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ix This book... seeks to provide theorists of knowledge in philosophy, information theory, cognitive studies, communication theory, and cognate disciplines with the conceptual tools required for a quantitative treatment of the products of inquiry.
x intelligence is no more than the capacity for producing and handling knowledge
x the quantitative point of view... I am persuaded that it affords us the basis for a deeper understanding of the nature and prospects of the processes at issue with the ascension and development of knowledge.
p.5 THESIS 1: Insofar as our thinking is vague, truth is accessible even in the face of error.
p.6 Ignorance is a matter of inability to answer questions properly.
p.6 THESIS 2: By constraining us to make vaguer judgments, ignorance enhances our access to correct information (albeit at the cost of less detail and precision).
p.6-7 Duhem's Law of Cognitive Complementarity means that it is going to be a fact of life in the general theory of estimation that the harder we push for certainty - for security of our claims - the vaguer we will have to make these claims and the more general and imprecise they will become.
p.9 Actual information (in contrast with misinformation) requires little more than truth. But knowledge is something far more demanding: it calls for information that is organized, purified, systematized.
[JLJ - Perhaps information requires only the interpreted output of a sensor - without the interpretation it is only data. Knowledge is information that is timely, relevant and actionable (graspable in order to 'go on'). Information itself does not require truth as Rescher seems to imply - you can have actual incorrect information.]
p.9 items of information are not created equal... Only information that is scrutinized, verified, coordinated, and systematized can plausibly qualify to be regarded as knowledge.
p.11 As Kant saw it, adequate understanding can be achieved only through the systemic interrelating of facts.
p.12 as Kant sensibly saw it, only a body of information coherently systematized on principles of organic interlinkage can be regarded as constituting knowledge. Authentic knowledge must form part of a coherently integrated system, and every part of such a system must serve in the role of a contributory sub-system: an organ of the overall organism.
p.15 As Spencer saw it, organic species in the course of their development confront a successive series of environmental obstacles, and with each successful turning along the maze of developmental challenges the organism becomes selectively more highly specialized in its bio-design, and thereby more tightly attuned to the particular features of its ecological context.
p.16 In the course of rational inquiry we try the simple solutions first, and only thereafter, if and when they cease to work - when they are ruled out by further developments - do we move on to the more complex.
p.19 The history of science is a sequence of episodes of leaping to the wrong conclusions because new observational findings indicate matters are not quite so simple as heretofore thought.
p.21 scientific progress is a matter of complexification because over-simple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world.
p.26 The struggle with complexity that we encounter throughout our cognitive efforts is an inherent and unavoidable aspect of the human condition's progressive impetus to doing more and doing it better.
p.27 seeing that knowledge is a matter of organized and systematized information, informational complexity becomes our best standard for assessing the extent of its attainment. Knowledge grows in line with the extent to which our increasingly extensive and thereby complex body of information expands its hierarchical structure.
p.30 A question arises at time t if it then can meaningfully be posed because all its presuppositions are then taken to be true. And a question dissolves at t if one or another of its previously accepted presuppositions is no longer accepted.
p.30 A change of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the entire fabric of questions that presupposed this earlier answer. For if we change our mind regarding the correct answer to one member of a chain of questions, then the whole of a subsequent course of questioning may well collapse.
p.30 Epistemic change over time thus relates not only to what is "known" but also to what can be asked.
p.32 it would actually seem more plausible and realistic... that every state-of-the-art condition of questioning ultimately yields, somewhere along the road, a line of questioning that engenders the transition... the natural course of inquiry provides an impetus by which a given state is ultimately led to give way to its successor. At bottom, Kant's Principle rests on the insight that no matter what answers are in hand, we can proceed to dig deeper into the how and why of things by raising yet further questions about the matters involved in these answers themselves. Accordingly, whenever we obtain new and different answers, interest is at once deflected to the issues they pose.
p.33 Cognitive progress brings growing complexity in its wake.
p.37 Knowledge commonly develops via distinctions (A vs. non-A) that are introduced with ever-greater elaboration to address the problems and difficulties that one encounters with less sophisticated approaches.
p.39 In rational inquiry we try the simple solutions first, and when they cease to work - when they are ruled out by further findings (by some further influx of coordinating information) - we move on to the more complex.
p.44 The more knowledge we already have in hand, the slower (by very rapid decline) will be the rate at which knowledge grows with newly acquired information.
p.45 In developmental perspective, there is good reason to suppose that our body of bare information will increase more or less in proportion with our resource investment in information gathering.
p.58 Without the distinction between the important and the unimportant, mankind could neither adequately understand, successfully teach, or effectively practice science.
