|
p.27 Classical pragmatism as envisioned by Peirce was designed to provide a standard of objectivity, a test of the appropriateness of our factual beliefs. Its motivating rationals lay in the question: How are we to tell that our beliefs about the world - and our scientific claims above all - are objectively true and indeed... that they are actually meaningful in characterizing reality in the way that we intend?
[JLJ - My own concept here is that there are no truths per se - merely truth claims. I can have my truth claims and you can have yours, and the people of 300 years ago can have theirs, and the people in the future will have theirs. The real is ultimately kind of irrelevant (!) because what matters now, in our current predicament, encumbered as we are, is how to go on within the real, whatever it is. We intelligently and practically acquire and categorize for possible use 'tricks that ought to work', and the various conditions in which they ought to work. What is real does not necessarily tell us how to decide what to do next. What is truly important is our current predicament and the driving forces that conspire to change what is real now to what is real in the next instant. We manage ourselves, our resources, our relationships, our investments, and our posturing against what may be.]
p.33 The pragmatists of the right take roughly the following line:
Pragmatism is concerned with what works - with the effective and efficient achievement of purpose... Those ways of proceeding which prove themselves effective and efficient here are ipso facto substantiated, so that people engaged in the project are rationally impelled to adopt them. We may propose, but nature disposes - it is reality not we ourselves that is the arbiter of what works in relation to our actions in the world...
Such an approach looks to pragmaticism as a "reality principle"
p.37-38 The crux is that what is of man's authorship is not the truth itself but merely our best, most firmly substantiable estimate thereof.
[JLJ - I maintain that there are no truths, merely truth claims.]
p.40 To all appearances, pragmatism is not a unified theory but a grab bag of very different doctrines that bear only remote similarities to one another.
[JLJ - Is this surprising? The human mind is a collector and ponderer of tricks that work, and the intelligent classification and application of these various tricks to the various predicaments that they work in.]
p.49 Idealism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated.
p.50 Traditional ontological idealism... centered on the idea that thought creates reality.
p.95 The basic idea of the Delphi technique is to proceed by means of structured interaction among a group of predictors.
p.97 The post-World War II era has seen a growing preoccupation with planning and forecasting
p.111 As Leibniz sees it, the manifold of possible worlds spans the whole spectrum of logical possibility. Whatever can be true in some contingent circumstances is unconditionally the case in some possible world or other.
[JLJ - Wouldn't it just be better to say we don't know?]
p.113 a nonexistent possible substance
[JLJ - This might interest you - it does not interest me. If we must conceive of a nonexistent possible substance, how about the concept of a Rescher book not laden with typos and editing errors?]
p.129 Leibniz wrote:
[S]pace is that which makes many perceptions cohere with each other at the same time...
p.133 Possible worlds can differ from ours very drastically indeed. After all, they contain altogether different substances. And words whose substances are radically different and behave in line with radically different laws of nature might well have a spatial structure quite different from ours.
[Here Rescher and Leibniz are imagining things. Just because you can conceive of something does not mean it must exist elsewhere.]
p.134 What, then, of time? Here we can be brief. Any substance that is possible in the order of contingent existence must be positioned alike in space and time. Time, for Leibniz, is conceptually coordinate with space; both are aspects of the descriptive structure of a world: one could not have space in an atemporal context, nor conversely. For space is the order of coexistence - that is, the order among the mutually contemporaneous states of things - while time is the order of succession, that is, the order among the various different mutually coexisting states of things which, qua mutually coexisting, must of course have some sort of spatial structure.
p.134 For Leibniz, space and time... stand in an inseparable coordination with one another in the overall ordering process... With him... space and time are mutually coordinate - their ontological status is exactly the same and neither is more fundamental than the other.
[JLJ - Or, in my philosophy, space and time are the conceptual inventions of cognitive beings to make sense of their world and move about within it. A hydrogen atom cares nothing about time, or space.]
p.135 Could a possible world fail to have a spatiotemporal structure altogether? ...Leibniz maintains... that a world cannot lack the sort of ordering at issue here.
p.137 Leibniz again and again insisted that there is an independent standard of the perfection of things that is determined by considerations of objective necessity... just what is this criterion...? This standard, Leibniz maintains, is the combination of variety and order... the best of possible worlds is that which successfully manages to achieve the greatest richness of phenomena... that can be combined with... the greatest simplicity of means
[JLJ - Interestingly, the principles of evolution rely on just these same criteria to create, in effect, without a creator.]
p.137 [Leibniz]
There is always a principle of determination in nature which must be sought by maxima and minima; namely, that a maximum effect should be achieved with a minimum outlay, so to speak.
p.138 The prime factor in Leibniz's theory is not just lawful order as such, which, as we have seen, is inevitable. Rather, it is a matter of the elegance or the economy of laws.
p.139 As Leibniz considers it, variety has two principal aspects: completeness and comprehensiveness of content on the one hand, and diversity and richness and variation and complexity upon the other.
p.145 As Leibniz sees it, the magnitude of something good or bad should be measured by the product of its inherent value multipled by the probability of its realization... the expected value idea... affords a natural tool of impressive versatility and power for the assessment of goods and evils in human affairs.
