contemporary pragmatism, but, unlike most analytic thinkers, he
managed to establish himself as a systematic philosopher. In
particular, he built a system of "pragmatic idealism" that combines
elements of the European continental idealism with American
pragmatism. One of the most salient features of Rescher¹s work is the
breadth of topics with which he has dealt, including logic in its
various forms, epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics,
process philosophy, ethics and political philosophy. He has written
about 400 articles and 100 books.
In his system of pragmatic idealism, the activity of the human mind
plays a key role and makes a fundamental contribution to knowledge,
while "valid" knowledge contributes to practical success. Rescher also
defends a coherence theory of truth in a manner differing in a
significant way from that endorsed by classical idealism. He draws an
original distinction between a pragmatism of the left and a pragmatism
of the right. The first is a flexible type of pragmatism that endorses
a greatly enhanced cognitive relativism. The second envisions the
pragmatist enterprise as a source of cognitive security. Rescher sees
Charles S. Peirce, Clarence I. Lewis and himself as adherents to the
pragmatism of the right, and William James, F. S. C. Schiller and
Richard Rorty as representatives of the pragmatism of the left, with
John Dewey standing in a middle of the road position.
In the philosophy of science, Rescher claims, against any form of
instrumentalism and many postmodern authors as well, that natural
science can validate a plausible commitment to the actual existence of
its theoretical entities. Scientific conceptions aim at what really
exists in the world, but only hit it imperfectly and "well off the
mark." What we can get is, at most, a rough consonance between our
scientific ideas and reality itself.
Rescher recognizes that moral rules are frequently part of the customs
of a community, but he denies that morality consists in conformity to
mores or in benefit-maximization.
1. Life
Nicholas Rescher was born on July 15, 1928, in the German town of
Hagen, Westphalia. He is one of the many contemporary American
philosophers whose life began in a foreign country, and who then
pursued a successful career in the United States. Rescher obtained his
Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1951 at the age of
twenty-two. He was the youngest person ever to do so in that
department. He is also among the most prolific of contemporary
scholars, having written more than 400 articles and 100 books, ranging
over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of which have been
translated into foreign languages.
He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic
Scholarship in 1984, the Cardinal Mercier Prize in 2005, and the
American Catholic Philosophical Society's Aquinas medal in 2007. He
has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association,
American Catholic Philosophy Association, American G. W. Leibniz
Society, C. S. Peirce Society, and the American Metaphysical Society.
He has held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca,
Munich, and Marburg; and his work has been recognized by seven
honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Rescher serves
on the editorial board of Process Studies, the principal academic
journal for both process philosophy and theology. He has for many
years been teaching at the University of Pittsburgh with a status of
University Professor. His life is detailed in an Autobiography
(Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2007).
2. Main Topics of Rescher's Work
Rescher has written on a wide range of topics, including logic,
epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the
philosophy of value. He is best known as an advocate of pragmatism
and, more recently, of process philosophy. Over the course of his
six-decade research career, Rescher has established himself as a
systematic philosopher of the old style, and the author of a system of
pragmatic idealism that combines elements of continental idealism with
American pragmatism. To this end, he:
* Has developed a system of pragmatic idealism, in which the
activity of the human mind makes a positive and constitutive
contribution to knowledge, and "valid" knowledge contributes to
practical success;
* Defends a coherence theory of truth in a manner differing
somewhat from that of classical idealism; see for example his exchange
in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (in the Library of Living
Philosophers series);
* Advocates an "erotetic propagation" of science, asserting that
scientific inquiry will continue without end because each newly
answered question adds a presupposition for at least one more open
question to the current body of scientific knowledge;
* Propounds an epistemic law of diminishing returns that holds
that actual knowledge merely stands as the logarithm of the available
information. This has the corollary that the comparative growth of
knowledge is inversely proportional to the volume of information
already at hand, so that when information grows exponentially,
knowledge will grow at a merely linear rate.
Apart from this larger program, Rescher has made significant contributions to:
* Historical studies on Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, and on the medieval
Arabic theory of modal syllogistic and logic;
* Logic (the conception of autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic);
* The theory of knowledge ("epistemetrics" as a quantitative
approach in theoretical epistemology);
* The philosophy of science (the theory of logarithmic returns in
scientific effort).
3. Pragmatism
Rescher draws an important distinction between a more flexible
"pragmatism of the left" and a more conservative "pragmatism of the
right." Referring to a famous article by Arthur Lovejoy, he notes that
there seem to be as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Usually, however,
those who are interested in pragmatism from an historical point of
view tend to forget that, from the beginning, a substantial polarity
is present in this tradition of thought. It is a dichotomy between
what Rescher calls "pragmatism of the left," namely a flexible type of
pragmatism which endorses a greatly enhanced cognitive relativism, and
a "pragmatism of the right," namely a different position that sees the
pragmatist stance as a source of cognitive security. Both positions
are eager to assure pluralism in the cognitive enterprise and in the
concrete conduct of human affairs, but the meaning they attribute to
the term "pluralism" is not the same. Rescher sees C. S. Peirce, C. I.
