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p.1 While harmony strikes the modern ear as primarily a musical term, the basic idea it conveys is something far larger both in its origins and in its subsequent history... What is at issue throughout is... a unifying coordination of elements into a comprehensive and evaluatively positive structure - an organically unified whole that is able to realize a positive function [JLJ - a potential?] through the coordinated collaboration of its several parts.
p.2 A change that occurs in a harmonious whole becomes diffused throughout
p.2 With a harmony, two factors accordingly become crucial: a coordinative unification of component parts and an evaluatively positive overall result, that is, a union of constituents into a functionally unified, coherently integrated whole in a way that is evaluatively positive either by way of intellectual appreciation or of affective response. The former factor might be characterized as systemic integrity and the second as evaluative positivity. Taken together these are what a harmony is all about.
p.2 The idea of harmony became significant as a philosophical concept in the thought of Pythagoras and his school in classical antiquity.
p.14 An effective cognitive system must be constructed more like a medieval trail than a modern highway. It must follow the natural bends and contours of the terrain that it traverses rather than cutting a level path through it all.
p.17 In formulating an effective cognitive system in a particular case, achieving completeness may require sacrificing simplicity.
p.38 As H. H. Joachim puts it, "a system possesses self-coherence (a) in proportion as every constituent element of it logically involves and is involved by every other; and (b) in so far as the reciprocal implications of the constituent elements, or rather the constituent elements in their reciprocal implications, constitute alone and completely the significance of the system"
p.40 From the epistemic standpoint, the parameters of systemic harmony - simplicity, coherence, regularity, and so on - can effectively serve to regulate and control the claims of our explanatory-descriptive accounts of the world to rational acceptability. In particular, they can serve as regulative principles of inquiry, as instruments for assessing appropriateness and acceptability in the conduct of our cognitive endeavors.
p.41 acquiring and managing information is a purposive human activity - like most of our endeavors. And as such it involves the ongoing expenditure of resources for the realization of the objectives - description, explanation, prediction, and control - that represent the defining characteristics of our cognitive endeavors.
p.41-42 Simple tools or methods can, suitably used, create complicated results. A simple cognitive method, such as trial and error, can ultimately yield complex answers to difficult questions... Our commitment to simplicity in scientific inquiry does not, in the end, prevent us from discovering whatever complexities are actually there.
p.42 Induction is no more than a search for cognitive order in the resolution of our questions... if it is there. When fishing, a net whose mesh has a certain area will catch fish of a certain size if any are present. Use of the net indicates a hope, perhaps even an expectation that the fish will be there, but certainly not a pressured foreknowledge of their presence.
p.56 Inferences from sample to population, from part to whole... are... modes of inductive reasoning.
[JLJ - perhaps this is how the pollsters miscalled the US 2016 presidential election - they keep forgetting that they are making inferences from data. Polling perhaps has a finite margin of error due to its methods - precise though they are - that sampling-and-ever-so-careful-adjustment just cannot overcome. Polling faces the extreme challenge of having to predict an outcome while people are listening to the results and deciding whether or not to vote. Polling has to predict, in the light of people listening to the actual prediction itself.]
p.57 Induction is... a fundamentally regulative and procedural resource for inquiry - one that proceeds by way of implementing the injunction: Maximize the extent to which your cognitive commitments are harmoniously systematic overall. In the absence of such a principle, or some functional equivalent of it, the venture of rational inquiry via empirical data will not get under way at all.
Induction is accordingly not so much a process of inference as one of estimation; its conclusions are not so much extracted from data as suggested by them... Induction is always a matter of guesswork... what is involved is responsible, rather than wild, guesswork
p.58-59 Induction is a matter of projecting our cognitive commitments just as far beyond the data as is necessary to get answers to our questions... The ideas of economy and simplicity are the guiding principles of inductive reasoning... In induction we exploit the information at hand to answer the questions in the most straightforward (economical) way... The inductively appropriate course lies with the production rule that is the simplest answer... In induction, we proceed to answer questions by opting for the simplest resolution that meets the conditions of the problem. And we do this not because we know a priori that this simplest resolution will prove to be correct... We adopt this answer, provisionally at least, just exactly because this is the simplest, the most economical way of providing a resolution that does justice to the facts and to the demands of the situation. We recognize that other possibilities exist but ignore them pro tem, exactly because there is no cogent reason for giving them favorable notice at this stage.
p.60 In inductive situations we are called on to answer questions whose resolution lies beyond the reach of information at hand. We simply have to transcend the data.
[JLJ - This also applies in strategic situations, which Rescher completely ignores. Rescher forgets that other people exist in the world who are estimating/guessing your response to situations and are planning and positioning themselves accordingly. They are operating strategically - are you?]
p.62 The ideas of economy and simplicity are the guiding principles of inductive reasoning.
[JLJ - Perhaps, but not necessarily that of strategy. If one knows that his opponent operates on these principles, he then steers the conflict into complicated situations where economy and simplicity are not the best options - but appear to be. The opponent might then make a strategic mistake, which can then be capitalized on.]
p.65-66 rules of procedure are conditional injunctions that indicate specific steps to be taken in various circumstances... A principle, by contrast, does not tell one what specifically is to be done, but only gives generalized guidance.
p.66 Principles do not prescribe particular actions or courses of action; they stipulate directions. They do not specify concrete steps but generalized objectives, indicating the necessity or desirability of a certain generalized tendency.
