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p.1 This book... proposes to view the pursuit of knowledge in methodological terms: as a specific instance of the generic idea of a procedure or process aimed at the development of a result or product. The theory of knowledge will thus be approached... from the angle of the methods, processes, techniques, procedures, and instrumentalities used in the "production of knowledge."
p.1 The pivotal issue is this: What is the appropriate rational justification or legitimation of claims to knowledge?
p.2 such-and-such norms or standards or procedures... what sorts of considerations establish the legitimacy or appropriateness of these in their turn as an adequate and appropriate basis for the sort of thing we call knowledge?
p.2 metamethodology... The mission of such a discipline is to study the general theory of methods in its various aspects: comparative methodology, methods for devising methods, the methodology for evaluating, refining, and improving methods, etc.
p.3 To be justified instrumentally is to be justified in the way inherently appropriate to an instrumentality, tool, method, procedure, opus operandi, technique, or the like. The fundamental idea in this area is that of agency at the generic levels of ways of acting or of doing things. By their very nature, instrumentalities (techniques, methods, and the rest) are means for doing things of a certain sort. Accordingly, an instrumental justification is one given in a manner appropriate to means as such, one that is naturally "fitting and proper" with regard to instrumentalities.
p.3-4 Instrumentalities... are invariably purposive: they are means for the realization of certain ends. Accordingly, anything methodological... is properly validated in terms of its ability to achieve the purposes at issue - its success at accomplishing its appropriate task.
p.4 the natural standard for the rational evaluation of methods is that of success... The pivotal issue is the "pragmatic" one of assessing whether the method actually works in practice... In sum, the rational legitimation of a method is not at all a question of theoretical considerations turning on matters of abstract principle, but is essentially practical in its orientation.
p.5 A method is a generic device capable of repetitive application
[JLJ - Yes, but a method must in general be slightly modified as it is applied to account for conditions of the moment. To be effective, a method ought to be intelligently and experientially applied. Methods are not immune to counter-methods, strategically applied at the weak points of the method in question, with the intent to derail its purposes and intent.]
p.7 A rational person would obviously only recognize a revision in a method as affording an actual... improvement of it when there is good reason to think that it is indeed superior on the basis of the teleological evaluation of results. Superior performance is the key to progress in methodology
p.8 The essential ingredients of any evolutionary model are but two: variation and selection.
p.12 if one is to hold of either scientific or of common-life inquiry that they yield information about the world, one is constrained to the view that they entitle us to accept certain factual theses - with "acceptance," of course, to be understood as acceptance-as-true... For acceptance to provide information about the world it must be a committal and earnest acceptance-as-true.
[JLJ - Not necessarily. There is nothing 'true' about investigations done to prepare a team for an upcoming game, or prepare merchandise for sale in a store, or prepare troops for an engagement. You prepare a game plan a business plan or a battle plan, based on experience or a workable scheme, and based on your instinct and diagnostic tests which declare that you are 'ready' or not, for both the known and the unknowable. Information cues and observations of scrimmages or small-scale marketing efforts or skirmishes do not need to be 'accepted as true' because in our scheme or plan we are making diagnostic observations in a complex and changing world in order to prepare for an unknown future, to determine how to 'go on.' We simply 'feel' rather than 'know' that we are likely 'ready' or not. If we have the right posture towards the world - if we are 'ready' for whatever it might throw at us, it should not worry us that we ought to classify our perceptions and premonitions as 'true' or not. We lock our doors at night, not because it is 'true' that someone will try to break in, but because a locked door is an acceptable posture towards the unknown, and the unknown person(s) who might try to open the door at 3 am...]
p.18 The lesson of the Wheel Argument (diallelus) is that there simply is no direct way of checking the adequacy of an inquiry procedure... It is therefore necessary to explore the prospects of a different strategy of validation.
p.20-22 the teleology of inquiry is internally diversified and complex... Success in the domain of praxis is something very different from "success" in the sphere of theory... The success of the pragmatic context is of the affective order, ranging over the spectrum from physical survival and avoidance of pain and injury on the negative side to positive satisfactions such as those attending the satiation of physical needs on the other... But the core factor is that of the "success" of a being emplaced in this world in medias res who must intervene in the course of events to make matters eventuate so as to conduce to his survival and well-being. The issue here is thus not to be construed as one of cognitive success - nor even of predictive success alone... but in terms of the affectively satisfying and purposively adequate guidance of action, i.e., intervention in the course of events so as to make things work out "satisfactorily."
p.22 Success in the pragmatic sphere is a matter of the avoidance of affective mishaps and the attainment of affective satisfaction through the effective guidance of the actions of a being emplaced within a difficult and generally uncooperative world.