Lewis and himself as adherents of the pragmatism of the right, and
William James, F. S. C. Schiller and Richard Rorty as representatives
of the pragmatism of the left, with John Dewey standing somehow in a
middle of the road position.
The position of the so-called pragmatists of the left is clear: one
just has to read Rorty's works to see where it ends up, from both a
cognitive and a social-political viewpoint. But what does the
pragmatism of the right really come to? Parochial diversity is
something that a post-modern pragmatist such as Rorty gladly accepts
in order to achieve results that are, at the same time, subjectivistic
and relativistic. On the other hand, even a Rescherian pragmatist sees
practical efficacy as the cornerstone of our endeavors, but at the
same time he takes efficacy to be the best instrument we have at our
disposal for achieving objectification.
Objective pragmatism — or the pragmatism of the right, as Rescher
calls it — implies that (a) our social-linguistic world evolved out of
natural reality; (b) this social-linguistic world acquires an
increasing autonomy; (c) between the social and the natural worlds
there is no ontological line of separation, but just a functional one;
(d) however, the accessibility to natural reality is only granted by
the tools that the social-linguistic world provides us with; (e) this
means that our knowledge of natural reality is always tentative and
mediated by our conceptual capacities; (f) there is no need to draw
relativistic conclusions from this situation, because the presence of
an objective reality that underlies the data at hand puts upon
personal desires objective constraints that we are able to overcome at
the verbal level, but not in the sphere of rational deliberations
implementing actions.
4. Objectivity and Rationality
Rescher's definition of ontological objectivity is the following:
Objectivity is not something we infer from the data; it is something
we do and must presuppose. It is something that we postulate or
presume from the very outset of our dealings with people's claims
about the world's facts – our own included. Its epistemic status is
not that of an empirical discovery but that of a presupposition whose
ultimate justification is a transcendental argument from the very
possibility of the projects of communication and inquiry as we
standardly conduct them.
The specification at stake here is just the opposite of objectivity
conceived of as something that we merely infer from empirical data
(maybe with a little abstractive effort). But, on the other side, nor
can it be equated with a classical idealistic viewpoint, according to
which objectivity is something that our mind simply creates in the
process of reflection. Objectivity is, in this case, a sort of
cross-product of the encounter between our mind-shaped tools and
capacities, and a surrounding reality made of things that are real in
the classical meaning of the term: they are there and in no way can be
said to be mind-created. But a final — and quite important —
qualification is in order: the very mode in which we see these real
things, and conceive of (and speak about) them is indeed
mind-dependent. Science itself gives us some crucial insights in this
direction, since it shows that we see, say, tables and trees in a
certain way which, however, does not match the image that scientific
instruments are able to attain.
On the other hand rationality is for Rescher a matter of idealization.
Although we must admit our natural origins and evolutionary heritage,
we must give way as well to the recognition that there is indeed
something that makes us unique. Only human beings are able to "gaze
towards idealities" and to somehow detach themselves from "the
actualities on an imperfect world." Just like objectivity, rationality
is the expression of mankind's capacity to see not only how things
actually are, but also how they might have been and how they could
turn out to be if we were to take some course of action rather than
another. Thus the concept of possibility plays a key role.
5. Truth
Rescher endorses a coherentist approach to truth. Why? The answer is,
first of all, systemic and holistic: he needs a coherence theory
because the older and more classical correspondence theories do not
fit into the comprehensive philosophical system he managed to build.
But there is also a more theoretical reply, because he believes a
coherence theory has a great number of fertile applications, such as
in the methodology of the use of historical sources, the analysis of
counterfactual conditionals, and the problems of inductive logic. As
he recognizes in The Coherence Theory of Truth, the first impetus
towards developing a coherentist approach to truth came from a theory
of inference from inconsistent premises constructed for the analysis
of counterfactual conditionals.
Rescher's point of departure is the distinction between "definitional"
and "criterial" theories of truth, that is, between what truth is and
how we acquire truth. The definitional theories try to provide a
definition of the expression "is true" as a characteristic of
propositions. The criterial ones aim, instead, at specifying the
test-conditions which allow us to determine whether (or not) there is
warrant to apply "is true" to propositions. Rescher prefers the second
alternative and, once again, the reasons for such a preference are
typically pragmatic: The criterial approach to truth is
decision-oriented. Its aim is not to specify in the abstract what "is
true" means, but rather to put us into a position to implement and
apply the concept by instructing us as to the circumstances under
which there is rational warrant to characterize or class something
(that is, some proposition) as true. Why bother with a criterion once
a definition is at hand? To know the meaning of a word or concept is
only half the battle: We want to be able to apply it, too. It does
little good to know how terms like "speed limit" or "misdemeanor" are
defined in the abstract if we are left in the dark as to the
conditions of their application.
