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ix The line of thought developed in this book... maintains that although natural science is by nature an incompletable project, and a theoretical prospect of further progress lies ever before us, nevertheless, the ongoing pursuit of this prospect is subject to a drastic increase in cost.
xi Natural science, like any other constructive venture on which we humans can embark, is subject to suboptimally-constraining economic limitations.
xi The economic realities of the conditions under which our scientific inquiries into nature do (and must!) proceed are such that our knowledge is imperfectable and that the putative "laws of nature" that our science provides us are no better than best estimates whose almost certain imperfections we have not as yet discovered.
p.2 Virtually every aspect of the way we acquire, maintain, and use our knowledge can be properly understood and explained only from an economic point of view.
p.2-3 Any theory of knowledge that ignores this economic aspect of the matter does so to the detriment of its own adequacy.
p.3 [Charles Sanders Peirce]
knowledge that leads to other knowledge is more valuable in proportion to the trouble it saves in the way of expenditure to get that other knowledge. Having a certain fund of energy, time, money, etc. ...the question is how much is to be allowed to each investigation
p.4 Philosophical epistemologists subsequent to Peirce have paid regrettably little attention to these matters. Indeed, they often proceed on the tacit assumption that information is something that is economically costless - a free good that comes to rational inquirers without expenditure and effort of course. [JLJ - possibly 'cost' was intended. We will likely never know - Rescher rarely revises his manuscripts to fix errors.]
p.5-6 We have questions and we need answers... The basic urge to make sense of things is a characteristic aspect of our makeup - we cannot live a satisfactory life in an environment we do not understand.
p.8 Rationality has an ineliminable economic dimension. The optimal use of resources is, after all, a crucial aspect of rationality... Cost effectiveness - the proper coordination of costs and benefits in the pursuit of our ends - is an indispensable requisite of rationality.
p.8-9 With any source of information or method of information acquisition, two salient questions arise:
- Utility: How useful is it... what sort of benefit does its possession engender?
- Cost: How costly is its employment; how expensive... is its use?
p.9 A natural tendency is at work in human affairs... to keep these two items in alignment so as to maintain a proper proportioning of costs and benefits. In particular:
- If some instrumentality affords a comparatively inexpensive means to accomplishing a needed task, we incline to make more use of it.
- If we need to achieve a certain end often, then we try to devise less expensive ways of achieving it.
p.9 Economy of effort is a cardinal principle of rationality that helps to explain many aspects of the way in which we transact our cognitive business.
p.10 from such an economic point of view... there will be some conditions and circumstances in which the cost of acquiring information... is simply too high relative to its value. There are... circumstances in which the acquisition costs of information exceed the benefits or returns on its possession... information is just like any other commodity. The price is sometimes more than we can afford and often greater than any conceivable benefit that would ensue... Rational inquiry is a matter of epistemic optimizations, of achieving the best overall balance of cognitive benefits relative to cognitive costs.
p.11 Concern for answering our questions in the most straightforward, most cost-effective way is a crucial aspect of cognitive rationality in its economic dimension... knowledge acquisition is a purposive human activity... As such it involves the ongoing expenditure of resources for the realization of objectives... that represent the defining characteristics of our cognitive project. The balance of costs and benefits becomes critical here
p.14 [biologist Bentley Glass]
What remains to be learned may indeed dwarf imagination.
p.18 [French physicist Jean Paul Vigier]
At all levels of Nature you have a mixture of causal and statistical laws (which come from deeper or external processes)... Causal laws at one level can result from averages of statistical behavior at a deeper level, which in turn can be explained by deeper causal behavior, and so on ad infinitum. If you then admit that Nature is infinitely complex and that in consequence no final stage of knowledge can be reached, you see that at any stage of scientific knowledge causal and probability laws are necessary to describe the behavior of any phenomenon, and that any phenomenon is a combination of causal and random properties inextricably woven with one another.
p.19-20 When we change the purview of our conceptual horizons, there is always in principle more to be learned - novelty that could not have been predicted from earlier, lower level information.
p.26 Even though nature might be of finite physical and nomic complexity as regards its physical structure and its basic procedural laws, nevertheless it could be infinitely diverse in the unfolding operational complexity of its phenomenal products over time.
p.28 The crucial fact is that scientific progress hinges not just on the makeup of nature herself, but also on the character of the information-acquiring processes by which we investigators investigate it.
