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x Realizing the limited extent of one's knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
[JLJ - For me, examining the consequences of one's actions, and inactions, and the actions and inactions of others, is the beginning of wisdom.]
xi The book, after all, is being written for its readers rather than its critics.
[JLJ - Yes, but this does not mean that you get a "get out of critical review free" card. Welcome to the Internet, Mr. Rescher, where everyone is a critic and everyone has an opinion. If you are going to publish, you are going to get criticized, period. A critic is a reader who can influence people who have not read the work into reading it or not reading it. By far the large majority of people on this planet will never read anything you have written. A critic can change that percentage - either up or down.]
p.1 Cognitive ignorance is the lack of knowledge of fact.
[JLJ - But ignorance is truly much more than that. I can look up something I do not know on Google. But 'knowledge of fact' will not tell me how to run my life, instruct me how to relate to others or teach me compassion. 'Knowledge of fact' will not tell us how to 'go on,' in complicated situations with unresolvable driving forces.]
p.1 Ignorance leaves us without guidance
[JLJ - Perhaps, but we can likely ask, 'How do things typically turn out in this situation? What ought I pay attention to? What are the driving forces here, and how are they going to play out? What posture - active or passive - can I assume here that is likely to achieve good results, against both the known and unknown?' There is always trial and error, and the knowledge gained, so one is never truly ignorant (or truly without direction) if one has tried several times and failed several times, and has the resources to examine the consequences of such attempts.]
p.3 There is no way to measure ignorance.
[JLJ - One can measure ignorance through diagnostic tests of trivial and non-trivial knowledge in various categories. Consider that ignorance on many subjects is removed with the Google search engine and a few keyboard clicks. There must be degrees of ignorance and ignorant-like conditions where we are separated from knowledge, but can obtain it on a moment's notice. Also, there are tricks to remove ignorance, and we can collect them for future use. Better to think in terms of schemes to 'go on,' which involve learning.]
p.5 One of the most critical yet problematic areas of inquiry relates to knowledge regarding our own cognitive shortcomings. It is next to impossible to get a clear fix on our own ignorance, because in order to know that there is a certain fact that we do not know, we would have to know the item at issue to be a fact, and just this is, by hypothesis, something we do not know.
[JLJ - Yes, but you can play along with the contestants of the TV trivia game show Jeopardy! and make some general observations that there are likely some categories of knowledge which you are generally ignorant of. Practice tests, carefully constructed diagnostic tests, etc. can reveal much about one's ignorance.]
p.8 I can know about my ignorance only vaguely and generally... at the level of indefiniteness, but I cannot know it in concrete detail.
p.8 Perhaps the clearest and most decisive impediment to knowledge are our conceptual limitations.
p.14 presumption... often serves as a placeholder for knowledge... the reality of it is that we operate with a source of standard perceptions of presumption - of how to proceed in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
p.15 What is the extent of our ignorance? Just how vast is the domain of what we do not know?
p.16 this book... contemplates that, despite whatever we may come to know, there are some matters about which we are destined to remain ignorant, and that among the things that we can get to know about are far-reaching facts about the nature and extent of our own ignorance.
p.21 Evolution is a process in which the balance of cost and benefit is constantly maintained in a delicate equilibrium.
p.22 Kant opened his Critique of Pure Reason with the following thesis:
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. (Avii).
p.30 A question arises at the 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... A change of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the entire fabric of questions that presupposed this earlier answer.
p.32 The fact that ignorance is ineliminable in the larger scheme of things does not stand in the way of answering any or many of the particular questions in which we take an interest. While ignorance is indeed here to stay, it will never block the path to progress.
p.39 ignorance... properly speaking... obtains only when one does not know the correct answer to an appropriate question... when we look at cognition from the angle of questions rather than knowledge, ignorance becomes concretely identifiable.
p.54-55 The situation contended here has important cognitive ramifications that are brought to view by the following line of thought:
- Everything there is... has an idiosyncratic property, some feature, no doubt complex and perhaps composite, that holds for it alone...
