our attention it generally must arise appropriately. This is because we constantly ask ourselves, 'How much should I care about what I am currently occupied with, considering that I am currently in a predicament, and have other pressing matters?' If the answer is, 'not much,' then we likely will abandon whatever it is we are doing.]
p.13 We want to know with respect to our knowledge both what questions it answers and what question it poses.
p.13 One question may be said to preempt another when they have mutually incompatible presuppositions.
p.14 The progress of knowledge is simply a matter of fitting more pieces into the puzzle.
p.15 A presupposition is thus accordingly a thesis (proposition) that is implied by all of a question's admissible (explicit) answers, following from each and every one of them. The presuppositions of a question accordingly delimit the range of its admissible answers.
p.17 questions and answers stand coordinate with each other.
p.17 Unless the presuppositions of a question are all satisfied, the question simply "does not arise" - cadit quaestio as the Roman juriconsults were wont to put it.
[JLJ - Literally, 'the question falls.']
p.23 Usually in epistemology we deal with knowledge. But its lack - namely ignorance - also constitutes a significant part of the subject. Now ignorance is simply an inability to deal with questions.
[JLJ - Yes, but an encyclopedia of knowledge will not tell you decisively how to invest in the stock market. Knowledge is nice, but it does not tell you how to 'go on,' in certain competitive situations where someone else has a carefully developed scheme to sell products or stocks (or even to field a sports team in a competitive event), and can construct marketing materials, sales pitches and advertisements which make their product seem to be the best. Knowledge can help you select a roofing company, but it cannot make them do a good job replacing your roof.]
p.27 Aristotle observed that "Man by nature desires to know." Our human situation in this world is such that we have questions and want - nay need - to have answers.
p.27 Our means for the acquisition of factual knowledge are unquestionably imperfect.
p.27 The object of rational inquiry is not just to avoid error but to answer our questions, to secure information about the world. And here, as elsewhere, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" is the operative principle.
p.28 Rationality insists on proceeding by way of carefully calculated risks... Any workable screening process will let some goats in among the sheep.
[JLJ - Yes, but perhaps a calculated risk as part of a scheme for 'going on.' Humans have the adaptive capacity and resilience to adjust plans when initial gropings and launching directions are later determined to be inexact.]
p.30 In cognition, as in other sectors of life, there are no guarantees, no ways of averting risk altogether, no option that is totally safe and secure. The best and most we can do is to make optimal use of the resources at our disposal to "manage" risks as best we can... If we want information - if we deem ignorance no less a negativity than error - then we must be prepared to "take the gamble" of answering questions in ways that risk some possibility of error.
[JLJ - Rescher is coming dangerously close to my idea of cognition as a "bag of tricks" that simply "work", which possibly "trigger" upon recognition of subtle cues in the environment, and which our consciousness browses, rummages and then selects one with "promise," at critical times. What we truly and critically need, at each and every moment of our predicament, is an acceptable posture which can and will evolve into future acceptable postures. The details of the future posturings are for the moment, or can be, unknown.]
p.31 Charles Sanders Peirce... "The first question, then, which I have to ask is: Supposing such a thing to be true, what is the kind of proof which I ought to demand to satisfy me of its truth?"
p.34 In inquiry as in life we have to be prepared to take chances.
[JLJ - Yes, but taking chances does not address how prepared we are for things to go wrong that we can anticipate in advance. A risk should be mitigated to the most practical extent possible. Perhaps we should envision scenarios where we encounter the unexpected and must stretch to adapt, in the various ways that we might need.]
p.37 Inquiry, as we standardly conceive it, is predicated on a commitment to an inquirer-independent truth of things; it is a quest for information about "the real world" with respect to which our own conceptions of things are nowise definitive, and into which others can accordingly enter unproblematically. It is thus geared to the conception of an objective world... We could not operate the notion of inquiry as aimed at estimating the true character of the real if we were not prepared to presume or postulate a real truth for these estimates to be estimates of.
p.41 Questions cluster together in groupings that constitute a line of inquiry. They stand arranged in duly organized and sequential families; the answering of a given question yielding the presuppositions for yet further questions which would not have arisen had the former questions not been answered.
p.42 A question cannot arise before its time has come: certain questions cannot even be posed until others have already been resolved, because the resolution of these others is presupposed in their articulations.
