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xi The larger project here at issue seeks to present my philosophical ideas in a sufficiently comprehensive and coordinated form that their systematic interrelatedness becomes clearly manifest.
xiii Both the object of inquiry and the inquiring mind that investigates it make a contribution to the character of the picture of nature at which our inquiries arrive, and the respective contributions of the two sides are so intermingled that one cannot draw a clear line to separate which is which.
xiii our picture of reality is - and has to be - constituted by means of the representations of a mind that has its own characteristic sort of modus operandi and proceeds according to its own terms of reference.
xiii-xiv it is only through theorizing - only through the speculative use of mind - that we can come to understand the world to whatever extent we can in fact manage to realize these desiderata.
p.3 Intelligence arises through evolutionary processes because it provides one effective means of survival. It has evolved not because nature somehow favors intelligence but because intelligence favors the survival of its possessors within nature
p.4 We have questions and need answers - the best answers we can get here and now, regardless of their imperfections... The need for information, for cognitive orientation in our environment, is as pressing a human need as that for food itself - and more insatiable.
p.9 There often is no uniquely best alternative, and when this is so, rationality leaves us with options... Some problems are simply too complex to admit of a perfect resolution by the means actually at our disposal.
p.17 Presumptively justified beliefs are the raw materials of cognition. They represent contentions that, in the absence of preestablished counterindications, are acceptable to us "until further notice," thus permitting us to make a start in the venture of cognitive justification without a need for prejustified materials.
p.27 the ancient skeptics... replied that while we must indeed act, this action need not be based on knowledge at all. They have insisted on the sufficiency of noncognitive guides for action - appearances, custom, the general consensus, inclination, instinct, or the like.
[JLJ - Or, in my view, in tricks that work. A workable scheme which contains a portfolio of when you see such-and-such a thing you now do so-and-so an action, is a completely valid approach to the unknown - is one way to 'go on,' among others, and may represent - if mature in conception and workable in execution - a wise way to proceed, *if* it in fact produces results which are acceptable.]
p.28 Now, when it comes to the implementation of such guarded beliefs and unenthusiastic acceptance in situations that will exact real costs if we prove to be wrong, we would certainly want to hedge our bets.
[JLJ - Yes, this is why adaptive capacity must be measured indirectly, with diagnostic tests which detect - among other things - multiple paths to proceed in the future, because this allows us to select one path from among many based on information that emerged down the road that we did not have earlier. To adapt, we must be able to reconfigure, in a way that allows us to continue towards our goals.]
p.29 In inquiring, we cannot investigate everything; we have to start somewhere and invest credence in something. But of course our trust need not be blind. Initially bestowed on a basis of mere hunch or inclination, it can eventually be tested and can come to be justified with the wisdom of hindsight... ultimately, a this-or-nothing recognition of the validity of presumption emerges ex post facto through the utility... of the results it yields. Legitimation is thus available, but only through experiential retrovalidation, or retrospective validation in the light of eventual experience.
p.39 The things we have to do to manage our life-style must not only be possible for us, they must in general be easy for us (so easy that most of them can be done unthinkingly and even unconsciously).
p.39 For evolution to do its work, the survival problems that creatures confront have to be by and large easy for the mechanisms at their disposal... All of the ordinary problems of one's mode of life must be solvable quickly in real time, and with enough idle capacity left over to cope with the unusual.
[JLJ - I disagree - for evolution to 'do its work' there must be a mechanism that creates a variation of some kind - possibly even random - in the production process of a new organism, and a selection mechanism that favors certain qualities over others in the organisms that survived and reproduced. A variation scheme produced humans of various levels of intelligence, and the selection forces of the environment and among the humans themselves rewarded with differentially more offspring those who were more intelligent. Evolution 'stumbles upon' great solutions that themselves come from good solutions, and have the capacity to create even greater solutions. Only time, and the environment, will tell.]
p.50 We have no guarantee that we are not exchanging one somehow incorrect opinion for another that is at bottom no less so. Accordingly, we can claim neither that in inquiry we attain the truth, nor that we steadily draw nearer to this goal.
p.51 In factual inquiry into the ways of the world, we can do no better than to pose questions and canvass the currently visible alternatives. But the questions we pose are limited by our conceptual horizons. And the answers we can envision are also limited by the cognitive state-of-the-art.
p.52 What we manage to achieve in scientific inquiry is not to approximate the truth but to estimate it - to form, as best we can, a reasoned judgment of where the truth of the matter lies.