6. Evolutionary Epistemology
According to Rescher we must address a basic question: which kind of
evolution are we referring to when talking of evolutionary
epistemology? If we take evolution to be an undifferentiated concept,
such that no useful distinction can be found in it, we are — according
to our author — on a wrong track. The evolutionary "pattern" is
certainly one, but for sure this should not lead us to assume that the
specific characteristics of mankind must be left out of the picture,
either because they are not important or because no specifically human
characteristic is admitted. Rescher's evolutionary framework, as it
always happens in his philosophical system, is pluralistic and
multi-sided.
The evolutionary pathway provided by the route of intelligence is one
of the alternative ways of coping within nature that are available to
biological organisms. (Other ways include toughness, multiplicity and
isolation). Human beings, thus, can be said to have evolved to fill a
possible ecological niche left free for intelligent creatures.
There are, however, many ways to look at the evolution of mankind.
Rescher stresses that, after all, intelligence has evolved not because
it aids the survival of its possessors within nature. It arose because
it represents one effective means of survival. Intelligence is our
functional substitute for the numerousness of termites, the ferocity
of lions, or the toughness of microorganisms. So, it might even be
said that this is our specific manner of fighting the battle for
survival: we would not be here if our intelligence-led rationality
were not survival-conducive. But does all this mean that intelligence
is an inevitable feature of conscious organic life? The answer to such
a question is crucial and, as long as Rescher is concerned, is
negative.
The scheme we get by adopting this stance is, thus, more complex than
the reductionistic one endorsed by materialist philosophers, since any
element of the biological sphere is matched by an analogous element
located in a sphere that may be defined as
"sociological-intellectual," along the following lines. At the
biological level we have:
(A) Biological mutation;
(B) Reproductive elimination of traits through their non-realization
in an individual's progeny; and, eventually,
(C) One's physical progeny.
The same steps can be traced at the sociological-intellectual level:
(A1) Procedural variation;
(B1) Reproductive elimination of processes through their lapsed
transmissions to one's successors (for example, children or students);
(C1) Those individuals whom one influences.
The differences between (A)-(C) and (A1)-(C1) are clearly visible but,
no doubt, the same process is at issue in both cases, since both
involve structures that are maintained over time.
7. Pragmatic Idealism
No one can seriously doubt that there are strong idealistic features
in Rescher's philosophy. For example, he never tires of stressing that
the conceptual apparatus we employ itself makes a creative
contribution to our view of the world, and his holistic stance is
clearly influenced by Hegel and Bradley, thinkers who have long been
quite unpopular within American analytic philosophy. But idealism is
just one element in a broader framework where pragmatism plays the key
role, and other important components are detectable as well in his
thought (for instance naturalism). No doubt Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and
Bradley are all philosophers who deeply influenced his outlook. But,
still, the central figure in Rescher's personal Olympus is (and will
remain) Charles S. Peirce. Here is how Rescher recalls how the
idealistic perspective became a central feature of his comprehensive
philosophical outlook:
I recall well how the key ideas of my idealistic theory of natural
laws – of "lawfulness as imputation" – came to me in 1968 during work
on this project while awaiting the delivery of Arabic manuscripts in
the Oriental Reading Room of the British Museum. It struck me that
what a law states is a mere generalization, but what marks this
generalization as something special in our sight — and renders it
something we see as a genuine law of nature — is the role that we
assign to it in inference. Lawfulness is thus not a matter of what the
law-statement says, but how it is used in the systematization of
knowledge — the sort of role we impute to it. These ideas provided an
impetus to idealist lines of thought and marked the onset of my
commitment to a philosophical idealism which teaches that the mind is
itself involved in the conceptual constitution of the objects of our
knowledge. (Instructive Journey: An Essay in Autobiography, pages
172-173)
It should be noted that Rescher immediately tied these idealistic
insights to the philosophy of science, a sector that has always been
at the core of his interests. The aforementioned statements, in fact,
led him to the conclusion that scientific discovery, Galileo
notwithstanding, is not a matter of simply "reading" what is written
in the book of nature, but is rather the outcome of the interaction
between nature on the one side, and human mind on the other. The
contribution which mind gives to the construction of "our science" is
at least as important as that provided by nature: no science as we
know it would be possible without the specific contribution of the
mind.
What is the source of our ideas according to his philosophical
outlook? Locke, for instance, remarked that we can only think about
ideas, their source being either sensation or observation of the
internal operations of our mind. Taking this path we can certainly
avoid the problems connected to metaphysical skepticism, but ideas
become our only "real" point of reference, which is not such a
wonderful solution from an empiricist point of view. According to the
verifiability principle held by the logical positivists, on the other
hand, the meaningfulness of a statement is strictly tied to the
existence of some possible set of observations that, were they to be
ever made, would determine the truth of the statement itself. In this
case metaphysical skepticism could be avoided by equating metaphysics
with non-sense, but the verifiability principle created other,
unexpected problems. Scientific laws, in fact, clearly resist the
application of the verifiability principle, and the price to be paid
for the elimination of metaphysics seemed, to say the least, too high.
So the problem of demarcating science from metaphysics, which has been
deemed tremendously important by some sectors of early twentieth
century philosophy, remains pressing.
