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p.5 Error rears its ugly head in every department of human affairs: our choices can go wrong on every front. Cognitive errors arise in matters of knowledge, evaluative errors in matters of judgment, practical errors in matters of action.
p.10 Homo sapiens is also Homo valuens: humans are evaluative animals. We have a natural tendency to take an evaluative stance of pro or con toward virtually everything.
p.15 That an error has been made is something that often only comes to light with the wisdom of hindsight, since what was done "seemed like a good idea at the time."
p.18 Our only route to cognitive progress proceeds along a pathway paved with error - we are creatures to whom truth becomes available only by risking error.
p.27 real things have hidden depths... all that one can ever manage to bring off in one's purportedly fact-assertive discourse is to convey what one thinks or conceives to be so.
p.29 This ever-operative contrast between "the thing itself" and "the thing as we ourselves take it to be" means that we are never in a position to claim definitive finality for our conception of a thing.
p.36 Clearly, the ideal sort of inquiry process is one that efficiently provides certifiably correct answers to our questions so that the issue of error is effectively expelled from the scene.
p.36 a further desirable prospect is that of an inquiry procedure that is self-corrective. Here, question resolution is addressed by a process that is able not only to detect an error when made but also to produce an alternative that both has promise as an alternative and at least partially rectifies the error at issue. The further our inquiry procedure achieves question resolution, the more suitable it is for its intended work.
p.37 The roadways to error are too numerous to admit of anything like a comprehensive listing. The best we can do is to give a handful of prominent examples with regard to cognitive error: inattention, misjudgment, confusion and conflation, miscalculation, under- and overestimation, leaping to conclusions. Correspondingly, error reduction can take many forms: concentration of effort, double checking, proofreading, getting second opinions. There is also the issue of damage control - of measures we can take to mitigate the consequences of errors if and when they occur despite our best efforts at minimizing them.
p.38 If there is any one thing we can learn from the history of science, it is that the science of one day is looked upon by the next as naive, deficient, and somehow wrong from the vantage point of the wisdom of hindsight.
p.40 averting error by vague and insufficient answers to our questions does not offer a very satisfactory route to knowledge... The aims of inquiry are not necessarily furthered by the elimination of cognitive errors of commission.
p.50 Knowledge progresses via error
p.51 To save time, effort, or breath we often deliberately simplify matters, realizing full well that some aspect or feature of reality is being omitted from view. But this does not worry us because we have good and sufficient reason to believe that the overlooked item, whatever it is, simply does not matter for present purposes. However, this sort of thing is simplification and not oversimplification. When oversimplification occurs... what is being lost sight of is something that does indeed matter
p.52 Oversimplification occurs when simplification is carried to an extent that is counterproductive in relation to the aims of the enterprise at hand.
p.53 In practice the line between beneficial simplification and harmful oversimplification is not easy to draw. Often as not, it can only be discerned with the wisdom of hindsight.
p.55 Oversimplification is, at bottom, nothing but a neglect (or ignorance) of detail. Its beginnings and origination lie in lack of detail - in errors of omission.
p.57-58 rationality enjoins us to operate on the basis of Occam's razor - considerations are never to be introduced where they are not required: complexity is never to be posted beyond necessity.
p.59 scientific progress is a matter of complexification because oversimple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world.
p.66 Oversimplification has significant consequences, and we have little alternative but to accept (1) that science as we actually have it affords us with an oversimplified model of Reality, and (2) that what holds for oversimplification in general will apply in this particular case as well. Taken together, what this means is that... our science is involved, not merely with errors of omission but with errors of commission as well - that nature's lawful modus operandi is not adequately and accurately depicted through the resources of science as we have it. We have to be fallibilistic and realistic about it.
p.79 we have no direct access to the truth, independently of the warranting considerations that authorize our staking claims to its realization.
[JLJ - This partially aligns with my thinking that there are or exist only truth claims.]
p.79 It is one of the unfortunate but nevertheless inevitable aspects of our condition as finite knowers that we can and not infrequently will have rationally warranted belief in falsehoods.
p.82 In the end, a creature that concedes its susceptibility to error and ignorance has little choice but to acknowledge the contrast between what is and what is thought to be so - even though the creature can do this only in general terms, subject to an inescapable incapacity to provide concrete instances.
[JLJ - Why be hung up on error? Just create a scheme to go on that has multiple paths forward and rely on the adaptive capacity present in our very being to correct things on the fly. It is an error to be obsessed unnecessarily with error. Consider the advice of the dwarf Dwalin to the hobbit Bilbo in Tolkien's the Hobbit: "Don't be precise," said Dwalin, "and don't worry! You will have to manage without pocket-handkerchiefs, and a good many other things, before you get to the journey's end..." ]
p.88-89 Error... results when certain perfectly real features of perfectly real things are ascribed through some sort of mixup or confusion to yet another perfectly real thing where they just do not belong.
[JLJ - Would it be more accurate to say that our execution of a particular scheme for 'going on' produced a result that is usually correct (and is usually a good guide to action) but - later on down the road - was determined to be not so, due to several factors, primarily a shortcut of sorts that we relied on that usually works, and in fact is usually quite convenient, but in this particular case did not, for reasons that involve an unusual combination of events transpiring? Human cognition involves the collection, evaluation, and execution of tricks that work, and in fact is my personal explanation for consciousness - the sum effect of tricks that work lying suspended in action, or nearly so, waiting to be triggered, vibrating tripwires of action suspended for the moment, sparking questions, inspired articulations of wonder, which we answer or not, allowing us to effectively 'go on,' or at least to position of ourselves for success within our environment. 'Being' for me can be functionally conceived as 1. a reveling in the present by way of constructed or adopted schemes, 2. with a distilled wisdom from the past guiding our actions, 3. along with premonitions of the future. When we die, is it not our constructed and adopted schemes for 'going on' that die, as our chemical body dies? In order to understand error, Rescher needs to look no further than the texts of his published works...]
p.89 "There are flying saucers"... "The Easter rabbit exists."
[JLJ - You will have to read the text. Yes, he did write that.]
p.95 "three is greater than five"
[JLJ - Poor, poor Nicholas Rescher. He is self-destructing at the end of his book on error. Maybe he is tired. What name should we give to errors, contained within a book on error?]
p.95 Error... is just a matter of getting things wrong, of failing to capture the truth, as Plato had it.
p.96 error is the reverse side of the coin of knowledge. The prominence of error in our cognitive affairs is explained in part by the consideration that in resolving our questions there is generally only one way to get things right but a myriad of ways of getting them wrong.
[JLJ - Isn't knowledge simply the cognitive elevation of simple information to a place of importance where (we assess) it can guide our actions?]
p.98 we... do well not only to minimize the occurrence of error but also to mitigate its adverse consequences should it occur - as occur it will.
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