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vii Overall the book stresses the rational and objective nature of evaluation, setting out the case for holding that evaluation is - or ideally ought to be - a matter of rational and objective deliberation.
[JLJ - If Rescher looked at evaluation as part of a scheme to 'go on,' things would be a lot easier to explain. Why evaluate? You can hem and haw, but in the end you are trying to accomplish something, to 'go on' about your life, and practically we develop schemes of action which we execute and modify as needed. It is our schemes - which reflect our values - that call for a comparison-and-choice, strategically and practically we must perform evaluation. We are confronted at virtually every point of our lives with other people operating schemes to 'go on.' From telemarketers who launch robocalls marketing time-shares, to businesses offering sales on products, to colleges offering degrees. 'Rational and objective deliberation' is a nice ideal, but it frequently is clouded by marketing tricks, quality-as-perceived different than quality-as-it-stands, bait-and-switch techniques, impulse buying, price fixing, hidden fees, 'limited time offers,' fine print on warranties, and plays-on-emotion that make that time-share seem like a good deal, until you realize later that it isn't. Evaluation works, as part of rational deliberation, provided the 'tricks' used in the evaluation itself are not manipulated by others to make things that are actually 'bad', seem be be 'good'.]
p.4 Being good at something is not necessarily a good thing - it all depends on what the something itself happens to be.
[JLJ - Which is why I tend to think in terms of value-neutral schemes - which can be either good or bad, or neither.]
p.5 In large measure, values issue from needs... our values... provide orientation in matters of action through guiding our choices and decisions. Their guidance is thus limited in scope. They do not inform us what specifically to do, how quickly to move there... and much else. Their specific implementation depends on a multitude of situational factors: means, opportunity, and understanding.
p.7 valuation has to be kind-coordinated: to evaluate something we must assess it sui generis, as a thing of its kind... the first step in evaluation is to take into view a group of instances of the type at issue.
p.8 In his highly respected book on Realms of Value, Perry defined "value" as follows: "A thing - anything - has value or is valuable, in the original and generic sense, when it is the object of an interest - any interest."
[JLJ - I would say that a thing, - anything - has value or is valuable, when it is or can be part of a scheme for going on. A scheme is a large collection of if-this-happens-then-you-do-thats, and if sufficiently mature, can simply be executed in order to 'go on.' As far as a thing having value when it is the object of interest, consider the Microsoft Windows operating system. The operating system itself is of no interest whatsoever to me, but it is of value to me because I use it as part of my scheme for accessing the Internet, for the various purposes I have.]
p.12 evaluation is a matter of judgment on the basis of principles
[JLJ - Practical evaluation can be based on what typically happens, informed (or not) by weak probes. For example, a professional thief might see a house without a garage which has all the lights turned off and no car present in front. Coming by at different times during the day during the week, he observes that a car is out front until 7am, is gone during the day and then returns at 5pm. Soon after 7am he walks up to the house with a gift of some kind and knocks on the door. No one answers and no dog barks. There are no lights which indicate an alarm system. He leaves the gift at the front door. Driving by at later times during the day, he sees that the gift remains at the front door. His evaluation is that typically in this situation, no one is home during the day and therefore the house is a prime target for burglary. One evening he notices that the tenant of this house has placed a trash bag out front. The professional thief constructs a bag of trash that looks similar, takes the trash bag and quickly replaces it with the duplicate. After separating out and disposing the food trash, the thief finds items in the trash which indicate/confirm that 1 person lives there. Putting all the information together, he decides to break in to the house at 8am the next day, with a friend as lookout. There are no true principles here, just practically informed, clever guesses, based on what typically happens, and weak probing into what is essentially an unknown environment.]
p.17 Something has value for us humans if its pursuit and realization conduces to our capacity to thrive and flourish as the sorts of creatures we are - that is, when it facilitates our needs and appropriate wants.
[JLJ - Is it not as part of a potential contribution to a scheme to go on that value is created? For example, the buffalo was used by the plains Indian for many purposes related to survival, and so had value. They had appropriate schemes for killing, skinning, eating, and so on which they successfully executed, and so the buffalo had value to them. I personally do not eat buffalo, and in fact I really don't have any use for a buffalo. Perhaps if something can be part of a scheme to go on, then it has (or can have) value.]
p.17 minds are needed not for the existence of values but for their conceptualization... to have value is to be such as to deserve being appreciated or the reverse.
p.18 values are an instrumentality of reason. They are inextricably bound up with the question of good reasons for preferring one state of affairs to another.
p.18 Does the three [sic] that falls unobserved in the forest make a sound?