- The possession of such a unique characteristic property cannot obtain in virtue of the fact that the item at issue is of a certain natural kind or generic type. It can only obtain in virtue of something appertaining to this item individually and specifically.
- Accordingly, for anything whatsoever, there is a fact - namely, that that thing has that particular idiosyncratic property - that you can know only if you can individuate and specify that particular thing.
p.58-59 It is instructive to survey some situations in which the ways of the world impel ignorance upon us. One instance is afforded by quasi-quantities that cannot be pinned down exactly. What is at issue here is a quantity that resists being specified precisely by a particular number. It admits of being located within a certain numerical range while nevertheless not letting itself be made precise.
p.59 An interesting question arises in this connection. Are there any situations in life (or, indeed, even in science) where extreme precision actually matters, where the fact that X is a quasi-quantity rather than a precise quantity makes a difference to anything - and "being as precise as one can reasonably be expected to be in matters of this kind" is not good enough?
[JLJ - Mr. Rescher is obviously not an Aerospace Engineer. Anything with performance in the name usually has a tight manufacturing tolerance... What about grinding the primary mirror of a very large telescope, or a gravity-wave detector? An insurance claim pivots on a specific appraisal number - an extremely precise dollar amount, even thought the true cost of repairing damage might in reality be a range of dollar values.]
p.60 There are two sorts of properties of objects: namely generic properties that an object shares with all others of a particular natural kind to which it belongs, and idiosyncratic properties that characterize it uniquely without in anyway inhering in a natural kind to which it belongs.
p.61 the specifically surd feature of objects/items are those facts about them that are not inferentially accessible from a knowledge of their nature - and thereby not explicable through recourse to general principles... Its possession by an object has to be determined by inspection
p.72 The basic structure of Haeckel's position is clear: science is rapidly nearing a state where all the big problems have been solved.
[JLJ - Solved? Hardly. Someone will always want to build a bigger telescope to see further into the universe to just see what is there. What we see may change the theories we have on the origin of the universe, which is still a mystery. On the scale of the small, someone will always want to build a bigger "superconducting supercollider" to smash particles together at higher velocities to create traces of even more fundamental particles. Science will always advance, it seems, on the scale of the large and of the small. Someone will always want to build a machine that plays a better game. On the internet, someone will always want to build a contraption that serves more targeted, invasive ads, and so on. There are an infinitely large number of to-be-discovered contraptions that seek to improve human health, or health screening.]
p.73 The reality of it is that any adequate theory of inquiry must recognize that the ongoing progress of science is a process of conceptual innovation that always leaves certain theses wholly outside the cognitive range of the inquirers of any particular period... The scientific questions of the future are - at least in part - bound to be conceptually inaccessible to the inquirers of the present.
p.74 Not only can we not anticipate future discoveries now; we can not even prediscern the questions that will arise as time moves on, and cognitive progress with it.
p.78 Power is a matter of the effecting of things possible - of achieving control
p.79 The point is that control hinges on what we want, and what we want is conditioned by what we think possible, and this is something that hinges crucially on theory - on our beliefs about how things work in this world. And so control is something deeply theory-infected.
p.83 It is a key fact of life that ongoing progress in scientific inquiry is a process of conceptual innovation that always places certain developments outside the cognitive horizons of earlier workers because the very concepts operative in their characterization become available only in the course of scientific discovery itself.
p.86 We can never claim with assurance that the position we espouse is immune to change under the impact of further data... We can never achieve adequate assurance that apparent definitiveness is real.
p.92-93 The temporal aspect of the knowledge of finite beings... means... that our knowledge is developmental in nature: that it admits of learning and discoveries, that there are things (facts) that we do not and cannot know at one temporal juncture that we can and do manage to get to know at another.
p.93 Knowledge does not come to us from on high, perfected and completed like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. It is the product of a process of inquiry unfolding over time - a process from which the possibilities of error and omission and commission can never be excluded.