p.30 If we are sufficiently myopic, then, even when the scene that we examine is itself only finitely complex, an ever-ampler view of it will emerge as the resolving power of our conceptual and observational instruments is increased.
p.31 Continuing discovery is quite as much a matter of how we inquirers proceed with our work as it is of the nature of the object of inquiry.
p.36 In developing natural science, we humans began by exploring the world in our own locality... In due course, however, we accomplish everything that can be managed by these straightforward means. To do more, we have to extend our probes into nature more deeply, deploying increasing technical sophistication to achieve more and more demanding levels of interactive capacity. We have to move ever further away from our evolutionary home base in nature toward increasingly remote observational frontiers.
p.37 As a fundamentally inductive process, scientific theorizing calls for devising the least complex theory structure capable of accommodating the available data.
p.43 With the progress of science, nature becomes less and less yielding to the efforts of further inquiry. We are faced with the need to push nature harder and harder to achieve cognitively profitable interactions.
p.44 we can learn about nature only by interacting with it
p.54 Progress in natural science is a matter of dialogue or debate between theoreticians and experimentalists.
p.59-60 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 can pose are limited by our conceptual horizons, and the answers we can envision are also limited by the cognitive state of the art.
p.60 Ongoing scientific progress is not simply a matter of increasing accuracy by extending the numbers at issue in our otherwise stable descriptions of nature out to a few more decimal places. Significant scientific progress is genuinely revolutionary in involving a fundamental change of mind about how things happen in the world.
p.61 what we detect or "find" in nature is always something that depends on the mechanisms by which we search. The phenomena we detect will depend not merely on nature's operations alone, but on the physical and conceptional instruments we use in probing them.
p.70 The best that we can do in matters of science and technology forecasting is to look toward those developments that are "in the pipeline" by looking to the reasonable extrapolation of character, orientation, and direction of the current state of the art - this is a powerful forecasting tool on the positive side of the issue.
p.74 One can make predictions only about what one is cognizant of, takes note of, deems worthy of consideration... In cognitive forecasting, it is the errors of omission - our blind spots, as it were - that present the most serious threat, for the fact is that we cannot substantially anticipate the evolution of knowledge.
p.75 present-day science cannot speak for future science
p.82 Enroute to knowledge we must begin with information.
p.82-83 By "knowledge" we shall here understand putative knowledge that is not necessarily correct but merely represents a conscientiously contrived best estimate of what the truth of the matter actually is.
p.83 Information is simply a collection of (supposedly correct) beliefs or assertions, while knowledge... is a matter of important information: information that is significantly informative.
p.85 Knowledge commonly develops via distinctions (A vs. non-A) that are introduced with ever-greater elaboration to address the problems and difficulties that one encounters with less sophisticated approaches.
p.86-87 Consider...
- knowledge is distinguished from mere information as such by its significance. In fact: Knowledge is simply particularly significant information...
- The significance of additional information is determined by its impact upon preexisting information. Significance in this sense is a matter of the relative (percentage-wise) increase that the new acquisitions effect upon the body of preexisting information (I), which may... be estimated in the first instance by the sheer volume of the relevant body of information... Accordingly: The significance of incrementally new information can be measured by the ration of the increment of new information to the volume of information already in hand: Δ I / I.
p.87 knowledge-constituting significant information is determined through the proportional extent of the change effected by a new item in the preexisting situation (independent of what that preexisting situation is).
p.90 In rational inquiry we try the simple solutions first, and only if and when they cease to work... do we move on to the more complex. Things go along smoothly until an oversimple solution becomes destabilized by enlarged experience. We get by with the comparatively simpler options until the expanding information about the world's modus operandi made possible by enhanced new means of observation and experimentation demands otherwise.
p.91 Nature imposes increasing resistance barriers to intellectual as to physical penetration... Each successive order-of-magnitude step involves a massive cost for lesser progress; each successive fixed-size investment of effort yields a substantially diminished return. Intellectual progress is exactly the same
p.108 There is no escaping from the iron triangle of the real world facts that our nature-interactive technology is resource limited, that our nature-reflective data are technology limited, and that our nature-characterizing theories are data limited.
p.111 what we are able to detect in nature is always something that depends on the mechanisms by which we search.
p.113 Accordingly, while we can confidently anticipate that our science will undergo ongoing improvement, we cannot expect it ever to attain perfection.
p.114 If the future is anything like the past, if historical experience affords any sort of guidance in these matters, then we know that all of our presently favored scientific theses and theories will ultimately turn out to be untenable - that none are correct exactly as is. All the experience we can muster indicates that there is no justification for viewing our science as more than an inherently imperfect stage within an ongoing development.
p.125 Admittedly, there is only one universe, and its laws, as best we can tell, are everywhere the same.
