Understanding Reality: Metaphysics in Epistemological Perspective 1498585108, 9781498585101

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Understanding Reality

Understanding Reality Metaphysics in Epistemological Perspective

Nicholas Rescher

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All figures created by author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available LCCN 2018947264 | ISBN 978-1-4985-8510-1 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4985-8511-8 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Prefacevii Introductionix 1 Reality1 2 Consciousness19 3 Control Issues

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4 Reality’s Intelligible Order

69

5 The Role of Technology in Natural Science

75

6 Oversimplification89 7 Overcomplication107 8 Quantitative Epistemology

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9 Information Iniquities

117

10 Managing Uncertainty

127

11 The Paradox of Inquiry

139

12 Prediction, Fashion, and Futurity in the Philosophy of Science

151

13 Probative Homogeneity in Rational Substantiation

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14 Teleology and Chance

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15 Explaining Existence

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v

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Contents

References199 Index205 About the Author

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Preface

The present book is a metaphysical investigation. It affords a novel philosophical perspective upon our knowledge of Reality. For while natural sciences tells us (or seeks to tell us) what the world is like and how its processes work, the present study seeks to explain how we deal with the obstacles that confront our endeavors to realize this objective. I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her ever-competent work in helping to put this paper into a form suitable for publication.

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Introduction

Metaphysics is the study of existence at the highest level of generality. It is traditionally characterized as the study of “being qua being”—of being in general rather than specifically of this or that sort, annual or manual or whatever. Accordingly, the salient task of the field is to clarify what is at issue with existence and its contrasts are to spell out the concepts and principles by whose means a clearer understanding of the ideas of being, existence, and reality can be achieved. As such, metaphysics has been an established sector of philosophy since the time of Aristotle’s initial systematization of the subject in the fourth century BC. And down to the present day it continues to be a lively area of investigation and deliberation. Understanding the framework of the Reality of which we ourselves are part is a prime mission for us humans as self-supposed rational beings. Now it is, of course, the aim of science to investigate Reality and determine its composition, structure, and modus operandi. But this leaves open the preliminary question of how we are to go about cultivating this project—what are the assumptions and presumptions we have to adopt in order to make this project practicable? How are we to conceive of our interactions with Reality in this endeavor to construct a plausibility formed scientific picture of its ways? Approaching the matter from this angle is the task of metaphysics. Its pursuit is based on the presupposition that the world we live in is a rationally intelligible system; and that coherent lawful order is of its essence. How this presupposition works its way out in epistemology and natural philosophy is the theme of the present deliberations. In line with the philosophical tradition the present book deals with the key topics that have always figured on the agenda of metaphysics: the nature and rationale of existence, the differentiation of what is actual from irreality and mere possibility, the prospects and limits of our knowledge of the real. ix

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Introduction

One leitmotif of the present deliberations is the inherent complexity of actual existence and the consequent limitedness of our knowledge of the world. The ideal of perfected knowledge—of a cognitive grasp of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of things is just that, an inherently unrealizable ideal. There is, inevitably, an information gap between the inherent actuality of things and our putative knowledge thereof, and the reason for this lies in very basic considerations that merit closer scrutiny. There are, in the end, three different albeit related enterprises dealing with three different albeit related issues: Natural Sciences: What serves to explain how things work in the world? Epistemology: What serves to explain how it is we learn what science has to say: what justifies us in saying that the world is as science claims it to be? Metaphysics: What serves to explain why it is that the world is as? Very different sorts of issues are on the agenda here. And each range of inquiry investigation requires a characteristically different mode of description and explanation. None of these cognitive disciplines is in a position to do the work of the others. And the present deliberations are designed to show how metaphysics manages to do its part. Two pivotal perspectives will be at work in these pages, namely: Experiential Realism as based on the idea that our interactive experience with Nature on the basis of what its conclusions and modus operandi reveals itself, so that the reality of things is, in substantial degree, as our experience indicates it to be. Pragmatic Coherentism as based on the idea that the adequacy of our view of Nature as conjecture-infused inquiry can be monitored by the pragmatic efficacy of our resultant efforts at prediction and intervention (i.e., cognitive and practical control). The cyclic, feedback character of such an approach to considering reality cannot be overemphasized. In the first instance, our investigations and inquiries proceed on the basis of certain initially modest presumptions and presuppositions. But as matters proceed, and our initial suppositions become increasingly revalidated by the course of events, they can also become more ambitions and thereby engender a cycle of feedback amplification that provides us with increasing confidence in the adequacy of our cognitive proceedings. Accordingly, the present discussion so unfolds as to show that ultimately Reality’s inherent impetus to lawful order serves also to account for its existence. The ultimate explanation of its order is as something that also provides

Introduction

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for its reason for being. Step by step, a train of thought unfolds to indicate that Reality both exists and has the nature it does for good reason, and specifically because this is somehow for the best. Such an approach goes back to the Platonism of classical antiquity. Many difficulties lie in the way of its acceptance. But is it, in the final analysis, the theory that works here takes the form of a Neo-Platonism of sorts. Or if reality has any rational explanation at all, it is one that will have to proceed along these lines, based upon rationality itself. An underlying theme that runs throughout the present elaboration of metaphysics is the dialectic of interaction between descriptive facts on the one hand and normative ideals on the other. On such a view, it is a salient factor in metaphysics that reality as such is descriptively constituted as a potentially perfect system of knowledge even though we imperfect beings cannot get a more than an imperfectly secure cognitive grip on it. Accordingly, we can never hope to surmount the contrast between: • The metaphysical ideal of a perfected system of knowledge. • The imperfect realization of actuality that we can ever hope to achieve in practice. But of course partial understanding and approximative explanation is a good deal better than nothing. There is a vast difference between a skepticism that is nihilistic in rejecting the very possibility of understanding, and a fallibilism that is realistic in insisting that these ventures will always remain imperfect and incomplete. It is in the spirit of being realistic in this sense of the term as well that the deliberations of the present book will proceed.

Chapter 1

Reality

APPEARANCE AND REALITY The term “reality” (realitas), derived from the Latin res (“thing”), was introduced by Duns Scotus in the thirteenth century as a synonym for “being.” In current philosophical usage it continues to be used for actual existence or being, in contrast to possible or fictional being or existence. Reality then is the manifold of actuality as it really and truly obtains. But how are we to understand the relation that obtains between Reality, the actual truth of things, and Appearance—our putative truth, the manifold of what we think to be true? The best option at our disposal here is analogy—the proceeding of association to simplify similar situations. We certainly must not think of this as a matter of identity. For it is clearly not appropriate to claim that our putative truth—the truth as we think it to be—is actually correct—that we are always right in what we think to be. For the history of science is a history of correction, a constant progress in understanding that continually changes and supplements our earlier view of things. There is no reason to think that scientific revisionism exists here and now, in the present moment with us. While inquiry proceeds on the fundamental intention to deal with the objective order of this “real world,” the fact of it is that things are not always what they seem to be. And yet our understanding of what is will invariably be mediated via that which seems. And if our assertoric commitments did not transcend the information we have on hand, we would never be able to “get in touch” with others about a shared objective world. It is—or should be—clear that our personal connection do not sustain claim to primacy of our own conceptions, for their correctness, or even for their mere agreement with those 1

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of others. What there is rather a communicative presumption or imputation rooted in an a priori commitment to the idea of a commonality of objective focus—a presumption that is allowed to stand unless and until circumstances arise to render it untenable. Appearance, by contrast, is a matter of how things seem or are purported to be. For some, appearance serves as a contrast term to reality. The ideas of reality’s appearance as it actually is should be a contradiction. For them appearance is by its very nature mere appearance that cannot be authentic. For others, however, matters will sometimes be as they appear, so that authentic appearance can represent some aspect of reality. It is this second line of approach that is adopted here, the idea of authentic or veridical appearance is accordingly not a contradiction in terms. In distinguishing reality from mere appearance, what is fundamentally at issue is thus not an ontological distinction of different realms of being or thing-kinds, but an epistemological distinction between a correct and an incorrect view of things. Properly understood, the operative contrast is thus not that between reality and the phenomenon but between reality (veridical and authentic phenomena included) and what is misleading or incorrect. For reality can make its appearance in different guises—sometimes correctly and sometimes not. Appearance is not something different in kind and nature from reality, it is how reality presents itself. And reality is not by nature something different from appearance: it sometimes—and one would hope often—actuality is what it appears to be. The fundamental distinction then, is not between the appearances available in our experience and that which is inaccessibly external to it, but rather between that which is correct within our experience and that which is somehow incorrect or misleading. It would thus be wrongheaded to think of reality as a distinct sort of being different from “the phenomenal realm” of what people take to be so. The crux is not the contrast between what is and what is thought to be, but rather between what is thought correctly and what is thought incorrectly and imperfectly. In this context of consideration, reality just exactly is, and is nothing but, the condition of things that people purport when they avoid making mistakes and achieve the adaequatio ad rem that the medievals saw as the hallmark of truth. Properly conceived, reality is by its very nature accessible to inquiry, albeit to an inquiry which in practice will often get matters wrong. Reality, that is to say, is not something inherently extra experiential: a mysterious something outside our cognitive reach. Instead, it encompasses that sector of experience which involves the true facts of the matter. After all, there is no reason why things cannot be what they appear in various respects, and these respects appear as they actually are. Save in the world of the paranoid, things can be as they appear to be.

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The fault line between the real and the apparent runs not only across the space of alternative possible realities, but also across the spectrum of envisioned possibilities as well. Appearance, our putative reality, can—and often does—have features that reality not only does not have, but could not possible have. For appearance can be vague, indefinite, indeterminate, and blurry. But reality—and any of its ­alternative—does not have of these options. Unlike appearance, it must be exact, precise, and definite in its pervasive and endlessly ramified detail. The letter on the optician’s eye chart is something definite, even though its appearance is a blurry mess (an option which reality itself does not have). When we see things confusedly and fuzzily “as through a glass, darkly” we know we are dealing with mere appearance; authentic reality—reality proper—just could not be like that. Nor need reality agree with true belief in some literal sense of the term; for true belief can be disjunctive, while reality cannot manage that. It cannot hesitate between alternatives, but must “make up its mind.” It is just as weird as it sounds to say that reality is by nature that which we know not of. Regrettably, the contrast between appearance and reality is often ­identified—and thereby confused—with that between reality on the one side and mistaken or misleading appearance on the other. And this conflation will, effectively by definition, erect a Chinese Wall between reality and appearance. And this, rather paranoid, view of the matter must be put aside from the outset. To reemphasize: the philosophically significant contrast is not that between the real and the apparent as such, but rather that between the real and the merely apparent. PHENOMENAL REALISM Phenomenal Realism as here understood is not, however, the rather trivial view that appearances can be real in their own way as actual rather than merely imaginary occurrences. Rather it holds that there is a reality whose existence goes above and beyond the phenomena but whose descriptive nature is revealed by them. It does not, however, maintain the phenomenalistic thesis that the phenomenon is all there is and that the idea of a reality above and beyond them is an illusion. Instead, it sees the crux as a distinction between mere phenomena that are disconnected from reality and authentic appearances, and veridical phenomena that indicated some actual features or aspects of reality. Phenomenal realism accordingly envisions a reality that presents itself through its appearances. And it endorses a resultant view of reality (i.e., reality-as-it-presents-itself-through-its-appearance) as an instruction on the basis of those experiential data. It authorizes acceptance of a reality whose

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nature is not inferred from the experiential data (the “phenomena”) but rather is presented by them. And it is a significant feature of this position that the “experience” at issue with these realistic and authentic experiential data include not only experiences in the cognitive/observational order but also encompass in the affective/ evaluative order. Accordingly, so the resultant realism pertains not just to the descriptively informative domain but to the affectively evaluative domain as well. On this basis the good, the bad, and the ugly as well as the kind and the cruel or the generous or the selfish all become objectively real factors of human transactions in much the same way that colors and odors function as reality-reflective features of physical objects. The resultant realism is thus oriented not only at observational properties but at affective properties as well. What is at issue here is thus a reversal of the common philosophical view of the relation between Reality and Appearance, defined by Kant by claiming that Reality somehow causes its appearances by a nonstandard mode of noumenal causality. Here reality serves as the causal creator of its appearance. But the presently envisioned phenomenal realism effectively reverses this position. For it contends that what is existentially basic is the appearances and that they function collectively so as to reveal Reality. However the mode of production at issue is not obliquely causal but directly presentational. The words don’t cause the sentence, they present it. And obliquely experience does not obliquely cause us to form impressions of the real but at least something straightforwardly presents it to us as is. If reality’s relation to appearance were causal, then absolutely nothing further can be inferred. For causes need not resemble their efforts, but only need to be correlated with them. Lightening (a visual phenomenon) can cause thunder (an auditory effect). Bacteria can cause fever. There would be no relation of similarity between a cause and it is effects. Here we are back to Kant’s Ding an sich. A seemingly promising stratagem might be to follow Kant in seeing the relation not as one of causality but one of phenomenality. In theory, there are two versions of phenomenal realism accordingly as one holds their position in an epistemological version which has it that phenomenal consensus evidentiates the nature of Reality, or that phenomenal censuses constitutes the nature of Reality. On the former—epistemological view—reality reveals itself authentically via phenomenal consensus with Reality’s nature providing the explanatory basis for the consensus. On the latter—metaphysical view—phenomenal consensus is what constitutes Reality; Reality just is what that phenomenal consensus provides. The former, evidential view is a realism that sees Reality as having a standing apart from the experiences that reveal its nature. The later, constitutive view version is idealistic in its nature: it sees Reality as being sometimes actually presented in experience.

Reality

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Such an approach would, however, depart radically from Kant. For he held what might be called a paranoid view of human experience, for him things cannot possibly be as they seem to be: human experience is by its nature incapable of representing reality as it actually is. Phenomenal realism—the idea that sometimes at least things actual are as they seem to be, that there sometimes are such things as correct appearances which present Reality as it actually is—is anathema to Kant. By contrast, experience of the phenomenal realism to be sketched here has it that the contrast between the real (actual, authentic) and the merely seeming is a contrast to be drawn within that range of experience, rather than a contrast between what is in experience and what lies outside and beyond it. Kant’s position is one of mystification. If the inherently trans-experiential reality of the Ding an sich somehow causes the appearance, then there is nothing we can say about it, seeing that no secure inference is ever possible for the descriptive constitution of efforts to the descriptive instantiation of causes. The whole of the post-Kantian tradition was baffled by his cognitively inaccessible Ding an sich. But yet on a causal approach there is no escape from it, Instead, the most promising approach is to accept the idea of a reality that has a nature revealed by experience to which it is related by similarity rather than causality. THE REAL AND ITS PHENOMENA Objectivity is a feature of beliefs, contentions, judgments, assertions, or the like—claims, for short. They possess the feature when they hold impersonally independently of the specifications, particularities, or idiosyncrasies of their claimant. Objectively claimed facts obtain (or fail to obtain) on grounds that are cogent in themselves and do not lie somehow subjectively “in the eyes of the beholder.” And accordingly, such claims should be such that any normal person functioning in similar circumstances would deem then to be acceptable and in order, their basis of justification being independent of any presumably particular aspect of the make-up or situation of their claimant. An objective judgment, in sum, is one which a normal claimant would make in circumstances that are standard for the type of situational issue. There is, however, no reason of principle to deny that personal experience can provide access to objectivity by presenting something that holds generally and can be widely or even universally shared. In sum, one can and should contemplate the prospect experience that is at one’s personal and objectively valid—subjectively available but generally accessible as well. There is nothing that you do or can see about the flag atop that pole that is not accessible to pretty everyone else.

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What is at issue here is the important distinction between objective reality and objective validity drawn by Kant in the “Ideal of Pure Reason” in his classic Critique of Pure Reason. With the former it is an object, an objectively existing and experientially accessible thing or object that is at issue; with the latter it is an objectively obtaining fact or condition of things that is at issue. And the key fact is that both sorts of items—both things and facts—can have objective, person interpreted status or standing. Neither necessity—nor even diversity—lies “in the eyes of the beholder.” For accuracy and informativeness, our thought about Reality should be objectively true and our claim abort belief about it should be objectively valid. This salient point is that there is no reason to think that the personal cannot be objective, that is must be idiosyncratic and unavailable to others. There is physical observation of factual arrangement in the physical reality about us. And there is normative apprehension of the transcendental arrangements of non-physical reality about us. It is said often that objective-based information is objective and impersonal while the apprehension-based information is subjective and person variable. But this is erroneous. Both alike depend crucially in the evidence at our disposal and the supposition on whose basis we make use of it. Observational information differs from person to person, from society to society, from era to era. And apprehension based normative information does as well. Neither side has a monopoly on interpersonal, subcultural, and transtemporal current information. People do or should think differently on the basis of their experiential differences, be it observation-based or apprehension-based information that is at issue. Whatever difference there is between the observational and the apprehensive side, it is one of degree and not of kind. Of course claims and judgments are made by people and are in that sense person-correlative. Objectivity is not in contradiction of this obvious fact. What it does call for is that the contention at issue is crucially based on this individual’s idiosyncrative or subjectivitistic particularizes. That foxglove is poisonous is an objective claim, whereas that its odor is pleasant is subjective. (However that a particular individual finds it to be so remains an objective claim.) That grass is green is a matter of observation—of how certain sorts of things look to people, that is to people of normal vision functioning in ordinary circumstances Again, that rotten eggs have an unpleasant smell—one that people in general find obnoxious—is an objective fact independent of any personal idiosyncrasies. That Lincoln was more than averagely tall is an objective fact, although that he was impressively tall is something that depends on the subjective idiosyncrasies of the individual viewer. That X looks like Y depends subjectively on the individual, but that X resembles Y in point of sharing features with him is objective.

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However, consensual agreement does not establish objectivity because it may represent little more than a shared idiosyncracity. But it nevertheless does tend to evidentiate it. And disagreement need not refute objectivity. People may disagree on their estimation of the weight of the pig, but a fact is nevertheless at issue. Interpreted agreement suggests objectivity but it is nevertheless neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for it. A sound item of evidence for the objective validating of a judgment (albeit no more than that) is a consensus of the knowledgeable. When those who are well-informed about and seriously engaged with the matter at issue endorse a judgment with virtual curiosity we can accept this as strongly inductive of objective correctness. Granted, here as elsewhere evidence is not proof, but it is often as close to definitive substantiation as we can readily come. The objective/subjective distinction does not parallel the descriptive/ evaluative distinction. Descriptions can embody subjective factors. (“He was shockingly rude to her.”) And evaluations can be squarely objective. (“It was a highly competent performance.”) There is no reason why evaluations cannot be objective in the stated sense of the term. And descriptions can be sufficiently eccentric and personalized to be altogether subjective. One could approach the idea of objectivity in the light of the ladder of Display 1. Objectivity is not impersonality: it does not factor the element of personalized apprehension out of the picture altogether. The tops of this ladder are overly demanding and too restrictive to qualify as realistic. The bottom is too limited and easy-going. Only that the middle rung of the ladder gets the matter just right.

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The characteristic idea of phenomenal realism is thus that the appearance can correctly represent Reality and that whenever there is a substantial consensus among them, that is how the matter actually stands. (How substantial a majority is needed can and will depend on the mode of experience at issue and will differ as between (say) auditory and chronometric experience.) For phenomenal realism trusts the general reliability of our experiential resources and credits them with the capacity to provide a correct representation of reality in certain circumstances. So on its basis, the relationship of reality to experiential appearance is not one of causal determination (Reality produces the appearance, or the appearances constitute Reality). Rather it is one of reciprocal coordination or, if one prefers, harmonization. On this approach, the Reality is not something that stands in contradictory contrast to Appearance but rather is something that manifests itself through statistical preliminaries in the manifold of appearance itself. Reality thus is not seen as something totally distinct and apart from experience; the situation is, rather, that appearance can, and often does, correctly and accurately confront us with some (inevitably practical) aspect or feature of reality. And so to that extent experience provides an accurate and correct view of reality itself. REAL EXISTENCE INVOLVES MIND-TRANSCENDENCE Consider two questions: What is real? What is it to be real? These are very different. The former is a substantive question that is best left to investigative inquiry. To find out what is real in the world we must investigate it. But the latter is a conceptual question that should be addressed by rational analysis. And only this second question falls within the purview of philosophy. So—what is it to be real, actually to exist? In addressing this question it seems sensible to begin with the straightforward existence of things in space and time in the manner of trees, dogs, and automobiles. And we then thus proceed reiteratively somewhat as follows, specifying that something exists if (1) it exists unproblematically in the just-specified manner of playing an active causal role in this real world of ours in which our life and our experience unfolds, or else (2) if it is something whose actual existence must be invoked in providing a satisfactory explanatory account of the features of something that exists. (And here it does not matter if the explanatory account at issue is efficiently causal, or functionally finalistic, or conceptually explicative.)

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Such a meaning-specification is essentially recursive. It proceeds by sequential steps or stages, maintaining first—ordinary material objects are existentially real, and thereupon extending this stepwise to anything whatsoever that is bound up with the existent by way of explanatory linkages. Approached in this manner, one quintessential way of being real is by figuring in human experience through being something with which we can get into perceptual contact. This is a special concern of item (1) and is certainly a paradigmatic way of establishing a claim to reality. In fact, Immanuel Kant was sufficiently in the grip of the empiricist tradition to think this experiential route to afford the only viable pathway to reality. But this view of the matter is too narrow. For we do well to include in “reality” not only those things that we experience, but also those processes and factors needed to explain them. A sensible realism must endorse the ontologically geared conception that there is a mind-independent reality able to ground the phenomena as we discern them. However, our commitment to a mind-independent reality is not the fruit of experience. For we do not derive the existence of reality from experience; we bring it to our experience in order to be able to construe it as such—that is, as the experience of something real. For we indispensably need that initial existential presupposition to make a start. Without a committing from the very outset to a reality that grounds our experience, its cognitive import will be lost. For only on this basis can we proceed evidentially with the exploration of the interpersonally public and objective domain of a physical world-order that we share in common. To be sure, such a view of existence is anathema to a considerable array of philosophers for whom our commonplace world is not reality but mere appearance whose furnishings do not really exist. For them, what “really exists” is something that entirely transcends this world of everyday experience (Plato’s realm of ideas, for example), or that imperceptibly underlies it (such as Democritus’s atoms and the void). With such theorists, what is basic to the conception of reality is not existence as we standardly have it, but a somehow concealed manifold of being that is thought somehow to account for those familiar things. In contrast to such doctrines the present approach to the issue of realism takes the line that in understanding real existence, as in so much else, we must begin from where we are. Viewing matters in this light casts experience in a leading role as our cognitive gateway to reality. Experiential encounter is the basic and primary way in which one can learn about reality and experience in our inevitable starting point here. But—dogmatic empiricism to the contrary ­notwithstanding—this is only the beginning and not the whole story. For in the process of a theoretical systematization that seeks to explain what we experience the horizons of our reality will inevitably expand. And as they do so we are led to the

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conviction that there is always some as yet experience-transcending room for them to expand into. The salient idea of realism is that the existence and nature of the world are matters distinct from anyone’s thinking about it: that—minds themselves and their works aside—the real world is what it is without any reference to our cognitive endeavors and that the constituents of nature are themselves impervious, as it were, to the state of our knowledge or belief regarding them. As one expositor puts it: “Even if there were no human thought, even if there were no human beings, whatever there is other than human thought (and what depends on that, causally or logically) would still be just what it actually is.”1 Such a realism is predicated upon a commitment to the notion that human inquiry addresses itself to what really and truly is—the condition of things whose existence and character are altogether independent of our cognitive activities. Reality is not subordinate to the operations of the human mind; on the contrary, man’s mind and its dealings are but a minuscule part of reality. The nature of things reaches beyond experience because the things that experience leads us to accept as real are invariably seen as having features that experience does not reveal. (The features that realia have outrun what we know of them.) Appearance is not something by nature different from reality; it can/will encompass that sector of reality which presents itself to us as it indeed is—albeit only in point since reals will, and invariably must, have features that experience does not make manifest. On this account, our commitment to realism is, at least initially, not a product of our inquiries about the world, but rather a working presumption that undergirds our very conception of the world. The sort of realism contemplated here is accordingly one that pivots on the fact that we think of reals in a certain sort of way because doing so merits our ends and purposes. It is, accordingly, rooted (in the final instance at least) not in the world’s facts as such, but rather in the conceptual resources we employ for thinking about them—a stance which, ultimately, secures validation through “the wisdom of hindsight.” ON MANIFESTATION It is, of course, clear that we have no cognitive access to reality apart from forming beliefs about it. In saying that reality is such and such—that a given state of affairs actually obtains—I will accomplish no more than to convey my conviction in the matter. No matter how hard one thumps on the table in maintaining that p one accomplishes no more than would be accurately reported by saying “I hold p to be the case.” Whether or not p actually is the case is virtually always a distinct and distinguishable issue. In affirming

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something to be a feature of reality one accomplishes no more than to manifest that this is how the matter appears to be. But one also accomplishes no less. That claim one makes is not a claim about appearance but a claim about reality. After all, the claim “It appears to me that the cat is on the mat” is something quite different from—and far weaker than—the flat-out assertion that the cat is on the mat. For while factual claims may manifest how things appear to us, but they are claims about reality and not just claims about appearance. To be sure, the coordination of reality with correct thought still leaves open the question: which is the dependent and which is the independent viable in this thought/reality relationship. Does reality depend on what is thought or does thought depend on reality? Are we to be realists and hold that reality is as it is independently of what people think? Or are we to be idealists and hold that reality is as it is because thought presents it so? The proper response here is that this is not a matter of either/or, but rather one of both—albeit with each duty qualified. Thought is ontologically dependent on reality: it is as it is because that’s how reality works things out. But, conversely, an epistemological dependency runs the other way as well. For the only reality we know of is that which thought puts at our disposal. Thought is ontologically dependent on what is real, but any view of this reality accessible to us is epistemically dependent on thought. So what is at issue here is a matter of coordination rather than vicious circularity. What can and should be said comes to two main theses: • What is truly thought to be so depends productively and existentially on reality’s being what it is. True thought is ontologically dependent upon reality. • Our view of reality depends conceptually on what is truly thought to be so (because that is how the concept of truth functions). Whatever glimpse of reality we are able to achieve is conceptually dependent upon and mediated through true thought (authentic appearance, if your will). And a deep-rooted coordination is at work here. For the idea of being truly thought to be so establishes an indissoluble conceptual linkage between being-thought-to-be and actually being. We must hark back to the fundamental considerations that • truth involves an adequation to fact and • fact characterizes reality and represents things as they actually are. When we accept a belief as true we have no alternative but to hold that that is how reality actually stands. Thought and belief are inseparable from reality

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just exactly because true belief characterizes reality in that whenever our thought about things (“the appearances”) actually is correct, then that is how the reality of it actually stands. The relevantly operative contrast is accordingly not that between what is and what is thought to be, but rather between what is correctly thought to be and what is not. Some philosophers have proposed conceiving of reality as standing in contrast to what people think and thereby set reality apart from whatever people can conceive and know. But this makes no sense at all. To conceive of reality in a way that precludes as a matter of principle the prospect that people should come to know is decidedly unreasonable. Reality is not to be construed as something inherently disjoint from the realm of the knowable. “Appearance” as philosophers use the term encompasses not just how things manifest themselves in sensory observation but the much broader range of how we take matter to stand—how we accept them to be not just in sense-observation but in conceptual thought as well. On this basis it would be gravely fallacious to take the step—as is often done—to map the real/unreal distinction and the real/apparent distinction, for this mixes the sheep and the goats in heaping vertical appearance together with mere (i.e., non-vertical) appearance, thereby subscribing to the paranoid delusion that things are never what they seem to be. The entire history of science and learning indicated that there is no adequate basis of justification for us to think that Reality (the real world as it exists all around us) is exactly and in detail as we think it to be—that actual reality is comprehensively and in accurate detail the same as the putative reality that we envision. But of course while we realize that Reality differs from what we think it to be, we cannot even manage to specify just how this is so. The impetus “Give me an example of a false belief that you actually hold, here and now” is a request that cannot possibly be satisfied. I have no difficulty in specifying beliefs that you hold, but cannot manage this in my own case. And so the unavoidable albeit awkward question confronts us: Just what is the relationship between our view of Reality and Reality itself? How are we to conceive of Reality itself and the Appearance it has for us? How does our present view of things relate to the actuality of it? The issue of comparison here is inherently problematic. For the contacts between belief and fact is something we cannot manage in our own case, exactly because the details of our belief does not differ from the facts as we see them. A key lesson emerges. There is not justifiable, rationally sustainable way in which we can appropriately claim to characterize the relation between actual reality and the putative reality that constitutes our cognitive surrogate for it. So since we do not know what reality is like independently of what we think it to be and have no way to effect a comparison between our putative reality

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with what is actual, we have to resort to analogy. And the sorts of analogies that are available here include: • Guesswork: conjecture regarding about what is not available in the basis of what is. • Estimation: assumption of an inaccurate surrogate for what is accurate. • Approximation: acceptance of something as “roughly correct” or close to the actuality of the matter. • Evidentiation: using what we accept as evidential data regarding some state of things as evident basis for characterizing or explaining it. • Harmonization: combining some or all of the preceding to arrive at an optimally conduced theoretical surrogate for the actuality of things. It is on the basis of such considerations as these that we acquire confidence in holding reality to be as we think it to be. And reality is not a distinct realm of being standing apart and separate from the manifold of what we know in the realm of appearance. Those “appearances” will—insofar as correct—be appearances of reality that represents features thereof. And, accordingly, the contrast between Reality and Appearance is not one carried out in the ontological order of different sorts of things. The realm of appearance is homogeneous with that of reality insofar as those appearances are correct. The fact of it is that things sometimes—perhaps even frequently—are substantial as they appear to be. Reality and its appearance just are not two separate realms: there is nothing to prevent matters actually being as they are perceived and/or thought to be. APPEARANCE AND REALITY AGAIN Scientific progress presents us with an ever-changing view of nature, not only in point of the descriptive characterization of its components but also (and even more drastically) in point of the nature of the laws that govern their modus operandi. In these regards there is much that fails to remain stable and invariant. Scientific progress ensures that the world looks different to each successive generation. No date on the calendar ever sees the definite termination of this process of alteration in understanding. Our technical means for interaction with nature, both passively in observation and activity in experimentation, are growing ever more powerful and sophisticated. And the same is true in means for analysis and representation. Successive generations of scientists never look at the world in quite the same way, and therefore never see quite the same thing; they invariably focus on

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different features and aspects of the real. And consequentially their models of reality are different. To be sure, we cannot ever assess the adequacy of our current Realty-view by comparing it to Reality, simply because the only Reality to which we have access is that of our Reality-view itself. How then can we ever master the adequacy of that view itself? What enables us to assess well-wrought Appearance as a plausible version of Reality? One thing and one thing only: implementational efficacy: the success (or failure) of operating within Reality by the guidance of Appearential surrogate. The success of action based on the guidance of Appearance is our best available standard for adequacy assessment. The successful guidance of action is our best available means to rest the adequacy of our conjectural forays. Periodic, implementation, application—the management of praxis—is our best available test criterion of adequacy on belief formation. The claims of Appearance to approximate Reality depend on its successful guidance of praxis. The link of Appearance to Reality pivots on the matter of applicative supplementation. The pragmatics are right: successful in working out is the key to truth acceptably: it is not the meaning of truth but its criteriological arbiter. The conviction that we are dealing a mind-independent reality accordingly plays a central and indispensable role in our thinking about communication and cognition. In both areas alike we seek to offer answers to our questions about how matters stand in this “objective realm” and the contrast between “the real” and its “merely phenomenal” appearances is crucial here. Moreover, this is also seen as the target and telos of the truth-estimation process at issue in inquiry, providing for a common focus in communication and communal inquiry. The “real world” thus constitutes the “object” of our cognitive endeavors in both senses of this term—the objective at which they are directed and the purpose for which they are exerted. And so the commitment to a sub-experiential reality becomes pivotal here, affording the existential matrix in which we move and have our being, and whose impact upon us is the prime mover for our cognitive efforts. All of these facets of the concept of reality are integrated and unified in the classical doctrine of truth as it corresponds to fact (adaequatio ad rem) a doctrine that only makes sense in the setting of a commitment to mind-independent reality. But could Reality possibly be just exactly as it appears? It certainly could in this or that detail. When Appearance puts the cat on the mat, there is no reason why. Reality cannot also do so. But Reality could not be just as it appears overall and in total. For Appearance has imprecisions, vagueness, and blank specs of ignorance. Reality could not possibly be like that. There is always more to things than that “meets the eye” of the appearances. The paramount contrast for the appearance/reality distinction is that between how things are correctly thought to be and how they are erroneously thought.

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The salient distinction is accordingly that’s not between mere belief and actual fact, but that between belief that is true (correct) and which is not—a distinction of status that involves no separation of kinds. When we accept a belief as true we have no alternative but to hold that that is how reality actually stands. And realism thus emerges when we put these ideas together to arrive at the principle that True claims about things can and in suitably favorable circumstances will characterize reality as it really is in some manner or respect. This principle represents an indissoluble link between epistemology and ontology inherent in that medieval idea of truth as adequation to fact. That in our operations in this word we are entitled to accept “until further notice” our view of reality as best we can form it as a workable surrogate for the real thing. The crux of the matter is that things sometimes—perhaps even frequently— are exactly as they appear to be, for there is clearly nothing to prevent that things actually are as they are perceived and/or thought to be. In point of actual separation, the crucial contrast is that between how things are correctly thought to be and how they are erroneously thought to be rather than that between what is and what is thought to be. There is no insuperable gap between the real and the knowable, no Kantian Ding an sich, everlastingly hidden away behind an impenetrable veil between appearance and reality. A great deal of mischief has been done in philosophy by the idea of a “veil of appearance” based on the distinction of the realm from the unreal. For such dualization of modes of being cannot be identified with the epistemically more natural distinction between appearance = how things are thought to be reality = how things actually are It is critically important in the interests of clarity and agency not to conflate these two distinctions. AUTHENTIC APPEARANCE Presentational realism has it that, speaking somewhat figuratively, we are entitled to claim that reality reveals itself through our experiences, at least partially. For those experiences will, when authentic, show—at least ­partially—what reality is actually like. Experience can thus be divided into three groups: (1) mistaken, (2) misleading, and (3) authentic. The first two groups constitute what might be called mere experience; by contrast, however, the third group correctly reveal some features or facet of reality.

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One cannot say (as the so-called phenomealists do) that reality (as a whole) simply is the totality of its authentic experiences. That is because there certainly is more to reality than experience ever reveals, for beyond actual experience there lies the further (experientially unexplored) domain of possible experiences. But while experience does not reveal “The whole truth,” and, as mere experience, does not even afford “nothing but the truth” it does often, when authentic, afford us “the real truth” about the constitution of reality. Reality, accordingly, is not something outside of experience and inaccessible to it. This nature—what it is really and truly like—is often exactly what it appears to be. We need—should not—not be paranoid about the informative reliability of experience as an ever-failing misguide to reality. For in actual fact it is perfectly possible for an experience to present a feature of reality as it actually and authentically is. And the fact is that such experience affords our only cognitive access way to the constitution of reality. In seeking to understand the nature of reality we are well advised to make the best and most use of experience that we can possibly achieve. It is, in fact, altogether reasonable to adopt in cognitive matters a procedural rule of thumb to the effect: whenever nearly the whole of relevant experience is in agreement, that is how the reality of the matter stands. And in this regard we can endorse a principle which St. Augustus applied in very different (i.e., theological) matters, namely secures indicat orbis terrarium: general agreement betokens how matters really stand. And so phenomenalist realism along the lines envisioned here has some significant advantages over the traditional sort of phenomenalism, while yet enjoying its salient advantage—the prospect of seeing reality as an experientially accessible manifold rather than a problematic product of speculative conjecture. Any such an approach has many advantages. (1) It overcomes the paranoia of a scepticism that denies us any conceptual access to reality and insists the experience is always false and misleading. (2) It affords us a natural distinction between authentically infinitive and erroneously misleading experience. (3) It makes sense of the prospect of serious inquiry into the worlds ways by encompassing the prospect of correct information via appropriate knowledge claims. (4) It makes sense of the common-sensical distinction between truth and error and possibilizes the idea of a pursuit of truth. (5) It provides the means of an inclination between Realism and Idealism via the following perspective:

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Reality = Authentic experience arising via an account of appearance with reality Idealism = reality is as a side of experience presents it. • The realistic part of the representation lies on the fact has features that outrun experience—that it is never the case that real things present all of their facets and features to experience, so that reality always outruns its phenomenal presentations. • And the idealistic aim of the realizing resides in the fact that reality’s instantiation is in significant (albeit limited) part as experience expects it to be. Thus suppose you are allotted five minutes for reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Then 1. No part of the book, no single sentence or paragraph, is inaccessible to you. And— 2. Whatever you actually manage to read will (we expect) correctly and accurately make that part of the book known to you. Yet, nevertheless— 3. The book as such—as a whole—is destined to be inaccessible to you as something you know as it is. And so— 4. Your knowledge of the book is nowise wrong but is, in the circumstances, incomplete, partially and potentially misleading with regard to fundamentals. By analogy, our knowledge of reality is something like this, something that we can manage alright, but only in diminutive part. NOTE 1. William P. Alston, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Real World,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 52 (1979), pp. 779–808 (see p. 779). Compare: “The world is composed of particulars [individual existing things or processes] which have intrinsic characteristics—i.e., properties they have or relationships they enter into with other particulars independently of how anybody characterizes, conceptualizes, or conceives of them.” Frederick Suppe, “Facts and Empirical Truth,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3 (1973), pp. 197–212 (see p. 200).

