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p.5 Consensus is a matter of agreement... consensus... can prevail in all three of these areas: ...in matters of belief;... with respect to action; and... with matters of value.
p.7 Wise leaders... realize that the interests of understanding are best served by a complex picture that portrays the state of existing information and speculation - and ignorance! - in its fully diverse complexity.
p.15 Consensus is a substitute for an inherently unavailable rationality.
[JLJ - Perhaps it is no more than a way to 'go on,' one among many possible.]
p.15 Consensus is no effective substitute for cogency because there can be good as well as bad consensus - agreement that is evil or stupid as well as agreement that is benign and wise... When a consensus confronts us that is not the end of the matter but the beginning. For we are then well advised to ask why that consensus exists
p.16 It is never just consensus we want but the right sort of consensus - that is, a consensus produced in the right way
p.17 When I realize that my position on some issue of consequence disagrees with yours, I am well advised to inquire into how it is that you have rendered a conclusion different from mine... But I am not well advised to worry about the bare fact that your beliefs differ from mine in ways that are detached from the issues that relate to grounds and reasons. It makes good sense to revise beliefs to accommodate them to other evidence, but it makes no rational sense to revise them to accommodate other people.
p.43 In various respects consensus is doubtless a good thing... It is something we would ideally like to have, abstractly speaking, but which we do not expect to achieve in the concrete situations in which we actually labour.
p.45 can one somehow hitch truth to the wagon of consensus?
[JLJ - This leads us back to the question, what is truth?]
p.49 Sceptics through the ages have been wilfully blind to how little actually follows from a lack of consensus.
[JLJ - Yes, but the specific details which emerge from such 'lack of consensus' can perhaps suggest what to do next, a possible way to 'go on.' For example, if 9 out of 10 people agree on a certain plan, someone can announce, 'Ok, so this is the plan, right?' and 9 people head nod and the 10th person can choose to strongly, vocally object, or not. If 5 out of 10 agree on one plan, and 5 on another, maybe a compromise is in order. Simply stated, a lack of consensus can wisely point out a way to proceed, given the way things are. Rescher fails to see that decisions - even rational decisions - are often composed of intermediate steps that focus our attention on what to do next. Until we are done making a rational decision, we are still obligated to perform some kind of rational inquiry - fact-finding of sorts - looking under this stone (because we likely might learn something new) and not under that stone (likely nothing there we didn't already know, time to move on). A Rescher decision is therefore composed of practically guided fact-finding and pre-decided values, combined with time management wisdom, which estimates for example whether we will likely be better off postponing the decision - for whatever reason - or even making a quick-decision to take advantage of an opportunity. Where we lack facts due to the presence of complex interactions, we can substitute diagnostic tests of various kinds. Much like the Rescher truth machine mentioned in another book, we now have the Rescher decision machine...]
p.51 Consensus turns on what people think; objectivity on what is actually so.
p.52 In matters of inquiry there is no natural compulsion that of necessity impels all competent minds to a uniform result... Consensus is thus no highway to truth - and no substitute for an objective criteriology.
p.53 Consensus can thus provide an instrumentality of plausible estimation, albeit only in situations where cogent - and thus more than merely consensual - standards are at hand... Consensus can be invoked to extend the range of what is rationally acceptable as true, but it cannot be invoked to delineate this range.
[JLJ - Do you mean to imply, that consensus is at bottom a trick that sometimes - perhaps even often - works in order to determine how to 'go on'?]
p.60 In the practical business of inquiry we do not have a royal road to the truth as such. Rather, the rocky road of estimation based on imperfect data is generally the best and most that we can manage.
