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p.4 For process theorists, becoming is no less important than being - but rather the reverse.
p.5 Other events and processes relate to the coordinated doings of things
p.5 Heraclitus. For him, reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of process... Process is fundamental... Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). Not stable things, but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world.
p.11-12 A substance-ontologist is committed to seeing the physical world (nature) as a collection of things and objects. And on this basis, one immediately faces the problem of accounting for laws that coordinate the behavior of things.... But by seeing the world as a matrix of process - by viewing nature as the substantiation of a family of operative principles (taken in their all-inclusive totality) - we secure straightaway a coherent conceptualization of nature in a way that removes such difficulties. For the idea of a law is inherent in the very concept of a process.
p.12 A process approach thus simplifies greatly the problem of securing a coherent view of nature.
p.12 The development of stable "things" begins at the submicroscopic level with a buzzing proliferation of "events" that have little if any fixed nature in themselves but only exist in reciprocal interaction with each other, and which have no stable characteristics in and of themselves but only come to exist spatiotemporally stable aspects at the level of statistical aggregates.
p.13 modern physics envisions very small processes (quantum phenomena) combining to produce standard things (ordinary macro-objects) as a result of their modus operandi.
p.13 The quantum view of reality demolished the most substance-oriented of all ontologies - classical atomism. For it holds that, at the microlevel, what was usually deemed a physical thing, a stably perduring object, is itself no more than a statistical pattern, that is, a stability wave in a surging sea of process. Those so-called enduring "things" come about through the compilation of stabilities in statistical fluctuations - much like gusts of wind. Processes are not the machinations of stable things; things are the stability patterns of various processes. All such perspectives of modern physics at the level of fundamentals dovetail smoothly into the traditional process approach.
p.18 process philosophy... A thoroughly worked-out, full-fledged development of this approach simply does not yet exist as an accomplished fact. All that we really have so far are suggestions, sketches, and expressions of confidence.
p.22 A natural process by its very nature passes on to the future a construction made from the materials of the past. All processes have a developmental, forward-looking aspect... The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualizing possibilities that are subsequently left behind as the process unfolds.
p.24 The contribution of the process idea is to help us keep together in reality things that thought inclines to separate in idea.
p.24 A process can be blocked by uncooperative occurrences... the normal unfolding of a process can be aborted through the intrusion of external events
p.25 the actualization of a process by an agent or agency must always intervene between the mere instructions and the fully realized process itself... although the recipe or instruction set for process production is, or in a certain sense may be, timeless, the process itself must nevertheless be temporal... For processes, to be is to be exemplified... the process itself is... something that must have its footing in space and time in order to exist.
p.28 process philosophy is characterized by its insistence on the fundamentality of transformative processes, with their potential detachment from substantial things.
p.29 Agent-managed processes are in general teleologically productive; they usually issue an intended result of some sort.
p.29 A process can be represented by a stable artifact: the poem recitation by the printed text, the musical performance by the printed score. However, it takes the intermediation of productive agents to turn such static process representations into actual processes.
p.30 Cognitive processes... provide our only available access to understanding the world about us.
p.30 When smaller processes join to form larger ones, the relation is not simply one of part and whole but of productive contributory to aggregate result.
p.31 Whitehead makes much of a category he terms "nexus," which is designed to provide for the combination and integration of his atomic process units. A nexus represents "a particular fact of togetherness among actual entities,"
p.32 The idea of process is thus a fertile device in ontology - one that is able to extend our informative horizons beyond the concept of substance that has historically monopolized attention in these discussions.
p.46 Process philosophy and pragmatism represent two areas of America's most substantial and distinctive contributions to philosophy.
p.44 Actions are agent-managed processes... An action will always be something done by an agent.
p.59 Human knowledge should be thought of as a process rather than merely a product. It is clearly not stable; because ongoing inquiry leads to new and often dissonant findings and discoveries, knowledge emerges in phases and stages through processes that engender an ever-changing state-of-the-art.
p.60 A time will come when our posterity will marvel that such obvious things were unknown to us.
p.60 Questions cluster together in groupings that constitute a line of inquiry... 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.
p.61 Such a cycle - an "erotetic cycle" - determines a course of inquiry that is set by an initial, controlling question together with the ancillary questions to which it gives rise and whose solutions are seen as facilitating its resolution. 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 possible... 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. 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 stipulation to a dynamical one.
p.61 The conception of a course of inquiry has important ramifications.
p.61 Cognitive progress is commonly thought of in terms of the discovery of new facts - new information about things.