Chapter 2

Consciousness

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? Our only access of Reality is via a conscious awareness of its features. Consciousness is a particular mode of mental activity, exhibited by complex organisms whose cognitive capacity suffices to achieve a complexity of thought. In a way, consciousness is what consciousness does—an experiential awareness of conditions. Consciousness is inherently diversified. To be conscious is to be able to achieve any one of a long inventory of mental performances that one can only manage when conscious: • • • • • • • •

recognize a friend categorize something as instance of a type understand a verbal communication answer a question describe a feeling “get” a joke solve a puzzle make a mistake1

A person can be said to function consciously in almost numberless ways: the list of possibilities cannot possibly be completed. Think of a door contrived to open automatically when a sensor detects an approaching person. We have here an effectively functional stimulusresponse system. But there is no consciousness. The sensor detects but does not feel; the device responds appropriately but does not realize it. The system can be said to obtain information (a person’s approach) and to initiate 19

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appropriate action in response (in arranging for the door’s opening), but something crucial is absent: mental apprehension in thought, the intervention of a functioning mind. Only mind-endowed beings can be conscious. The question “What is consciousness?” is rather like the question “What is odor?” or “What is flavor?” In all three cases the answer is fundamentally of uniform format.” “X is a mode of experience enjoyed by certain highly developed organisms in certain conditions of interaction with their environment.” None of the three (odor, flavor, consciousness) is a thing or type of thing—each is bound up with the occurrence of certain physical processes within certain sort of complex organisms under suitable conditions. All three are mutually reactive proceedings which, notwithstanding the complexities at issue, have nothing fundamentally occult or mysterious about them. They are certain modes of agency that organic evolution has put at the disposal of certain sorts of organisms. The condition under which their occurrence is realized is part of the workings of nature as we have it. A big question arises: Is consciousness some one particular sort of common factor or function that is uniformly present throughout the whole range of its occurrences? Or is consciousness something like combustibility—a feature possessed alike by wood, kerosene, oxygen, rubber, and so on which lack any other fact of unifying commonality. Is there some pervasive linking factor such that consciousness is the effect of its presence or is consciousness itself the unifier of its occurrences? Consciousness is a mode of cognitive proceeding. And it is no more a particular type of thing than ownership is. Like ownership, consciousness is an amalgamation concept that groups phenomena together on the basis of varying analogies and complex similarities. Owning a house, ball-point pen, a right-of-way, a Dalmatian are all very different things that have little substantive or even practical similarity to one another. And consciousness is in much the same boat. It is a nondescript psychic condition which can, like intelligence or insanity, manifest itself in inconceivable different ways. Consciousness studies accordingly indicate a particular domain of investigation no more than would be the case with ownership studies or intelligence studies. Particular modes of conscious activity—doing arithmetic or translating text—may admit of a profitably informative study, but consciousness as such is a delusional mirage. There is as much to integrity consciousness (as such) as there is to furniture as such. To think of consciousness as something with a certain particularity—let alone a fixed identity—is to fall victim to a delusion. Consciousness is thus not a type of thing of substance—it is a process—a mode of operations in a complex organism: the functionary of the brain in producing awareness much like the functioning of a nerve in producing pain. Even denying that consciousness ever exists commits one to having to specify what consciousness is every bit as much as would be requisite if it

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actually did exist. For before inquiry about where consciousness is present and how it works, one has to begin by asking just exactly what consciousness actually is. And here it is helpful first to spell out a few things that consciousness is not, which includes such features as being: • a substance (like air) • a property of things (like their weight) • a state of things (like liquidity) Unlike most of the things that concern us, consciousness is not an object of experience but represents a mode of experiencing. But it is easier to say what consciousness is not than what it is. The nature of consciousness is a classic metaphysical puzzle. We all know that it exists and yet do not really understand it. We can indicate what it enables us to achieve in the way of a witting apprehension of things but yet do not really understand it: we know what it does but cannot quite manage to say what it is. In addressing the matter we have “to beat around the bush.” Consciousness is the capacity for awareness of situations. Stuck with a pin, your body will react by withdrawal, but your mind will react by feeling pain. This sort of realization is a gift of evolution. Like arithmetical computation or linguistic communication—or indeed intelligence itself—consciousness is something that emerges at a certain stage of complexity and sophistication in the course of organic evolutionary development. It is present only well up on the ladder of evolutionary development. In this regard it is in the same boat as various other higher-level mental components, such as intelligence, reason, and evaluative affectivity and (very possibly) witting choice and free will. Only a conscious being can actually know various facts, but then too only a conscious being can ever be mistaken about something. As long as human thought functions simply at the stimulus-response level there need be no particular role for consciousness. But the situation begins to change with the explicitness of description and classification. And higher level processes of discursive thinking rely on the recourses of language to an extent that conscious operations come to be essential. Various mental operations can be managed prelinguistically, but reasoning is not one of them. Being conscious of something is like being informed by someone. In either case, the end result is somewhat the same—being aware of some fact and/ or situation. But information can come in endlessly diverse ways: verbal or written communication, observations, signals and inferential reasoning, memory and recollection, and so on. And just as there is no such thing as a single process of informativeness so there is no such thing as a single process of consciousness. Consciousness and awareness are a vast array of modes that has no common core in any one single proceeding or process. We lump

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them together because of an analogy of result in the way of which we lump together games or means of communication. But to look for a processual unity of consciousness is as vain as to look for a processual unity of ways of doctoring or of cleaning. There is no unity of operation to being aware any more than there is with remembering or forgetting. Consciousness is in many respects like gravity. One experiences it alright but one certainly doesn’t observe it. What we observe is its effects and what one can know of it has to be inferred therefrom. As far as we are concerned, gravity is what it does. And this of course does not automatically make us well-informed regarding either its nature of its origins. And consciousness is much like this. It manifests itself through its effects: primarily awareness and lived experience. Many things are visible; many things are combustible. But they are not so through any across-the-board possession of some shared feature or fact constitutive of visibility or combustibility. There just is no initial condition of constitutes this condition, no visibility-producing or combustibility-engendering constituent. The only commonality among all visible (or combustible) things is just the fact of this visibility itself. The only commonality there is is ex post facto and retrospective. And just this is the case with consciousness as well. The only thing common to all items that figure is our consciousness in that very fact of consciousness-involvement itself. With respect to its nature as a conception, mental consciousness is thus rather akin to mental illness. There are numerous and endlessly varied ways of being mentally ill and they can have very little to do with one another— indeed they all fail to fit any generally common features apart from qualifying as mental illnesses. And the same goes for consciousness. Tautology apart— for example “having awareness”—there just is no uniform mental process that qualified as “being conscious.” Our conscious-awareness functions sequentially, now this, now that. The result is the conception of a “stream of consciousness.” This expression, however, suggests a problematic continuity. What is actually at issue seems more like a set of discrete steps or links than a continuous stream. There are many things a conscious-capable being can do only when activity conscious. To be sure, breathing and perspiring are not among them, but remembering and joking certainly are. WHY THE PROBLEM: ISSUES OF PRODUCTION Production can function in two ways, that of reformation and that of transformation. The difference pivots on the idea of a “type of thing”—a natural kind or category. One makes a cake with ingredients that are organic materials, a

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machine with parts that are material components, a novel forms presuppositions that are verbal complexes. All such modes are reformulation. But when inscriptions create meanings, sounds produce music, paint daubs pictures, these modes of production are transformative. They engender a categorially different sort of item that is not just a more complex recombination of the former type of thing, but rather bring on (“emergently”) new and different types of things upon the stage of consideration. And in doing so they do not just produce but actually create. How this is achieved may well be obscure, but that it is frequently achieved is plain. In the present context, this distinction between two types of productivity is important. For reformative changes are explainable in terms of transcendental processes. But transformative changes just happen. There is no explanative intermediation it is not a matter of systemic association—now this than that. No explanatory mechanism intervening. There is no public access way to the substance of someone’s subjectivity. Feelings and impressions are private property. The individual agent himself is the only one able to experience what is transpiring on the stage of his conscious awareness: anyone else knows this only through inference or by second-hand reportage. Brain activity can be monitored by observers, but the experiential content of awareness cannot. One cannot be conscious without being conscious of something any more than one can be afloat without floating on something. Feeling pain—one’s own pain, a pinprick for example—is a quintessential mode of awareness. This is not just a matter of an aversion/ evasion response: that response does not constitute my pain experience, but rather evidentiates it for all to see. This observational inaccessibly of a large section of cognition is an awkward reality for “cognitive science.” The easy out for its practitioners is thus simply a “fox and grapes”—reminiscent course of denying that it exists. It is, however, simply a “fact of life.” I cannot possibly appropriate your experience: experience as such is not interpersonally transferrable. Consciousness is not some type of stuff (like metal) not even a certain state of things (like magnetic attraction). Instead, it comprises a broad and diverse range of phenomena of different and diverse sorts—phenomena gathered together under a common instance of communicative convenience. And so, just as there is not and cannot be any uniformly focused science of mental illness, there cannot be any uniformly focused science of consciousness. Even as “abnormal psychology” has to be a disjointed assemblage of diverse specialties, so will “consciousness studies” be. Neither constitutes a unified science because both lack a uniform subject-matter focus. This or that mode of conscious activity can be studied but “consciousness studies” have about as much substantial integrity as “amusement studies” would. The manifold sort of conscious activity is certainly open to fruitful

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scientific study in their distinctive particularity. But consciousness itself is not, seeing that what is at issue with this idea lacks the integrity of thematic focus requisite for such an integrated enterprise. And so in its deliberations about consciousness metaphysics has little choice but to “beat around the bush.” Consciousness is not inherently no more mysterious than any other force produced through the machinations of natural processuality—magnetism, say, or gravity or cosmic expansion. So just what is so puzzling and problematic about consciousness? The answer lies in modern philosophy’s deep-rooted commitment to materialism. Ever since Descartes philosophers have been entranced by the question: If man indeed is part of Nature’s physical and “materialistic” order, then how is it that we can think, seeing that thought is something altogether different from matter in its nature? The underling rule is proved by the puzzle.

Just what has gone wrong here, seeing that that inclusion is obviously inconceivable? Clearly it is (and has to be) that second premise of causal homogeneity. And yet that principle has been a philosophical axiom ever since classical antiquity. What, in the end, is all that assurance about that Principle of Causal Homogeneity? • • • • •

Matter can produce energy (and conversely) Wind can produce electric current Insert seeds can produce living plants Friction can produce fire Larva can produce butterflies

Just as a turbine is a sophisticated mechanical artifact—a product of human artifice—that can transmute water current into electric power, so the brain is a sophisticated organism nature fact—a product of material evaluation—that can transmute brain processes into conscious mind processes. Consciousness, that is to say, is something produced by the brains of certain complex organisms that are the product of evolution. In the final analysis there should be nothing mysterious and inherently baffling about this general scenario.

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However, in the case of that final transformation—water flow to electric current—there is a complex story of sequential causal development. In the latter case—brain process to mental eventuations—there is not. The first transformation is extensively mediated by successive stages but the second transformation is one of processually unmediated occurrence. This critical difference needs to be explained. WHAT EXPLAINS CONSCIOUSNESS But how is it that the functioning of those mechanisms produce that results (e.g., that cold temperature TURNS those water droplets into snowflakes? Or that hot temperatures lead metals to expand?). Again the answer is substantially uniform: “That’s how the relevant laws of nature work things out.” There is nothing all that special about the consciousness question. The puzzle (or, if you prefer, mystery) involved here is substantially the same on every side. When people ask “How is it that brain-state events can produce conscious awareness?” they are looking for the specification of a process of some sort by which these occurrences (respectively in brain and mind) can be linked. But this presupposition—that the linkage is one of processual i­ ntermediation— is simply incorrect. It overlooks some very important considerations. Productive efficacy across the mind/brain divide is simply a matter of coordination: there is no causal processuality, no productive process. The productive efficacy at issue is the result of immediate association rather than being processually mediated by some sort of process or “mechanism.” Transformative transmutation is simply a matter of one thing and then another. To ask for a processual account is to commit a category mistake. For the two modes of occurrence (brain state activity, conscious mental activity) are not linked by any processually mediated causality: their connection is a matter of direct, immediate, unprocessual linkage—effectively two different sides of the same line. For the connection is not more mediated than that at issue with asking “How does the concavity of the left-hand side go about producing the convexity of the right-hand side.” The two issues are linked directly, not meditatively, and no process of productivity is in any way involved. The productive connection at issue is immediate and direct and not processually mediated. Sometimes a person’s psychically conscious response to a physical bodily process is intermediated by a complex chain of causality. (Think of a pinprick or a feather-tickle.) But then you get around to brain physiological processes the physic response can get to be immediate and devoid of any intermediating string of causal production. For we have to distinguish between mediated and unmediated causality.

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When John turned on the light by throwing the switch, the connection between cause and result is effected by a complex intimidating process. But when he said “Light!” there was no causal intermediation between the sound he produced and the meaning of what he said. The question “How do I know that I am aware that there is a cup on the table?” is a lot like the question “How do I know that I feel cold?” or “How do I know that I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy?” There simply is no “How I go about securing such knowledge,” no process or procedure for verifying that these things are so with sequential stages through which I move. I “just realize” these things, and the end of it. There is no definite process or procedure I employ to acquire such knowledge and no specifiable procedure I follow for its realization. Awareness of things is not something I acquire by doing something; it is something that I have in the circumstances. It comes to me automatically as a free gift of my capacities as an intelligent being. Consider the question: How is it that the human mind is able to apprehend things consciously? To all intents and purposes this is akin to asking

The answer is in every case substantially uniform: “Evolution has so arranged it that the moral operations of the mechanism involved produce the results at issue.”

MIND-BODY INTERACTION: CONSCIOUSNESS REQUIRES CORRELATIVE BRAIN ACTIVITY BUT IS NOT PRODUCED BY IT There is no question but that minds can be conscious. But minds do not function without brains. Consciousness is the mental side—the mental accompaniment, if you will—of certain complex modes of activity in certain complex brains. But this formulation is chosen with care in saying characterizing consciousness as the mental accompaniment of brain activity rather than necessarily its causal product. Conscious reactions can be evoked by physical stimuli but they are not constituted by them. Physical developments may be prominent in their causation but mental developments are paramount for their constitution.

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Without the brain the mind cannot operate, but without the mind the brain is functionally helpless. In providing the brain/mind complex nature has, through evolution, created a collaborative partnership. Consciousness is an evolved capacity of mind-endowed creatures to become aware of the aspects of their setting. Its most developed form is self-awareness—explicit awareness of oneself with no self-conception can in principle be conscious of things. There is no question but that consciousness of something is the (invariable) accompaniment of correlative brain activity. But this does not mean that consciousness reduces to brain activity from a causal and productive standpoint. The coordinate consciousness with brain activity and to have it that these cannot be conscious without suitable brain activity is not to say that consciousness is the causal result of brain processes. People are coordinated with their finger prints: different prints different people. But that does not mean that the finger prints cause persons to be the individuals they are. The emotions of a person are coordinated with his facial expressions but not produced by them. ID numbers are coordinate with people, but neither produces the other. Coordination says nothing about the direction (or even existence) of causal efficacy. “I shall now count slowly to ten, and when I reach seven I shall wiggle the fingers of my left hand.” Here there is consciousness of myself as agent, as well as awareness of certain performatory resources at my command (finger motion) and of my power of engendering conditions that would otherwise not be. These capabilities and capacities are not aspects of my physical make-up or physical nature—they relate not to how I am constituted but to what I can deliberately do. Consider a group of ball-bearings spread out on a stretched rubber sheet. You now have a clearly correlative system—move the ball bearings and the shape of the sheet changes; alter the shape of the sheet and the ball bearings will move accordingly. To all visible appearances mind and the brain are coordinated in this way. Processual inaugurating is a two-way street: sometimes as the mind functions, the brain responds correspondingly; sometimes as the brain functions, the mind responds. There is always coordinative agreement, but sometimes the one potency is in control of change and sometimes the other. Brain activity often controls the mind’s thought, but thought sometimes inaugurates brain responses. Either will sometimes produce the other. Brain activity and thought proceedings are interrelated in a complex relationship that exhibits the following features: 1. Every thought process has a corresponding counterpart in brain-activity: there are no “spooky” (brain independent) thought processes. 2. Some brain-activities have no corresponding counterparts at the level of thought at all—neither in conscious or unconscious thought.

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3. Not every brain-activity has a corresponding counterpart at the level of conscious thought. There is such a thing as an unconscious thinking. Moreover— 4. Some brain activities cause thought responses (thought activities) that would not exist without them. Here brain-activity is the causal inaugurator of thought. 5. Some thought activities cause brain responses: here thought is the causal inaugurator of brain-activity. In the operating of the brain/mind complex, the brain is the invariable participant in the overall processuality of what goes on. It is thus the senior partner of the enterprise. But it is not the invariable inaugurator of what goes on: the direction of initiative is left open. And this will work sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other. (The two factors are interlinked but which is the free and which the dependent variable will be a matter of case-by-case determination.) The relation of brain/mind in relation to activity is like the situation of plane/pilot in relation to location. The pilot’s location is always in coordinate with the plane: he does not go his separate way. But while their location change is generally managed by the plane itself (via its autopilot) it is occasionally managed by the pilot when he happens to take control. The initiative can work both say. Analogously, it is sometimes mind rather than brain that is the change-initiating operative. The point is that consciousness and brain activity are lawfully coordinated. A brain is an evolutionarily developed facility that can engage in psychic activity: it engenders mental activity in the way of believing, interpretation, feeling, preferring, deciding, and so on. Brains of a certain level of evolutionary complexity cannot function without ingesting mind activity, any more than electric currents can function without producing magnetic effects. Nor conversely can mental activity (as far as we know) have an existence apart from the brains of organisms. And, as best as we can tell, complex brain states and mind states are intractably and inseparably coordinated. But one has to pay very close attention to exactly what such considerations mean, for it is at just this point that most thinking on the subject goes awry. For many theorists misinterprets coordination as one-way causation. The mind is an active and versatile agency—an instrumentality engaged in producing a vast and diversified set of products: ideas, concepts, beliefs, hopes, wishes, fears, aversions—and a whole host of semiconscious and even unconscious thought-activity. Conscious mental operations can have material bodily effects. My decision to get up and walk can set my body into motion. But conversely, material bodily events can have mental effects: I feel those pinpricks. Brains move

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minds, but minds can also impact upon brains. Brain-mind interaction is a two-way street. Causal productivity can operate reciprocally along the two-way street. Sometimes A and B are angry at one another because they disagree; sometimes they disagree because they are angry at one another. Sometimes prices rise because there is more buyer interest in buying (owing to reasons of rumors of increased demand), sometimes there is no interest in buying because prices are rising (and people don’t want to miss out on potential profit). When an A can cause changes in B, this does not means that the causations won’t function in revere, with changes in B producing changes in A. Mark Twain asked: “When the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” But one could just as well ask “When the mind decides that the hand shall open, does the body remain inept?” Changes in brain state can undoubtedly produce thought changes. But there is much reason to think that the reverse can also occur. The two sides of a teeter-totter move imperfect coordinate, but the direction of causality is left undetermined. When processual variables are coordinated, the direction of causality (the question of which is the dependent and which is the independent variable) is left open. The more closely mind states and brain states are interlocked, the more truly the prospect to two-way causality. The linkage of thought and consciousness to brain state activity does nothing to settle the issue of subordination, does not show consciousness is no more than an epiphenomena of brain activity. The point is that conscious awareness is, or can be, the immediate—­ processually unmediated—result of brain processes. But the reverse is also possible. The causal interlinkage at work here is a two-way street. For it so functions that—somewhere at least—it is mind processes (conscious or not) that sometimes take the initiative in evolving otherwise unrealized brain reactions. The Brain-Mind coordination can so function that each party can—in teeter-totter fashion—have the initiative in evoking responses from the other. (And this is the basis for the phenomena generally contemplated under the heading of “free will.”) Symbol interpretation—the process of interpreting ink marks and understand messages—is a quintessential instance of body-mind interaction. And plan implementation—say, deciding to arise from one’s chair to answer the door bell—is a quintessential instance of the reverse process, as it is following verbal instructions where the body is set in motion by thought. With mind-matter interaction there is no process of causal intermediation: The response is immediate. There is no specifiable intermediating causal process between our apprehension of the physical symbol and our understanding of the word it conveys. Implementing the instruction: “Drive your car home” calls for a vast number of intermediating steps of causal productivity: going to the car, finding

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its key, opening its door, getting seated, starting the engine, and so on. But to implement the instruction: “Blink your eyes” there is no intermediating set of steps. Once we decide to obey the instruction there is nothing other than “just doing it.” As far as we can see no further intermediating productively is called for. Brain activity and mind activity are two coordinate features of one fundamental manifold of natural process. And they are closely coordinated and inseparably interlinked. But it is not that one exerts invariable predominance over the other. For the most part, bodily functioning (and brain functioning in particular) exceeds dominant causal influence over mental activity. But often the direction of casualty is reverse. When the mind is frightened, the body responds and the pulse quickens. When the mind decides the hand writes (or types). The operation is coordinated—one does not function without the others. But the causal initiation can issue from either side. There is no ultimate reason of principle why a complex electronic device could not achieve the level of complex function required for consciousness. But its circuitry would have to mirror the complex circuitry of the brain of a higher primate. The neuronal composition of the human brain involves the consideration of functioning of N units. To replicate this artificiality on presently available principles without the astonishing minimizations achieved by humanoid evolutions would call of simulating a device the size of Texas and require power and input and presumptive working on an almost unimaginable scale. On the science-fiction level it is not unimaginable that a cosmos in which the entire physical universe accessible to our observations is no more than a subatomic particle and that the totality of these make up a thinking organism. But this is an idea so wildly speculative as to approach madness. MISTAKES IN AWARENESS Consciousness has developed with their unfolding of natural history as a gift of evolution, enabling us of generally reliable information about the world of our environment; our minds being what C. S. Peirce has called “co-natured” to reality. Of course his harmonization is not perfect, error and illusion being facts of life. But it is more than good enough “for practical purposes.” There are certainly abnormal states of consciousness—in dreaming, say, or under the influence of drugs. And there are erroneous states of mistaken impression. Unconsciousness is not the only alternative to consciousness, there is sub-consciousness and mis-consciousness (i.e., faux consciousness) as well. But only for beings capable of authentic consciousness can consciousness possibly malfunction. There is nothing automatically veridical

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about consciousness. Misimpressions can exist. We can take ourselves to be aware of a cat on the mat when it is actually a puppy. I can mistake one person as another. That tree we take ourselves to see may be a thing of smoke and mirrors. What we think of the things we are experiencing may fail to reflect their reality. But even being mistaken is a version of mental activity: even misunderstanding is a mode of understanding and even thinking mistakenly is still thinking. As a more or less typical experience consider a pinprick and its associated withdrawal response. Unless numbed by anesthetic or otherwise lapsed into an “abnormal” condition we are certainly aware of such a bodily development. Presumably it can be counter-indicated by extra-ordinary intervention (such as posthypnotic suggestion), so that what ordinarily would be a normal response is evoked in abnormal circumstances. But even an abnormally produced pinprick sensation is still a perfectly real sensation, however extra-ordinary the mechanics by which it is evoked. And—be it authentic or ­inauthentic—it could certainly not be evoked in a being incapable of feeling, of mental experience, of consciousness. The question “Can awareness be mistaken?” calls for drawing a crucial distinction. In ascribing to someone awareness of a particular state of affairs, we automatically concede correctness. In saying that “Smith realizes that the cat is on the mat” or “Smith is aware of the cat’s being on the mat” I commit myself to the fact that there actually is a cat on the mat. To put this factual commitment into suspension I would have to say that “Smith thinks (or believes) that the cat is on the mat” or “Smith is under the impression that the cat is on the mat.” These ways of facilitating the matter are commitment neutral regarding the declarer’s own position. And in this regard they differ from the negative extreme: “Smith mistakenly thinks there is a cat on the mat” or “Smith hallucinates a cat on the mat.” And the same sort of thing holds in one’s own case. The statement “I am aware of the tiger in the room” stakes the dual claim: “There indeed is a tiger in the room and I realize that this is so.” To be epistemically more cautious about it would require saying something like “I am aware that there is a large creature in the room and I take it to be a tiger” or even more indefinitely “Something is going on in the room which I construe as the presence of a large tiger.” However, we must thus distinguish between the fact of awareness and the awareness of fact. When I take myself to be aware of a cat on the mat, I cannot be mistaken about the fact of awareness itself—about my belief that there is a cat on the mat. It makes no sense to say “I believe there is a cat on the mat but might be wrong in thinking that I believe it.” I might be wrong in thinking what I believe, but cannot be wrong in thinking that I believe it. Of course that belief itself may very well be wrong: I could well mistake a small dog for a cat and a towel for a mat. The fact I claim to be

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aware of may be all wrong. But the fact of my having this awareness remains untouched by its error. The language works in such a way that certain experiences are self-­ certifying. “I am conscious of its raining outside” might well be wrong—that pitter-patter could be a scrabbling squirrel. But “I am conscious of a strong odor” is something else again. Subjectivity stands on secure ground. When I am under the impression that there is a cat on the mat, I can be mistaken about the cat (and indeed the mat as well), but I cannot be mistaken about the impression that it is something else again. I can certainly be mistaken about your absence but it is somewhere between difficult and impossible for me to be mistaken about my belief in it. What I am under the impression of may well be amiss, but my being under this impression stands secure, wholly unaffected by this mistake. Two related questions occur here: (1) Can one be unaware of a belief one actually has, and (2) Can one be mistaken about one’s believing something? The answer to (1) is certainly affirmative. Think of the innumerable romances whose protagonist did not realize his deep love for his “friend” until it was too late. And the answer to (2) is similarly affirmative. For could I not in my deep Freudian sub-consciousness “really” believe in ghosts while at the level of conscious avowal I reject the very idea? Insofar as these considerations hold good, one would need to distinguish between a person’s acknowledged beliefs and their authentic beliefs, between those prima facie beliefs they view themselves as having and those they actually have. And then it will only be in respect to the latter, real, and authentic beliefs outside the realm of “false consciousness” that people cannot be mistaken. HOW DID CONSCIOUSNESS ARISE? Ordinarily cat sightings are produced by cats, pinpricks by pins, and shivers by cold. And such responses standardly occur via consciously apprehensible eventuations like cat-encounters or pinpricks. It is perfectly possible, however, that certain putatively cognitive experiences could be produced in a matter that is unwarrantedly and systematically inappropriate—that, for example, in a phantom limb situation someone feels as though he was receiving the handshake of a muscular friend. This sort of “sensory malfunction” is certainly conceivable in various sorts of unusual circumstances. But that should prevail systematically—always, unavoidably, and with everyone—is effectively inconceivable given the evolutionary emergence of human capacities. Sense experience is our guide to action in this world, and if it were to mislead us standardly and systematically we would not be here to tell the tale.

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Consciousness is the mental accompaniment (though not necessarily the causal product) of the psychological activity of sophisticated organism brains. The capacity of such brains to function coordinatively with consciousness is the product of evolutionary development of increasingly complex organisms. Consciousness in humans is every bit as much the product of evolution as is flight in sparrows. And the reason for the emergence of consciousness in nature is that it is highly conducive to the survival of complex organisms that solve the problem lifer not by automaticity or instinct but by thought, by figuring out what to do in the circumstances. “Why is it that the world so functions as to have conscious beings emerge within it?” This is not a scientific but a metaphysical (perhaps even theological) question. In raising such questions we are not asking again for a scientific accounting for the existence of consciousness. Instead we are asking why it is that this story is true—why the world is as science reveals it to be in this regard. And this of course is a question about science which, as such, cannot be answered within science. And so you have a choice. You can say that is inappropriate, improper, and ought not to be asked. Or you can accept it at face value and then look to extra-scientific, metaphysical, or theological ways of addressing it. It is constructive to contemplate the classic consideration of microcosm and macrocosm. For in the thought consciousness and its creative realization in theorizing thought can replicate or model the very world in which it arose. It is as though consciousness emerged so that the world could replicate itself through modeling in thought. Consciousness, so regarded, corresponds to the impetus of a complex world to provide a means for its own self-apprehension. WHAT DOES CONSCIOUSNESS LEAD TO? Consciousness is creative. It opens the way to new facts that did not have a foothold in the world prior to its own emergence. A new dimension of reality emerges in the world with the developmental arrival of conscious and intelligent beings: the realm of thought. Heretofore there is only the manifold of physical reality but now there emerges also that of hypothetical possibility. Heretofore there are only the discernible features of the things at which one can point. But now there are also the merely suppositional creations of thought that cannot be identified by pointing at all; there now comes into play things that do not exist as such at all but whose only mode of being is being thought about. There is now not only understanding, but misunderstanding as well. (A world without consciousness is error-free.)

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Prominent among these is knowledge—the capacity to formulate and process information. After all, knowing, like supposing, is something that only intelligent beings can possibly do. But on the other side of the coin there is also its contrary: Ignorance! And indeed even the inevitable ignorance of unknowable fact. Cognitive access here stands in direct logical conflict with the item-characterizations that are at issue. For consider: being a person who has passed into total oblivion. being a never-formulated question. being an idea no-one any longer mentions. A knowledge-claim regarding the identity of such items will automatically unravel their specifying characterization.2 The unknowability of the facts at issue is built into their very specification. Thus no one can answer the question: “What is an example of a question that will never be asked?” Such a challenge defeats the effort of this world’s finite intelligences. But when it is said that a fact about the world is unknown or unknowable, there immediately arise two questions: Which world? and By whom? The answer in both cases is straightforward: The world at issue is of course this world of ours—the one only available to us for factual knowledge rather than conjecture or supposition. And the question “By whom?” is of course to be answered: “By us—the intelligent beings who inhabit this world.” Worldexternal super or supranatural beings are not in question here. So when we speak of “facts being known” or of “questions being asked” we mean these be construed with reference to this world’s intelligent beings. But since knowing and unknowing are something that only intelligent beings can manage, it follows that such facts can meaningfully function in the world only after intelligence gains a foothold there. Only then will be facts about it that are not just unknown by those intelligences in the world but actually are even unknowable by them. For what intelligence cannot manage to do is to get a comprehensive grip on its own imperfections. Finite minds will always be inadequately informed about their own limits and limitations. And since thinking and thought-guided acting are integral to the functional make-up of the world, there will be aspects of reality regarding which the world’s intelligences must ever remain imperfectly informed. For, given the integration of thought into nature, an incompleteness of knowledge regarding the former unavoidably carries in its wake an incompleteness of knowledge also regarding the latter. Ironically, it is with the emergence of intelligent consciousness that the universe itself becomes (imperfectly) intelligible. The human mind is a powerful and eminently useful instrumentality. But as with all of our capacities there are limits to what it can manage to achieve.

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Just how does the emergence of intelligence change the world? The short answer is—revolutionarily, for there is now a place for self-awareness in the scheme of things—self-awareness in matters of thought and in action through recognizing the limitations that will inevitably afflict the cognitive condition of finite beings. What intelligence cannot do is to get a comprehensive grip on itself—a fully adequate grasp on its own powers and its own limits. The irony of it is that the questions that defy the utmost efforts of intelligence are exactly those that relate to facts concerning the limits of its own operation—that the very existence of intelligence in the world is a precondition of its cognitive opacity. With consciousness, not only does theoretical/cognitive reason some upon the scene but practical/procedural reason does so as well. And conscious awareness facilitates and guides not only our beliefs but also our actions. It lays the groundwork for the process of deliberation and evaluation in which our characteristic human condition as intelligent free agents is grounded. As rational beings, understanding is, for us, not just a matter of want but of actual need. And our capacity to understand reality is the complex result of a process not unlike digging a tunnel where the two opposed entities ultimately have to meet agreeably in union. Both thought and nature, mind and r­eality have to come into coordinate fusion. And the fact that mind has developed evolutionarily within nature assures that the requisite degree of harmony will obtain as we pursue the complex and challenging processes of inquiry and investigation. NOTES 1. One can certainly make a mistake without being conscious of it. But unless one is a conscious being who can adopt a purpose (and thereby fail in its realization) one cannot make a mistake. 2. To be sure one could plausibly say something like “The individual who prepared Caesar’s breakfast on the fatal Ides of March is now totally unknown.” But is this true? After all, we have just taken note of this very individual. This seeming anomaly needs to be removed by a distinction. The individual has been alluded to but not specified—individuated but not concretely identified. So I cannot appropriately claim to know who the individual at issue is but only at best that a certain individual is at issue.

Chapter 3

Control Issues

Control plays a potentially important role in many contexts. In engineering it is salient in the theory of control systems; in metaphysics it plays a key role in mind-body deliberations and the problem of free will; in ethics and law it figures critically in relation to culpability and responsibility. Moreover, the question issue of control has substantial scientific involvements. What sorts of things can be controlled, how much control can be achieved, how it can be exercised, and what sorts of processes and procedures are needed to do this efficiently and effectively are all quintessentially empirical questions about how this works in the world of the sort that typifies the problem-agenda of natural science. Moreover, control figures importantly in our very understanding of natural science, seeing that “control over nature” is generally regarded as one of the definitive aims of the scientific enterprise. All in all, it is one of philosophy’s most prominent and significant conceptions. And yet the question of just how the conception works in its physical, metaphysical, and ethical involvements is something to which philosophers have given little explicit attention. Consider some of the items over which a person may exercise control: the ballerina over the position of her limbs, the swimmer over his breath, the pianist over his instrument, the pilot over his aircraft, the drill sergeant over his platoon. Control is varied: people may be in control of instruments of themselves (their bodies), of other people. But in all these cases there is the common core of power to produce desired results that is characteristic of control. The conception of someone’s having control over something, or conversely, of something being under somebody’s control, is prominent and pervasive in everyday life. Confronted by a moving vehicle or a whirring piece 37

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of machinery, we may well want to know such things as: Who is in control? How effective is this control? How is this control exercised? Moreover, the conception of control has multiple philosophical involvements, and arises in a wide variety of philosophical contexts. It plays a significant role in moral philosophy and in jurisprudence, in setting limits to responsibility since one of the standard ways of rebutting blame or defeating recrimination is by establishing that what happened occurred “due to circumstances beyond one’s control.” It is important in philosophical psychology, because of its role in the characterization of action, since an action that one does—in contradistinction to something that one “just happens” to do (such as a reflex reaction)—is an item of behavior over whose occurrence one exercises control. It is involved in the logic of commands and imperatives, because a proper command cannot require of its addressee a response that does not lie within his control. And finally, the conception of control is important in the philosophy of science: in describing the workings of physical systems it is important to distinguish between the dependent and the independent variables of the equations descriptive of their mode of functioning, that is, between those (controlling) parameters which are basic in the causal situation because their variation initiates change, and on the other hand those (controlled) parameters which respond to variations in the former.1 More important yet, an understanding of this concept is bound up with a clear conception of the very nature of science—for it is a commonplace that “control over nature” is one of the definitive tasks of the scientific enterprise, and, to be clear about this, one must obviously first understand just what control is all about. It is thus clear that the idea of control has a prominent place in a widely differentiated group of philosophical settings. A correct understanding of this concept of control will have relevance throughout the immense range of issues. OUTCOME ISSUES The concept of the outcome of an exercise in control is surprisingly convoluted. For our acts generally set in train a causal cascade of consequences whose description requires a complex developmental narrative. Consider, for instance, the following sequence • • • • •

the agent pulls the trigger the revolver fires the bullet flies the victim is shot the victim is disabled

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• the ransom money cannot be delivered by him • the kidnappers are enraged • their abductee is killed All of these terms are “outcomes” of the initial act, although only some of them will recede outside the agent’s awareness let alone his intentions. This of course means that causal responsibility and moral responsibility are going to be rather different things. From this standpoint, the acts of agents will involve different ranges of outcomes: • the actually possible outcomes. (For instance, Heads or Tails with the tossing of a coin.) • the envisioned outcomes as the agent sees them. (Here a certain possibility may never have occurred to the agent. Or he may contemplate an outcome that is not really possible—as when the addressee of his letter is already dead.) • the intended outcomes that the agent has in mind. Control is always control over something: it is by nature always aspectival. Thus for example it may address: • • • • •

the location of the patient the position of the door the setting of a dial the orientation of one’s hand the pointing of a pencil

Of course a controller may exercise control over several aspects of a controlled object. In this context we may adopt the idea of “degrees of freedom” in control over an object to designate the various (independent) respects in which the controlled object is in the controller’s power. Control will accordingly depend critically upon how this outcome range is specified. Thus in a game of “Pick-a-number between 23 and 29” the agent has control over whether the number is odd or even but not over whether is a prime or not. WHO HAS CONTROL The distinction between having control and exercising (asserting) it must be carefully heeded. The driver has control of his car, but when distracted

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refrains from exercising it. The pilot has control of the plane but may delegate it to the autopilot system. Control might be exercised not by an intelligent agent but by an inanimate device of some sort—a thermostat, for example, or an autopilot. Control by sensor activated automata is still control. This sort of thing is nowadays leaping into greater prominence with the onset of the self-driving car. Moreover, natural laws can exert control over the condition of physical systems as is the case of gravity in astrophysics or entropy in thermodynamics or metabolic operations in organisms. Consider a concrete example of the potential usefulness of such an inquiry. If it were to turn out, upon careful scrutiny, that the notion of “control,” properly speaking, involved very rigid requirements, and were properly applicable only under very restrictive conditions, then we might well not want to press very hard in ethics upon the dictum that one cannot be responsible for something outside of one’s sphere of control. For the principle that one is not responsible for that which is “due to circumstances beyond one’s control” is in intent and purport of a rather narrow range of application, so that this avenue of excuse should have to be blocked off in many cases, which would not be the case if the domain of what lay “beyond one’s control” were very pervasive. Direct control by an operator is control exercise by this operator itself: indirect control is control delegated by him to subordinates and intermediaries. The witting and deliberation exercise of control require a personal agent, an intelligent being. Many difficult and complex issues are raised by the question of what such beings have or can bring under control. Here is just one of them: the nature of the agent who exercises control. Under normal circumstances it can certainly be said that I am in control of my bodily movements (and perhaps even to some extent of my thoughts). But what answers to the “I” here: Is it not somehow a specifiable part of myself? Not at all: I do these things, to be sure, they are all “under my control.” (Think of the familiar expression “self-control.” Where there is control there must be a controller.) But the “I” here is myself, not a part of me, and the controlling self is indivisible! There is surely no homunculus-like “inner man” or “self” that guides my body (or thoughts?!) as the helmsman steers his ship. (Shades of Descartes and the Gilbert Ryle’s “Ghost in the Machine”!) It might be objected: If control is, as you say, indivisible, how could the one make sense of the (perfectly meaningful) locution: “He lost control of himself”? We reply as follows: since nobody would question that this locution is meaningful, the only live question is what it means. Surely we are not required to think in terms of a part of him (his so-called inner self) losing control of the rest. Rather, the point of the locution is simply that he (that entire indivisible controller, as we see it) is just not in a position to

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control the things that he usually controls (his words, or body-movements, or the like). A person can not only possess but even exercise control without being aware of it. In walking about in sunlight you control over your shadow’s movements without giving the least thought to the matter and quite unaware of it. But even when control is being exercised wittingly it may not be asserted willingly and voluntarily. Think here of the bank manager who opens the safe under duress. CONTROL: FULL VS. PARTIAL: POSITIVE VS. NEGATIVE In general terms, control—full control—is the capacity to intervene in the course of events so as to be able both to make something happen and to preclude it from happening, this result being produced in a way that can be characterized as in some sense intended or planned or foreseen. Control thus calls for the possibility of causal participation (“intervention”)2 in the course of events (“to make something happen or preclude it”) which can be exercised both positively (“to make happen”) and negatively (“to preclude from happening”). Control is a matter of potential, of capability, or capacity. Thus, the usual distinction between potentiality and actuality must be maintained. What the controller can do if he chooses is the essential consideration. This explains the aptness of the locution “He thought he had control over R, but he didn’t.” The difference between having control and exercising it must be recognized, the latter being the actualization of the potentiality represented by the former.3 When only one part of these two requisite capacities is at hand, we have to do with what is but one incomplete aspect of control. Thus (merely) negative control over a result is the capacity of assuring its not happening, though possibly not that of assuring its happening. Conversely, (merely) positive control is the capacity of assuring its happening, though possibly not that of assuring its non-happening. A person who can dispose over a necessary condition for a result has negative control over it, and one who can dispose over a sufficient condition has positive control: for full control both a necessary and a sufficient condition of the result’s being realized must be at his disposal. In control situations a certain tightness of fit between the controller’s actions and the controlled result is required. The connection must be systematic and secure. In a physical system (e.g., a light operated by a switch) the needed connecting linkage is underwritten by natural laws. In systems

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involving humans (e.g., the conductor’s control over his orchestra or the sergeant’s control over his platoon) the connecting linkage is underwritten by social practices involving laws, regulations, agreements, customs, sanctions, and so on. The linkage of necessary and sufficient determinability of control is generally based on physiconomological connections on the one hand or the somewhat larger but still effective connections of the “laws” of social transactions upon the other. Consider the following apparatus:

Suppose that two different controllers are involved here: that Mr. A can regulate the setting of Spigot l and Mr. B that of Spigot 2. Note that neither controller has full control over the outflow—that is, over the presence or absence of an outflow. Each exercises negative control over the outflow (i.e., each can, singlehandedly, determine that there will not be any outflow). And together they exercise positive control, and therefore they conjointly exercise full control in our specified sense. On one common view of the matter, we have the thesis: If someone can act so as to assure that (the result) R obtains, then he has control over R.

But this thesis is false according to our specified conception of control; or at any rate, it is a half-truth. For negative (i.e., preclusive) control must also be involved. Whereas the thesis claims full control on the basis of something sufficient to establish solely what we have designated as merely positive control. It might seem on first thought that the distinction between positive and negative control, being dichotomous, is confined in applicability to control situations of the simple ON-OFF variety of our faucet example. But this is not so. Positive control involves the power to assure a desired result, whereas negative control involves the power to prevent an undesired result. These pertain also to non-dichotomous cases. Consider a dial that can be set on any of a number of positions l, 2, 3, . . . . If X presides over a device that prevents the

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dial’s assuming any given position—without, however, stopping it at certain predictable settings—then X has negative control over the setting of the dial. (We have to suppose that the device works only once on each occasion—so that X cannot simply keep on actuating it until he ultimately gets what he wants.) Again, let the result at issue be “Setting the dial on setting No. 1,” and suppose further that (l) the dial gets immovably stuck at this setting, and (2) the dial has an insuperable tendency to slip into this setting of its own accord. Under these assumptions, X will have positive control over the specified result, but will lack negative control over it. CONTROL AND AGENCY Must control be exercised through intelligent agency (by men, animals, demons)? Seemingly not. A traffic light can control the flow of traffic; an electronic computer can control the output of an automated production line; a thermostat can control the functioning of a heating system. All these are instances of automatic control systems which govern (or “regulate”) the workings of some mechanism or man machine system. And in such cases something can be “under control” without there being an X (individual or group) with respect to which it can be said that this item is under X’s control. Such automatic control stands in seeming contrast to agent-control, which involves the overt intervention of agents in the exercise of control. Agent control (i.e., control by—not necessarily of—agents) is a special subcategory of control in general. We say that the traffic light controls the flow of traffic. But we also say that the spigot controls the flow of water. Is there any difference here? Of course there is. The role of the spigot is purely passive: The controller controls the flow of water by means of the spigot. The role of the traffic light is a more active one. No actual controller need be on the scene at all. (The people who planned, installed, and activated the traffic light may all be dead.) There need be no one of whom it can be said that he (or they) then and there control the traffic by means of the light. Consider the thesis that: All control is exercised by agents. This thesis must, as we have seen, be qualified in its full generality because of the existence of control of the automatic sort. For here the actual “exercise of control” may not be in the hands of controllers (i.e., agents) at all. Nevertheless, in control there is always an element of contrivance, of purposive design, of the use of artifacts. The concept is an essentially anthropomorphic one: control has as an inherent ingredient a certain capacity for deliberate agency on the controller’s part; it is bound up with what we can do

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if we choose. One can control the movement of the muscles of one’s hand, but not the movements of the muscles of one’s heart. Even when, as with the traffic light, the case is not one of agent control, so that there is seemingly not actually any controller in the picture, we would not be entitled to speak of “control” if the workings of the control device were not in a broad sense what the German calls planmaessig, hence the mention in our defining formula of intention and purpose, planning and foresight. This is the point at which the idea of the effectiveness of control comes in: as a measure of the extent to which the controller’s capabilities for the exercise of control accords with the purposes he has in mind (or that one generally has in mind in situations of the type at issue). To be “under control,” things must go along more or less as the controller plans them to. The traffic light gone berserk may still be said to determine the flow of traffic, but this flow is no longer a controlled one. The terminology of “control” has become inappropriate. If purely natural arrangements were involved, without any admixture of purpose or intention, I would propose speaking not of “control” but of “determination.” The movements of the moon determine the ebb and flow of the tidal waves (in our technical sense of this term): to say that the moon controls the tides is (on our view) to speak figuratively. In control, a controller must always be somewhere on the stage, no matter how much on the sidelines. One striking feature of control is that it can be exercised not only over things, but also over other agents, agents distinct from the controller himself. Moreover, it can be exerted at a distance, so that the controller, who determines what the agent will do, and the agent himself, who actually does whatever is being accomplished, are two distinct individuals. The controller himself need exercise no agency whatever, over and above whatever activities are requisite for his exercise of control. Apart from this, all of his “actions” can be vicarious. He can work through intermediaries, mechanical (as in “remote control”), or human (as an air traffic controller controls the movements of an aircraft through the pilot). MORE ON FULL AND PARTIAL CONTROL Control in general consists in the capacity to intervene on the course of events so as to create conditions that would not otherwise obtain. And here those “conditions” may only be that a certain outcome has a certain probability. This involves a contrast between control and influence. Full productive control puts the controller in a position to determine the outcome with fail-proof assurance. Influence, by contrast, enables an operator

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only to affect the probability of an outcome. The master of a small vessel in strong seas will have only limited control over the movement of the ship. At best he may exert influence. But even when you can only influence an outcome rather than control it, you are still in full control of how you employ your influence. The shooter fully controls the shooting of his arrow but only probabilistically controls its hitting its mark. You control the pulling of the trigger, and thereby normally also the firing of the gun. However, whether or not the bullet hits its mark and furthermore whether thereby the kind of damage that results is what you had envisioned are issues you do not actually control but only (strongly) influence. You can (presumably) control what you say. But what someone takes you to mean is something that you can, at best, influence. The thermostat’s operation controls the operation of the furnace; but it only influences the temperature of the house, seeing that someone may choose to leave the windows open. An agent has positive productive control over an outcome when he can ensure its realization, being able to act so as to guarantee this. An agent has negative or preventive control over an outcome when he can avert its realization, being able to act so as to prevent it. The combination of other of these modes of control over an outcome constitutes full control over it. Note that positive control over an outcome provides for negative control over all of its alternatives. Normal people ordinarily have full control over the things they say, although not over the things they think. But in exercising control the operator need not be an intelligent agent, or even an organism. Control via the volitions of a consciously purpose-pursuing controller is only a special case—albeit an especially important one. Control can be exercised by automata and artificial devices. A traffic light can control the flow of traffic; a thermostat can regulate the functioning of a climate control system; an electronic computer can control the functioning of an automated production line. An operation can be “under control” without its being possible to specify agency X with respect to which it can be said that the operation is under X’s control. Think of a wartime aircraft navigator who, as the person’s sole survivor, is frantically working the controls to get the hang of what they do so as to be able to bring the aircraft under control. There is no question that he “is in control of” the aircraft, since whatever the aircraft does is being done in response to his settings and resettings of the control apparatus. But until he masters the workings of the situation, so as to be able to coordinate this control at his disposal with his purposes, we would not say that he “has control over” the aircraft.4 There is an important difference between the former mode of

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“control in the causal order” and the latter mode of “control in the intentional order” to which we must return below. An agent has partial control over an outcome when he shares full control with others. When you have full control of the cold water faucet of your kitchen sink, but someone else controls the warm water faucet and someone else yet the outflow, your control over the water levels in the sink is only very partial. You presumably have full control of the trees planted in your apple orchard but only very partial control of the crop yield. For Mother Nature also has her share of the control here. This divided control might consist in control over one dimension of a multi-dimensional outcome. (Think, for example, of an Etch-a-sketch apparatus where one operator controls the vertical and the other the horizontal movement.) Let it be that Smith’s survival depends on his securing 100 grubniks. You cannot provide him with more than the 70 you possess. His fate in point of survival/non-survival is something you cannot control. And whatever you do may well prove to be irrelevant to the outcome. (For instance, Jones comes along and provides Smith with 120 grubniks.) So you are not really in control of Smith’s survival. All you can do here is to do your bit and exert such partial control as you possess. By giving Smith those 70 grubniks you have opened the door to other developments involving this. This is partial— that is, shared—control. Casting your vote for a candidate obviously affects his prospects of winning (by however small an amount). But it is something that stands worlds apart from actual control. Even where an agent has only partial control over a certain outcome there is always something (albeit something else) over which he has full control, namely whether or not actually to exercise that partial control. Partial control over something is always correlated with full control over an associated something else. Even if only many votes are needed and you have no control over who gets elected you still have full control over whom you vote for. Three sorts of situations can exist with respect to shared or divided control: (1) Positive productive control can be shared among several parties, with each making a partial contribution. (Think here of several bricklayers all working at parts of a large wall, or of an automobile production line.) (2) Negative (preventative) control can be shared among several parties, each competent enough to avert a certain outcome. (Think here of a bench of judges each empowered to issue an injunction that blocks some proceeding.) (3) A mixture of positive (productive) and negative (preventive) control. (Think here of two operators presiding over the water level in a bathtub, the one controlling the inflow and the other the outflow.)