[JLJ - Yes, but combine this with a reasonable amount of adaptive capacity, and isn't this enough to determine how to 'go on?']
p.60 Even where consensus exists we are well advised to take it with a grain of salt. If consensus were a guarantor of truth we would feel differently about it than we actually do. Sensible people presumably do not deem themselves entitled to take a potentially highly dangerous course of action... simply because a consensus exists that it is safe.
p.65 People conduct their problem-solving affairs on the basis of weaving new information into the fabric of the old. They construe the implications of new data in the light of their background information... Conforming or deviating from a pre-established pattern of normalcy makes all the difference in how a given piece of information is to be interpreted.
p.65-66 Rational inquiry is a matter of aligning our views with the substance of our experience. It calls for making judgments that achieve the most harmonious overall co-ordination between the information afforded us by our experience and our question-answering endeavours. Its products are thus... the laboriously constructed makeshift contrived by imperfect humans in the course of an active engagement in the world's affairs - an ongoing interaction between inquirer and environment. They... emerge from the reactions of individual agents proceeding on the basis of their personalized... backgrounds of experience.
[JLJ - Rescher sometimes stumbles headfirst into worthwhile ideas for game theory. A machine playing a complex game of strategy performs a kind of rational inquiry and produces 'laboriously constructed makeshift' contrived by executing a cleverly designed script designed to explore the complex interactions of the agents or game pieces, in a desire to separate the coercive positions from those that only appear to be such, effectively estimating the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion.]
p.66 The solutions we adopt to resolve our questions about the world are the products of evidentially substantiated conjectures.
p.66 Be it in science or in everyday life, the rational formation of opinion rests on fundamentally inductive processes that involve the search for, or construction of, the least complex belief-structure capable at once of answering our questions and accommodating the available data.
[JLJ - Not so fast - in my ontology a 'belief' is adopted by the cognitive mind in order to 'go on.' We simply cannot continuously and openly ponder every possible thing that is unclear, or that involves our survival or our very existence, for infinite amounts of time - we must eventually draw a line in the sand and arrive at or construct a belief in order to determine how to 'go on' in the real world. Such a belief might be the 'least complex', but in complex situations or in attempts to outmaneuver an opponent, we might fall back on diagnostic tests, or on 'tricks that work,' however complex they may be.]
p.67 Since we can only learn about nature by interacting with it, everything will depend on just where and how we bump up against nature in situations of observational and detectional interaction.
And what holds true of science holds elsewhere as well.
p.71 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.
p.72 The most characteristic and significant difference between one conceptual scheme and another arises when the one scheme is committed to something that the other does not envisage at all - something lying entirely outside the conceptual range of the other.
p.74 Thomas Kuhn... tells us that scientists who work within different scientific traditions - and thus operate with different descriptive and explanatory 'paradigms' - actually 'live in different worlds'. The things that confront them may be the same, but their significance is altogether different.
p.86 If we want information - if we deem ignorance and indecision no less a negativity than error - then we must be prepared to 'take the gamble' of answering our questions in ways that risk some possibility of mistakes.
p.87 The quest for cognitive orientation in a difficult world represents a deeply practical requisite for us. That basic demand for information and understanding presses in upon us and we must do (and are pragmatically justified in doing) what is needed for its satisfaction.
p.89 In trying to be equally open (or closed) to all the alternatives, we get nowhere.
p.95 To refuse to discriminate - be it by accepting everything or by accepting nothing - is to avert controversy only by refusing to enter the forum of discussion.
p.114 Mere preferences... are irrationalizable; they are what they are, without grounds or reasons. But values and standards - cognitive included - are always defensible. They can and must be supported by reasons and arguments... which... pivot on factors that are not chosen by us, but are situational givens.
p.114 The stance espoused throughout the present discussion has quite emphatically been that of a perspectival rationalism (or contextualism). Such a preferentialist position combines a pluralistic acknowledgement of distinct alternatives with a recognition that a sensible individual's choice among them is not rationally indifferent, but rather constrained by the probative indications of the experience that provides both the evidential basis and the evaluative criteria for effecting a rational choice.
p.114 people who are confronted with a spectrum of competing alternatives are seldom altogether indifferent. Nor is it reasonable that they should be.
p.117 I have no choice but to proceed from whatever place fate has assigned me in the experiential scheme of things.