[JLJ - Or alternatively, to form an answer good enough to help us to determine how to 'go on,' from where we are right here right now, in our current predicament, encumbered as we are and able, to some degree, to decide what to do in the current moment, and in the next.]
p.59 in scientific contexts we must think of truth in terms of estimation rather than approximation.
p.69 Even when we continue to occupy ourselves with the same species of object... and the same basic laws... we can nevertheless encounter increasingly complex operational modes that constitute new sorts of data. Consider an analogy. The chess master and the beginner make exactly the same sorts of moves - their realms are governed by exactly the same laws... It is in point of the complexity of the higher-level principles of tactics and strategy that masters and beginners differ decisively.
p.73 Complexity, after all, lies less in the objects than in the eyes of their beholder.
[JLJ - Complexity lies in the mutual interaction among several or many objects.]
p.73-74 At each successive state-of-the-art stage of increased precision in our investigative proceedings, the world may take on a very different nomic appearance, not because it changes, but simply because at each stage it presents itself differently to us.
p.80 we cannot comparably estimate the amount of knowledge yet to be discovered, because we have and can have no way of relating what we know to what we do not.
p.80 One can make predictions only about what one is cognizant of, takes notes of, deems worthy of consideration.
p.94 A goal is something that we hope and expect to achieve. An ideal is merely wishful thinking, a "wouldn't it be nice if," something that figures in the mode of aspiration rather than expectation; we look to its stimulation in the present rather than to its realization in the future.
[JLJ - An ideal is what you would aim for if there were no obstacles in your way. Because of obstacles, and the fact that we have every kind of limitation, we must proceed strategically via small steps which challenge us to do better than we otherwise would - the name we give to these small steps is 'goals'.]
p.100 Evolutionary pressure coordinates the mind with its environment.
[JLJ - More so, the mind attempts to understand the environment in order to position the body within it for ongoing strategic exertions likely to produce good results.]
p.102 There must be regular patterns of occurrence in nature that even simple, single-celled creatures can embody in their makeup and reflect in their modus operandi. Even the humblest organism... must so operate that certain types of stimuli (patterns of recurrently discernible impacts) call forth appropriately corresponding types of response - that such organisms can "detect" a structured patterns in their natural environment and react to it in a way that proves to their advantage in evolutionary terms. Even its simplest creatures can maintain themselves in existence only by swimming in a sea of detectable regularities of a sort that will be readily accessible to intelligence. Their world must encapsulate straightforwardly discernible patterns and periodicities of occurrence in its operations - relatively [simple] laws, in other words.
p.102-103 Nature's own contribution to solving the problem of its mathematical intelligibility must accordingly be the possession of a relatively simple and uniform law structure - one that deploys so uncomplicated a set of regularities that even a community of inquirers possessed of only rather moderate capabilities can be expected to achieve a fairly good grasp of the processes at work in their environment.
p.107 It is fortunate (and evolutionarily most relevant) that we are so positioned within nature that many "wrong" paths lead to the "right" destination - that flawed means often lead us to cognitively satisfactory ends. If nature were a combination lock where we simply "had to get it right" - and exactly right - to achieve success in implementing our beliefs, then we just would not be here.
p.108 The success of science should be understood somewhat on analogy with the success of the thirsty man who drank white grape juice, mistaking it for lemonade... the point is that his beliefs are not wrong in ways that lead us to his being baffled in his present purposes... We thus arrive at the picture of nature as an error-tolerant system.
[JLJ - LIkewise, our scheme for playing a complex game of strategy should involve a fault tolerant system for attending to the various possible lines of play in order to intelligently assess an adaptive capacity for a certain posture, over any others.]
p.109 functional adequacy is something very different from truth... the success of the applications of our current science does not betoken its actual truth but merely means that those ways (whatever they be) in which it fails to be true are immaterial to the achievement of success - that in the context of the particular applications at issue, its inadequacies and incorrectness lie beneath the penalty threshold of failure.
p.109 The conceptual mechanisms we deploy in studying the world's ways are instrumentalities of our own devising, and in this case as in others, the sorts of tools we use condition the sorts of artifacts we can create. We are constrained to depict the world in terms of concepts, categories, and schematicism to whose formation we ourselves make a decisive contribution.
p.124-125 There is, no doubt, a mind-independent reality, but cognitive access to it is always mind-conditioned. All that can ever be known of reality is mediated through conceptions shaped by the ways in which this reality affects us, given the sensory and cognitive endowments with which our evolutionary heritage has equipped us.
p.129 Questions arise most pressingly where the information in hand does not suffice... Induction is an instrument for question-resolution in the face of imperfect information. It is a tool for use by finite intelligences, capable of yielding not the best possible answer... but the best available answer
p.131-132 We want not just an answer of some sort but an appropriate answer - an answer to whose tenability we are willing to commit ourselves. Induction is not a matter of mere guesswork but of responsible estimation... we want an estimate that is sensible and defensible: tenable, in short.
p.134-135 inductive argumentation involves a characteristic two-step process.
