Nicholas Rescher

Process Philosophical Deliberations

 PROCESS THOUGHT

Edited by

Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber

Advisory Board
Mark Bickhard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli

Volume 11
 Nicholas Rescher

Process Philosophical
Deliberations

ontos
verlag
Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick
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Process Philosophical Deliberations

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: PROCESS PHILOSOPHY 1

Chapter 2: ON SITUATING PROCESS PHILOSOPHY 27

Chapter 3: BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY:

A VENTURE IN PROCESS AXIOLOGY 35

Chapter 4: TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY:

A PROCESS-PHILOSOPHICAL
REFUTATION OF HISTORICIST
RELATIVISM 47

Chapter 5: CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE

WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE 61

Chapter 6: KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL

PERSPECTIVE 77

Chapter 7: COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS 87

Chapter 8: DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE

PROCESS 115

Chapter 9: COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A

COMPLEX WORLD:
DESTABILIZATION AND
COMPLEXIFICATION 137

Chapter 10: PROCESS AND COGNITIVE PROGRESS 159

Index of Names 189

PREFACE

I n recent years I have given a good deal of attention to process philoso-

phy. Four books have resulted from this effort:

• Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Al-

bany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

• Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues (Pittsburgh: University

of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

• Inquiry Dynamics: A Processual Approach to the Theory of Knowl-

edge (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000).

And drawing extensively on the preceding, there has also emerged a syn-
optic collection of my discussions in a French translation by Michel
Meyer:

• Fondements de l’ontologie du procès (Frankfurt: ONTOS Verlag,

2006).

But apart from these publications, I have also produced a series of arti-
cles and papers dealing with various philosophical issues from a process-
philosophical direction of approach. Most of these studies are assembled
in the present volume which will, I hope, help to persuade the reader of the
versatile and potential of process philosophy.
I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her help in putting this material into
publishable form. And I much appreciate the interest in the dissemination
of my work on the part of ONTOS Verlag and its genial director, Dr.
Rafael Huentelmann.

Nicholas Rescher
Pittsburgh PA
August 2006
Chapter 1

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY
1. WHAT PROCESS PHILOSOPHY IS

T he philosophy of process is a venture in metaphysics, the general the-

ory of reality and our knowledge of it. Its concern is with what exists
in the world and with the terms of reference in which this reality is to be
understood and explained. The task of metaphysics is, after all, to provide
a cogent and plausible account of the nature of reality at the broadest, most
synoptic and comprehensive level. And it is to this mission of enabling us
to characterize, describe, clarify and explain the most general features of
the real that process philosophy addresses itself in its own characteristic
way. The guiding idea of its approach is that natural existence consists in
and is best understood in terms of processes rather than things—of modes
of change rather than fixed stabilities. For processists, change of every
sort—physical, organic, psychological—is the pervasive and predominant
feature of the real.
Accordingly, process philosophy focuses on the consideration that
things in this world just do not stand still. Buildings disintegrate, trees
wither, birds molt. A thing is no more than an eddy of comparative stabil-
ity, a sea of process. And this holds good not just for material objects but
for combination as well. Theories, concepts, ideas, and even mathematical
concepts like figures and numbers change as people think differently about
them in different concepts of thought. Shakespeare’s plays are in some
ways the same as in his day but in some not. The words have a different
pronunciation, a different sense, a different meaning in the larger scheme
of things. Nothing stands still: the tooth of time knaws all.
There are two pivotal sorts of questions that can be asked about things:

• Questions of description and classification regarding what sort of

thing something is and what sorts of properties it has.

• Questions of operation and function regarding its modus operandi:

how it developed and what it does—how it behaves and functions.
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

From the angle of process philosophy, it is this second sort of issue re-
garding the processual comportment of things that is fundamental. At bot-
tom a thing is what it does. Even the seemingly static studies and proper-
ties of objects—their color, or shape, or size—are matters of functional in-
terrelationships with others and of an item’s self-projection upon a stage of
other agents. As process philosophy sees it, being is ultimately a matter of
acting.
Process philosophy diametrically opposes the view—as old as Par-
menides and Zeno and the Atomists of Pre-Socratic Greece—that denies
processes or downgrades them in the order of being or of understanding by
subordinating them to substantial things. By contrast, process philosophy
pivots on the thesis that the processual nature of existence is a fundamental
fact with which any adequate metaphysic must come to terms.
A process is a structural succession of states of affairs which accord-
ingly form a unified overall complex of terms connected by “and then.”
This linkage can be one of causal nature incubation (e. g., a thunderstorm)
or procedural agent-production (e.g., extracting the square root of an inte-
ger). The unity of a process is pragmatic, not substantival (matching a
thing with its properties) but rather procedural (an occurrence sequence
with it stages).
Process philosophy puts processes at the forefront of philosophical and
specifically of ontological concern. Process should here be construed in
pretty much the usual way—as a sequentially structured sequence of suc-
cessive stages or phases. Three factors accordingly come to the fore:

• That a process is a complex—a unity of distinct stages or phases. A

process is always a matter of now this, now that.

• That this complex has a certain temporal coherence and unity, and
that processes accordingly have an ineliminably temporal dimension.

• That a process has a structure, a formal generic format in virtue of

which every concrete process is equipped with a shape or format.

From the time of Aristotle, Western metaphysics has had a marked bias
in favor of things or substances. However, another variant line of thought
was also current from the earliest times onward. After all, the concentra-
tion on perduring physical things as existents in nature slights the equally
good claims of another ontological category, namely processes, events, oc-

2
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

currences—items better indicated by verbs than nouns. And, clearly,

storms and heat-waves are every bit as real as dogs and oranges.
What is characteristically definitive of process philosophizing as a dis-
tinctive sector of philosophical tradition is not simply the commonplace
recognition of natural process as the active initiator of what exists in na-
ture, but an insistence on seeing process as constituting an essential aspect
of everything that exists—a commitment to the fundamentally processual
nature of the real. For the process philosopher is, effectively by definition,
one who holds that what exists in nature is not just originated and sustained
by processes but is in fact ongoingly and inexorably characterized by
them. On such a view, process is not only prominent in human affairs but
also both pervasive in nature and fundamental for its understanding.

2. HISTORICAL ASPECTS

Like so much else in the field, process philosophy began with the an-
cient Greeks. The Greek theoretician Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540
B.C.)—known even in antiquity as “the obscure”—is universally recog-
nized as the founder of the process approach. His book “On Nature” de-
picted the world as a manifold of opposed forces joined in mutual rivalry,
interlocked in constant strife and conflict. Fire, the most changeable and
ephemeral of these elemental forces, is the basis of all: “This world-order .
. . is . . . an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in meas-
ures” (Fr. 217, Kirk-Raven-Schofield).1 The fundamental “stuff” of the
world is not a material substance of some sort but a natural process,
namely “fire,” and all things are products of its workings (puros tropai).
The variation of different states and conditions of fire—that most process-
manifesting of the four traditional Greek elements—engenders all natural
change. For fire is the destroyer and transformer of things and “All things
happen by strife and necessity” (Fr. 211, ibid). And this changeability so
pervades the world that “one cannot step twice into the same river” (Fr.
215, ibid). As Heraclitus saw it, reality is at bottom not a constellation of
things at all, but one of processes: we must at all costs avoid the fallacy of
substantializing nature into perduring things (substances) because it is not
stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activi-
ties which they produce that make up this world of ours. Process is fun-
damental: the river is not an object, but an ever-changing flow; the sun is
not a thing, but a flaming fire. Everything in nature is a matter of process,
of activity, of change. Heraclitus taught that panta rhei (“everything

3
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

flows”) and this principle exerted a profound influence on classical antiq-

uity. Even Plato, who did not much like the principle (“like leaky pots” he
added at Cratylus 440 C), came to locate his exception to it—the enduring
and changeless “ideas”—in a realm wholly removed from the domain of
material reality.
Heraclitus may accordingly be seen as the founding father of process
philosophy, at any rate in the intellectual tradition of the West. And the
static system of Parmenides affords its sharpest contrast and most radical
opposition. However, the paradigm substance philosophy of classical an-
tiquity was the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus, which
pictured all of nature as composed of unchanging and inert material atoms
whose only commerce with process was an alteration of their positioning
in space and time. Here the properties of substances are never touched by
change, which effects only their relations. It was this sort of view that
Heraclitus preeminently sought to oppose.
In recent years, “process philosophy” has virtually become a code-word
for the doctrines of Alfred North Whitehead and his followers. But of
course, this cannot really be what process philosophy actually is. If there
indeed is a “philosophy” of process, it must pivot not a thinker but on a
theory. What is at issue must, in the end, be a philosophical position that
has a larger life of its own, apart from any particular exposition or exposi-
tor.2 And in fact process philosophy is a well-defined and influential ten-
dency of thought that can be traced back through the history of philosophy
to the days of the Pre-Socratics. Its leading exponents were Heraclitus,
Leibniz, Bergson, Peirce, and William James—and it ultimately moved on
to include Whitehead and his school (Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss), but
also other 20th Century philosophers such as Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd
Morgan, and Andrew Paul Ushenko.

3. HOW PROCESS PHILOSOPHY PROCEEDS

Against this historical background, “process philosophy” may be under-

stood as a doctrine invoking certain basic propositions: (1) That time and
change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding,
(2) That process is a principal category of ontological description, (3) That
process is more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental than things
for the purposes of ontological theory, (4) That several if not all of the ma-
jor elements of the ontological repertoire (God, nature-as-a whole, persons,
material substances) are best understood in process linked terms, and (5)

4
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

That contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the funda-
mental categories of metaphysical understanding. A process philosopher,
accordingly, is someone for whom temporality, activity, and change—of al-
teration, striving, passage, and novelty-emergence—are the cardinal factors
for our understanding of the real.
The demise of classical atomism brought on by the dematerialization of
physical matter through the rise of the quantum theory brings much aid and
comfort to a process-oriented metaphysics. Matter in the small, as con-
temporary physics conceives it, is not a Rutherfordian planetary system of
particle-like objects, but a collection of fluctuating processes organized
into stable structures (insofar as there is indeed stability at all) by statistical
regularities — i.e., by regularities of comportment at the level of aggregate
phenomena. Twentieth century physics has thus turned the tables on clas-
sical atomism. Instead of very small things (atoms) combining to produce
standard processes (windstorms and such) modern physics envisions very
small processes (quantum phenomena) combining to produce standard
things (ordinary macro-objects) as a result of their modus operandi.
For the process philosopher, the classical principle operari sequitur esse
(functioning follows upon being) is reversed: his motto is the reverse esse
sequitur operari. As he sees it, all being is in the final analysis of the prod-
uct of processes. Process thus has priority over product — both ontologi-
cally and epistemically. As process philosophers see it, processes are basic
and things derivative, because it takes a mental process (of separation) to
extract “things” from the blooming buzzing confusion of the world’s
physical processes. For process philosophy, what a thing is consists in
what it does.
And insofar as reality itself is a vast micro-process embracing a diversi-
fied manifold of micro-processes novelty, innovation, and the emergence
of new forms is an inherent feature of the cosmic scene.

4. AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Evolution is an emblematic and paradigmatic process for process phi-

losophy. For not only is evolution a process that makes philosophers and
philosophy possible, but it provides a clear model for how processual nov-
elty and innovation comes into operation in nature’s self-engendering and
self-perpetuating scheme of things. Evolution, be it of organism or of
mind, of subatomic matter or of the cosmos as a whole, reflects the perva-
sive role of process which philosophers of this school see as central both to

5
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

the nature of our world and to the terms in which it must be understood.
Change pervades nature. The passage of time leaves neither individuals
nor types (species) of things statically invariant. Process at once destabi-
lizes the world and is the cutting-edge of advance to novelty. And evolu-
tion of every level, physical, biological, and cosmic carries the burden of
the work here. But does it work blindly?
On the issue of purposiveness in nature, process philosophers divide
into two principal camps. On the one side is the naturalistic (and generally
secularist) wing that sees nature’s processuality as a matter of an inner
push or nisus to something new and different. On the other side is the
teleological (and often theological) way that sees nature’s processuality as
a matter of teleological directedness towards a positive destination. Both
agree in according a central role to novelty and innovation in nature. But
the one (naturalistic) wing see this in terms of chance-driven randomness
that leads away from the settled formulations of an established past, while
the other (teleological) way see this in terms of a goal-directed purposive-
ness preestablished by some value-geared directive force.3
Process philosophy correspondingly has a complex, two sided relation-
ship with the theory of evolution. For secular, atheological processists
evolution typifies the creative workings of a self-sustaining nature that dis-
penses with the services of God. For theological processists like Teilhard
de Chardin, evolution exhibits God’s handwriting in the book of nature.4
But processists of all descriptions see evolution not only as a crucial in-
strument for understanding the role of intelligence in the world’s scheme
of things but also as a key aspect of the world’s natural development. And,
more generally, the evolutionary process has provided process philosophy
with one of its main models for how large scale collective processes (on
the order of organic development at large) can inhere in and result from the
operation of numerous small-scale individual processes (on the order of in-
dividual lives), thus accounting for innovation and creativity also on a
macro-level scale.
But there is one further complexity here. Where human intelligence is
concerned, biological evolution is undoubtedly Darwinian, with teleologi-
cally blind natural selection operating with respect to teleologically blind
random mutations. Cultural evolution, on the other hand, is generally
Teilhardian, governed by a rationally-guided selection among purposefully
devised mutational variations.5 Taken in all, cognitive evolution involves
both components, superimposing rational selection on biological selection.
Our cognitive capacities and faculties are part of the natural endowment

6
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

we owe to biological evolution. But our cognitive methods, procedures,

standards, and techniques are socio-culturally developed resources that
evolve through rational selection in the process of cultural transmission
through successive generations. Our cognitive hardware (mechanisms and
capacities) develops through Darwinian natural selection, but our cognitive
software (the methods and procedures by which we transact our cognitive
business) develops in a Teilhardian process of rational selection that in-
volves purposeful intelligence-guided variation and selection. Biology
produces the instrument, so to speak, and culture writes the music—where
obviously the former powerfully constrains the latter. (You cannot play
the drums on a piano.)
The ancient Greeks grappled with the question: Is anything changeless,
eternal, and exempt from the seemingly all-destructive ravages of time.
Rejecting the idea of eternal material atoms, Plato opted for eternal
changeless universals (“form,” “ideas”) and the Stoics for eternal, change-
less laws. But the world-picture of modern science has seemingly blocked
these solutions. For, as it sees the matter, species (natural kinds) are also
children of time, not changelessly present but ever-changingly emergent
under the aegis of evolutionary principles. The course of cosmic evolution
brings nature’s laws also within the orbit of process, endowing these laws
with a developmental dimension, (where, after all, was genetics in the mi-
crosecond after the big bang?). For process philosophy, nothing is eternal
and secure from the changes wrought by time and its iron law that every-
thing that comes into being must perish, so that mortality is omnipresent
and death’s cold hand is upon all of nature—laws as well as things.
However, process philosophy does not see this gloomy truth as the end
of the story. For process philosophy has always looked to evolutionary
theory to pull the plum of collective progress from the pie of distributive
mortality. In the small—item by item—nature’s processes are self-
canceling: what arises in the course of time perishes in the course of time.
But nevertheless the overall course of processual change tends to the de-
velopment of an ever richer, more complex and sophisticated condition of
things on the world’s ample stage. For there are processes and processes:
processes of growth and decay, of expanding and contracting, of living and
dying. Recognizing that this is so, process philosophy has always accentu-
ated the positive and worn a decidedly optimistic mien. For it regards na-
ture’s microprocesses as components of an overall macroprocess whose
course is upwards rather than downwards, so to speak. Hitching its wagon
to the star of a creative evolutionism, process philosophy sees nature as en-

7
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

compassing creative innovation, productive dynamism and an emergent

development of richer, more complex and sophisticated forms of natural
existence.
To be sure, there are, in theory, both productive and destructive proc-
esses, degeneration and decay being no less prominent in nature than
growth and development. Historically, however, most process philoso-
phers have taken a decidedly optimistic line and have envisioned a close
relationship between process and progress. For them, this relationship is
indicated by the macro-process we characterize as evolution. At every
level of world history—the cosmic, the biological, the social, the intellec-
tual—process philosophers have envisioned a developmental dynamic in
which later is better—somehow superior in being more differentiated and
sophisticated. Under the influence of Darwinian evolutionism, most proc-
ess philosophers have envisioned a course of temporal development within
which value is somehow survival-facilitative so that the arrangements
which do succeed in establishing and perpetuating themselves will as a
general tendency manage to have done so because they represent actual
improvements in one way of another. (A decidedly optimistic tenor has
prevailed throughout process philosophy.)6
After all, differentiation is sophistication; detail is enrichment. The per-
son who merely sees a bird does not see as much as the person who sees a
finch, and she in turn does not see as much as the person who sees a Dar-
win finch. The realization and enhancement of detail bestows not just
complexification as such but also sophistication. As process philosophy
sees it, the world’s processuality involves not only change but improve-
ment—the evolutionary realization—at large and on the whole—of what is
not only different but also in some way better. Accordingly, novelty and
fruitfulness compensate for transiency and mortality in process philoso-
phy’s scheme of things.