Detaching himself from the mainstream of American analytic philosophy
which, under the influence of the logical positivists, had been
largely dominated by empiricist and positivist trends of thought,
Rescher in the early 1970's launched his project of rehabilitating
idealism. Taking notice of the fact that idealism had been effectively
dead in Anglo-American philosophy for more than a generation, he tells
us that, "this eclipse of an important sector of philosophical
tradition seems to be entirely unjustified on the merits."
"Idealism" is a sort of umbrella-term that covers a large variety of
trends and sub-trends. Each of them is somehow connected to the
others, but disagreements within the idealistic field have always been
strong. Rescher readily recognizes this fact, providing a general
scheme in which all the various idealistic trends can be inserted. The
fundamental distinction to be made is between the "ontological"
versions of idealism and the "epistemic" ones. Ontological versions
imply that everything there is arises causally from, or is
supervenient upon, the operations of mind. Epistemic versions are less
strongly committed because they rule out the thesis that mind creates
the world in toto, be it natural or social, and content themselves to
point out the intimate correlatedness between our mind and the
world-as-we-know it. Rescher says explicitly that his conceptual
idealism belongs to the epistemic version of the theory, and he
characterizes it as follows: "Conceptual idealism [states that] any
fully adequate descriptive characterization of the nature of the
physical ('material') reality must make reference to mental
operations; some recourse to verbal characteristics or operations is
required within the substantive content of an adequate account of what
it is to be real."
Another important consideration relates to Rescher's attitude towards
Kant and his transcendental idealism. Kant's presence is clearly
perceivable in our author's writings, but his Kant is always Kant
viewed and interpreted through the lenses of pragmatism (which in this
case are Peircean lenses). On the one hand Rescher accepts the Kantian
view that our knowledge is strongly determined by the a priori
elements present in our conceptual schemes, and that they indeed have
an essential function as long as our interpretation of reality is
concerned. On the other hand, he tends to see these aprioristic
elements as resting on a contingent basis, and validated on pragmatic
rather than necessitarian considerations. The mind certainly makes a
great contribution towards shaping reality-as-we-see-it, but the very
presence of the mind itself can be explained by adopting an
evolutionary point of view.
8. Philosophy of Science
It is only too natural that when the man of the street reads about the
results of scientific discoveries he takes them to be descriptions of
"real" nature. Why should different thoughts come to his mind, given
the impressive results that science was able to attain in the last few
centuries? It should be noted, however, that not only philosophers,
but also even many scientists have often denied the validity of the
picture that the man of the street takes more or less for granted.
Many examples could be provided in this regard, as any standard text
on the history of science might easily confirm. In the past century
uncertainty about the content of our theories has grown fast, together
with the feeling that there are alternative theories that can account
equally well for all possible observations. Clearly the threat of
relativism arises at this point, even though many authors nowadays no
longer take relativism to be a threat, but just a fact of the matter.
Obviously things were different when logical positivism still was the
dominant — and, in many cases, even the only — doctrine in philosophy
of science. In that case the main purpose was to individuate the
immutable models that lie beyond concrete scientific practice, because
it was commonly held by the main representatives of this neopositivism
that science is objective and progressive, in the cumulative sense of
the term. Intersubjectivity was granted through recourse to the
scientific language, purportedly believed to be neutral, free of
errors and misunderstandings and, thus, available to every observer.
Formal logic became then something much more important than a simple
instrument, since its task was supposed to be that of "capturing"
intersubjectivity by means of a language constructed in the purest
form possibly available to human beings, leaving aside all the
unpleasant distortions that our natural languages bring with them.
At this point we can note that scientific realism (and the nature of
scientific knowledge at large) is a theme where the originality of
Rescher's position clearly emerges. Certainly he is very distant from
the received view of logical empiricism. Looking back to the years of
his philosophical formation, he says: I was thus led back to take a
rather different view of the technical preoccupations in the minutiae
of formal analysis which came to the forefront in the postwar years.
It seemed to me that the passion for the detailed analysis of
small-scale side issues was getting out of hand. All too often,
philosophers were using their technical tools on those issues of
detail congenial to their application, rather than concentrating them
on inherently important matters. Technical questions became
preoccupations in their own right, rather than because of any
significant bearing on the central problems of the field.
Rescher's increasing distance from the neopositivist model, however,
should not lead one to think that he got closer to the more recent,
and more fashionable, post-empiricist trend of thought. He argues,
against any form of instrumentalism and many postmodern authors as
well, that natural science can indeed validate a plausible commitment
to the actual existence of its theoretical entities. Scientific
conceptions aim at what really exists in the world, but only hit it
imperfectly and "well off the mark." What we can get is, at most, a
rough consonance between our scientific ideas and reality itself. This
statement should not sound surprising, if only one recalls Rescher's
proclaimed conceptual idealism and his unwillingness to trace a
precise borderline between ontology and epistemology.
