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xi This book is the second volume of my "Pragmatic Idealism" trilogy.
p.3 Rationality is a matter of the intelligent pursuit of appropriate objectives - of proceeding in what we do in line with cogent reasons.
[JLJ - Yes, but there is much more to living life than to constantly pursue objectives - intelligently or not. One might relax, revel in the present, play a game, listen to music, sing a song or go dancing, etc. One can "intelligently relax" but one can also watch silly cat videos on youtube - is this entirely rational?]
p.7 the question "What is the rational thing to believe or to do?" must receive the indecisive answer: "That depends." It depends on context and situation, on conditions and circumstances.
p.12 The three major contexts for rationality are belief, action, and evaluation; it is in these three spheres that success or failure to act rationally standardly manifests itself.
p.18 Evaluative judgments often take the generalized form "Items of a certain kind (e.g., of type T) have positive (or negative) value of such-and-such a sort, and to such-and-such an extent." ...If we are ever to make actual use of such a generalization, we must bring it to bear on a specific case.
p.18 evaluation's demand for factual information will require a practically grounded leap across the gap from subjective evidence to objective conclusions.
[JLJ - Yes, but if evaluation is performed as part of a 'trick that works', then the 'leap' in question is explained and rationalized. Evaluation itself is rarely done outside of an attempt to accomplish a larger goal or purpose. It is a practical scheme in question that calls for the evaluation, and which is grasped/selected by the mind and executed, in order to 'go on,' in the current predicament.]
p.19 Rationality, then, is a matter of the intelligent pursuit of appropriate ends.
p.22 Rational agents have a fundamental duty to make good use of the opportunities that come their way to realize themselves as fully as possible - the fundamental duty of self-realization.
[JLJ - Yawn, easy to say, not so easy to do. This is why people in general do not read Rescher - boring trite condescending argumentative and lecturing text about what 'is' - appropriately deliverable only to classroom-trapped and sleepy-sleeping students who were too lazy to find other credits - that cannot be applied specifically. If one looks at Rescher as a preacher at the pulpit of the Church of Rationality, out to convert the heathen (that would be you, Mr. reader), we can then begin to forgive (but just barely) what he does over and over again to his unsuspecting readers in his many books. Self-realization has already been explored by Maslow and the lack of specific steps leaves us with pie-in-the-sky thinking that is nice to say, but technically empty in application.]
p.47 philosophers even now follow Hume in saying things of the following sort: "Reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a gun for hire that can be employed in the service of any goals we have, good or bad."
p.48 Hume's profound error... reason at large must care for ends as well as means.
p.52 Evaluation... lies at the very heart and core of rationality.
p.52-53 But just what is it that is in a person's real or best interests? Partly, this is indeed a matter of meeting the needs that people universally have in common - health, satisfactory functioning of body and mind, adequate resources, human companionship and affection, and so on.
p.54 Rationality is not just a matter of doing what we want... it is a matter of doing what we (rationally) ought, given the situation in which we find ourselves.
[JLJ - This is easy to say, but not so easy to do. The world does not tell us how to meet our needs - paths to goals do not emerge of their own accord. Perhaps we ought to come up with strategic plans or schemes to 'go on', that aim to bring us incrementally closer to our goals in due time - our position and posture in life ought perhaps to lead to future positions and postures that are rewarding and need-fulfilling.]
p.55 Rationality calls for objective judgment - for an assessment of preferability, rather than for a mere expression of preference. The rationality of ends, their rational appropriateness and legitimacy, is accordingly a crucial aspect of rationality.
p.56 The rationality of ends inheres in the simple fact that we humans have various needs - that we require not only nourishment and protection against the elements for the maintenance of health but also information ("cognitive orientation"), affection, freedom of action, and much else besides. Without such varied goods we cannot thrive as human beings - we cannot achieve the condition of human well-being that Aristotle called "flourishing."