4. AN INSTRUCTIVE APPLICATION

Recourse to process is a helpful device for dealing with the classical

problem of universals. We are surrounded on all sides by items more eas-
ily conceived of as processes than as substantial things—not only physical
items like a magnetic field or an aurora borealis, but also conceptual arti-
facts like letters of the alphabet, words, and statements. That purported
universal—the opening line of a play, say, or a shade of phenomenal red—
now ceases to be a mysterious object of some sort and becomes a specifi-

8
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

able feature of familiar processes (readings, perceivings, imaginings).

How distinct minds can perceive the same universal is now no more myste-
rious than how distinct walkers can share the same limp—it is a matter of
actions proceeding in a certain particular way. Since processes are struc-
tural in nature, universals are now pulled down from the Platonic realm to
become generic features of the ways in which we concretely conduct our
cognitive affairs.
The philosophy of mind is another strongpoint of process philosophiz-
ing. It feels distinctly uncomfortable to conceptualize people (persons) as
things (substances)—oneself above all—because we resist flat-out identifi-
cation with our bodies. However, there is no problem with experiential ac-
cess to the processes and patterns of process that characterize us personally
— our doings and undergoings, either individually or patterned into talents,
skills, capabilities, traits, dispositions, habits, inclinations, and tendencies
to action and inaction are, after all, what characteristically define a person
as the individual he or she is. Once we conceptualize the core “self” of a
person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process — of action
and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and
psychical) — then we thereby secure a concept of personhood that renders
the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself
simply consists of such processes. What makes my experience mine is not
some peculiar qualitative character that it exhibits but simply its forming
part of the overall ongoing process that defines and constitutes my life.
The unity of person is a unity of experience — the coalescence of all of
one’s diverse micro-experience as part of one unified macro-process. (It is
the same sort of unity of process that links each minute’s level into a single
overall journey.) On this basis, the Humean complaint — “One experi-
ences feeling this and doing that, but one never experiences oneself” — is
much like the complaint of the person who says “I see him picking up that
brick, and mixing that batch of mortar, and troweling that brick into place,
but I never see him building a wall.” Even as “building the wall” just ex-
actly is the complex process that is composed of those various activities, so
— from the process point of view — one’s self just is the complex process
composed of those various physical and psychic experiences and actions in
their systemic interrelationship.

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

5. DIVERSITY/COMPLEXITY

Like any philosophical tendency—realism, idealism, materialism, etc.—

process philosophy is a fundamentally prismatic complex and has internal
variations. The main difference at issue is rooted in the issue of what type
of process is taken as paramount and paradigmatic. Some contributors (es-
pecially A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson) see organic processes as
central and other sorts of processes as modeled on or superengrafted upon
them—the conception of an all-integrating physical field being pivotal
even for Whitehead’s organic/biological reflections. Others (especially
William James) based their ideas of process on a psychological model and
saw human thought as idealistically paradigmatic. Methodologically, on
the other hand, some (e.g. Whitehead) articulated their process philosophy
in essentially scientific terms, while others (esp. Bergson) relied more on
intuition and indeed an almost mystical sort of sympathetic apprehension.
And then too, of course, there are cultural processists like John Dewey.
But such differences notwithstanding there are family-resemblance com-
monalties of theme and emphasis that nevertheless leave the teachings of
the several processists in the position of variations on a common approach.
So in the end it is—or should be—clear that the unity of process philoso-
phy is not doctrinal but thematic; it is not a consensus or a thesis but rather
a mere diffuse matter of type and approach.
Accordingly, process philosophy as such is something rather schematic.
There are distinct approaches to implementing its pivotal idea of the perva-
siveness and fundamentality of process, ranging from a materialism of
physical processes (as with Boscovich) to a speculative idealism of psychic
processes (as in some versions of Indian philosophy). There are rather dif-
ferent ways of being a process philosopher, varying drastically according
to the nature of one’s ideas regarding what process is all about. In histori-
cal perspective, process philosophy has accordingly run a somewhat mean-
dering course that traces back more to the origins of philosophy in the days
of Pre-Socratic philosophy.
As such considerations indicate, the process approach has many assets.
But it has significant liabilities as well. It is not unfair to the historical
situation to say that process philosophy at present remains no more than a
glint in the mind’s eye of various philosophers. A full-fledged develop-
ment of the process doctrine simply does not yet exist as an accomplished
fact, its development to the point where it can be compared with other ma-

10
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

jor philosophical projects like materialism or absolute idealism still re-

mains to be realized.
The process approach has been a particularly important development in
and for American philosophy—especially owing to its increasingly close
linkage to pragmatism in such thinkers as Peirce, James, and Dewey. In
recent decades the great majority of its principal exponents have done their
philosophical work in the United States, and it is here that interest in this
approach to philosophy has been the most intense and extensive, constitut-
ing a considerable sub-sector within American philosophy at large. Like
American philosophy in general, process philosophy is too complex and
diversified an enterprise to be captured or even dominated by any one
school of thought; it is a highly diversified manifold that encompasses ten-
dencies of thought representing a wide variety of sources.
Regrettably, authors of histories and surveys not infrequently fail to
give process philosophy the recognition that is its due. For example, the
otherwise excellent survey of American philosophy by the able French
scholar Gerard Deledalle omits all mention of process philosophy as such
and takes only perfunctory notice of Whitehead in an Appendix.7 To take
this line is not, perhaps, to give us Hamlet without the ghost, but is at least
tantamount to omitting Horatio.

6. STRAWSON’S CRITIQUE

P. F. Strawson has argued in his influential book on metaphysics8 that

processism in all its versions is doomed to failure because physical ob-
jects—and, in particular, material bodies—are requisites for the idea of
identifiable particulars in a way that is virtually indispensable to any viable
metaphysical position. Strawson maintains that the identification of par-
ticulars in communication between speakers and hearers (“referential iden-
tification” as he terms it) necessarily requires reference to things possessed
of material bodies, so that “we find that material bodies play a unique and
fundamental role in particular identification” (Ibid., p. 56). As he sees it,
processes will not do as basis for particular identification because: “If one
had to give the spatial dimensions of such a process, say, [as] a death or a
battle, one could only have the outline of the dying man or indicate the ex-
tent of the ground the battle was fought over” Ibid., p. 57. Strawson ac-
cordingly holds that material bodies are a necessary precondition for any
setting in which objective knowledge of particulars is to be possible.
In brief outline, Strawson’s argument runs essentially as follows:

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

1. For objective and identifiable particulars to be knowable, some items

must be (1) distinguishable from other co-existents, and (2) reidenti-
fiable over time.

2. These conditions (viz. distinguishability and reidentifiability) can

only be met by material objects (i.e. particulars with material bodies).

If this line of reasoning is indeed correct, processism is untenable in meta-

physics. For it is perfectly clear that any viable metaphysic must have
room for identifiable particulars, and if these are to be had only on the ba-
sis of a material-object substantialism then process metaphysics is a lost
cause.
This argumentation, however, has its problems. To begin with, Straw-
son would have been well advised to add yet a third item, viz. (3) that indi-
viduals must not only be distinguishable and reidentifiable by a particular
knower, but interpersonally and intersubjectively distinguishable and rei-
dentifiable throughout a community of knowers. Yet even with premiss 1
strengthened in this way, premiss 2 does not hold water.
Strawson maintained that:

The only objects which can constitute [the space-time framework essential to
interpersonal communication] are those which confer upon it their own fun-
damental characteristics. That is to say they must be three dimensional ob-
jects with some endurance through time . . . They must collectively have
enough diversity, richness, stability, and endurance to make possible just that
9
conception of a single unitary [space-time] framework which we possess.

The process philosopher will have no quarrel with any of this. However,
Strawson then proceeded straightaway to draw a deeply problematic con-
clusion:

Of the categories of object which we recognize, only those satisfy these re-
quirements which are, or possess, material bodies—in the broad sense of the
expression. Hence given a certain general feature of the [space-time commit-
ted] conceptual scheme which we possess, and given the character of avail-
able major categories, things which are, or possess, material bodies must be
[epistemologically] basic particulars.10

12
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

To its decisive detriment, Strawson’s argument simply begs the question

here. For all of the features that his analysis require (spatiotemporal stabil-
ity and endurance, diversity, richness, interpersonal accountability, and the
like) are possessed every bit as much by physical processes as by the
things that “are or possess material bodies.” It is not material substances
(things) that can be distinguished and reidentified within nature’s spatio-
temporal framework, but occurrence-contexts (processes) as well. Proc-
esses are physically realized without being literally embodied. And the
one is no less confrontable and capable of ostensive indication than the
other (“that lion”; “that yawning”). Only by an act of deeply problematic
fiat is Strawson able—even within the restricted confines of his own analy-
sis—to advantage and prioritize material bodies over physical processes.
Even Strawson’s insistence that epistemically basic particulars must be
identifiable by ostension holds every bit as much for instances of physical
process as for particular constrained material bodies. (Indeed, as we shall
see, it is theoretically possible to reconceptualize material bodies as com-
plexes of physical processes, while the reverse—the general reconceptuali-
zation of physical processes as complexes of material objects—is just not
all that plausible (notwithstanding Kotarbinski’s “reism” or “concretism”,
and that of the later Brentano).
Strawson’s reasoning sets out from the quite appropriate Kantian obser-
vation that objective distinguishably and reidentifiability requires the ma-
chinery of a spatiotemporal matrix for the emplacement of our experiential
encounters with objects in a unified, all-encompassing framework of coor-
dination viz. space-time. But at this point his reasoning goes astray. For
as he sees it, a spatiotemporal framework demands—and can only be de-
termined in terms of—ordering relations among material objects. But
there are in fact other physically “embodied” items distinct from material
bodies that can serve this function equally well—to wit, processes. For as
long as processes have both position and duration—as long as like a flame
(rather than a sound) or a wedding ceremony (rather than something more
ethical like a divorcement)—there are items that have a sufficiently defi-
nite place and a sufficiently long lifespan to serve as coordinate markers.
Processes too, in sum, can serve to define and constitute the required spa-
tio-temporal framework.
Strawson’s position is plausible only because he accepts the question-
begging Process Reducibility Thesis that insists on seeing all processes in
terms of the activities of things (substances). From this standpoint, all
processes are owned and we are to look at them from a specifically geni-

13
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

tive point of view: the death OF the wife of Julius Caesar, or the great
clash OF the armies of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I at Borodino. But
this of-indicated object-correlativity (of that person, of these two armies)
takes too narrow a view of the matter. It reflects only the particular (i.e.
owned) sort of processes at issue, and not their processuality as such.
Where processes are more basically concerned, their object-correlativity
can disappear from view.
The point is that while we can indication-identify various concrete
processes genitively—as per “this birth” = “the birth of Julius Caesar”—
proceeding in terms of process-type plus substance-correlative possession,
we can no less easily in dualism identify them positionally in terms of
process-type plus location: “this birth” = “the birth at such-and-such a
space-time location.” And of course the referential markers that orient us
in space-time need not be substantial (the town center of Greenwich) but
can be processual (the pole = the place where the compass needle spins
around evenly).
Accordingly, Strawson’s argumentation misses its target. It is simply
not the case that material objects are the indispensable basis for a frame-
work of knowable particulars. Physical processes of a suitable sort can ac-
complish this essential task equally well.

7. PROCESSES AND STABILITY

As process ontologists see it, enduring things are never more than pat-
terns of stability in a sea of process. Like a wave pattern in water they are
simply pending configurations in a realm of change.
The very idea of a process involves trans-temporal constancies. Water
evaporates. That is to say, the evaporation of water is a generic process. It
has many instances, occurring alike after rainstorms in 16th century Lima
and in 20th century Atlanta. Any and every particular process is always an
instantiation of a general pattern. One just simply cannot identify a proc-
ess that fails to be of a (processual) type and which, in consequence, is
not—at that level of abstraction—capable of repetition. And so the con-
creta of history, viewed in an epistemic perspective, can in fact manage to
transcend their space-time settings to instantiate general patterns. Al-
though their manifestations are inevitably temporal and concrete, those
processes themselves can be atemporal and generic.
And of course different concrete instances of a process can produce
products of exactly the same generic type. Different factories can and of-

14
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

ten do produce the same model of car, different cooks can and do produce
the same variety of soup. And this is strikingly so when the product hap-
pens to be information: different presses can print the same text, different
respondents can give the same answer to the same question, different
mouths can utter the same sentence, different minds can entertain the same
idea.
The point is that in the realm of informational abstractness products can
escape the limitations of their (invariably relativized) productive origins.
The historical relativization of the production process to a particular his-
torico-cultural context—the fact that the thinking or the assertion of a truth
is so relativized—of itself does nothing to limit the product (the truth that
is so thought or asserted) to a historico-cultural context. Once produced, it
is generally available—and (insofar as abstract) will be cross-temporally
accessible via its exemplifications and manifestations at different times and
places.
Some sorts of things exist out of space but not time—one’s ownership
of a piece of jewelry, for example, or one’s right to exercise an option to
purchase a tract of land. Other sorts of things exist neither in space nor in
time—numbers, facts, and generalized relationships for example. (The
Eiffel Tower was erected in Paris in the 19th century, but the fact that
Julius Caesar did not realize this is something that has no spatiotemporal
emplacement.) And information is like that. The things that information
may be about may be spatiotemporal, as will be the speech or writing by
which the information is conveyed from one person to another. But the in-
formation itself is altogether nonspatiotemporal. It simply lies in the na-
ture of certain sorts of things, information included, not to be located in
space and time—to be “abstract.”
Admittedly, when we are viewing something, the only views we can
possibly obtain are views from somewhere (and from view-points belong-
ing to us and not to God). But when the viewing is done with the eyes of
the mind, and its object is the realm of information rather than the realm of
physical reality then what the view is a view of is something ahistorical.
For information as such exists outside of history even though our acquiring
it is invariably an historical transaction. We must avoid the category mis-
take of confusing process with product here: of conflating the information
that we access with the historical actions and events of our accessing it.
Of course we have no way to get to the abstract (the belief) save via the
historical (the believing). But what we achieve (the product) is something
of a nature different and status distinct from the mode of its realization (the

15
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

process). When we engage ourselves in intellectual processes that carry us

into the informational domain we impel ourselves from history into an
ahistorical sphere. The same idea (the same thought-process, the same be-
lief) is accessible to people at different times and places. Were it not so,
communication would be altogether impossible.
The overall situation in matters of abstraction is triadic (to use the term
favored by C. S. Peirce). There are: (i) the various and sundry concrete
green things; (ii) the abstract property at issue (viz., the property or charac-
teristic of being green); and (iii) the mediative conception or idea of green-
ness which is the thought-instrumentality through which that abstract prop-
erty comes to be imputed to those concrete items that putatively manifest
it. The medieval metaphysical dispute between nominalism, conceptual-
ism, and Platonism needs to be resolved conjunctively: all three are
needed: a nominalism is required for concrete particulars, a conceptualism
for particular-applicative concepts, and a Platonism for abstractions (e.g.,
in pure mathematics). The situation is not one of either/or; we must en-
dorse all those doctrinal positions—each in its own place.
Yet how can temporalized thought deal in timeless information? How
is it that particularized episodic thought can make episode-abstractive gen-
eralizations? The long and short of it is that that’s just how thought works.
To puzzle about this is like puzzling about any of the world’s brute facts.
And once those realities are taken in stride the problem has been left be-
hind. One might as well ask “How is it that money can be used to buy
things? or that words can be used for speaking?” No matter how much we
may wonder at the phenomena we have to accept them as part of the
world’s realities.
There indeed are fundamental problems that lie in the background here:
how standardized exchange is possible or how verbal communication is
possible. But once such fundamental background issues are resolved, the
original question is dissolved as such: something that is not a medium of
exchange would not be called money, nor would something that could not
play a generalized role in verbal or written communication be called a
word. Even so something would not be called thought if it could not func-
tion abstractly to convey general information transcending the episodic oc-
currences at issue.