Furthermore, Rescher's aim is to replace Charles S. Peirce's "long-run
convergence" theory of scientific progress by a more modest position
geared to increasing success in scientific applications, especially in
matters of prediction and control. This dimension of applicative
efficacy is something real, and can hardly be denied from a rational
point of view. He goes on arguing that the connection between adequacy
and applicative success in questions of scientific theorizing leads,
in turn, to a pragmatist-flavored philosophy of science. He also
states very clearly that "perfection" (the completion of the project)
is, in principle, unfeasible. This means that his ideas are opposed to
all those scientific projects whose aim is the search for a "final"
theory.
So we have a general picture of this kind: In attempting answers to
our questions about how things stand in the world, science offers (or
at any rate, both endeavors and purports to offer) information about
the world. The extent to which science succeeds in this mission is, of
course, disputable. The theory of sub-atomic matter is unquestionably
a "mere theory," but it could not help us to explain those all too
real atomic explosions if it is not a theory about real substances.
Only real objects can produce real effects. There exist no
"hypothetical" or "theoretical entities" at all, only entities, plus
hypotheses and theories about them which may be right or wrong,
well-founded or ill-founded. The theoretical entities of science are
introduced not for their own interest but for a utilitarian mission,
to furnish the materials of causal explanation for the real
comportment of real things. Thus our inability to claim that natural
science as we understand it depicts reality correctly must not be
taken to mean that science is a merely practical device, a mere
instrument for prediction and control that has no bearing on
describing "the nature of things." What science says is descriptively
committal in making claims regarding "the real world," but the tone of
voice in which it proffers these claims always is (or should be)
provisional and tentative.
So we can never assume that a particular scientific theory, for
instance, Einstein's relativity theory, gives us the true picture of
reality, since we know perfectly well from the history of science
that, in a future we cannot actually foresee, it will be replaced by a
better theory. And it should be noted, moreover, that this future
theory will be better for future scientists, but not the best in
absolute terms, since its final destiny is to be displaced by yet
another theory.
Rescher's conception of scientific realism is thus strictly tied to
his distinction between reality-as-such and reality-as-we-think-of-it.
He argues that there is indeed little justification for believing that
our present-day natural science describes the world as it really is,
and this fact does not allow us to endorse an absolute and
unconditioned scientific realism. In other words, if we claim that the
theoretical entities of current science correctly pick up the
"furniture of the world," we run into the inevitable risk of
hypostatizing something, that is, our present science, that is only a
historically contingent product of humankind, valid in this particular
period of its cultural evolution. Rescher's view is, instead, that "a
realistic awareness of scientific fallibilism precludes the claim that
the furnishings of the real world are exactly as our science states
them to be — that electrons "actually are just what the latest
Handbook of Physics claims them to be."
But what about future science? We might in fact be tempted to say
that, since present-day science is really bound to be imperfect and
incomplete, perhaps future science will do the job, thus accomplishing
that project of "perfected science" that the logical positivists loved
so much. Even in this case, however, many problems arise. First of
all, just which future are we talking about? There is indeed no reason
to believe that tomorrow's science will be very different from ours as
long as its capacity of providing the "correct" picture of reality is
concerned. The fact is, he argues, that scientific theories always
have a finite lifespan. This is so for every human creation (and
science is a human product, in any possible sense of the term), so
that, "as something that comes into being within time, the passage of
time will also bear it away." While we can certainly claim that the
aims of science are stable, it should honestly be recognized that its
questions and answers are not.
Ideal science, even when its realization is referred to the future,
looks more like a philosophical utopia than a feasible accomplishment
(even though utopias, as Rescher often recognizes, are indeed useful
when they are viewed as essentially "regulative" ideas). Perfected
science, thus, is not "what will emerge when," but "what would emerge
if," and many realistically unachievable conditions must be provided
in order to obtain such a highly desirable result. This means that our
cognitive enterprise must be pursued in an imperfect world, and the
strong realistic thesis that science faithfully describes the real
world should be taken for what it is: a matter of intent. The only
type of scientific realism that looks reasonable to Rescher is a
scientific realism viewed in idealistic perspective, in which what is
at stake is a sort of "ideal science" that no wise men can claim to
possess.
9. Logic and Conceptual Schemes
The real alternative at stake here is the following: logic as
"doctrine" vs. logic as "instrument." Rescher does not deny that logic
has, in this particular regard, a dual nature. From the doctrinal
point of view it is clearly a body of theses or, even better, a
systematic codification of those special propositions defined as
"logical truths." At the methodological level, instead, it must be
seen as an operational code for conducting sound reasoning. Having
once again recourse to historical considerations, our author observes
that the distinction at issue carries back to the old dispute —
carried on throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages — as to
whether logic is to be considered as a part of knowledge or as an
instrument for its development. The best minds of the day insisted
that the proper answer is simply that logic is both of these — at once
a theory with a body of theses of its own, and a tool for testing
arguments to determine whether they are good or bad.