[JLJ - "We will answer no question before its time."]
p.42 Inquiry is a dialectical process, a step-by-step exchange of query and response that produces sequences within which the answers to our questions ordinarily open up yet further questions. Such a process will issue in a regressive series... Although a register of this sort looks linear and sequential (as the temporal structure of human thought requires), the exfoliation of questions actually takes us into a treelike structure... The setting out of such a sequential "course of questioning or inquiry" always involves presenting a complex treelike or weblike structure of this sort. (Its transformation into a linear form in written or spoken exposition is a step which, however convenient, obscures the underlying complexities of the situation.) And as a well-developed line of inquiry unfolds it proceeds in such a way that the later questions are linked to the earlier ones in a means-ends relationship of subordination and follow-through in such a way that later questions pave the way for the ever more satisfactory resolution of their predecessors.
[JLJ - Profound applications for artificial intelligence.]
p.43 Structuring our information by seeing it in terms of responses to logically unfolding of questions is the most basic and doubtless the most important mode of cognitive system-building. To systematize knowledge is, in general, to set it out in a way that shows it to be the rational resolution of a rationally connected, sequentially exfoliated family of questions.
p.43 The unfolding lines of inquiry defines the program of search - of research - that arises in question-answering inquiry, yielding a sequential process of question-and-answer where each Ai is an answer to Qi. Once underway, we have in hand at each stage "a body of available knowledge" Ki to provide presuppositions for further question-posing... Accordingly, the circumstance that our answers to questions open the way to further question leads not only to regress but also to progress in the development of inquiry.
[JLJ - In order to initially get "underway" in our inquiry, we might use any sort of heuristic - perhaps even a scheme-based or probability-based "trick" that "often works" - for just long enough to guide our strating efforts until the system dynamics themselves (and the initial knowledge uncovered) of the line of inquiry begin to be our guide. If our inquiry aims to discover something that is initially hidden, then the end result of our inquiry matters and becomes our goal. If our inquiry is not the discovery of a specific something hidden but an estimate of a hidden quality, such as an adaptive capacity or the performance ability of a job interview candidate, or the sense of a nation before an election, then the end result of our inquiry is merely part of a diagnostic test of a stretching capacity or a job performance or an opinion, and can be grasped as a useful substitute for what cannot be initially seen directly, in order to 'go on,' much as a poll is grasped/reported as an acceptable "measure" of the thinking of a larger group. Is not knowledge just a 'thing' that enables us to effectively 'go on,' something that just simply 'works,' for whatever the reason? Do we not intuitively and instinctively grasp such 'things' in order to go on, and evaluate them, much as a shopper examining produce in a store?]
p.44 One question emerges from another in such a course of inquiry whenever it is only after we have answered the latter that the former becomes posable. The unfolding of such a series provides a direction of search - of research - in question-answering inquiry. It gives the business of knowledge a developmental cast, shifting matters from a static situation to a dynamical one.
p.44 The conception of a course of inquiry has important ramifications. For one thing, it helps us to see graphically how, as our cognitive efforts proceed, our questions often come to be seen as resting on an increasingly cumulative basis, with the piling up of an increasingly detailed and content-laden family of suppositions. Moreover, it makes clear how a change of mind regarding the appropriate answer to some question can unravel the entire fabric of questions that was erected on this earlier answer.
p.44-45 if we change our mind regarding the correct answer to some particular question in a series, then the whole subsequent questioning process may collapse as its presuppositions become untenable.
