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p.1 "our real interests." ...the validity of our values lies in their capacity to guide our efforts toward the satisfaction of these desiderata.... our values are the guideposts to "the good life"
p.2 Evaluation is an indispensable instrument for rational deliberations. To paraphrase Bishop Butler, it is "the very guide of life" for us.
p.2 while factual statements can be assessed as true or false, evaluative statements are subject to a different standard of evaluation. They are adjudged as appropriate or inappropriate, justified or unjustified. Their condition of correctness/incorrectness is not one of veracity but one of suitability.
p.2 Evaluation... is a purposive endeavor. We undertake it with an end in view, because the product that it yields - evaluative assessments - are something that we need.
p.3 Evaluation is a purposive resource. It is action guidance, specifically to guide choice - about what to keep, obtain, do, believe, endorse, etc. And the purposive goal-directedness of the enterprise marks evaluation as a practical device - a pragmatic resource.
p.3 Evaluation requires having values: it can be done only by beings who set a value on something.
p.3-4 evaluation is not a practice that we carry on for its own sake. We engage in it because we want and need to make use of its products, and this demands that we determine the extent to which they are efficient and effective in serving the sensible purposes at issue.
p.4 The validity of evaluation lies in the fact that in pursuing the things evaluated positively and in avoiding those evaluated negatively we arrive at outcomes that are positive. An evaluation is correct when its guidance of behavior is appropriate
p.5 The book pivots on the premise that evaluation is a rational process.
[JLJ - Evaluation is practically the most effective as part of a strategy or scheme to 'go on.' The scheme calls for the evaluation - perhaps a diagnostic test - and tells you to do one thing if it is above 5, say, and another thing if it is below 5. An evaluation that is performed which is not part of a scheme to 'go on' (in some fashion) doesn't really tell you what to do next.]
p.7 In an oft-cited passage in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote:
We deliberate not about ends but about means. For a doctor... an orator... a statesman... anyone else... They assume the end and consider how and by what means it is to be attained; and if it seems to be produced by several means they consider by which it is most easily and best produced
p.9 When one asks what is to be done, reason as such has no instructions - it is wholly a matter of what one happens to want.
[JLJ - Yes, but wisdom will tell us (or hint to us) that certain "wants" are not worth pursuing because the actual chances of obtaining them are not likely. Wisdom and strategy do not appear as central elements of Rescher's ontology. I would argue that "goals" as such are derived from strategies or schemes which we adopt in order to 'go on.' Specifically, it might be wise to/we might have to aim for multiple goals in order to 'go on,' because some goals might not be obtainable due to complications we do not yet foresee, while others will become suddenly easier to obtain due to unexpected events we also did not foresee. The complexity of the modern world, and of the intelligent agents moving, interacting and competing within it, is such that we cannot just move directly to any old goal. We have to approach all goals that we are serious about obtaining strategically, if at all. It would make more sense to ponder a direction in life, and then to derive the goals as secondary 'levers', as part of a scheme or plan to 'go on.']
p.9 Reason herself is inherently conditionalized: she says not what one must (or must not) opt for, but only what one is consequentially committed to if one already stands committed to something else.
[JLJ - Perhaps when writing code to play a complex game of strategy, what we are saying is simply, 'Look, this procedure or scheme - whatever it is - just happens to work in made-up tournaments of games, it will likely achieve similar results in a tournament game against similar opponents. It is likely - but not guaranteed - to call attention to certain moves and move sequences (and not to others), in such a way that (in the end) appropriately diagnoses the (perhaps hidden) capacity of the pieces to coerce, in the unknown future. It is a trick that works - there is no lab-coat and clipboard science to it as such, it simply examines the information cues and move sequences that effectively diagnose capacity, much as a high school football coach runs drills and sets up scrimmages between players to estimate, then further develop the capacity of the team to play the game against future opponents, eventually suggesting after a period of deliberation that one move is likely better than the others, and therefore is strangely useful for 'going on' in playing a strong game, that is all.' If we evaluate crudely, it is part of a scheme to focus our attention on the move sequences which as a group are diagnostic of a capacity to coerce in the unknown future.]
p.16 Rational comportment does not just call for desire satisfaction, it demands desire management as well. The question of appropriateness is crucial.
p.17 But just what is it that is in a person's real or best interests?
[JLJ - We live in a world flooded with advertising and sales promotions of all kinds. One need not ponder this question - one simply falls into the trap of this sales pitch, or that club membership, or that attractive automobile. The business community creates demand and markets what we ought to want. The Bangkok street merchants know all of your needs and have the merchandise ready and waiting. One simply fails to reject a product pitch, and there you have it, you have purchased something that like it or not is now yours.]
p.18 in assessing the rationality of actions we cannot look just to personal motives, but must invoke universally appropriate values as well.