[JLJ - We could ask if the 'one' or the 'two' that fell earlier made sounds...]
p.25 philosophers of science have seen the simplicity of theories as a key factor for their acceptability.
p.29 It lies in the nature of things that their desirable features are in general competitively interactive.
p.31 When does a particular alternative have sufficient value to warrant its acceptance?
p.43 In evaluating an item we generally find that various distinct aspects of merit have to be taken into account.
p.52 We evaluate things with a view to some sort of application and implementation - be it practical or theoretical in nature. And our choice among [alternative] ways of procedure will accordingly be grounded by considerations of [suitability] with respect to the aims and purposes of the situation at hand.
[JLJ - What better way is there to evaluate something in general, than to construct a diagnostic test where we imagine or simulate its practical use or consumption, and estimate our level of happiness that results? Consider a hammer with a broken handle. Someone may think that the broken handle makes the hammer worthless - that it has no value. Another may plan to repair the handle and so assigns it a small value. On fixing the hammer, it now has full value. Another may tape the handle in a temporary fix - enough to get one or two hammering jobs done. Upon breaking a second time, it might be discarded. And so on.]
p.56 For a belief, action, or evaluation to qualify as rational, the agent must (in theory at least) be in a position to "give an account" of it on whose basis others can see that "it is only right and proper" to resolve the issue in that way... It lies in the very meaning of the concept of rationality as such that if something is indeed "the rational thing to do" then it must be possible in principle for anyone to recognize the rational sense of it once enough information is secured.
p.59 Any object of evaluation will belong to a type or kind for which certain standards are correctively appropriate... The proper application of type-appropriate criteria is crucial to the rationality of evaluation. The rational cogency of an evaluation is a matter of "proper standards, properly applied."
p.61 Evaluation is made an inherently rational enterprise by the fact that values are objective in being subject to standards of appropriateness/inappropriateness or correctness/incorrectness.
p.61 Value is a feature of the object itself - a property of it... Value as such - unlike an estimate of it - does not "lie in the eyes of the beholder."
[JLJ - Well I disagree here - consider a pile of manure. Most people would not place any value in this "object," but a gardener or landscaper might value it and use it as fertilizer. Its value does truly "lie in the eyes of the beholder." Consider your personal library, Nicholas. Most people in the world will not care about your specific collection of books. You on the other hand, do care.]
p.74 Evaluation thus lies at the very heart and core of rationality.
[JLJ - Heuristic evaluation lies at the very heart and core of the scheme for 'going on.' A professional criminal evaluates a locked door before breaking into an empty house - this is hardly rational behavior in Rescher's mind, but it does qualify nevertheless as part of a scheme or way to 'go on.']
p.78 Sensible evaluation is not a matter of taste but is subject to the rational basis of rational deliberation.
[JLJ - Sensible evaluation is carried as part of a scheme for going on. We never evaluate in isolation from other things, including goals. But evaluation can be diagnostic - it can help us guess at what things and forces are present and to what extent, so we can determine how best to 'go on.' when things are unclear or complicated]
p.81 In both matters of cognition and of action, we are at every turn confronted with a choice among alternatives.
[JLJ - Yes, but our scheme for going on should tell us, at every situation we confront, what we should do when we see or determine such-and-such. It is never truly a question of, 'What do I do now?' but rather, 'To what degree is that particular sign present, because if it is present at one level I do one thing, and if it is present at another level I do another thing.' Our scheme for going on should tell us practically what we ought to do, in each situation we encounter. Perhaps our true choice is simply and practically to choose one scheme for going on, rather than another.]
p.85 Can value judgments be rationally validated without vicious, or at least vitiating circularity?
[JLJ - If you hold, as I do, that there are practically speaking no truths as such, but merely truth claims, then arguments are merely suspended, never 'won' or 'settled.' An argument, whatever it is, or however circular it is, is either continued or it is abandoned for now. Similarly, attempts to validate value judgments are either continued or suspended.]
p.87 It needs to be stressed 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 premisses that are somewhere along the line evaluative in their substance.
p.89 in innumerable situations, the transition from factual premisses to evaluative conclusions is mediated by frequently enthymematic evaluative premisses that are essentially trivial and truistic in that they turn merely on an adequate grasp of concepts and issues... Certain evaluations are thus simply a matter of an experientially based grasp of fundamentals. The propositions which formulate such states of affairs are trivial, truistic, and able to dispense with any need for grounding in something further that supports ab extra [JLJ - from the outside]... What marks such an evaluative truism as enthymematically available is not its profound truth but its very triviality.