- Possibility elaboration...
- Possibility reduction...
p.135 induction... its conclusions are not so much extracted from data as suggested by them.
p.136-137 the parameters of systematicity... include preeminently the following items:
- completeness: comprehensiveness, avoidance of gaps...
- cohesiveness: connectedness, interrelationship, interlinkage, coherence... if some components are changed or modified, then others will react to this alteration;
- consonance: consistency and compatibility... harmonious mutual collaboration or coordination of components...
- functional regularity: lawfulness, orderliness of operation...
- functional simplicity and economy: elegance, structural economy, tidiness in the collaboration or coordination of components...
- functional efficacy: efficiency, effectiveness, adequacy to the common task, versatility...
These are some of the characterizing parameters of systematization.
p.137 systematization is not just a matter of constructing a system, however jerry-built is may prove to be, but of constructing it under the aegis of certain standard criteria... If a system... were to lack these characteristics in substantial measure - if its coherence, harmony of functioning, or end-realizing effectiveness were substantially diminished - then its very existence as a system would be compromised... This reliance upon the parameters of systematicity as inductive norms - as standards of plausibility and presumption for induction gap-filling - means that systematicity becomes the arbiter of acceptabilty-as-true, to use the well-chosen word of F. H. Bradley.
p.141 We live in a world not of our making where we have to do the best we can with the imperfect means at our disposal. We must recognize that there is no prospect of assessing the truth (or presumptive truth) of claims in this domain independently of the use of our imperfect mechanisms of inquiry and systematization. And here it is estimation that affords the best means for doing the job, though, to be sure, the fact that we have an inductively warranted answer in hand must never be taken as a basis for shutting the door to further inquiry.
p.141 induction... It is certainly not a failproof, surefire instrument for generating certifiably correct answers, something that would in the very nature of the case be infeasible in these information-transcending cases. Rather, it is a method for doing the job at issue - that of truth estimation - as well as possible in the epistemic circumstances of the case.
p.148 Our inductively formed picture of the real is built up by means of conventions - of postulations and suppositions - that are dictated not by the nature of things but by what we find to be convenient and useful for our purposes in the business of obtaining and transmitting information.
[JLJ - Our current predicament requires that we adopt a scheme to 'go on,' where we need to figure out what is going on around us in order to plan our next action, and the next one after that. The 'real' is constructed from perceptions and intelligently made categorizations out of necessity. For an imperfect being in a predicament with limited knowledge and intelligence, and encumbered as it is, there simply is no other choice in the matter.]
p.150-151 The justification of our inductive presumptions does not lie in establishing as a secured fact the generalization "In proceeding in this way, you will obtain correct information and will not fall into error." Rather, it is the methodological justification "In proceeding in this way, you will efficiently foster the interests of the cognitive enterprise; the gains and benefits will, on the whole, outweigh the losses and costs." We adopt our inductive procedures not because we can somehow establish their validity from the very outset but because of their in-balance cost-benefit advantage.
p.157 Coherentism thus views the systemic interrelatedness of factual theses as the critical standard of their acceptability... A coherentist epistemology thus views the extraction of knowledge from the data by means of an analysis of best-fit considerations. Its approach is fundamentally holistic in judging the acceptability of every purported item of information by its capacity to contribute toward a well-ordered, systemic whole... the coherentist's inputs are raw materials and not themselves finished products. They are not secure and solid; they have nothing "foundational" about them.
p.157 Chapter 10: A Coherentist Criteriology of Truth
p.157-158 In general terms, the coherence criterion of truth operates as follows. One begins with a datum-set S... of suitably "given" propositions. To be sure, they are not given as secure truths in a foundationalists's manner of theses established once and for all, but merely as presumptive or potential truths, that is, as promising truth candidates... The task to which a coherentist epistemology addresses itself is that of using coherence considerations to bring order into S by separating the sheep from the goats, distinguishing what merits acceptance as true from what does not.