[JLJ - Or, for that matter, effectively and competitively play a complex game of strategy.]
p.58 Importance is a comparative conception: one thing is more important than another... It is precisely because one finding is more important than another that it claims and deserves a larger amount of attention and respect.
p.58 Importance in general is a teleological conception that connects people with purposes. Something is important to someone for something... What is at issue here is thus the importance to serious inquirers for the proper understanding of nature's ways.
p.58-59 Importance is like pornography - we can generally spot it when we see it all right
[JLJ - Perhaps importance is intuitive - we cognitively develop a sensitivity to important things and cues that we likely could not write down on paper if asked or challenged, but nonetheless can and do respond to when encountered.]
p.59 Perhaps the most promising approach is to see importance as hinging on the answer to the following question: "How large a loss by way of emptiness and unknowing would be created for our grasp of a certain domain if we lost our grip on the information at issue?" So regarded, cognitive importance consists in making a difference for adequate understanding.
p.59 The deliberations of the preceding chapters have been predicated on construing knowledge as elite information
p.68 the crucial determinative factor for increasing importance is the extent of seismic disturbance of the cognitive terrain... 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.
p.69 Scientific importance is... a relational feature, a function of how one item... relates to the others. Specifically, when something is important, a lot else depends on its being the way it is, and this is bound to be reflected in how much occasion there is to have recourse to it in an adequate systematization of the domain at issue. This approach inflects a fundamentally pragmatic perspective. It views cognitive objects such as concepts, ideas, and theories as tools. And with any sort of production process - be it physical or cognitive - the importance of any tool lies in how much occasion one has to make use of it.
[JLJ - I would say that the importance of any tool lies in its potential ability to resolve a predicament in one's favor, rather than a simple numerical tally of use. Consider an airbag in an automobile. Most will never be used, but when they are, the lifesaving potential makes it quite important.]
p.70 it transpires that we can use citation frequency as a measure of quality.
p.71 importance can just as effectively be estimated in terms of prominence in citation space as by prominence in discussion space.
p.79 It was accordingly a key aspect of Leibniz's thought that human understanding cannot keep up with reality.
[JLJ - And why should it? We have newspapers and Journals that summarize events for us so we prioritize the attempt to 'keep up.' Human cognition constantly asks, 'How much should I care about that?' and we proceed through our current predicament - and into our next - in an almost 'crisis management' style. Business and government provide, or make available to us, all the appropriate tools we need to 'keep up'. Family members, society, friends, all conspire to help us bootstrap ourselves into an effective and rewarding role in society. We understand what we need to understand, and there are others who worry the details that we find inconvenient or irrelevant to our current and future predicaments.]
p.92 With Musical Chairs we know that someone will be unseated, but we cannot (given the ordinary contingencies) manage to say who this will be.
p.104 our cognitive limitedness as finite beings notwithstanding, there nevertheless are no boundaries - no determinate limits - to the manifold of discoverable fact.
p.105-106 In concluding, a brief survey of the principal theses may be in order. They stand as follows:
Duhem's Law of Security/Detail Complementarity. The security and detail of our knowledge stand in a relation of inverse proportionality...
Kan't Principle of Cognitive Systematization. Knowledge, in the qualitative and honorific sense of the term, is a matter of the extent to which information is coherently systematized...
Spencer's Law of Cognitive Development. Cognitive progress is accompanied by complexification and can be assessed in terms of the taxonomic complexity of the information manifold at hand. However, this complexity is not proportional of the amount of information, but to its logarithm. And this yields -
Kant's Principle of Question Propagation. The progress of knowledge-development in the course of resolving our questions always brings new questions to light...
Gibbon's Law of Logarithmic Returns. The quantity of knowledge interest in a body of information is proportional not to the size of this body, but merely to the logarithm thereof...
Adam's Thesis of Exponential Growth. Throughout recent history the body of scientific information has been growing exponentially. But, in view of Gibbon's Law, this means that cognitive progress in terms of actual knowledge has been growing at a rate that is merely linear and thereby stable.
Quality/Quantity Alignment. The lower levels of informative quality information that define the lesser degrees of "knowledge" are in volumetric alignment with the λ-power (0<λ≤1) of the total amount of information at hand...
Zipf's Law. With objects rank-ordered by measurable size, the product of this size with the number of objects of at least that size is constant. And with cognitive importance as size this puts quality and quantity into a relationship of complementarity...
Quality Retardation. Cognitive progress at lesser levels of what is not so much knowledge as high-quality information proceeds at a pace that is ever slower as the bar of quality is raised...
Leibniz's Thesis of Cognitive Limitation. Mere volumetric considerations indicate that knowledge cannot keep up with fact. Seeing that our knowledge is language-bound, it is inherently unable to accommodate reality's unending complexity of details.
Isaiah's Law. A mind of a lesser power cannot fathom the workings of one of greater power: some of its operations are bound to appear as "magic." ...
Kant's Perspective on Cognitive Finitude. While the realm of knowledge - of ascertainable fact - is indeed limited, it is nevertheless unbounded...
Taken together these various theses and ideas provide a quantitative perspective on knowledge and its limits.
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