[JLJ - This idea is useful for game theory - but it is only a heuristic or rule of thumb which must achieve practical results before it can be considered useful for any sort of purpose.]
p.147 God must create the best of possible worlds all right, but the "must" that is operative here is not that of logic (of metaphysical necessity) but rather of benevolence (of moral necessity)
p.149 Inspired by its success in optics, Leibniz was eager to extend the applicability of minimax principles by means of a general principle that, in all natural processes, some physical quantity is at a maximum... Throughout problems of this sort, the object is to find one among an infinite number of alternate paths that achieves an extremization (minimization or maximization) of some parametrized characteristic - time or distance, or the like.
p.154 Leibniz repeatedly maintained that all possible substances have "a certain urge toward existence," an exigentia existentiae - that... we find in all possibles a certain conatus, a dynamic striving toward existence proportionate to the perfection of the substance.
p.156-157 Leibniz's theory of possible worlds is something of a model of philosophical workmanship... To be sure, this account may not look all that plausible to us who live in an era of very different cognitive sensibilities.
p.189 The existence of this latent (hidden, occult) sector is a crucial feature of our conception of a real thing... The totality of facts about a thing - about any real thing whatever - is in principle inexhaustible, and the complexity of real things is in consequence descriptably unfathomable.
[JLJ - Yes, but we humans are geniuses in our ability to simplify complexity - using heuristics which we construct - to the point that we are able to "go on" continuously in our predicament, and into our next predicament - mostly with ease.]
p.195 To identify a particular we must distinguish it from all the rest; we must single it out through some overall idiosyncrasy that differentiates it from all the others.
p.208 Counting anything... presupposes identifying the items to be counted.
[JLJ - ...and presupposes the absence of an 'opponent' who seeks to thwart your counting by creating inflatable 'tanks', such as those on Calais, a distant location from the impending D-Day allied landing at Normandy...]
p.219 real things always have more experientially manifestable properties than they can ever actually manifest in experience. The experienced portion of a thing is like the part of the iceberg that shows above water. All real things are necessarily thought of as having hidden depths that extend beyond the limits not only of experience but also of experientability... much the same story holds when our concern is not with physical things, but with types of such things.
p.220-221 We know full well that it is false to claim, "Whatever looks, quacks, and waddles like a duck will actually be a duck." But in ordinary circumstances... we feel free to implement the policy at issue with an inferential leap, not because in doing so we cannot possibly go wrong, but rather because we will generally go right... Cognitive utility is the crux here.
p.246 And so the fact remains that complexity is the inseparable accompanyment of modernity.
[JLJ - ...only because the available resources, driving forces and competition among the agents to reach their goals create an emergent reality that is complex to maneuver within, and results in a predicament to our conscious mind which requires intelligence, profound wisdom and managed, invested, directed regenerative energies, of all kinds.]
p.247 Moreover, the fact remains that computers do just exactly what they are programmed to do. The level of complexity management they are able to achieve is determined through - and thus limited by - the ingenuity and conceptual adequacy of their programming.
[JLJ - Yes but... using artificial intelligence, we can evolve an algorithm that plays a game, such as chess, to the point that it can play a very strong game, yet do so in a way that cannot be understood by human intelligence. The software has perhaps transcended the ingenuity and conceptual adequacy of its programming.]
p.248 Computers fly planes, land rocket modules on the moon, win chess tournaments, and develop mathematical proofs.
[JLJ - Computers also crash planes (the Boeing 737-Max), crash rocket modules on the moon (Israel's Beresheet lander on 11 April 2019), win chess tournaments among machines (computers no longer play actual people for championships), and construct mathematical proofs that cannot be understood or used by the common man.]
p.252 Risk is a natural companion to complexity.
[JLJ - Yes, but so are the concepts of an acceptable level of paranoia for that risk, and that of a managed or mitigated risk. We manage, we mitigate, then we move on to other things.]
p.254 We all too frequently cannot see our way clearly through the accompanying ramifications to grasp the implications of innovation for their management.
p.259 In situations of near-impenetrable complexity, our practice in matters of public policy will generally be guided far more effectively by localized experimantal trial and observation than by the theorizing resources of intellectual technology.
|