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Absolute control over a range of alternatives exists when there is total positive and total negative control over each member of this range. However absolute control is a matter of exactly how that range is specified. Thus consider a situation with three possible outcomes A, B, and C. And let it be that agent X can determine whether or not A is realized but has no power over whether B or C should occur when A is not the case. Then X has absolute control with respect to its range A vs. not-A, but lacks such control with respect to the range A, B, C. RECIPROCAL CONTROL: FREE AND DEPENDENT VARIABLES Consider two piles of stones A and B—and suppose a controller to exercise control over: the relative size of A and B. The controller can thus determine, ex hypothesi, whether A > B, B > A, or A = B. However this, of course, is not the whole story. It wholly leaves out of account the issue of the modus operandi: the issue of the means and manner (processes, procedures, techniques, control devices, etc.) by which the controller effects his selection of one of these alternatively realizable states of the system under his control. For even after all of the preceding considerations have been settled, the question remains: How are we to suppose the controller exercises his control? There are four basic possibilities: the controller may be able (1) To add stones to A. (2) To take stones from A. (3) To add stones to B. (4) To take stones from B. These four items spell out alternative modes of operation in control of outcomes by specifying where the “points of control” lie at which the controller intervenes to exercise his mode of control. At this point an important issue comes to the fore. For only knowledge of the modus operandi enables us to specify the independent and the dependent “variables” (i.e., parameters at issue in the control situation). Consider a money transfer between two parties, as regards overall wealth, there is a situation of stasis: A’s wealth increases by a certain amount that is also exactly the amount that B’s decreases. They collaborate as it were in producing this outcome. But which agent is active and which

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passive? Is that wealth-conserving transfer the product of A’s paying B or the result of B’s robbing A? Is A’s fund-diminution the cause or the effect of B’s fund-increase. Which agent is the actively controlling factor and which is the passively controlled? That transfer itself does not answer the question. Or again, consider a teeter-totter. The overall total elevation of A and B is a constant. But is A’s going up the cause or the effect to B’s going down? Who is pushing up and who is pressing down? Who is the controller and who is the controlee? Again, the basic set-up does not answer the question. In such interactive cases the issue of directionality in the exercise of control—or in more technical terms, the question of which is the dependent and what the independent variable—remains open. There is—by hypothesis— coordination and collaboration in the production of an outcome, but the issue of the direction of the exercise of control in the face of overall coordination remains open. (A side remark: this issue is particularly germane to the problem of mindbrain coordination in studies of the relation between thought activity and brain physiology. For no matter how tight the coordination, the question of the direction of causality in a given case—of which is the dependent and which is the independent variable in the particular circumstance at hand—is something that constitutes an additional and by no means easy problem. For owing other things, it is perfectly possible that the direction of control changes from case to case.) As these deliberations indicate clarity regarding the conception of control required for drawing many significant distinctions: • • • • • • • • • •

positive/negative complete/partial categorical/probabilistic witting/unwitting deliberate/automatic voluntary/involuntary intentional/unintentional direct/vicarious (or delegated) conceptual/causal proximate/remote

With these matters clarified, let us consider some of the specifically ethical ramifications of the exercise of control that have important ethical ramifications. For it is clear that the operative detail of a control situation will interact delicately with the ethics of the matter.

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AGENT CONTROL AND VOLITION Does the exercise of agent control necessarily involve an “act of will”—does it require a decision or call for a voluntary step of some sort? Certainly not! A controller can exercise control out of habit (as the experienced driver controls his car). Control can be such that the controller exercises it automatically without the intervention of any consciously entertained “intentions,” and indeed without any overt thought whatsoever neither about means nor ends. Moreover, a controller may still be said to be “in control” (in a loose sense), when in actuality matters have got “beyond the point of control” so that the time for decision is behind him (as the man who takes sleeping pills at time 12:00 may no longer exercise control at 12:01 as to whether he is awake or asleep at 12:15). Or (most decisively) a controller may exercise the control he has in a wholly inadvertent way (e.g., by accidentally leaning on the control-lever). Consider the thesis: He brought the result R about intentionally ⟶ He produced R either through the exercise of positive control or a failure to exercise negative control.

(The arrow here represents entailment or necessary implication.) This thesis strikes me as essentially correct. But its converse, viz., He produced R either through the exercise of positive control or a failure to exercise negative control ⟶ He brought the result R about intentionally.

is certainly false. This is shown by the aforementioned case of a man who depresses a control-lever accidentally (say in saving himself from falling). Agent control calls for a capacity to produce specific results. This capacity must be such that it can be exercised intentionally.5 But it is seldom (or never) such that it can only be exercised in this way. In general, the exercise of (positive) control or failure to exercise negative control can be an inadvertent one. Therefore the exercise of control must not be equated with an act of will. The intentional exercise of control is inevitably a matter of agent control, but the exercise of agent control is not inevitably intentional. It is possible—and indeed important—to distinguish between control in the causal order on the one hand, and control in the intentional order upon the other. Consider the case of a man who works the levers of a machine, causing it to go through all sorts of gyrations, but who does not know what results the movement of those levers will effect. Does he control the motions of the machine—is he in control of it or not? In the causal order the answer is yes: his manipulations (and by hypothesis they alone) effect the changes that lead the machine to go

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through its motions. But in the intentional order the answer is no: although the machine does whatever it does in response to his manipulations, it may well not ever do anything that he “wants it to do.” In such a circumstance, his intentions have no bearing upon what goes on: he is “in control” only in the rudimentary, causal sense of the term. PARTIAL CONTROL VS. FULL CONTROL Whenever control is exercised conjointly by several controllers (as in the spigot example of Sect. 2 above) we shall say that each controller has partial control, or in such cases one may also speak of “divided control” or “shared control.” Partial control may be either positive or negative. If a safe can be opened only if each of three different men makes appropriate settings on distinct dials, then each has full negative control (i.e., each can prevent the safe’s opening), but every man has only partial positive control. By way of contrast, if several men all know the combination to the same safe, then each can exercise full positive control over the safe’s being open, but each only has partial negative control—since the others can all open it, and negative control only resides in the entire group. It might seem at first blush that all instances of partial control of something resolve into full control over an associated something else. Not “the door’s being open or not” (in the examples of the preceding paragraph), but “the dial’s being set on door-open or door-closed position.” Or, in the spigot example of Sect. 2, not “water flowing from the faucet” but “the spigot being set on flow-through position.” Let us consider this thesis: The possession of partial control (over something) is always correlated with the possession of full control (over an associated something else).

This control-resolution thesis is surely not correct. Our examples have been misleading in this regard because all of them still involve some type of full control over some result R. But consider the following example. Suppose that full control over something is vested in a three man committee under conditions of majority rule. Then its three members all have only partial control—negative or positive alike. Note that now none of the controllers has full control over anything that has to do with R as such. Of course it might be said that each one has full control over “how he exercises such control as he does have”—that is, in the present example, each one has control over “his own vote.” But to save the thesis by bringing this mode of “control” upon the tapis is to save it at the cost of a substantial evisceration. For the “associated something else” over which the controller exercises full control (viz., how

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he marks his ballot) is in such cases “associated” with the controlled item in so remote and tenuous a way as to empty the thesis at issue to the point of trivialization. INFLUENCE It is important to draw a distinction between partial control on the one hand, and what I propose—somewhat arbitrarily—to term influence upon the other.7 Essential in the idea of control is a condition of definiteness: the controller(s) can definitely make something happen or definitely preclude its happening. But there is also the prospect of what by way of contrast with control—we shall call influence, viz., the capacity to make something’s happening more likely or less likely. For example, the taking of vitamin pills may render it less probable that I shall contract a common cold. The pills do not give me control—not even incomplete control—over my catching colds: the connection is merely one of influence in the specified sense (i.e., taking the pill “influences” whether or not I shall catch cold). When partial control is shared with a great number of other (partial) controllers, so that the aspect of control is very thinly attenuated, it is plausible to regard the matter in the light of influence rather than in terms of control. (An example of this would be that of a voter in a very large electorate.) A paradigm example of the contrast can be given in terms of a “fixed” roulette wheel in a gambling house. We should speak of “control” if the house can select the specific outcome of the wheel, but if the house can merely affect the probability distribution of the outcome, without being able to determine any specific outcome, we should—in our terminology—have to speak of “influence” (rather than control). It might be objected: “You have no right to deny the rubric of ‘control’ to what you call ‘influence.’ This is merely a matter of somewhat arbitrary verbal legislation.” We reply: To some extent a decision about the use of words is involved, going beyond the mere explanation of existing usages. But the decision is not an arbitrary one—it has a basis in a genuine distinction based on a difference that has to be reckoned with in any event. We thus reply to the objector: “You are certainly free to apply to our ‘influence’ some such label as ‘weak control.’ What counts is the distinction at issue—which now for you becomes that between weak and strong control—the terminology is largely immaterial.” Although we have drawn a sharp distinction between influence and control, it should be recognized that the (deliberate) exercise of influence invariably involves doing something over which one has control (e.g., taking the cold pills), so that the use of this influence will have to be something over which one has control.

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DIRECT VS. INDIRECT CONTROL We are tempted to say that one has direct control over the light switch, the steering wheel, and the key, but only indirect control over the light, the wheels of the car, and the lock. The distinction here at issue must be scrutinized. We must see whether there is a distinct category of control situations where the exercise of control is direct. Just how would one characterize this matter of direct control? The best approach to the question proceeds by way of the distinction between direct and indirect control. Perhaps this distinction is to be drawn in this way—that one controls directly what one manipulates with one’s hands or other parts of the body, and indirectly whatever is controlled as a causal consequence of the exercise of direct control. But this conception of directness is highly problematic. Is direct control only exercised in immediate bodily contact? What about the person who wears gloves, or even whose hand is covered by a film of oil? And over what is this “immediate contact” variety of direct control exercised? Is only that part of the steering wheel in touch with one’s hands manipulated directly and the rest of the wheel indirectly? Moreover one would have to construe “manipulation” here in terms of intentional bodily movement. But even this will not serve, for what if I move my one hand, held limp (or suppose paralyzed) with the other. Now if I push a stone along with my limp hand, it is certainly “moved by a bodily contact resulting from an intentional bodily movement”—and thus the motion would be directly controlled on the definition at issue (unlike the case in which I push the stone along with my gloved hand when motion would be controlled indirectly!). Examine the following situations:

Consider the situation in the middle picture. Do we want to say that the person who controls the faucet controls directly the water level in the left-hand tank and indirectly that in the right-hand tank? But then why not say in the situation of the first picture that the controller controls directly the water level in the left-hand side of the tank, where the water pours in, and only indirectly that in the right-hand side of the tank? And if that’s what we want to say in the

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case of the situation of the middle picture, then consider the right-hand picture in which (we shall assume) the same controller controls both spigots, and the middle spigot is (by hypothesis) set at the OPEN position. Would one want to say that here in contradistinction to the situation in the middle picture—the controller exercises direct control over the left-hand tank but only indirect control over the right-hand tank? And if one does agree to make this contrast, how is this to be justified? Does the mere presence of the second spigot serve to place the first item of control in the direct category, and the second in the indirect? Difficulties of the sort we have been considering strongly militate on behalf of the following thesis: The question “Is there anything we control directly in an absolute sense?” is to be answered in the negative. “Direct control” is not an absolute category, but half of the contrast-pair relatively direct or indirect, exactly as there is no category of the long, but only the relative contrast-pair long/ short.

On this view direct control is not a special type of control, but is a contrastrelative description, contradistinguishing one mode of control from another related mode. The driver’s control of his hands is direct as compared with his control over the wheel but this is direct in comparison with his control over the steering column. And this direct in comparison with his control over the orientation of the wheels, and this direct in comparison with his control over the motion of the car, and so on. Directness of control is a comparative, and not an absolute matter. There is, however, one needed modification or qualification of this position. Consider saying that: He exercised his control over A (say “the flow of water from the faucet”) by exercising control over B (say “the setting of the spigot”).

In such cases where control over one thing is in the controller’s possession in virtue of his control over something else, we shall speak of instrumental control and say that A is controlled through the instrumentality of B. Now consider an intentional bodily movement, such as my moving my hand from this position to that (in the “normal” way, not by pushing it about with the other hand, etc.) I (intentionally) steer the car “by intentionally moving the wheel” but there is no distinguishable action A such that I move my hand “by intentionally performing the action A.” In the causal order, the abovementioned locution certainly remains applicable: I exercise my control over the position of my hand by exercising control over (say)

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the tension of my muscles: my muscles are—in point of ontological fact— the instruments by which I move my hand. But in the intentional order, the abovementioned locution is inapplicable: I did not readjust my muscles in order to move my hand; I did not intentionally do anything else “in order to” move my hand, I just moved my hand. I do not “operate” my body by working the buttons of a machine-like contrivance. One may manipulate something with one’s body but one does not (normally) manipulate one’s body with anything. There is an important contrast between the things I do to the spigot (I turn it) and those I do with the spigot (I make the water flow from the faucet). But while there are many things I can do with a voluntary motion of my hand, there is nothing (apart from moving it as such) that I (intentionally) do to my hand in voluntarily moving it. In the case of intentional bodily or mental changes it is undoubtedly the case that control is exercised without any sort of instrumental intermediaries, so that the pattern he exercises his control over A by deliberately (intentionally) exercising control over B is inapplicable.

Consequently, there is a clearly defined category of the noninstrumentally controlled—viz., intentional bodily and mental changes—which underwrites a hard-and-fast distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental control (in the intentional order). Now if somebody wants to draw the direct/indirect distinction in these instrumental terms one cannot but take the view that he is free to do so, recognizing that what is “direct control” for him is to be equated with what we have characterized as being control that is noninstrumental in the intentional order. (Our view of this procedure is that it draws an important distinction in an infelicitous way.) The distinction between the causal and the intentional order is an important one. Of the traffic light gone berserk, we may still say that it “regulates”—or, as we said above, “determines”—the traffic in some way—“controlling” it in the causal order, even though it is no longer “under control” in the intentional order. THE HIDDEN CONTROLLER One of the unfortunate effects of the conception of an absolute category of direct control is that this is readily construed to lead to what we may term “The Problem of the Retreat to the Inner Man.” This problem arises for someone who thinks that there is a definite core of the directly controlled whence indirect control emanates outwards into the exterior. But consider the following diagrammatic picture:

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Where are we to locate the core of absolute control: where is the inner homunculus that “ultimately” controls my doings? In my mental life—which, in point of fact, I “control” in only a rather strange way, if at all? In my (intentional) bodily movements—with all of the difficulties already enumerated? Or perhaps in a part of my body, as with O. W. Holmes’s rather bizarre theory, represented by his celebrated definition of an act as “a willed muscular contraction.”8 On all such views there is a sector of a person that is, somehow, “in control” of the rest: some part of a person is controlled which operates the rest of him the way the operator operates a machine. The search for the “inner man” (braincum-nerves, muscles, and skeleton) who alone exercised direct control is a fruitless and quixotic quest.9 THE EXERCISE OF CONTROL An essential feature of the conception of control is represented by the following thesis: Control is inevitably control of something: control must have as its object something or other that is controlled.

We do not propose to argue explicitly for this contention. The reader may devise for himself a proof by examples, by thinking of some paradigm control situations and examining them for concrete substantiation of the thesis. We must examine the question of whether control can be exercised over people as well as over things. The answer is, on our view, negative, albeit a qualified negative. On our—admittedly somewhat technical—conception of control, one cannot exercise control, that is, full control, over the voluntary actions of other people, because such control is always shared with them. This means that partial control is always at issue here. Nevertheless the thesis All control must be direct personal control: One person cannot vicariously control the actions of another.

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is to be rejected. Control thins out in the full/partial contrast in such a way that one person can share in the control of certain activities of another. It is obviously true that one person can control (i.e., control fully) certain things about other people that are distinct from their actions.10 A hospital technician might, for example, be in a position to control the location of an unconscious patient, and thus our qualifications. People can be fully controlled only insofar as they are not merely “are treated as” but actually are—things, like the man in the science-fiction story whose brain is wired into a controlling machine. (And then the things “they do” are not to be characterized as “their actions.”) The complexity of the situation is implicit in the question: Does the conductor of an orchestra control anything, and if so, what? Certainly he does not fully control the playing of the instruments—here, he at most exercises influence or has shared control. But what he does control is the music produced by the players: in determining when, what, and how they play. It is not the instruments but the orchestra over which a conductor exercises control. The question “Who is in charge?”—which can certainly be raised with respect to an orchestra or a team of workmen is probably in certain cases a more appropriate rephrasing of the question “Who is in control?” Locutions such as “The revolutionaries have seized control of affairs in Ruritania” have to be construed along these lines. MODUS OPERANDI This brings us to an important quasi-technical conception of what we shall designate as modus operandi, arrogating this venerable terminology to our present purposes. Consider two piles of stones A and B—and suppose a controller to exercise control over: the relative size of A and B.

The controller can thus determine, ex hypothesi, whether A > B, B > A, or A = B. Here control is in its role of a selection mechanism. We have a system (the two piles) which can be in several alternative states: (S1)  A > B, (S2)  B > A, (S3)  A = B And the controller is in the position to select (determine, “control”) which state the system is to be in. But this, of course, is not the whole story. It wholly leaves out of account the issue of the modus operandi: the issue of

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the means and manner (processes, procedures, techniques, control devices, etc.) by which the controller effects his selection of one of these alternatively realizable states of the system under his control. For even after all of the preceding considerations have been settled, the question remains: How are we to suppose the controller exercises his control? There are four basic possibilities: the controller may be able (1) to add stones to A (2) to take stones from A (3) to add stones to B (4) to take stones from B With control the modus operandi is an important, integral part of the control situation. A command, for example, may well be such that its recipient is not only directed to bring to realization a certain result-state in a matter over which he has control, but may also lay down the modus operandi— specifying the way (means, manner, timing, etc.) by which this result is to be achieved.11

WHAT CAN BE UNDER ONE’S CONTROL? It would appear on first sight that many sorts of things can be under one’s control. The beginning of a list might be as follows: other people, instruments and instrumentalities, states of affairs (e.g., the setting of a dial), and the realization of a proposition (e.g., whether “The light is on” is to be true or false). Consider the following set-up. In a room with an uncurtained window there is a lighting fixture worked by a switch over which Mr. X exercises complete control. The question now arises: Does Mr. X control the quantity of illumination in the room? He certainly does not have full control over this. Nor does he have partial control in our technical sense of control sharing since he does not share full control with any other controllers (but at best with the sun and moon). Nor is the matter a probabilistic one, so that the situation cannot be described in terms of influence in our technical sense. But still, undeniably, Mr. X is in a position to affect decisively and alter systematically the quantity of illumination at issue. How then is this to be put in terms of control? Quite simply as follows: Mr. X controls the quantity of extra-natural illumination in the room (“extra-natural” illumination in the sense of that apart from whatever illumination is provided by sunlight or moonlight). Thus to make our terminology applicable we have to shift the

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specification of what it is that is controlled away from “the quantity of illumination in the room.” For with respect to this item this control parameter as I shall call it—Mr. X exercises neither control nor influence, according to the construction we have placed upon these conceptions. But this example does present a situation we have not heretofore considered—namely that of full control of a certain component or constituent of an aggregate result. For this case we may introduce the terminology of fragmentary control. The man who writes on a moving train controls his pencil in this fragmentary way—the pencil moves in part according to the willed movements of his hand and fingers (over which he has control) and in part according to the lurchings of the train (with which he has nothing to do). Fragmentary control is another mode of control that is incomplete or “partial” in a broader sense, in addition to the particular type of partial (i.e., shared) control considered above. The controller who, as it were, “shares” his control not with other controllers but with “natural forces” may be said to be in fragmentary control over the result at issue, provided that his role in its realization is a sufficiently prominent one. Control must always have an object, but it invariably relates to an aspect of this object as for example: • • • • •

the location of the patient the position of the door the setting of a dial the orientation of one’s hand the pointing of a pencil

Of course a controller may exercise control over several aspects of a controlled object. Whenever we say that X is in control of a thing or that the thing is “under X ’s control,” it is always in fact such partial or aspective power over this thing that is at issue. In this context we may introduce the idea of “degrees of freedom” in control over an object to designate the various (independent) respects in which the controlled object is in the controller’s power. All the same, the following thesis deserves stress: The only things that can be under one’s control in the strict sense are processes (or: “courses of events”) by which different states in the controlled objects are produced.

Strictly speaking, what can be under one’s control are not “other people” (simpliciter), but “the activities of other people” (or certain of their activities); not simply instruments, but the workings of instruments; not simply states of affairs, but the course of events by which the state of affairs comes

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to be realized; not propositions, but the actions through which they come to be rendered true or false. The point is best made by a survey of characteristic examples. Thus, let us reexamine the above list of controlled aspects of an object (states of affairs). The hospital orderly who controls “the location of the patient” presides over the movements that shift him from one location to another. The operator who controls the setting of a dial effects the turning that rotates it from one setting to another, the writer who controls the pointing of the pencil carries out its redirection from one pointing to another, and so on. Throughout there is reference to a process that brings about transitions or constancies in the state of the controlled object. The situation is still further complicated by the existence of the “controls” of mechanisms, that is, the parts of the controlled devices through the manipulation of which the controller effects readjustments in the parameters of control. It is by “working the controls” that the controller operates such things as airplanes and cranes. And such devices are spoken of as being “out of control” when, at a time when the machine continues to function in some manner, it is impossible for the controller to exercise control over it.12 In sum, it is my contention that, in speaking of “control,” what is at issue in the foreground or background is always the exercise of control through a certain process, that is, the action or activity through which the controller effects his control over the controlled object in the relevant respects. This line of thought again emphasizes the need for the conception of a modus operandi (along the lines specified in the preceding section) characterizing the way in and means by which the alterations involved in the exercise of control are produced by the controller. According to the point of view advocated here, the full presentation or, as I shall call it, the “exposition” of a control situation in general involves, apart from the controller, four further elements: (1) the object under control (e.g., the window, the lever) (2) the control parameter, that is, the aspect of the object control over which the controller exercises control (the height of the window, the angular position of the lever) (3) the control alterations, that is, the changes (or constancy-maintenance) in the control parameter that are put into effect in the exercise of control (i.e., by raising—or lowering—of the window, or by the motion of the lever from one position to another) (4) the modus operandi, that is, the set of procedures specifying the means and manner by which the controller effects the control alterations. The full description of a control situation evidently requires specifications of all these different elements (in addition, of course, to the necessary

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information about the controller). All the same, (4) is in a position rather different from (1)–(3). For (1)–(3) are all essential to the fact that control is exercised, (4) deals with the additional issue of/how control is exercised. If one of the items (1)–(3) is lacking, we do not even really know what the control situation is that is being talked about. On the other hand, if item (4) alone is lacking, we know full well what the control situation at issue is—we simply lack an important item of information about it. For it is perfectly possible in principle at any rate, to have envisaged control situations in which (1)–(3) are fixed, but (4) differs radically, in that the control at issue is effected by a very different modus operandi. (Think, for example, of the lever-position controllable by the different means outlined in Sect. 6.) In the end one must answer the question: “What can be under someone’s control?” in terms of (1)-(3), as in the thesis: What is under one’s control invariably comes down to the alteration of a “control parameter,” i.e., the readjustment (or constancy retention) of an aspect of the object with respect to which control is said to be exercised.

Control over an object is never exercised over the object as such but over some aspect (feature, characteristic) of the object. Control is never unqualifiedly absolute. Control of something is always control over it in respect to such and such (its motions, movements, functioning, etc.). Nothing can ever be under one’s control in every respect. Even when it is under his “full control” a driver cannot make a motor vehicle go sideways, upwards, and so on. The normal person may be said to “control his hand,” that is, its position and location over a fairly large range of variation, but not (say) its temperature.13 There can be but a restricted number of “degrees of freedom,” corresponding to the particular aspects of the controlled object over which the controller exercises his control: certain parameters are not “control parameters” at all—the controller will simply lack control altogether with respect to them. CONTROL, RESPONSIBILITY, AND ETHICS It is a common contention in moral philosophy and ethics that one is responsible for everything that is under one’s control, although one is responsible only for things that are under one’s control. In contradiction to this contention, I want to put forward the thesis: Control (even full control) is neither necessary nor sufficient for responsibility.

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Control is not sufficient for responsibility, because one may have control, but exercise it involuntarily or inadvertently. (We have already met with illustrative examples of this.) The most, it seems, that can plausibly be upheld with regard to sufficiency is the contention: The autonomous, self-motivates14 exercise of control always is a sufficient condition for responsibility.

In this weakened form, the sufficiency part of the thesis at issue seems to be secure against objection. Moreover, control (even partial control) is not necessary for responsibility at any rate as matters seem to be constituted in this world, for responsibility can (quite appropriately) be put conventionally upon someone who does not personally exercise control (in our demanding sense). The “sphere of responsibility” can be specified so as to extend beyond the area of actual control. For example, responsibility can be extended to an area where the powers at issue do not extend beyond what we have characterized as influence. Think, for example, of the military commander who is “held responsible” for everything that goes on “within his command”—even though many or most of these goings-on do not actually fall within his overt control (at any rate in our rigoristic sense of the term). Other types of cases where there can be responsibility in the absence of the voluntary exercise of control can also be instanced. Think of the intoxicated driver who is “in control” of his vehicle even though he does not have control of it. The law unhesitatingly holds him responsible for mishaps that arise even when he no longer has control of himself (and a fortiori of his vehicle). (Of course, there was a presumptive “point of control” at the earlier juncture when he let himself become intoxicated. Where there is responsibility, control must be somewhere upon the scene. The point is, however, that this need not be in the proximity of the transaction to which responsibility is attached.) Only beings capable of witting and willing control over outcomes—and so only agents of a certain level of intelligence—fall within the sphere of moral assessment. Machines and lower animals can cause harm but not do wrong. But we humans are in another category: we can control outcome by belief, intention, and action. Even if you are causally responsible for an untoward outcome, you are nevertheless free from moral culpability if you had no effective control over the outcome. (Your own inadvertent fall knocked him over and did him harm.)

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there was no reason for you to think that this outcome would or might ensue from what you did. (You administered to him the medication which, unbeknownst to you, had been poisoned by someone else.) while you realized that this outcome might ensue, you neither expected not intended for it to do so. (You administered a situationally mandated medical procedure which—you fully realize—may occasionally prove fatal.) The point is that in all such cases the negative outcome causally produced by you was nevertheless beyond your witting and intended control. The idea that one is morally responsible only for those outcomes that are under one’s control was central in the ethical theory of the philosopher Kant. And it led him to insist that, since in this difficult world the agent does not generally control outcomes, it is not these that are pivotal for moral assessment but rather intentions. Whether the resulting outcome of my action is good or evil (whether it kills or cures) depends on too many “external” factors over which I have no control. But my intention or motivation is wholly up to me. And on this basis Kant argued that it is intention and motivation that is the make-or-break factor in assessing the moral worth of what people do. The idea that an agent is responsible only for those eventuations that lie within his control is no more than a first approximation that needs to be qualified in many ways. For one thing, a certain result may be beyond an agent’s control only because he himself has conveniently put it there. One could certainly not issue him a moral free pass for that. Or again think of the intoxicated driver who is “in control” of his vehicle even though he does not have control of it. The law unhesitatingly holds him responsible for mishaps that arise even when he no longer has control of himself (and a fortiori of his vehicle). (Of course, there was likely a “point of control” at an earlier juncture when he let himself become intoxicated. Even the exercise of mere influence that facilitates a misstep is reprehensible as for example lending a vengeful maniac a gun. Even the mere failure to exercise negative control to avert some mishaps that you control (or even mere influence) should have prevented is a proper occasion for moral reprehension. Circumstances where there can be moral culpability without actual control include situations arising: When that lack of control is countervailed by the existence of influence that makes the misstep more likely without actually creating it. (E.g., by letting it be known that one’s neighbor keeps his house-key under to doormat.) When that lack of control is caused by the agent himself exactly to avert responsibility. (E.g., by leaving his town deliberately to avoid a possible call to duty.)

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When that lack of control exists but the agent thinks otherwise. (E.g., when the antidote has already been administered and the agent’s doing so rendered irrelevant.) When that lack of control is the product of irresponsible delegation. (E.g., the parents who have left a determinably incompetent babysitter in charge.) When my action created an otherwise avoidable negativity for someone which—while I neither envisioned nor intended it—was such that I would to have been so aware but was improperly negligent. Thus overall the issue of moral culpability is complicated, murky, and situation-sensitive. Then too there is the situation of a negative outcome being the product of the conjoint collaborative productive agency of several collectively controlling agents. Here the full quota of moral culpability falls upon each and every one of them alike. Moreover, matters must be handled differently when the fat in the fire is not one’s own. You are free to manage your own risks, but must be very guarded if those negativities can fall on someone else. (Risky situations are an exception to the rule that one should treat others as one would wish to be treated by them. You might well wish that others would expose you to duly favorable risks, but are not yourself morally free to do this with them.) An interesting situation arises with collective action when a group is responsible for something without any member bearing individual responsibility for it. Thus, for aught he knows to the contrary, any given member of the firing squad might be only shooting blanks. Distributively no one member is in full control of the execution. Any particular individual member of the firing squad might be making a zero contribution to the outcome. But collectively the group is fully in control and any voluntarily acting mention of it is accordingly responsible. Suppose that there are three agents (A, B, C) each of which can set their switch at on (+) or off (−). They act independently and none of them knows what the others are doing. If exactly two of them are on +, then all is well, but otherwise there will be some disaster. Here every agent is in the same boat. So each can reason as follows: My two companions can produce four possible outcomes, namely ++, +−, +, and −−-. Now if I choose +, then in two of the four cases all will be well. But if I choose −, then this will be so in only one of these four cases. Hence I must chose +. But by parity of reasoning the other two agents will arrive at the same conclusion and disaster is then assured.

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On the other hand it the agents forego making a definite choice and say to themselves: to maximize the chance of averting disaster I must use a

mixed/problematic approach. And here a bit of calculation shows that if I pick + with probability 2/3 (add so − with probability 1/3)—and if my colleagues do exactly the same—then we will have a chance of 4/9 of averting disaster. In such cases, randomization is the best way to proceed. The clear lesson here is that sometimes it is best to forego definitive control over outcomes and simply “roll the dice” instead of exercising control to decide matters probabilistically. However, delegating a decision to a random device does not cancel responsibility. (The situation of a positive outcome is discussable.15) And so, various qualifying complexities intervene between having control over a bad outcome and bearing responsibility for it. In neither direction is the relationship straightforward. You can be in control of a bad outcome without bearing any moral responsibility for it. And conversely you can be morally responsible for outcomes you do not control. The issue of control over improper outcomes poses special difficulties for moral evaluation. Thus consider a situation where you have to decide between doing something (X) and doing nothing. However if you do nothing, then something bad will occur, while if you do X something rather less bad will result. Accordingly, we here confront a conflict between two plausible moral imperatives. • Act so as to minimize the bad. • Act so as to minimize the bad that results from your actions. In effect we have here a conflict between two ethical doctrines: a consequentialism of maximizing the good and/or minimizing the bad in the one hand, and on the other a deontology of dutiful avoidance of deliberately creating negative outcomes. Examples of this sort illustrate that in moral deliberation there is a place for taking collateral damage in stride and accepting “the lesser of the evils.”16 Thus in the Display 1 situation the agent has to choose between having a clear

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conscience for himself and keeping people from greater harm. In the circumstances, there is no way to have it all. And this means that a promising case can be made for questioning the otherwise plausible idea that the deliberate production of bad outcomes is always morally reprehensible. All an all, then, the ethics of control is complex and convoluted, posing challenging issues throughout the range of its philosophical involvements.

LOSING CONTROL Queen Victoria carried no money, she never opened a door for herself, and she never turned on the lights to brighten a dark room. Neither do we. All such things were done by servants for her and for us by electronics. Without servants, Victoria would have stood helpless before the ordinary business of life. And we are well along to getting ourselves into the same position. For we are well along in the process of losing control over how things work in our world, increasingly delegating control of significant operations to devices whose functioning we ourselves neither control personally nor understand. Our bank deposits, our telephone interactions, and our burglar alarms are all automated. Our heating systems or lightening systems are controlled not by us but by electronic devices. The modern bathroom controls its various functions by sensors rather than knobs or handles that we ourselves operate. Our airplanes—and soon or automobiles—are directed by automated substitutes for pilots and drivers. Increasingly we delegate control of things to the operations of electronic surrogates whose functioning we neither manage nor understand. The control of our personal affairs has become increasingly impersonal.

NOTES 1. For example, when applying Boyle’s gas law P = T X V in the usual pistonin-cylinder case, is the piston being held fixed and the cylinder being heated (V : constant. T = the independent variable, P = the dependent variable). Or is the piston being drawn out with the temperature kept constant (T = constant. V = the independent variable. P = the dependent variable)? 2. The concept of intervention is a complicated one, but we shall not stop to explicate it here. What is principally at issue is a long story regarding the formula of “how things would have gone but for. . . .” 3. It must be noted that control (positive or negative) may be exercised in some cases not so much by any “action” as by inaction, omission, and inactivity (e.g., a failure to exercise a veto).

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4. Applying this distinction, we would say of the drunken driver that he is in control of his vehicle even though he does not have control over it. 5. I can think of only one puzzle case or borderline situation. Under hypnosis, a person can, in response to instructions, produce certain specific results (e.g., long-term recall and even shutting off bleeding in parts of his body) over which he cannot exercise intentional control under normal conscious circumstances. Would it be appropriate to say that the hypnotized person (or his hypnotist—or even the two combined) exercises “control” over these results? I doubt it. But if somebody does opt for this way of putting the matter then he does to this extent, depart from the thesis at issue. However, when a person’s mind is in a sufficiently nonstandard state (through drugs or hypnosis, etc.) one tends to think of him as having altogether stepped outside of the intentional order. (Of course, it is not easy to implement this conception because of its reliance on the vague idea of “sufficient” nonstandardness.) Thus we would ourselves want to say that the hypnotized man has control over these results in the causal order, albeit not in the intentional. (The distinction between these two orders will be developed below.) And we would go on to say that when something is only controlled in the causal but not at all in the intentional order, then it would not be appropriate to speak of “agency” and of “agent control.” 6. Applying this distinction, we would say of the drunken driver that he is in control of his vehicle even though he does not have control over it. 7. Our use of this term is technical—it has only a remote connection with the standard usage of one person’s having influence with (over, upon) another. In ordinary usage, when X can get Y to do what he wants, he may be said to influence Y if the means by which he does this are friendship, cooperation, and permission; but he will be said to control Y if the means include threats, pains, or penalties. Here, the difference between control and influence is made to turn on the agent’s motivation. He acts in response to the controller’s instructions because of such and such considerations. The difference between influence and control is made to turn on the nature of these considerations. 8. This is so notwithstanding the fact that we have the common locutions of “selfcontrol” and “loss of self-control.” 9. The use of this term is deliberate: hypnotic behavior, and so on, is not at issue, for here control is obviously possible. 10. It must be granted that the idea of “his action” operative here is a quasi-technical one, on which (say) the post-hypnotic activities of a man may well turn out not to be “his actions” at all (viz., if he actually has no control—or even influence—over them). 11. A modus operandi under the heading of means (rather than manner) may be lacking in those control situations which we have characterized as noninstrumental in Sect. 7 above. 12. Thus a machine’s being “out of control” is a very special type of malfunction, not simply a breakdown of any sort (let alone a complete stoppage). Nor does it necessarily come about when the “controls” break down in such a way that the controller cannot exercise control in the usual, customary way, for he might be able to “bring it under control” by extraordinary means.

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13. To say that something is “uncontrollable” (the barking of a dog, the pitching of a ship) generally indicates not a complete absence of control, but rather the lack of a mode of control that is usually available under more normal circumstances. 14. The terms “deliberate” or “intentional” would be too weak here because of the possibility of duress. 15. The trustee for an orphan’s legacy bets the whole thing on the ponies. If he loses, the full share of blame is his. If he wins—and wins big!—does he get any credit? Is there any diminution of the obvious moral reprehension of having put his charge’s interest at risk? A messy question—this! 16. The situation is reminiscent of the Principle of Double Effect in moral theology. For in the choice of “Doing X” the agent variably accepts the doing of something bad to avoid a greater evil. Of course the issue of how far this goes—of how bad an action can prove acceptable—still remains untouched. The comparative determination of which evil is the lesser is something far from straightforward.

Chapter 4

Reality’s Intelligible Order

RATIONAL CREDENCE Our understanding of Reality comes via what we know or at any rate believe about it. There is, of course, no real point in accepting a belief that is not true seeing that only true belief corresponds to the reality of things and that it is in Reality that we move and have our being. But unfortunately we have no way to find our way to the truth save (or except) via what we accept as such. There just is no direct, acceptance-free way to get there from here. “Don’t tell me only what you think to be true and accept as such, but rather what actually is true, independently of and apart from what you think or accept as such.” This is an impracticable injunction that is in principle impossible to obey. In the end, one deserves to accept something as true often made un or subconsciously, part of a complex venture based on a variety of determinative considerations. Claims and contentions do not come to us with Good Housekeeping seals of approval to guarantee their truth. Endorsing them by acceptance as true is invariably and unavoidably something that is up to us, something we do on our own account and on our own responsibility. And for us this is always a matter of deliberate or tacit decision—a decision which can be made sensibly or irrationally. But by what standards are we to assess a claim’s qualification for acceptance? To validate acceptance in a sensible and rationally appropriate way, we have to take three sorts of considerations into account: • The likelihood or substantive plausibility of the claim at issue. • The extent to which the available information provides evidentiation substantiate the claim at issue. • The reliability of the sources that speak for the claim at issue. 69

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Unfortunately these considerations need not agree by way of harmonizing with one another. A very plausible claim may emanate from a rather unreliable source. An inherently implausible claim may have a great deal of substantiating evidence in its favor. How, then, are we to proceed in the face of such a conflict of criteriological support? It all depends. There is, of course, no absolutely secure and fail-proof way of moving from plausibility to truth. Here as elsewhere, we simply have no alternative but to do the best we can manage in the circumstances. And the best that we can manage is to optimize on our explanation of experience toward ­estimating—or, if need be, conjecting—what the reality of the matter is. Suppose that separate highly reliable sources independently report that a highly unlikely event has occurred—a flash-flood, say, or a multiple murder. We would not hesitate here to prioritize reporter-reliability over reportimprobability. But then there are those other cases in which we could apply the Roman saying: “I would not believe this, even were it said by Cato himself.” Again, people will sometimes accept something that is highly probable even in the face of strong counterevidence. (Think here of cases that defeat the legal presumption that someone missing for seven years is dead.) But in other matters we could dismiss even seemingly well evidentiated claims in the light of inherent improbability. (Think here of sightings of the Loch Ness Monster or of flying saucers.) Then too, probability is no sure road to acceptability. Take a roulette wheel with 100 compartments. It is highly probable that our black ball will not end up in compartment 1, nor yet in compartment 2, and so on. But if we were to accept each of those probable denials, we will wind up with a sure falsehood. Moreover, attestation of well-informed sources and presumptive experts is also so sure way to truth. The history of science and learning is littered with episodes where our best informed experts and most reliable informants got matters totally wrong. Nor yet can extensive evidentiation provide a guarantee of truth. For there are numberless cases where all the best available evidence pointed in the wrong direction. The regrettable reality of it is that there simply is no failproof and totally secure of steering our acceptance into the secure possession of the truth of things. Like any such multi-criterial situation poses our certification question poses a characteristic problem. For how are matters to be settled when their criteria disagree? Note that each of those three factors (plausibility, evidentiation, reliability) can be rated along a scale from high (H) to middling (M) to low (L), which opens up a spectrum across those three factors ranging from HHH to LLL, yielding 3 × 3 × 3 = 27 different categorizations.