The function of principles is thus to guide the process of decision making... The principle does not dictate a course of action: it serves to delimit the range of appropriateness... Every practice has its principles.
p.67 Why should there be principles? Why not get by with rules alone? Because in a complex world the range of cases and circumstances is so vast and variegated that no set of explicit rules could adequately cover the range of possibilities. There are exceptions to all or at any rate most rules, and without the guidance of principles we would not be able to proceed appropriately on the basis of rules alone.
p.73 Knowledge pivots on generalization.
p.78 To maintain that one fact or finding is more important than another within the problem-setting of a particular subject-matter domain is to make a judgment of worth or value: it is to say that one finding merits a greater expenditure of intellectual resources - of attention, concern, time, and effort to discover, learn, explain, and teach - than another. Importance is accordingly a fundamentally economic concept - one of the pivotal concepts of the rational economy of cognition. The crux here is an essentially seismological standard based on the question, If the concept or thesis at issue were abrogated or abandoned, how large would be the ramifications and implications of this circumstance? ...Importance accordingly is a comparative concept of intellectual economy: it represents the extent to which one thing deserves more attention (time, effort, energy) than another. The crucial thing for importance is thus inherent in the question of how much... the crucial determinative factor for increasing importance is the extent of seismic disturbance of the cognitive terrain.
p.79 The systematic articulation of a cognitive domain is bound to reflect the structure of importance within its boundaries... A scientific idea, concept, principle, thesis, theory, finding, or fact is important exactly to the comparative extent that it merits space allocation in a perfected exposition of its field.
p.79-80 Since importance in such a sense, as already noted, is a fundamentally economic conception, it encounters the economically pivotal factor of limits or finitude. But now the crucial factor is not, as is more usual, absolute size but comparative size. It is a matter of proportion - of deserving this-and-so much of the overall pie... so if one fact or finding deserves an additional 1 percent of the overall pie of attention and concern, then this has to be taken away from something else.
p.80 One key mechanism for implementing the idea of importance lies in the general principle that the comparative size of an elite (at any given level of eliteness) is determined by a fixed percentage... At issue here is a kind of cognitive Richter scale of importance based on the idea of successive orders of magnitude.
p.84 throughout, importance is directly related in terms of space allocation... the importance of an item within a given domain of deliberations is simply an index of the comparative amount of attention it deserves and thereby the comparative amount of space that would be devoted to it in a fully adequate exposition of the domain at issue.
p.85 it should be clear that when we ourselves actually engage in the business of attributing importance to facts and findings we are providing estimates of importance.
[JLJ - Well yes, but we might be operating within a scheme which calls for us to do no more than spend time examining possibilities which appear to be important - such as in playing a complex game of strategy such as chess or go. Our estimate of importance might drive our initial exploration efforts, and what emerges from these explorations helps us to estimate an adaptive capacity for navigating the future consequences which might emerge from beyond our planning horizon. We might then decide on/develop a stance which is preadapted to many of the critical lines of play.]
p.88 No one can doubt that the use of citation statistics is an imperfect method for estimating importance given that many sorts of issue-distorting influences can come into play... But as a useful resource for the first approximation in providing what is admittedly no more than an estimate, there seems to be no more plausible... place to start... once the issue of assessing importance is seen in terms of estimation rather than of determination, this third approach offers the best prospects.
[JLJ - we see here that 'citation statistics' are an imperfect metric for estimating importance, but nevertheless are a good place to start. It seems that game theory could benefit from heuristics which - in a similar way - indicate how much we should initially care about potential lines of play - how important they are, in other words, on initial estimate.]
p.88-89 In clarifying the concept of scientific importance, as with other terminology coherent concepts, one confronts three issues:
- What does it mean to call something an X?
- What soft of standard authorizing evidence entitles one to call something an X?
- What reason is there to think that the authorizing evidence at issue is adequate to the meaning at hand.
[JLJ - We might think here instead, of what does it mean to call a certain move in a complex game of strategy a promising move, or a move worth investigating?]
p.89 being influential is our best-available test for importance in science. [JLJ - perhaps as well in game theory, when considering promising moves.]
p.90 Cognitive importance... is by nature a decidedly idealized conception. And in this imperfectly mundane dispensation of ours we have no access to the ideal. In matters of science, too, we have no alternative but to let the best estimate that we can get make do provisionally as a placeholder for the best there is. And just this is the case with even so important an idea as that of importance.
p.91 In all of these aspects of cognitive endeavor it is critical that resources be allocated with a view to the importance of the issues.
p.95 a thing is what it does
p.100 For the localist, what matters is the least costly solution to the range of problems that lie immediately at hand. With Occam's razor as his favored instrument, he rejects out of hand any entities, concepts or theories that do not answer to the requirements of immediate needs. A global approach, by contrast, looks beyond the issues of the moment toward those that will predictably arise further down the road... various schools of epistemic minimalism go about posting signposts that put all risk of engaging larger issues off limits. Such theorists turn Occam's razor into Robespierre's guillotine. Their tumbrels carry off a wide variety of victims
p.101 In philosophy, as in life, the economies of a localistic minimalism are unwise practices that frequently produce long-term waste.
p.102 In most any problem-solving contexts we do well to keep all our commitments in reasonable coordination overall. Why should philosophy be any different?
p.105 It must be emphasized that the impetus toward rational coherence does not in any way prejudge the outcome of our theorizing.
p.106 the cognitive parameters at issue in systemic harmony - simplicity, regularity, coherence, unity, uniformity, and the rest - have the standing of regulative principles of probative procedure. They implement the idea of epistemic preferability or precedence, of presumption and burden of proof, by indicating where, in the absence of specific counterindications, our epistemic commitments are to be placed in weaving together the fabric of our knowledge. Such a procedural/methodological stance does not anticipate and prejudge the ultimate answer to the questions we pose about the harmonious makeup of the real. All that it does is to guide and control the process by which answers - whatever they may be - are attained. No substantive issues are prejudged
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