[JLJ - Here we have a core concept for 'search' direction in artificial intelligence - very specifically, our change of an answer to a question in a series of questions acting together as a line of inquiry causes a presupposition to be false - therefore directing us to change how we have (perhaps even initially) allocated our attention. It is as simple as that.]
p.46 A question arises at the time t if it then can meaningfully be posed because all its presuppositions are then taken to be true. And a question dissolves at t if one or another of its previously accepted presuppositions is no longer accepted... questions... arise at some juncture and not at others; they can be born and then die away.
[JLJ - As far as artificial intelligence, such questions ought to arise and dissolve - an AI programmer should write code accordingly.]
p.46 A change of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the entire fabric of questions that presupposed this earlier answer. For if we change our mind regarding the correct answer to one member of a chain of questions, then the whole of a subsequent course of questioning may well collapse.
[JLJ - Yes, and therefore our line of inquiry roughly represents a tree which we appear to be searching through. As questions arise we proceed down a certain particular line of inquiry, and as they die away we attend to other pressing matters. What emerges from a line of inquiry - roughly guided initially perhaps by historical/practical tricks that often work - is the direction of the inquiry. Perhaps a detective initially interviews several people with connections to the murdered victim by asking them a standard set of questions, then focuses or directs his attention on the 1 or 2 'persons of interest' with means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime. The direction of the inquiry emerges from the underlying dynamics of applying the practically effective 'tricks' that 'usually work.']
p.46 Epistemic change over time thus relates not only to what is "known" but also to what can be asked. The accession of "new knowledge" opens up new questions... Epistemic change over time thus relates not only to what is "known" but also to what can be asked.
p.47 The phenomenon of the ever-continuing "birth" of new questions was first emphasized by Immanuel Kant, who saw the development of natural science in terms of a continually evolving cycle of questions and answers, where, "every answer given on principles of experience begets a fresh question, which likewise requires its answer and thereby clearly shows the insufficiency of all scientific modes of explanation to satisfy reason."
p.46-47 What is seen as the correct answer to a question at one stage of the cognitive venture may, of course, cease to be so regarded at another, later stage.
p.48 The Erotetic Dynamic of Inquiry [JLJ - diagram converted to numbered steps]
- Set out from an initial body of knowledge S
- Determine Q(S) the set of explanatory questions that can appropriately be framed on the basis.
- Endeavor to determine the K-relatively true answer for the questions of the question set Q(S).
- Insofar as [JLJ - K-relatively true answer] does afford answers to Q(S) seek out the new S-unavailable answers.
- Readjust S to a revised body of knowledge able to accommodate these new answers.
- Repeat.
p.48 the natural course of inquiry provides an impetus by which a given state is ultimately led to give way to its successor.
p.49 whenever we obtain new and different answers, interest is at once deflected to the issues they pose... Accordingly, the motive force of inquiry is the existence of questions that are posable relative to the "body of knowledge" of the day but not answerable within it. Inquiry sets afoot a sequential process, of cyclic form
p.52 The fact that question agendas and answer manifolds each suffice to identify an overall state of knowledge of course means that they should coordinate with each other.
p.54-55 Where the prospect of error is sufficiently remote, there presumably is no really practical point in expending resources in an endeavor to accommodate purely hypothetical worries.
[JLJ - Yes, but what if you are designing and building a nuclear power plant, or sending troops into battle? If you are playing with fire, there is the risk that you might eventually burn yourself. Integrate a very small probability over a very long period of time, and eventually an unwanted action, no matter how unlikely, will somehow come to pass. The history of engineering is the story of designing in the face of forces that conspire to destroy or degrade exactly what it is that is being designed. We mitigate and operate with redundancy wherever possible, in wise anticipation of a time when the unexpected occurs.]
p.57 How is one to conceive of cognitive progress?
p.60 Some of the biggest advances in science come about when we reopen questions - when our answers get unstuck en masse with the discovery that we have been on the wrong track, that we do not actually understand something we thought we understood perfectly well.
p.63 the importance of questions is something that we can only assess with the wisdom of hindsight.
p.64 in the end, praxis is the arbiter of theory... For progress one must, in sum, look not so much to what we can say as to what we can do... it is thus in the field of action rather than in that of cognition, as such, that the power of improved science most strikingly manifests itself.
p.67 Authentic knowledge of the detailed truth of things is by nature something of an idealization: it is what emerges from appropriate inquiry appropriately carried through.