A pragmatic conception of logic, however, leads him to view its
instrumental-methodological character as primary with respect to the
doctrinal features. All this follows quite naturally from what we said
above, because, for a pragmatically oriented thinker, logic's task
lies, first of all, in systematizing and rationalizing the practice of
reasoning in all the contexts (theoretical included) where human
beings usually draw inferences. Logical rules, in turn, are not
supposed to have an abstract and formalistic character, because in
that case they cannot be attuned to human practices (be they
theoretical or instrumental). It is interesting to note that this
approach is not distant from some insights contained in the works of
the second Wittgenstein, where language is no longer taken to be an
ideal entity endowed with some sort of "essence," but rather a set of
social practices that are used in order to satisfy men's concrete
needs. Our models of inference thus become the products of social
practices, while the social dimension pertains to language in each of
its many characteristics and features. In other words, our rules for
drawing inferences are essentially practical and not formal; they are
rules that allow (or do not allow) us to perform a certain kind of
action.
For Rescher a conceptual scheme for operation in the factual domain is
always correlative with a Weltanschauung — a view of how things work
in the world. And the issue of historical development becomes involved
at this juncture, seeing that such a fact-committal scheme is clearly
a product of temporal evolution. Our conceptions of things are a
moving rather than a fixed target for analysis. The startling
conclusion is that there are assertions in a conceptual scheme A that
are simply not available in another conceptual scheme B, because no
equivalent in it may be found. This view also allows him to challenge
Donald Davidson when he says that, "we get a new out of an old scheme
when the speakers of a language come to accept as true an important
range of sentences they previously took to be false." The point at
stake, in fact, is different, since Rescher answers that a change of
scheme is not just a matter of saying things differently, but rather
of saying altogether different things.
In other words, a scheme A may be committed to phenomena that another
scheme B cannot even envisage: Galenic physicians, for instance, had
absolutely nothing to say about bacteria and viruses because those
entities lay totally beyond their conceptual dimension. Where one
scheme is eloquent, Rescher says, the other is altogether silent. This
means, moreover, that our classical and bivalent logic of the True and
False is not much help in such a context. Some assertions that are
deemed to be true in a certain scheme may have no value whatsoever in
another scheme, so that we need to formalize this truth-indeterminacy
by having recourse, say, to a many-valued logical system in which,
besides the classical T and F, a third (Indeterminate) value I is
present. We have, in sum, a more complex picture than Davidson's.
Rescher observes that in brushing aside the idea of different
conceptual schemes we incur the risk of an impoverishment in our
problem-horizons. So, to deny that different conceptual schemes exist
is absurd.
10. Social Philosophy
Even in the social field, for Rescher, context-relativization means
neither irrationalism nor indifferentism. For sure we must recognize
the presence of different perspectives, but on the other hand our
experiential indications provide us with criteria for making a
rational choice. The fact that no appropriate universal diet exists
does not lead to the conclusion that we can eat anything, and the
absence of a globally correct language does not mean that we can
choose a language at random for communicating with others in a
particular context. For these reasons he concludes that an individual
need not be intimidated by the fact of disagreement — it makes
perfectly good sense for people to do their rational best towards
securing evidentiated beliefs and justifiable choices without undue
worry about whether or not others disagree.
To what extent are Rescher's doubts about the notion of consensus
applicable to the real social and political situations? Consensus is
deemed by many authors to be a sine qua non condition for achieving a
benign political and social order, while its absence is often viewed
as a premonitory symptom of chaos. Needless to say the feelings are
usually strong in this regard, because political and social philosophy
has a more direct impact on our daily life than other such traditional
sectors of the philosophical inquiry as, say, metaphysics or
epistemology.
What deserves to be pointed out is that the search for consensus has
many concrete contraindications, which can mainly be drawn from
history. Think, for instance, of how Hitler gained power in Germany in
the 1930's. As a matter of fact he obtained a resounding victory
through democratic election, because he was able to make the political
platform of the Nazi party consensually accepted by a large majority
of citizens. It would be foolish, however, to draw the conclusion that
Hitler and the Nazis were right just because they were good
consensus-builders. On the contrary, the United States is a good
example of a democratically thriving society that can dispense with
consensus, and where dissensus is deemed to be productive (at least to
a certain extent). Another striking fact is that the former Soviet
Union was, instead, a typically consensus-seeking society.
Homogeneity granted by consensus is not the mark of a benign social
order, since this role is more likely to be played by a
dissensus-dominated situation that is in turn able to accommodate
diversity of opinions. It follows, among other things, that we should
be very careful not to characterize the consensus endorsed by majority
opinion as intrinsically rational. In the industrialized nations of
the Western world the power of the media in building up consensus is
notoriously great. It may, and does, happen sometimes, however, that
the power of the media in assuring consensus is used to support bad
politicians, who repay the favor by paying attention to sectorial
rather than to general interests. It is thus easily seen that
consensus is not an objective that deserves to be pursued no matter
what.