[JLJ - Speculation. Questions arise in our current universe as to why matter dominates over anti-matter. Perhaps our universe is a freak occurrence, perhaps the capital-U Universe recycles itself over and over again in endless cycles of big bangs, with a random tweak to various parameters, possibly a unique symmetry break each "time", happening at (or prior, but that thought is illegal because it destroys the concept of time) to its re-birth.]
p.125 Minds with different sorts of concerns and interests and different backgrounds of information can deal with mutually common items in ways that yield wholly disjoint and disparate results because altogether different features of the thing are being addressed.
p.128 Our science reflects not only our interests but also our capacities.
p.134 intelligence... will prove survival-conductive mainly for a being of a particular restless disposition, a creature such as man, who refuses to settle down in a secured ecological niche, but shifts restlessly from environment to environment needing continually to readjust to self-imposed changes. The value of intelligence, one might say, is not absolute but remedial - as an aid to offsetting the problems of a particular sort of lifestyle.
[JLJ - Alternatively, intelligence will prove survival-conductive in an environment continuously throwing or producing puzzle-like situations, where jury-rigging things, poking around and making things up as we go is rewarded positively. Intelligence helps us to strategically produce scenarios from the driving forces - this helps us to select the appropriate behavior for the current predicament, and helps us form a posture to both the known and the unknown, and ultimately helps us to both develop and execute a scheme to 'go on.']
p.145 Thus, even if only a small fraction of what is realizable in theory is realizable in nature, any increase in organizational complexity will nevertheless be accompanied by an enormous amplification of possibilities.
p.148 The workings of evolution - be it life or intelligence or culture or technology or science - are always the product of a great number of individually unlikely events.
p.159 Scientific realism is the doctrine that science describes the real world - that the world actually is as science takes it to be and that its furnishings are as science envisions them to be.
[JLJ - Science, in my opinion, represents the formal discussions and publications of the members of the scientific community, and these communications merely aim to describe the real world, and that it certainly seems to be so, based on the experiments performed and the analysis and conversations which followed. But publication in a formal journal is not a guarantee of correctness - time will likely reveal that revisions are required based on subsequent findings. Science is simply a best guess by the leading learned of today - the current winner or winning position of an intellectual argument or debate - an emergent from carefully performed critical review - nothing more.]
p.166-167 When there are interactions to which we have no access, we must presume phenomena that we cannot discern. It would be very odd indeed if nature were to confine the distribution of scientifically significant phenomena to those ranges that happen to lie conveniently within our reach
p.177 There is only one world in existence: the real world as it actually is.
[JLJ - Thanks for that, Nicholas. What would we do without your brilliant insight into matters such as these. But this is simply an opinion - like much of your other writings. What if in fact there were multiple worlds, separated from each other by an unknown containment of some kind? The way I see it, the real matters to the extent that we determine from it how to 'go on.' Alternate realities may or may not exist but they do not bother us, so why even bother thinking about them?]
p.177 what we achieve in scientific inquiry is not the definitive truth as such, but only our best estimate of it... Science as we actually have it - now or ever - is and can be no more than the best estimate of the real condition of things that we can currently make with the nature-interactive resources at our disposal. For this estimate we will never be able to claim either comprehensive completeness or definitive correctness.
[JLJ - Yes, but consider my position that 'science' is merely the continuing activity (publications, conversations, arguments, conferences, proposals for funding, spending of acquired funds, etc) of the community of the designated learned. We can then observe that 'science' operates on two levels - published science, and theories rejected or not yet mature - proposed ideas that have been rejected as unproven, or failed experiments such as the LIGO gravity wave detector after its initial unsuccessful detection run when it made no discoveries. Science operates on two such levels: the official, Journal-published and orthodox, and the behind-the-scenes ideas in development, as yet unpublished.]
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