16
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

8. QUANTUM ISSUES

As Whitehead’s own reaction shows11, the rise of the quantum theory

put money in process philosopher’s bank account. The classical concep-
tion of an atom was predicated on the principle that “by definition, atoms
cannot be cut up or broken into smaller parts,” so that “atom-splitting”
was, from the traditional point of view, simply a contradiction in terms.
Here the demise of classical atomism brought on by the dematerialization
of physical matter in the wake of the quantum theory did much to bring aid
and comfort to a process-oriented metaphysics. For quantum theory taught
that, at the microlevel, what was usually deemed a physical thing, a stably
perduring object, is itself no more than a statistical pattern—a stability
wave in a surging sea of process. Those so-called enduring “things” come
about through the emergence of stabilities in statistical fluctuations.
The quantum view of the world is inherently probabilistic—indeed it
has trouble coming to terms with concrete definiteness (with the “collapse
of the wave packet” problem). And this too is congenial to processists,
seeing that process philosophy rejects a pervasive determinism of law-
compulsion. Processists see the laws of nature as imposed from below
rather than above—as servants rather than masters of the world’s existents.
Twentieth century physics has thus turned the tables on classical atom-
ism. Instead of very small things (atoms) combining to produce standard
processes (windstorms and such), modern physics envisions very small
processes (quantum phenomena) combining in their modus operandi to
produce standard things (ordinary macro-objects). The quantum view of
reality has accordingly led to the unraveling of that classical atomism that
has, from the start, been paradigmatic for substance metaphysics.
Process metaphysics envisions a limit to determinism that makes room
for creative spontaneity and novelty in the world (be it by way of random
mutations with naturalistic processists or purposeful innovation with those
who incline to a theologically teleological position).
Moreover, process philosophers have reason to favor quantum physics
over relativistic physics. For relativity sees space time as a block that en-
compasses all real events concurrently, leaving the time differentiation of
earlier-later to be supplied from the subjective resources of observers rela-
tive to their own mode of emplacement within the grand scheme of things.
Special relativity with its preoccupation with time-invariant relationships
in effect suppresses time as a factor in physical reality and relegates it to
the penumbral status of a subjective phenomenon. This serves to explain

17
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

why Whitehead sought to provide a new theoretical basis to relativity the-

ory and reconstrue space-time, as well as the conception of other physical
objects, as being construction made from “fragmentary individual experi-
ences.”12 Processes are not the machinations of stable things; things are
the stability-patterns of variable processes. All such perspectives of mod-
ern physics at the level of fundamentals dovetail smoothly into the process
approach.

9. PROCESS THEOLOGY

The God of scholastic Christian theology, like the deity of Aristotle on

whose model this conception was in part based, is an immaterial individ-
ual, located outside of time—entirely external to the realm of change and
process. By contrast, process theologians, however much they may dis-
agree on other matters, take the radical (but surely not heretical) step of ac-
cording God an active role also within the natural world’s spatio-temporal
frame. They envision a foothold for God within the overall processual or-
der of the reality that is supposed to be his creation. After all, active par-
ticipation in the world’s processual commerce need not necessarily make
God into a physical or material object. (While the world indeed contains
various physical processes like the evolution of galaxies, it also contains
immaterial processes such as the diffusion of knowledge or the emergence
of order.)
For process theology, then, God does not constitute part of the world’s
making of physical processes, but nevertheless in some fashion or other
participates in it. Clearly no ready analogy-model for this mode of par-
ticipation (spectator, witness, judge, etc.) can begin to do full justice to the
situation. But what matters first and foremost to the angle of process the-
ology is the fact that God and his world are processually inter-connected—
the issue of the manner how is something secondary that can be left open
for further reflection. So conceived, God is not exactly of the world of
physical reality, but does indeed participate in it processually—everywhere
touching, affecting, and informing its operations. Thus while not emplaced
in the world, the processists’ God is nevertheless bound up with it in an
experiential process of interaction with it. In general, process theists do
not believe that God actually controls the world. The process God makes
an impact persuasively, influencing but never unilaterally imposing the
world’s process.

18
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

Process theology accordingly invites us to think of God’s relationship to

the world in terms of a process of influence like “the spread of Greek
learning in medieval Islam.” Greek learning did not become literally in-
ternal to the Islamic world, but exerted a substantial and extensive influ-
ence upon and within it. Analogously, God is not of the world but exerts
and extends an all-pervasive influence upon and within it. After all, proc-
esses need not themselves be spatial to have an impact upon things in
space (think of a price inflation on the economy of a country.) The idea of
process provides a category for conceptualizing God’s relation to the world
that averts many of the difficulties and perplexities of the traditional sub-
stance paradigm.
Even apart from process philosophy, various influential theologians
have in recent years urged the necessity and desirability of seeing God not
through the lens of unchanging stability but with reference to movement,
change, development, and process.13 But, the process theorists among
theologians want to go beyond this. For them, God is not only to be re-
lated to the world’s processes in a productive manner, but must himself be
regarded in terms of process—as encompassing processuality as a salient
aspect of the divine nature.
To be sure, process theologians differ among themselves in various mat-
ters of emphasis. Whitehead sees God in cosmological terms as an “actual
occasion” functioning within nature, reflective of “the eternal urge of de-
sire” that works “strongly and quietly by love,” to guide the course of
things within the world into” the creative advance into novelty.” For
Hartshorne, by contrast, God is less an active force within the world’s
processual commerce than an intelligent being or mind that interacts with
it. His God is less a force of some sort than a personal being who interacts
with the other mind-endowed agents through personal contact and love.
Hartshorne wants neither to separate God from the world too sharply nor
yet to have him be pantheistically immanent in nature. He views God as
an intelligent world-separated being who participates experientially in eve-
rything that occurs in nature and resonates with it in experiential participa-
tion.
Such differences of approach, however, are only of secondary impor-
tance. The crucial fact is that the stratagem of conceiving of God in terms
of a process that is at work in and beyond the world makes it possible to
overcome a whole host of substance-geared difficulties at one blow. For it
now becomes far easier to understand how God can be and be operative.
To be sure, the processual view of God involves a recourse to processes of

19
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

a very special kind. But extraordinary (or even supra-natural) processes

pose far fewer difficulties than extraordinary (let alone supra-natural) sub-
stances, seeing that process is an inherently more flexible conception. Af-
ter all, many sorts of processes are in their own way unique—or, at any
rate, radically different from all others. Clearly, processes like the creation
of a world or the inauguration of its lawful order are by their very nature
bound to be unusual, but much the same can be said of any particular type
of process. Moreover, through its recourse to the idea of a mega-process
that embraces and encompasses a variety of subordinate processes, process
theology is able to provide a conceptual rationale for reconciling the idea
of an all-pervasive and omnitemporal mode of reality with that of a mani-
fold of finitely temporalized constituents.14
The processist view of nature as a spatiotemporal whole constituting
one vast, all-embracing cosmic process unfolding under the directive aegis
of a benign intelligence is in various ways in harmony with the Judeo-
Christian view of things. For this tradition has always seen God as active
within the historical process which, in consequence, represents not only a
causal but also a purposive order. After all, the only sort of God who can
have meaning and significance for us is one who stands in some active in-
terrelationship with ourselves and our world. (Think here of the Nicene
creed’s phraseology: “the maker of all things … who for us men and for
our salvation …”.) But of course such an “active interrelationship” is a
matter of the processes that constitute the participation and entry of the di-
vine into the world’s scheme of things—and conversely.
And of course not only is it feasible and potentially constructive for the
relation of God to the world and its creatures to be conceived of in terms of
processes, but it is so also with the relationship of people to God. Here too
process theology sees such a relationship as thoroughly processual because
it rests on a potentially interactive communion established in contempla-
tion, worship, prayer, etc.
In particular, for processists there is little difficulty in conceiving God
as a person. For once we have an account of personhood in general in
process terms as a systemic complex of characteristic activities, it is no
longer all that strange to see God in these terms as well. If we processify
the human person, then we can more readily conceive of the divine person
as the focal source of a creative intelligence that engenders and sustains the
world and endows it with law, beauty (harmony and order), value and
meaning.

20
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

Then too there is the problem of the Trinity with its mystery of fitting
three persons into one being or substance, which has always been a stum-
bling block for the substantialism of the Church Fathers. A process ap-
proach makes it possible to bypass this perplexity. For processes can in-
teract and interpenetrate one another. With the laying of a single branch a
woodsman can be building a wall, erecting a house, and extending a vil-
lage. One act, many processes; one mode of activity many sorts of agency.
For process theology, then, God is active in relation to the world, and
the world’s people can and should be active in relation to God. People’s
relationship to the divine is a two-way street, providing for a benevolent
God’s care for the world’s creatures and allowing those intelligent beings
capable of realizing this to establish contact with God through prayer, wor-
ship, and spiritual communion. Process theology accordingly contemplates
a wider realm of processes that embrace both the natural and the spiritual
realms and interconnect God with the vast community of worshippers in
one communal state of macroprocess that encompasses and gives embodi-
ment to such a comprehensive whole.
To be sure, process theologians usually see the divine as one power
among other and viewed God’s role in relation to the world as rather dif-
fuse and indirect and limited. But this seems to be more because a novel
perspective appeals to those of theologically liberal and unorthodox orien-
tation than to the inherent demands of a process approach. In theory a
process theology could take a more traditional line than has been the case.

10. A QUESTION OF LEGITIMACY

From the days of the Pyrrhonian sceptics of antiquity we are told again
and again throughout the history of philosophy that speculative systemati-
zation is inappropriate—that such knowledge as we humans can actually
obtain is limited to the realm of everyday life and/or its precisification
through science. Repeated in every era, this stricture is also rejected by
many within each. The impetus for big-picture understanding, for a coher-
ent, and panoramic view of things that puts the variegated bits and pieces
together, represents an irrepressible demand of the human intellect as a
possession of “the rational animal.” And process metaphysics affords one
of the most promising and serious options for accommodating this demand.

21
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

11. INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Process thought constitutes one (albeit only one) very prominent sector
of the active philosophical scene in the USA at the present time. Apart
from the proliferation of books and articles on the topic,15 it has achieved
considerable insubstantialization during the years after World War II. Indi-
cations of this phenomenon includes the formation of the Society for Proc-
ess Studies, as well as the prominence of process philosophizing within the
aegis of the Society for American Philosophy and the American Meta-
physical Society. Another clear token is the journal Process Studies, Pub-
lished by the Center for Process Studies in Claremont CA, and founded in
1971 by Lewis S. Ford and John B. Cobb, Jr., a publication that has in re-
cent years become a major vehicle for article-length discussions in the
field. Representatives of process philosophy occupy influential posts in
departments of philosophy and of religious studies in many American uni-
versities and colleges, and some half-dozen doctoral dissertations are pro-
duced annually in this field. American philosophy is at this historic junc-
ture an agglomeration of different cottage industries, and process philoso-
phy is prominent among them.16

REFERENCES

Browning, Douglas, Philosophers of Process (New York: Random House,

1965).

Cobb, John B., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster

Press, 1965).

Cobb, John B. and David R. Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory

Exposition (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1976).

, Process Theology as Political Ecology (Philadelphia, Westminster

Press, 1982).

Gray, James R., Modern Process Thought (Lanham, MD.: University of

America, 1982).

Hartshorne, Charles, “Contingency and the New Era in Metaphysic,” Jour-

nal of Philosophy, vol. 29 91932), pp. 421-431 and 457-469.

22
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, IL.: Open
Court, 1970).

, “The Development of Process Philosophy,” in Process Theology,

ed. Ewert H. Cousins (New York, Newman Press, 1971).

, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1948).

, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, IL.: Open Court,
1967).

Whithead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970 (Lincoln, NB.:

University of Nebraska Press, 1972).

Lucas, George R. Jr., Two View of Freedom in Process Thought: A Study

of Hegel and Whitehead (Missoula, MN: Scholar’s Press, 1979).

, The Genesis of Modern Process Thought (Metuchen, NJ.: Scare-

crow Press, 1983).

, Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic

Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986).

, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytical and Historical

Arsenal of Process Philosophy (Albany, NY.: SUNY Press, 1989).

Palter, Robert M., Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy of Science (Albany,

NY.: SUNY Press, 1979).

Rescher, Nicholas, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Phi-

losophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1996).

, Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic issues (Pittsburgh, Pa.:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

Seibt, Johanna, Properties as Processes: A Synoptic Study of W. Sellars’

Nominalism (Reseda, CA.: Ridgeview, 1990).

23
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

Strawson, P. F., Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959).

Whitehead, A. N., An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural

Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919; reprinted
New York: Kraus Reprints, 1982).

, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1920).

, The Principle or Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1922).

, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Mac-

millan, 1929). Critical edition by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherbourne
(New York: Macmillan, 1978).

, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan,

1927; reprinted New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959).

, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1929).

, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

, Nature and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).

Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Li-

brary, 1948).

Whittemore, Robert C., (ed.), Studies in Process Philosophy (New Orleans:

Tulane University Press, 1974).

24
 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

, Studies in Process Philosophy, II (New Orleans: Tulane Univer-

sity Press, 1976).

, Studies in Process Philosophy, III (New Orleans: Tulane Univer-

sity Press, 1975).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). This book gives an informative
account of the philosophy of Heraclitus. See also Dennis Sweet, Heraclitus:
Translation and Analysis (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1995).
2
Many influential Whitehead scholars agree that the master’s work must be seen in
a broader context and that process philosophy is something larger than White-
headianism. In this category one may class William Christian, Jr., George L.
Kline, George R. Lucas, and Donald W. Sherburne, among others. (For their writ-
ings see the Bibliography at the end of the book.)
3
On these issues see Edward Pols, Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Carbondale and Ed-
wardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967).
4
See H. James Birx, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Philosophy of Evolution (Spring-
field IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1972).
5
Various aspects of cultural evolutions are interestingly treated in Culture and the
Evolutionary Process by Robert Byrd and Peter J. Richardson (Chicago and Lon-
don: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Their deliberations indicate that cultural
evolution is not just an analogue of biological evolution, but that both are variant
forms of one structurally uniform process.
6
This separates process philosophers from other evolution-inspired thinkers whose
views are pessimistic and nonprogressivistic—for example, Nietzsche with his doc-
trine of eternal recurrence.
7
Gérard Deledalle, La Philosophie Américaine (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme,
1983); see pp. 265-6.
8
P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London:
Methuen, 1959).
9
Ibid, p. 39.
10
Ibid.