All this seems plausible and reasonable to Rescher, despite the fact
that many theorists nowadays continue to view consensus as an
indispensable component of a good and stable social order. It is the
case, for example, with Jürgen Habermas. The Marxist roots of
Habermas' thought explain why the German philosopher is so eager to
have the activities of the people harmonized thanks to their
interpersonal agreement about ends and means. The basis of agreement
is thus both collective and abstractly universal. Another Rescher's
key word, "acquiescence," needs at this point be introduced. Given
that the insistence on the pre-requisite of communal consensus is
simply unrealistic, we must come to terms with concrete situations,
that is, with facts as presented by real life. If, according to
contractarian lines of thought, we take justice to be the
establishment of arrangements that are (or, even better, would be)
reached in idealized conditions, then we cannot help but note that
justice is not a feature of our imperfect world. "Life is unjust" is
bound to be our natural conclusion, together with the acknowledgement
that real-life politics is the art of the possible. It is obvious as
well, however, that even in real-life politics we constantly need to
make decisions and to take some course of action. How should we
behave, then, given the fact that the so-called communal consensus
turned out to be unachievable?
The answer is that a modern and democratic society looks for social
accommodation, which means that it always tries to devise methods for
letting its members live together in peace even in those inevitable
cases when a subgroup prevails over another. As Rescher as it, the
choice is not just between either the agreement of the whole group, on
the one hand, or the lordship of some particular subgroup, on the
other hand. Accommodation through general acquiescence is a perfectly
practicable mode for making decisions in the public order and
resolving its conflicts. And, given the realities of the situation in
a complex and diversified society, it has significant theoretical and
practical advantages over its more radical alternatives. The reader
will not find it difficult to recognize that this is just the strategy
constantly adopted within the democratic societies of the Western
world, which, in turn, distinguishes them from all forms of tyrannies
and monocratic (one-person) forms of government.
Acquiescence is thus a matter of mutual restraint, a sort of "live and
let live" concrete politics that permits any individual or subgroup
belonging in a larger group to avoid fight in order to gain respect
for its own position. Thus acquiescence, and not consensual agreement,
turns out to be the key factor for building a really democratic
society, Rescher argues. In a situation like that of the former
Yugoslavia, for instance, it would be foolish to ask for consensus
given the historical and ethnical roots of war today. But a search for
acquiescence would be much less foolish, with all factions giving up
something in order to avoid even greater damages and losses.
If we want to be pluralists in the true spirit of Western democratic
thought, we must abandon the quest for a monolithic and rational
order, together with the purpose of maximizing the number of people
who approve what the government, say, does. On the contrary, we should
have in mind an acquiescence-seeking society where the goal is that of
minimizing the number of people who strongly disapprove of what is
being done. We should never forget, Rescher claims, that the idea that
"all should think alike" is both dangerous and anti-democratic, as
history shows with plenty of pertinent examples. Since consensus is an
absolute unlikely to be achieved in concrete life, a difference must
be drawn between "being desirable" and "being essential." All in all,
it can be said that it qualifies at most for the former status. The
general conclusion is that consensus is no more than one positive
factor that has to be weighed on the scale along with many others.
11. Ethical Issues
Rescher recognizes that cultural, social and ethical diversity are a
fact of life rather than a mere hypothesis. Social scientists have
always stressed the elements of differentiation across social groups,
and especially sociologists are ready to pick up strong differences as
long as moral beliefs of various social groups are concerned. From
this, most social scientists and even several philosophers draw the
conclusion that cultural relativism is unavoidable: since each group
has a different way of dealing with beliefs, relationships, and so
forth, it follows that there is no unique criterion for evaluating
actions. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, we are provided
with no "trans-cultural standard" which can be deemed to be valid for
all conceptual schemes. Social scientists and philosophers who find
the hermeneutic stance congenial will most likely be in favor of the
aforementioned conclusion, because it shows that cultures are unique
and cannot be investigated from a general viewpoint.
It goes without saying that the ethical side of relativism is strictly
connected to all its other branches (conceptual, epistemological,
etc.), since the real problem at stake here is the search for
cross-cultural "universals" which could explain the fact, often denied
by relativists, that we share as rational beings many common features
(which, of course, does not mean to deny that there are many and
important differences, too).
So we must wonder about the real nature of norms and values: are they
something that can be only referred to particular social groups, in
the sense that we can only speak of norms and values as referred to
group A, or B, or C? Or are we authorized to talk about kinds of
"moral universals" that are the true foundations of any normative
system?
It would seem that anthropology, and social science in general, has a
message for us concerning human variability, but it is not exactly the
one endorsed by radical cultural relativism. Rather, the correct
conclusion appears to be that there is both uniformity and diversity
across human cultures at the level of concepts, beliefs, and norms,
sasys Rescher. Diversity shows the creativeness of human capacity for
developing cultural instruments. Uniformity, instead, reflects both
the biological constants in human life and the common features of the
human existential situation.
Relativists of all sorts try to solve the problem by equating
"morality" on the one side and "mores" on the other. Rescher notes in
this regard that cultural relativism is the doctrine that societies
and cultures have their own customs and folkways, which are so many
different and in principle equally valid ways of transacting their
business of everyday life. Moral relativism is the theory which holds,
analogously, that there are different and discordant but in principle
equally valid moralities. It is one of the widely pervasive
convictions of our day that the former, plausible mode of relativism
somehow entails the latter, that one group's moral goodness is
another's moral wickedness — it all simply "lies in the eyes of the
beholder".