[JLJ - For game theory, rather than "truth" (I believe that ultimately there exist only truth claims), we would be interested in which sequences of moves deserve our attention, in order to construct a diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity of our current position to reconfigure in the event of the unexpected, but expectable.]
p.158-159 The process of deriving useful information from imperfect data is a key feature of the coherence theory of truth, which faces... the question of the inferences appropriately to be drawn from an inconsistent set of premises. On this approach, the coherence theory of truth views the problem of truth determination as a matter of bringing order into a chaos comprised of initial data that mingle the secure and the infirm. It sees the problem in transformational terms: incoherence into coherence, disorder into system, candidate truths into qualified truths.
p.160-161 One critic of the coherentist epistemology has objected: " ...'entrenched' knowledge can hardly be overthrown." But this objection misses its mark if directed against the presently envisioned version of the theory. For "entrenchment" (acceptance, actual credence) is, as we shall see, not all that decisive. Even a well-entrenched item can be dislodged in the face of more plausible data... one can be brought to recognize that one has fallen victim to an illusion. Our "accepted facts" unquestionably have a "benefit of doubt," but that is not to say their lease on life is absolute.
p.161 Unlike foundationalism, coherentism dispenses with any appeal to basic, foundational truths of fact, diametrically opposing the view that knowledge of the actual, and even of the probable, requires a foundation of certainty... the coherentist begins with a very large initial collection of insecure pretenders to truth and from these proceeds to work inward by suitably reductive procedures of elimination to arrive at a narrower domain of truth.
p.162 The reductive strategy... begins in a quest not for unproblematically acceptable truths but for well-qualified candidates or prospects for truth. At the outset one does not require contentions that are certain and altogether qualified for recognition as genuine truths, but presuppositions that are no more than plausible, well-spoken-for, well-grounded candidates for endorsement... We cannot simply adopt the whole lot, because they are competing - mutually contradictory. We have to impose a delimiting... screening out that separates the sheep from the goats until we are left with something that merits endorsement... It is not "the uniquely correct answer" but "the most defensible position" that we seek in coherentist inquiry.
p.162-163 The essential difference between the coherence methodology and any foundationalist approach to acceptance-as-true lies in the fact that on the latter line of approach, every discursive (i.e., reasoned) claim to truth requires truths as inputs... The decisive difference of the coherence theory is its capacity to extract (presumptive) truths discursively from a basis that includes no conceded truths whatsoever - that is, from data that are merely truth candidates and not truths.
[JLJ - Certain truths are stumble-upon-able, such as groping in the dark in an unfamiliar hotel room to determine a path to an exit door. Wide sweeping motions of the arms and hesitant steps reveal candidate paths, which can be explored, back-tracking if necessary, to locate an exit door. No doubt many murderers turned themselves in, because police detectives would inevitably stumble upon them as candidates for the crime, perhaps because they were relatives or lovers of the victim, or had means, motive and opportunity. Certain other truths are not obtainable in this way, such as locating a printout containing your hotel receipt, in the dark, from among several other similar pieces of paper. In this case, actions of any kind (other than turning on the light) do not usually produce 'candidate pieces of paper' which offer better chances of being the receipt, than others. All 8 1/2 by 11 pieces of paper feel the same in the dark. What for Rescher is merely a datum in most basic form (that transforms into a truth via systematization), candidate truths in fact seem to require that we possess a 'looks-like-a-duck-quacks-like-a-duck' wisdom which uses heuristic cues that are useful to intelligently scheme to separate the duck-like from the non-duck-like. We must also be able to separate non-ducks that are cleverly masquerading as ducks (pseudo-ducks? You see, in philosophy you can just make up words and expect your reader to understand - Rescher does this, so I can too).]
p.165 The coherentist unhesitatingly endorses the historic thesis that knowledge is "true, justified belief," construing this as tantamount to claiming that the known is that whose acceptance-as-true is adequately warranted through an appropriate sort of systematization... "justified" comes to mean, not "derived from basic (or axiomatic) knowledge," but rather "appropriately interconnected with the rest of what is known." ...coherentism insists, the validating process is not linear but cyclic.
p.183 Real things have hidden depths - they are cognitively opaque.
p.236 a satisfactory evolutionary pragmatism must be predicated upon the shift from a Darwinism of theses to a Darwinism of methods. For now we can suppose a trial-and-error model that operates not with respect to individual theses but with respect to across-the-board methods of thesis substantiation. On such a model, the course of evolution, however slow in the initial stages, is able to provide for very rapid eventual progress when once any headway at all is made.