25
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
11
See Process and Reality, p. 94-95/145-146 and 238-39/365-66.
12
See especially his The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity
(1922).
13
See for example, Michael J. Buckley, Motion and Motion’s God (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971).
14
On this aspect of process theology see: Josiah Royce, The World and the Individ-
ual, 2 vols. (New York: MacMillin, 1901-1902), Vol. I, chapter entitled “The
Temporal and External”; E. S. Brightman, “A Temporalist View of God,” in The
Journal of Religion, vol. 2 (1932), pp. 545-55; A.O. Lovejoy, “The Obsolescence
of the Eternal,” in The Philosophical Review, vol. 18 (1909), pp. 479-502; and J. A.
Leighton, “Time and the Logic of Monistic Idealism,” in Essays in Honor of E. J.
Creighton (New York: the Macmillian Company, 1917), pp. 151-161.
15
For details, see the list of references given below.
16
This chapter draws upon an entry on process philosophy that I contributed in 2004
to the internet edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

26
Chapter 2

ON SITUATING PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

1. ASPECTS OF PROCESSES

T his chapter’s deliberations have two distinct phases or stages, the first
dealing with processes as such and the second with process philoso-
phy as it has evolved in the work of people like Peirce, Whitehead, and
Hartshorne. The natural course of events will make it clear why this is
so—and why it has to be so within the wider context of the discussion’s
prime purpose of placing process in its proper location in the philosophical
landscape.
Let us begin, then, by looking in a rather broad-gauged way at what is at
issue with processes.
Nothing particularly new or unusual will be said here on the issue of
understanding what a process is. A process will be construed in pretty
much the usual way—as a sequentially structured sequence of successive
stages or phases. Three factors accordingly come to the fore:

• That a process is a complex—a unity of distinct stages of phases.

A process is always a matter of now this, now that.

• That this complex has a certain temporal coherence and integrity,

and that processes accordingly have an ineliminably temporal di-
mension.

• That a process has a structure, a formal generic format in virtue of

what every concrete process is equipped with a shape or format in
that its temporal phases exhibit a fixed pattern.

Although processes themselves are always temporal, they can in general

be given an abstract structural—and thus atemporal—representation. Thus
the mathematical process for solving an equation can be represented by a
formalized instruction sequence, or a process of musical performance can
be represented by the score that specifies how the performance is to go. Of
course, such process representations are not themselves processes as such.
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

The computer program for solving a mathematic problem is not a proc-

ess—altogether its execution carrying with it the actual solving of the
problem, will be so. The program conveys the instructions by which a
solver (human or mechanical agent) actualize the process of producing a
solution. Again the score conveys the instructions in line with which a
process—the performance that realizes it—can be realized by players pro-
ceeding to do the right things. And the same holds for text script by which
a set of performers (human agents) can actualize the actual process of
mounting a stage performance. In such instances, what we have in an in-
struction set, and this instruction set is not the process itself, but merely the
recipe for producing (i.e., realizing) it. In such cases, it is only the realiza-
tion of the recipe—its concrete execution or production—that constitutes a
process (of solving or performing, respectively).
Now while the recipe or instruction set for process production is, or may
in a certain sense be, a timeless item, nevertheless the process itself must
be temporal. To exist (to actually be realized) it must exist in time (with its
full realization unfolding “in the course of time,” so to speak). In conse-
quence, the actualization of a process by an agent or agency must always
intervene between the mere instructions and the process itself. Only by
such activity can the process be realized concretely in time
This issue of the existence of processes leads to the question: under
what sorts of circumstances can processes be said to exist? The answer is:
only through their concrete manifestations. For processes to be is to be ex-
emplified. As long as it is not concretely realized, we have only a possible
and not an actual process.
“But surely processes can be contemplated, thought of, described, etc..
without being exemplified.” Quite right. But, process-descriptions (a con-
ceptualization in general) do not create processes, any more than people-
descriptions create people. The principle “To be is to be describable”
holds for process conceptions. alright, but not for processes as such. The
coherent description of a process does indeed indicate the existence of a
correlative process-concept (i.e., of a certain mentalesque abstraction),
But, of course, the process itself is something else again, something which
must have its founding in space and time in order to exist.
Next, we may turn to the issue of the typology of the issue of the typol-
ogy of processes. A process is a sequentially structured sequence of suc-
cessive stages or phases which themselves are types of events or occur-
rences (in the case of an abstract process) or definite realization of such
types (in the case of a concrete process). A structureless sequence—just

28
 ON SITUATING PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

one darn thing after another—is not a process. There are, accordingly,
three principal ways of classifying processes: (1) by the character of the
sequential structure at issue, (2) by the type of subject-matter concerned in
the way in which this character is realized, and (3) by the nature of the end-
result to which the process tends.
The classification of processes will accordingly revolve about three
questions:

(1) What sort of structure?

(2) What sort of occurrences?

(3) What sort of result?

With respect to the first we can discriminate, for example, between such
different types of sequential structures as those involved in:

• a causal process, such as the germination of a seed where each

stage of the development sets the stage of the causal production of
the next.

• thought-sequencing process, such as the instruction for pursuing the

grammar of a statement or performing long division or the extrac-
tion of a square root. This takes the form; do this, then do this, then
do so.

• a ceremonial process, such as the king’s toilette, first he removes

his nightshirt and hands it to the master of the wardrobe, then he is
helped by him into his undershirt, etc.

• a performatory process such as the performance of a play or of a

concerto.

With respect to the second, we can discriminate between such topical sub-
ject matter at themes for occurrences as:

• a biological process

• a mathematical process

29
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

• a mental process

• a political process

With respect to the third, we can discriminate such different end-results as:

• a productive process whose end-result is the realization of some

sort of end-product

• a problem-resolving process

• a process of social stylization such as a wedding or a coronation or

a formal installation in office.

As such deliberations indicate, processes at large can plausibly be clas-

sified in such a tripartite schema: structure-type, occurrence type, result
type, that is to say by format, by thematic content, and by end-product.
With these deliberations about the nature, the existence, and the classifi-
cation of processes securely in place, let us now move off in another direc-
tion, subject to the understanding that we shall eventually return to this
point of departure.

2. ASPECTS OF PROCESS THOUGHT

The topic that will now occupy our attention is “process philosophy,”
the philosophical doctrine dating back to Heraclitus, that sees processes as
central in the ontological scheme of things. In particular, let us consider
some issues regarding how this philosophical approach is positioned on the
philosophical stage.
As this century now approaches its end, it is becoming clear that its his-
torians are inclined to picture the situation in philosophy in terms of a
great divide. On the one side here lies so called “Analytic” philosophy—
the tradition evolved in the wake of thinkers like Frege, Moore, Russell,
and C. D. Broad. On the other side lies the tradition of Continental Phi-
losophy evolved in the wake of thinkers like Heidegger, Cassirer, and
Gadamer in Germany, and Croce or Sartre elsewhere. The one movement
aims at precision and clarity taking as its model the formal or the empirical

30
 ON SITUATING PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

sciences, the other aims at historical depth and hermeneutical generality,

taking a humanistic and value-oriented approach.
Now in this regard, the general tendency among students and historians
of philosophy has been to see process philosophy as firmly emplaced on
the Continental side. Classical precursors of processism are seen to in-
clude figures like Leibniz and Hegel and its later exponents on the Ameri-
can scene comprising such continentally influenced thinkers as Peirce,
Whitehead, and Hartshorne. Anti-processists, on the other hand have been
principally recruited from the Analytic side of the divide, and include such
philosophers as Ramsey, Quine, and Strawson, logically inspired theorists
who work under the influence of an essentially static picture of the world
drawn from logical theory. And in the setting of this perspective, students
and devotees of process philosophy alike have viewed this philosophical
approach as positioned squarely on the Continental side of the divide.
Such a view is not without its justification. For it must, of course, be
recognized and acknowledged that process philosophy poses problems of
assessment—of prioritization and doctrinal evaluation—that involve inti-
mate doctrinal as well as historical affinities with Continental thought.
Processists are concerned with issues of priority and significance, of inter-
personal action and interaction, and of larger human concerns in a way that
is generally—and rightly—seen as central in the Continental tradition of
philosophizing.
All the same, it has to be said that this is very far from being all that
there is to it. For to think that process philosophy can simply be integrated
into the Continental Framework is in error. This error is one of omission
rather than commission. The fact is that there is nothing inherently one-
sided about process philosophy. On the contrary, it is very much of a
broad church—a large-scale project that has affinities and involvements
across the entire board of philosophical concerns.
In particular, as the issues with which these present deliberations began
clearly indicate, process philosophy is also involved with a whole list of
fundamentally analytical issues along the lines of

• How does the concept of processes work?

• What is the nature of a process?

• How is the conception of a process bound up with that of time.

31
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

• How is the temporal aspect of processes to be understood.

• What is involved with the existence of processes. How are we to

understand the claim that a center process actually exists?

• What sorts of processes are there? How are processes to be clas-

sified and what is the typology of process?

It is evident that questions of this sort are quintessentially analytical in

character. And it is no less clear that any process philosophy that can stake
a cogent claim to adequacy must come to terms with them. In neglecting
such issues, it would leave us in the lurch with respect to expectations that
are altogether reasonable with regard to the cogent articulation of a phi-
losophical position.
On this basis, I would submit that process philosophy has an inherently
analytical dimension that so functions as to block the adequacy of any ac-
count that one-sidedly positions it on the Continental side of the divide.
Any fair-minded and conscientious view of the matter has to acknowl-
edge that process philosophy is a complex and prismatically many-sided
project that results any attempt to fence it in neatly and narrowly in prees-
tablished the program holes of philosophical textbook typology. The fact
of the matter is that process philosophy is so complex and many sided as to
send forth its tentacles into every area of philosophical concern.
And this line of thought brings use to another related point.
In a classic paper of 1908, the then prominent and influential Johns
Hopkins University philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy gave reign to his not
inconsiderable annoyance with pragmatism.1 “What,” he asked, “is it that
those pesky pragmatists want anyway?” And in probing for an answer to
this question Lovejoy provided a discussion—provocatively entitled “The
Thirteen Pragmatisms”—that enumerated so many different pragmatic
themes and theories. Each of these rather different versions of pragmatism
varied from the rest and often as not actually came into logical conflict
with some of them. In scanning this complex and disunified scene
Lovejoy concluded that pragmatism just is not a coherent position in phi-
losophy. The doctrine, so he contended, simply selfdestructs through inner
fission.
However, Lovejoy’s plausible-looking objection to pragmatism com-
mits a serious of far-reaching mistakes. For it fails to acknowledge and ac-
commodate the fundamental differences in philosophical teaching between

32
 ON SITUATING PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

a philosophical doctrine or position on the one hand, and the philosophical

approach or tendency on the other. The one is a specific and definite sub-
stantive position, the other a generic and potentially diffuse doctrinal ten-
dency. And it is, of course, mistaken to look for doctrinal unicity within
any broad philosophical tendency.
The fact is that any substantial philosophical tendency—realism, ideal-
ism, materialism, etc.—is a fundamentally prismatic complex. Each in a
broad programmatic tendency that can be worked out in various directions.
In each instance it would indulge an inappropriate essentialism to insist on
having a single definite monolithic core doctrinal position. Each such ten-
dency is inherently many sided and multiplex.
And of course this holds not just for pragmatism but for process phi-
losophy as well. It too is not a doctrinally monolithic tendency predicated
in a particular these or theory, but a general and programmatic approach.
To see it as a unified doctrinal would in fact be as much an error as it
would be to identify it with the teachings and ideas of a single thinker.
Like any philosophical movement of larger scale, process philosophy
has internal divisions and variations. One important difference at issue
here roots in the issue of what type of process is taken as paramount and
paradigmatic. Some contributors (especially Henri Bergson) see organic
processes as central and other sort of processes as modeled on or superen-
grafted upon them. Others (especially William James) based their ideas of
process on a psychological model and saw human thought as idealistically
paradigmatic. Or, turning from substance to methodology, it might be ob-
served that some processists (e.g. Whitehead) articulated their position in
terms that root in physics, while others (esp. Bergson) relied more on bio-
logical considerations. And then too, of course, there are cultural proc-
essists like John Dewey. But such differences not withstanding there are
family-resemblance commonalties of theme and emphasis that nevertheless
leave the teachings of process theorists in the position of variations on a
common approach. So in the end it is—or should be—clear that the unity
of process philosophy is not doctrinal but thematic; it is not a consensus or
a thesis but rather a mere diffuse matter of type and approach. All this is
something to which a Lovejoy-style complaint about doctrinal diversity
would do serious injustice.
The satisfying articulation of any sort of process philosophy requires the
sort of evaluative appraisal and historical contextualization that character-
izes Continental philosophy. But it also requires the sort of conceptual
clarification and explanatory systematization that characterizes Analytic

33
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

philosophy. The long and short of it is that process philosophy covers too
vast a range to belong to one side or the other of this divide: it is too big to
be owned as an exclusive possession of any one particular philosophical
approach or tendency.
And there is good reason for accepting this state of things as only fitting
and proper. For in this respect process philosophy is being true to itself.
Process thought, after all, proposes to view reality as a complex manifold
of varied but interrelated processes. And just exactly this is, to all appear-
ances, true of process philosophy itself.2
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1
Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psy-
chology, and Scientific Methods, vol. 5 (1908), pp. 5-12 and 29-39.
2
This chapter was originally published under the same title in Process Studies, vol.
28 (1999), pp. 37-42.

34
Chapter 3

BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR

DAY: A VENTURE IN PROCESS
AXIOLOGY

1. RETROSPECTIVE CONDEMNATION

A processual view of things calls for temporal contextualization. Where

does this leave ethics? How far do our ethical and evaluative stan-
dards reach across the divides of space and time? Can we appropriately
judge people remote from our own setting by the criteria we would apply
locally? Do our norms project across spatiotemporal distance to apply to
them as well?
One of the many problematic aspects of the “political correctness” that
has become so fashionable in this turn-of-the-century era is the tendency to
condemn and disparage various individuals or groups of earlier eras for
having values, opinions, and customs of which our own times do not ap-
prove. The myriad available examples include:

• condemning the Founding Fathers for their acceptance of slavery

• condemning the politicians of the 1890-1920 era for the resistance to

“votes from women”

• condemning the industrialists of the 19th century for their willingness

to employ child labor

A good case can be made, however, for rejecting this practice of assessing
the actions and agents of the past by our own standards. For adjudging
their ethical standing and moral status as good or bad, benign or evil, in the
light of our current standards is something highly problematic from the an-
gle of rationality and questionable from that of justice.
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

2. NORMS AND BELIEFS: THE ANALOGY OF COGNITION

How after all could we reasonably except people of distant times and
places to adopt our practices and conform to our standards? Condemning
18th century agents for failing to act on 21st century ethical norms makes
about as much sense as reproving 18th century generals for failing to em-
ploy 21st century strategies or judging medieval cartographers by 20th cen-
tury norms.
In this regard one cannot but heed the parallelism between the cognitive
and the evaluative situation. Clearly we cannot reproach the physicists of
the 18th century for not employing 20th century standards and practices,
nor even lay fault at the door of the physician of a decade ago for not con-
forming to the norms that subsequent discovery has made standard at the
present.
A look at the intellectual landscape of these times shows all too clearly
that many of us are deeply enmeshed in a normative egocentrism that leads
us to view those of earlier times who do not share the “enlightened” stan-
dards of our day as being if not willfully evil then at least ethically blind.
As many see it, the benighted folk of the past must simply have realized
that it is wrong to exclude women from the vote, Asians from the immigra-
tion quota, Jews from the social clubs, homosexuals from military service,
and the like. How can they have failed to see that inequality is unfair and
ipso facto wicked?
And of course if those discriminatory practices were no more than un-
reasoned prejudice this view would be entirely correct. But that is assur-
edly not how it was. Be it right or wrong, those “wicked malefactors” of
the past had, or thought they had, perfectly good reasons for their discrimi-
natory practicesreasons which to them seemed every bit as good as ex-
cluding child abusers from schoolmasters posts or alcoholics from bus
driving seem to us. For the most part, at least, they acted not out of an un-
thinking antagonism to these groups, but out of a conviction that allowing
them entry into those prohibited categories would be significantly harmful
to legitimate social interests. On the whole, their mind-set was not evil and
their motives were notor need not have beenoutright wicked. They
acted under the guidance of the good (sub ratione boni). They may have
beenand doubtless weremistaken in those beliefs, but even so the fact
remains that the faults at issue were of intellect and understanding not one
of character. And it is no more valid to reprehend such past misunder-

36
 BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY

standings than it would be to reprehend the misunderstandings of the 18th

century physicians who sought to treat gout by salt cures.