p.93 Our "picture" of the world - our worldview, as one usually calls it - is an epistemic construction built up from our personal and vicarious experience-based knowledge. And like any construction it is made over time from preexisting materials - in this case the information at our disposal. We can select these materials - but only to a limited extent. In the main they force themselves upon us through the channels of our experience.
p.94 There can be no question but that the future is a massive reservoir of ignorance. Questions whose resolution requires determining the outcome of contingent future events - future choices and chance occurrences included - are, effectively by definition, not now answerable in a convincingly cogent way... The difficulties that we encounter throughout the predictive realm are deep rooted in the nature of our epistemic situation.
p.97 If it is simply an answer that we want, we can contrive predictors that will oblige us. But the problem, of course, is to have a predictor whose predictions are probable... on a basis that is credible in advance of the fact... The very most that one could plausibly ask for might seem to be that predictors predict correctly everything that is in principle possible for them to predict.
p.98 What is needed at this point is a determination of what is in fact predictable - and not just an indication of what the science of the day considers (perhaps mistakenly) to be predictable.
p.100 The very most that one could sensibly ask of a predictive device - singly or in the aggregate - is to perform in a way that is and has been error free as far as one can presently tell and that this performance is "miraculously" effective in point of versatility. We could, without actual absurdity, ask that a predictor manifest an amazingly competent performance.
p.101-102 the principal impediments to predictability are the following:
- Anarchy: literal lawlessness - the absence of lawful regularities to serve as linking mechanisms
- Volatility: the absence of nomic stability and thus of cognitively manageable laws
- Uncertainty: law-ignorance - the lack of nomic information due to an epistemic failure on our part in securing information about the operative linking mechanisms
- Haphazard: the lawful linking mechanisms (such as they are) do not permit the secure inference of particular conclusions but leave outcomes undetermined owing to the operation of: Chance and chaos... Arbitrary choice... Innovation: the entry of novelty in ways that make outcomes unforeseeable because prediscernible patterns are continually broken
- Fuzziness: data indetermination...
- Myopia: data ignorance...
- Inferential incapacity: the infeasibility of carrying out the needed reasoning (inferences/calculations) - even when we may have the requisite data and know the operative inferential linkages
p.121 Predictability thus runs into difficulty whenever the causality of the issue sensitively involves several difficult-to-determine factors that themselves depend on others of a like nature.
[JLJ - This is where scenario-based schemes come into play. Is it not true that we predict in order to be 'ready' for whatever emerges? Why not just run a variety of practical scenarios and position ourselves to be able to adapt to whatever arises in the future. That is effectively what we were after in prediction, anyway. We may not know the future - that does not mean that we will not be ready for it - whatever it is.]
p.123 If a problem is to qualify as solvable at all, will computers always be able to solve it for us?
[JLJ - Here Rescher fails to understand that 'solving' problems is not the only thing that computers can do for us. Computers can reduce large volumes of data and suggest to us how to 'go on.' Such an answer is merely a suggestion, and might even be wrong, but perhaps in the long run (and on average, over time) is 'less wrong' they we ourselves would be, guided by our own means, and deserves further investigation. Perhaps a fraud investigator narrows a list of suspects. Perhaps a company decides where to advertise to maximize effectiveness. Perhaps a bank decides whether a business defaulting on a loan deserves/merits a second chance or forbearance. Perhaps a computer chess program spends 3 minutes investigating a chess position and comes up with 3 candidate moves. We would likely have to guess in these situations anyway, and wish to be 'less wrong' - in the long run - than we otherwise might be. These cases are hardly 'problems solved' - they are instead machines acting as expert-based systems providing advice for how to act in the present, which can be used, discarded, or combined with other like or dissimilar information. Perhaps a business like Walmart uses computers to track inventory and arrange 'just in time' deliveries, saving money and allowing lower prices. Perhaps a computer manages the paperwork involved in yearly performance evaluations, allowing them to be performed over the Internet and maintained to later use. In this case, the 'problem' to be solved is how to lower cost, and is performed with efficiency, saving time that equals money in the long run.]
p.126 The question before us is, "Are there any significant cognitive problems that computers cannot solve?"