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Now at the extreme there is no problem. Claims that rate HHH, we would accept. Claims that rate LLL, we would reject. But what of the intermediate cases? The point is that the interrelation of those three salient truth-substantive factors—inherent likelihood, supportive evidentiation, and source ­reliability—are intricate and complex. No one of them is of itself automatically issue-determinative, be it positively or negatively. Rather what matters is the specific mode of interaction in the particular case at issue with its own characteristic nature taken into account. In the end, matters of acceptance will in in the end have to be settled not via general practice but rather by case-specific considerations that take account of the personalistic conditions that prevail in the case at hand. Much though philosophers, theoretician, and knowledge theorists would like it to be able to transit their business in general principles, the reality of it has it come to grips with the fact that in this domain there are always exceptions to all these general rules and sensible proceedings have to come to terms with the complex realties of particular cases. The variation of conditions and circumstances is so extensive and manysided that generalities can provide definitive guidance. The multiplicity phenomena always affords cases that slip through the network of general rules. In the end, an adequate methodology of acceptance will have to be prepared to deal with the complexity of variant specifics because the phenomena we have to deal with in some domains of practice are so varied and potentially complex that “every rule has its exceptions.” This situation should not be seen as all that surprising. Acceptance is a mode of procedure—a practice. And in every area of practical procedure we are—for very practical reasons—prepared to settle for a modus operandi that works out successfully in the great majority of cases. The circumstances and condition under which we labor always have some degree of “noise” and “entropy,” an obscurity that can never be wholly eliminated but will have to be accommodated on the basis of a consideration of adequacy that are statistical (by and large) rather than absolute (always and unavoidably). In matters of practice, we have to settle for what is circumstantially adequate rather than theoretically ideal. And this general situation of rational practice applies also to our cognitive practice, seeing that (as noted at the outset) acceptance-as-true is a mode of action whose situation as such make theorizing itself a domain of practical endeavor. UNDERSTANDING REALITY But it is one thing to observe, describe, and report on Reality, and something further and rather different to understand it, to comprehend, coordinate,

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and (at least to some extent) explain its composition. Apprehensibility and comprehensibility are different matters, the latter of which requires not just characterization but explanation by way of coordination, classification, rationalization in terms of some intelligent framework of systemic order and coherent organization. However, this basic issue of natural Reality’s order and organization itself possesses a serious problem. To wit: How is this systematicity itself to be explained what is the root of natural Reality’s intelligible order? Reality is intelligible only insofar as it is or has a lawful order. For to understand is to coordinate—to emplace something in a system of order. But how are we to validate this idea that Reality possesses and/or exhibits a significant degree of lawful order. To explain, to comprehend, to account for all requires coordination, classification, and ordering of some sort. Forming part of a systematically naturalistical rational order is the strongest index we have for the truth of our beliefs. Its inner taxonomy—its sortalization into structured framework of natural kinds—gives reality the explanatory order. But does it have this order in and of itself, or is it something that we devise and project into reality through thought imputation? Since the origin of philosophy among the ancient Greeks, it has been one of the main questions for theorists whether this order exists by convention or by nature. Whether we create the order to which we need understanding or whether we discover it as something that preexists our cognitive endeavors. Whether that order which is altogether indispensable for us is a product of human artifice or is something that exists independently on its own becomes a crucial question. So does reality itself have this structure of itself or do we endow it with structure by the way in which we proceed to conceptualize it? Two conflicting views are at work here. There is one standpoint here that has pervaded much of the tradition of Western philosophy from its very start. It is based on the classic principle of Greek philosophizing that like can only come from like. And it accordingly proceeds that the mind-accessibility of Reality’s lawful order roots in the fact that this intelligible order is the product of a creative intelligence. Accordingly, intelligence (i.e., our intelligence) can discern within nature what nature-formative Intelligence has already put into place. This is the tradition found in Plato (via the Demiurge of the Timaeus), in the Aristotelian idealism of Alexander of Aphrodisias, in Neoplatonism (via its primal nous), in the Platonism of Church Fathers, in the World Soul of Averroes, in concept realism of Leibniz, and in the absolute realism of Frege. And on the other side—that of epistemic or artefactual conceptualization—lies the tradition of Theophrastus, of medieval nominalism, of Kantian

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categoricity, and of latter-day minimalists such as W. V. Quine and Nelson Goodman. And so with regard to this conflict, the present deliberations are squarely on the side of Platonic realism. For it is only plausible to hold that that can be no subjective mind-supplied ordering without objective, reality-supported order. An orderly manifold of human functioning requires a coherent order of natural processuality. After all, even in those matters where the mind imposes order, this is unlikely to occur in an arbitrary way. To canalize its orderly functioning there have to be principles of order not created by the mind itself but imposed upon it by man-external constraints. For understanding the mind must work in an orderly way. The Principle Association provides a model example. (Here matters of experience are divided into types and where type 1 and type 2 things have been correlated in the past, this is now done again.) The mind cannot function in a productive way without such laws of procedure to coordinate its modus operandi. But to realize this modus operandi the minds functional content in the world has to provide a mind-external setting of lawful stability. What we call “laws of nature” are exactly those patterns of order that are found in physical reality and the discovery and analysis of these patterns of order is what we call natural science. REJECTING NOMINALISM The nominalistic tradition has it that lawful order and the distinction of natural kinds that goes with it is a matter of human artifice. There is good reason for rejecting this view. For subjective order could not exist without objective order. The subjective order requires a setting of objectively operative order to function coherently. To be sure, various theorists are under the impression that the order of nature must inevitably stem from a super or supranatural source—that it must stem from the ordinary activity of a nature-external agent or agency. On this line, the Reality’s intelligibility inheres in and derives from the fact that Reality is the created artifact of a creative intelligence so that it intelligibly derives from the operations of a creative intelligence in its constituting. There is a harmonious design in the make-up of things because an intelligent designer puts it there. Historically this position has been prominent, and theoretically it is certainly a conceivable possibility. But nevertheless such transcendentalism is not the only available option. For there is also the prospect of an immanentist and naturalistic basis for the Rational order of things—one that envisions

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the instantive and propagation of order via principles on whose basis order is self-cultivating, self-potentiating, self-constituting, and self-embracing (ordering). Order the aegis of such a nisus, order is seen as emergent from primal chaos, a sea of disorderly randomness, through the chance formation of self-potentiating regularities, patterns, and stabilities. The pivot here is that once order enters into in a system via some sort of rule-conformity, this is bound to carry further modes of order in its wake. Order self-propagates and engenders additional order. As such deliberations indicate, we standardly regard Reality’s intelligible order as the naturally evolved through a course of developments in which pure chance may initially play the predominant role. And with most of the metaphysical tradition of the West, we take the line that the mind finds rather that creates order in the world without thereby having to stipulate some transcendental source for it. But while certainly not rationally mandatory, such a line of approach is both available and inviting. It fits the parameters of the situation more closely and naturally than any available alternative. In our thinking about reality, order plays an absolutely central role. In one regard it is substantially determined, for—as noted above—it provides for the practical principles in whose basis we distinguish between Reality and mere Appearance. On the other hand it lies at the basis of the lawfulness by which we explain how the world’s realities function. The world’s lawful order is thus pivotal for our understanding both in conceiving of Reality and in explaining it. And the fundamental processes that are at work in the world at once provide for the rational order of reality and the processes of the human mind in its interaction with circumambient natural Reality. And the internal coordination of these two—mind and nature—on the basis of their coordinated harmonization.

Chapter 5

The Role of Technology in Natural Science

THE EMPIRICAL IMPETUS Modern science is critically dependent upon technology and scientific progress almost invariably demands an escalation in the technological state of the art. For natural science is fundamentally empirical, with its advance critically dependent not on human ingenuity alone but on the monitoring observations to which we can gain access only through interactions with nature. And the days are long past when useful scientific data can be obtained by unaided sensory observation of the ordinary course of nature. Artifice has become an indispensable route to the acquisition and processing of scientifically useful data. The sorts of data on which scientific discovery nowadays depends can be generated only by technological means. The rationale for this situation is straightforward. In developing natural science, we humans begin by exploring the world in our own locality—not just our spatial neighborhood but our parametric neighborhood in the “space” of physical variables like temperature, pressure, radiation, and so on. Near our natural “home base” we are—thanks to the evolutionary heritage of our sensory and cognitive apparatus—able to operate with relative ease and freedom, scanning nature for data with the unassisted senses. But in due course we did all that we could manage in this way. To do more, we proceeded to extend our interactive probes into nature more deeply, deploying increasing technical sophistication to achieve increasingly high levels of capability. We have pushed ever further out from our evolutionary home base in nature toward increasingly remote frontiers. From the egocentric standpoint of our local region of parameter space, we journey ever further to “explore” in the manner of a “prospector” searching for cognitively significant phenomena along the various parametric dimensions. 75

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With the enhancement of scientific technology, the size and complexity of this body of data inevitably grows, expanding on quantity and diversifying in kind. Technological progress constantly enlarges the window through which we look upon nature’s parametric space. In developing natural science we continually enlarge our view of this space and then generalize upon what we see. But what we have here is not a homogeneous lunar landscape, where once we have seen one sector we have seen it all, and where theory projections from lesser data generally remain in place when further data come our way. Instead, historical experience shows that there is every reason to expect that our ideas about nature are subject to constant radical changes as we explore parametric space more extensively. The technologically mediated entry into new regions of parameter space constantly destabilizes the attained equilibrium between data and theory. Technology is the engine that advances the frontier of progress in natural science. The call of science on technology is indeed so demanding, that the engineering of scientific instrumentation is very likely the most technically advanced and sophisticated mode of engineering. One acute observer has put the matter as follows: This dependence of high-energy physics on technology and engineering frequently stretches the capabilities of existing technology to the utmost, requiring innovations and extrapolations that go well beyond any present state of the art. Because the resulting technological developments have implications much broader than their use in particle physics, all technology benefits from the opportunity to respond to this pressure. New technical developments occur sooner—sometimes much earlier—than they would in the absence of such pressure, and they often present new engineering opportunities, unrelated to high-energy physics, that can be exploited immediately. Examples of such engineering developments are manifold: large volume, very-high-vacuum systems; sources of enormous radio-frequency power; cryogenic systems; large-scale static superconducting magnets; variable- current superconducting systems; pattern-recognition devices; very fast electronic circuits; and on—line computer techniques. In this sense, elementary-particle physics has had a major impact on technology, but the effect has been an indirect one resulting from the urgency of the research requirements rather than the results of the research.1

The idea of “novel phenomena” is the talisman of contemporary experimental physics. Workers in this domain do not nowadays talk of increased precision or accuracy of measurement in their own right—it is all a matter of the search for new phenomena. And the development of new data technology is virtually mandatory for the discerning of new phenomena. The reason is simple enough. Inquiry proceeds on such a broad front nowadays that the range of phenomena to which the old data—technology gives access is soon

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exhausted. And the same is generally true with respect to the range of theory testing and confirmation that the old phenomena can underwrite.2 When such limitations in the database occur, they produce correlative imperfections in our theoretical understanding. A homely fishing analogy of Eddington’s is useful here.3 He saw the experimentalist as one who trawls nature with the “net” of his equipment for detection and observation. Now suppose (says Eddington) that fisherman trawls the seas using a fish— net of two-inch mesh. Then fish of a smaller size will simply go uncaught. And the theorists who analyze the experimentalist’s catch will have an incomplete and distorted view of aquatic life. Only by improving our observational means for “traw1ing” nature can such imperfections be mitigated. A look at the history of major scientific innovation indicates that this is generally not a matter of spontaneous generation but rather a provoked response to three sorts of challenges that crop up uninvited and often unwelcome. We standardly encounter here situations in which the equilibrium of “established” theory and “familiar” fact is upset by the accession of new facts, creating a situation in which new data sources are at issue because existing theories can presumably—and usua1ly—accommodate the old data (this, after all, being the basis on which they are the “existing” theories).4 The new data or data complexes create a disturbance of the cognitive equilibrium in the general coherence of the over-all constellation of data-cumtheory. A setting is thus created—a novel problem-situation—in which scientific innovation (i.e., readjustment on the side of the accepted scientific theories) becomes a situational imperative. The salient characteristic of this situation is that, once the major findings accessible at a given level of sophistication in data-technology level have been attained, further major progress in any given problem area requires ascent to a higher level on the technological scale. Every data-technology level is subject to discovery saturation, but the exhaustion of prospects at a given level does not, of course, bring progress to a stop. Once the potential of a given state-of-the-art level has been exploited, not all our piety or wit can lure the technological frontier back to yield further significant returns at this stage. Further substantive findings become realizable only by ascending to the next level of sophistication in data-relevant technology. But the exhaustion of the prospects for data extraction at a given data-technology level does not, of course, bring progress to a stop. This picture is clearly not one of geographical exploration, but of the physical exploration—and subsequent theoretical rationalization—of “phenomena” which are distributed over the “space” of the physical quantities spreading out all about us. This exploration metaphor forms the basis of the conception of scientific research as a prospecting search for the new phenomena needed for significant new scientific findings. As the range of

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telescopes, the energy of particle accelerators, the effectiveness of lowtemperature instrumentation, the potency of pressurization equipment, the power of vacuum-creating contrivances, and the accuracy of measurement apparatus increases, that is, as our capacity to move about in the parametric space of the physical world is enhanced—new phenomena come into our perception, with the result of enlarging the empirical basis of our knowledge of natural processes. The key to the great progress of contemporary physics lies in the enormous strides made in this regard.5 Given that we can only learn about nature by interacting with it, Newton’s third law of countervailing action and reaction becomes a fundamental principle of scientific epistemology. Everything depends on just how and how hard we can push against nature in situations of observational and detectional interaction. As Bacon saw, nature will never tell us more than we can forcibly extract from her with the means of interaction at our disposal. And what we can manage to extract by successively deeper probes is bound to wear a steadily changing aspect, because we operate in new circumstances where old conditions cannot be expected to prevail and the old rules no longer apply. Physicists often remark that the development of our understanding of nature moves through successive layers of theoretical sophistication.6 But scientific progress is clearly no less dependent on continual improvements in strictly technical sophistication: Some of the most startling technological advances in our time are closely associated with basic research. As compared with 25 years ago, the highest vacuum readily achievable has improved more than a thousand-fold; materials can be manufactured that are 100 times purer; the submicroscopic world can be seen at 10 time higher magnification; the detection of trace impurities is hundreds of times more sensitive; the identification of molecular species (as in various forms of chromatography) is immeasurably advanced. These examples are only a small sample. . . Fundamental research in physics is crucially dependent on advanced technology, and is becoming more so.7

Without an ever-developing technology of experimentation and observation, scientific progress would grind to a halt. The discoveries of today cannot be attained with yesterday’s instrumentation and techniques. To secure new observations, to test new hypotheses, and to detect new phenomena, an ever more powerful technology of inquiry is needed. Throughout the natural sciences, technological progress is a crucial requisite for cognitive progress. We are embarked on an endless endeavor to improve the range of effective observational and experimental intervention. Only by operating under new and previously inaccessible conditions—attaining extreme temperature, pressure, particle velocity, field strength, and so on—can we realize those circumstances that enable us to put our hypotheses and theories to the test. As an

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acute observer has rightly remarked: “Most critical experiments [in physics] planned today, if they had to be constrained within the technology of even ten years ago, would be seriously compromised.”8 Science has accordingly come to outstrip industry in rivaling military weaponry in its concern for technological sophistication: Fundamental research in physics is crucially dependent on E advanced technology, and is becoming more so. Historical examples are overwhelmingly numerous. The postwar resurgence in low-temperature physics depended on the commercial production of the Collins liquefier, a technological achievement that also helped to launch an era of cryogenic engineering. And today, superconducting magnets for a giant bubble chamber are available only because of the strenuous industrial effort that followed the discovery of hard superconductors. In experimental nuclear physics, high-energy physics, and astronomy—in fact, wherever photons are counted, which includes much of fundamental ­physics— photomultiplier technology has often paced experimental progress. The multidirectional impact of semiconductor technology on experimental physics is obvious. In several branches of fundamental physics it extends from the particle detector through nanosecond circuitry to the computer output of analyzed data. Most critical experiments planned today, if they had to be constrained within the technology of even ten years ago, would be seriously compromised.9

Recognition of reciprocal dependence between scientific and technological progress does not, however, affect the basic point of the present deliberations. To be sure, technology is largely applied science and technological innovation in some degree reflects new uses of scientific knowledge. But this symbiosis does not displace the crucial consideration that science cannot effectively push its inquiry into nature further than the available mechanisms of informational technology permit. And these limits are not only limitations on one’s capacity to test hypotheses that are already in hand (as the ancients could not test hypotheses about mountains on the far side of the moon), but— more crucially—they impose restrictions on one’s capacity even to conceptualize certain hypotheses (as the ancients could have no glimmering of the red shift). Progress is insuperably limited at any given stage of scientific history by the implicit barriers set by the available technology of data acquisition and processing. Technological dependency sets technological limits—first to data acquisition and then to theory projection. One arrives at the crucial fact that the achieved level of sophistication in the technological “state-of-the-art” of information acquisition and processing sets definite limits to the prospects of scientific progress by restricting the range of findings that are going to be realistically accessible. The ancient Greeks were certainly as intelligent as we are—perhaps, arguably, even more so. But given the information technology of the day, it is not

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just improbable but actually inconceivable that the Greek astronomers should have come up with an explanation for the red shift or the Greek physicians with an account of the bacteriological transmission of some communicable disease. The reason for this is simple—the relevant types of data needed to put such phenomena within the cognitive grasp of man simply lay beyond their reach. Given the data-acquisition technology of the times, there just was no way for the Greeks (no matter how well-endowed in brain power) to gain physical or conceptual access to the relevant phenomena. Progress in theorizing in these directions was barred—not permanently, but then and there for them—by a technological barrier on the side of data that was as absolute as the then-extant technological barriers in the way of developing the internal combustion engine or the wireless telegraph. IS COMPLETION A PROSPECT? THE TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS AND LIMITATIONS OF INQUIRY Technology extends the capacity of our natural economy in point of observation with nature. And the arbitrament of praxis—not theoretical merit but practical capability—affords the best standard of adequacy for our scientific proceedings that is available. But could we ever be in a position to claim that science has been completed on the basis of the success of its practical applications? On this basis, the perfection of science would have to manifest itself in the perfecting of control—in achieving a perfected technology. But just how are we to proceed here? Could our natural science achieve manifest perfection on the side of control over nature? Could it ever underwrite a recognizably perfected technology? The issue of “control over nature” involves much more complexity than may appear on first view. For just how is this conception to be understood? Clearly, in terms of bending the course of events to our will, of attaining our ends within nature, but this involvement of “our ends” brings to light the prominence of our own contribution. For example, if we are inordinately modest in our demands (or very unimaginative), we may even achieve “complete control over nature” in the sense of being in a position to do whatever we want to do, but yet attain this happy condition in a way that betokens very little real capability. One might, to be sure, involve the idea of omnipotence, and construe a “perfected” technology as one that would enable us to do literally anything. But this approach would at once run into the old difficulties already familiar to the medieval scholastics. They were faced with the challenge: “If God is omnipotent, can he annihilate himself (contra his nature as a necessary being), or can he do evil deeds (contra his nature as a perfect being), or can he make

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triangles have four angles (contrary to their definitive nature)?” Sensibly enough, the scholastics inclined to solve these difficulties by maintaining that an omnipotent God need not be in a position to do literally anything but rather simply anything that it is possible for him to do. Similarly, we cannot explicate the idea of technological omnipotence in terms of a capacity to produce and result, wholly without qualification. We cannot ask for the production of a perpetuum mobile, for spaceships with “hyperdrive” enabling them to attain transluminar velocities, for devices that predict essentially stochastic processes such as the disintegrations of transuranic atoms, or for piston devices that enable us to set independently the values for the pressure, temperature, and volume of a body of gas. In sum, asking of a “perfected” technology that it should enable us to do anything that we might take it into our heads to do, no matter how “unrealistic” this might be. All that we can reasonably ask of it is that perfected technology should enable us to do anything that it is possible for us to do—and not just what we might think we can do but what we really and truly can do. A perfected technology would be one that enabled us to do anything that can possibly be done by creatures circumstanced as we are. But how can we deal with the pivotal conception of “can” that is at issue here? Clearly, only science—real, true, correct, perfected science—could tell us what indeed is realistically possible and what circumstances are indeed inescapable. Whenever our “knowledge” falls short of this, we may well “ask the impossible” by way of accomplishment (e.g., spaceships in “hyperdrive”), and thus complain of incapacity to achieve control in ways that put unfair burdens on this conception. Power is a matter of the “effecting of things possible”—of achieving control—and it is clearly cognitive state-of-the-art in science which, in ­ teaching us about the limits of the possible, is itself the agent that must shape our conception of this issue. Every law of nature serves to set the boundary between what is genuinely possible and what is not, between what can be done and what cannot, between which questions we can properly ask and which we cannot. We cannot satisfactorily monitor the adequacy and completeness of our science by its ability to effect “all things possible,” because science alone can inform us about what is possible. As science grows and develops, it poses new issues of power and control, reformulating and reshaping those demands whose realization represents “control over nature.” For science itself brings new possibilities to light. (At a suitable stage, the idea of “splitting the atom” will no longer seem a contradiction in terms.) To see if a given state of technology meets the condition of perfection, we must already have a body of perfected science in hand to tell us what is indeed possible. To validate the claim that our technology is perfected, we need to preestablish the completeness of our science. The idea works in such a way that claims perfected control can rest only on perfected science.

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In attempting to travel the practicalist route to cognitive completeness, we are thus trapped in a circle. Short of having supposedly perfected science in hand, we could not say what a perfected technology would be like, and thus we could not possibly monitor the perfection of science in terms of the technology that it underwrites. Moreover, even if (per impossible) a “pragmatic equilibrium” between what we can and what we wish to do in science were to be realized, we could not be warrantedly confident that this condition will remain unchanged. The possibility that “just around the corner things will become unstuck” can never be eliminated. Even if we “achieve control” to all intents and purposes, we cannot be sure of not losing our grip upon it—not because of a loss of power but because of cognitive changes that produce a broadening of the imagination and a widened apprehension as to what “having control” involves. For the project of achieving practical mastery can never be perfected in a satisfactory way. The point is that control hinges on what we want, and what we want is conditioned by what we think is possible, and this is something that hinges crucially on theory—on our beliefs about how things work in this world. And so control is something deeply theoryinfected. We can never safely move from apparent to real adequacy in this regard. We cannot adequately assure that seeming perfection is more than just that. We thus have no alternative but to presume that our knowledge (i.e., our purported knowledge) is inadequate at this and indeed at any other particular stage of the game of cognitive completeness. Such a perspective indicates that our knowledge of nature is limited in two dimensions. There are both thematic and progressive limits. The first is a matter of the specific parametric direction in which our inquiries orient our data-seeking interactions with physical reality. And the second is a matter of the extent to which we are willing and able to push forward in this direction. The cognitive yield of such a project is not continuous but proceeds stepwise: new data disestablishes old theories whose revision in turn provides a new impetus to data acquisition. The result is a dialectic of to and fro as between theory-systematization and technological advance. THE POTENTIAL OF ALIEN SCIENCE To what extent would the functional equivalent of our physical science built up by the inquiring intelligences of an astronomically remote civilization be bound to resemble our science? In reflecting on this question and its ramifications, one soon comes to realize that there is an enormous potential for diversity.

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Williams James wrote: Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these [actual ones] of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those we actually use.10

One’s language and thought processes are bound to be closely geared to the world as one experience it. As is illustrated by the difficulties we ourselves experience in bringing the language of everyday experience to bear on subatomic phenomena, our concepts are ill-attuned to facets of nature different in scale or structure from our own. We can hardly expect a “science” that reflects such parochial preoccupations to be a universal fixture. With alien science viewed in this perspective, we see that the machinery of formulation used in expressing their science might be altogether different. Specifically, their mathematics might be very unlike ours. Their dealings with quantity might be entirely anumerical—purely comparative, for example, rather than quantitative. Especially if their environment is not amply endowed with solid objects or stable structures congenial to ­measurement—if, for example, they were jellyfish-like creatures swimming about in a soupy sea—their “geometry” could be something rather strange, largely topological, say, and geared to flexible structures rather than fixes sizes or shapes. Digital thinking might be undeveloped, while certain sorts of analogue reasoning might be highly refined. Or, again, an alien civilization might, like the ancient Greeks, have “Euclidean” geometry without analysis. In any case, given that the mathematical mechanisms at their disposal could be very different from ours, it is clear that their description of nature in mathematical terms could also be very different. (Not necessarily truer or falser, but just different.) Then, too, their natural science might deploy mechanisms very different from ours. Communicating by some sort of “telepathy” based upon variable odors or otherwise “exotic” signals, they might devise a complex theory of emphatic thought-wave transmittal through an ideaferous aether. Again, the aliens might scan nature very differently. Electromagnetic phenomena might lie altogether outside the ken of alien life forms; if their environment does not afford them lodestone and electrical storms, the occasion to develop electromagnetic theory might never arise. The course of scientific development tends to flow in the channel of practical interests. A society of porpoises might lack crystallography but develop a very sophisticated hydrodynamics; one comprised of mole-like creatures might never dream of developing optics or astronomy.

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The point is that the interests of creatures shaped under the remorseless pressure of evolutionary adaptations to very different—and endlessly ­variable—environmental conditions might well be oriented in directions very different from anything that is familiar to us. Different life conditions are bound to impose different concerns and interests. A comparison of the “science” of different civilizations here on earth suggests that it is not an outlandish hypothesis to suppose that the very topics of alien science might differ dramatically from those of ours. In our own case, for example, the fact that we live on the surface of the earth (unlike whales, the fact that we have eyes (unlike worms) and thus can see the heavens, the fact that we are so situated that the seasonal positions of heavenly bodies are intricately connected with agriculture—all these facts are clearly connected with the development of astronomy. The fact that those distant creatures would experience nature in ways very different from ourselves means that they can be expected to raise very different sorts of questions. Indeed, the mode of emplacement within nature of alien inquirers might be so different as to focus their attention on entirely different aspects of constituents of the cosmos. If the world is sufficiently complex and multifaceted, they might concentrate upon aspects of their environment that mean nothing to us, with the result that their natural science is oriented in directions very different from ours.11 To motivate this idea of a conceptually different science, it helps to cast the issue in temporal rather than spatial terms. The descriptive characterization of alien science is a project rather akin in its difficulty to that of describing our own future science. It is a key fact of life that progress in science is a process of ideational innovation that always places certain developments outside the intellectual horizons of earlier workers. The very concepts we think in terms of become available only in the course of scientific discovery itself. Like the science of the remote future, the science of remote aliens must be presumed to be such that we really could not achieve intellectual access to it on the basis of our own position in the cognitive scheme of things. Just as the technology of a more advanced civilization would be bound to strike us as magic, so its science would be bound to strike us as incomprehensible gibberish—until we had learned it “from the ground up.” They might (just barely) be able to teach it to us, but they could not explain it to us by transposing it into our terms. It is tempting to reason: “Since there is only one nature, only one science of nature is possible.” Yet, on closer scrutiny, this reasoning becomes highly problematic. Physical laws are pervasive regularities in nature and are always and everywhere the same. But detection will of course vary drastically with the mode of observations—that is, with the sort of resources that different creatures have at their disposal to do their detecting. Everything depends on how nature

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pushes back on our senses and their instrumental extensions. Even if we detect everything we can, we will not have got hold of everything available to others. And the converse is equally true. The laws that we (or anybody else) manage to formulate will depend crucially on one’s place within nature—on how one is connected into its wiring diagram, so to speak. Empirical science is always the result of inquiry into nature, and this is inevitably a matter of a transaction or interaction in which nature is but one party and the inquiry beings another. We must expect alien beings to question nature in ways very different from our own. On the basis of an interactionist model, there is no reason to think that the sciences of different civilizations will exhibit anything more than the roughest sorts of family resemblance. Our alien colleagues scan nature for regularities, using (at any rate, to begin with) the sensors provided to them by their evolutionary heritage. They note, record, and transmit those regularities that they find to be useful or interesting from their standpoint and then develop their inquiries by theoretical triangulation from this basis. Now, this is clearly going to make for a course of development that closely gears their science to their particular situation— their biological endowment (“their sensors”), their cultural heritage (“what is pragmatically useful”). Where these key parameters differ, we must expect that the course of scientific development will differ as well. Admittedly, there is only one universe, and its laws and materials are, as far as we can tell, the same everywhere. We share this common universe with all life-forms. However radically we differ in other respects (in particular, those relating to environment, to natural endowments, and to style or civilization), we have a common background of cosmic evolution and a common heritage of natural laws. And so, if intelligent aliens investigate nature at all, they will investigate the same nature we ourselves do. All this can be agreed. But the fact remains that the corpus of scientific information—ours or anyone’s—is an ideational construction. And the sameness of the object of contemplation does nothing to guarantee the sameness of ideas about it. And so, in the end, our human sort of physical science may well be sui generis, adjusted to and coordinated with a being of our physical constitution, inserted into the orbit of the world’s processes and history in our sort of way. It seems that alike in science and technology, as in other areas of human endeavor, we are prisoners of the thought-world that our biological and social and intellectual heritage affords us. The literature created by extraterrestrial-intelligence enthusiasts is pervaded by the haunting worry: “Where is everybody?” “Why haven’t we heard from them?” Are they simply too distant—or perhaps too cautious12 or too detached?13 Our present discussion offers yet another line of response: they are simply too busy doing their own thing. Radio communication is ours; theirs is likely to be something very, very different. If alien civilizations

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inhabit alien thought-worlds, then this lack of intellectual communion might well explain the lack of physical communication. And so one constructing suggestion comes to view: If “being there” in scientific terms means having our sort of scientifically guided technology and our sort of technologically channeled science, then it does not seem all that farfetched to suppose that we might be there alone—even in a universe teeming with other intelligent civilizations. It is exactly the explicit dependency on data—the empirical aspect of the discipline—that sets natural science apart not only from the formal sciences (logic and mathematics) but also from the hermeneutic which—like the humanities—address themselves ceaselessly to the imaginative reinterpretation of old data from novel conceptual perspectives. Without the influx of new empirical data all one could do is to proceed to an increasingly sophisticated conceptual re-systematization and reinterpretation of the same database. While this might indeed constitute a progress of sorts, it just is not the sort of progress at issue in natural science, and blocks the way to the empirical process of hypothesis testing and—elimination on which the progress of science as we know it standardly depends. For here the symbiosis of speculation and technology—of theoria and techné—creates a systemic unity that fuses theory and practice into an integrally inseparable whole. In natural science we have it that, to paraphrase Immanuel Kant, theory without technology is blind and technology without theory empty. NOTES 1. D. A. Bromley et al., Physics in Perspective: Student Edition, op. cit., see pp. 55–56. And indeed the dominance of technology in scientific research is so complete that the recent periodization of experimental science is most readily accomplished in terms of its dominant devices. 2. Use of the term “phenomena” and insistence upon their primacy in scientific inquiry goes back to the ancient idea of “saving the phenomena” (see Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, trans. by E. Doland and C. Maschler [Chicago, 1969], and Jürgen Mittelstrass, Die Rettung der Phanomene [Berlin, 1962]). It finds its modern articulation in Newton’s Principia. The key point presently at issue was clearly perceived by Karl Pearson at the turn of the century: The progress of science lies in the continual discovery of more and more comprehensive [i.e., comprehensively applicable] formulae by and of which we can clarify the relationships and sequences of more and more extensive groups of phenomena. (Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science [New York, 1957], pp. 96–97; italics supplied.) 3. See A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York, 1928). 4. Compare T. S. Kuhn, “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” Science, vol. 136 (1962), pp. 760–764.

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5. A homely fishing analogy of Eddington’s is useful here. He saw the experimentalist as akin to a fisherman who trawls nature with the “net” of his equipment for detection and observation. Now suppose (says Eddington) that a real fisherman trawls the seas using a fishnet of two-inch mesh. Then fish of a smaller size will simply go uncaught. Similarly, the theorists who analyze the experimentalist’s catch will have an incomplete and distorted view of aquatic life. Only by improving our observational means for “trawling” nature can such imperfections be mitigated (see A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World [New York, 1928]). 6. “Looking back, one has the impression that the historical development of the physical description of the world consists of a succession of layers of knowledge of increasing generality and greater depth. Each layer has a well-defined field of validity; one has to pass beyond the limits of each to get to the next one, which will be characterized by more general and more encompassing laws and by discoveries constituting a deeper penetration into the structure of the Universe than the layers recognized before.” See Edoardo Amaldi, “The Unity of Physics,” Physics Today, vol. 261, no. 9 [September 1973], pp. 18–32 and also E. P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communication on Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13 (1960), pp. 1–14; as well as Wigner’s, “The Limits of Science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 93 (1949), pp. 521–526. Compare also Chapter 8 of Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950). 7. D. A. Bromley et al., Physics in Perspective, Student Edition (Washington D.C: National Research Council/National Academy of Science Publications, 1973), p. 23. 8. D. A. Bromley et al., Physics in Perspective: Student Edition, NRC/NAS Publications (Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 16. 9. D. A. Bromley et. al., Physics in Perspective: Student Edition (Washington, D.C: NRC/NAS Publication, 1973), p. 23. 10. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, 1907). 11. His anthropological investigations pointed Benjamin Lee Whorf in much this same direction. He wrote: “The real question is: What do different languages do, not with artificially isolated objects, but with the flowing face of nature in its motion, color, and changing form; with clouds, beaches, and yonder flight of birds? For as goes our segmentation of the face of nature, so goes our physics of the cosmos,” (“Language and Logic,” in Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. by J. B. Carroll [Cambridge, MA, 1956], pp. 240–241). Compare also the interesting discussion in Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 12. Robert Nozick, “R.S.V.P.—A Story,” Commentary, vol. 53 (1972), pp. 66–68. 13. John A. Ball, “The Zoo Hypothesis,” Icarus, vol. 19 (1973), pp. 347–349.

Chapter 6

Oversimplification

WHY OVERSIMPLIFIES MATTERS IN NATURAL SCIENCE Similarity is a crucial factor in scientific deliberations. It is, however, by no means a simple idea and that many different types or modes of simplicity must be distinguished. For example • Mereological simplicity: One item is mereologically simpler than another if it has fewer parts. (In this sense a short story is simpler than a novel.) • Typological simplicity: One item is typologically simpler than another if it has fewer types of parts. (In this sense a novel is simpler than a naive concept which must provide not only for verbal matters but for stage setting and background music.) • Structural simplicity: One item is structurally simpler than another if the structural arrangement of its parts is less complex. (In this sense a random poll of bricks is simpler than a brick wall.) • Productive simplicity: One item is productively simpler than another when its creation requires less expenditure of resources and effort. • Performatory simplicity: One item is performatively simpler than another when its performative realization involves fewer or less demanding activities for its realization. These different modes of simplicity can be at odds with each other. And given the many-sided diversity and complexity of the idea at issue, it appears that the conception of simplicity does not so much constitute a descriptive feature of things as a group of ways from which to view them. It affords less of a means for theoretical diversification than a practical and 89

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pragmatic resource for our consideration of things in respect to their utility and use. Like inexpense or accessibility it is a conception that indicates how thing relate to us rather than some feature of their constitutive nature. It is, that is to say, an essentially pragmatic conception. Simplification can of course arise either knowingly and deliberately, or unknowingly and inadvertently. Oversimplification—simplifying matters beyond the warrant of the functional requisites of the particular situation at hand—is almost always inadvertent. Usually the only context in which it is done deliberately is in instructional situations where it function as a heuristic way station to more adequate subsequent treatment. Inadvertent oversimplification occurs because we are not omniscient. In the final analysis oversimplification is inevitable for limited intelligences seeking to come to grips cognitively with an endlessly complex world. As beings whose actions are guided by thought we constantly have questions that require to be answered in real time, in circumstances where acquiring and processing the requisite information simply takes too long. To get from where we are to where we need to be demands shortcuts across an informational vacuum. And oversimplification is the only way to manage this. Oversimplification of the real is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. For empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusion (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation is continually enhanced by technological advance in the devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. And our theories fit the existing data tightly. And so the web of theory that is woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that obtains subsequently, after our body of information has become enhanced. It is—inevitably—oversimple. And so as our data are amplified through new observations and experiments, the previously prevailing theories will almost invariably become destabilized. Those old theories oversimplified matters: new conditions call for new measures, new data for more complex theories. It lies in the rational economy of sensible inquiry that the history of science is an ongoing litany of oversimple old theories giving way to more sophisticated new ones that correct their oversimplification of the old. In natural science we continually enlarge the window through which we view the phenomena of nature. As we build more powerful telescopes or microscopes, more elaborate particle accelerators, more sophisticated apparatus for low temperature experimentation closer to absolute zero, and so on we bring new phenomena to view. And new phenomena generally do not fit into old patterns. There is no fact about the history of science that is established more decidedly than this: that new technology (be it material or conceptual) puts new

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data at our disposal and that new data manifest the oversimplification of earlier theories. We package our account of nature’s phenomena into the smallest and most compact explanatory box that we can manage to contrive for them. And as the scientific progress enhances our means for experimentation and observation it enlarges the volume of data at our disposal. The old package no longer manages to encompass the whole. We must go back to the old drawing board to construct a larger explanatory container. And this will complicate the situation. The former state of the art will, in respect, seem oversimple. The reality of it is that in scientific theorizing we proceed along the lines of least resistance, seeking to economize our cognitive effort by using the most direct workable means to our ends. Whenever possible, we analogize the present case to other similar ones, because the introduction of new patterns complicates our cognitive repertoire. And we use the least cumbersome viable formulations because they are easier to remember and more convenient to use. Science tries to transact explanatory business into the simplest, most economical way: in explanation as elsewhere it is only rational to adopt the simplest solutions. But the new phenomena destabilizes the old simplicities and call for more complex responses. But novelty produces complexity. In every branch of science, today’s handbooks, and manuals are thicker than yesterdays. From the point of view of the present, yesterday’s science always seems oversimplified. Oversimplification occurs because we are not omniscient. The root cause of oversimplification is ignorance: we oversimplify when there are features of the matters at issue about which we lack yet-unavailable information. And it is somewhere between hard and impossible to come to terms with this. Ignorance is the result of missing information, and one level of this is inevitably tenuous. What is at work here is one of the fundamental principles of epistemology: We are bound to be ignorant regarding the details of our ignorance. I know that there are facts about which I am ignorant, but I cannot possibly know what they are. For to know what such-and-such is a fact about which I am ignorant, I would have to know that this is a fact—which by hypothesis is something that I do not know. And the same situation prevails on a larger scale. We can know that in various respects the science of the present moment is incomplete—that there are facts about the working of nature that it does not know. But of course I cannot tell you what they are. An inherent impetus toward greater complexity pervades the entire realm of human creative effort. We find it in art; we find it in technology; and we certainly find it in the cognitive domain as well.1 And so we have no alternative to deeming science-as-we-have-it to afford an oversimplified model of reality. And in consequence science cannot but enmeshed in the same shortcomings that beset oversimplification in general.

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Why do we ever oversimplify? Why don’t we simply take those ignored complications into account? The answer is that in the circumstances we simply do not know how to do so. The situation is akin to that of the Paradox of the Preface. Recall that here the author writes: I want to thank X, Y, and Z for their help with the material in the book. I apologize to the reader for the remaining errors, which are entirely mine.

