Nicholas Rescher - Ideas

Ideas

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:

• Projects a system of pragmatic idealism, in which the activity of the human mind makes a formative contribution to the substance of 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 e.g. his exchange in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (in the Library of Living Philosophers series);
• Defends a version of process metaphysics that defines items less in terms of their description than in that of their modus operandi, understanding what things are in terms of what they do. (Thus ideas acquire an enhanced status in relation to physical things.)
• 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 which 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 propositional to the volume of information already at hand, so that when information grows exponentially, knowledge will grow at a merely linear rate.
• Articulates a theory of axiogenesis which addresses some of the fundamental questions of philosophical metaphysics on the basis of value-eared considerations.

Apart from this larger program, Rescher has made significant contributions to:

• Historical studies on Leibniz, Kant, Charles Peirce, and on the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic and logic.
• The study of rational dialectic as a rhetorical and linguistic process.
• The theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology).
• The philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic returns in scientific effort).

One central theme of his thought is the role of unknowing, uncertainty, risk, and luck in human affairs. The resultant need for orientation and support amidst the challenges of life in conditions so largely beyond our control as a prime pillar of religion.

During the 1960s and 70s Rescher worked extensively in symbolic and philosophical logic, contributing various innovations in many-sided logic and temporal logic, including the conception of autodescriptive systems of many-valued logic. He has also contributed to futuristics, and with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey, invented the Delphi method of forecasting.

A lifelong aficionado of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Rescher has been instrumental in the reconstruction of Leibniz’s machina deciphratoria, an ancestor of the famous Enigma cipher machine. Rescher is also responsible for two further items of historical rediscovery and reconstruction: the model of cosmic evolution in Anaximander, and the medieval theory of model syllogistic.