[JLJ - Yes, but where is the place for wisdom, in the 'pragmatic sphere'? You have a clever collection of tricks that work, for now - does this mean that they will go on working forever? What good are practical tricks at playing, say, basketball, when one has grown up - one is no longer a child, and now needs to find a job and a career? Of what ultimate use are practical methods to steal, that are effective? One wisely needs a mid- to large portfolio of ethical, practical, career-related and social skills to truly 'succeed.']
p.23 one should interpret the quality-control factor of the "success" of a cognitive method or criterion in the practical rather than the theoretical mode. Practical or pragmatic efficacy thus comes to be seen as the appropriate standard of instrumental justification for our criterion of factual truth.
p.23-24 the hard core of the praxis at issue related to man's survival, welfare, and affective well-being - it has to do with making life possible, easier, and pleasanter.
p.38 William James...
The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. ...True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name... unless they had been useful from the outset in this way....
p.39 The position at issue here is in line with that of Richard Rudner's much-discussed 1956 paper, "The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments," where it is maintained that:
...in accepting a hypothesis the scientist must make the decision that the evidence is sufficiently strong or that the probability is sufficiently high to warrant the acceptance of the hypothesis... How sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake would be.
p.42 How serious is a matter of error? Some regard it as akin to a heinous crime.
[JLJ - If that is true, then the large number of errors and mistakes in Rescher's published works makes him a hardened criminal...]
p.115 A presumption is a thesis that is avowedly not known (i.e., known to be true), but having some claim - however tentative or imperfect - to be regarded as a truth.
[JLJ - Presumptions are important resources for investigations because they provide a starting point to discovering truths that are of the figure-out-able kind. By investigating the promising or the interesting or the curious, or the strange, or the out-of-place, we can discover truths that are stumble-upon-able.]
p.118-119 Presumption represents a crucial epistemological resource which one would have to make room for in any case... This is true once one turns to the question of the inputs essential to the workings of an inquiry procedure... If their status were that of established truths, then we could never get off the ground... An inquiry procedure... must constitute an originative mechanism, capable of yielding an output of (putative) truths without demanding an initial input of previously established (putative) truths.
[JLJ - Yes, but consider that a police detective arriving at a crime scene, looking at the evidence and interviewing the 'usual suspects,' is likely to stumble upon the identity of the murderer by following an established investigation procedure, then making and following up on reasonable presumptions - the murderer likely has left a trail of clues that make him/her stand out from the crowd - the 7 billion or so people in the world that did not commit the murder. The investigation has crime scene clues as input and the murder victim has a 'story' and actions immediately and several days prior to the murder, from which emerges or points an incriminating arrow. That is hardly, as Rescher implies, an 'output' of 'truths' without a corresponding 'input' of 'truths.' In the end, our initial investigation aims to produce as output, 'persons of interest' - the actual murderer comes later, if at all. Presumptions are intermediate results of procedures - the cognitive investigation process - which prompt actions that ultimately and indirectly will cause the detective to stumble upon incriminating evidence which will suggest to the detective the identity of the murderer - that is all.]
p.121 The reasonableness of the over-all process again rests on the internal coherence and mutual support its various stages lend to one another. The justificatory rationale must be coherent as a whole. The entire process must function in a self-sustaining way, and it is a key aspect of this self-sustainingness that derived truths must revalidate, at least by and large, the claims built into input assumptions.
p.136 The cognitive methods and substantive procedures we deploy for structuring our view of reality evolve selectively by an historic, evolutionary process of "trial and error" ...Accordingly, cognitive methods develop subject to revision in response to the element of "success and failure" in terms of the practice of rational inquiry.
p.163 [C. S. Peirce]
...However man may have acquired his faculty of divining the ways of Nature... he cannot give any exact reason for his best guesses... man has a certain Insight, not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right, into... Nature... This Faculty is at the same time of the general nature of Instinct... though it goes wrong oftener than right... the relative frequency with which it is right is on the whole the most wonderful things in our constitution.
p.167 the science of today invariably contradicts the science of yesterday. We realize full well that the science of the future will regard as a tissue of errors much or all of what its present-day counterpart asserts.
[JLJ - Ok, then is it not a better description that science represents "the conversations of the scientists" as they talk among themselves and attempt to answer difficult questions. Science is what scientists talk about.]
p.168 These methods... operate in such a way that, given an initial position based on guesswork (however wild) there is an automatic procedure for successfully refining and developing this wrong answer into one that approximates stage by stage more closely to the correct answer. As Priestly put it:
Hypotheses, while they are considered merely as such, lead persons to try a variety of experiments, in order to ascertain them. These new facts serve to correct the hypothesis which gave occasion to them. The theory, thus corrected, serves to discover more new facts, which, as before, bring the theory still nearer to the truth. In this progressive state, or method of approximation, things continue....
p.176 Self-correctiveness... comes down to a phenomenon of cyclic feedback - the capacity of an inquiry procedure to criticize at each given stage its workings at the earlier stages through which the present position was achieved.