One is, of course, tempted to object: “You silly author! Why apologize for those errors? Why not simply correct them?” But alas the reader just does not know how. That there are errors he realizes; what they are he does not. And the situation with oversimplification is much the same. All too often we realize that we oversimplify, what we do not know is where we oversimplify. This is, in general, something that we can discern only within the wisdom of hindsight. THE PRICE OF OVERSIMPLIFICATION: COGNITIVE MYOPIA Oversimplification becomes a serious cognitive impediment by failing to take note of factors that are germane to the matters at hand, thereby doing damage to our grasp of the reality of things. Oversimplification consists in the omission of detail in a way that is misleading in creating or inviting a wrong impression in some significant—that is, issue-relevant—regard. In practice the line between beneficial simplification and harmful oversimplification is not easy to draw. Often as not it can only be discerned with the wisdom of retrospective hindsight. For whether that loss of detail has negative consequences and repercussions is generally not clear until after a good many returns are in. For the most part, oversimplification involves loss. The student who never progresses from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to the works of the Bard of Avon himself pays a price not just in detail of information but in the comprehension of significance. And the student who substitutes the Cliff’s Notes version for the work itself suffers a comparable impoverishment. To oversimplify a work of literature is to miss much of its very point. Whenever we oversimplify matters by neglecting potentially relevant detail we succumb to the flaw of superficiality. Our understanding of matters then lack depth and thereby compromises its cogency. But this is not the worst of it. Oversimplification always involves errors of omission. It occurs whenever someone leaves out of account features of an item that bear upon a correct understanding of its nature. For example, to say that Rome declined because its elite was enervated by lead poisoning from the pipes of its water supply

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oversimplifies the issue by fixing on one single—and actually minor—causal factor to the exclusion of many others. Accounts of such complex historical episodes almost invariably oversimplify matters. It is inevitable for oversimple thought about anything to be incomplete, because just this is exactly what oversimplification is—the omission of significant detail through a failure to take note of various factors that are germane to the matters at hand, thereby resulting in a failure to understand the reality of things. Whenever we unwittingly oversimplify matters we have a blind spot where some significantly issue-relevant facet of reality is concealed from our view. Oversimplification involves a deficit of information. And this in turn involves the incapacity to understand and explain phenomena. Thus if you cannot tell the difference between A and a—if both of them look like α to you, then the series aAAXaaAaAAXaAaAAXAAXA . . . will look like αααXααααααXααααXααX . . . to you. The X-occurrences seem now perfectly random. The fact that X always and only follows the occurrence of a double A becomes lost. And oversimplification can easily conceal structural information from our sight. Thus consider simplifying I to II as per:

One now loses sight of the fact that no X comes near the boundary as well as gains the misimpression that all four quadrants have the same structure. Optical myopia results involves indistinct vision, having an indefinite image of things. Cognitive myopia is much like that, consisting in an imprecise conception of things thanks to a lack of clarity in their conceptual (rather than visual) apprehension. Both alike involve a failure to distinguish things that are in fact distinct—or the reverse. There are two prime forms of cognitive myopia, namely conflation when things that are different take to be alike (say both X and Y seen as Z), and confusion when things that are the same take

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to be different (say with one instance of X seen as such but the other as Y). Conflation often has the result that irregularities are seen as regular; confusion has the result that regularities are seen as irregular. Conflation often leads to seeing uniformity where there should be difference. Confusion oversimplifies matters by seeing difference where there is actually uniformity. To see more clearly how oversimplification can create misunderstanding consider someone whose visual myopia is such that he has is incompetent with regard to telling 5 and 6 apart. As a result of such an inability to distinguish 5 from 6 the individual may well through conflation and failure to distinguish:

Or again, the individual may through confusion mix up 55 and 66 and so: envision 56 as 65.

Conflation obscures sameness, confusion obscures difference. And neglect of either results in oversimplification of complexity. Such modes of cognitive myopia have very different ramifications for our grasp of the world’s lawful comportment. Suppose that we are in reality dealing with the perfectly regular series R: 6 5 6 5 6 5 6 5 6 5 . . .

but due to the occasional confusion of a mild cognitive myopia we may then actually “see” this (be it by way of observation or conceptualization) as M: 6 5 5 5 6 5 5 5 6 5 . . .

But observe that our inability to distinguish has here effectively transmuted a lawful regularity into a random disorder. It is then clear (via “Mill’s Methods of Agreement and Difference”) that there is no causal correlation between R and M. The supposition of (mild) myopia thus induces a drastic disconnection between the two levels of consideration at issue, with the lawful order of R giving way to lawlessness in regard to its model M. Thus even so crude an example suffices to show that lawful order can unravel and be destroyed by the confusion engendered by an occasional inability to discern differences. And this relatively rudimentary observation has far-reaching implications. In specific, it means that if even if the world is

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possessed of a highly lawful order, this feature of reality may well fail to be captured in even a mildly myopic representation of it. SIMPLICITY TROPISM AS METHODOLOGICAL: ECONOMY OF EFFORT It has long been recognized that simplicity must play a prominent part in the methodology of science, constituting is a crucial cognitive value and a paramount factor in inductive reasoning. There is as widespread agreement as there ever is in such foundational matters on the principle that simple hypotheses enjoy a preferred status. But when one presses the question of validating this simplicity preference, one meets with discord and disagreement. The matter becomes far less problematic however, once one approaches it from a methodological rather than a substantive point of view. The simplest feasible resolution of our problems is patently that which must be allowed to prevail, at any rate pro tem, until such time as its untenability becomes manifest and complications force themselves upon us. Where a simple solution will accommodate the data at hand, there is no good reason for turning elsewhere. It is a fundamental principle of rational procedure, operative just as much in the cognitive domain as anywhere else, that from among various alternatives that are anything like equally well qualified in other regards, we should adopt the one that is the simplest, the most ­economical-in whatever modes of simplicity and economy are relevant. In induction we exploit the information at hand to answer the questions in the most straightforward (economical) way. Suppose, for example, that we are asked to supply the next member of the series 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . we shall straightaway respond with 5, supposing the series to be simply that of the integers. Of course, the actual series might well be 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 12, 13, 14, 101, 102, 103, 104, . . . . And then the correct answer will eventuate as 11 rather than 5. Though we cannot rule such possibilities out, they do not deter our inductive proceedings. The inductively appropriate course lies with the production rule that is the simplest answer: add 1 to the number you’ve just produced. In induction, we proceed to answer questions by opting for the simplest resolution that meets the conditions of the problem. And we do this not because we know a priori that this simplest resolution will prove to be correct. (We know no such thing!) We adopt this answer, provisionally at least, just exactly because this is the simplest, the most economical way of providing a resolution that does justice to the facts and to the demands of the situation. We recognize that the possibilities exist but ignore them pro tem, exactly because there is no cogent reason for giving them favorable notice at this stage.

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In inductive situations we are called on to answer questions whose resolution is beyond the reach of information at hand. We simply have to transcend the data. And we do this by projecting our problem resolutions along the lines of least resistance. We try to economize our cognitive effort. We use the simplest workable means to our ends exactly because the others are harder to use. Whenever possible, we analogize the present case to other similar ones, because the introduction of new patterns complicates our cognitive repertoire. We use the simplest viable formulations because they are easier to remember and simpler to use. Insofar as possible, we try to ease the burdens we pose for our memory (for information storage and retrieval) and for our intellect (for information processing and calculation). We favor uniformity, analogy, simplicity, and the like because that lightens the burden of cognitive effort. When other things are anything like equal, simpler theories are bound to be economically more advantageous. We avoid needless complications whenever possible, because this is the course of an economy of effort. And just herein lies the justification of simplicity seeking in induction. With cognitive as with physical tools, complexities, disuniformities, abnormalities, and so on, are complications that exact a price, departures from the easiest resolution that must be motivated by some appropriate benefit, some situational pressure. Accordingly, the rationale of our inductive praxis is a fundamentally economic one. It is the universal practice in scientific theory construction, when other things are anything like equal, to give preference to • one-dimensional rather than multidimensional modes of description, • quantitative rather than qualitative characterizations, • lower rather than higher-order polynomials, • linear rather than nonlinear differential equations. In each case, the former is somehow simpler than the latter alternative. To be sure—efforts to the contrary notwithstanding—no theoretician and no philosopher has managed to provide an adequate substantive characterization of simplicity, answering to the formula X is simpler than Y if they stand to one another in a relation of just such-and-such a descriptive sort. But a methodological, or procedural, characterization is something far easier to come by. The comparatively simpler is simply that which is easier to work with, which overall is the more economical to operate when it comes to application and interaction. Simplicity on such a perspective is a concept of the practical order, pivoting simply on being more economical to use—that is, less demanding of resources. The ideas of economy and simplicity are the guiding principles of inductive reasoning. The procedure is that of the precept, resolve your cognitive

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problems in the simplest, most economical way compatible with an adequate use of the information at your disposal. Our penchant for simplicity is easy to justify on grounds of economy. If one claims a phenomenon to depend not just on certain distances and weights and sizes, but also (say) on such further factors as temperature and magnetic forces, then one must design a more complex data-gathering apparatus to take readings over this enlarged range of physical parameters. Or again, in a curve-fitting situation, compare the thesis that the appropriate function is linear with the thesis that it is linear up to a point and sinusoidally wavelike thereafter. Writing a set of instructions for checking whether empirically determined point coordinates fit the specified function is clearly a vastly less complex—and so more economical—process in the linear case. In inductive reasoning we constantly make use of organizational principles for the structuring of our information: subsumptive classification schemes, connecting laws, coordinating analogies. All of these are means. For the assimilation of given cases to general patterns. All such instruments for storing information, recovering it, processing it, and putting it to work, are one and all means for the cost-effective handling of information in the service of resolving our questions. Throughout, operating cost-effectiveness and inductive adequacy run hand in hand. Ease of operative-economy, in brief—is the touchstone of induction, whose guiding idea is just that of employing the normal economic means to adequately serve our cognitive ends. The impetus of simplicity has one other important ramification. In life we must not only solve problems but also learn. Yet we must learn to walk before we can run, and to solve simple problems before we can solve complicated ones. In simplifying and indeed oversimplifying our problems, we adopt a good strategy for learning. Induction is on the side of cost-effectiveness economics in our cognitive operations. On such a view, inductive systematicity is best approached with reference, not to reality as such, or even to our conception of it—but rather, more accurately, to the ways and means we employ in conceptualizing it. Simplicity preference (for example) is based on the strictly method-oriented practical consideration that the simple hypotheses are the most convenient and advantageous for us to put to use in the context of our purposes. There is thus no recourse to a substantive (or descriptively constitutive) postulate of the simplicity of nature; it suffices to have recourse to a regulative (or practical) precept of economy of means. And the pursuit of cognitive systematicity is ontologically neutral. It is noncommittal on matters of substance; it merely reflects the procedure of conducting our question-resolving endeavors with the greatest economy. In inquiry as elsewhere, a principle of least effort predominates; rationality enjoins us to employ the maximally economic means to the attainment of chosen ends. Such an approach constitutes a

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theoretical defense of inductive systematically, which in fact rests on practical considerations. Simpler (more systematic) answers are more easily codified, taught, learned, used, investigated, and so on. In short, they are more economical to operate. In consequence, the regulative principles of convenience and economy in learning and inquiry suffice to provide a rational basis for systematicity preference. Our penchant for simplicity, uniformity, and systematicity in general is not a matter of a substantive theory regarding the nature of the world but one of search strategy—of cognitive methodology. In sum, we opt for simplicity (and systematicity in general) in inquiry because it is teleologically effective for the more cost-efficient realization of the goals of the enterprise, for the parameters of inductive systematicity-simplicity, uniformity, regularity, normality, coherence, and the rest—ail represent practical principles of cognitive economy.2 They are labor-saving devices for the avoidance of complications in the course of our endeavors to realize the objects of inquiry. The rationale of simplicity preference is straightforward. It lies in the single word economy. The simplest workable solution is that which is the easiest, most straightforward, most inexpensive one to work with. It is the very quintessence of foolishness to expend greater resources than are necessary for the achievement of our governing objectives. And by its very nature, induction affords us the most cost-effective—the economically optimal—means for accomplishing an essential cognitive task. In all contexts, cognitive ones included, the rational agent opts for the simplest workable solution. We certainly do not do this because we know a priori that the simple answers are bound to prove correct. Rather, we adopt the simplest viable solutions until further notice (i.e., until they may prove to be no longer viable) just exactly because they are the simplest—just because there is by hypothesis no good reason whatsoever for resorting to a more complex possibility. The rational basis for our inductive simplicity preference lies in considerations of the economic dimension of practice and procedure, rather than in any factual supposition about the world’s nature. From this perspective, then, simplicity preference emerges as a matter of economy of labor, a matter of the intellectual economy of cognitive procedure. Why use a more complex solution where a simple one will do as well? Why depart from uniformity? Why use a new, different solution where an existing one will serve? The good workman selects his tools with a view to (1) their versatility (power, efficacy, adaptability, and the like), and (2) their convenience (ease of use), and other similar factors of functional adequacy to the task in hand.3 Simplicity preference, accordingly, emerges as a means of implementing the precepts of economy of operation in the intellectual sphere. Its initial advantages are not substantive/ontological but methodological/pragmatic in orientation. The crucial fact is that simplicity preference is

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a cognitive policy recommended by considerations of cost effectiveness; in the setting of the cognitive purposes at issue, it affords a maximally advantageous inquiry mechanism. Such an approach in effect combines the commonsensical precept “Try the simplest thing first” with a principle of burden of proof: “Maintain your cognitive commitments until there is good reason to abandon them.”4 It clearly makes eminent sense to move onward from the simplest (least complex) available solution to introduce further complexities when and as—but only when and as—they are forced upon us. Simpler (more systematic) answers are more easily codified, taught, learned, used, investigated, and so on. The regulative principles of convenience and economy in learning and inquiry suffice to provide a rational basis for systematicity-preference. Our penchant for simplicity, uniformity, and systematicity in general, is now not a matter of a substantive theory regarding the nature of the world, it is a matter of search strategy—of cognitive methodology. In sum, we opt for simplicity (and systematicity in general) in inquiry not because it is truth indicative, but because it is teleologically effective in conducing to the more efficient realization of the goals of inquiry. We look for the dropped coin in the lightest spots nearby, not because it is more likely to be there than in the shadows, but because this is—in the circumstances—the most sensible strategy of search: if it’s not there we can’t find it at all. Our inductive systematicity-preference thus emerges as a means toward implementing the precepts of economy of operation in the intellectual sphere. Its initial advantages are not theoretical/ontological but methodological/ pragmatic in orientation. Insofar as the issue of success and efficacy and “furnishing the best predictions” comes upon the scene (and admittedly it cannot be wholly left out), we can and do proceed inductively, letting the process of induction itself teach us about the relative efficiency of our inductive proceedings and monitoring the modus operandi of our inductive praxis by inductive considerations. This methodological approach to the rationalization of cognitive systematicity on grounds of economy embodies no claim, tacit or otherwise, to any sort of ontological linkage between simplicity, uniformity, and so on, and (probable) truth. In the first instance, at any rate, the thesis that nature is a system is seen as a regulative principle for its cognitive rationalization. As Kant already insisted, the basis of the principle is epistemologico-conceptual rather than ontological. Inductive systematicity is best viewed as an aspect, not of reality as such, but of our procedures for its conceptualization and accordingly of our conception of it, or, to be more precise, of our manner of conceptualizing it. Simplicity-preference (for example) is based on the strictly method-oriented practical consideration that the simple hypotheses are the most convenient and advantageous for us to put to use in the context

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of our purposes. There is thus no recourse to a substantive (or descriptively constitutive) postulate of the simplicity of nature; it suffices to have recourse to a regulative (or practical) precept of economy of means. And in its turn, the pursuit of cognitive systematicity is ontologically neutral: it is a matter of conducting our question resolving endeavors with the greatest economy. The principle of least effort predominates—the process is one of maximally economic means to the attainment of chosen ends. This amounts to a theoretical defense of inductive systematicity that in fact rests on practical considerations. OVERSIMPLIFICATION In the final analysis oversimplification is inevitable for limited intelligences seeking to come to grips cognitively with an endlessly complex world. As beings whose actions are guided by thought we constantly have questions that require to be answered in real time, in circumstances where acquiring and processing the requisite information simply takes too long. To get from where we are to where we need to be demands shortcuts across an informational vacuum. And oversimplification is the only way to manage this. Oversimplification of the real is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. For empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusion (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation is continually enhanced by technological advance in the devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. And our theories fit the existing data tightly. And so the web of theory that is woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that obtains subsequently, after our body of information has become enhanced. It is—inevitably—oversimple. And so as our data are amplified through new observations and experiments, the previously prevailing theories will almost invariably become destabilized. Those old theories oversimplified matters: new conditions call for new measures, new data for more complex theories. It lies in the rational economy of sensible inquiry that the history of science is an ongoing litany of oversimple old theories giving way to more sophisticated new ones that correct their oversimplification of the old. In natural science we continually enlarge the window through which we view the phenomena of nature. As we build more powerful telescopes or microscopes, more elaborate particle accelerators, more sophisticated apparatus for low temperature experimentation closer to absolute zero, etc. we bring new phenomena to view. And new phenomena generally do not fit into old patterns.

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But the reality of it is that in scientific theorizing we proceed along the lines of least resistance, seeking to economize our cognitive effort by using the most direct workable means to our ends. Whenever possible, we analogize the present case to other similar ones, because the introduction of new patterns complicates our cognitive repertoire. And we use the least cumbersome viable formulations because they are easier to remember and more convenient to use. Science tries to transact explanatory business into the simplest, most economical way: In explanation as elsewhere it is only rational to adopt the simplest solutions. But the new phenomena destabilizes the old simplicities and call for more complex responses. But novelty produces complexity. In every branch of science, today’s handbooks, and manuals are thicker than yesterdays. From the point of view of the present, yesterday’s science always seems oversimplified. Oversimplification here occurs because we are not omniscient. The root cause of oversimplification is ignorance: we oversimplify when there are features of the matters at issue about which we lack yet-unavailable information. And we are bound to be ignorant regarding the details of our ignorance. I know that there are facts about which I am ignorant, but I cannot possibly know what they are. For to know what such-and-such is a fact about which I am ignorant, I would have to know that this is a fact—which by hypothesis is something that I do not know. And the same situation prevails on a larger scale. We can know that in various respects the science of the present moment is incomplete—that there are facts about the working of nature that it does not know. But of course I cannot tell you what they are. Oversimplification becomes a serious cognitive impediment by failing to take note of factors that are germane to the issues at hand, thereby doing damage to our grasp of the reality of things. Whenever we unwittingly oversimplify matters we have a blind spot where some facet of reality is concealed from our view. Oversimplification always involves errors of omission. It occurs whenever someone leaves out of account features of an item that bear upon a correct understanding of its nature. For example, to say that Rome declined because its elite was enervated by lead poisoning from the pipes of its water supply oversimplifies the issue by fixing on one single—and actually minor—causal factor to the exclusion of many others. Accounts of such complex historical episodes almost invariably oversimplify matters. It is inevitable for oversimple thought about anything to be incomplete, because just this is exactly what oversimplification is—the omission of significant detail through a failure to take note of various factors that are germane to the matters at hand, thereby resulting in a failure to understand the reality of things. Whenever we unwittingly oversimplify matters we have a blind spot where some significantly issue-relevant facet of reality is concealed from our view.

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The fact of it is that scientific progress is a matter of correcting for oversimplification because oversimple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world. The natural dialectic of scientific inquiry continually impels us into ever deeper levels of sophistication.5 Aristotelian mechanism did not distinguish between weight and mass. Newtonian physics did not distinguish inertial from gravitational mass. Cartesian dynamics did not distinguish between force and action. Mendeleev’s chemistry did not distinguish atoms from their isotopes. And so it goes. Enhanced observations evolve more elaborate theories that require more sophisticated distinctions. From the vantage point of later science the earlier efforts look to be oversimple. But the ever-present oversimplification of our scientific thinking in the short range as is continually diminished over the large run by the nature of the proceedings in which whatever-expanding experience comes to be at our disposal. THE ASPECT OF RETROVALIDATION Induction, as we have seen, is a matter of the pursuit of system in the cognitive sphere. Simplicity seeking systematicity here represents a regulative ideal of inquiry correlative with the procedural injunction “So organize your knowledge as to impart to it as much systematic structure as you possibly can!” But does not the prospect that its objective may well be unattainable destroy the validity of this ideal? Surely not. The validation of this cognitive ideal does not lie in the fact that its realization can be guaranteed a priori from the outset on the basis of considerations of general principles alone. We may in fact never realize this ideal. But this possibility should not be allowed to impede our efforts to press the project of systematization as far as we possibly can. Here, as elsewhere, the validity of an ideal does not call for any prior guarantee of its ultimate realization. (What ideal is ever validated in this way?) To be sure, a hope of its eventual realization can never in principle be finally and totally demolished. But this feeble comfort is hardly sufficient to establish its propriety. This is something that emerges from the circumstance that while we have no a priori assurance of ultimate success in the quest for systematicity, what began as an initial presumption in favor of this ideal ultimately reemerges as rationally legitimate because of its demonstrated furtherance of the inherent aims and objectives of the cognitive venture. This point is critical for the recourse to what we have characterized as the inductive retrovalidation of induction. Its task is not to show, ex post facto, as it were, that the world is indeed an ontological system (via a principle of the uniformity of nature or some other such metaphysical presupposition). Rather, its task is to show that a process of inquiry geared to systematicity-preference

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is relatively efficient. This crucial point cannot be overstressed. It affords the Archimedean fulcrum on which the whole of the methodologico-pragmatic justification of induction pivots. To reemphasize: cognitive systematicity functions throughout as a regulative ideal governing the conduct of inquiry an ideal whose implementation along economy—governed lines, while at first merely hopeful, is ultimately retrovalidated by the fact that its pursuit enables us to realize more efficiently the fundamental aims and purposes of the cognitive enterprise. Initially, the pivotal issue is simply the matter of our convenience in doing what must be done to serve our purposes. The whole ontological question of the systematicity of nature can safely be left to await the results brought in by the actual use of the inductive processes. No prior presuppositions are needed in this regard: initially the outcome here is largely irrelevant from the standpoint of justificatory considerations. Our inductive systematicity-preference finds its final justification in the fact that it affords an effective search-policy for serviceable truth-estimates regarding answers to our questions, rather than in providing an index of truth. The task of the retrovalidation at issue is not to establish that nature is systematic, but to show that a methodology of inquiry geared to systematicity-preference is relatively successful. The justification of systematicity as a regulative ideal in the pursuit of our cognitive affairs must thus be seen in essentially instrumental terms: “Design your cognitive procedures with a view to the pursuit of systematicity!” This is a regulative principle of inquiry whose legitimation ultimately lies in its being pragmatically retrovalidated by its capacity to guide inquiry into successful channels. We are to prefer the optimally systematic (simple, uniform) alternative in the first instance because this is the most economical, the most convenient thing to do, and ultimately because experience shows that the utilization of such economical methods to be efficient—that is, as optimally conducive (relative to available alternatives) to the realization of the task. The following objection will doubtless be made: Such a methodological-pragmatic justification does not establish that induction will actually succeed. In pivoting the justification of induction on “the conveniences of our epistemic situation,” the position invites the question: What reason is there to think that nature obliges man?

The answer here is simple: it doesn’t and it doesn’t need to. To repeat the key point once more—a prior guarantee of success just is NOT needed to justify our recourse to inductive procedures. Insofar as the factor of success is a legitimate justificatory consideration—as in the final analysis it is bound to be—it is also something that can be fashioned “in due course” rather than

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“in advance,” a fact that can—quite appropriately—be allowed to emerge as a product of induction itself. The evolution of our cognitive methods through rational selection plays a key role in this connection. For (as we saw in chapter 5) it so unfolds as to assure the coordination of convenience with effectiveness. This coordination is not a miracle inserted into the scheme of things from without by a benign deus ex machina; it is a matter of evolutionary conformation between nature itself and the cognitive apparatus (sensory or discursive) of a creature that must make his way in the world by its wits. The fact that inductive systematization, as we “employ it, actually works is no mere brute fact, because why it works is something we can explain quite satisfactorily in strictly evolutionary terms.”6 A process of rational selection is at work to support the retention, promulgation, and transmission of those cognitive resources that prove themselves effective in operation. To sum up: on procedural and methodological grounds economy and convenience play the crucial pioneering role in the initial justification of our cognitive commitments. But the pragmatic issue of effectiveness and success comes to predominate in systemic validation during at the subsequent stage of ex-post-facto retrojustification. And the question of the seemingly “preestablished harmony” of the coordination of these two theoretically disparate factors is ultimately resolved on the basis of evolutionary considerations.7 NOTES 1. An interesting illustration of the extent to which lessons in the school of bitter experience have accustomed us to expect complexity is provided by the contrast between the pairs: rudimentary/nuanced; unsophisticated/sophisticated; plain/ elaborate; simple/intricate. Note that in each case the second, complexity-reflective alternative has a distinctly more positive (or less negative) connotation than its opposite counterpart. 2. Kant was the first philosopher clearly to perceive and emphasize this crucial point: But such a principle [of systematicity] does not prescribe any law for objects; it is merely a subjective law for the orderly management of the possessions of our understanding, that by the comparison of its concepts it may reduce them to the smallest possible number; it does not justify us in demanding from the objects such uniformity as will minister to the convenience and extension of our understanding; and we may not, therefore, ascribe to the [methodological or regulative] maxim [Systematize knowledge!] any objective [or descriptively constitutive] validity (CPuR., A306 B362.) Compare also C. S. Peirce’s contention that the systematicity of nature is a regulative matter of scientific attitude rather than a constitutive matter of scientific fact. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 7, sec. 7.134.

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3. To be sure, these two factors can come into conflict, in which case one must balance things out. 4. Some issues revolving around this principle are discussed in D. Goldstick, “Methodological Conservatism,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 8 (1971), pp. 186–91. 5. On the structure of dialectical reasoning see the author’s, Dialectics (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), and for the analogous role of such reasoning in philosophy see Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 6. Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of the inquiring mind as “co-natured with reality” through evolution is relevant here. 7. A wide spectrum of considerations relevant to these issues is canvassed in the author’s, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) and Cognitive Systematization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

Chapter 7

Overcomplication

HOW OVERCOMPLICATION ARISES The dualized self-potentiation of complexity in Mind and Reality is readily illustrated by examining tilework. For here ongoing inspection will generally bring ever more elaborate patterns of complexity into view. And knowledge is much the same. Every range of discussion or deliberation has its appropriately detailed range of detail and elaboration. And here as elsewhere there are two ways of addressing these limits, namely too little and too much. With too little detail and elaboration we have oversimplification, with too much we have overcomplication. Both have their negativities. With oversimplification you lose information and incur an ignorance that can lead to error. With oversimplification you incur distortion. The previous chapter dealt the oversimplification; addressing overcomplication is the present chapter’s work. Overcomplication arises in two ways in relation to our beliefs about Reality, namely: (1) When there is overly elaborate machinery for the range of application and implementation at issue, especially when this calls for discriminations that are too numerous or too intractable so that its descriptive factors cannot be properly assessed. Or (2) when it involves complicated and elaborate descriptively analytic relationships that are too complex and convoluted for effective manageability so that its functional relations have no clear linkage to determinable processes. These modes of thematic difficulty reflect the fact that a theory can become disconnected from reality in two ways. Any theory that is overly complex for the range of phenomena that it purports to address will fail in just these regards. Its wheels and gears spin without the traction of applicability needed to connect with reality—either 107

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because its parameters or its fundamental relations cannot be properly monitored in reality to determinable reality. A watch that oversimplifies matters by only giving the hours presents the matter unhelpfully. (It will have you waiting a long time to meet your appointments.) By contrast, an over-precise position locator (say one that always provides you the exact latitude/longitude coordinates for positions) will inconveniently force you to spend a great deal of time studying charts and maps in order to make this information useful. Overcomplication can prove just as unhelpful as oversimplification. Adequate information must be attuned to the ways and means of the purposive nature of the situation. Overcomplication imposes informative overload. Take the analogy of mapping. Representational amplification as per 10/1 let alone 1000/1 generally has little informative use and is likely to result in disturbing one’s view of things. An overcomplicated body of theory will be effective because in the end theory exists for the sake of application and implementation. For any given context of applicative implementation is defined by its correlative purposes— its operative teleology. And when those complications outrun the reach of necessity—when they become purposively unproductive—let alone counterproductive, we have entered the range of overcomplication. Theories that are overcomplex for the range of phenomenon they purport to address would include: The explanation of optical phenomena and perspective in terms of Flat Earth Theory. The explanation of meteorological phenomena in terms of the Greek Theistic Theory of the Olympus theology. The explanation of biomedical phenomena in terms of Chinese Chi theory. Even when theories cussed in explaining various phenomena, they nevertheless are deeply problematic: when their internal machinery lacks any determinable link to needful fact. In this regard they come to lack a link to the domain of what can be observed and marked in practice. They are simply too complex for smooth attunement to reality. Even the small-scale matters’ complexity can be troublesome. Consider a mechanism designed to print out letters. Every third letter is a C, randomly small or large. Every C-subsequent letter is A, again randomly capital on lower case. And then every following letter is case-variably a T. Thus it simply prints successive variants of cat, be it Cat, or CAT. It mixes total predictability with randomness. And now if (say) after every eighth capital it stops for two minutes, its production speed becomes unpredictable. We will

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be unable to specify how many times it will print CAT in a day. Even with a sample system operative complexity can become a cognitive impediment. COSTS/NEGATIVITIES OF OVERCOMPLICATION (PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL) In the seventeenth century, English prose writers frequently capitalized common nouns, as German writers do this day. The simplified use of capitals only for ease of interpretation (viz. using capitals only to initiate sentences and to distinguish proper names) did not establish itself in English until the nineteenth century—and in German not adopt even to the present day. The older practice is actually pretty well pointless. After all, writing is supposed to mirror speech, and speech does not capitalize. Here as elsewhere overcomplication creates avoidable wastage of effort. In this age of automation, overcomplication creates a remarkable tension between producer and consumer. It is comparatively easy for producer to make his product more versatile to serve a larger range of functions (with costs for this of course off-loaded on the consumer). Thus the consumer must pay more than he ought otherwise need to for a product leaving many functions that he does not require, a cost hopefully minimized by the producer’s lager market. But even then a collateral cost that remains to be paid is the additional of operational cumbersomeness of using a process devised for purposes above and beyond those at hand. Generalize capacity often produces overcomplication that impedes localized convenience. In most real-world operations complication imposes negativities: • the informational surfeit involves processing costs that render cognitive management cost-ineffective. • it impels one into wild goose chases amidst masses of detail. You are continually looking for needles in haystacks. • detail management is difficult and costly (in time, attention, resources). With added detail these costs increase exponentially. Theory after all exists in the service of thought and practice—to emplace our understanding and to facilitate action. And oversimplification impedes both of these objectives. Complication avoidance suggests a variant of Occam’s Razor: complications are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Complications will always raise superfluous questions. Thus suppose that you propose to distinguish between lower case and capital letters. Then the question will arise whether the C of cat is to be large or small. Similar

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proceedings where such matters do not arrive are always less cumbersome and operatively cheaper. Consider such matters as further layers of control and determination in the operation of bureaucracy, which is bound to increase the principles of delay, confusion, misunderstanding, and malefaction. Instructive cases of counterproductive overcomplication can be illustrated in matters of pictorial representation.

A great many facts remain assured, for example: • All positions on the\diagonal are X-occupied • Only the extreme corners on the/diagonal are blank But now error has also crept into it. For example the Appearance situation has it that there is on X in the/diagonal, which is evidentially not the case. When a theory is overcomplicated it becomes detached from the real world and thereby increases irrelevance to real-world situations. Complications must pay for themselves in terms of thought and action in understanding and convenience (procedural efficacy). Complications produce costs, specifically: 1. cognitive costs in terms of potential dislocation and misrepresentation: the more oversimplified, the less accurate. 2. practical costs in matters of application and obligation: the more complicated the less useful. 3. opportunity costs: the more complicated the more difficult to accommodate and the less investment from possible benefit elsewhere. OVERCOMPLICATION MATTERS One might find it tempting to say “Do not let complications worry you: the more detail you accommodate the greater the range of potentially useful

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information.” But this is very questionable. With information it is not simply a matter of the more the better. For information can obscure as well as clarify: it is hard to find needles in haystacks. In every context where information matters to us there is a reason why—a use for that information relative to the interests at issue. And with overcomplication we are apt to become enmeshed in issue-irrelevant information that may of itself be correct but yet fail to make any contributions to the issues at hand. Overcomplication always introduces irrelevant material. Insofar as the aim of rational inquiry is to provide an instructive and accurate account of the facts, it transpires that over-complication be as damaging an impediment to the views of the enterprise as it oversimplification. And even worse. Overcomplication does not just amplify information: it invites error-inducing distortion. For in elaborating the complexity of some matters beyond the bounds of informative necessity you endow it with a precision it generally does not merit. The irony, however, is that the line between productive complexitymanagement and overcomplication is seldom discernible in advance. It is, in general, something that can only be seen with the wisdom of hindsight. Nevertheless the most sensible plan is never to have resort to additional complexity until it is actually needed for essential work.

Chapter 8

Quantitative Epistemology

PRELIMINARIES The present deliberations will not address the epistemology of mathematics; rather, they will deal with the mathematics of epistemology. Their starting point lies in the consideration that our factual knowledge—our knowledge that something or other is the case—has to be formulated symbolically, by means of language (broadly speaking). And language as we deal with it is articulated recursively, developed from a finite vocabulary by a finite number of basic rules of combination. This means that our symbolically articulable claims—and thereby our accessible knowledge—are theoretically at most enumerable and practically actually finite in scope. And in actuality no more than a finite number of facts have ever been expressed and accordingly be known. As G. W. Leibniz already noted in the seventeenth century, the manifold of known information is destined to be finite.1 This cannot, however, be said of the manifold of fact. For there is good reason to think that this manifold is not merely infinite but even transdenumerably infinite in scope. For consider: (1) The mathematical realm embodies collections of items which, like the real numbers, are transdenumerably infinite in extent. (2) If (as it seems) the physical realm involves various descriptive parameters that vary along a continuous scale, this too points to a transdenumerably diverse body of information. For once we are dealing with a feature subject to continuous (real-number) parametrization, a trans-countable manifold of factuality emerges. 113

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(3) Even if the number of basic objects within in a theoretical domain or in the natural world is only enumerable in quantity, still the number of compound and complex objects engendered by viewing these in combination is going to be transdenumerably large. (This follows from Cantor’s theorem that the cardinal number of subsets of a given set is always greater than that set’s own cardinality). All of this means is that the scope of what is known is going to be quantitatively far smaller than the totality of fact, so that we finite knowers will have to come to terms with a vast volume of unknown fact. To be sure, at this point the temptation to deliberate as follows arises: Recall that there are two very different ways of presenting and considering a body of information. One is by way of an inventory: one simply provides a register in inventory of the facts at issue. And of course given this way in which we have to proceed here, this will always be something of finite scope and thus limited. But there is another, altogether different way afforded by the monumental discovery of the ancient Greeks—the way of axiomatization. Here one indeed starts out with a finite register of basic facts. But on the pathway of inferential derivation can amplify this potentially ad infinitum. And thus a modest register of basic facts can embody a potentially infinite range of fact by way of implicit logical derivation rather than explicit textual articulation.

But this well-intentioned idea will not achieve its present purpose. For one thing, lies in the logic of the situation that no inventory can ever ensure its own completeness. For to do so we would have to be able to move inferentially from (∀x ∈ I)Fx to (∀x)Fx, and such a step is logically impracticable without begging questions about the nature of I. However, the non-axiomatizability of the truth at large is also rooted in fundamentally logical considerations. For suppose that we endeavor to axiomatize the truth. We would then have to set out a group of axiomatic truths t1, t2, t3, . . . tn

that purports to provide an inferential basis for deriving what is true:

Given the truth of all those ti, this contention is unproblematic. But of course when what is additionally needed for overall axiomatization is:

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The upshot of these considerations is that the manifold of fact will be deductively incomplete: any supposed axiomatization of it is bound to leave something out. The cognitive ideal of course, is to know “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Here the radical sceptic is concerned to deny that we can ever know the truth of things; as he sees it the realization of certifiably true knowledge is beyond us. And the moderate sceptic is concerned to deny that we can know “nothing but the truth”; as he sees it our information always contains an admixture of misinformation and does so in a way that we cannot securely distinguish the one from the others. But neither of these modes of scepticism has been at issue in the present deliberations which have no quarrel with the idea of cognizable truth. They are addressed only at the third element of that dictum, by rejecting the idea that we can ever know “the whole truth.” Accordingly these deliberations do not of themselves make for cognitive scepticism of some sort, but only for cognitive modesty.

QUANTITATIVE DISPARITY Quantitative disparity brings to the fore some crucial considerations regarding knowability—considerations which the analogy of musical chairs helps to bring into clearer view. For the question “Are all truths knowable?” is akin to the question “Are all persons seatable?” And here consider that not all persons are even candidates for seatability since the room will be too small to admit more than a handful of players, and among these candidates it is inevitable that some players will ultimately be unseated when the music stops since limited number of chairs imposes limits on seatability. Accordingly, we will have to distinguish between the number of people that are effectively seatable (i.e., can ultimately be seated), the number of them that can possibly

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be seated through being participants in the game, and the number of them that are theoretically seatable as potential players. And this situation will carry over by analogy to the cognitive case, where we must distinguish between • the actually achievable body of knowledge as a finite subset of the manifold of truths, • the potentially realizable body of knowledge (as the manifold of truths at large) which is denumerably infinite in scope, and • the theoretically available knowledge relative to the vast, non-denumerably extensive body of fact. However, one very important point needs to be made. The situation that the range of fact vastly outruns the reach of knowability does not however, in and of itself mean that there are untenable facts. To see that this is so, consider the game of musical chairs where there are more players than seats. The circumstance that not all players can possibly be seated does not mean that there is any one player who is in principle unseatable. And so this is in prospect for fact knowability as well. However the situation is not quite as easy as this might make it seem. For there is at least one fact—viz. the megafact consisting of all facts taken together—whose unknowability is inherent in the numerical disparity at issue.2 We are thus carried back to the fundamentals of Leibnizian epistemology. We humans are finitely discursive thinkers who have to conduct their cognitive business with truths framed within the discursive instrumentalities of recursively (combinationally) articulated language. But the world of actual fact is more ramified and complex than that. We conduct our cognitive affairs by digitally discrete means in an analogue world of analytic continuities. And so our comprehension of the realm of fact is bound to be imperfect and to some extent conjectural. NOTES 1. For details see the author’s, “Leibniz’s Quantitative Epistemology.” Studia Leibnatiana, vol. 36 (2004), pp. 210–31. 2. It is, to be sure, possible that as my friend Patrick Grim stressed the idea of a totality of fact—the fact of all facts—in epistemology will encounter the same theoretical difficulties as the idea of a set of all sets in mathematics. See his fascinating, The Incomplete Universe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

Chapter 9

Information Iniquities

THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION Throughout recent times, the amount of information available in print, on tape, and via electronics—has been growing exponentially. Print space no longer limits encyclopedias, library space no longer limits book storage. The volume of available information is enormous and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Not only is there an ongoing recording and monitoring of such trivia as telephone conversations and charge card use but impertinent scientific, sociable, and cultural facts are continually developed. Scientific information is particularly prominent here. During most of the present century, the number of American scientists has been increasing at 6 percent to yield an exponential growth-rate with a doubling time of roughly twelve years.1 A startling consideration is that well over 80 percent of ever-existing scientists (in even the oldest specialties such as mathematics, physics, and medicine) are alive and active nowadays.2 And moving beyond science it remains that in social statistics, in the study of history, of culture, or of art we throughout have access to more information than we know what to do with. And the electronic means of storing and accessing information have energized this production of information almost beyond imagination. FRUSTRATING IMPLICATIONS Yet notwithstanding this information explosion the capacity of humans for information management has certain decisive limits. For any given human 117

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individual has only 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, and some 80 years in a lifetime. There is only so much information one can process—so many books to read, so many skills to master. And as the range of options increases the proportion of what is possible to what is achievable grows ever greater. Scholars and scientist force the countdown of an ever larger amount of material with less and less time to dedicate to any issue in relation to what is available. People are no longer chemist or historians but organic microbiologist or social historians of the American Civil War. And this shrinkage of the range of effectiveness has its problems, seeing that it carries in its wake specialization and division of labor to an extent that creates problematic consequences. An inherent impetus toward greater complexity pervades the entire realm of human cognitive effort. We find it in art; we find it in technology; and we certainly find it in the cognitive domain as well.3 And so we have no alternative to deeming science-as-we-have-it to afford an oversimplified model of reality. And in consequence we have no real alternative to becoming enmeshed in the same shortcomings that beset oversimplification in general. The increasing complexity of our world-picture is a striking phenomenon throughout the development of learning. The lesson of such considerations is clear. In the course of ongoing progress our knowledge grows not just in extent but also in complexity. The years of apprenticeship that separate a master from novice grow ever greater. And as the cognitive enterprise itself grows more extensive, the greater elaborateness of its productions requires an ever more demanding methodology for its accommodation. With a limited number of people confronting an ever complex surfeit of material there are increasingly fewer who can deal with a particular item. Sometimes it appears that the only people who read a given frontpiece are those immediately involved in its publication. To be fruitful information must not only be ample in scope but integrated and coordinated in substance. Thus consider:

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If X knows that the desired answer lies on the\diagonal and Y knows that is lies on the/diagonal, their joint information fixes it at the center. But unless and until someone correlates what they individually and separately know, the fact that their knowledge fixes the answer at the center is unavailable. Some basic facts about systems engineering need to be taken into account at this point. Suppose an overall system S consists of two subsystems, S1 and S2. And suppose further that we have a fair but yet imperfect grip on the functioning of these subsystems: we know how S1 works 90 percent of the time and the same of S2. What does this mean for our knowledge about the conjoint system S? The answer of course is that it all depends. It is a question how those Si are conjoined and coordinated. If favorably so then we may well be able to say how this S works some 90percent of the time. But if unfavorably so then our knowledge of S’s functioning may be very imperfect indeed. The point is that interrelationships matter in systematic understanding, and with increasingly complex systems their mastery becomes increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible. INFORMATIVE OVERLOAD An important lesson at once emerges from these considerations. A proper understanding of the behavior of complex system depends critically on a proper understanding of the feedbacks and interconnection that obtain among the relevant subsystems. And this means that the specialization and division of labor developed to yield a better understanding of how subsystems work may well prove to be unproductive for our understanding of things. Complexification militates to cognitive overload. And this has its problems. In particular it enjoins what might be dubbed a paradox of cognitive self-defeat. Day after day the turkey was fed and coddled—until Thanksgiving Day finally arrived. In cognition as elsewhere we can come to the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. The situation is akin to building brick chimneys or towers of ever greater height. They become ever larger and more impressive but also ever less stable, eventually collapsing under their own weight. Ever more massive size does not yield products of greater adequacy and usefulness. Detail is not always an advantage. A colleague once reported an exchange occurring when his brother asked his mother a question about something. She commented: “Why don’t you wait and ask your father about it when he comes home?” And the lad responded: “I don’t want to know that much about it.”

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If you are investigating reality A and have got as far as B and then augment this to C, you are likely tempted to think that the actuality of it is D rather than A.