[JLJ - You mean, perhaps, that you have to decide how to 'go on.' Nevertheless, your 'proceeding' from experience can include gathering of opinions, looking at things from the viewpoint of others, and learning. When you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences of that behavior.]
p.119 A sensible pluralism... will view those rivals as available, as deserving serious attention, perhaps even as plausible and tempting. But it will not - and need not - view them as correct... It refuses to be dogmatic and to reject rival positions out of hand, without the courtesy of due scrutiny and evaluation. But it equally refuses to be gullible - to accept anything and everything on its own. It is open-minded, not empty-headed... it is perfectly prepared to be preferential and discriminating... Its negative view of rivals is not unthinking and dogmatic but rests on a basis of reflection based on rational evaluation.
[JLJ - Rescher perhaps fails to see that complexity of interaction, and the scheming of individual agents, are not things which can be unraveled by simple rationality, in any form other than a strategic 'muddling through' and the experienced trial and error which it seems to demand.]
p.120 As long as we are serious about rational inquiry we must actually have a perspective of consideration and take an evaluative position by assuming a normative-value orientation.
p.131 All values, cognitive ones included, involve an orientation towards decision and action, thus incorporating an element of position-taking that can only be justified on a normative basis of some sort.
p.134 The fact is that a consensus can effectively issue from bad as well as good motives and can altogether lack a morally appropriate basis.
p.135 Cognitive valuation calls for according significance to certain considerations, seeing certain matters as important, and taking certain cases to be archetypical - or at least highly relevant.
p.138 our conception of any real particular... is always held tentatively, subject to a mental reservation of sorts, in that we maintain a full recognition that this conception of ours may ultimately prove to be mistaken.
p.139 In his Cartesian Meditations, Edmund Husserl developed the interesting idea of a horizon in perceptual knowledge, a phenomenon that roots in the fact that our awareness always pertains to a mere aspect or part of the object that we actually perceive, and never the whole thing. It follows that some element of incompleteness, and thus of indeterminacy, is present throughout perceptual knowledge, because the percipient can never be sure that, for all that he knows, the unperceived aspects of the object may be quite different from what he or she thinks them to be. Our conceptualized knowledge of things is always limited by a horizon across which we cannot 'see' and beyond which matters are so situated that the impressions we have based upon our incomplete information may well prove false.
[JLJ - If such a knowledge horizon happens in a critical matter, perhaps we ought to arrange our position or posture so that we have enough adaptive capacity to overcome the possible consequences - there also ought to be cues present which indicate that additional tests are likely necessary to diagnose that we are facing an 'x' say, rather than a 'y'. Is this why our cars have air bags, why we maintain appropriate following distance and speed, and why we have rear view mirrors and extensive glass windows in automobiles?]
p.158 In many situations of human life, people are induced to make their best effort in inquiry or creative activity through rivalry rather than emulation, through differentiation rather than conformity, through a concern to impede the folly they see all around. Productivity, creativity, and the striving for excellence are - as often as not - the offspring of diversity and conflict.
p.159 Crucial for these deliberations is the distinction between productive or constructive modes of disagreement and dissensus on the one side, and on the other those modes of discord that are unproductive and destructive.
p.163 Most human intellectual, cultural, and social progress has begun with an assault by dissident spirits against a comfortably established consensus.
p.194 Only a system that can function smoothly despite dissensus is theoretically adequate and practically viable.
p.195-196 An ideal as such belongs to the practical order. It is something that can and perhaps should be a guide to our actual proceedings, providing a positive goal - or at least a positive direction - of appropriate human endeavour... an ideal represents a state of affairs whose pursuit in practice is to be regarded as pre-eminently 'a good thing'. By its very nature as such, an ideal is something towards whose realization right-thinking people would deem it appropriate to strive... Ideals, in sum, are constructively action-guiding
p.198 No doubt, ideals can be a useful motive in the direction of positive action. But generally only as a primum mobile - an initiator.
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