[JLJ - Sometimes Rescher hits the nail on the head.]
p.67 In inquiry, as elsewhere, we often fall short. There are no guarantees in the pursuit of truth.
p.68 it lies in the very nature of rational estimates as such that we are entitled to cast them in the role of the items that they are estimates of.
[JLJ - Sounds like a good 'trick' or a 'scheme' to me, that would help us decide how to 'go on.' But only in so many ways - what if you yourself were being tricked into making such an estimate? What then? We would then need to practically test the fidelity of our estimate - but are we then being paranoid? Is our original estimate good enough? All this estimating-and-testing-and-goodenoughing needs to happen as part of a 'scheme' to 'go on.']
p.68 The fact that we can never resolve all of our questions means that we must come to terms with the unavoidability of ignorance. Just how serious a liability does this constitute?
[JLJ - The human mind was not designed to 'go on' by containing an answer, Ken Jennings Jeopardy-style, to every posable question. The human mind counters ignorance with of course knowledge, but also by developing schemes to 'go on' which place us in postures with poised behavior triggers where we effectively and therefore practically can 'handle' whatever subsequently emerges through a combination of adaptive behaviors, social skills, informal requests and categories which we place nearby objects and groups of objects, which indicate that certain actions on our part are likely our best course of action. The primary function of the human mind is perhaps at high level to position us for success in our world by designing and executing schemes that ought to work - and at lower levels to recall or generate ideas for how to 'go on' from our bag of tricks as we enter and resolve each predicament we end up in.]
p.68 in doing the best one can one proceeds appropriately through doing the most that anyone - ourselves included - can reasonably ask of us.
[JLJ - Yes, but you can always try to come up with a better strategy or technique or process for doing something. The fact that you do not do so means that you are not truly doing the most that you can. It is likely that someone, somewhere, has a practically effective scheme for doing what you are trying to do, that works well for him/her. Why not try to determine what that effective scheme is?]
p.68-69 Evolutionary considerations afford us good reason to think that... we do not need to be right about things for our opinion-guided action to be successful. And indeed even in cognitive matters we can - strange to say - manage to extract truth from error.
[JLJ - What is truth? Truth is for philosophers, and for those who deserve to know it. In order to 'go on,' what we need are practical schemes that ought to work, which we can then execute. Oh and they should be fair and legal. 'You can't handle the truth.' The truth is, there are only truth claims.]
p.69 THESIS 1: Insofar as our thinking is vague, truth is accessible even in the face of error.
p.69 THESIS 2: There is, in general, an inverse relationship between the precision or definiteness of a judgment and its security: detail and probability stand in a competing relationship.
p.71 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).
p.71 THESIS 4: In practice our beliefs are generally overdetermined by the evidence. In order "to be sure," we generally "overdesign" our beliefs in matters that are important to us by keeping them comparatively indefinite.
p.74 THESIS 5: It would be an error to think that a conclusion based on fuller information is necessarily an improvement, presenting us with a result that cannot be false if its "inferior" predecessor was already true.
p.76 Precisely because additional knowledge always has the potential of constraining a change of mind - rather than merely providing additional substantiation for a fixed result - we have no assurance that further information produces "a closer approximation to the truth."
p.76 THESIS 6: In many cases we may actually be better off by proceeding in ignorance - even in cognitive matters of belief formation.
p.77-78 John Godfry Saxe's poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant"... tells the story of certain blind sages... None... was altogether in error, it is just that the truth at their disposal was partial in a way that gave them a biased and misleading picture of reality... bias... is a prospect whenever the information at our disposal is incomplete, which is to say virtually always. Conclusions based on incomplete information... are always vulnerable, always in a condition where things can go wrong.
p.79 Often - and indeed even generally - the sort of information we can get is good enough for the practical purposes that confront us.
p.79 We have to content ourselves with doing "the apparently best thing" ...We can never be sure in advance that what we don't know makes no difference... Why should we act on the most promising visible alternative, when visibility is restricted to the limited horizons of our own potentially inadequate vantage point? The fact is ...like the drowning man, we clutch at the best available prospect... Reason affords no guarantee of success, but only the reassurance of having made the best rational bet - of having done as well as one could in the circumstances of the case.