Paradoxical though it seems some extensive and detailed information can prove to be unfavorably unhelpful. Informative detail can augment confusion rather that clarity of comprehension. In many cases further information can simply throw us off the track, B leading down primrose paths and blind alleys. (The history of ether theories in physics provides a good example of this.) The biochemist knows vastly more about how a medicament works in the body, but that does not make it easier for him to choose than it is for the less knowledgeable doctor to proscribe—let alone for the ill-informed patient to decide. Developments on the battlefield are easier to understand if you focus on divisions rather than companies, and sometimes even when you focus on corps rather than divisions. In choosing a route from point A to point B it is easier to use a map of scale 1/100,000 rather than a more detailed one of 1/10,000. Decision makers of every stripe soon learn that larger masses of detailed information do not make practical decisions easier to achieve. PROBLEMS OF OVERSIMPLIFICATION But simplification too has its dangers: specifically oversimplification. Induction with respect to the history of science—a constant veritable litany of errors of oversimplification—soon undermines our confidence that nature operates in the way we would deem all that simple. The history of science is in fact a litany of ongoing corrections of flaws of oversimplification. For that history is an endlessly repetitive story of simple theories giving way to more complicated and sophisticated ones. The Greeks had four elements; in the nineteenth century Mendeleev had some sixty; by the 1900s this had gone to eighty, and nowadays we have a vast series of elemental stability states. Aristotle’s cosmos had only spheres; Ptolemy’s added epicycles; ours has a

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virtually endless proliferation of complex orbits that only supercomputers can approximate. Greek science was contained on a single shelf of books; that of the Newtonian age required a roomful; ours requires vast storage structures filled not only with books and journals but with photographs, tapes, floppy disks, and so on. Consider an example. In the eleventh (1911) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, physics is described as a discipline composed of nine constituent branches (e.g., “Acoustics” or “Electricity and Magnetism”) which were themselves partitioned into twenty further specialties (e.g., “Thermo-electricity: of “Celestial Mechanics”). The fifteenth (1974) version of the Britannica divides physics into twelve branches whose subfields are— seemingly—too numerous for listing. (However the fourteenth 1960’s edition carried a special article entitled “Physics, Articles on” which surveyed more than 130 special topics in the field.) When the National Science Foundation launched its inventory of physical specialties with the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel in 1954, it divided physics into twelve areas with ninety specialties. By 1970 these figures had increased to 16 and 210, respectively. And the process continues unabated to the point where people are increasingly reluctant to embark on this classifying project at all. The fact of it is that oversimple theories invariably prove untenable in an enormously complex world. They only way for us to manage the vast masses of information that everywhere surround us is by condensation, and this is always a venture in oversimplification. But why do we ever oversimplify? Why not just go ahead and take those ignored complications into account? The answer is that in the circumstances we simply do not know how to. The situation is akin to that of the Paradox of the Preface. Recall that here an author writes: “I want to thank X, Y, and Z for their help with the material in the book. I apologize to the reader for the remaining errors, which are entirely mine.” One is, of course, tempted to object: “Why apologize for those errors? Why not simply correct them?” But of course he cannot do so because he does not know where those errors are located. And the situation with oversimplification is much the same. All too often we realize that we oversimplify, what we do not know is where we oversimplify. This is, in general, something that we can discern only within the wisdom of hindsight. We willingly and deliberately adopt the policy of allowing oversimplification to lead us in error time and again because we actually have very little choice about it. Oversimplification is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. Empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusions (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation are continuously enhanced by technological advance in the

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devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. The progress of science proceeds in the wake of an ever more powerful technology for the acquisition and processing of data which increasingly sophisticates the distinctions that have to be drawn and increasingly refines the theories employed in providing explanations.4 And a web of theory woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that will obtain later on, after our body of information has become enhanced. In matters of scientific discovery and progress the present cannot foretell what the future will bring. Our other-things-equal preference of simpler solutions over more complex ones is sensible enough. Simpler solutions are less cumbersome to store, easier to take hold of, and less difficult to work with, cognitive rationality combines the commonsensical precept, “Try the simplest thing first,” with a principle of burden of proof: “Maintain your cognitive commitments until there is good reason to abandon them.” But unfortunately oversimplification is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry.5 And so oversimplification is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. It roots in the very nature of the venture as a project of human inquiry as a matter of rational economy in the exploiting data to ground our inferences and conjectures regarding Reality. Empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusion (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation is continuously enhanced by technological advance in the devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. And our theories must be minimalistic: they must fit the existing data tightly. And so the web of theory that is woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that obtains subsequently, after our body of information has become enhanced. It is— inevitably—oversimple. This means that as our data are amplified through new observations and experiments the previously prevailing theories will almost invariably become destabilized. Those old theories oversimplified matters: new conditions call for new measures, new data for more complex theories. It lies in the rational economy of sensible inquiry that the history of science is an ongoing litany of oversimple old theories giving way to more sophisticated new ones that correct their oversimplification of the old. There is no fact about the history of science that is established more decidedly than this: that new technology (be it material or conceptual) puts new data at our disposal and that new data manifest the oversimplification of earlier theories. And so in the end, our methodological commitment to simplicity cannot stand in the way of an ongoing journey into complexity.6

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A PARADOX OF COGNITIVE PROGRESS: DIMINISHING AND POSSIBLY NEGATIVE RETURNS Suppose there are ten researchers each one producing one SCO (Significant contribution) a year. Then there will be 10 total SCOs in a year and 400 in a productive lifespan of 40 years. And now suppose further that it requires ten SCOs to provide for the grist for every new SCO. Then in a productive lifespan of 40 years with those 400 SCOs available as final for 40 SCOs total. Under these suppositions we have a situation of productive equilibrium. But now suppose the variant situation of diminishing returns where the production of significant accommodation becomes more difficult. Accordingly, let it be that instead of its requiring ten SCOs to energize the discovery of one more, twenty are required. Then those 400 provided for by the previous hypothesis would provide for only 20 (and not 40!) during a productive lifespan. Clearly, a drastic diminishing of productivity would result. As such a greatly oversimple model suggest, in matters of scientific and scholarly innovation the operation of a law of diminishing returns would issue in a situation of innovative collapse—as least as far as significant innovation in situations of innovative collapse. Of course this would not stop the wheels of productivity from turning. Doubtless scholars and researchers would continue to turn out material. But the significance of this material—its capacity to deepen our understanding and appreciation of things—would decline and fall. What might be termed the Law of Increasing Irrelevance to the effect that: As our body of information expands the proportion of issue-relevant information invariably decreases. Accordingly, the search for further issueilluminating information is subject to a principle of diminishing returns. As the haystack in which we seek our needles grow finding them is an everdecreasing prospect. In inquiry we have to work ever harder to secure issue-illuminating information. A law of diminishing returns is at work. The principal successes come early on and further progress becomes increasingly difficult. Further search is comparatively less productive. (The exception, of course, is provided by the rare case when further effort has us stumble on a problem-unlocking key.) The point is that additional information need not carry one closer to the truth but rather, all depending on its nature, lead further down the promise path to anomaly or bias. (If those black swans are limited to Australia, then getting more Scandinavian swans into the agenda is not helpful. If your quest for even primes begins at eleven, then extending the search by a billion more places will not prove informatively rewarding.) Overall we are confronted by an understandable but nevertheless troublesome process of the following format:

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The process of inquiry is not just productive but in a way over-productive, involving us in a venture of looking for needles in ever expanding and more elaborately entangled haystacks. IGNORANCE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE Ironically, despite the vast multitude of facts that one does not know one cannot give any example of them. There is, to be sure, no difficulty about questions I cannot answer. But the challenge “Give me an example of a fact that you do not know” is a request I cannot meet! For to instance F is a fact I do not now I would have to realize that F is a fact, which is to say that I would have to claim to know it to be so. This, of course, is impracticable. But more far-reachingly, there are also facts that no-one can possibly know—issues whose resolution lies beyond the power of anyone and everyone. Given human finitude—both at the level of individuals and ­collectively—there will be some facts which nobody actually knows so that the now-generalized question “What is an example of a fact that nobody knows?” will be unanswerable. For while it doubtless has an answer, it will nevertheless be one that no-one can appropriately provide, since that suchand-such a particular fact is universally unknown to be so is something that no-one can possibly know. Yet while it is obviously impossible to provide examples of unknowable facts, it would take considerable hybris to deny that such facts exist. Thus if no intelligent being in the cosmos happens to know that a certain fact obtains, then nobody can know that this particular circumstance is so. Even as our own ignorance lies outside our personal ken, so our collective ignorance lies outside our collective ken as well. If altogether untenable facts there are, then nobody can know this in detail. Thus consider such questions as: • What is an example of a problem that will never be considered by any human being? • What is an example of an idea that will never occur to any human being?

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There are sound reasons of general principle (the potential infinitude of problems and ideas; the inherent finitude of human intelligence) to hold that the items at issue in these questions do actually exist. And it seems altogether plausible to think that other hypothetically possible (non-human) intelligences could well answer these questions correctly. But it is equally clear that it is beyond the limits of possibility for anyone to know the details of their ignorance.7 And regrettably, ignorance in general invites error. In trying to fill the blank spaces in our knowledge we are led into plausible conjectures and suppositions that are simply off the mark. For with most questions the range of available responses has only one single correct solution but many that are wrong. CONCLUSION The present deliberations should not be viewed as an essay “In the Praise of Ignorance.” They are not designed to denigrate the quest for knowledge. Instead, what they seek to show is that information as such is not a gift horse into whose mouth we should not look. Nothing said here is designed to impede the quest for more information. Rather, the pivotal point is that this quest has to be pursued subject to the instruction: “Handle With Care!” NOTES 1. The older figures are given in S. S. Visher, “Starred Scientists, 1903–1943” in American Men of Science (Baltimore, 1947). For many further details regarding the development of American science see the author’s, Scientific Progress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 2. On these issues see the author’s, Epistemology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). 3. An interesting illustration of the extent to which lessons in the school of bitter experience have accustomed us to expect complexity is provided by the contrast between the pairs: rudimentary/nuanced; unsophisticated/sophisticated; plain/elaborate; simple/intricate. Note that in each case the second, complexity-reflective alternative has a distinctly more positive (or less negative) connotation than its opposite counterpart. 4. On these issues see also the author’s, Scientific Progress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 5. On these issues see the author’s, Epistemological Studies (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2009). 6. On these issues see the author’s, Epistemological Studies (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2009). 7. On the issues of this section see also the author’s, Unknowability: An Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009) and Epistemic Principles (New York: Peter Lang, 2017).

Chapter 10

Managing Uncertainty

DEGREES OF UNCERTAINTY We humans make our way in the world not by instruct and automaticity but by knowledge and deliberation. But our knowledge is decidedly limited so that we have not only knowledge but also ignorance and not only information but unknowing as well. And all too evidently uncertainty in matters of decision and action has its roots in ignorance—in a lack of information regarding essential features of the prevailing situation. Such uncertainty is a fact of life with which we must come to terms. One major mode of uncertainty is the cognitive uncertainty that arises from incomplete information with the consequence that there are various questions whose answer is indeterminable in the prevailing informative combinations. Thus give a tic-tac-toe square and told that it contains exactly one X and that it is not positioned on a diagonal, it remains uncertain in which of the four shaded squares that X is located.

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A second mode of uncertainty related to the physical uncertainty arising where there is a process subject to the contingency that it may work out in any of several different alternative but unspecifiable ways. An instance would be a coin toss currently in progress whose outcome of Heads versus Tails yet remains undecided. And the same holds for the exact time of decay of an unstable transuranic atom of a certain half-life. Given the realities of the human condition, such a state of things is a pervasive feature across the entire landscape of life, time, and again confronting us with inconvenient ignorance as we consider how to go about managing our affairs. Specifically, whenever our best-available knowledge of something is imprecise then not only are we uncertain about just what exactly the situation is, but it is in fact actually uncertain what this is. Unavoidable imprecision enjoins uncertainty—if at all. Given that one does not know—and has no way of finding out—just how tall A. Lincoln was to the nearest millimeter—then one simply has to say that it is uncertain exactly what this man’s height was. Such uncertainty becomes explicit in discourse through a vast array of guiding and qualifying locutions: “roughly,” “appropriately,” “more-or-less,” “something like,” “somewhat as,” and so on. The imprecision of metaphor, simile, analogy, and the like all bring uncertainty to view. One must distinguish between subjective or agent-correlative uncertainty (“X is uncertain”) and objective or impersonal uncertainty (“It is uncertain”). Something is subjectively uncertain of an individual if he does not know whether it holds or not. Something is objectively uncertain when one cannot know whether it obtains or not: the very claim of its obtaining is problematic because any prospect of determining whether or not it obtains is beyond feasible realization: the contention that it obtains answers to no determinable fact of the matter. Classic instances of such objective uncertainty include the eventuation of processes that are matters of pure chance (e.g., the outcome of coin tosses) or of inherent contingency (e.g., outcome of sharply contested elections). The main focus here will be on objective uncertainty. GRADES OF UNCERTAINTY It is accordingly important to distinguish three grades of uncertainty. I. Radical or Qualitative Uncertainty. Radical uncertainty prevails with choices in conditions of inadequate knowledge, when there is gravely insufficient information about the possible outcome one’s decisions. Here one cannot even say just what the possible results might be, let alone what is the probability and the value of their realization. In such

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situations there simply is no rationally viable way rational resolution— one is simply groping about in the dark. II. Strict or Quantitative Uncertainty. Here one at last knows what may happen—what the possible outcomes are. However, what one does not know is the probability of their realization or the magnitude the positive or negative results at issue with their occurrence. The probabilities and values involved are of unknown extent so that no informative expectation can be determined. III. Imprecision or Metric Uncertainty. In this case one can not only define the range of possible outcomes but can even make a rough determination of the quantities at issue. Here, while one cannot say with precision exactly what the relevant probabilities and outcome values are, one can at least place them in a certain determinate range. Those then are the three grades of uncertainty that can and should be distinguished—here duly listed in order of diminishing seriousness and unmanageability. For with radical uncertainty we face a situation that is formless—without determinable structure. With strict uncertainty maintaining we face a situation that is unquantifiable. With imprecision uncertainty we have a situation that has structure but is quantifiable alright, yet only in a way deficient in exact detail. Clearly the least of these offers the best hope of rational tractability. Acting under conditions of uncertainty generally carries risks because life being what it is, those uncertain outcomes will include negative possibilities. Risk is always at work when we act with uncertainty. Ignorance creates hazards: in general uncertainty carries the risk of a wide range of potential negativities in its wake. MODES OF UNCERTAINTY Short of radical uncertainty, situations of problematic choice there exhibit five principal modes of uncertainty, relating respectively to • C-uncertainly: Choice uncertainty: uncertainty regarding the range of choices that stand before us as available prospects. • O-uncertainty: Outcome uncertainty: uncertainty regarding the outcome that will ensue when we make a particular choice. • P-uncertainty: Probability uncertainty: uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the probability that a particular outcome will be realized. • Y-uncertainty: Yield uncertainty: uncertainty regarding the value of the outcome that is realized.

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• E-uncertainty: Expectation uncertainty: uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the expectation at issue, (Since expectation is a product of probabilities and yields, both R-uncertainty and Y-uncertainty create E-uncertainty.) In point of rational tractability matters improve substantially once one gets past the first two of these. Here expectation can be our guide—at least roughly. Thus consider the indecisive situation of Display 1, where a limited quantitative uncertainty regarding x puts it in the range for .1 to .2. Here doing A gets a clear expected-value advantage and we have the guidance we need for decision. It is clear that rational choice is not necessarily precluded by (here quantitative) uncertainty but hinges critically on the detail of the case. CHOICE AND OUTCOME UNCERTAINTY Choice uncertainty is a serious impediment to rational deliberation. Insofar as available possibilities are entirely unknown to us, determining an appropriate course of action becomes infeasible. And the situation is almost as bad with outcome uncertainty, where we know our choices but cannot say what outcomes they might or can produce.

With O-uncertainty even the range of possible outcomes is i­ mponderable— as with bringing children into the world, the possible eventuation is simply unknowable. The effect of reducing outcome uncertainty is to narrow the range of possible results. It is problematic whether this betters or worsens the expectation,

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seeing that this eliminated cases can possibly be either for the good or for the bad and thus bears upon the expectation either positively or negatively. Given this stark reality it might seem that the sensible thing to do is to diminish the uncertainty at issue. But often this is not practicable. However an outcome narrowing may possibly improve upon and cannot possibly degrade the “if worse comes to worst” situation. Accordingly, insofar as rational decision making is predicated upon a worst-possible-outcome avoidance, it becomes possible for outcome-uncertainty reduction to make a positive (albeit minimal) contribution to the decision process. PROBABILITY UNCERTAINTY Probability uncertainty (P-uncertainty) arises because an uncertain outcome may simply not have a determinate probability at all. There is no determinable probability that Judge Crater was alive in 1960 or that Lizzy Borden killed her parents. In such matters one can at best specify a probability value within board-limits. Consider the following situation:

Here we will have it that:

EV ( Do A ) = x • Y1 + (1 - x ) • Y2 = Y2 + x (Y1 - Y2 )

But should it be that x has a variation of ± a percent, then substituting (1 ± a)x for x, we arrive at:

EV* ( Do A ) = Y2 + X (1 ± a )(Y1 - Y2 ) = Y2 + x (Y1 - Y2 ) ± ax (Y1 - Y2 ) = EV ( do A ) ± ax (Y1 - Y2 )



The interactive magnitude of these quantities will determine whether expected-value comparisons alone will be of any avail in situations of probability-uncertainty. And very possibly they will not be.

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YIELD UNCERTAINTY In situations of uncertain expected-value comparisons with respect outcomes prove to be of only limited help. Thus consider the following sort of situation:

In such matters we get unproblematic guidance for expected-value comparisons only as long as the uncertainty range of the alternatives at issue do not overlap (as they do in this diagram). EXPECTATION UNCERTAINTY Does uncertainty reduction in matter of expectation help? It all depends. Thus consider the decision of whether or not to do A in the situation depicted in Display 2. In the BEFORE situation the matter was confused and indecisive; in the AFTER situation the preferability of not doing A has become clear. But this is a special case. For the most part uncertainty leaves the comparison of expectations in the state of confusion.

How sensitive is expected value to variation in probability versus outcome yield? Consider again the preceding sample uncertain-outcome situation:

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As regards expectation we again have:

EV = xY1 + (1 - x ) Y2 = Y2 + x (Y1 - Y2 )

CASE 1. Let us suppose a 10% uncertainty in the probability x, with x = .8. Then x can vary from .72 to .88.

Subcase .1 : x = .72



EV ( Subcase 1.1) = Y2 + .72 (Y1 - Y2 )



Subcase .2 : x = .88



EV ( Subcase .2 ) = Y2 + .12 (Y1 - Y2 )

The range of variation is simply the arithmetical difference between the two cases, which comes to .6(Y1 - Y2). CASE 2. Suppose a 10% uncertainty in the yields Yi, so that each Y-value actually ranges from .9Y to 1.1Y. There will now be four choices as per:

EV ( Subcase 1) = 1.1Y1 x + 1.1Y2 (1 - x )



EV ( Subcase 2 ) = 1.1Y1 x + .9Y2 (1 - x )



EV ( Subcase 3 ) = .9Y1 x + 1.1Y2 (1 - x )



EV ( Subcase 4 ) = .9Y1 x + .9Y2 (1 - x )

The range of variation between these will of course vary from cases to case. But consider just the discrepancy between EV(subcase 1) and EV(Subcase 4) namely: .2Y1x + .2Y2(1 – x), Now with x = .8 this comes to .16Y1 + .04Y2. How does this compare with the preceding range or variation, namely .6(Y1 – Y2)? Consider

.6Y1 − .6Y2 ~ .16Y1 − .04Y2

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4.4Y1 ~ 6.4Y2

Y1 ~

16 Y2 11

Clearly the comparison can go either way: it all depends on the ratio Y1/Y2. The issue of comparative sensitivity to probabilistic and yield uncertainty has to remain unsettled: the matter will vary according to cases, without any uniform generality. UNCERTAINTY AND TRUTH Uncertainty actually plays a positive role in its relation to truth. For inexactness and imprecision are both truth-facilitative and probability conducive. It is a far more promising truth-claim—and much more likely to be correct— that the room is 4 ± 2 meters high than that it is 4 ± .001 meters high or that there are roughly 2,000 people in the crowd than that there are exactly 1,982. Imprecision and exactness may compromise the informativeness of a claim and perhaps thereby its usefulness also. But credibility and probability are something else again. Uncertainty in the way of inexactness and impression does not hinder the realization of truth but facilitates it. What we require for useful information is the combination of tenability and detail. And in their interaction these two factors stand in a tension of a reciprocally complementarity tension: as depicted in Display 3. Obtaining more of the one can be achieved only by settling for less of the other, so the most promising procedure is to settle for a judicious combination of the two—one that best meets the needs of the specific situation at hand. Uncertainty need not necessarily prove to be a negative factor.

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UNCERTAINLY DEFENSES There are various standard paths to rational and prudent proceeding when we have to act under conditions of uncertainty. These defensive measures principally include: • insurance • hedging one’s bets • averting substantiating negative outcomes In relation to the last of these, consider a situation like that of Display 4. Here a risk aversive individual may well prefer the Do A option with its certain loss because regardless of qualitative expectation he might not want to risk a substantial loss (as per do B), let alone run a risk of disaster (as per Display 4).

When the uncertainties at issue are cognitive (rather than material or physical), the available defenses include • disjunction (if the uncertainty is simply as between A and B then A-or-B becomes a sure bet). • imprecision (if the uncertainty lies within a certain range—say between 120 and 140, then the indecisively vague “somewhere around 130” becomes a good bet—here terms like “roughly” or “approximately” can render good service.) • ambiguity (often several distinct possibilities can be involucrated within one “oracular” expression). When we are eager to protect our reputation for reliability, truthfulness, and veracity we resort to hedging devices or this sort. In doing so, we should be mindful, however, of the Display 3 tradeoff.

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COST EFFECTIVENESS What can be said about the cost-effectiveness of uncertainty reduction? First as to effectiveness. What does uncertainty-reduction do for us; what benefits does it provide? Ordinarily we would assess the cost effectiveness of a decision proceeding via its bearing on our expectations. However, when uncertainty rears it problematic head, this need no longer avail. Expectations are now not so much altered as obscured. To be sure, with uncertainty-reduction the range of indefiniteness is narrowed, but this may well not help matters. In situations of uncertainty we are generally well-advised to follow the example of the investment markets. In situations of serious uncertainty they opt for safety and “go to gold.” What they now seek is not an enhancement of expected gain but a diminution of potential loss—an averting of the worstcase scenarios. Reducing the range of quantitative uncertainty is often costeffective not in the positive way of enhancing the promise of gain, but only in the negative and defensive way of diminishing the prospect of loss. Uncertainty “puts us on the defensive” for when the range of realizable possibility is widened we will have diminished information about what to expect. Decision planning geared to expectations then becomes increasingly pointless. Instead, the prospect of averting the worst-case now becomes more urgent and “playing it safe” becomes an increasingly attractive option. OVERALL LESSONS1 Various instructive lessons follow from these deliberations. 1. First and foremost: uncertainty in general offers a serious challenge to rational choice and decision. 2. Particularly difficult and intractable is the matter of qualitative uncertainty where even the matter of what might happen is unclear. 3. There are very different degrees and different modes of uncertainty, and they function in importantly different ways. 4. Quantitative uncertainty is the most tractable version. For here the extent of uncertainty can often be reduced to a point where traditional expected-value considerations can provide adequate guidance. 5. However, in many cases this cannot be done at all or only at an expectation that is unaffordable or not cost-effective. (This problem is particularly prominent in matters of uncertainty or imprecision relating to the truth.)

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6. In circumstances of drastic uncertainty, the best we can generally do is to resort to the principle of risk-minimization based on avoiding prospect of inferior outcomes. 7. Overall, uncertainty is so complex and many-sided overall that general nostrums are of little use. The issues must be dealt with in a case-by-case basis, with the rationally appropriate mode of treatment adjusted with to the specific particularities of the case. NOTE 1. Further useful resources include: Bibliography of Papers Regarding Measurement Uncertainty (http://www.fasor.com/iso25/bibliography_of_uncertainty.htm). Understanding Uncertainty Site from Cambridge’s Winton program (https://understandinguncertainty.org/)

Chapter 11

The Paradox of Inquiry

THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION Our knowledge bears the burden of its own progress. The Greeks had four elements; in the nineteenth century Mendeleev had some sixty; by the 1900s this had gone to eighty, and nowadays we have a vast series of elemental stability states. Aristotle’s cosmos had only spheres; Ptolemy’s added epicycles; ours has a virtually endless proliferation of complex orbits that only supercomputers can approximate. Greek science was contained on a single shelf of books; that of the Newtonian age required a roomful; ours requires vast storage structures filled not only with books and journals but with photographs, tapes, floppy disks, and so on. Of the quantities currently recognized as the fundamental constants of physics, only one was contemplated in Newton’s physics: the universal gravitational constant. A second was added in the nineteenth century, Avogadro’s constant. The remaining six are all creatures of twentieth century physics: the speed of light (the velocity of electromagnetic radiation in free space), the elementary charge, the rest mass of the electron, the rest mass of the proton, Planck’s constant, and Boltzmann’s constant. It would be naive—and quite wrong—to think that the course of scientific progress is one of increasing simplicity. The very reverse is the case: scientific progress is a matter of complexification because oversimple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world. The natural dialectic of scientific inquiry continually impels us into ever deeper levels of complexity sophistication.1 We are led to ever higher levels of aggregation, compression, and abstraction. In seeking for the needle in the expanding haystack we must carry our search processes to ever greater lengths. In much of the recent period, the pool of information workers has grown rapidly (at some 5 percent annually), and their output even more so (at a pace 139

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of around 15 percent yearly during the twentieth century) indicating an impressively growing efficiency in the production of information.2 In the early 2010’s some 2-1/2 million books were published annually (up from some 1/3 million in the early 2000s.)3 In regard to the literature of science, it is readily documented that the number of books, of journals, of journalpapers has been increasing exponentially over the recent period.4 Throughout modern times the number of scientists has been increasing at roughly 5 pertcent per annum.5 Thus well over 80 percent of ever-existing scientists (in even the oldest specialties, e.g., mathematics, physics, and medicine) are alive and active at the present time. And scientific information has also been growing at the (reasonably constant) exponential rate over the past several centuries, so as to produce a veritable flood of scientific literature in our time. The Physical Review is now divided into six parts, each of which is larger than the whole journal was a decade or so ago. The total volume of scientific publication is truly staggering. It is reliably estimated that, from the start, well over 10 million scientific papers have been published and that by the mid-1970s some 30,000 journals were publishing some 600,000 new papers each year. It is readily documented that the number of books, of journals, of journals-papers has been increasing at an exponential rate over the recent period.6 To be precise, the printed literature of science has been increasing at some 5 percent per annum throughout the last two centuries, to yield an exponential growth-rate with a doubling time of ca. fifteen years and an order-of-magnitude increase roughly every half century. And much the same story holds for the recruitment of people and the expenditures on equipment—that is for resource commitment in general. This disintegration of knowledge is also manifolded vividly in the fact that out cognitive taxonomies are bursting at the seams. Consider the example of taxonomic structure of physics. Substantially the same story can be told for every field of science and learning. The emergence of new disciplines, branches, and specialties is manifest everywhere. And as though to negate this tendency and maintain unity, one finds an ongoing evolution of interdisciplinary syntheses—physical chemistry, astrophysics, biochemistry, and so on. The very attempt to counteract fragmentation produces new fragments. Indeed, the phenomenology of this domain is nowadays so complex that some writers urge that the idea of a “natural taxonomy of science” must be abandoned altogether.7 The expansion of the scientific literature is in fact such the natural science has in recent years been disintegrating before our very eyes. An ever larger number of ever more refined specialties has made it ever more difficult for experts in a given branch of science to achieve a thorough understanding about what is going on ever in the specialty next door.

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LIMITATIONS OF ACCESS It may well be suggested that the process will reach a natural end: that as inquiry proceeds we will eventually run out of new knowledge. After all, it might be said, there are only so many laws of nature. However, even a system that is finitely complex both in its physical makeup and in its functional laws might nevertheless be infinitely complex in the phenomena that it manifests over time. For the operations of a structurally and lawfully finite system can yet exhibit an infinite intricacy in productive complexity, manifesting this limitless diversity in the working out of its processes rather than as regards its spatiostructural composition or the nomic comportment of its basic components. Even if the number of constituents of nature were small, the ways in which they can be combined to yield phenomena in space-time might yet be infinite. Think here of the examples of letters, syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs, books, genres (novels, reference books, etc.) libraries, library systems. Even a finite nature can, like a typewriter with a limited and operationally simple keyboard, yield an endlessly varied test. It can produce a steady stream of new products—“new” not necessarily in kind but in their functional interrelationships and thus in their theoretical implications. And on this basis our knowledge of nature’s workings can be endlessly enhanced and deepened by contemplating an unending proliferation of phenomena. There are two principal modes of information: substantive and relational. The one deals with descriptive detail, the other one with relational interconnections. (A town may be described by its buildings or its roads, a range of occurrence via its phenomena or its explanatory laws.) And as the substantive situation grows ever more extensive and complex, the project of understanding the relational connections become even more so. (Thus four items can be listed in 4! = 24 ways.) The growth of knowledge provides not only benefit but challenges. The lesson of such considerations is clear. Scientific knowledge grows not just in extent but also in complexity and comprehensiveness, so that science presents us with a scene of ever-increasing complexity. It is thus fair to say that modern science confronts us with a cognitive manifold that involves an ever more extensive specialization and division of labor. The years of apprenticeship that separate master from novice grow ever greater. A science that moves continually from an oversimple picture of the world to one that is more complex calls for ever more elaborate processes for its effective cultivation. And as the scientific enterprise itself grows more extensive, the greater elaborateness of its productions places ever more demanding requirements for its effective cultivation. We humans have limited and fixed amounts of time, attentiveness, and absorption-capacity. Accordingly, faced with a growing body of material

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we find that our proportionate access to information is ever smaller. When X percent of the whole is what we are able to master, then X, our proportionate mastery of material, grows ever smaller. (See Display 1.)

To say of a fact f that it is knowable (i.e., can be known) is highly equivocal. It admits of very different constructions ranging over the following spectrum: (1) Facticity: f is indeed a fact and is thereby something available for being known. f is cognitively accessible to some sort of intelligence (intelligent being). (2) Cognitive Accessibility: f is cognitively accessible to us: we humans all have at our disposal the ways and means by which we (i.e., some of us) can in principle get a cognitive grip on it. f is within the cognitive reach of all of us humans. (3) Cognitive Realization: f has actually come to be known to some of us humans. And the salient point for present purposes is that the range of realizability in sense (4) is constantly shrinking in relation to that which is knowable in senses (1) and (2). LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING AND INFORMATION COMPRESSION But what if one were to relax the qualification requisite for knowledge? Can we not maintain the overall size of what is personally known by simply being more relaxed about it?

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Here a choice look at what factual understanding calls for becomes necessary. For while the access of information can be maintained by compression, the quality of what is achieved is gravely degraded. Instances of the compression of information are readily provided. Maps at increasing levels of scale afford increasingly fine-grained information. Dictionaries at increasing levels of sophistication—ranging from “collegiate” to “unabridged” to OED-like provide greater detailed of linguistic usage. Textbooks and manuals—ranging from beginners, for armatures, for serious students, and ultimately for experts—manifest different levels of informativeness and depth. Throughout the cruder, less detailed, less sophisticated accountings fall short not because the information they provide is false but because it is less detailed, less nuanced, less accurate. And in all such contexts those conceived functions at different levels of information adequacy beginning with that of the layman who only looks to the general lay of the land, moving on to the interested non-specialists who is content with the rough generality of things, and on to the specialist expert to whom every small detail matters. In the face of expanding knowledge, access to information can certainly be enhanced by compression. Such compression can involve take many forms: • Omitting superfluities. The omission what is trivial, self-evident, commonplace. Often what is said can be taken “to go without saying.” That the physicians in Napoleon’s army were male, or that the only general officers in the armies of Louis XIV were noblemen where conditions that hold so generally as to dispense with need for specific mention. There is no point to special acknowledgment of facts conforming to standard patterns and established normalities. REDUNDANCY REDUCTION The omission of dispensable detail is a prime means of textual compression. Rare is the Sunday Sermon that cannot absorb a 50 percent compression without communicative loss. Even newspaper reportage of current developments could usually absorb 25 percent reduction. Much of our informative communication is subject to substantial redundancy. Much of what is said is a clear consequence of what is already there. These are the “free and easy” modes of information compression. But they can take us only so far. They only reduce the icing but now we must cut into the cake itself.

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A great many facts are contextually obvious. One need not repeat city and state in the address book for a given town or state that US currency is being used in the price list of a US store. GENERALIZATION If all the apples grown in a given orchard go to the Jones Apple Sauce Factory, there is to point in stating seriatim that this is so for each weekly crop. If all the students of a certain school are women, there is no point in claiming this to be so separately and individually for each year’s graduating class. Clearly, then, one simple way of condensing a mass of information is by having it that all of it conforms to a single universal pattern. Generalizations may accordingly be accounted as a prime means of information compression. The quest for generalization constitutes a paramount means for compressing reformation. CONSEQUENCE ELISION There is no point in being explicit about obvious consequences. Once it has been stated that apples have seeds, it is superfluous to have it that all Macintosh apples do so. APPROXIMATION When the situation regarding X is analogous or approximate to that regarding Y, this is something that can be conveyed on an overall basis. Once it is clear that palaces provide housing for people there is no need to make the point that they too have doors, windows, floors, stairs, and so on. • Typicality. In describing Macintosh apples it suffices to include their generic features, consideration of various norm-departures particularities can be omitted. Delving in the prominent aspect and clusters of phenomena. INDUCTIVE SYSTEMATIZATION The assumption that the future not only foreshadows but resembles the past— which lies at the basis of all inductive reasoning—is one way of reducing a potential mass of information traceable. Thus consider the series.

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These then are some of the main ways in which the textual compression of information can be achieved. But of course the process is one that can be carried only so far. LIMITS OF COMPRESSION The relationship of the extent of information loss to the amount of compression (of reduction in expansion volume) is shown in Display 1 above. The detail will of course vary from context to context but the general situation is the same up to a certain point (α) compression comes cost-free: expositing abbreviation is effectively without loss. Thereafter loss grows mightily up to an inflection point (I) after which it decelerates until fully reaching the total of 100 percent. Those two crucial parameters α and I define the specifics of the situation. Always as compression grows there is in the end a coordinate degree of information loss, ranging from “negligible” to “significant” to “crucial” and ultimately “fatal” compression always carries negativities. And the greater the compression the greater the loss. As Display 2 shows, as of a certain point expository compression always exacts a loss by way of oversimplification.

OVERSIMPLIFICATION AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF COMPRESSION Oversimplification of the real is inherent in the very nature of cognitive rationality as it functions in scientific inquiry. For empirical science is a matter of drawing universal conclusion (“theories” they are usually called) from the perceived facts of observation and experiment. But observation and experimentation is continually enhanced by technological advance in the devices used to monitor and manipulate nature. And our theories fit the existing data tightly. And so the web of theory that is woven about a given manifold of data will not—and effectively cannot—be adequate to the situation that obtains subsequently, after our body of information has become enhanced. It is—inevitably—oversimple. And so as our data are amplified through new

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observations and experiments, the previously prevailing theories will almost invariably become destabilized. In natural science we continually enlarge the window through which we view the phenomena of nature. As we build more powerful telescopes or microscopes, more elaborate particle accelerators, more sophisticated apparatus for low temperature experimentation closer to absolute zero, and so on. we bring new phenomena to view. And new phenomena generally do not fit into old patterns. Those old theories oversimplified matters: new conditions call for new measures, new data for more complex theories. It lies in the rational economy of sensible inquiry that the history of science is an ongoing litany of oversimple old theories giving way to more sophisticated new ones that correct their oversimplification of the old. For in the end, scientific progress is a matter of correcting for oversimplification because oversimple theories invariably prove untenable in a complex world. Aristotelian mechanism did not distinguish between weight and mass. Newtonian physics did not distinguish inertial from gravitational mass. Cartesian dynamics did not distinguish between force and action. Mendeleev’s chemistry did not distinguish atoms from their isotopes. And so it goes. Enhanced observations evolve more elaborate theories that require more sophisticated distinctions. From the vantage point of later science the earlier efforts always look to be oversimple. But the ever-present oversimplification of our scientific thinking in the short range as is continually diminished over the large run by the nature of the proceedings in which whatever-expanding experience comes to be at our disposal. The principal problem here is the inaccessibility of expert information to non-experts who lack the background for copying with the sophisticated technicalities at issue. The necessary information is only accessible to them in a compressed and eviscerated version—which means that in the end it is not available to them at all. The need for compression and deliberation of detail puts limits to what can be conveyed. And in this regard less is not just quantitative but quantitated—that is, inadequate. Compression and oversimplification go hand in hand. And this exists a penalty at every level of concern, ranging from that of the interested layman to that of the productive specialist expert. CONSEQUENCES AND COSTS OF COMPRESSION TO INFORMATION-CONSUMERS (LAYMAN) From the information-consumer’s point of view compression unavoidably has unhappy consequences. It is invariably accompanied not only by the loss but also by the destruction of information. And this of course means that the consumer will unavoidably have to settle for imperfect understanding. Indeed with sufficient compression he becomes condemned to amateurism

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Oversimplification consists in the omission of detail in a way that is misleading in creating or inviting a wrong impression in some significant—that is, issue-relevant—regard. In practice the line between beneficial simplification and harmful oversimplification is not easy to draw. Often as not it can only be discerned with the wisdom of retrospective hindsight. For whether that loss of detail has negative consequences and repercussions is generally not clear until after a good many returns are in. For the most part, oversimplification involves loss. The student who never progresses from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to the works of the Bard of Avon himself pays a price not just in detail of information but in the comprehension of significance. And the student who substitutes the Cliff’s Notes version for the work itself suffers a comparable impoverishment. To oversimplify a work of literature is to miss much of its very point. Whenever we oversimplify matters by neglecting potentially relevant detail we succumb to the flaw of superficiality. Our understanding of matters then lack depth and thereby compromises its cogency. Oversimplification always involves errors of omission. It occurs whenever someone leaves out of account features of an item that bear upon a correct understanding of its nature. For example, to say that Rome declined because its elite was enervated by lead poisoning from the pipes of its water supply oversimplifies the issue by fixing on one single—and actually minor—causal factor to the exclusion of many others. Accounts of such complex historical episodes almost invariably oversimplify matters. It is inevitable for oversimple thought about anything to be incomplete, because just this is exactly what oversimplification is—the omission of significant detail through a failure to take note of various factors that are germane to the matters at hand, thereby resulting in a failure to understand the reality of things. Whenever we unwittingly oversimplify matters we have a blind spot where some significantly issue-relevant facet of reality is concealed from our view. A deep principle of cognitive theory comes to the fore at this point—a principle which might be indeed the Principles of Cognitive Horizons to the effect that the understanding is operationally restricted in its functional resources and capacities in such a way that an intelligent functional at a lesser level of sophistication cannot possibly secure adequate cognitive access to what is going on at a higher level. The workings of a more powerful intelligence will always look to be incomprehensible magic to the understanding of a lesser intellect. A less sophisticated intellect simply cannot look beyond its cognitive horizons to get a cognitive grip on what is going on beyond. No looking over the horizon. From its standpoint, what is happening there is simply incomprehensible magic. Aristotle and quantum physics. Impossibility of transpiring the finite of a more complex and sophisticated into the identical resources of a lower level.