[JLJ - Ha ha. Rescher is sounding like Hartmut Bossel.]
p.57 where there is no appropriate, and... meaningful end, rational agency ceases... goal-directed action... without appropriate goals... will be problematic from the rational point of view.
p.59 Only through standards can we reach that impersonality and generality of application that is crucial to objectivity... The objectivity of rational evaluation ultimately roots in the nature of our real interests.
p.61 Our values are instrumentalities that serve a human good - the realization of our real interests - and with changing conditions their appropriateness can change as well... rationality as such is committed to the assessment of appropriateness
[JLJ - Which is perhaps why the business community thinks in terms of critical success factors - these are values (of course) which are deemed important, but too much of a good thing - perhaps causing the neglect of another quality deemed equally as good - is not necessarily a good thing. You develop projects or issue directives to realize your critical success factors, and fund the projects plus or minus according to your resources and corresponding to which of the perceived value factors is not being appropriately realized. In this case, the critical success factors are values which serve the good of the current business operational scheme.]
p.62 Without rational evaluation, practical rationality becomes infeasible - with fatal consequences for rationality as a whole, given the systematic unity of reason.
p.66-67 A factual statement is, clearly, one that restricts itself to staking claims about strictly "factual" matters - that is, to providing information about the descriptive features and circumstances of things. It makes no attempt to assess, judge, or evaluate... A value statement, by contrast, is one that asserts or implies something about the worth and value of things - whether overtly or implicitly, explicitly or by implication, positively or negatively. A value statement, accordingly, embraces claims regarding the inherent positivity or negativity of things - about what should be prized (or devalued), approved (or disapproved), preferred (or spurned) or the like. What is at issue with value statements is not just a matter of factual or descriptive information but a contention or implication - explicit or implicit - that a pro or con attitude is in order, that people generally should, and right-thinking people actually would, manifest approval or disapproval toward something.
p.68,71 Under exactly what sorts of conditions are we going to class a statement as evaluative? ...The logical complexity of the issue of a cogent standard of evaluativeness makes it advisable to proceed without any attempt at a logically regimented criteriology, simply taking the line that we generally know an evaluative statement when we see one.
p.74 The reasoning here is indeed from fact to value, but only via an enthymematic premise that bridges the fact-value divide.
p.78 The crucial point is that the value realm is inferentially closed... Inferentially, values must root in values: where only "value-free" facts go in, values cannot come out.
p.79 values almost emerge from facts. The gap between facts and values is often so small... that it can be crossed by a step so short as to be effectively negligible, namely, by means of truisms.
p.79-80 in innumerable situations, the transition from factual premises to evaluative conclusions is mediated by auxiliary... evaluative premises 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 grounded grasp of fundamentals.
p.81 What sorts of considerations constitute a basis for positive epistemic appraisal? These are two sorts, the evidential and the probative. The evidential considerations are simply the available items of substantiating "data." The probative considerations include such factors as generality, order, simplicity - in short, the considerations that provide for a smooth and systematic coherence with our other overall commitments.
p.84 On both sides of experience - both with the sensory "observation" and with the evaluative "assessment" - we thus leap across the gap separating subjective seeming ("appearance") from objective being ("reality") by one selfsame device: systematization of the data. In each case we enter into a realm of objective claims through rational triangulation from the data of experience.
p.86 some evaluative claims can be fitted out with a suitably straightforward legitimating rational warrant. Appraisal in the range of validatable-nonvalidable, warranted-unwarranted, correct-incorrect, appropriate-inappropriate, right-wrong is altogether sufficient, and the truth issue as such need not arise.
p.86 Why should evaluations be destroyed as rationally cogent objects if it were to turn out that the appropriate appraisal categories are not true-false but something like (say) well grounded or ill grounded? ...even as regards statements there are many other sort of categories of rational appraisal other than true-false:
- appropriate-inappropriate
- foolish-shrewd
- correct-incorrect
- plausible-implausible
- probable-improbable
p.87 Evaluations do indeed supervene [JLJ - follow or result as an additional development] on facts, but they do so in view of "appropriate considerations" that are themselves evaluative, even though they may verge on triviality.
[JLJ - One ought to develop a practical system in order to do evaluations properly, perhaps based on tricks that often work when applied in new situations, and that takes reasonable precautions to ensure accuracy, or that one is not being tricked by things not being as they seem to be. Such a system can be developed and applied using one's mind, or even written as a procedure and executed by someone else's mind, or even a computer or complex mechanism, as in artificial intelligence.]
p.88-89 Do value ascriptions attribute actual properties to the items at issue? ...the "properties" at issue in value appraisal are:
- dispositional;
- mind-involving relational;
- not perceptively observational but judgmentally evaluational.