[JLJ - I would say that in "assessing the rationality of actions" one would have to perform an honest projection of one's actions into the future, perhaps looking at people similar to ourselves attempting the same actions, and estimating the realistic chances of oneself succeeding. Rationally, perhaps we should develop as "goals" a broad range of skills and capabilities, because we might end up using them at whatever we do, a specific something which might not be clear to us at present and therefore something that we might not be able to "aim" for directly. However, this assessment clearly indicates that many "successful" actors were not entirely rational in their actions. For example, Christopher Columbus could not have been acting entirely rationally when he set out on his voyages. The great majority of presidential candidates in the United States fail to achieve their end goal - is it even rational to try?. The great majority of Olympic athletes do not win a medal, even though they train very hard over many years - is it even rational to try? Is it "rational" to play or even to consider playing the sports of basketball or American soccer, baseball or American football as a boy, knowing full well that even if you make the high school team, that the odds are against you in making the college or professional teams? Rationally, perhaps we should "aim" for goals which (in part) support a general development of our talents, and form more specific plans or goals when more specific opportunities emerge.]
p.19 Rationality is not just a matter of doing what we want... it is a matter of doing what we (rationally) ought, given the situation in which we find ourselves.
[JLJ - Yes, but in many matters the way forward is unclear, cloudy. One needs a wise assessment of the situation/predicament and a clever strategy which is likely to work, all things considered, which one can then execute. One must think about tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow. Life is, in the final assessment lived in the present while visited by the ghosts of the past and the hints of the emerging future, a reveling in who one is and with those one connects with, wherever one finds oneself. One pushes oneself towards strategic goals, then rests, then pushes, then rests. Rationality is strangely silent about how to 'go on.' I know of no one who has 'He lived rationally' carved on his/her tombstone.]
p.21 Rationality calls for objective judgment - for an assessment of preferability, rather than for a mere expression of preference.
p.21 The rationality of ends is essential to rationality as such; there is no point in running - however swiftly - to a destination whose attainment conveys no benefit.
[JLJ - Rescher is obviously not a runner. Many people including myself enjoy a good long walk or run or bike ride. Once again, Rescher's devotion to rationality - whatever that is, is kind of irrational. If one were to restrict oneself to doing only rational things, one would never have any fun. One would be, perhaps, just a philosopher who reads and churns out books, which most people in the world do not read, and in fact are mostly ignorant of.]
p.23 The springs of human agency are diverse.
p.31 Can value judgments be rationally validated without vicious, or at least vitiating, circularity?
[JLJ - One can appeal to performance, as in, "I adopted these values and my business/career/personal relationships/performance in the arts/sports began to succeed." One can appeal to satisfied feeling, as in, "I adopted these values and now I am happier/sleep better at night/less stressed." One can appeal to successful development over time, as in, "I adopted these values and I began to get better grades in school and better performance on my sports teams, as I grew older and began to mature." Perhaps one rationally validates value judgments of a lower level by appealing to deeper or higher level values. Higher level values perhaps are validated by even higher level values such as feeling, or declarations that somehow one "knows" that they "just are the right thing to do," etc.]
p.33 It should be noted that rational evaluation too is a form of cognition, seeing that what is at issue is simply knowledge about matters of value rather than about matters of fact... Evaluative conclusions can be substantiated only via premises that are somewhere along the line evaluative in their substance.
p.36 Certain evaluations are thus simply a matter of an experientially grounded grasp of fundamentals... If someone were to dissent from it, we would have no alternative but to take the view that this betrays the absence of any real grasp of the central concepts operative in discussion and deliberation within the domain at issue.
p.37 values cannot be derived from facts alone
p.40 Matters of value too can and should be regarded as objectively factual - the difference is just that we are dealing with evaluative rather than simply informative facts.
[JLJ - Perhaps it is the scheme we adopt in order to 'go on' that calls for evaluation and regards the 'matters of value' as 'factual'. Another scheme to 'go on,' which we did not adopt, might call for other values, and determine other facts, in order to 'go on.' We evaluate, in part, in order to decide what to do next, which might just be to obtain a more detailed evaluation. Evaluation does not stand on its own, on a pedestal in the middle of a room - it is part of a higher-order cognitive concept - such as a scheme to 'go on' - that must also be considered. When performed properly and intelligently, perhaps even when executed blindly, and critically as part of a best practice, evaluation is (or can be) part of a scheme or trick that works, in deciding how to 'go on.']
p.54 In evaluating objects of choice, the first step is to define the range of available options - be it affordable passenger cars or domestic residences. Whatever lies outside this range - such as houses and cars that we simply cannot afford - will thereby also have to remain outside the horizon of consideration.
p.55 In practice however, it soon reaches a stage where rough-and-ready assessments meets the needs of the situation because further microdetail will no longer have a significant impact upon the ultimate outcome.2
2 [p.69] As aspects are split into sub-aspects and then into sub2-aspects etc., the contribution of those subn-aspects eventually becomes diminished, ultimately reaching a point where a rough approximation of a given subn-aspect is acceptable because at this stage of estimation precision no longer matters.
p.55 How is one to effect an overall evaluation when different and potentially competing aspects of advantage are at issue?