p.178 Only an inquiry procedure that views the status of its own inputs as provisional, acceptable merely prima facie - and so ultimately defeasible - can make claims to autonomy and systematic completeness. Such a procedure must be able to evaluate its inputs from its own resources. It must make room for self-criticism, since we must be able to turn the testing-processes of the inquiry procedure upon the start-points of its own applications... With an autonomous inquiry procedure... where external "quality control" (check on output) is impossible - one has to rest content with checks on systemic functioning (such as the controls of pragmatic efficacy at the methodological level).
p.182 When an inquiry procedure is autonomous and defeasible, then the linkage of the adequacy of the method to the truth of its products operates through the mediation of a rational presumption - a presumption whose rationality is underwritten ultimately by pragmatic considerations of increased success in the areas of predictive and manipulative control.
p.183 in all contexts of factual inquiry, an "evidential gap" between the assertive content of our claims and the supporting data we have in hand for them is inevitable.
p.208 Presumption represents a way of filling in - at least pro tem - the gaps that may confront us at any stage of information.
[JLJ - Perhaps presumptions work as a cognitive device because certain facts are revealed only through the indirect effects of actions taken. We presume that the scrimmage we construct between our starting offense and defense is diagnostic of the strengths and weaknesses present in each, and can point to skill areas that either need work or are ok for now. A detective re-constructs the actions and persons met in the last three days by the murder victim and retraces specific events or interviews each - presuming that additional information will be revealed which points to the murderer. Presumptions are merely guides to action which offer practical payoff in terms of additional facts uncovered or additional confirmation of existing theories. Perhaps a presumption, in the end, is a practical thought device which can help further an investigation or argument.]
p.211-212 Clearly there must be some class of claims that are allowed at least pro tem to enter uncontested into the framework of argumentation, because if everything were contested then the process of inquiry could not progress at all... In "accepting" a thesis as such one concedes it a probative status that is strictly provisional
p.214-215 Not everything is a presumption... if presumption is to have any probative bite, it stands in need of some justification: there will have to be some rationale for counting presumptions as presumptions in the first place.
p.229-230 we justify our acceptance of certain theses because (ultimately) they are validated by the employment of a certain method, the scientific method, thus breaking outside the cycle of justifying theses by thesis through the fact that a thesis can be justified by application of a cognitive method. And in turn we justify the adoption of this method in terms of certain practical criteria: success in prediction and efficacy in control.
p.231-232 there can be no real question that an established method - one which has, as it were "proven itself" in various applications lying within the range of its correlative objectives - has solid claims to a presumption in its favor.
p.232 There is no reason why even a perfectly rational inquirer acting cautiously on the best evidence at his disposal might not exchange true theses for false ones whenever "the evidence at his disposal" simply points in the wrong direction. And this can even happen when a "superior" method of inquiry is begin used.
p.233 The critical point is that in the context of justificatory argumentation with respect to methods and procedures one is not dealing with the establishment of a factual thesis at all - be it demonstrative or presumptive - but rather with the rational validation of a practical course of action. And the practical warrant that rationalizes the use of a method need not call for a guarantee of success... but merely for having as good reasons as, under the circumstances, we can reasonably expect to lay our hands upon... this difference between theses and methods is crucial for our present purposes. It provides the rationale for taking the fact that a method has worked in certain other cases as basis for its application in the present case
p.264 Coherence when narrowly interpreted is only a matter of internal conditions of adequacy, whereas the normative aspect must also include external considerations of functional adequacy and purposive efficacy.
p.265 any instrumental justification can - given suitable assumptions about the rationality of the agents in its operative environment - yield an essentially evolutionary pattern of development in its dynamical application over the course of time... What is, on the systemic side of rational validation, a process of probative justification in the order of reasons becomes, in its historical dimension, an evolutionary process of development.
p.276 while the over-all structure of epistemic validation may well be cyclic, at each stage it remains sequential
p.282 Some questions of truth one settles by calculation, some by inquiry into language-use, some by experimentation or observation of nature.
p.289 Knowledge is power, but a power indifferently serviceable for good or for evil - and, moreover, limited knowledge is imperfect power. Our knowledge is a two-edged sword - one that may prove in the absence of wisdom to be a "dangerous thing"
p.293 Success in navigating amidst the reefs and shoals of our natural and man-made environment is the key test of cognitive adequacy
p.294 The pragmatic method is a powerful instrument, but its power inheres in its very nature as a special-purpose device and is confined within the definite boundaries delimiting its range of effective operation.
p.296-297 rational action need not rest on certain knowledge... because plausibility and supportive consonance are perfectly sufficient.
p.303 By enabling us to perceive intelligently, record, generalize, theorize, learn from experience, etc., our intellectual tools serve the interests of the practical necessities of life. To "understand" what goes on in the world is to grasp it in terms of its generic interrelations as causes and effects and so to see them in terms of their potential uses by or implications for our agency - in short as possible means for the gratification of the will.
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