Such properties are not instances of the familiar types... If we are going to discuss whether or not their value features represent properties of objects, we first of all have to get clear about what sorts of properties there are... Primary properties characterize the physical makeup of the object itself; secondary properties correspond to dispositions to produce certain sensory effects on normal observers... Tertiary properties... represent cognitively discernible features - characteristics that (only) a suitably informed mind reflecting on the object and its context can come to recognize... Secondary qualities are supposed to be something that any physiologically normal person can observe. Tertiary properties, by contrast, are features that only a suitably informed and intelligent thinker can recognize. There is nothing mysterious about them, they are just something conceptually different from and more complex than secondary properties.
p.89 An object's... tertiary properties pivot on dispositions to evoke characteristic reflective responses in the suitably informed mind... Now if we are going to see the value features as properties of things, then it is clearly at the level of tertiary properties that we shall want to proceed... We ascribe... tertiary properties on essentially judgmental [grounds]. Here thought is pivotal, and reasons come into it.
p.91 the good Kantian point that evaluation is a matter of judgment on the basis of principles... The crucial fact is that value is not sense perceptible but mind judgmental: something to be determined not simply by observation of some sort but by reflective thought duly sustained by background information and suitably equipped with an awareness of principles.
p.91-92 we have adopted a realism of tertiary properties, since the issue of appropriate evaluation is indeed one of an item's disposition to figure in a certain sort of way in the thought processes of duly informed and enlightened reflective appraisers.
p.92 there is good reason for believing that evaluations can indeed be rationally substantiated, nonwithstanding the circumstance that values cannot be derived from facts.
p.100 We are not so much Homo sapiens, the knowing people, as Homo quaerens, the inquiring people.
p.101 The need for knowledge is part and parcel of our nature... once the ball of information seeking is set rolling, it keeps going under its own momentum, far beyond the limits of strictly practical necessity.
[JLJ - Yes, but humans do not usually seek information for its own sake, as a contestant would preparing for the TV trivia game show 'Jeopardy!'. The predicament we are in, the uncertainty of events and of our plans, the need for a practical and effective scheme to 'go on,' and to test that scheme for effectiveness, and the need to determine how to best posture or position ourselves for present and emerging events in a complex and changing world, drives us to seek information. We do not as much consume information as bend it into an arrow, that directs or guides us in how and in what way we 'go on'.]
p.117 Persons are evaluative beings. Not only must they be able to believe and to act in the light of their beliefs, but their actions must be geared to values: to preferences and priorities on whose basis a rational being can see the objects of its desires as being desirable. Evaluation is crucial to personhood.
p.117 To be a person is to be a creature that thinks of itself as having aims and ends - ideally including a commitment to realize in and for itself those values that are at issue in being a person.
p.118 A person... the Hegelian conception... approaches personhood in terms of one's position in relation to others within the framework of a social order. The crux of personhood lies in the mutual recognizance and reciprocal acceptance that characterizes one's acceptance by others. On the other side... For Nietzsche, a personal self is something one becomes through asserting one's independence of all else and insisting on the privacy of one's own inwardness. One forms oneself as an authentic person by asserting a scale of self-oriented values as guides for fashioning a life of one's own... Personhood combines two sides: the one directed inward, the other outward.
p.119 Personhood is something inherently normative. To be a person in the full sense of the term is to see oneself as capable of acting in the light of values appropriately deemed valid.
p.119 The fact is that evaluation - and, in particular, a prizing of those capacities involved in personhood - is essential to being a person.
p.121 The class of authentic persons... constitutes a family united by a bond of respect that is generally mutual but sometimes unilateral... the limits of this family do not even stop at the boundaries of the human community. Should there be other, nonhuman rational agents in the universe whom we have good reason to see as possessed of a sufficiently developed self-image to value themselves as such, then we would have strong reason to accept them as persons also. It is thus (just barely) conceivable that "thinking machines" could come to qualify as persons.