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CONSEQUENCES AND COSTS OF COMPRESSION TO EXPERTS To be an expert in a field of science and learning requires achieving adequate mastery in one way or another the substance of fair percentage (say, for the sake of discussion one-half) of its relevant information. But when a field grows exponentially this masterly becomes unachievable. Only by narrowing the field of concern—by turning it into ever smaller subfields—is one able to achieve the knowledge requisite for authentic expertise. And so the information explosion that here concerns us exacts a real, significant, and unavoidable price of the experts. They must become ever more narrowly circumstance specialists. A good example is afforded by the recent history philosophy—my own field of work. When I did my doctoral training it was possible—perhaps just possible—to be really well informed—even if not fully expert—in the history of modern European philosophy during the era from Leibniz to Hegel. Some thirty years later one would at most be a specialist/expert in the philosophy of Kant. And at present—some sixty years later—one would be a specialist in the theoretic philosophy of the early Kant or the practical philosophy of the late Kant. Specialization has forced scholars to deal not with entire individuals but with partitioned and segmented individuals. CONSEQUENCES AND COSTS OF COMPRESSION TO KNOWLEDGE EXPOSITORS The dynamics of inquiry surveyed in these pages conjoin to yield a problematic and indeed paradoxical result. For they throw a shadow of frustration and self-defeat over the whole enterprise. In particular they bring five interrelated phenomena to the fore • Knowledge diminution: The ratio of what is known to any individual and what is knowable (within the community) is growing ever smaller. • Question propagation: The agenda of identifiably unresolved issues is growing ever larger. • Ignorance expansion: The range of what is identifiably unknowable (via the interactions and connections that obtain among what is known) grows ever larger. The imbalance between known by the individual to known to the group is ever less favorable. With the advance of knowledge the layman drops ever further behind. An obvious paradox is at work: The more we know

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(collectively) and in toto the less we learn (individually and in proportion). The paradox: The very idea of knowledge defeats ever more decisively the realizability of the idealized aspirations of the cognitive enterprise. This paradox is enfolded within a yet larger paradox: In advancing knowledge by extending the detail of our information we increasingly complicate the systemic interconnectiveness through which alone our knowledge can become adequate. For the two aspects of knowledge—detailed information and integration—are effectively in conflict. The success of inquiry in amassing detailed information defeats the correlative object of comprehensive understanding. (The parable of the fisherman whose boat is threatened by capsizing by the magnitude of the catch.) As conquerors since the era of Alexander the Great have been compelled to realize, success carries with it the seeds of failure. For the larger the success, the greater the area of conquest, the harder it becomes to control, manage, consolidate, and unify. And it this regard the situation of enlarging cognitive and physical territory are not all that different. NOTES 1. On the structure of dialectical reasoning see the author’s, Dialectics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), and for the analogous role of such reasoning in philosophy see Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 2. See M. V. Parat, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, May 1977; OT Special Publication 77–12 (1); p. 133. See also Derek J. Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 3. Source: Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. (Washington [U.S.] G.P.O: 1879–2011). 4. Cf. Derek J. Price, Science Since Babylon, 2nd ed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), and also Characteristics of Doctrinal Scientists and Engineers in the University System, 1991 (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 1994); Document No. 94–307. 5. Derek J. deSolla Price, Little Science, Big Science, pp. 6–8 6. For the statistical situation in science see Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon 2nd ed (New Haven, 1961; 1975), See Chap. 8, “Diseases of Science.” F ­ urther detail is given in Price’s, Little Science, Big Science (op. cit.). 7. See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Meraphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Chapter 12

Prediction, Fashion, and Futurity in the Philosophy of Science

STAGE SETTING Fashion is a phenomenon that exists not just in the domain of costume and couture but also makes its way into art, literature, as well as into purely cognitive domains like sciences, scholarship, and even philosophy. And it makes its imprint on the cognitive domain not only in matters of doctrinal endorsement and belief but also in the constituting of an agenda of topics discussed and questions investigated. To illustrate this phenomenon it is instructive to consider the influence in and on the philosophy of science of a 1948 paper by C. G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim entitled “On the Logic of Explanation.” This paper formulated and illustrated what became known as “the Hempelian Model” of scientific explanation according to which has it that such explanation paradigmatically consists in subsuming the fact to be explained under general laws though by means of descriptive boundary-value conditions. For an entire generation of theoreticians this model set the agenda for such questions as • • • •

Need explanatory laws be strictly universal or can they also be probabilistic. What is it that makes statistical generalizations lawful? Need explanatory laws always stipulate causal relationships? And just what if anything is involved in causality over and above lawful correlation. How does rational prediction relate to explanation? Do they exhibit the same reasoning and have the same scope and limits? 151

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These issues set the agenda for innumerable investigations—a sector of philosophical history described in magisterial detail in Wesley Salmon’s splendid book in Forty Years of Scientific Explanation covering the period from Hempel-Oppenheim in 1948 to Putnam’s Representation and Reality in 1988. PREDICTION: THE TURN TO DELPHI This widespread preoccupation with explanation was soon projected further into the issue of prediction in the hands of Hempel’s long-term associate Olaf Helmer and Hempel’s student Nicholas Rescher. The landscape of the day was littered with studies on this problem area.1 The fond hope that underlay much of the work of this period was based on what might be called the “Chronological Symmetry Theory” that predictive reasoning was structurally isomorphic in its format with explanation—with the true orientation simply redirected from the past to the future. In complex ways that need not be canvassed here, this idea encountered a series of increasingly serious obstacles. And it became more and more clear that rational prediction was a sui generis business that required procedure instrumentalities of its own. In particular, it came to be accepted that the complexity of the contextual circumstances invited a recourse to the informed judgment of human expertise. The line of thought at issue here was initially spelled out in the 1958 Helmer-Rescher paper “On the Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences,” and it engendered the development of the so-called Delphi methodology of forecasting.2 The ideas at issue evolved into a widely used predictive process that proceeds by way of a structured interaction among a group of predictors. However, this predictive process proceeds without any face-to-face interaction among the group members, but instead uses a series of successive questionnaires to elicit responses from a panel of experts to arrive at an aggregate prediction about future developments. As this indicates the predictive procedure at issue here is not algorithmically mechanized but places essential reliance on human judgment. After an initial set of questionnaires relating to predictive issues is completed in the Delphi process, the responses are collectively redescribed in statistical terms. Then a second round is carried out with the participants being provided with such aggregated information regarding the initial response as (for example) means and quartiles together with an (anonymous) indication of the respondents’ arguments for various positions. The group of respondents is then asked to submit revised estimates and some indication of their reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with the initial consensus. In the third (and later rounds) this procedure is repeated, with additional commentary

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and (depersonalized) exchange of information. Eventually, if the method works according to plan, the respondents will increasingly converge in their thinking, with a resulting narrowing of the range of estimates. Moreover, the feedback aspect of the process makes for an impetus toward consensus that can be reinforced by various artificial means—say by successively discarding extreme judgments. THE FUTUROLOGY BUBBLE For a time such predictive concerns were all the rage. Overall, the roughly 1965–75 period witnessed an explosion of activity here. Enthusiasm also sprung up not only for making concrete predictions, but also for projecting scenarios—pictures of “alternative futures” (and of course possible and plausible—not wholly improbable—futures). Developed out of war-gaming techniques, this methodology of possibility projection was initially conceived at The RAND Corporation in California in the 1950s, and was subsequently applied extensively to issues in economics, politics, and international relations.3 One prominent example was the Commission for the year 2000, a study group chaired by Daniel Bell for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. and the National Planning Association have also been active in future-oriented inquiries. Then too, there was the influential Club of Rome’s investigation of the social and environmental import of industrial and technological development, which issued in the widely publicized “Limits of Growth” study.4 Not to be outdone in the United States, the Congressional Research Service established a Futures Research Group to provide support for policy deliberations. In the early 1970s the Natural Science Foundation launched its project to devising science indicators on the analogy of the economic indications of the Commerce Bureau.5 And this was filled in 1979/80 by the USF’s extensive two-volume study of The Five Year Outlook: Problems, Opportunities, and Constraints in Science and Technology (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1980). All of these studies served the same fundamental objective: to provide guidance about the future as background for public policy formulation. This diffusion of futurism was bound up with the ever-increasing prominence in all industrialized nations of what might be called the Advice Establishment: academics, working scientists, technical experts, and pundits of all sorts serving on advisory boards, policy study groups, and public commissions developing information, ideas, and speculations to provide guidance about the future as background for public policy formulation.6 This rise of

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a movement—indeed virtually an industry—of “futurism” or “futurology” in the post-World War II period has been one of the characterizing features the period,7 with many writers urging the elaboration and recognition of such a new science, whose prime task is that of forecasting the nature and impact of technical innovations.8 This futurism soon expanded to become institutionalized in non-profit research institutions such as the Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, The Hudson Institute in Croton-on-Hudson NY, as well as the Institute for the Future and an Institute of twenty-first Century Studies. In Europe there was formed the Institut für Zukunftsfragen in Vienna. A World Future Society was launched in Washington, D.C., in 1966 with a magazine called The Futurist first issued in February, 1967. Soon other journals like Futures, Futures Research Quarterly, Futuribles, and Futurific sprang up.9 And in the 1970s various doctoral programs on future studies were launched in American universities with courses in the field proliferating in business schools in particular. At this juncture (1973), Olaf Helmer was appointed to the world’s first professorship of futuristics at USC. Also notable in this connection is the contemporaneous blossoming of futurism in popular culture. Some examples are the interesting discussion of “The Future as a Way of Life” by Alvin Toffler in the summer, 1965, issue of Horizon magazine, as well as a feature article in TIME Magazine, which coined the term “the futurists” for those who have been prominent in establishing and promoting this area of research. Walter Cronkite even presented a mid-1960s television series on “The Twenty-First Century.” The January 1967 issue of Fortune magazine contained a long article on the future by Max Ways discussing “the new style” in forecasting and futuristic planning, and itself venturing the prediction: “By 1977, this new way of dealing with the future will be recognized at home and abroad as a salient American characteristic.” The great success of Alvin Toffler’s best-selling Future Shock of 1972 propagated his enthusiasm for futurists as “the New Soothsayers” and seemingly brought this prediction to verification.10 Most of the credit for popularizing futurology belongs to the World Future Society. It sponsored the First Global Conference on the Future in Toronto in 1980, which had an attendance of over 6,000. The new futurism of the postwar era also rekindled interest in older approaches. The predictions of astrologers and psychics continue to proliferate in the human interest sections of most US newspapers—especially on New Year’s day. Then too there are more substantive publications like the annual American Forecaster,11 whose predictions combine a mixture of general punditry, government statistical projections, and publicity release information (regarding new films, books, and clothing styles).

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All in all, this Futurology Bubble represents a remarkable transit of ideas from the philosophy of science into the wider culture (as they then were). GONE WITH THE WIND: WHY DID THE BUBBLE BURST? What became of it all? Unsurprisingly the bubble burst. In the first instance, a whole host of theoretical difficulties came to the fore on closer view. Impredictability in many areas of interest becomes unachievable not because of epistemic limitations on inquirers (say in point of data access or computing power) but for essentially ontological reasons with regard to Nature’s modus operandi. And at this point the three Cs come to the fore: chance, chaos, and choice. Two fundamental and interrelated aspects of Nature’s modus operandi constitute a deep-rooted rationale for the bursting of the Predictive Bubble, namely resistance barriers and diminishing returns. For in any area of prediction, as the requirement for greater exactness and detail is highlighted the possibilities of success become dimensioned. One can predict rainfall in London more readily for an entire season than for a particular future day— and more readily if that day is three weeks than if it is three weeks hence. And the investment of further effort, energy, and talent in a predictive issue accordingly produces continually diminishing benefits. In medical prognosis a second opinion may well be worthwhile, a fourth of fifth is scarcely worth the bother. And it did not help matters that the expert’s treated us to a considerable series of spectacular predictive failures. Disillusion set in the wake of various spectacular failures in prediction such as The Overthrow of the Shah The Stock Market Plunge of 1987 the Collapse of the Soviet Empire It is not that the extensive studies comprised in what is here called The Futurology Bubble did not have a payoff in understanding. But rather the unfortunate fact of it was that as we gain increasingly deep and extensive insight into the nature of the predictive process we also learn not how to improve our predictions but rather why we cannot manage to do so. And so too the heyday of Hempelian explanation reached its inevitable end and the Futurism Bubble burst with it. What replaced it? In its time explanation, prediction, and confirmation dominated the scene. But now a very different array of issues and perspectives came into the forefront.

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Three interrelated issues in particular now took over center stage: The process of theory formation and change. The Kuhnian phenomenology of scientific revolution via the change of explanatory paradigms The focus on episodic case studies and its correlative de-emphasis on generality and generic explanatory structures. Attention thus shifted to the details of historical episodes. Prediction was not just put on the back burner but thrown out the window. Ironically, futurology became a thing of the past. (I am tempted to think of my 1998 SUNY Press book on Predicting the Future as constituting its obituary.) How to explain it all? THE GENERAL DIALECTICS OF FASHION The history of the Forecasting Bubble should have surprised no one. After all, pretty much every domain of human interest is caught up in the whirlpool of fashion. Latinity has a tag for it: tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. A double-aspect duality conjoins two complementary inclinations of the human psyche: the yearning for novelty and the disinclination to what is boringly familiar. Once something becomes entranced in consolidated orthodoxy, people begin to hanker after a replacement by something new and original. Throughout the realm of fashion success carries the seeds of its own destination. Yesterday’s novelty is today’s mainstream and tomorrow’s old hat. • Innovation: promising idea: a plausible way of addressing a problem or goal: infatuation with the new (“love affairs”). • Development and Domination: explanation and working out the ramifications and applications of this idea. • Disillusion: realizing that those high expectant are not fulfilled to the anticipated extent. • Back to the beginning. The developmental dialectics of the phenomena of fashion accordingly has the structure depicted in Display 1. A developmental course of this structure is pretty much uniform as between sartorial, artistic, intellectual, and even philosophical fashions. Even in the historical development of civilization something of a similar nature would appear to be in operation—as the

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challenge and response model of history articulated by Arnold Toynbee goes to illustrate.

To be sure, different ranges of fashion exhibit different degrees of volatility. Fashions in haute couture change almost annually; fashions in popular music have a lifespan of several years; fashions in academic philosophy last for a decade or two. The phenomenon of fashion effectively transforms Thomas Kuhn’s sequential paradigm shifts into a Hegelian circuit of developmental dialectic. SPECIAL PREDICTIVE PROBLEMS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Fashion of course operates at many levels in philosophy as elsewhere. Specifically it can bear upon: the agenda of issues treated, the questions asked, the answers endorsed, the objections addressed, and so on. All major sectors of the subject are ultimately subject to fashion. Yet what explains the prominence of fashion in philosophy? One fundamental reason for it lies in the impact of scientific findings for philosophical development. It is a key fact of life that ongoing progress in scientific inquiry is a process of conceptual innovation that always places certain developments outside the cognitive horizons of earlier workers because the very concepts operative in their characterization become available only in the course of scientific discovery itself. (Short of learning our science from the ground up, Aristotle could have made nothing of modern genetics.) What one scientific generation sees as a natural kind, a later one disassembles into a variety of different species. We have as yet no inkling of the concept mechanisms that later scientific eras will make use of. The major discoveries of later stages are ones that the workers of a substantially earlier period (however clever)

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not only have failed to make but which they could not even have understood, because the requisite concepts were simply not available to them. Newton could not have predicted findings in quantum theory any more than he could have predicted the outcome of American presidential elections. One can only make predictions about what one is cognizant of, takes note of, deems worthy of consideration. Thus, it is effectively impossible to predict not only the answers but even the questions that lie on the agenda of future science. For new questions in science always arise out of the answers we give to old ones (as per what might be called Kant’s Principle of Question Propagation to the effect that the answers to current questions always give rise to new ones). And the answers to these questions involve conceptual innovations. We cannot now predict the future states of scientific knowledge in detail because we do not yet have at our disposal the very concepts in which the issues will be posed.12 LARGER LESSONS These deliberations have an instructive lesson not only for the philosophy of science but for philosophy in general. And the impredictability of fashion in the realm of science has profound implementation for impredictability and unfathomability with respect to philosophical fashions. For these are predominantly produced in response to major modes of scientific thought. To realize this one need only consider the profound variations in philosophy that was a response to such “revolutionary” scientific developments as • • • • • •

Darwinean in biology Cantor-Frege-Gödel revisions in mathematics Einsteinian relativity in physics The development of quantum cosmology The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) The double helix and the genomic turn in genetics

All of these scientific innovations have exerted massive transformative influence on recent philosophy. But all of them were predictively inaccessible in advance of the fact and the resultant shift in philosophical theorizing was thereby also antecedently imponderable. The redirection of philosophical interest in the wake of innovation is proved to be one of the main reasons for the bursting of the “Predictive Bubble” in the philosophy of science. And this should be seen as something altogether natural and not surprising. A striking series of basic mechanisms are at work here:

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#topic fatigue (Example: neo-Hegelism) #diminishing returns (Example: rational choice policies) #over-complexification that sees issue domains collapse under their own weight (Example: possible world’s metaphysics) And the operation of these mechanisms in the course of philosophical development has striking implications. It means among other things that the long lifespan of philosophers sets the stages for a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions—as the aging Royce saw his neo-Idealism collapse all around him, the aging Cassirer witnessed the fading of neo-Kantianism, or the aging Carnap witnessed the demise of the logical positivism of his prime. As noted at the outset, the historical evidence indicates that the “Flux of Fashion” is just as prominent in philosophizing as in ladies couture. And regrettably, we cannot reasonably expect that an exception will be made for us in this regard. NOTES 1. A representative cross-section of the literature at issue includes: C.G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 18 (1948), pp. 135–75. The present author has long been involved in this discussion. See his paper “On Prediction and Explanation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8 (1958), pp. 281–90. For an informative historical account of the entire issue see chapter 2 of Wesley C. Salmon, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) and compare also the author’s, “H2O: Hempel, Helmer, Oppenheim,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 67 (1997). Other contributions to the relevant controversies include Israel Scheffler, “Explanation Prediction, and Abstraction,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7 (1957), pp. 293–309; N. R. Hanson, “On the Symmetry Between Explanation and Prediction,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 68 (1954), pp. 349–58; Adolf Grünbaum, “Temporally Asymetric Principles,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 29 (1962), pp. 147–70; Jaegion Kim, “Explanation, Prediction, and Retrodiction,” Princeton University Dissertation, 1962; Michael Scriven, “Explanations, Predictions and Laws” in H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, Vol. III (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 170–230; Michael Scriven, “The Temporal Asymmetry between Explanations and Predictions” in B. Bauman (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar, Vols. 1–2 (New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 97–105; Sidney Morgenbesser, “The Explanatory-Predictive Approach to Science” in B. Bauman (ed.), op. cit., pp. 41–55; Nicholas Rescher, “Discrete State Systems,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 30 (1963), pp. 325–45; Wolfgang Stegmüller, “Explanation, Prediction, Scientific Systematization, and NonExplanatory Information,” Ratio, vol. 8 (1966), pp. 1–24; Wolfgang Stegmüller,

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“Cause and Counterfactual,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 34 (1966), pp. 323–40 (with Herbert Simon); Paul Dietl, “Paresis and the Alleged Asymmetry Between Explanation and Prediction,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 17 (1967), pp. 313–18; W. A. Suchting “Deductive Explanation and Prediction Revisited,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 34 (1967), pp. 41–52; Joseph Hanna, “Explanation, Prediction, Description, and Information,” Synthese, vol. 20 (1969), pp. 308–44; Nicholas Rescher, Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1970); James Fetzer, “Grünbaum’s ‘Defense’ of the Symmetry Thesis,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 20 (1974), pp. 173–87. During the 1975–90 period, the issue has largely lain fallow. An informative recent treatment is Gerald Feinberg et al., “Knowledge of the Past and Future,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 89 (1992), pp. 607–42. 2. The Delphi method was developed in the 1950s by Olaf Helmer and two collaborators in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation, Norman Dalkey and the present author. (All three of us held PhDs in philosophy which may have increased our sympathy for eccentric approaches.) The method drew inspiration from the study by Abraham Kaplan, A. L. Skogstad, and M. A. Girshik, “The Prediction of Social and Technological Events,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 14 (1950), pp. 93–110). It was initially explained in Olaf Helmer and N. Rescher, “On the Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences,” Management Science, vol. 6 (1959), pp. 25–52. (This article reprints and internal Rand Corporation paper of 1958, and was the earliest discussion on Delphi published in the open literature.) For other descriptions see Olaf Helmer’s, Social Technology (New York: Basic Books, 1961), and his Looking Forward: A Guide to Future’s Research (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983). For further references see pp. 299 ff. of Roger M. Cooke, Experts in Uncertainty: (op. cit.), (chapter 11, entitled “Combining Expert Opinion” is particularly relevant to the deliberations of this section.) Good discussions of Delphi are also found in Harold A. Linstone and Murray Turoff (eds.), The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1975), and in Joseph P. Martino, Technological Forecasting for Decisionmaking (New York: American Elzevier, 1972), pp. 28–64. See also Essen Mahmoud, “Accuracy in Forecasting: A Survey,” Journal of Forecasting, vol. 3 (1984), pp. 139–59 (see esp. pp. 149–53); and also R. G. Winkler and Spiros Makridakis, “Combination of Forecasts,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 146 (1983), pp. 150–57. The question is whether in combining methods the weaker are on balance offset by the more effective or whether the efficacy of the latter is simply diluted. The available evidence, though meager, speaks for the former prospect. 3. The literature presenting some of these developments includes Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Herbert Goldhammer and Hans Speier, “Some Observations on Political Gaming,” World Politics, vol. 12 (1960), pp. 71–83. Harold S. Guetzkow, Simulation in the Social Sciences: Readings (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962), and Harold S. Guetzkow, Simulation in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963). 4. See D. H. Meadows et al., The Limits of Growth (New York: American Library, 1972).

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5. The third and most developed volume of the series Science Indicators-1977 was issued late that year in Washington, D.C. by the US Government Printing Office. 6. Such activity has given rise to numerous recent books on the line of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s, Art of Conjecture (original French edition, Monaco, 1964; English translation, New York, 1966), Arthur L. Clarke’s, Profiles of the Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Dennis Gabor’s, Inventing the Future (New York: Knopf, 1964), Theodore J. Gordon’s, The Future (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), and Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener’s, The Year 2000 (New York: Macmillan, 1967). (These American publications have been matched by a spate of continental books and articles in French and German—with such themes as Pascual Jordan’s, Wie sieht die Welt von Morgen aus? (München: List, 1958), and Fritz Baade’s, Der Wettlauf zum Jahre 2,000 (München: Oldenburg, 1960)). 7. See Ossip K. Flechtheim, Futurologie: Der Kampf um die Zukunft (Kühn: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1971). Flechtheim coined the term futurology. He did so in a concern for visions of the future different from those of American capitalism and Soviet socialism—which is ironic since it was in just these two contexts that the enterprise took root. 8. See Robert Jungk, “Anfänge und Zukunft einer neuen Wissenschaft, Futurologie 1985,” in R. Jungk and H.J. Mundt (eds.), Unsere Welt 1985 (München: Kurt Desh, 1965), pp. 13–25. For an anthology which contains a good cross-section of relevant literature see Alvin Toffler (ed.), The Futurists (New York: Random House, 1972). 9. The last-named magazine has survived to the present day (1994) and is published—appropriately enough—by the Foundation for Optimism. 10. See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1972). Toffler’s later book The Third Wave (New York: Morrow 1980) is less interesting from a predictive standpoint because it is not concerned with forecasts as much as with the examination of prevailing trends. 11. Compiled by Ken Long, and published annually in recent years by the Primary Press of Philadelphia, PA. The fifth annual edition lies before me as I write: The American Forecaster: 1988. Compare also The People’s Almanac’s Book of Predictions compiled by David Wallechinski et al (New York: Wm. Morrow & Co., 1980). 12. As one commentator has wisely written: “But prediction in the field of pure science is another matter. The scientist sets forth over an unchartered sea and the scribe, left behind on the dock, is asked what he may find at the other side of the waters. If the scribe knew, the scientist would not have to make his voyage” (Anonymous, “The Future as Suggested by Developments of the Past Seventy-Five Years,” Scientific American, 123 [1920], p. 321). The role of unforeseeable innovations in science forms a key part of Popper’s case against the impredictability of man’s social affairs—given that new science engenders new technologies which in turn make for new modes of social organization. (See K. R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. vi and passim. The impredictability of revolutionary changes in science also figures centrally in W. B. Gallie’s, “The Limits of Prediction” in S. Körner (ed), Observation and Interpretation (New York:

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Academic Press, 1957). Gallie’s argumentation is weakened, however, by a failure to distinguish between the generic fact of future discovery in a certain domain and its specific nature. See also Peter Urbach, “Is Any of Popper’s Arguments against Historicism Valid?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 29 (1978), pp. 117–30 (see pp. 128–29), whose deliberations seem (to this writer) to skirt the key issues. A judicious and sympathetic treatment is given in Alex Rosenberg, “Scientific Innovation and the Limits of Social Scientific Prediction,” Synthese, vol. 97 (1993), pp. 161–81. On the present issue Rosenberg cites the instructive anecdote of the musician who answered the question “Where is jazz heading” with the response: “If I knew that, I’d be there already” (op. cit., p. 167).

Chapter 13

Probative Homogeneity in Rational Substantiation

PRAGMATIC VALIDATION Pragmatic efficacy—success in application—is the natural and appropriate standard for specifically procedural validation. For in the end, the proper means for assessing any sort of method process or procedure is in terms of its effectiveness in achieving satisfactory results in the purposive context at issue. In matters of cognition and inquiry—especially in abstractly theoretical contexts such as mathematics or information processing—this can be achieved categorially by demonstrating that the process at issue represents the only possible way to realize an appropriate result. But generally and for the most part the matter is one of showing that the process represents the seemingly best available proceeding on the basis of implementing trials that provide it with a good track record. Here the proof of the pudding is in the eating—allowing the course of experience to show that the proceeding in question yields a better promise of success than its otherwise available alternatives. In using their track record to betoken merit in assessing methods and procedures we commit ourselves to a course of reasoning that proceeds as follows:

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So, what we have here is an inferential move from promise of success on the basis of a track record to warranted employment in the present situation. The pragmatic efficacy of the procedure thus serves as an effectual appraised standard for appropriateness. And this practical mode of reasoning can of course also be used in cognitive (factual) matters. For the general template of processual justification can here take the specific form:

Accordingly, we establish A as the appropriate answer to our focal question. However, the reasoning that yields this conclusion is certainly not demonstrative: it does not provide a decisive, deductively valid argument for its conclusion here, but rather represents a practical/pragmatic course of reasoning. THE PROBLEM OF VALIDATION But what is it that authenticates such a pragmatic course of reasoning? As just noted, it is not deductively valid—that its conclusion does not follow on general principles via logical inference. What then is it that authorizes this mode of reasoning? The fact is that what we have here is no more than an exercise in practical reasoning that falls within the scope of our initial analysis. For its acceptability hinges on the fact of it itself having a good track record. What we thus have before us is, in effect, the use of a particular validation procedure in the service of validating itself. But is not such probative self-reliance vicious and thereby self-invalidating? A VARIANT RESPECTIVE: DEDUCTIVE DEMONSTRATION In addressing this issue it is constructive to look back to the situation of deductively demonstrative reasoning. What is it that justifies acceptance here?

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What now concerns us is a course of reasoning of the following format:

This is how we reason in the deductive case. But just what is it that justifies this reasoning? The answer is straightforward: its deductive validity itself. To see this proceeding consider an argument by modus ponens that substantiated the conclusion C on the basis of premises a premiss P as per:

But now just why should we actually accept C? Clearly because

In sum, the argumentation that validates (MP) itself has the format of (MP) argumentation.1 The validation of deductive reasoning is itself deductive in its structure. ANOTHER VARIANT PERSPECTIVE: INDUCTIVE SUBSTANTIATION By contrast to deductively demonstrative reasoning, inductive validation proceeds by way of plausible inference. It has the following format.

Here once again we affirm the conclusion C, but this time on an entirely different cognitive basis—and one that is certainly not deductively valid. The clear fact of it is that this mode of argumentation is itself of no more

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than inductive cogency. In using it to substantiate our conclusions we validate induction inductively. In theory it is of course possible to recast any infra-deductive validation in deductive form by treating it as an enthymematic argument in which suitably requisite premiss has been omitted. Specifically in the above case of inductive substantiation we could add the premiss: “Whenever conditions (1)–(3) are satisfied, C obtains.” With this added premiss the argument becomes deductively valid. But of course the fly in the ointment is that this premiss is false—as will also be so with any other deduction-validating alternative. THE PIVOTAL POINT: PROBATIVE HOMOGENEITY The preceding deliberations combine to convey a clear lesson. • The acceptability of the conclusions substantiated by deductively valid arguments can be established by deductive reasoning. • We can do no better than establish the acceptability of the conclusions substantiated by inductive arguments by inductive reasoning. • We can do no better than establish the acceptability of practical reasoning by practical reasoning. In sum, in all these contexts justification is thematically homogeneous: throughout validating the acceptance of conclusions substantiated by X-type reasoning proceeds by way of X-type reasoning. VIRTUOUS CIRCULARITY Does the self-dependency exhibited by such thematic homogeneity not make for vicious circularity? Not at all! If a course of reasoning is to establish a conclusion successfully it must have two components. It must • have acceptable premisses • instantiate a valid mode of inferential argumentation But from a logical point of view these conditions take on a radically different character. For premises that beg the question—which themselves require the support of what they themselves affirm—will indeed invalidate instantiate the reasoning on grounds of vitiating circularity. But self-substantially argumentation is another thing altogether—something that is nowise self-invalidating. For here self-reliance is self-validating. And so with arguments (inference,

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reasoning) we are in an entirely different situation as compared with that of premises. Self-instantiation argumentation is nowise invalid on grounds of circularity. The overall lesson is that a cogent mode of reasoning (argumentation, validation) must be cogent on its own telling. It must be prepared to speak on its own behalf. And here this self-support is not a matter of vitiating circularity but rather one of systemic self-sufficiency. For • a deductive argument must be probatively effective on deductive grounds, • an inductive argument must be productively effective on inductive grounds, and • a pragmatic (practical) argument must be probatively effective on pragmatism (practical grounds). A failure on any one of these modes would be self-invalidating. We have to expect and require that a valid mode of argumentation is cogent in its own telling. The efficacy of a style of the argumentation will always be something that can be substantiated on a basis that is true to its nature. We thus arrive at a Principle of the Thematic Homogeneity of Substantiation: an effective type of substantiation must be sui generis appropriate: its cogency will have to hold on its own telling. In regard to reason and rational cogency, self-support is something to be demanded rather than denigrated. After all, one would not want a defense of rationality that was not itself rationally cogent. PRAGMATIC RETROSPECTS The pragmatic justification of a course of reasoning calls for showing it to work out successfully—to yield appropriate results in the range of cases at hand. And the probative homogeneity of rational argumentation makes an indispensable contribution to this end. Accordingly, it is fitting and proper that pragmatic validation is capable of speaking on its own behalf. For what this means is that pragmatic rationality possess the indispensable virtue of self-support. NOTE 1. Lewis Carroll, “What Achilles said to the Tortoise,” Mind, vol. 4 (1895), pp. 278–80.

Chapter 14

Teleology and Chance

CHANCE PROCESSES ADMIT OF PRODUCTIVE ORDER Common belief to the contrary notwithstanding choice and directionality, haphazard and reason, mere randomness and developmental order is not entirely at odds with one another. For teleology is actually not a mysterious backward causation, but a process of self-propulsion providing for change in the direction of greater sophistication, complexity, and elaborateness of order. And so teleology, as here envisioned, does not deny the pervasive operation of laws of efficient causality, but rather sees such laws as capable of functioning as a productive development in a process of self-potentiation that issues in a hierarchically structural array of increasingly complex and coordinated operation. Theorists of scientific explanation have been inclined to envision a conflict between teleology and chance, envisioning an irreconcilable disconnection between productive directionality and stochastic randomness. As they see it, fortuitous accident is incompatible with developmental directedness via a seemingly straightforward proof along the following line of reasoning:

And thinkers of a scientistic persuasion apply exactly the same reasoning with regard to “the development of the cosmos and its modus operandi” that is here addressed to the limited sphere of “the evolution of homo-sapiens and his 169

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powers.” Both lines of thought alike are simply implementations of the idea that chance excludes any room for teleology and rational purposiveness of design. However, the considerations at work in the following five theses countervail against this idea. Thesis 1: Chance can in fact be enlisted in the service of teleology with randomness affording a means to realizing effective functionality.

Chance is in many ways a problem-solver through providing advantageous means to overviewing obstacles. Consider the matter of systemic stability. If the effective functioning of the whole group requires As to find Bs to collaborate with, then a given A will more likely encounter a B when these are distributed randomly in its environment rather than being concentrated in a distinct region. In such circumstances conditions that make Bs randomly available without further special conditions will prove to be beneficial. And in this way a recourse to chance and randomness in the operation of natural processes may well prove to be a functional asset. For these factors can provide the means to efficacy, efficiency, and rational economy in providing for functionally effective natural processes. For example, the females of various mammalian species have regular periods of fertility (being “in heat”) that invite impregnation by random males in the interests of perpetuating of the species. To be sure, with the more complex modes of social organization suitable for a more highly developed society of intelligent agents this situation changed. But in certain circumstances chance can provide an impediment to teleology but rather its instrument, the mechanism of its realization. Thesis 2. In situations where a stable taxonomic order is essential to the emergence or proliferation of a group, chance can provide the means to this end.

The human family, like many other biological species, requires an ongoing succession of various sorts of subgroups for persistence and flourishing. Biological communities require males and females; human societies require various skills and propensities (farmers, producers, planners); human diets require proteins and carbohydrates—the taxonomic impetus that divides groups into stable and functionally effective subgroups generally requires or invites randomness for effective functioning. And the processes that can provide for such diversification will often emerge and flourish via the operation of chance. Thesis 3.  The realization of biologically benign conditions often requires developments that occur occasionally and haphazardly without fixed periodicity to facilitate social and cultural development.

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Healthy forests require occasional fire; healthy societal arrangements may require occasional revolutions. Occasional random shake-ups of stagnating routines often yield developmentally productive consequences. Thesis 4. Random processes of allocation are not incompatible with stability. And random changes can still produce determinately foreordained outcomes

This fact is mode manifest in the following flow diagram:

Thesis 5:  Various physical problems are resolved most efficiently and effectively by arrangements that involve random processes, and a recourse to chance can thus come to be validated on the basis of considerations of functional adequacy and effective operation.

Thus consider a simple analogy. Let it be that a physical system calls for a limitation of its constituents from one state to another. And now let it be that this can be accomplished by one of two revolving-door turnstile passageways between the two states, each of which can allow the passage of one constituent per unit of time. Now consider two possible and plausible lawful rules for unit transit: I. Effect transit via a determinate passageway (say the nearest). II. Effect transit via a passageway selected 50:50 at random.

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It is clear that, in these conditions, the second rule would clearly make the transfer of units more efficient (i.e., faster). For with a rule of fixed determination it would well transpire that a condition of crowding would transpire via something akin to a traffic jam. For efficiency to be achieved throughout the entire ensemble of possible initial conditions, then the behavior of individual constituents may well have to be governed by laws geared to probabilities. Moreover, consider the further prospect that those two connective turnstiles rotate at different speeds, say one at twice the rate of the other. Then the optimizing rule for those individual units would not be to effect a transit with one-to-one randomness as between the two turnstiles but to head for the faster at a two-to-one ratio of probability. For maximum efficiency the operative probability would then have to be adjusted to the mechanical mode of turnstile operation. Probability would thus become derivative from nonprobabilistic features of the modus operandi of the physical set-up at issue via considerations of efficiency and economy. The phenomenon of what may be called pathway over-crowding—of “traffic-jam” in colloquial usage—can thus make the recourse to probabilistic proceedings cost-effective in circumstances of transit. Take the analogy of human affairs. Not every passenger should go to the same side of the boat and in evacuating an unevenly occupied building the universalized instruction “Go to the nearest exit” may not be as effective as “Just leave” (by whatever exit you may wish). And insofar as a plurality of transitional microchannels coalesce into larger macrochannels, in this sort of situation, the associated transition probabilities associated with them come simply to the sum of the probabilities of their constituent components. *** As the preceding thesis combines to indicate, it is decidedly questionable to envision an irreconcilable conflict between teleology and random chance. For there are in fact many sorts of situations in which randomness provides the instrumental means through which the interests of purposive efficacy can become well-served. Rather than being the enemy of teleology, chance can in various contexts become its effective facilitator. CHANCE AND EFFICACY In the human sphere, randomness also has a constructive role to play. A classic illustration of this situation arises in connection with equal claims to an indivisible good—as with a tied election, where law and custom generally divide not the award but the probability of achieving it. And an analogous

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situation arises with any insufficiency of resources for meeting equivalent claims. Thus suppose that someone owes $100 to each of two otherwise equivalent creditors, but only has $120. Were it to be that each requires payment in full to pay for some essential medicament, one might as well proceed by random selection. Given that we cannot achieve an equality of outcome, an equality of opportunity is the best we can realize. The result, which leaves one claimant empty-handed, is certainly not unproblematic—one can hardly say the demands of justice are satisfied. But in the circumstances one must concede that it is fair—seeing that equally qualified claimants are treated alike.

The basic principle at work here is amusingly illustrated in the following science-fiction situation: A mad scientists has rigged up an electrocution apparatus and is forcing A, B, and C to participate in his evil scheme. The setup is such that their innocent friend X will be fatally electrocuted unless just exactly two of the trio throw a disconnect switch. However, they have to proceed independently, without any knowledge of what their mates are doing. Should they throw that switch?

As Display 1 shows, there are overall eight theoretically available possibilities for these individuals with respect to the choice: throw (T) or not-throw (N). And each of our three subjects has the prospect of reasoning along any of the following four seemingly plausible lines. (We shall look at this situation from A’s point of view, so that A = I myself, noting that B and C face an identical situation): I. B and C and I are all rational agents facing exactly the problem, and are thus bound to arrive at the same resolution. It matters not what I choose

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to do, seeing that B and C, being similarly situated, are also bound to choose likewise. So 1 and 8 are the only real options. Accordingly, poor X is doomed irrespective of what I choose to do. II. Overall those eight alternatives seem equally available. But if I choose T then X will be saved in two cases, while if I choose N he will be saved in only one. So I had best throw that switch, which appears to double X’s prospects of survival. III. B and C are smart fellows. They are going to reason as per II that they ought to throw the switch. And therefore I must opt out and choose N. (But, alas, here again if they reason likewise, poor X is doomed.) IV. I might as well simply toss a coin, counting on the others to do likewise. With three of the eight cases now in his favor, that will give X at least a 3/8 (i.e., 38%) chance of survival. V. I should resort to a probabilistically mixed strategy—as in case IV. But not that of case IV itself. Rather, suppose that I select T with probability x and N with probability 1 - x. Then calculation reveals that value of x which maximizes the chances of saving X (namely at 4/9 or 44%) is going to be x = 2/3. Accordingly, these lines of reasoning lead to various different conclusions: I. Choice Indifference between T and N II. Choice of T III. Choice of N IV. Probabilistic Indifference between T and N V. Favor T over N probabilistically at a ratio of 2:1 However, all considered, it is clear that alternative V does the best job of ensuring X’s survival. It deploys the facts of probabilistic randomness in the most functional—ethically optimal—way. Accordingly, there may be sound rational basis for having a determination made randomly. This is especially so in matters of what might be called “strategic interaction.” In the children’s game of “Rock–Paper–Scissors” the best plan is to make one’s selection randomly to ensure an even chance of winning. Any other policy will result in a detectable bias of which the opponent can take advantage in the long run. Again, in war planning of the classical sort, a commander does well to vary his attacks randomly as between the left and the right wings to keep his opponent off balance. And in the conflict between message encoders and their code-breaking cryptanalytic opponents is similar. The effective use of ciphers is critically dependent on concealing meaningful messages in a fog of apparent randomness—and the more randomness

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the higher the level of secrecy. So here too randomness and chance can play purposive roles. THEOLOGY AND REASON The teleology of order and economy is seen at work throughout the biological domain, as is vividly illustrated in D’Arcy W. Thompson’s classic on Growth and Form. 1 The teleology of human endeavor—be it conscious or ­unconscious—is strikingly portrayed in George K. Zipf’s classic Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort.2 Moreover, the role of teleological considerations in physics is highlighted by the entire tradition if rational mechanics. In every branch of inquiry, teleology makes itself manifest in a world pervaded by chance. For throughout the affairs of nature and of man alike, rationally optimal arrangements are often most efficiently and effectively met by resolutions effected through randomness. Chance and order simply just do not conflict. As snow crystals show, things can issue randomly from one arbitrary starting point in an infinite range and yet exhibit the most symmetrical and regular order. Randomness and reason do not conflict: A recourse to randomness often affords the optimal pathway to effective issue resolutions. Teleology, so regarded, is not obscurantist, and antithetical to efficient casualty. Rather it looks at the nature of scientific explanation by efficient causation’s products over time and emphasizes the directionality of productive processuality in the function of new types of natural systems of increasing complexity and sophistication. These considerations combine to suggest turning the teleology-effecting argument at the outset of these deliberations on its head, recasting it as follows:

On this perspective, the productive role of randomness and chance in the development of man can be maintained conjointly on rationally cogent grounds. That choice is operative in nature is something that may obtain for reasons of principle, rather than by mere chance. There may be very sound and cogent reasons for the role of pure chance that renders certain situations as

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variation and inexplicable. Randomness and chance can operate in the service of systematicity and rational purposiveness. They need not—and indeed do not—conflict with the emergence and operation of rationale order which can tolerate and indeed can sometimes require localized pockets of randomness. The long and short of it is that local disorder is sometimes in the interest of a more extreme order. RATIONAL EXPLAINABILITY Global rationality can atone for local chaos: The anomalous anarchic irrationality of this or that subregion of phenomena can always in principle find its cogent realization within a wider context of rationality. For it can always condone to the interests of holistic order that islands of disorder should exist under special conditions. Only with reality-as-a-whole will the prospect of such “excuse-finding” come to be unworkable. To be sure, it is not, in general, necessary that an object of inquiry must exhibit the features that characterize an adequate inquiry process. After all, a sober study of inebriation is possible, so why not a rationally coherent study of an irrational and disorderly reality? The fact is that drunkenness (inebriation) is only a minority component part of a vast reality. And in such matters the rationality of the whole can and should provide coherently explanatory atonement for the inability of the part. However, with the whole itself such explanatory exculpation is not possible. Where the whole fails to achieve rational coherence, there just is no prospect of explanting exculpation. At this level there is no prospect of excuse, exculpation, and “explaining problems away.” In the final analysis chance and rational order in the world’s scheme of things can be brought into a collaborative symbiosis. NOTES 1. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 2. George K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley, 1949).

Chapter 15

Explaining Existence

METAPHYSICS IN THE TRADITION OF PLOTINUS Metaphysics, the inquiring into the nature of being—of Reality at large— began in pre-Socratic Greece and reached its first pinnacle in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Its subsequent culmination in classical antiquity combined the work of these family fathers and bequeathed a complex heritage to its successors. For in the Western tradition of philosophy rooted in the Platonism of classical antiquity there are three prime factors essential to the metaphysical understanding of the world: Reality: as comprised by the totality of what there is Order: as descriptive of how Reality is organized Rationale: as explanatory for why Reality and Order are as is These of course are questions to which any systematic account of existent should endeavor to provide an answer: What is there? How is it structured and organized? Why does this order of things prevail? Accordingly, the task of metaphysics has three prime sectors that relate, respectively, to the what, the how, and the why of things. Accounting for Reality calls for the description and classification of the things there are (in some way or manner). Accounting for Order calls for specifying the modus operandi of the real: its principles of organization and laws of operations. And accounting of for the rationale of things calls for explaining how and why the preceding matters stand as they do. These then are the prime foci of metaphysical deliberations. It deserves note that this trichotomy of the metaphysical domain already clearly figures in the philosophy of Plotinus (AD 204–270). Due to Plotinus, albeit in rather different terms of reference, his way of conceptualizing 177

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the issues was original and characteristic. It took the form of his three “hypostases”: The One (hên): reality/existence [the entirety of the things of the world as they are actually constituted] Soul (psychê): rational order/organization [The descriptive concept-forms we devise for the understanding of things-at-large, The One.] Reason (nous): rationale/explanation [Our picture of reality: Soul’s conceptualized understanding of The One.] On the perspective, the base level of realty/existence (to hên) becomes accessible to rational understanding (nous) on the basis of a rationally intelligible order made manifest to the mind (psyche). And the task of metaphysics as Plotinus saw it—and the subsequent metaphysicians of the Western mainstream with him—is to give an account of things on the basis of these three hypostatic functions. However, in so proceeding there are two opposed but complementing transits • Reality is constituted in a way that enables Reason to understand it on the basis of principles of order. • Reason functions in a way that possibilizes its understanding of Reality on the basis of principles of order. The upshot is not a vicious circle but rather an overall cycle that unites Reason and its conceptualizations of Reality into a unified and coordinated complex. Each of these issues of course divides into various constituent components. Reality includes physical reality (Nature: the physical world). But it also includes social reality (society and its political domain) as well as abstract reality (e.g., mathematical and the realm of numbers, structure, and shape). Each of these realms has its characteristics mode of taxonomy, order, and organization. And as Reason coming to terms with the question of why these matters stand as is Plotinus becomes able to provide a rationale to account for the prevailing order of things. A hierarchy of explanatory procedure emanating in increasing fundamentality of explanation, with the modus operandi of each level accountable for at the next higher level, whose inherently greater rationality emanates (as it were) its deeper intelligibility toward that which precedes. Each successively higher level of understanding renders what goes before more intelligible and rational. Reason (nous) will meet the demand for a proper systemic account (logos) for the overall constitution of things.