Rescher goes on noting that social scientists are especially drawn to
this sort of approach, which in his opinion amounts to "imperialistic
power grabbing." Thus anthropologists, who study norms and customs,
claim that morality belongs to their discipline because moral rules
are nothing more than norms and customs. The same happens with the
economists, who study the operations of rational self-interest in the
production and distribution of goods; they, too, claim that morality
belongs to their discipline, because moral rules are no more than
procedures that maximize social utility and serve "the greatest good
of the greatest number." Rescher disagrees.
There is in his view a "wide gulf" that separates morality from mere
mores. Many social theorists endorsedrelativism from a variety of
anthropological, sociological, and ideological perspectives.
Relativism has become so successful that it is often seen as a sort of
truism that does not even need a defense. For Rescher, however, the
rejection of relativism and the articulation of plausible arguments
for absolutism are indeed essential to any meaningful legitimation of
the moral project. They represent his main task, meaning that the
moral project must itself be legitimated "in terms of
morality-external values," that is, values which, like personhood and
responsibility for self-realization, are fully in agreement with moral
concerns. Instead, values as social conformity or personal advantage
are not consonant with such concerns.
Rescher's strategy is twofold. On the one side he is ready to admit
that moral rules are frequently part of the customs of a community or
that moral behavior advances the welfare interests of the social group
or the individual agent. On the other, however, he firmly rejects the
view according to which morality consists in conformity to mores or in
benefit-maximization. In other words, morality cannot adequately be
accounted for in terms of values that imply no characteristically
moral bearing. For this reason Rescher claims that the anthropological
route to moral relativism is highly problematic. There is no
difficulty whatever about the idea of different social customs, but
the idea of different moralities faces insuperable difficulties. The
case is much like that of saying that the tribe whose counting
practices is based on the sequence: "one, two, many" has a different
arithmetic from ourselves. To do anything like justice to the facts
one would have to say that they do not have arithmetic at all, but
just a peculiar, and very rudimentary way of counting. And similarly
with those exotic tribesmen. On the given evidence, they do not have a
different morality, but rather their culture has not developed to a
point where they have a morality at all. If they think that it is
acceptable to engage in practices like the sacrifice of firstborn girl
children, then their grasp on the conception of morality is, on the
face of it, somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent.
The conclusion is thus clear. Anti-absolutism must take a flexible and
non-dogmatic stance if it wants to be coherent enough, while what it
does today often is the opposite. The global rejection of absolutes
has gone too far, and a middle of the road position is indeed
mandatory. As Rescher notes, the very antipathy to dogmatic uniformity
that characterizes the era's sensibilities will, or should, militate
against an absolutistic position in relation to philosophical
absolutes. There is good reason to see the anti-absolutism of 20th
century thought as misguided and in need of replacement by a position
that is far less doctrinaire.
12. References and Further Reading
Rescher has published more than 100 books as well as more than 400
essays, chapters, and reviews. Below is a list of selected books:
* The Development of Arabic Logic. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1964.
* Studies in Arabic Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1968.
* Introduction to Value Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.
* The Coherence Theory of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
* Methodological Pragmatism: A Systems-Theoretic Approach to the
Theory of Knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977.
* Scientific Progress: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of
Research in Natural Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1978.
* Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory of Risk
Evaluation and Management. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1983.
* The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications
of Philosophical Diversity. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1985.
* Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
* Cognitive Economy: Economic Perspectives in the Theory of
Knowledge. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
* A Useful Inheritance: Evolutionary Epistemology in Philosophical
Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989.
* Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology. Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990.
* A System of Pragmatic Idealism (three volumes): Volume I: Human
Knowledge in Idealistic Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991. Volume II: The Validity of Values: Human Values in
Pragmatic Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Volume III: Metaphilosophical Inquiries. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
* Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
* Luck. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995.
* Essays in the History of Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1995.
* Process Metaphysics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.
* Instructive Journey: An Autobiographical Essay. Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1996.
* Complexity: A Philosophical Overview. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1998.
* Predicting The Future: An Introduction To The Theory Of
Forecasting. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998.
* Kant and the Reach of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
* Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999.
* The Limits of Science, 2nd ed. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
* Nature and Understanding: A Study of the Metaphysics of Science.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
* Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution. Chicago: Open
Court Publishing, 2001.
* Process Philosophy Nature and Understanding: A Study of the
Metaphysics of Science: A Survey of Basic Issues. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
* Epistemology: On the Scope and Limits of Knowledge. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2003.
* On Leibniz. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
* Epistemic Logic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
* Metaphysics: The Key Issues from a Realist Perspective. Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 2005.
* Reason and Reality: Realism and Idealism in Pragmatic
Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
* Collected Papers (14 volumes). Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2005-2006.
* Epistemetrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
* Conditionals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
* Error: On Our Predicament When Things Go Wrong. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.
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