[JLJ - Perhaps an "evaluation" is really just a starting or launch point for further activity, which as a whole accomplishes a more complicated evaluation or furthers a more complicated activity. An "evaluation" of cars in Consumer Reports might be used not to indicate which car to buy, sight unseen, but instead rather to suggest which of several vehicles to test-drive - a starting point for a more complicated evaluation process. Whatever the evaluation problem, there is likely a "best practice" which works on the whole acceptably, and so can be "executed" as a scheme in order to 'go on.']
p.55 This coordination of quality with quantity implements the instructive and advantageous verbal shift made by contrasting evaluation with valuation, subject to the idea that only when numbers are introduced do we have the latter - valuation.
p.57 The question of the way in which different factors play off against each other in evaluation renders this project a complex and challenging issue.
[JLJ - The legal profession side-steps the whole problem of deciding a case by bringing in an impartial jury and making the whole matter a trial by ordeal - specifically the ordeal of the judge deciding what evidence to accept, the jury listening, then sitting down, determining the facts, deliberating, and having all to agree. Justice is simply a process that is executed, as one turns a crank.]
p.59 What might be termed desideratum complementarity arises whenever different sorts of merit stand in a teeter-totter relationship; it is clearly inevitable that they cannot both achieve a maximal degree at one and the same time.
p.59 In the overall evaluation of things, different modes of merit will come into play. But just how is one to go about the prospect of combining these value parameters into an overall result - a single, everything-considered, synoptic bottom line? How is this pivotal problem of factor comparison to be addressed?
[JLJ - There may be no easy answer - we might have to run a series of diagnostic tests and perform an extended study.]
p.63 Clearly, weighted averaging is not going to be sufficient by itself to meet the needs of rational evaluation.
[JLJ - Yet Inside the Juror (Hastie, 1993, 1994) http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id545.html contains an article which postulates just that. Go figure.]
p.67 intuition... we use it as a touchstone for determining the relevantly optimal resolution method. in this way, intuition is deployed... as a test criterion for case-resolving procedures. After all, appraisal cannot always be discursively grounded - in the end it must root in something less than subsumption under justifactory principles.
p.72 From the angle of acceptance, there are once more several prime possibilities, seeing that a claim or assertion can be
- accepted as true
- accepted as probable
- accepted as plausible.
[JLJ - Perhaps another - a claim can be a starting point for discussion in matters where information is lacking.]
p.75 Excellence is a key concept in quality assessment... Excellence is a matter of bettering other comparable items
p.76 An item cannot just be excellent: it has to be an excellent something.
p.77 Excellence is an evaluative rather than descriptive feature.
p.79 The realization of excellence is sometimes simply a matter of success in competitive performance - chess and tennis being clear-cut examples.
p.80 Many kinds of things have a particular group of positive features characteristic of that type of thing... These positive features define a mode of excellence for that particular type of thing... Often there are clear-cut criteria by which modes of excellence can be assessed.
p.92 Evaluative assessment always has some end or purpose in view
[JLJ - Not necessarily - I can write a computer program that systematically performs a complicated set of measurements and calculations that does nothing whatsoever. Rather, it is evaluation that is called for by a scheme of sorts - the scheme which calls for the evaluation can be useful or not.]
p.92-93 To evaluate is to acknowledge that there must be a difference in point of what to do about it, for if this were not the case, quality assessment would be pointless.
p.105 Information Manifolds. A manifold of information will contain items of three grades in point of merit assessed in respect to likelihood:
probably true/uncertain/probably false
An inquiry process will yield results of these three sorts.
p.106 We evaluate items with a particular purpose in view... Evaluation is always thematic in nature. One cannot just evaluate an object as such; one must evaluate it in point of this or that consideration so as to obtain an estimate of its value as an X... evaluation is a fundamentally purposive and pragmatic undertaking.
p.114 Value is not sense-perceptible but mind-judgmental: something to be determined not simply by observation of some sort but by reflective thought duly sustained by background information and suitably equipped with an awareness of principles.
p.116 If trivial details could not be distinguished from important facts - if every one factual statement on a given topic were every bit as significant as any other - no meaningful discussion could ever be managed in science nor any meaningful instruction provided.
p.126 The problem of improvement is not all that simple. For whether matters will actually turn out for the better in the wake of our benign intentions is something regarding which we regrettably cannot secure rational information.
p.127 The daunting reality of it is that we humans live in a nearly impenetrable fog of uncertainty as regards our ability to improve the world. We have no categorical assurance that our efforts to make things better will result.
p.131 "But surely if one effected this or that modification in the world without changing anything else, one would improve matters thereby." Perhaps. But the difficulty lies in that pivotal phrase "without changing anything else." In anything worthy of the name "world" the constituent components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change one without changing innumerable others.
p.132 A world is an infinitely complex arrangement of interrelated features and factors. And it is bound to have these coordinated in a complexly interrelated harmony. Modify this and you disturb that.
p.134 In the endeavor to achieve our objectives we simply have to do the best that we can.
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