3. WHO APPOINTED US AS ARBITER?

After all, who or what has appointed us as supreme arbiter? Where is it

written that our own standards are universally authoritative? We look
down our ethical noses at these benighted legislators of 17th Century Eng-
land who mandated drastic penalties for such minor offenses as petty theft.
But where will we ourselves stand in the sight of a posterity that may well
come to regard our practices in regard to abortion as nothing but casual in-
fanticide? Our own standards should of course be seen as compelling for
usfor evaluating what we ourselves and our contemporaries do here and
now. If we did not see them in this light, then they just would not be “our
standards.” But with what right or justification can we see them as com-
pelling for other times and places? How could we validate a normative
egocentrism that elevates our present standards of judgment to a position
of universal supremacy? What justifies a normative Ptolemaicism that puts
us at the center of the evaluative universe?

4. THE AGENT, THE ACT, AND THE ACTION

A pivotal distinction must be heeded here, namely that between the

moral assessment of a generic sort of act on the one hand and on the other
its performance in the particular action of a particular agent on a particular
occasion. The questions “Should we approve someone’s performing that
action here-and-now?” and “Should one think ill of someone who per-
formed the action then-and-there?” pose very different issuesand they
require different answers. Take polygamy. Clearly we doquite
rightlysee it is a wrongful and unacceptable practice. But by this we
door shouldmean to condemn its performance here and now, by peo-
ple of this time and place in our own existential setting. We would and
should quite properly condemn someone among our contemporary
neighbors who commits this type of act. But it would certainly be morally
obtuse of us if we were comparatively to condemn the biblical Abraham.
Our disapproval of polygamy cannot reasonably be directed at his polyg-
amy simply because the conditions and circumstances of its occur-
rencethe setting of circumstances and values in which it occurredwas
utterly different from our own and relates to evaluative considerations of

37
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

which this patriarch did not and could not have had any inkling. We can
and should judge the abstract practicethe generic mode of actionby
our own standards and according to our own lights. But this proceeds at
the generic level of the abstract, not at the specific level of the concrete.
And there it is only sensible and just to judge remote agents and acts by
their standardsthose that prevail in particular setting and circumstances
is at issue here. Accordingly, we canand shoulddisapprove of those
acts in general without thereby derogating those remote agents and im-
pugning their morals.
An important theoretical distinction is called for. In evaluating general
practice it is only right and proper that we should do so by our own
lightsour own standards and values, those which we take ourselves to be
able to validate as proper and correct. But in evaluating the actions of
people of another time and place we should manifest urbanity, avoiding the
parochialism of imposing on our own standards and being willing to apply
those of the agents own time and place. After all, different issues are at
stake and here, as elsewhere, different questions can require different an-
swers.

5. WHAT CAN REASONABLY BE EXPECTED?

When engaged in evaluating the moral or ethical condition of someone

from another time and place, it is only sensible to ask: “What is it reason-
able to expect of this individual?” And obviously that he should conform
to the norms and values of our place and time is simply not a reasonable
expectation. How could those remote individuals possibly be expected to
adopt and conform to those as-yet unarticulated values and to them un-
known standards? Where are they to get a crystal ball that would enable
them to discern the substantially indiscernible evaluative future?
We can, in principle, operate in matters of judgment and evaluation in
relation to the action and merits of people who are remote in time and set-
ting in terms of

(1) our own personal standards

(2) the general standards of our time and place (of our social context)

(3) the general standards of their time and place (of their social con-
text).

38
 BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY

Here (2) is unsuitable because it would require people to act on the basis of
considerations entirely outside the scope of their knowledge and under-
standing. And (1) is inappropriate both for the same reason and because it
asks of people more than could ever reasonably be expected of them. For
only (3)the one and only remaining alternativeis practicable in this
connection. Only the abstract act can rightly be judged by us according to
our own standards and not its performance by some remote agents. To
make one’s moral assessment of the people and actions of another place
and time in line with one’s own values and standards is to proceed in a way
that is clearly parochial, urbanity-deficient, narrow minded. And it is also
unjust because it calls for expecting of someone something that they could
not possibly manage to achieve. We might perhaps hope that people will
look beyond the baseline of a normative localism and we would certainly
welcome their doing so, but we have no right to expect it of them.
That the reach of one’s obligations do not outrun the limits of the possi-
ble has been a legal maxim since Roman times. (Ultra posse nemo obliga-
tur.) And at the basis of the matter lies the issue of rationality. After all, it
is absurd ever to ask for something that exceeds the limits of the possible.
And exactly this principle regarding legal obligation holds good for moral
obligation as well. That which lies beyond a person’s powers due to condi-
tions for which the individual in question is nowise responsible is some-
thing for which he cannot bear reasonable reprehension. Justifiable re-
proach stops at the limits of effective responsibility. And for this reason if
no other applying unavailable standards would be both unreasonable and
unjust.

6. A KANTIAN PERSPECTIVE

As Immanuel Kant already insisted long ago, the pivotal factor in the
moral assessment of an agent’s actions pivots on this agent’s motives in
doing it.1 The performance of even an inherently meritorious action (help-
ing someone in need) can be reprehensible if done for an unsavory motive
(seeking praise) and even an inherently wrongful action (inflicting pain on
someone) can be meritorious if done for a benign motive (saving his life in
a medical procedure). And while loyalty to the values and practices of our
time and place is in ordinary circumstances appropriate and thereby should
in general motivate our actions, those of the agents of the past are going to

39
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

depend on the norms of their day because these norms alone can possibly
play a role in their motivation.
What is inappropriate about judging people and their acts by standards
other than their own is that these are not available to them. Only the
norms of his time and place are accessible to an individual and able to ca-
nalize his doings and dealings. It is inappropriate to bring other norms to
bear because it is irrational to demand that an agent should govern his do-
ings by considerations outside his den.
An agent of the past no more deserves automatic condemnation as
wicked for doing something that we would deem so in our contemporaries
than a savant of the past would deserve condemnation for beliefs we would
regard as inappropriate and uninformed in a scientist of our day.
It is not only right but inevitable that one must judge our issues by our
standards (they would not be our standards if we did otherwise). How then
could we in all fairness deny a like privilege to others?

7. THE ROLE OF OUR STANDARDS?

An important distinction must be introduced at this point, however. To

this stage we have simply spoken of “standards” indiscriminately, as
though all standards were created equal. But this is certainly not the case.
There are standards and standards. And in particular there are standards of
adequacy and standards of excellence. Any and every apparatus of evalua-
tion permits of distinctions along these qualitative lines as between norms
for run-of-the-mill performance and norms for superior performance.
Of others we are, by rights, entitled to expect in moral and ethical mat-
ters no more than adequate performance. Here we have to satisfy our-
selves with grey mediocrity. Doing more is a matter of supererogation as
far as we ourselves are concerned. Only of ourselves are we enti-
tledindeed obligatedto expect superior performance. Of others we can
reasonably expect no more than the run of the mill.
But on what comparison basis can this ordinary/superior destinction be
predicated? Of course it will have to be that of the general cast of charac-
ters that populate “their world.” That is to say we must judge themthose
remote agentsby the generally prevalent standards of their time and
place. Only where that time and place is our own and the people at issue
ourselves are we entitled to view those general standards in a critical spirit
and to ask for morefor ethically superior performance. The rest we must
judge on the basis of their doing when in Rome that which the Romans do.

40
 BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY

To ask more of them would be to ask for too muchand the error here
would be ours.
Because motivation plays so pivotal a role in moral appraisal, all that
we can properly expect of someone in matters of ethical assessment is that
they should act in accordance with the values and standards of their time
and place. And that is all that we can reasonably expect of our own con-
temporaries and neighbors as all. Only of ourselves can we justifiably ex-
pect more. Here we can and should demand excellence rather than ade-
quacy. In relation to our own actions we should not see the standards of
our place and time as necessarily binding because we have the (moral) ob-
ligation to assess the appropriateness and validity of these standards them-
selves, and should not see them as gift horses that we should not expect to
scrutinize. But with others the matter is different. For while we have a
special sort of standing and responsibility towards ourselves, this is not so
towards them.
It is, of course, every person’s rightnay dutyto do what they can to
ensure that the general standards of their environment are excellent rather
than mediocre, and manifest an impetus to high quality rather than (as
seems to be the case in our own place and time) dropping through the floor
to mediocrity and “going to hell in a wheelbarrow.” But this aspect of
one’s own moral duty is not the point of our present concerns, which ad-
dress the ethical and moral assessment of remote agents. And here in the
absence of specific, case-characterizing information as to their intentions
and motives we must and should conform our assessment to the standards
of the place and time. We have no right to ask our expert more of ordinary
people than conformity to the ordinarily prevalent standards.
Thus when it comes to approving or disapproving the actions and char-
acter of people, the pertinent apparatus of standards of judgment and
evaluation will have to be that of their setting and it will only be in a very
special “close-to-home” case (viz. that of ourselves) that we are rationally
and ethically entitled to ask for more.

8. ON RENDERING JUSTICE

In judging people by the standards of their time and place, we do of

course have to reckon with the fact that those standards may be seriously
deficient from our own evaluative point of view. But nevertheless the fact
remains that if the standards allotted to them by their historico-cultural set-
ting were deficient (as we ourselves see it), this is something for which we

41
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

cannot very well blame themany more than whatever reproach may ul-
timately be seen to be deserved by the standards of our time and place can
be imputed to any one of us. The deficiency of their standards is not their
fault but their loss. It is no valid basis for reproaching someone in the con-
text of moral appraisal, but is something for which the individual is more
to be pitied than censured.
The only fair and reasonable course to take in matters of moral evalua-
tion is to judge people in terms of what they did with the opportunities at
their disposalhow they played the hand that fate dealt to them (to put it
figuratively). In evaluating the acts or morals of someone of another place
or time, our obligation (by our own standards and values) is surely to ren-
der justice to and fairness to those with whom we deal. And only by judg-
ing them against the background of their values and standards can we man-
age to accord then the fairness and justice that is the right of all.

9. A KEY OBJECTION

“But what if those standards and values of the place and time are trans-
parently evil and malign by our own standardsand indeed by what we
take to be the only reasonable ones? What of the value system of Hitler’s
Germany or Stalin’s USSR?” Are such monstrous value-systems to be ac-
cepted as furnishing usable norms?
The first question to be asked here is whether it is indeed the case that
these malign norms were indeed “the values of the time and place”that
is, of the mid-century Europe of the 1900’s. In addressing that question of
“time and place” we must not draw our borders too narrowly so as to ele-
vate local eccentricities into cultural norms.
The pivotal question when judging those “wrongdoers of the past” is not
“Should they (ideally) have known better?” but rather: “Could they (real-
istically) have known better.” And the consideration that leads us rightly
to condemn the sundry egregious malefactors who constitute a prime ex-
ample here (Polish pogromists, Stalinist executioners, Nazi gauleiters, and
the like) is that they could and should have known better and usually
doubtless did so as witness to their efforts to conceal their actions beyond
the circle of the like-minded. On this basis, the consideration that renders
the treatment of the Amerindians by the conquistadors particularly con-
temptible is the prominent presence among them of numerous friars who
did their utmost to provide them of ample opportunity “to know better.”
But whenever we cannot construct a case for holding that these “malefac-

42
 BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY

tors” of other times and places did in fact have such clear opportunity, it is
neither reasonable nor just to reprehend them.

10. RELATIVISM REJECTED

“Judge the actions of people by the standards of their place and time.”
But isn’t that just bad old relativism?
This, of course, will very much depend on just what it is that one takes
to be at issue with “relativism.” Now, standardly, this is construed as a
mode of indifferentism: you just pick your standards, and to each his
ownit just doesn’t matter. And this, of course, is emphatically not what
is being maintained here. Such indifferentism fails to be at issue because
the value and standards of one’s place and time are not matters of free
choice to individuals; they are situational givens, not deliberated options.
What is contemplated here is accordingly not an indifferentist relativism,
but rather the contextualism of a situationally determinate value system.
This point deserves a somewhat closer look.
The reality of it is that no belief system, no value framework, and no
system of moral norms is an extra-mundane absolute, mandated in un-
changeable perfection by circumstances beyond our control. The best we
can do is to figure things out on our own. And here we can do no more
than make use of the local, particularized, diversified instruments that we
humans can manage to develop within the socio-cultural limitations of our
place and time. Thus far a contextualism is both inevitable and correct.
But this situation emphatically does not engender an indifferentist and sub-
jectivist relativism. The crucial point is that one can be a contextualistic
pluralist in matters of morality without succumbing to such indifferentist
relativism (let alone nihilistic scepticism).
The characteristic flaw of relativism is its insistence on the rational in-
difference of alternatives. Be it contentions, beliefs, doctrines, practices,
customs or whatever that is at issue, the relativist insist that “it just doesn't
matter” in point of rationality. People are led to adopt one alternative over
another by extra-rational considerations (custom, habituation, fashion, or
whatever); from the rational point of view there is nothing to choose—all
the alternatives stand on the same footing. Presented with alternatives of
the sort at issuebe it cognitive, moral, or whateverthe relativist insists
that at bottom it just doesn't matter—at any rate as far as the rationality of
the issue is concerned. The fatal flaw of this position roots in the fact that
our claims, beliefs, doctrines, practices, customs, all belong to identifiable

43
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

departments of purposive human endeavor—identifiable domains, disci-

plines, and the like. For all (or virtually all) human enterprises are at bot-
tom teleological—conducted with some sort of end or objective in view.
Now in this context, the crucial fact is that some claims, beliefs, doc-
trines, practices, customs, etc. are bound to serve the purposes of their do-
main better than others. For it is pretty much inevitable that in any goal-
oriented enterprise, some alternative ways of proceeding serve better than
others with respect to the relevant range of purpose, proving themselves
more efficient and effective in point of goal-realization. And in the teleo-
logical contexts thereby establish themselves as rationally appropriate with
respect to the issues. It lies in the nature of the thing that the quintessen-
tially rational thing to do is to give precedence and priority to those alter-
natives that are more effective with respect to the range of purposes at is-
sue.
Moral absolutism is to be rejected because a moral code is in its details
not a matter of one-size-fits-all uniformity.2 But equally, moral indiffer-
entism is to be rejected because the moral code of one’s own community
has a valid claim to our own allegiance barring any specific and cogent
reasons to the contrary. We thus reject relativism in favor of an objectiv-
ism that sees objectivity not as a matter of a “God’s eye view” but rather
one of the view which we ourselves can see as reasonable insofar as we are
being reasonable about the pursuit of our own projects.

11. HOISTED BY ONE’S OWN PETARD?

A subtle and sophisticated objection looms up at this point:

You say it is inappropriate and ethically obtuse to judge the people of another
day and place by the standards of our own. And you say that instead they
should be judged by the standards of their own time and place. But then look
to our own contemporariesthe people of our time and place. As you your-
self say, they seem to be given to judging everyone by their standardspast
people included. If it indeed is nowadays normal practice to judge the past
by current standards, then how can you possibly condemn this practice? After
all, you insist that we can expect no more of people than of conformity of the
norms of their place and time. In line with your own principles you should
therefore see this as only-to-be-expected and refrain from disapproval on this
basis.

44
 BY THE STANDARDS OF THEIR DAY

However this subtle and sophisticated objection is no better than sophisti-

cal. It fails to take heed of the distinction, carefully drawn above, between
evaluating a generic mode of acting on the one hand and on the other
evaluating a particular agent’s actions. For what is being maintained here
is that the generic mode of acting (“judging past actions of past agents by
present standards”) can be ethically inappropriate and wrong even when
the specific acts of these agents are understandable and venial. It is not be-
ing maintained that those critics and commentators who engage in criticiz-
ing past actions and agents by current standards deserve condemnation.
We can and should be liberal towards them and understanding towards
their actions. But what we need not and should not do is to approve of the
agents actions at issue. Here, as elsewhere, we canand shouldbe un-
derstanding of the wrongdoer without endorsing the wrongdoing.