[JLJ - What if we constructed or performed an evaluation of a position in a complex game of strategy, using nothing more than diagnostic sequences of moves that are either promising, interesting, or at minimum, deemed worthy of time spent in examination of the consequences. What then? We might just obtain an estimate of our capacity to coerce, in the unknown future, which is useful for playing the game at a high level. This estimate would emerge from our efforts and would depend to a large degree on what moves or move sequences caught and held our attention.]
p.93 the rational validation of descriptively factual claims in empirical inquiry and of evaluative claims in normative assessment proceed in closely analogous ways. Both consist in the rational systematization of experience - informative and evaluative experience, respectively.
p.98 What has value here is not the thing at hand, but its relationships within the context. The value renders not on the object as such, but via its moon-like intunement with the reflected glory of something else... What I am valuing is actually not a particular artifact... but something larger of which that thing is only an element
[JLJ - In artificial intelligence, as in cognition in general, the intelligently crafted and executed diagnostic test produces a result, which itself has value in its ability to capture and direct our attention.]
p.103 The important things are those that count, and the unimportant ones are those that don't... Cognitive significance is a matter of serviceability for achieving a comprehensively informative orientation toward the world about us.
p.106 A crucial ramification of importance is thus inherent in the question of how much - how prominent a place in the sun does a certain idea or concept deserve... The crucial determinative factor for increasing importance is the extent of seismic disturbance of the cognitive terrain.
p.106-107 We are playing something of a zero-sum game in attributing importance, seeing that all we can ever partition of anything is 100 percent of if: you can't get an increase on 100 percent and exactly 100 percent of anything is ever available for partition or allocation... In cognitive and practical matters alike, rationality calls above all for the appropriate and sensible allocation of effort. And no aspect of this rational economy of effort is more crucial than giving just due to the things that are important. With virtually any issue or activity we can and should ask: How much time, money, effort, and concern does it deserve? ...Rationality demands specifically that we allocate to matters a share of attention and resources proportionate with their actual importance, expending on an activity no more resources... than its correlative ends are worth.
[JLJ - Here is where I both agree and disagree with Rescher - for me, the crucial determinative factor for increasing importance is a monitoring of the the critical success factors, and the development of detail-oriented schemes which directly or indirectly produce progress towards goals. Yes, we should ask how much time, money, effort, and concern it deserves - but we cannot predict everything and so we should maintain a posture towards the present and future which lets us adapt to whatever happens. We then should or ought to construct diagnostic tests which help us adjust our posture so that it is practically effective and not subject to tricks or counter-schemes.]
p.107 In the end, the importance of an issue that arises in one state-of-the-art state is something that can only be discovered with hindsight from the vantage point to which the attempts to grapple with it has led us... The wisdom of eventual hindsight is going to have to come into it, so that in actual practice the issue is less one of determination than one of estimation. And we can, of course, be mistaken in our judgments in this regard... Importance is, or should be, an indispensable guide to the alternatives of scarce resources - time, effort, and treatise - in managing our cognitive affairs.
[JLJ - I would argue that importance itself emerges from the results of intelligently crafted diagnostic tests, which execute constantly and involve perhaps subtle cues or even self-evident obvious ones - whatever the wisdom of hindsight demands.]
p.108 Seeming importance is not necessarily the real thing... Hindsight often reveals that apparent importance - importance as we judge it here and now - is something decidedly different from real importance: that is, importance as it will eventually emerge to view with the accession of further and fuller information.
p.109 importance is something that inheres in the nature of things rather than in our thoughts... The prominence of sporting competitions or games, like chess or go, for example, shows that things can be extremely interesting to people without being very important in themselves... the difference between something's being important for someone and its seeming important to this individual is not only real but crucial. People not uncommonly assign to an issue an importance it does not deserve - and the reverse.
p.113 the factors of propositional merit often stand in a state of competing tension with others, reflecting a general situation among multi-factual merits at large.
p.125 All we can ever partition of anything is 100 percent of it... if one fact or finding deserves an additional 1 percent of the overall pie of attention, concern, etc. then that percent has to come away from something else. To assign more importance to something is to attribute less importance to another.
p.134 what suppositional reasoning... involves... is... a matter of bringing the standard principle of information management to bear upon our experientially grounded knowledge of matters of actual fact.
p.137 evaluation is a purposive instrumentality. Alike in matters of belief, choice, and action alternative possibilities confront us. We have to decide among various different prospects alike with cognitive, evaluation, and practical matters. Throughout, preferability is called for, and rational beings do and must determine their choices on the basis of an evaluative assessment of the alternatives.
p.138 inquiry itself is a practice and in the pursuit of its aims the issue of efficacy and effectiveness in goal realization do and must constitute our criterion of procedural adequacy.
p.138 evaluation is a purposive enterprise and [aims] at delivering into our hands reasons for rational decision alike in matters of cognition and action.
p.138 Ideas, convictions, and beliefs are tools we use to solve our problems: answering questions, and guiding procedure in matters alike in inquiry and practice.
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