[JLJ - we can intelligently construct a diagnostic test and use the 'facts' obtained to guide further actions. Consider an interview of a candidate for a job. The initial questions posed are answered, which in turn point to further questions. This is effectively becomes a useful diagnostic test of the fitness of the candidate for the job.]
p.63 A body of knowledge may well answer a question only provisionally, in a tone of voice so tentative or indecisive as to indicate that further information is actually needed to enable us to settle the matter with confidence... 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.65 Kant's principle rests on the insight that no matter what answers are in hand, we can proceed to dig deeper into the how of things by raising yet further questions about the matters involved in these answers themselves.
p.65 the moving 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 process of a cyclic form
p.69 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 and need new answers to old questions.
p.78 Induction is a matter of building up the simplest theory structure capable of "doing the job" of explanatory systematization.
p.80 The history of science is a history of episodes of leaping to the wrong conclusions.
p.81 The impossibility of foreseeing the new phenomenon that awaits us means that at no point can we prejudge what lies further down the explanatory road.
p.83 Newton's third law of countervailing action and reaction becomes a fundamental principle of epistemology because we can only learn about nature by interacting with it. Everything depends on just how and how hard we can push against nature in situations of observational and detectional interaction. We cannot "get to the bottom of it" where nature is concerned.
p.84 There is good reason to think of nature as cognitively inexhaustible: as we extend the range of our interactions, we can, in theory, always learn more and more about it, attaining ever new horizons of discovery, with the new no less interesting or significant than the old.
p.90 Our knowledge of ourselves and of the world about us is always a work in progress because our capacity to answer questions is limited.
p.91 as far as we finite knowers are concerned, real things have hidden depths - they are always cognitively opaque to us to some extent because more about them can always come to light.
p.91 Any particular thing - the moon, for example - is such that two related but critically different versions can be contemplated: (1) the moon, the actual moon as it "really" is; and (2) the moon as somebody (you or I or the Babylonians) conceives of it.
p.99 The very conception of inquiry as we conceive it would have to be abandoned if the contract conceptions of "actual reality" and "the real truth" were no longer available.
p.99 We need the notion of reality to operate the conception of truth.
[JLJ - in myth you have cannon to indicate which fables are 'real'.]
p.99 Reality... is the realm of what really is as it really is.
[JLJ - really?]
p.106 the human mind is sufficiently well attuned to reality that some knowledge of it is possible. But it is no less important to join with realists in stressing the independent character of reality, acknowledging that reality has a depth and complexity of makeup that outruns the reach of mind.
p.108 We only have and can only ever achieve opinion and putative truth; the real article - the truth as such - lies outside our grasp.
[JLJ - yes, but there can be truth claims, and we can operate as if such a truth claim is truly true. But is is truly truly true? Truth be told, I think I am getting carried away here...]
p.110 Every culture is entrapped in its own culture realm.
p.111 I think the voodoo maven cast an evil spell on my neighbor
[JLJ - to find out what Rescher was implying you will have to read the book...]
p.112 The processual aspect of human thought provides the basis for its capacity to rise above its episodic particularities.
p.117 With thought - unlike bodily action - we can move beyond the present into the past and future and indeed from the realm of the real into that of the merely possible.
p.117 intelligent agents are able to have dual-function experiences that at once cause their beliefs and provide the reasons for holding them.
p.119 The fact is that beliefs are concurrently produced and justified by experiences... One's reason for holding a belief need not be yet another belief but can simply be an experience - an experience that produces (from a causal point of view) and validates and justifies (from a probative point of view) that belief.
p.123 The term monad is used in both a physical and metaphysical sense. Physically, monads are centers of force or activity - loci characterized by a dynamic impetus to change. Metaphysically, monads are existing items (units of reality) whose identities lie in their descriptive uniqueness.
p.123 Monadology stands committed to the idea that anything concrete admits of a specific identifying description. The doctrine thus pivots on a distinctive approach to ontological item identification. Its maxim is: To be as a unit of existence is to be uniquely characterizable.
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