[JLJ - The question is moot because if a 'cognitive problem' is deemed significant enough to an organization with financial resources, they can then advance the state of the art to whatever level they choose. Consider certain money-loaded and market-seeking US businesses. Google has developed a champion 'go' -playing computer program, and there is the self-driving car thing. Consider Apple and the IPhone. The result is a human-developed scheme which merely is executed on a machine. It is a human contraption in all aspects except for the actual physical execution itself.]
p.128 In all problem-solving situations, the performance of computers is decisively limited by the quality of the information at their disposal. "Garbage in, garbage out," as the saying has it. But matters are in fact worse than this. Garbage can come out even where no garbage goes in.
p.129 the search for rationally appropriate answers to certain questions can be led astray not just by the incorrectness of information but by its incompleteness as well. The specific body of information that is actually at hand is not just important for problem resolution, it is crucial.
[JLJ - Rescher misses the fact here that in practical human affairs a certain amount of adaptive capacity can compensate for missing or incorrect information. We build margin, we conduct safety checks, we perform surprise audits. Missing and incomplete, even incorrect, information is a fact of life, and simply declaring that information needs are crucial does not prevent one from 'going on' - successfully - in the absence of correct information. Often we seek to establish a posture or stance against both the known and unknown, and diagnostic testing of adaptive stretching - to meet real and imagined challenges - is one step above a 'rationally appropriate answer.']
p.131 Artifice cannot replace the complexity of the real; reality is richer in its descriptive construction and more efficient in its transformative processes than human artifice can ever manage to realize.
[JLJ - Yes, it can, to various degrees, if our need is simply to decide how to best form a posture in order to 'go on.']
p.138 The key lesson of these deliberations is thus clear: computers can reduce but not eliminate our cognitive limitation.
p.139 In the final analysis, the use of computers is no panacea for cognitive debility, for where there is no self-trust at all computers cannot be of aid.
p.142 while reliable information is often not as readily achievable as people are inclined to think, the cognitive enterprise nevertheless can successfully come to terms with this fact. Evolutionary considerations afford us good reason to think that we exist in a user-friendly world where we need not be right about things for opinion-guided action to be successful.
[JLJ - The human mind contemplates postures that are likely to work in unclear situations, knows how to ask for advice, and cleverly watches to see how others (including those that are successful) handle the same problem. A truly clever person finds ways that might work before they are even needed, and stores them away for future use. We are curious observers and collectors of tricks and schemes that might work, in a variety of situations, including those lacking information.]
p.144 insofar as our ignorance of relevant matters leads us to be vague in our judgments, we may well manage to enhance our chances of being right... Vagueness clearly provides a protective shell that helps to safeguard a statement against falsity... in practical matters, in particular, such rough guidance is often altogether enough.
p.149 additional knowledge always has the potential of constraining a change of mind - rather than merely providing additional substantiation for a fixed result.
p.150 our information, inevitably being incomplete, may well point us in the wrong direction. We can never secure advance guarantees that what we do not know makes no difference. The impact of ignorance is beyond the possibility of prejudgment.
[JLJ - Yes, but we can also be strategic and take/assume an acceptable posture that has great promise of adapting to whatever emerges. This is not a guarantee, but it perhaps is the next best thing, and of course, very much useful since we have to determine at each and every moment how to 'go on.' You look in vain past your ignorance for your guarantee, while I assume my carefully-pondered strategic posture (which is based on intelligently pondered scenarios involving the various driving forces). Let's see who ends up in the better position down the road.]
p.150 It is one of the most fundamental aspects of our concept of a real thing that our knowledge of it is imperfect - that the reality of something actual - any bit of concrete existence - is such as to transcend what we can know since there is always more to be said about it.
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