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Read e-book online Satisfying Reason: Studies in the Theory of Knowledge PDF

By Nicolas Rescher (auth.)

ISBN-10: 9401042160

ISBN-13: 9789401042161

ISBN-10: 9401104832

ISBN-13: 9789401104838

Leibniz stated with a mix of admiration and notion that the Duchess Sophie of Hannover constantly desired to understand explanation why in the back of the explanation why. and that's simply how rationality works: it desires to go away no unfastened ends to knowing, looking to permit us to appreciate issues via to the sour finish.
within the twelve chapters that make up Satisfying Reason, Rescher develops and defends the next perspective:

  • That rationality is a cardinal advantage in cognitive concerns.
  • That this isn't whatever uncomplicated and cut-and-dried: within the pursuit of fact in the course of the improvement of information we are facing stumbling blocks -- occasionally even insuperable ones.
  • All that we will be able to do is the simplest we will be able to, figuring out that even our best possible should be imperfect.
  • Nevertheless, the enterprise is much from hopeless. whereas absolutes are unimaginable within the cognitive enterprise, a few recommendations are situationally optimum, being relatively the easiest that may be controlled less than the conditions.
  • That cause itself allows us to return to phrases with this scenario, urging us to just accept the easiest we will do pretty much as good sufficient.

Satisfying Reason is an evidence of the presuppositions and strategies of rational enquiry, an unique workout in metaknowledge, constructing a scientific physique of data in regards to the scope and boundaries of information itself.

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476. 3. Compare Spinoza: Effectus cognitio a cognitione causae dependet et eandem involvit (Ethics I, ax. 4). 4. For a readable account see Steven Weinberg, Dreams 0/ a Final Theory (New York, 1993). A more technical exposition is H. M. ), The New Physics (Cambridge, 1986). CHAPTER 2 WHY BE RATIONAL? Reason requires that we do what is appropriate in matters of belief, evaluation, and action - that we use our intelligence to figure out the proper thing to do and then do it. But why should we do what reason demands?

2 4. REALITY TRANSCENDS THE DESCRIPTIVE RESOURCES OF LANGUAGE Our knowledge regarding the world's things is always cast in a linguistic/systematic frame of reference. Now in this context it is important to distinguish between a truth and a fact. A "truth" is something that has to be understood in linguistic terms - the representation of a fact through its statement in some actual language. Any correct statement in some actual language formulates a truth. ) A "fact," on the other hand, is not a linguistic entity at all, but an actual circumstance that exists objectively in its own right - an aspect of the world's state of affairs.

In opposing nihilism and irrationalism in its various forms we have to proceed in the mode of practical rather than logicotheoretical reason. The "inconsistency" in which these people are caught up lies in this practical rather than theoretical domain. For the crux is that in abandoning rationality we discernably compromise the chances of accomplishing our own ends - those to which we commit ourselves upon entering into the theoretical and practical projects at issue. We cannot reasonably set it up as a task for the rational enterprise to discharge the in principle impossible mission of convincing an (otherwise rational) moral nihilist (psychopath) to walk in the paths of morality and benevolence or to convince an (otherwise rational) epistemic nihilist and all-out sceptic to walk in the paths of ordinary rational inquiry.

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Satisfying Reason: Studies in the Theory of Knowledge by Nicolas Rescher (auth.)


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