12. THE DEMANDS OF RATIONALITY AND JUSTICE

The salient point of these deliberations is that moral evaluation is itself a

mode of activity that is inevitably subject to moral standards. Passing
moral and ethical judgment on people and their acts is itself an ethically
laden step that has direct implications for our own moral standing. For do-
ing this is something that we can do more or less justly, more or less fairly,
more or less conscientiously. Thus in engaging in this generic practice we
ourselves are doing something that has an ethical dimension. As the Bible
tells us, in judging others we lay ourselves open to judgment.
While those doings of the people of others times and places is a matter
of what they did, our forming evaluative judgments about this is a matter of
what we ourselves are doing. And as such, this process of evaluative ap-
praisal regarding people’s doings and deserts itself has a pervasively ethi-
cal coloration. And accordingly, it canand shouldbe asked of us that
we have proceeded in an ethically appropriate way, proceeding with a view
to such salient, here-and-now pertinent, factors of evaluative property as
fairness, justice, reasonableness, urbanity, and generosity. The evaluative
practice we are concerned with itself falls within the scope of its own con-
cerns. It is something in which the interests of others are engaged in a way
that demands procedural appropriateness on our part.
Accordingly, we here have both the right and the obligation to require
and achieve an at least adequate level of ethical performance in assessing
people’s judgmental practices. And the demands of adequacy in this con-
text call heeding just exactly those salient values that have just been enu-

45
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

merated. At this second level remove it is indeed those standards which

areor should beours that are determinative. But in this regard, evalu-
ating the acts and merits of people of other times and places by the current
standards of the present (let alone by our own personal standards) is unfair,
unreasonable, unjust, ungenerous, and unrealistic.
The business of evaluating others is something that we ourselves con-
duct on our own account, and thereby is bound to be something that is—or
should be—subject to our norms. And so what is now at issue calls for ap-
plying our standards to what we ourselves are doing here and now. And
here the operative norms of justice and fairness that hold for us call for re-
liance on their norms in forming our judgments regarding them. It is our
own values that do—and should—cry out loud and clear for evaluating
those of other places and times by their standards rather than ours.
In the end, standards change, like all else in the world to processes un-
folding subject to the conditions of time and place. Thus in this matter of
second-level considerationsof the standards governing our own evalua-
tive practiceit is indeed our standards that should be operative. And the
demand that these standards make upon our evaluative modus operandi is
that it shall proceed with reference to the standards of the subjects of
evaluation (rather than those of the evaluating agent). In this regard the
prime directive alike of reasonableness and justice is represented by the
commandment “By the standards of their day shall ye judge them.”3

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1
See Immanuel Kant, Foundations in the Metaphysics of Minds, tr. by Lewis White
Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merril, 1959).
2
William James was surely right to insist that “There is no point of view absolutely
public and universal.” (Talks to Teachers on Psychology [New York: Henry Holt,
1899], p. 4.)
3
This chapter was originally published under the same title in The Monist, vol. 86
(2003), pp. 469-80.

46
Chapter 4

TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY:

A PROCESS-PHILOSOPHICAL
REFUTATION OF HISTORICIST
RELATIVISM
1. STAGESETTING: HISTORICITY

P rocess philosophy represents a philosophical approach that is unques-

tionably of substantial interest and value in its own right. However,
the object of this present discussion it to exhibit its substantial instrumental
value. For, as will be argued here, it is also of great utility for the clarifica-
tion and resolution of philosophical problems which do not overtly lie in
its own characteristic domain. In this regard the specific object of present
concern is the much debated issue of historical relativism.
Everything that we humans manage to do is done within a setting of
place and time. The historical process envelops all our activities and deal-
ings. Everything we do is a part of history, caught up in the grand macro-
process of human development and finding its place there in some micro-
context of era and culture. In thinking as in looking we can only get the
view of things from where we are. Be it with the vision of the eye or of the
mind we can only see things from the particular perspective we happen to
occupy. There is, for us, no Archimedean fulcrum outside the spatiotem-
poral historicity of place and era for pivoting the lever of thought. As phi-
losophers repeatedly insist, we have no possibility of achieving a “God’s
eye view” or a “view from nowhere.” Our activities—alike physical and
mental—are inevitably part of that grand historical process, subject to the
relativization of era and culture. We are trapped within history. The in-
exorable contextuality of things inescapably tethers our thought to our spa-
tiotemporal placement in era and culture even as it ties our shadows to our
physical placement on the earth’s surface.
All of this is central to a historicist view of the world. And it must, I
submit, be taken as a given, a fact of life, a straightforward statement of the
way things are. This aspect of historical relativity has to be acknowledged
as pretty much undebatable and indeed virtually truistic. The real ques-
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

tion—and what indeed is debatable in the matter—is what follows from it.
Given that our human existence is unavoidably subject to historical condi-
tions, just what conclusion can be taken to follow?

2. EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM

The main conclusion that is commonly drawn from the fact of historic-
ity is epistemic relativism. The line of thought at issue here runs as fol-
lows.

Theoreticians insist that the real truth of things is timeless and placeless—
that what is indeed true is so always and everywhere. But human thought
and acceptance are always historical, always issuing from and based in a set-
ting of era and culture. And this means that we have no way to determine
what actually is true but only what people in certain places and times think to
be such. Everything we assert and accept is accompanied by the ubiquitous
Kantian I think. We only have and can only ever achieve opinion and puta-
tive truth: the real article—the truth as such—lies outside our grasp. Belief
and thought in general is always history-bound, while the real truth as such
(if such there is) will be something that transcends history. The unavoidable
conclusion here is that we cannot capture the truth as such. We cannot es-
cape historicity: if timeless and placeless truth is where we want to go, then
we have no way to get there from here.

So reason the historicist advocates of epistemic relativism. Their argu-

mentation is tempting—but at the same time profoundly fallacious.

3. THE PERSPECTIVE OF PROCESS

There is good reason to think that the fatal flaw of the indicated argu-
mentation for epistemic relativism lies in its failure to give due heed to the
dialectic of process and product—and in particular the distinction between
instances of the production of information and the items of information
that are produced. Granted—thinking, inquiry, assertion, and the like are
all intellectual processes carried on by humans which, as such, must inevi-
tably have an historical setting by way of place and time, of culture and
era. But this is clearly not the end of the matter. For the reality of it is that
there is no reason to think that there cannot be changeless patterns of sta-
bility within a changing historical process. And the nearer we get to com-
municative basics, the more stable. Cats give birth to kittens, not wood-

48
 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

chucks, oxygen bonds with hydrogen to make water and not alcohol. The
recognition of such facts is unquestionably a matter of place and time, but
this does not hold for these fact themselves.
The very idea of a process involves trans-temporal constancies. Water
evaporates. That is to say, water evaporates is a generic process. It has
many instances, occurring alike after rainstorms in 16th century Lima and
in 20th century Atlanta. One simply cannot identify a process that is not a
process of a processual type and which, in consequence, is not at that level
of abstraction capable of repetition. Any particular process—and every
such process—is always an instance of a process type—an instantiation of
a general pattern. And so the concreta of history, viewed in an epistemic
perspective, can in fact manage to transcend their space-time settings to in-
stantiate general patterns. Although their manifestations are inevitably
temporal and concrete, those processes themselves are atemporal and ge-
neric.
And of course different concrete instances of a process can produce
products of exactly the same generic type. Different factories can and of-
ten do produce the same model of car, different cooks can produce the
same variety of soup. And this is strikingly so when the product happens
to be information: different presses can print the same text, different re-
spondents can give the same answer to the same question, different mouths
can utter the same sentence, different minds can think the same thought.
The point is that in the realm of informational abstractness products can
escape the limitations of their (invariably relativized) productive origins.
The historical relativization of the production process to a particular his-
torico-cultural context—the fact that the thinking or the assertion of a truth
is so relativized—of itself does nothing to limit the product (the truth that
is so thought or asserted) to a historico-cultural context. Once produced it
is generally available—and (insofar as abstract) will be cross-temporally
accessible via its exemplifications and manifestations at different times and
places.
A currently fashionable position takes the line:

Different individuals and different societies live in altogether different

thought worlds. We contemporary Westerners live in a realm of physical and
chemical causation. Our primitive ancestors three millennia ago lived in an
animistic realm of nature-spirit-wind gods, cloud-spirits, and the like. There
is no way to cross such conceptual gaps. Chronological impracticability
apart, exchanging information by ordinary communicative processes would
be totally impracticable. Every culture is entrapped in its own concept real-

49
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

ism. The prospect of actual communication is inexistent. And so since there

is no way to effect contrast there is no prospect of any agreement or dis-
agreement. And as in matters of thought so also in matters of action. Here
there is no objective right or wrong either. To each his own—and to each his
own is right and anything else altogether fallacious.

The fatal flaw of such a position is that is overlooks what might be

characterized as the unavoidable overlap between any two conceptual
realms that have concept manifolds of a complexity sufficient to deal with
“the real world.”
Consider an example: the famous duck-rabbit. You are schooled to see
it as a duck; I to see it as a rabbit. And never the two can shall meet.
Wrong! At the duck/rabbit level of conceptual complexity we indeed can-
not come together. But when it comes down to more rudimentary talk
about “A linear configuration that looks like that (pointing)” we are in co-
ordination. You think of that object as a pencil, I (who know nothing
about such writing implements) think of it as a hairpin. Conceptually we
are miles apart. But both of us can agree that it is “A small wooden stick
with a black something that comes to a point on it.” I think the voodoo
maven cast an evil spell on my neighbor, you think he suffered through
imaginative autosuggestion when he learned about the doll with its pin.
We are miles apart regarding how we think about the events at issue. But
we have no trouble agreeing that “The maven stuck a pin through the head
of the doll she used to represent the neighbor and he suffered illness as a
somehow-produced result.”
The point is that any complex concept scheme has internal resources
through which the materials of another can be captured in a descriptively
more rudimentary—and thereby descriptively neutral—manner so as to
make communicative contact possible. Whatever is represented in the one
can be represented in the other in sufficient detail to make communicative
contact possible. There is never an absolutely unbridgeable gap, a total in-
commensurability of conception. Anything can be characterized as a suffi-
ciently enough and rudimentary level to possibilize its accessibility to an-
other scheme at that level.
In this connection an absolutely crucial resource is provided by the ma-
chinery of supposition, assumption, and hypothesis. Granted, there is just
no way in which we can translate the machinery of the Galenic humors
into the machinery of modern medicine. But this just does not render it
conceptually unavailable to the moderns. We can say: “Let’s make an as-
sumption. Suppose the heart were a furnace-type heat source, and that by

50
 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

its heating the blood warmth could be supplied to the human extremities.
Then . . . “ That is we could unfold a story within a framework of assump-
tions that rendered the whole Galenic instrumentarium accessible to the
modern mind. And inversely. We could not explain modern medicine to
the Galenic physician within the concept machinery of his favored theory.
But we could certainly go back and teach it to him beginning with the pre-
systematic conceptual resource that we use in bringing the modern student-
novice into the realm of modern scientific medicine.
And so while it may indeed transpire that concept-schemes may be so
“disjoint” that one cannot be translated into the other, they are never so dis-
joint that one cannot find within the resources of each sufficient expository
resources materials to render the claims of the other accessible at a level of
generality that allows of an information transfer which—however imper-
fect—suffices to make communicative contact possible.
The problem is that the contemporary discussion of these issues only
envision extreme options: either total concept-incommensurability or all-
out concept identity. The intermediate situation of a halfway house that al-
lows for a degree of concept-consideration sufficient to provide for com-
municative contact is simply ignored. And yet it is just exactly here that
the realities of the situation lie.
Accordingly, the inevitable historicity of all human proceedings does
nothing to show that various beliefs and behaviors cannot be more than the
characteristic possession of a transient and temporary era in the history of a
particular culture.

4. TRANSCENDING ORIGINS: ESCAPING HISTORICITY VIA

INFORMATION

Two concessions must of course be granted to the relativist (1) different

bodies of evidence will be available at different times (in the wake, for ex-
ample, of archeological research or of document discoveries), and (2) dif-
ferent frameworks of interpretation of available evidence will come to light
(in the course, for example, of medical or psychological research). And,
clearly, such changes in the volume or in the bearing of the evidence will
change our views regarding what the truth of the matter is. But these
changes of course affect just that—our views. They do not alter the facts
of the matter. If we should learn that Caesar has an egg for breakfast on
that fateful Ides of March this discovery would relate to a change in our in-
formation about the thing, but would not effect a change in Caesar himself

51
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

from a non-egg breakfaster to an egg breakfaster.

Information, in particular, is a special sort of product—one that is in-
herently abstract. There is the actual making or staking of a claim (which
is always biographical and therefore historical) and the claim that is made,
which exists ahistorically outside of space and time.
Consider an analogy, the color green vs. green things (a leaf, a lawn), or
again, the number two vs. pairs of things (twins, ears). Those concrete par-
ticulars are historically specific: they exist in particular times and places.
But colors and numbers as such are ahistorically generic: they have his-
torical instantiations and exemplifications but they themselves are outside
of space and time. Human activities—cognitive activities such as claims
and contentions in particular—are exactly like that. To historicize them is
to treat them as concrete things, and thereby to commit the fallacy of mis-
placed concreteness, as Whitehead called it.
It is important here to bear in mind the distinction between the trans-
historical (omnitemporal) and the ahistorical (timeless). Genuine laws of
nature (fundamental physical laws) are omnitemporal: they hold always
and everywhere—they pervade space-time, so to speak. But purely ab-
stract conditional relationships (for example) are atemporal. (Vertebrates
and canines are historical entities, but conceptual facts on the order of if
it’s a canine, then it’s a vertebrate are by nature timeless and ahistorical,
holding always and everywhere, even when canines and vertebrates are ab-
sent.) The abstractness of information is something which, by its very na-
ture, carries us outside the scheme of history. For while the learning or
imparting of information is always historical, the information that we learn
or impart need not be. Cognitive processes are indeed spatiotemporal, but
the objects they involve can be abstract.
Some sorts of things exist out of space but not time—one’s ownership
of a piece of jewelry, for example, or one’s right to exercise an option to
purchase a tract of land. Other sorts of things exist neither in space nor in
time—facts, for example. (The Eiffel Tower was erected in Paris in the
19th century, but the fact that Julius Caesar did not realize this is some-
thing that has no spatiotemporal emplacement. The horse that John stole is
located in space and time but the fact that stealing is wrong has no spatio-
temporal emplacement. Some sorts of things—numbers, facts, and gener-
alized relationships are just by nature the sorts of things that have no spati-
otemporal emplacement. And information is like that. The things that in-
formation may be about are spatiotemporal, as will be the speech or
writing by which the information is conveyed from one person to another.