p.128 The crux of the imperative to personhood is thus the fundamental duty to make good use of the opportunities that come our way to realize ourselves as fully as possible - the fundamental duty of self-realization... To be a person one must not only be able to do evaluation, but one must actually exercise this capacity
p.130 ideals... may be unachievable, but they can nevertheless strongly influence how we manage our affairs. To be sure, an ideal is not a goal we can expect to attain. But it serves to set a direction in which we can strive.
p.132 Our commitment to this visionary level of deliberation makes us into a creature that is something more than a rational animal - a creature that moves in the sphere of not only ideas but ideals as well.
p.133 what counts with an ideal is not the question of its attainment but the question of the overall benefits that accrue from its pursuit.
p.139 The fact remains that it is important - and crucially so - for a person to have guiding ideals. A life without ideals need not be a life without purpose, but it will be a life without purposes of a sort in which one can appropriately take reflective satisfaction... Someone who lacks ideals suffers an impoverishment of spirit for which no other resources can adequately compensate.
p.143 The crucial point for meaningfulness, then, is not making a big difference but making a real difference... For then the worth of what we do in our sphere of agency and action is something that, however "parochial," if there objectively for all to see.
p.145 the question remains: is man a machine, albeit an organic, biological one, rather than a mechanical, artifactual one? To pursue this question intelligently would in the first instance require a pretty exact specification of just exactly what "a machine" is.... Nobody has yet provided a clear and cogent explanation of just exactly what is to count as "a machine" in the current scheme of things... But even if it were to turn out in the end to be appropriate to categorize man as a machine, this eventuation would flatly fail to dehumanize us. If man indeed is a machine, then it is certainly a very peculiar one - one that is organic, intelligent, capable of feeling, suffering, loving, and so forth.
p.147 Freedom of action consists in being in operative control of one's doings.
p.149-150 intelligent agents... with their emergence purposeful action and rational evaluation came to be possible in a heretofore purposeless and value-free cosmos. Intelligent life does have meaning because value emerges with the emergence of intelligence... What ultimately renders life meaningful is not the "pursuit of happiness" but the "pursuit of value."
p.151 "Is life meaningful?" is a question somewhat like "Are people friendly?" Even as we can render people friendly only by viewing and treating them as friends, so we can render life meaningful only by and treating it as such.
[JLJ - If you can't answer a question, you simply state another similar question, and then answer that one. Problem solved? I would answer the question this way: how so?]
p.185 Rubbish!
[JLJ - Rescher voices his opinion of his life's work...]
p.233 Rationality, after all, is a matter of the intelligent pursuit of appropriate ends.
p.237-238 [John Staurt Mill]
...I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness... Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object.
p.240 Admittedly, there is much more to humanity than rationality as such. Our natural makeup is complex and many-sided - a thing of many strains and aspects. We have interests over and above those at issue in the cultivation of reason. But there is no reason whatever why our reason should not be able to recognize this fact... reason can and does acknowledge as wholly proper and legitimate a whole host of useful activities in whose conduct it itself plays little if any part - socializing, diversions, recreations, and so on. Reason is perfectly willing and able to give them the stamp of approval, fully recognizing their value and usefulness... rationality... is clearly in a position to appreciate the value of enjoyment as well as those of achievement.
[JLJ - Because Rescher does not see the central focus of life and living as a reveling in the present, while driven by visions of the past and premonitions of the future, and guided by a mind constructing visions and useful conceptions for 'going on,' he must bend and beat rationality to fit his aims. Too bad for that.]
p.243 In the end, the problems of life have no straightforward "purely rational" solution because the management of a satisfying life is a matter no less of the virtues of character than of those of the intellect.
p.249 Values provide the requisite means for the orientation of our thought... It is our dedication to values that ultimately gives meaning to our lives.
[JLJ - The concept of values orienting out thought can also be thought of as a practical trick that works. You ponder your values during quiet moments of reflection, select them, then in the heat of decision-making, you use them in order to decide how to 'go on.']
p.250 The starting point of the book was set by considerations regarding the need of a rational agent for values to provide the guidance needed for its management of practical and cognitive affairs. This concluding chapter has brought us round full-circle to this theme that a value framework as an indispensable instrumentality of the thought orientation demanded by a rational creature.
p.252 values are essential instruments of rational thought.
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