p.239-240 such an approach... constrains us to a certain view of inquiry, namely a commitment to the idea that the products of well-conditioned inquiry qualify for acceptance as our best estimate of the real truth. But given that we have no inquiry-independent access to "the real truth," the fact remains that we cannot go beyond this estimational perspective to claim some sort of stricter relationship between our putative truth and the real, definitive article.
p.247 There will always be facts about a thing that we do not know because we cannot even conceive of them in the prevailing conceptual order of things... The language of emergence can perhaps be deployed usefully to make the point. But what is at issue is not an emergence of the features of things but an emergence in our knowledge about them.
p.250-251 To be a real thing is to be something regarding which we can always, in principle, acquire further new information.
[JLJ - It is a wonder as to why we cannot adequately define what is real and what is not. The above definition fails because we can create a simulation of reality, such as an aquarium, or a virtual world, where things change and new things appear and new information is always obtainable, but it is not real. Perhaps the mind is the meeting place of the perceived and a sensitive nerve fabric conditioned by evolution and experience, producing the imagined and further shaped by experienced category into a construction of the real which stands in place of the real and if intelligently performed, is or becomes to us effectively real, for all practical purposes. Perhaps in the mind the real and the imagined coexist on equal footing, and collaborate to help us determine how to 'go on.' All that is real truly does not matter equally - but what does matter is how we decide to 'go on' - how and to what we attend, and our successes in those efforts.]
p.251 We realize that people will come to think differently about things from the way we do - even when thoroughly familiar things are at issue - recognizing that scientific progress generally entails fundamental changes of mind about how things work in the world... It is a crucial facet of our epistemic stance toward the real world to recognize that every part and parcel of it has features lying beyond our present cognitive reach - at any "present" whatsoever.
p.252 To make a true contention about a thing, we merely need to get one particular fact about it straight. To have a true conception of the thing, however, we must get all of the important facts about it straight.
p.259 Our ventures into communication and inquiry are undergirded by the stance that we communally inhabit a shared world of objectively existing things, a world of "real things" among which we live and into which we inquire, yet about which we do and must assume that we have only imperfect information at any and every particular stage of the cognitive venture.
[JLJ - Yes, this can perhaps be called the fundamental postulate of being, and from which we can derive through wisdom that we must, at every moment of our lives, develop a posture towards the real world that is effective with 1. the world that we see and understand, 2. the world that we do not see nor understand, but can imagine and 3. the world that is emerging from the interactions of the present, of which we are a part. Rather than getting bogged down with the absurd p.260 comments that "Reality... is the realm of what really is as it really is," we can just make a fundamental postulate of being that there is a reality of which we are a part and then move on from that. Others may postulate that there is no reality, or that we are not a part of it, or that there are other realities, or that reality does not matter, or that reality, for whatever reason, is not really really real. They can write their papers and see if anyone reads them. Reality forms the backbone of any scheme to 'go on,' - it does not tell you how to do this, but an effective scheme will take input from the real, process it and produce (other than directions for exploration) actions, and following actions. Being is essentially a reveling in the present, while simultaneously confronted by ghosts of the past, and premonitions of the future. The rest is just details.]
p.260 Reality... is the realm of what really is as it really is.
[JLJ - Really? Do they pay you to write this?]
p.260 We need the notion of reality to operate the conception of truth.
[JLJ - Alternatively, we need the concept of reality to form the input to our plans and schemes to 'go on.' Things that are not real do not in general form good input to effective plans and schemes. Our practical plans and mature schemes are of the form, 'Adopt thus and such a posture and proceed in thus and such a way - and if you now see or hear thus and such a thing, then do thus and such an activity.' The data and information we use in our plans and schemes must come from an intelligent and perceptive sensation of the truly important cues *from reality* that allow us to rapidly and correctly-enough construct (and then subsequently manage and move through communicate with) the driving forces which demand our present attention, and therefore become real for us. Otherwise, we will not effectively manage our affairs since we are living in a world with others who will demand from us, in our role as a member of a community, that we operate as such.]
p.264 We stand committed, however, to the idea that there must indeed be such a thing as knowledge-transcending reality, because only in this way can we operate our conceptual scheme with respect to inquiry and communication, with its inherent dedication to the conception of an objectivity that recourse to "the real world" can alone sustain.