52
 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

But the information itself is altogether nonspatiotemporal. It simply lies in

the nature of certain sorts of things—information included—not to be lo-
cated in space and time—to be “abstract.”
The overall situation in matters of abstraction is triadic (to use the term
favored by C. S. Peirce). There are the various and sundry concrete green
things; the abstract property at issue (viz., the properly or characteristic of
being green); and the mediative conception or idea of greenness which is
the thought-instrumentability through which that abstract property comes
to be imputed to those items that putatively manifest it. That third item—
the idea or concept—is also historicized (it too has an originative place-
ment in era and culture. But its nature is mediative since what is at issue
are generic cognitive processes that enable that idea or concept to provide
us with the (cognitive) means of linking the concrete to the abstract. And
the abstraction to which it yields access is not something that it creates and
whose reality is dependent upon it. The medieval metaphysical dispute
between nominalism, conceptualism, and platonism needs to be resolved
conjunctively: we require a nominalism for particulars, a conceptualism
for concepts, and a platonism for abstractions. The situation is not one of
either/or. We need to make use of all of those doctrinal positions—each in
its own place.
The trouble with a narrowly rigoristic nominalism lies in its vitiatingly
fragmented vision. True, universals may indeed represent features that
separated individuals have in common. But of course those commonalties
only exist because generic processes are at work “across the board” in
point of space and time—processes that function so as to produce those
commonalties. Those shared properties on which the nominalists rely are
themselves clearly not nominalisitcally self-sufficient. They do not stand
on their own but root in processual generality. Were it not for generic
processes that reach across the limits of space and time, those nominalistic
commonalties would not, could not be there.
This line of thought has important consequences for our present prob-
lem-situation. Information as such is abstract. The believing vs. the belief;
the theorizing vs. the theory; the assuming vs. the assumption. Different
people at different times and places have the same beliefs, project the same
theories, make the same assumption. The history-bound nature of the con-
crete-episode (the believing, theorizing, assuming) does not affect the ahis-
torical nature of the informative item at issue (the belief, theory, assump-
tion).
Of course we have no way to get to the abstract (the belief) save via the

53
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

historical (the believing). But what we achieve (the product) is something

of a nature different and status distinct from the mode of its realization (the
process). When we engage in intellectual processes that carry us into the
informational domain we impel ourselves from history into an ahistorical
sphere. The same idea (the same thought-process, the same belief) is ac-
cessible to people at different times and places. Were it not so, communi-
cation would be altogether impossible.
But how can temporalized thought deal in timeless information? How
is it that particularized episodic thought can make episode-abstractive gen-
eralizations? That’s just how things work. It’s like puzzling about brass
bands by asking how can tubes of bent metal make music. No matter how
much we may puzzle at the phenomenon we have to accept it as part of the
world’s realities.
Admittedly, when we are viewing something, the only views we can
possibly obtain are views from somewhere (and views belonging to us and
not to God). But where the viewing is done with the eyes of the mind, and
its object is the realm of information rather than the realm of physical real-
ity then what the view is a view of is something ahistorical. For informa-
tion as such exists outside of history even though our accessing it is in-
variably an historical transaction. We must avert the category mistake of
confusing process with product here: of conflicting the information that
we access with the historical actions and events of our accessing it.

5. AGAINST A MONISTIC NOMINALISM OF CONCRETA

To make a success of the idea of being “trapped within history” we

would need to be medieval-style nominalists who project an ontology of
concreta alone, denying the conceptualists’ idea that universals (abstracta)
can be manifested in such concreta in a way that enables them to reach into
the realm of the general. The almost unavoidably sensible ideas that con-
creta can instantiate or exemplify transcending generalities would have to
be abandoned. And from a process point of view this is eminently unreal-
istic. For processists do—and, given the genius of their theory must—
reject the idea that the atemporalities and trans-temporalities of the realm
of abstractive generality at issue with processes as such cannot be exempli-
fied in the world’s experienced concreta which, so to speak “participate” in
them, (to use Plato’s term).
Human action and experience embeds us in a concrete order of particu-
larized reality with its particularized setting in the spatiotemporal and

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 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

causal order. But ideas and information carry us into a universal (abstract)
order our experiential concreteness instantiates but does not encompass.
And intelligence with its characteristically mental processes provides for a
linkage that mediates between these two realms. It is exactly this—
intelligent thought—that provides for the linking processes that conjoin
and mediate between experiential concreta and ideational abstractness. It
lies in the very nature of intelligent beings that they function as amphibians
able to operate conjointly and concurrently both in the realm of concrete
experience and in that of abstract thought.
It lies in the very nature of intelligence that it effects the transit from the
episodically causal (the thinking) to the abstractly rational (the thought)—
and in matters of discourse also from the concrete declaring to the generic
declaration. All such intellectual process involve the projection from spa-
tiotemporal specificity to informative generality. In the domain of bodily
action we are indeed trapped within history, but intellectual action pro-
vides us with an escape—a means of entry into the region of abstract gen-
erality. For with thought—unlike bodily action—we can get beyond the
present into the past and future and indeed from the realm of the real into
that of the merely possible. Present action can only replicate but not actu-
ally repeat past actions, while present thoughts can not only implicate but
even repeat past ones.
With rational creatures, then, the two factors of causality and justifica-
tion can come together in a conjoint fusion. It is exactly here—in explain-
ing the modus operandi of rational beings—that these two must not be
separated. The “experience of having a cat perception of a suitable sort”—
exactly because it is a cognitivly significant experience—at once and con-
currently constitutes the cause of X’s claiming that “The cat is on the mat”
and affords X with a reason for making this claim. In the cognitive experi-
ence of intelligent beings there are not separable regions of causes and of
reasons: one and the same of experience will at once provide for the
ground and for the reason of a belief.
For intelligent beings whose modus operandi is suitably shaped by their
evolutionary heritage, the step from experience to belief is at once causal
AND rational: we hold the belief because of the experience both in the
order of efficient and in the order of final (rational) causation. With crea-
tures such as ourselves experiences of certain sorts are dual-purpose; their
occurrence both causally engenders and rationally justifies the holding of
certain beliefs. Informatively meaningful perceptions and physical stimuli
run together in coordinated unison.

55
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

Intelligent agency brings something new upon nature’s scene in the

course of its own functioning. Consider the following exchanges: Q:
“What causally produced his belief that the cat is on the mat.” A: “He saw
it there.” “Why—for what reason—does he claim that the cat is on the
mat” A: “He saw it there.” His seeing experience is a matter of dual ac-
tion in both modes of causality. Certain sorts of eventuations which are
amphibious because they operate at once and concurrently both in the
realm of natural causes and in the realm of reasons. My perspective ex-
perience of “seeing the cat on the mat” is at once the cause of my belief
and affords my reason for holding that belief. With intelligent agents such
as ourselves, experiences do double-duty as eventuations in nature and as
reasons for belief.
Intelligent agents as amphibians: they operate both in the realm of the
causality of nature and the causality of reason. And for them experiences
such as “cat-on-mat sighting” have a double aspect, able at once to engen-
der and (in view of imprinted practical policies) to justify suitable beliefs.
Accordingly, such intelligent agents are able to have dual-function experi-
ences that at once cause their beliefs and provide the reasons for holding
them.
One recent writer declares:

But while the actual occurrence of happiness or unhappiness, pleasure or

pain, etc., is indeed beyond our control . . . the same does not seem obviously
to hold for our beliefs about such matters. . . . Thus beliefs or judgments . . .
can . . . be arbitrarily manipulated at will, so long as the other elements are
1
appropriately adjusted.

It would thus be contended that, for example, while the actual occurrence
of pain, suffering, disappointment (etc.) may be extra-theoretical, neverthe-
less a person’s awareness of such things is not, but rather lies only in the
area of belief—of mere opinion. The two functions of experience and be-
lief can thus be detached from one another. But this assumption of separa-
bility is deeply problematic.
The fact is that beliefs are concurrently produced AND justified by ex-
periences. My belief that the cat is on the mat need not rest on the further
and different belief that I see it there; it can rest directly and belief imme-
diately on my seeing it. Beliefs, that is to say, do not require a justification
via other beliefs, they can rest directly on appropriate experiences—and do
so concurrently in the modes of. My reason for holding that belief is not
yet another belief but an experience—an experience which from one point

56
 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

of view produces and at the same time considered from another point of
view validates and justifies that belief.
A concretizing particularism of the nominalistic sort (“there are no ab-
stracta”) is totally at odds with process thought. For a concrete process is
always an instantiation or tokening a general process-type. It is axiomatic
in process philosophy that “To be a process is to be a process of a certain
specifiable sort.” And in the setting of a process theory of mind this fun-
damental fact carries us from sporatic cognitive experiences to the abstrac-
tions of information management.

6. COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES

Communication is by nature a process of conveying information. And

information in its turn is by its very nature something general and abstract.
If you are to understand me when I talk about apples, then the words that I
use must apply to your concreta as well as mine. Information transfer
could not take place between us if the concreta of my experience had to
correspond to those of yours. And this means that the instrumentalities by
which the process of communication works must transcend the limits of
their historical foothold.
In matters of communication, subscription to an objective reality, ab-
stractly independent of the historical vagaries of individualized discussion
episodes, is indispensably demanded by any step into the domain of the
publicly accessible objects essential to communal inquiry and interpersonal
communication about a shared world. We could not establish communica-
tive contact about a common objective item of discussion if our discourse
were geared to our own historical activities and our personalized concep-
tions that are bound up with them. The conventionalized intention to take
impersonal objects to be at issue is fundamental because it is overriding—
that is, it overrides all of our other intentions when we enter upon the
communicative venture. Without this conventionalized intention we
should not be able to convey information—or misinformation—to one an-
other about a shared “objective” world that underlies and connects those
historical discourse-activities of ours.
It is thus crucial to the communicative enterprise to take an egocen-
trism-avoiding stance that rejects all claims to a privileged status for our
own conception of things as bound to our own particular historical position
in the world’s processual scheme. If our communicative mechanisms were
inseparably confined to the concrete conditions of their use—to the space

57
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

and the time of their employment—communication would become imprac-

ticable. One could then never advance the issue of the identity of commu-
nicative focus upon a single item of mutual concern past the status of a
more or less well-grounded assumption. And then any so called communi-
cation would no longer be an exchange of information but a tissue of frail
conjectures. The communicative enterprise would become a vast inductive
project—a complex exercise in theory-building, leading tentatively and
provisionally toward something which, in fact, the imputational ground-
work of our language enables us to presuppose from the very outset.2 Only
by using the resources of thought to free our communicative resources
from the spatio-temporal processes of their employment can we manage to
communicate with one another across the reaches of space and time. Sub-
scribing to that fundamental reality postulates can we take the sort of view
of experience, inquiry, and communication that we in fact have. Without
this, the entire conceptual framework of our thinking about the world and
our place within it would come crashing down.
The viability of abstraction as a process that transcends the limits of ex-
periential concreta follows by a transcendental argument from the possibil-
ity of communication—to the “conditions under which alone” communica-
tion is possible. And so, to whatever extent Cicero’s contemporaries can
gain access to his thought via his deeds and his writings, so—in princi-
ple—can we. Communication and information transfer can take place to
the extent—and only to the extent—that we can reach out beyond the his-
torical concreta of our experience to function at a level of processive ab-
straction.

* * *

It is time to summarize. The idea that we can be cognitively trapped

within history by a relativism that tethers us to our time and culture foun-
ders on fundamental considerations of process thought—and in particular
the role of information in the communicative process. When evolution
produces an intelligent social being on the order of homo sapiens, it
thereby brings into existence a creature equipped with the intellectual re-
sources to enter into the realm of communication process in a way that en-
ables it to transcend the historical concreteness of its particular spatiotem-
poral context of existence. In virtue of being the kind of thing it is, such a
creature is no longer “trapped within history.” For if we indeed were so
trapped in the way that a doctrine naive epistemic relativism insist upon,

58
 TRAPPED WITHIN HISTORY

then any and all prospect of communication across the divide of space and
time would be annihilated. To advocate such a position would be to fly in
the face of the realities of the most fundamental aspects of the human con-
dition—the fact that we humans as homo sapiens are a creature that lives
and breathes and has its being within the processually ever-changing set-
ting of a communicative community.3
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1
This objection is raised in Laurence BonJour, "Rescher’s Idealistic Pragmatism,"
The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 39 (1976), pp. 702-26, (see p. 721).
2
The justification of such imputations is treated more fully in Chapter IX of the au-
thor’s Induction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
3
This chapter was originally published under the same title in Process Studies, vol.
29 (2000), pp. 66-76.

59
Chapter 5

CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND

FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL
PERSPECTIVE

1. PRELIMINARIES

T he present deliberations regarding the classic problem of free will un-

fold within the framework of process philosophy. The key thesis, put
into a nutshell, is that the traditionally envisioned philosophical difficulties
of the matter can be averted by the comparatively straightforward device of
viewing nature’s occurrences as actual processes (which ipso facto occupy
intervals of time, albeit perhaps very short ones), while at the same time
considering “acts of will” (choices, decisions, resolutions, and the like) as
process-conclusions an thus as temporally punctiform eventuations which
thereby take on a characteristic life of their own, subject to an agent-
causality of freedom distinct from the causality of nature (to use Kantian
terminology).
First a word about the will and its decisions. Free will is the capacity of
rational agents to make their decisions autonomously in the light of their
own self-engendered desires, projects, and intentions as reflected in their
view regarding the worth or value of things. An agent who has no stance
regarding the value (worth, desirability) of things is unable to act rationally
and is thus not really free. Free decisions are, in the final analysis, driven
not by nature’s causality but by value-geared choices.
A decision is free whenever it is not arrived at under an agent-external
constraint such as hypnosis, threat, undue influence, force majeure, or the
like. Decision involves choice; where there is a decision there must be a
choice between alternatives that are or merely appear to be available. The
paradigm of an act of free will is the product of an “act of decision or
choice” that is the terminus of a course of deliberation. A free decision can
accordingly involve either action or inaction either doing or refraining; it
need not be geared to overt action. One can decide to do nothing and “let
matters take their course.” (To be sure, where inaction is concerned there
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

is no visible difference between the unthinking and wise, be it by choice or

inattention, inaction looks the same either way.)
Next some metaphysics. Two sorts of occurrences or happenings tran-
spire in the world, namely events that are processes which take time, and
eventuations which are instantaneous.
Eventuations are terminations (completions) rather than parts of na-
ture’s processes. The running of a race is an event (as are its various part,
such as running the first half of the race). Completing the race is an even-
tuation. Such eventuations are endings or culminations. And not only “all
good things come to an end” but most any process, be it good or bad, come
to a completion. Even as the race ends when it is won (or lost), so the task
ends when it is completed (or abandoned). And the ending of a process is
no more a part of that process than is that the period that makes the end of
a sentence is a part of the sentence. It is something else again, something
outside, something above and beyond—the ending of a process of choos-
ing or deliberating. It is an occurrence of a different order that is not part
of the flow of causality which delineates nature’s processes. All constitu-
ents of the process of deciding antedate the choice or decision that marks
its completion, but its eventuation is not itself part of the process.
The crux of our present analysis is that acts of will are mental eventua-
tions that mark the completion of a process of which they do note consti-
tute a part (any more than its terminating period is part of a sentence or
statement). Deliberating—the process of making a decision—is indeed
just that, a process. But the decision itself and the “act of will” it repre-
sents is an arrival rather than a transit, a finish or completion rather than a
running of the race. The deliberation that issues in a decision is a temporal
process but culminating decision itself is effectively instantaneous. Striv-
ing to remember is an activity, a process; but remembering as such is not.
Thus thinking about Caesar’s conquest of Gaul is an activity, a process, but
remembering that Caesar conquered Gaul is not. And even so, while trying
to decide whether or not to take an umbrella and deliberating about the
matter is indeed a process, the actual ultimate decision itself is not. All
such terminations of a process are not themselves processes. And this sort
of termination—a decision or choice geared to action or inaction—is just
exactly what an “act of will” in fact is. It is a completion rather than a per-
formance: an eventuation rather than an event.
This salient bit of metaphysics is crucial for the present deliberations. It
has important implications that natural science and its works deal with the
world’s processes and events, whereas decisions and choices are, by con-

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

trast, matters of agent causation where it is eventuations and not events that
are at issue. And this difference has large consequences. For just here lies
the core of the presently proposed conception of free will. Its basis is the
idea that acts of will—decisions, choices, resolutions, etc.—are not proc-
esses of nature; they are hyper- or supra- (though emphatically not super-)
natural thought eventuations or terminations rather than natural events. As
such they need not be governed by the laws of nature. (Indeed they are of-
ten not subject to any contingent universal regularities at all.) Even as
points belong to a line but do not constituted parts (that is, segments) of it,
so acts of will fall within the order of nature history but do not constitute
parts of it.
It might seem at first glance that the present approach to freedom rests
on a problematic distinction between completions/eventuations as “matters
of human contrivance” and events as “natural processes.” But what is at
issue in this terminology is more of a conceptual distinction than an onto-
logical classification.1 For man after all is a part of nature and his contriv-
ances are devices that characterize the modus operandi of a nature-
encompassed and nature-evolved being. And since our reason is nature-
encompassed we have to recognize that the “causality of nature” and the
“causality of reason” are duly coordinated within a shared wider naturalis-
tic framework. After all, distinction is not separation. The object of the ex-
ercise must be to make room for free will without imposing a radical dual-
ism on reality.