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Plotinus for one, and most of the ambitiously systemic thinkers from his day to that of A. N. Whitehead and beyond, proposed to have solutions for this whole family of issues. That this idea is a delusion has been the agreed theme of most twentieth century philosophers. But delegitimizing these issues is difficult to justify, and there are still some philosophers—the present author among them—who think that the ambition of the “great thinkers” of the tradition of Western metaphysics—still has utility and legitimacy for us today, the difficulties of the project notwithstanding. A DIVISION OF LABOR Medieval logicians distinguished two modes of demonstration, namely (1) factual that-demonstration, demonstratio quia, which accounted for claiming that something is the case (quod ita sit), and (2) explanatory why-demonstration (demonstratio propter quid), which explains how it is that something is the case (cur ita sit). The moderns have lost sight of this important distinction. They seem to think that any noncircular deductive argument to a given fact from otherwise independent premises does the job of explanation. But this is wrong. Suppose we are asked to explain the following (supposed) fact: (F)The Earl of Bute owns some infertile land

And consider the following reasoning: • The Earl of Bute own the Isle of Arran • The Isle of Arran contains some infertile land The reasoning from these (true) premises to the (true) conclusion (F) is evident and cogent. But what we have here is only an instance of that-it-is-so demonstration (demonstatio quod). It accounts for the truth of the claim as issue. But the issue of why is it so (or demonstatio proper quid)—of providing an explanatory rationale for the earl’s ownership of infertile land—is left entirely untouched. Different modes of considerations are at issue. And it would take, at the very least, some narrative explaining how it is that the Earl has come into the possession of this island notwithstanding its having some infertile land. Explanation questions are by nature more complex and difficult. In addressing them we invariably require more elaborate and demanding reasoning. And with those large philosophical questions these demands go to massive and perhaps excessive proportions.

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Now the ideological fashion of our day seeks to hand all issues of explanation and understanding over to science. Its line is: “If you want to know about the what, how, and why of things, ask this of the correlative branch of science.” But the problem with this “Hand it over to science” gift is that science does not want it. Reality encompasses what is actual and what is possible but science addresses only actual existence, speculative possibility does not interest it. Reality embraces issues of fact and issues of value, but while science takes great interest in what people think about matters of value, the crucial issue of what is correct and appropriate here does not concern the scientist. The realities of the human sphere encompass big and difficult questions about matters of obligation, duty, and ethical propriety. But once more the issue of what is correct and appropriate here is not an issue that intrigues the scientist. In general science manages its affairs by considering how the observably determinable facts can be accounted for on the basis of employing the laws of nature. But the underlying why question—why it is that those explanatory laws obtain and take the form that they do—remains open and untouched. Science interests itself with discovery what the finitely operative laws of nature are. For it is the question of why it is that they are as is and have the character they do is not on its explanatory agenda. So where are we to go or an account of reality? Where else but to the tradition of philosophical metaphysics? THE LEIBNIZ QUESTION And so, among the most fundamental issues of philosophy is the ultimate metaphysical question put on the agenda of the field by G. W. Leibniz: “Why is there anything at all?” However, before this question can be addressed meaningfully, some essential clarification must be provided. To begin with, what sort of “thing” is to be at issue in this question? Are numbers to count as “things”? Then reasons of necessity will do the job. Or again, if facts (states of affairs) are to count as “things” then the answer is once more straightforward: there are such things because their necessity has it so. Some things—number and facts—necessarily exist. And there is also— according to many thinkers—yet another necessary existent, viz. God. And so as long as “things” like facts, and numbers (let alone deities) are allowed into the range of relevancy, the answer to the Leibnizian question is simply: “Because it has to be so and cannot possibly be otherwise.” However, this sort of consideration is really irrelevant. For the pivot of Leibnizian concern is actually,

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• Why is there something contingent—something whose existence is not necessary? Thus in the context of present concern, the necessary being of abstractions is beside the point and what is really at issue there is the matter of contingent existence. At bottom, that initial question is intended to ask: “Why is there a realm of contingent existence—a real world with concrete objects in it? Why are there actually spatio-temporal reals when there might possibly not be?” And of course once this issue is resolved satisfactorily there arises the further and no less problematic question: • Why is it that this contingent order of things exists rather than some possible alternative? DISTRIBUTIVE EXPLANATION CANNOT DO THE JOB? To begin with, it should be clear that an ultimate theory of explanation—one that addresses contingent existence-at-large must be holistic: it must address the integrity of a collective whole, the world. To be sure, some theorists endorse what has come to be called the “Hume-Edwards thesis”: If the existence of every member of a set is explained, then the existence of the set is thereby explained.1 And they then propose to resolve the Leibnizian question seriatim, by explaining the existence of every existent through a causal explanation of its origination. However, the fallacy at issue is not too difficult to see. For consider the following two claims: • If the existence of every sentence of a paragraph is explained, the existence of that paragraph is thereby explained. • If the existence of each note of a symphony is explained, the existence of that symphony is thereby explained. Both of these claims are clearly false as they stand. On the other hand, contrast these two with the following cognate revisions: • If the existence of every sentence of a paragraph as a sentence of that particular paragraph is explained, then the existence of that paragraph is thereby explained. • If the existence of every note of a symphony as a part of that particular composition is explained, then the existence of that symphony is thereby explained.

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Both these theses are indeed true—but only subject to that added qualification. After all, to explain the existence of the spouses is not automatically to achieve an explanation of the marital couple, seeing that this would call not just for explaining these participants distributively but their collectively coordinated copresence in the structure at issue. And the case is just the same with the Hume-Edwards thesis. Explanatory invocation of the Hume-Edwards Principle fails to heed certain critical conceptual distinctions that are readily brought to light by means of a bit of symbolic machinery. So let us adopt the following abbreviations: • p @ q for “p [is true and] provides an adequate explanatory account for q,” where the variables p and q range over factual claims. • E!x for “x exists,” where the variable x ranges over possible existents. Since the variable x ranges over existents, we have it that (∀x)E!x. On this basis, it is readily brought to view that the form of the statement “Everything has an explanation” or “There is an explanation for everything” admits of two very different constructions: Distributive explanation: “There is some case-specific explanation to account for each and any individual existent.” (1) (∀x)(∃p)(p @ E!x) Collective explanation: “There is one single comprehensive explanation that accounts for all existents—the entire totality of them.” 2 (2) (∃p)(∀x)(p @ E!x) It is clear that very different questions are at issue and very different matters at stake with distributive and collective explanations. For distributive explanations explain the fact that every member of a certain set has the feature F; collective explanations account for why it is that this is so. And explaining how it is that all members of the club are male—which could be so by fortuitous circumstances—does not accomplish the job of explaining why this is so (e.g., because the bylaws require it). In posing different questions we must be prepared for the possibility of different answers. Specifically a significant distinction is at issue here. Why-is-there questions are apt to be equivocal. The interrogative “Why are there lions—why is it that lions exist in nature” can ask two very distinct questions: 1. How has it come about that there are lions—that lions have come to realization in the evolutionary scheme of things? 2. Why is it that the process of organic evolution is such as to make for the emergence of lions?

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Accordingly, a why-is-there question can take either a local and proximate form or a global and ultimate one. “Why is there a moon” can ask for an account in the context of the development of the solar system, or it can ask the cosmic and virtually metaphysical questions: Why is cosmic evolution so structured that this system and its moon has come about. The former, proximate questions ask for process; the latter ultimate questions ask for a reason. Distributive questions address the issue locally and can be resolved by proximate answers; ultimate questions ask for more and have to be addressed globally. Accordingly, the Hume-Edwards thesis will be of no real avail in our explanatory quest. One has to look elsewhere. THE NEED FOR ODDITY: ABANDONING CAUSALITY In this regard, a key point was made by Leibniz long ago: The reasons for the entire world [must] therefore lie in something extramundane, different from the chain of states or series of things whose aggregate constitutes the world. . . . So [to account for the world’s being] there must exists something which is distinct from the plurality of beings, or from the world.3

In explaining the being and the nature of actual concrete existence-as-awhole we cannot have explanatory recourse to any aspect of the being and nature of reality itself. To do so would be to “beg the question”—to make use in giving an explanation of some part, feature, or aspect of the very thing that is to be explained. And of course this mode of explanation cannot function effectively in the present context. For any causal explanation carries us back to the starting point: the presupposition of this or that existent. But the questions at issue put this very circumstance into question. One cannot coherently invoke the existence of something in trying to explain the existence of anything whatsoever. In explaining the internality of the whole of real existence one must go outside this realm. It would accordingly be absurd to ask for some sort of causal account for reality-as-a-whole. Causality, after all, is a world-internal process: its functions show how some world-integral things and conditions arise out of others. It is the sort of account we use to explain how acorns yield trees and how lion parents produce baby lions. Causality is a matter of ultra-world agency and requires world-internal inputs to do its work. It is not the sort of resources that would possibly be called to account for the world itself and to explain the origination of the totality of existents. The pivotal lesson of the preceding deliberations is that one cannot adequately explain contingent existence-at-large by an appeal to the nature of

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existence itself. In the final analysis the nature of contingent existence must be explained not on the basis of existing things or substances, but rather in the operation of principles that function with respect to the manifold of possibility. Its formulation at this level of synoptic generality marks the why-thisworld? as decidedly nonstandard. For standard questions of existence-­ explanation proceed in causally putative terms. The reason that X exists is that there exist other items Y1, Y2, . . . Ya which interact causally so as to engender X. In standard existence explanations, what exists emerges through the causally productive machinations of other existents. But this sort of thing clearly will not do in the present context. The question of existence-in-general cannot be dealt with as one of the standard generative sort that asks for the existence of one thing to be explained causally in terms of the existence and functioning of another. We cannot say “Well there’s X in the world, and X explains the existence of things” because this simply shifts the issue to X, which after all is itself an existent. If we want global explanations of existence of things in the world, we are going to have difficulty in getting them from existential premises pertaining to what the world is like. Does this mean we cannot get them at all? And so, with ultimate questions about existence-at-large eccentricity is unavoidable. Those ultimate, totalistic, and holistic questions are altogether extraordinary. Usually when we ask about things and their conditions we are after a developmental account—how they got to be so given a process of transformation from some earlier condition. This standard sort of issueresolution is clearly impossible in the present case. The fact of it is that when we ask an extraordinary question we must be prepared for an extraordinary and indeed seemingly bizarre answer. For if an altogether basic condition of things is to be explained this cannot be achieved appropriately on the basis of the machinations within the realm of existing things. A TWOFOLD TURNING To secure an explanatory basis for contingent existence-at-large a radical step becomes inevitable. For here one has to redirect one’s line of thought in two directions, from actuality to possibility and from fact to value. Let us consider how these reorientations are to work. To begin with there is the turn to metaphysical possibility. To account for the being of contingent existence-at-large one has to put the burden explanation on something that is itself entirely outside the realm of contingent existence. With such an “ultimate” question the explanatory appeal has to move outside the entire realm of existential fact.

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But where can we possibly go if this condition is to be met? But where can one possibly look for explanatory resources of the realm of actuality, if “what there is,” is not available?” The answer is clear: we must look to the realm of possibility, of what can possibly be. In this ontological order nothing actually exists as such: there are only possibilities connected by hypothetical relations of if-then. And to secure any explanatory traction here, we must invoke the conception of value—of what there ought to be. Thus to resolve the problem on the metaphysics of existence we must ultimately turn to a metaphysics of value. A cogent explanatory account for the entire domain as a whole cannot be cogently explained by invoking some feature of its existential content. If there is to be an acceptable explanation, its probative basis must lie wholly outside this domain. It cannot be done within the realm of things or substances at all, but must step outside to proceed on the basis of some sort of principle. When we are to explain some actual condition of things without involving any other actual conditions of things, we are obviously facing a very tall order. And our room for measure is extremely limited. For if we cannot explain actualities at large in terms of actualities, we have little alternative but to explain them in terms of possibilities. What is thus called for here is a principle of explanation that can effect a transit from possibility to actuality, and thereby violates the medieval precept de posse ad esse non valet consequentia. Then too there is the further turn to eliminative valuation. It arises from the problem: If an adequate explanation of contingent existence is achievable only in terms of reference lying outside the realm of necessity and also outside the realm of concrete existence and contingent fact, then where can it possibly go? And the only conceivable answer here is this: it must go entirely outside the realm of fact to that of value. To achieve a synoptically ultimate explanation of the domain of contingent (existence/reality) we thus have to shift to another domain of deliberation altogether—and move outside of the evidential realm of what is to the normative realm of ought to be, from actuality to value. And to realize this transition we must shift from the sphere of production to that of elimination. We must effect a revolutionary shift in the orientation of thought from productivity to reducibility, from fact to value, from actuality to possibility. In sum, it must implement the idea that contingent reality is what it is because that is somehow for the best. It must, that is to say, explain existence in terms of value and take what might be called the axiological turn. And once again, the key point was made by Leibniz long ago: Even if the world is not necessary [absolutely or] metaphysically, in the sense that its contrary would imply a contradiction or logical absurdity, it is

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nonetheless necessary physically [or evaluatively], determined in such a way that its contrary would imply imperfection or moral absurdity. And thus as possibility is the principle of essence, so perfection or degree or essence is the principle of existence.4

Granted, this sort of thing may sound strange if not bizarre. But the reality of it is that in asking for an explanation of contingent existence as a whole one is posing a decidedly extraordinary question, and when you insist upon doing this, you must be prepared to a decidedly extraordinary answer. In this context, noting the bizarre nature of the answer is not an objection to it but the acknowledgment of a necessary condition for its adequacy. A TURN TO AXIOLOGY: THE OPTIMALITY PRINCIPLE Among varying possibilities that one comes to be actual what is not blocked from existence by the existence of something else. As in politics, one cannot beat someone with no one; it takes an actuality to de-actualize something by blocking it. Existence—not non-existence!—is the metaphysical (default) condition: possibilities obtain as real unless prevented from so being by preexisting others. To block the existence of a possibility requires an existing blocker. And so we arrive to the principle: if something does not exist then there must be some actually existent thing whose existence blocks it. Or symbolically:

(1)~ E ! x → (∃y) ( E ! y & yBx )

where yBx iff E!y → ~E!x.

A nonexistent, that is to say, always has an existent existence-blocker. But if axiological optimalism obtains and existence-blockage is always (and only) effected through superior alternatives, then yBx iff v ( E ! y ) > v ( E ! x )

And so now (1) becomes

(1′) ~ E ! x → [(∃y)E ! y & v ( E ! y ) > v ( E ! x )]

On such an approach value becomes the determinant of existence. This axiological approach makes for the triangle of optimalism. It means that that is actual among alternative possibilities that is optimal—on the whole and everything considered—will be the best one, simply because there will (by hypothesis) be no synoptically superior alternative to block it.

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On such an approach an ultimate account of reality-as-a-whole will proceed not in terms of causal production but in terms of possibility elimination based on evaluative considerations. The crux of the reasoning at work here lies in the Sherlock Holmes Principle: “When you have eliminated all untenable possibilities, whatever remains, whatever its features or other aspects, will be real and actual.”5 Here we reason from elimination to actualization, from disqualification from the realm of possibility to entry into the domain of the real. And this possibility elimination cannot proceed causally. It has to proceed normatively. Those eliminated possibilities are out not because some creative agent from an agency chooses to eliminate them, but because they are inherently unworthy—outranked and outflanked by far superior alternatives. Naturalistic explanation functions with regard to nature—to existence-inthe-world. But metaphysical explanations at the level of things-in-general have to function at the level of possibility. And here we come to the fundamental law of metaphysics: Inferior alternatives are ipso facto unavailable for realization. Inferior merit is existentially disqualifying. And this principle carries a crucial corollary: Reality is optimific. And so the answer to the question of what explains the elimination of the inferior alternatives lies in a metaphysical Optimality Principle: Given an exhaustive range of possible alternatives, it is the best of them that is actualized. And on this basis the answer to our initial question “Why is there something contingent—something whose existence is not necessary” is simply: “Because it is for the best that this should be so.” So what we have here is the Leibnizian Turn of shifting the explanatory strategy at work from the order of descriptive fact to that of normative evaluation. EXPLAINING THE OPTIMALITY PRINCIPLE: SELF-EXPLANATION AS THE PIVOT But what is it that could account for a Leibnizian Principle of Optimality? What sorts of considerations could possibly provide for the justifactory validation of optimalism? Why should it be that such a principle obtains? Why should what is for the best be actual? The answer here lies in the principle itself. The principle is literally self-explaining. Realization of the Optimality Principle is itself the best alternative in accounting for the prevailing order of things. What is at issue here is something of a principle of the coordination of explanatory and ontological merit: the best candidates for explanation and the best candidate for actualization are seen as being one and the same: the alternative that is the best for endorsement is that which is best for realization.

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But is this Reasoning not Invalidated Through Circularity? By no means! For at this stage circularity is not vicious but virtuous: it is not a flaw but an essential asset. The fact is that any ultimate explanation must be self-sustaining: it must rest on a principle that is self-validating. For if the validity of the principle rested on something else—some deeper and different rational of validation—then by hypothesis it would not be ultimate but would through this very circumstance be flawed. And of course the Optimality Principle indeed has this feature of selfsupport. For the obviously appropriate answer to the question “But why is it that such a principle of optimality obtains” is simply “The principle obtains because that is for the best.” Clearly the principle is self-sustaining and selfexplanatory. And in this present cast this is not vitiating circularity but an essential aspect of the problem—a decidedly virtuous circularity. The circumstance that an ultimate principle must be self-sustaining reinforces acknowledgment of the necessary shift from descriptive facts to normative values. For matters of descriptive fact cannot function self-­ sustainingly without vitiating circularly. But there is no sound reason for holding that value considerations cannot do so. The Principle of Optimality has a raison d′être alright. But it lies in its own nature, for it is, in the final analysis, for the best that the Principle of Optimality should obtain. After all, there is no decisive reason why that explanation has to be “deeper and different”—that is, no decisive reason why the prospect of self-explanation has to be excluded at this fundamental level.6 After all, we cannot go on putting the explanatory elephant on the back of the tortoise on the back of the alligator ad infinitum: as Aristotle already saw, the explanatory regress has to stop somewhere at the “final” theory—one that is literally “self-explanatory.” And what better candidate could there be than the Optimality Principle itself with the result that the divisions between real and merely theoretical possibilities is as it is (i.e., value based) because that itself is for the best?7 That Law of Optimality to the effect that “whatever possibility is for the best is ipso facto the possibility that is actualized” is certainly not a logicoconceptually necessary truth. From the angle of theoretical logic it has to be seen as a contingent fact—albeit one not about nature as such, but rather one about the manifold of real possibility that underlies it. Insofar as necessary at all, it obtains as a matter of ontological rather than logico-conceptual necessity, while the realm of possibility as a whole is presumably constituted by considerations of logico-metaphysical necessity alone.8 Any rational agent—God certainly included—would want to resolve any issue via the best available resolution. But what if we leave God out of the account—not necessarily via atheistic disbelief but simply as an explanatory

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exercise. Nature too is a problem solver: its ever-present problem being that if temporal continuity, of projecting itself from its present state into the unfolding future. This is a problem which, insofar as there are alternatives (which indeed there always are) she would want to resolve in terms of ever-operative principles which enable this development to unfold in the most uniform, simple, and efficient ways, that is, in the rationality-analogous manner. In the end, we must expect that any ultimate principle must explain itself and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something altogether different. The impetus to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. A rational person would not favor the inferior alternative; and a rational reality cannot do so either. So what has to be at work here is a proto-ontological law to the effect that under such and such conditions various theoretically available possibilities become eliminated (i.e., realization-ineligible) as real possibilities by virtue of evaluative inferiority. And such a process will have to continue to operate in the possibilistic domain until at last only one privileged alternative remains. What we have here is literally a struggle for the survival of the fittest, but now with matters being fought out not among competing actuals but among competing possibilities—that is between theoretically available possibilities and metaphysically acceptable ones. THE STANDARD OF METAPHYSICAL VALUE: NOOPHELIA AND THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE To be sure, optimalism’s pivotal idea is that value explains reality—that the best available alternative is going to be actualized—will spin like a useless gear that fails to engage the machinery of explanation unless and until the standard of evaluative that is at issue is identified. Only then will this “axiogenesis” approach acquire any explanatory traction. And so, at this point the pivotal question becomes: What sort of considerations can serve as the determinant of existential fitness here? What renders one world-arrangement superior and existentially more qualified than another? Until this issue is resolved, there is no way to comprehend the principle of optimality. Consider a sequence of 0s and 1s as per: 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 . . . . What can be said about this series over and above its indicated start? Effectively nothing. Until we have a rule that specifies its development completely we do not have a definite series at all, but only a manifold of possibilities. Without completion there is no definiteness—no specific object of consideration and without an identity nothing really exists as such. Complete specificity is essential for identification and identity is essential for existence. The shift from abstract

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status as a “real possibility” to actual existence as a specific item of the world’s outfittings require none. And here metaphysical optimality—being qualified—is the best available option. The problem of ontological merit becomes unavoidable at this point. And it is clear that one cannot just optimize, any more than one can just maximize or minimize. For one has to optimize something, some feature or aspect of things. But if this merit-indicating factor is to be something that is self-­validating and self-sustaining then the clearly most promising candidate would seem to be intelligence itself—that is to say the overall status and standing of intelligent beings at large. Any rational being is bound to see the loss of reason as a supreme tragedy. For an intelligent being—a rational creature—intelligence itself must have a prime place high on the scale of values. It, accordingly, is intelligence and rationality as such that best qualifies as the self-sufficient standard of value that will have to be at issue “for the best” will have to be construed in terms of what is best for the enhancement and diffusion of intelligence in the cosmos. Accordingly, the optimalism envisioned here is oriented at optimizing the conditions of existence for intelligent beings at large. And at the cosmological level such an optimalism militates toward a universe which • provides for the chance and randomness through which alone intelligent beings can emerge in the world through evolutionary processes based on chance-conditioned variation and selection. • provides for the chance-conditional novelty and innovation needed to provide an environment of sufficient complexity to be of interest for intelligent beings. • provides for the order of regularity and lawfulness needed for a universe sufficiently orderly and to allow complex creatures to develop and thrive. • provides for a lawful order in the modus operandi of nature sufficiently simple to be understood by imperfectly intelligent beings as a basis for grounding their decisions and actions in a complex world. The arrangements of an intelligently contrived universe must, in sum, manage things in a way that rational creatures would see as optimal from the vantage point of their own best interests as rational beings. And so an optimal world, in the cosmological sense presently at issue, is one that achieves a condition of optimalization under constraints—these constraints being a manifold of natural law favorable to the best interests of intelligence—that is, intelligent beings at large in the overall scheme of things. And so, optimalism is a theory of rational systematization that grounds the explanation of the world’s facts through a process of optimization subject to constraints—the constraints being the projection of a lawful order of things in

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which intelligent beings can emerge through evolutionary processes of a sort that affords them the opportunity to thrive physically and to progress cognitively. In effect we have: optimalism + noophelia = axiogenesis. The theory accordingly explains concrete reality’s existence and nature in terms of their providing for a natural domain that is conducive to the success of intelligent beings in the world (which is not quite to say that such success is guaranteed). But how can one say that reality is user-friendly for intelligent beings given the amount of human suffering in this world? This crucial question poses the so-called Problem of Evil and calls for another range of deliberations altogether. It requires separate treatment elsewhere.9 Only one brief reminder will have to do here, viz. that in world improvement we face the prospect that in the world system as with a bio-system in matters of medicinal interactions improving matters at point A may well call forth even greater collateral damage at point B.

CIRCULARITY PROBLEMS: THE ISSUE OF FIRST (AND LAST) PRINCIPLE The approach envisioned here is predicated on an inherent impetus to the metaphysical optimality governing the being and nature of Reality. This basic principle accordingly provides a uniform resolution to a cascade of basic issues: • Q: What explains the principle of optimality itself? Why does it govern Reality? A: It is self-explanatory. Its obtaining is for the (metaphysically) best. • Q: How did Reality arise and acquire its actual nature? A: Because its doing and being so are for the metaphysical best. Throughout the level of ultimate issues, the Hyperprinciple of Metaphysical Optimality does the requisite work. But is this Explanatory Process not Caught Up in a Vitiating Circularity? In its doctrinal validation, optimalism is self-reliant, cyclic, even circular. But this is not necessarily vitiating. Circular reasoning is not by nature vicious. The employment of a contention in the course of its own validation widely rejected as a matter of “begging the question.” Nevertheless, the idea that

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such a process of “circular” reasoning is thereby inappropriate and vitiating—let alone vicious—is very questionable. Cyclic reciprocity is the lifeblood of epistemology. We assess the meaning of words in the light of the truths they are used to convey and endorse truth on the basis of what their words mean. Circularity of this sort is not—or should not be seen—as automatically inappropriate. In many cognitive contents validation is not indirectional from for secure premises to inferred conclusions but is determined on the light of feedback processes of cyclic and reciprocal harmonization and systematization. We assess the reliability of reports on the basis of the trustworthiness of their species and assess this trustworthiness in the light of the circumstances of these reports. Consider the thesis: In validating a statement S it can sometimes be appropriate to make use of that very statement S itself as a premiss of the reasoning.

The question before us is whether this thesis is true. And in exploring this issue we shall proceed not by considerations of general principles, but rather by way of illustrations and examples. It is not all that difficult to provide instances of self-certifying theses— claims that are cogently self-substantiating. Thus consider: • There are truths. • This is an English sentence. • Some English sentences begin with “some.” • Some true statements are about statements. • Meaningful statements can mention science. • Negative claims are not invariably false. • Truths can be stated briefly. All of these claims are true and are, in fact, self-certifying. The reasoning at issue here unfolds as follows: • The claim that there are or can be items of a certain kind can be validated by adducing an item of this kind as a validating instance. • Thesis T claims that there are items of kind K. • Thesis T is itself an item of kind K. • Theses T can be validated by adducing itself as a validating instance. Such a line of reason pivots the establishment of a claim by providing that claim itself as a demonstrating fact. It is thus clearly circular but is equally cogent and unproblematic.

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As these deliberations indicate, self-substantiating claims can serve to show that the circularity of self-support need not be inappropriate (let alone invalidate) a claim but can be the raison d’etre a proposition’s truth. For clearly, these claims about themselves constitute conclusive evidence for their own truth (and need no external support). There is circularity alright but it serves to validate rather than disrupt. Consider the following situation:

Note here that the first statement of List I constrains the truth of statement one of List II which in turn constrains the truth of that former statement. In this situation that statement figures crucially in establishing its own truth. After all, suppose that it were not true, then List II will have to contain 0 or 1 or 3 true statements. But 0 and 3 are out, given what statements two and three of List II affirm. Hence statement one of List II must be true. And this constrains the truth of statement one of List I. And so what we have here is yet another example of the appropriateness of employing as statement itself in an order to establish its truth.10

REASON’S SELF-RELIANCE IS NOT VICIOUS BUT VIRTUOUS The only satisfactory explanation for anything—even for the existence of intelligence and its requirements—will have to be an intelligent explanation. In taking intelligence to provide its own ultimate explanatory basis we proceed in a way that is cyclical and indeed even “circular.” But this simply reflects the structural coherence of rational systematization. And there is nothing viciously self-defeating about such self-reliance, for while vicious circularity stultifies by “begging the question,” virtuous circularity merely coordinates related elements in their mutual interlinkage. The former pre-assumes what is to be proved; the latter simply shows how things are connected together in a well-coordinated and mutually supportive interrelationship. And this is crucial kin the present range of deliberations, for to be able to afford an adequate resolution of our ultimate question the principle at work cannot rest on further extraneous considerations. For the question of why the truth of things is what it actually is will arise with respect to the principle

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itself, and if it is to resolve such matters it must do so with respect to itself as well. It must, in short, be self-sustaining and self-grounding. Otherwise the requisite ultimacy will thus be achieved. The only validation of rational intelligence that can reasonably be asked for—and the only one worth having—must lie in considerations of the systemic self-sufficiency of reason—its endorsement on the basis of rational considerations. And such self-endorsement is not problematic but altogether appropriate. After all, even to ask the question “Why should it be that reality is intelligible?” is already to manifest one’s commitment to the principle at issue, since asking this question is to expect an answer—and a cogently intelligent one at that. There is simply no satisfactory alternative to using intelligence in its own explanation. For when a self-validating principle of explanation is needed, then intelligence and reason appear on the scene as ready volunteers. Noophelia—intelligence favoring—accordingly provides a natural pivot for the presently envisioned optimalism. The explanatory chain at issue here runs from the productively causal laws of nature to the eliminatively normative laws of metaphysics—from the actualistic to the possibilistic dimension and from the descriptively factualistic to the normatively axiological. A radical shift of perspective is at issue. Accustomed as we are to living and thinking within the sphere of actuality, such a change of perspectival context is bound to seem extraordinary. It is bound to seem strange by ordinary standards, because those ordinary standards just do not and cannot apply at this level of deliberation. Here we face a question whose inherent nature is too far out of the usual range existence-explanation that only an answer that lies entirely outside the box of accustomed thinking can even begin to address the matter in a meaningful way. The optimalistic approach has many theoretical advantages. Here is just one of them. It is possible—and perhaps even plausible—to contend that world-existence—that is to say, the existence of a world—is necessary while nevertheless this world’s nature (and therewith the existence of this particular world) is contingent. And this means that separate and potentially different answers would have to be provided for the two questions “Why is there anything at all?” and “Why is the character of existence as is—why is it that this particular world exists?” For these of course are very different questions. Consider, for analogy, the distinction between “Why is there currently a president of the USA?” (A: The constitution requires and provides for it) and “Why is there currently this particular president of the USA?” (A: the people elected him in 2016.) Such different questions call for different answers. And so the existence of some contingent order of things could well be necessary, even though there is no particular

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contingent order of things—not even this actual one—whose existence is necessary.11 However, an axiogenetic approach enjoys the advantage of rational economy in that it proceeds uniformly here. It provides a single uniform rationale for both answers—namely: “Because this is for the best.” It accordingly also enjoys the significant merit of providing self-supportively for the rational economy of explanatory principles at the level of metaphysical fundamentals. The crucial point of these deliberations is that the principles of order that characterize the real not only describe its constitution but also serves to explain its existence. The crux is that Reality can be known because it exists. And in the final analysis it exists because this is required for a realization of the order through which it can be known. Its existence is thus necessitated— not in the logical order of deliberations (as contemplated by Spinoza) but in that axiological order as adumbrate by Neo-Platonism and renovated by Leibniz. Such an explanation of Reality is nowise “unscientific” but rather transscientific. It has no quarrel whatsoever with the scientific description and explanation of things. For science explains what the natural order of the world’s law doctrine is. And the axiological approach to reality-explanation addresses a very different question: namely why it should be that to us Reality has this, the constitution, which science increasingly reveals. Science elaborates how things work in the world. Metaphysics sees to provide an account of why for only it should be that this elaboration is what it is. We are—or at any rate see ourselves—as rational beings. As such we stand committed to the idea that facts always have a rational explanation for being as is. (This is the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason.) Why the facts are as is—taken as a whole—is something that cannot be explained in the order of functionality. For when we explain some facts in terms of others as premises, we presume further facts, and this would lead to circularity when the manifolds of facts-as-a-whole are at issue. But if facts are indeed explainable, but so yet not so in the order of factuality, then the order of normativity—that of worth and volume—is the only other place to turn. And we must according deploy some version of the idea the facts are as is because this is somehow for the best (somehow optimal with regard to some order of physical value). To be sure, it is theoretically possible that in the end there just is no explanation for the actual nature of things—that reality is as is without rhyme or reason and the human search for explanation is a quixotic quest that is foredoomed to failure from the outset. But this is not something we either can or should bring ourselves to believe. And if the existence and nature of Reality has any explanation at all—which as rational beings we must suppose that it does—then this explanation cannot be on the order of existence, since that would be circular and this no explanation at all. Rather it must be

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via an account developed on the order of value. And it must accordingly take the form of working out the details of some version or other of the principle that Reality exists and has the features is does because this state of things is somehow for the best. CONCLUSION The present deliberations thus constitute an exercise in metaphysical idealism. They seek to establish that there is a coordinative interdependence among the key metaphysical facts contended here: Reality, Intelligence, and Order. The basic ideas at work are (1) that an ontological impetus to value gives rise to Reality, (2) that order is a key manifestation of value, (3) that reality’s lawful validness is the key to its intelligibility, (4) the mind and intelligent emerge within Reality under the aegis of its laws, (5) that mind seeks order for the sake of understanding and that this quest is bound to be satisfied in an orderly worlds. On this basis, reality is seen as an existential manifold whose existence and nature is based on the inherent value of a rational order to which intelligence secures a practicable access. NOTES 1. William R. Rowe, “Two Criticism of the Cosmological Argument,” The Monist, vol. 54 (1970); reprinted in W. L. Rowe and W. Wainwright (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: Selective Readings, 2nd edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1989), pp. 142–56. (See p. 153). On this principle in its relation to the cosmological aspect for the existence of God see William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See also Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Alexander R. Pruss, “The Hume-Edwards Principle and the Cosmological Argument,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 434 (1988), pp. 149–65. 2. Note that neither of these is the same as ($p)(p @ ("x)E!x) which obtains trivially given the symbolic conventions adopted here. 3. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. by L. E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 487. 4. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. by L. E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 488. 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of the Beryl Coronet (1892). 6. After all, there is no reason of logico-theoretical principle why propositions cannot be self-certifying. Nothing vicious need be involved in self-substantiation. Think of “Some statements are true” or “This statement stakes a particular rather than universal claim.”

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7. Optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” However, when we are dealing with exclusive and exhaustive alternatives the two theses come to the same thing. If one of the alternatives A, A1, . . . An must be the case, then if what is realized is for the best it follows automatically that the best is realized (and conversely). 8. The operative perspective envisions a threefold order of necessity/possibility: the logico-conceptual, the ontological or proto-physical, and the physical. It accordingly resists the positivistic tendency of the times to dismiss or ignore that second, intermediate order of considerations. And this is only to be expected since people nowadays tend to see this intermediate realm as predicated in value considerations, a theme that is anathema to present-day scientism. 9. The problem is addressed by Leibniz in his Theodicy. It is also treated at length in the author’s paper, “On the Improvability of the World,” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 64 (2011), pp. 489–514. 10. Something of an anomaly is afforded by the claim: “There are falsehoods.” For unlike “There are truths” this contention is not self-exemplifying. But it is nevertheless self-certifying. For what it says cannot possibly be false, since if it were, this statement would, ipso facto, be validating itself. In establishing the truth of this claim we do not accept but rather deny it. 11. There is a reason to think that this was in fact the line taken by Leibniz in the necessity of God’s nature as a Creator, with the optimality-dependent contingency of this world as his creation.

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Index

Alexander of Aphrodisias, 72 Alexander the Great, 149 Alston, William P., 17n1, 199 Amaldi, Edoardo, 87n6, 199 Aristotle, ix, 120, 139, 147, 177, 188 Averroes, 72 Avogadro, Amedeo Carlo, 139 Baade, Fritz, 161n6, 199 Bacon, Francis, 78 Ball, John A., 87n13, 199 Bell, Daniel, 153 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 139 Boyle, Robert, 65n1 Bromley, D. A., 86n1, 87nn7, 8, 9, 199 Cantor, Georg, 114, 158 Carnap, 159 Carroll, Lewis, 167n1, 199 Cassirer, Ernst, 159 Clarke, Arthur L., 161n6, 199 Cooke, Roger M., 160n2, 199 Cronkite, Walter, 154 Dalkey, Norman, 160n2 Democritus, 9 Descartes, René, 24, 40 Dietl, Paul, 160n1, 199 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 196n5, 199

Duhem, Pierre, 86n2, 199 Dupré, John, 149n7 Eddington, Arthur S., 77, 86n3, 87n5, 199 Edwards, Paul, 181–83,196 Feinberg, Gerald, 160n1, 199 Fetzer, James, 160n1, 199 Flechtheim, Ossip K., 161n1, 199 Frege, Gottlob, 72, 158 Gabor, Dennis, 161n6, 199 Gale, Richard M., 196n1, 200 Gallie, W. B., 161–62n12, 200 Gärdenfors, Peter, 200 Gilboa, Itzhak, 200 Girshik, M. A., 160n2, 200 Gödel, Kurt, 158 Goldhammer, Herbert, 160n3, 200 Goldstick, Daniel, 105n4, 200 Goodman, Nelson, 73 Gordon, Theodore J., 161n6, 200 Grim, Patrick, 116n2, 200 Grünbaum, Adolf, 159–60n1, 200 Guetzkow, Harold S., 160n3, 200 Halpern, Joseph, 200 Hanna, Joseph, 160n1, 200 205

206

Index

Hanson, Norwood R., 159n1, 200 Hegel, G. W. F., 148 Helmer, Olaf, 152, 154, 160n2, 200 Hempel, Carl G., 151–52, 159n1, 200 Holmes, O. W., 55 Hume, David, 181–83 James, William, 83, 87n10, 200 Jordan, Pascual, 161n6, 200 Jøsang, Audun, 200 de Jouvenel, Bertrand, 161n6, 200 Jungk, Robert, 161n8, 200

Parat, M. V. 149n2 Pearson, Karl, 86n2, 201 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 30, 104n2, 105n6, 201 Planck, Max, 139 Plato, 9, 72, 177 Plotinus, 177–79 Popper, Karl R., 201, 161–62n12 Price, Derek J. deSolla, 149nn2, 4, 5, 6 Pruss, Alexander R., 196n1, 201 Ptolemy, 120, 139 Quine, W. V. O., 73

Kahn, Herman, 160n3, 161n6, 200 Kant, Immanuel, 4–6, 9, 62, 86, 99, 104n1, 148, 158 Kaplan, Abraham, 160n2, 200 Kim, Jaegion, 159n1 Knight, Frank H., 201 Kuhn, Thomas S., 86n4, 157, 201 Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 201 Lamb, Charles, 92, 147 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 72, 113, 148, 180, 183, 185, 195, 196nn3, 4, 197n9, 11, 201 Long, Ken, 161n11 Mahmoud, Essen, 160n2, 201 Makridakis, Spiros, 160n2, 203 Margenau, Henry, 87n6, 201 Martino, Joseph P., 160n2, 201 Meadows, Donella H., 160n4, 201 Mendeleev, Dmitri Ivanovich, 102, 120, 139, 146 Mill, John Stuart, 94 Mittelstrass, Jürgen, 86n21, 201 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 159n1, 201 Nagel, Thomas, 87n11, 201 Newton, 78, 86n2, 139, 158 Nozick, Robert, 87n12, 201 Occam, William of, 109 Oppenheim, Paul, 151–52, 159n1, 200

Rescher, Nicholas 105n5, 149n1, 152, 159–60n1, 2, 200–2 Rosenberg, Alex, 162n12, 202 Rowe, William R., 196n1, 202 Royce, Josiah, 159 Ryle, Gilbert, 40 Sahlin, N. E., 200 Salmon, Wesley, 152, 159n1, 202 Scheffler, Israel, 159n1, 202 Scotus, Duns, 1 Scriven, Michael, 159n1, 202 Shakespeare, William, 92, 147 Simon, Herbert, 160n1, 202 Skogstad, A. L., 160n2, 200 Smithson, Michael, 202 Speier, Hans, 160n3, 200 Spinoza, Baruch, 195 Stegmüller,Wolfgang, 159–60n1, 202 Suchting W. A., 160n1, 202 Suppe, Frederick, 17n2, 202 Theophrastus, 72 Thompson, D’Arcy, 175, 176n1, 202 Toffler, Alvin, 154, 161n8, 10, 202 Tonybee, Arnold, 157 Twain, Mark, 29 Urbach, Peter, 162n12, 202

Index

Visher, S. S. 125n1, 203 Wallechinski, David, 161n11, 203 Ways, Max, 154 Whitehead, A. N., 179 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 87n11, 203

Wiener, Anthony J., 161n6, 200 Wigner, Eugene P., 87n6, 203 Winkler, Robert G., 160n2, 203 Zipf, George K., 175, 176n2, 203

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About the Author

Nicholas Rescher is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades he has well over one hundred books to this credit. Fourteen books about Rescher’s philosophy have been published in five languages. He has served as a president of the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic Philosophy Association, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, the C. S. Peirce Society, and the American Metaphysical Society, and as secretary general of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. Rescher has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain. He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007, the Founder’s Medal of the Metaphysical Society of America in 2016, and the Helmholtz Medal of the Germany Academy of Sciences (Berlin/Brandenburg) in 2016. In 2011, he was awarded the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and honorary degrees have been awarded to him by eight universities in three continents. In 2010, the University of Pittsburgh honored him with the inauguration of a biennial Rescher Prize for distinguished lifetime contributions to systematic philosophy.

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