p.264-265 postulates are not based on evidence... We need this postulate to operate our conceptual scheme. The justification of this postulate lies in its utility.
p.275 What the descriptive character of reality is, is bound to be a matter of discovery, the result of empirical inquiry... We certainly cannot say that our current scientific theories regarding how things work in the world provide us with the real (definitive) truth, but rather only that they provide us with the best estimate of the truth that we can achieve in the circumstances presently at hand... It is an important fact of epistemology... that science always involves guesswork, that we have no sure road to definitive information about the world at the level of scientific generality and precision.
p.275-276 at no actual stage does science yield a final and unchanging result... there is no justification for viewing current natural science as more than yet another inherently imperfect stage within an ongoing development.
p.277 our science... at best one can say that it affords an estimate of reality's nature and mode of operation that will doubtless stand in need of eventual revision.
[JLJ - Once more, problems happen when we take science and look at it as a 'thing' of itself, and separate it from our need to determine how to 'go on.' Science is a production of men and women acting in the (usually) professional role of scientists. It is of value to us, not as an object to be admired like a work of art, but as a tool of the mind to determine how to 'go on' from right-here-right-now within our current predicament, encumbered as we are at the moment, and possessing a freedom of some sort to 'decide' what to do in our next moment and in the moment after that. The experiment-backed speculations that we Journal-and-committee-and-peer-review-and-conference-package into science 'tell us' authoritatively how the world works, to a large degree, so that we can plan our actions and activities within it, including a simple pondering and wondering, wherever or whenever we choose to do so. Life is perfectly livable in a condition of general ignorance about how things work in the large scale - we can choose to attempt to understand our world or we can choose a simpler approach to living that merely accepts things as they appear, or as our traditions and customs dictate, without further or deeper investigation. For those who choose to investigate life and living, science offers authoritative, tentative perhaps, but (if sufficiently mature) reasonable answers backed by experiment and/or professional discussion - answers that later on down the road might be wrong or in need of revision - to questions that otherwise might seem to be unanswerable.]
p.282 Undoubtedly, a naturally evolved mind has a sufficiently close link to reality to be able to secure some knowledge of its features and furnishings... To be real is to be in a position to make an impact somewhere on something of such a sort that a suitably equipped mind-endowed intelligent creature could detect it. What is real in the world must make some difference to it that is in principle detectable.
p.285-286 commitment to a realism of intent is built into science because of the genesis of its questions... However gravely science may fall short in performance, nevertheless in aspiration and endeavor it is unequivocally committed to the project of depicting the real world, for in this way alone could it realize its constituting mandate of answering our question as to how things work in the world... we must accept that our scientific theories at least purport to describe nature.
p.287 Scientific inquiry, as we have argued, is a matter of achieving the very best estimate of the real truth that is available in the circumstances.
p.291 Common sense is capable of yielding secure claims, but only vague ones; science yields only insecure claims, but precise ones.
p.302 ideals... orient and guide our action in certain particular directions. And it is in this action-guiding role that their legitimation lies.
p.303 ideals are of value not for their own sake but for ours, because of the good efforts to be achieved by using them as a compass for orienting our thought and action amid the shoals and narrows of a difficult world.
p.303 The validation and legitimation of ideals thus lie not in their (infeasible) attainability but in their utility for directing our efforts - their productive power in providing direction and structure to our evaluative thought and pragmatic action.
p.304 Realism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is mind independent... Idealism centers on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the workings of the mind.
[JLJ - Perhaps the real is whatever anchors and guides our actions, and to which we subconsciously and instinctively return - we must separate the real from the imaginary, in order to effectively 'go on.' Perhaps, like US Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's infamous opinion, we just 'know it when we see it'.]
p.319 The conceptualistic idealist sees mind as an explicative paradigm for our understanding of the real, rather than as a productive source in the causal order of its genetic explanation. This position does not see mind as the causal source of reality, but as making a formative contribution to the shape - as well as the shaping - of the characterization of the real.
p.323-324 What seems right about idealism is inherent in the fact that in investigating the real, we are clearly constrained to use our own concepts to address our own issues - that we can learn about the real only in our own terms of reference. But what seems right about realism is that the answers to the questions we put to the real are provided by reality itself - whatever the answers may be, they are substantially what they are because it is reality that determines them to be that way.
p.324 Mind proposes, but reality disposes. But of course, insofar as one can learn about this reality, it has to be done in terms accessible to minds: our only access to information about what [is] real is through the mediation of mind.
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