[JLJ - I would argue that it is not reason alone but reason combined with the intelligently developed strategy of executing a proven scheme, that affords the best chances of success in a complex world. One simply executes the scheme that makes the most sense. In business, you form the business plan, then execute it. Rationally, it should be claimed, we ought to have a strategy for 'going on' which involves a scheme of some kind which ought to work. Any other approach to 'going on' allows others who are operating strategically the chance to effectively outmaneuver us, as we move towards our goals in a competitive environment. Rather than Rescher's 'apparently best thing' I would say the 'strategically best thing.' Rescher avoids the concept of strategy and has not published anything of note on it that I am aware of, because he cannot get past his irrational devotion to the concept of rationality.]
p.80 we here confront once more the familiar and vexing issue of the actual optimality of apparent optima.
[JLJ - If you were thinking strategically, you would not be puzzled by this 'vexing issue' - you would develop a mitigating plan from an appropriate level of practical paranoia.]
p.85 Here it must, of course, be acknowledged that we have no automatic process - no mechanical algorithm - for achieving cognitive adequacy.
p.86 Rational belief, action, and evaluation are possible only in situations where there are cogent grounds... for what one does.
p.88 It is readily seen that what we have here is simply a mass of confusions.
[JLJ - <satire>Mr. Rescher, stop being unfair to yourself. Yes your philosophy is confusing, but there must be someone, somewhere, who understands what you are trying to say...</satire>]
p.89 Numbers, by their very nature, are thought-accessible counting instruments that can be used throughout to enumerate collections of objects.
[JLJ - Numbers are symbols which represent quantities. We can use them intelligently for many reasons, including part of a scheme to determine how to 'go on', where they are intermediaries between something you can count and something you can do.]
p.91 The circumstances of human life are such that, like it or not, we need knowledge to guide our actions and to satisfy our curiosity. Without knowledge-productive inquiry we cannot resolve the cognitive and practical problems that confront a rational creature in making its way in this world.
p.95 the question "What is the rational thing to believe or to do?" must receive the indecisive answer: "That depends." It depends on context and situation - on conditions and circumstances
[JLJ - Yes, but successful people are executing plans of a strategic kind that allow them to succeed. What about following a similar approach? Wouldn't that be the "rational" thing to do? Rationality literally fails to guide in a complex world full of multiple opportunities and competing agents. Perhaps we "rationally" ought to develop then execute a strategic plan, or else this world may deny us success in reaching our goals.]
p.98-99 one contemporary philosopher offers the idea that
[U]nderlying each... judgment there is a choice that the agent has made... his or her choice expresses a decision as to what is to count as a good reason for him or her.
p.101 The key overall lesson of these deliberations is that inquiry is a dynamical and ultimately incompletable process so that the agenda of questions and the inventory of our answers to them are not something stable but rather manifest an ever-continuing flux. The project of resolving our questions, in science as elsewhere, is developmental and open-ended as new issues arise and old ones drop from sight.
p.101 Knowledge is not the only key theme of epistemology because in the realm of cognition questions are every bit as important as answers (chapter 1). Questions have a rational dynamic of their own that cannot be grasped if we look simply to their product - the inherently imperfectable knowledge that issues from our efforts to resolve them (chapters 2-3). Inquiry is a dynamical process and the phenomenon of question exfoliation is one of its crucial features (chapter 4). While we cannot define scientific progress by purely theoretical means, strictly cognitive, problem-solving terms, we can indeed characterize it in practical terms of technological capacity.
|