2. FREE DECISION

But just how does “freedom” come into it? What sort of work is this
idea to do for us?
Well before it is profitable to raise the question “Is the doctrine of free
will true” it is necessary to resolve the prior question: Just what does this
doctrine maintain: just what does it mean to say that people have free will?
We shall suppose that two points are primarily at issue here:

• A decision that someone makes freely inaugurates a chain of events

for which—taken as a whole—that decision becomes explanatorily
necessary, so that this chain of events could neither be nor be ac-
counted for but for the decision. Accordingly, when a free decision is
made at some juncture X there will be some post-X occurring event
that cannot possibly be explained properly (i.e., causally accounted

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

for) on the basis of the pre-X situation. The causal flow of natural
occurrence is interrupted by X. Nevertheless—

• That free decision is itself nowise the causally necessitated product

of anterior impersonal eventuations and is thus not a part of the flow
of the “causality of nature.” No finite set of prior events constrains or
lawfully produces the eventuation at issue.

Decisions do indeed emerge from courses of deliberation but they do so

by rational rather than efficient causation. And this means that the particu-
lar way in which they eventuate, while indeed influenced and canalized by
these deliberation events, do not supervene upon them in a deterministic
manner. Acts of free will (or choices) are spontaneous eventuations. They
represent outcomes (conclusion, terminations) of processes of choice and
deliberation that are not rendered actual (let alone inevitable) by the lawful
determinations of nature’s causality. The outcome of most courses of de-
liberation may be predictable—but only probabilistically and not unfail-
ingly so: The outcome of a free decision, however probable—is not inevi-
table as rendered a product of the operation of nature’s lawful order.

3. FREE WILL IS COMPATIBILISM WITH CAUSALITY

The problem of reconciling free will with the Principle of Causality

with free will arise at this point. How is this to work out?
Two considerations are basic here:

• There are acts of free will: acts of choice between different alterna-
tives whose outcome is not predictively determinable in advance
under the aegis of causal laws.

• Every natural occurrence in the world is caused and in-principle an-

tecedently predictable under the aegis of natural laws (Principle of
Causality).

Despite their seeming contrariety these theses can be reconciled. Thus

consider the following picture which envisions an act of choice X between
two alternatives, (1) and (2), determining (by decision rather than efficient
causation) which alternative (1) or (2) is to ensue.

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

(1)

Event E
X
(2)

Now let it be that (1) is chosen. Note that the occurrence of event E
(and indeed every decision-subsequent event) is in principle law-
determinately predictable from prior events some of which till, however,
have to be posterior to X. And so on this basis both principles (I) and (II)
are honored—not withstanding which free decision at X. (It need not, how-
ever, be predictable from the event junctures prior to X.
What is not law-determinately predictable antecedently to X is what will
happen subsequently. Given the nature of the choice situation “How
choice X will eventuate” is not predictively determinable in advance of the
fact. But then “X’s eventuating (1)-wise” or “X’s eventuation (2)-wise” are
not events and do not issue from any contemporaneously accessible de-
scriptive state of things. So principle (II) is nowise compromised by this
condition of affairs. No free decision is explicable via natural laws as the
causal product of previous eventuations—in the lawful order of natural
causation free decisions (“acts of will”) stand aside and apart. No set of
events antecedent to that decision renders that act lawfully inevitable. It is
not the causally inevitable outcome of choice-antecedent events.
Acts of free will thus do not invoke violations of the Principle of Cau-
sality at issue with (II). And the preceding way of arguing the compatibil-
ity of free will with Principle of Causality means that a free decision need
never itself enter into the causal explanation of any one of its so-called
consequences among the world’s occurrences.
To reemphasize, then, a free decision is not part of the fabric of causal-
ity. It is not rendered antecedently inevitable by any finite series of events.
All that II demands is prediction-determonstrability from some antecedent
prior juncture. Advance predictability from every prior juncture is some-
thing very different, something that envisions the fatalistic forever predic-
termination of the block universe. (This would indeed be incompatible
with the freedom of the will and to take this line is not to envision com-
patibilism but to abolish it.)
As seen from the perspective of these deliberations, acts of free will are
not so much causality-suspensive breaches in the causal order of things as
discontinuties within it. They mark causal singularities across which pre-

65
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

dictability breaks down: Some X-dependent consequences are impredict-

able event from complete information about any X-antecedent state of
things. But such impredictability is highly conditionalized and is nowise at
odds with the prospect of lawful predictability as such.
Courses of deliberation lead to but do not constrain to the choice-
eventuation that results. They are like equivocal texts—they underdeter-
mine outcomes. With an equivocal text only we can say is “With interpre-
tation #1 these obtains such-and-such a situation in that domain of meaning
and with interpretation #2 you have such-and-such a different situation.”
But of course there is an important different. With texts both readings
could in principle be correct; with choice only one can ever be actualized.
But here reality is more narrow-minded than textuality.

4. FREE WILL AND PREDETERMINATION

Many people think that once all natural events are taken as parts of the
causal order of things the game is over as far as a predeterministic fatalism
is concerned. For—so they reason—if every act or mine is the current
product of earlier conditions, then everything I do was causality fore-
ordained even prior to my birth. But such reasoning is quite fallacious. It
overlooks the idea of backwards convergence as illustrated in the following
diagram

X t3 t2 t1 O

Consider an occurrence at point O. Let it be the causal product of circum-

stances obtaining at time t1 halfway between O and X. And let this circum-
stance in turn be the causal product of circumstance prevailing at time t2
located halfway between t1 and X. And then let this in turn be the causal
product of circumstance prevailing at time t3 located halfway between t2
and X. And so on ad infinitum. Then clearly every such occurrence—
every single one—will be the causal product of earlier conditions and cir-
cumstances while nevertheless nothing in this causal chain can be traced
back antecedently to X. And this is the crucial point. The earlier course of
development subsequent to X, taken as a whole, could not be explained on
the basis of the history of things prior to X. That act of will is a turning
point that does not itself emerge from the “causality of nature” alone. That
course of development ensuing upon a choice at X is such that, while any

66
 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

one of its individual members will be explainable without reference to X,

nevertheless the aggregate totality of its individual member (i.e., that
course as a whole) will not be so. For nothing about the situation prior to
X is decisive one way of another with regard to this course-as-a-whole.
If genuinely free, a decision itself will not be pre-determined—causally
constrained in advance of the fact. For any ∈, no matter how small, the
eventuation of a decision X at t0 will not be constrained by and derivable
from any body of relevant information relating to the state of the world at
t-∈.
Would this situation cause a rent in the world’s causal order. Would it
mean that any natural occurrence apart from X itself and its causal conse-
quences need be exempt from antecedent causal necessitation and predict-
ability? By no means. All that it means is that those later, X-at-t0 depend-
able later consequences are unpredictable antecedently to X’s realization
at t0; it does not mean that they are unpredictable antecedently to them-
selves. (Our earlier illustration makes this manifest.)
On this basis of an “act of will”—a decision or resolution—occurring at
some specific juncture X can be such that every one of its subsequent
causal consequences can and will fall subject to the Principle of Causality
while nevertheless none of them have a causal history that carries back to
times earlier than the decision itself. For no free decision is explicable via
natural laws as the causal product of previous events.
Free acts are causal singularities. They are rents in the causal fabric.
They divide some course of casual process into causally unbridgeable be-
fore and after.
A free action is thus one that issues from a free decision or resolution
and thereby has no causally sufficient chain of antecedence that traces back
to a time prior to that decision itself. Free decisions can thus be seen as
turning points in the world’s nature through shifting that course of natural
development from moving in one direction to moving in another. But while
an “act of free will” itself constitutes a regularity or rent in the causal
stream—an eventuation that stands apart from it—every subsequent result-
ing natural occurrence nevertheless remains explicable on causal princi-
ples. No single natural event in the series of consequences of an act of will
indispensably requires recourse to that act of will for its causal explana-
tion.
Even when an “act of will” occurs at X to initiate some caused chain of
consequences then the Principle of (Natural) Causality continues in opera-
tion with the effect that every occurrence in the sequence of nature’s sub-

67
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

sequent processual developments would be causally explicable with refer-

ence to some prior events.
Only if we want to push our understanding of events beyond the level of
sheer causality to achieve an understanding of the entire course of occur-
rences need that act of free choice ever be invoked in the explanation of
events.

5. THE ECCENTRICITY OF AGENT CAUSALITY

Decisions accordingly can serve to explain actions. But such explana-

tions function in the order of agency and not in the order of impersonal na-
ture. When they come into operation we have an instance of what is gen-
erally called agent causality in contrast to efficient causality of nature. And
what is at issue here is a very different and distinctive mode of “causality.”
For acts of choice always involve personal agents. Those choices do not
just happen; they are made by someone. Accordingly, such agent causality
differs significantly from the standard causality of nature. The latter func-
tions via causal laws; the former is an artifact of thought and reason.
And what is crucial here is the fact that there are no empirical universal
laws of agent causality. With nature one has event-determining laws such
as “Whenever blue litmus paper is immersed in acid it turns red.” But there
are no analogous laws of the format “Whenever the individual P decides to
do A, then . . .” Certain types of natural event ensue universally upon other.
Nothing will ensure universally upon a type of decision. While certainly
not detailed for the course of natural events, decisions do not form points
of the lawful order that prevails there.
The position here is that the causality of nature deals with events and
processes and relates to them alone, whereas instantaneous eventuations
are always matters of human contrivance—the products of thought and its
proceedings and perspectives. Such eventuations are not part of causality’s
flow of natural events; they are, as it were, editorial comments upon them
issued from the sideline by mind-equipped observers. And this is beto-
kened by the consideration that there are no universal empirical generaliza-
tions obtain with respect to instantaneous eventuations. Natural processes
are governed by the contingent laws of nature that relate events, while
eventuations are something else again. Something which, as such, lies out-
side nature’s lawful order.

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

6. THE HUME-EDWARDS DIMENSION

But there now looms a problem. “How can reference to the agent cau-
sality of a decision occurring at X possibly accomplish anything at all if
every X-ensuing post-X event is naturalistically explicable without refer-
ence to that decision itself.?”
In addressing this question, it is crucial once more to draw—now with
respect to explication in specific—the crucial distinction between the dis-
tributive reading of each and every on the one hand, and or the other the
collective reading of all and totally on the other. Specifically we must dis-
tinguish between

• For each and any X-ensuing post-X occurrence there is an explana-

tion that dispenses with X-reference.

• There is an explanation for all post-X occurrence that dispenses with

X-reference.

The former thesis has the structure (∀e)(∃f) - - - while the latter has the
structure (∃f)(∀e) - - -. The former accordingly has a distributive and scat-
tered perspective, the latter has a unitary and holistic one. And while the
former, distributive thesis may be true, the latter, collective thesis is decid-
edly not so.
To be sure, a tempting way of addressing holistically global issues is to
reject them as such, and instead take the deflationary route of dividing
them by disaggregation into their local components. Accordingly there are
theorists who dismiss collectively global issues as such, and insist that all
we can ever meaningfully address are the destributively disaggregated mat-
ters regarding the various particular constituents of the whole at issue.
Such theorists advocate the philosophical doctrine of what has come to be
called the Hume-Edwards thesis that, when the existence (or the nature) of
every member of a set is explained, then the existence (or nature) of the en-
tire set is thereby explained.2
But this otherwise tempting tactic has its problems. After all, to explain
the existence of the bricks is not automatically to achieve an explanation of
the wall, seeing that this would call not just for explaining those bricks dis-
tributively but their collectively coordinated co-presence in the structure at
issue. Only by looking to the aggregate coordination of those bricks can we
put onto the agenda the wall that they collectively constitute. In explaining

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

the existence of the parts we do not as yet explain the existence of the
whole. The existence of the camels does not account for the existence of
the caravan. And to explain the existence of the spouses is not automati-
cally to achieve an explanation of the marital couple. In all such cases ho-
listic explanation calls not just for explaining these participants distribu-
tively but their collectively coordinated co-presence within the unifying
structure at issue.
Consider the following two claims:

• If the existence of every member of a team is explained, the exis-

tence of that team is thereby explained.

• If the existence of each member of a criminal gang is explained, the

existence of that criminal gang is thereby explained.

Both of these claims seem clearly false as they stand. One the other hand,
contrast these two theses with the following cognate revisions:

• If the existence of every member of a team as a member of that par-

ticular team is explained, then the existence of that team is thereby
explained.

• If the existence of every member of a criminal gang as a member of

that particular criminal gang is explained, then the existence of that
criminal gang is thereby explained.

Both of these theses are indeed true—but only subject to that added quali-
fication. For only by explicitly inserting the issue of holistic collectivity
into that distributive proliferation at hand would the Hume-Edwards thesis
be made tenable. But it is exactly that collectivization that the theory is
designed to resist—to its own decided detriment when holistic matters are
at issue, as is presently the case with these course of causality that free de-
cision inaugurate.
The salient point here—a point crucial for the utility of agent causal-
ity—is this: With regard to nature’s events as such, the natural domain is
indeed explanatorily closed: each of its events in principle admits of a
natural explanation that dispenses with a resource to agent causality. But
viewed holistically with the course of its occurrences viewed overall and as
a whole, this domain of natural occurrence cannot be properly explained

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

and understood without bringing agent causality into it. And so the differ-
ence between the distributive and individualized and the holistic and col-
lectivized perspectives is absolutely crucial here. For while the world’s dis-
tributively individualized events can be explained individually on the basis
of the causality of nature alone nevertheless experiencing the overall
course of its occurrences will (in some cases at least) demands a holistic
approach in which the business of agent causality becomes critical because
a proper understanding of occurrence requires us to deal with will-
governed eventuations as well as natural events.

7. BUT WHAT OF THAT DECISION (THAT “ACT OF WILL”)

ITSELF?

But what about the particular occurrence at issue with that “act of deci-
sion” itself—that thought-determination at X which inaugurated that entire
sequence? Does this act itself not violate the Principle of Causality
(which—for argument’s and discussion’s sake we here treat as sacred—
that all occurrences in nature admit of a causal explanation in terms of
prior antecedents?
Not really—thanks to our policy of excluding “acts of will” themselves
from qualifying as natural events.
But does it really make sense to exclude them in this way? An important
point arises here. To distinguish is not necessarily to separate. And cer-
tainly not in the present case of the distinction between nature-causality
and agent “causality.” Agents, after all, exist and act within nature. It is
just that this characteristic (free-decision ensuing) doings are doings of a
somehow different and distinctive sort. Agents are not extra-natural or su-
per-natural, let alone un-natural, but (if a control were really needed) supra
natural by way of insisting a bit beyond ordinary, run-of-the-mill nature.
For, to reemphasize, the present approach sees these “acts of will” as even-
tuations that are indeed IN but not OF the domain of nature’s processes.
If we think of X as a choice-point, we can say that it deflects the course
of natural occurrence (of causal eventuation) from one direction to another.
But it does not violate the Principle of Causality—viz., that every natural
event has a prior cause and so subject to causal exception in their time. For
natural events, as here regarded, are always processes that require some
timespan, however brief, for their realization. Our choices and decision in-
terrupt the flow of natural occurrence like single points deleted from a con-
tinuous line. And this circumstance frees decision from the grip of ordinary

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

causality. Causality relates to natural processes—to time intervals—and

information about such interval is never determinative with respect to the
points that they contain. Intervals are ruled by mathematical integrals—by
sums and averages; their individual points go unconstrained.
On such a view, an “act of choice” takes place within the realm of phys-
ico-natural causality—it transpires on the world stage alright—but is not it-
self part of the manifold of nature’s causality. In our quasi-technical ter-
minology, that “act of will” is an occurrence on the world stage alright, but
it is not of nature’s law governed flow of events. Like the background mu-
sic of a performance it is not part of the action—thought doubtless attuned
to and consonant with it. (Or again, like the terminating period it is not part
of the sentence or statement whose completion it betokens.)

8. A DIFFICULTY

It must be stressed that the preceding analysis deals only with the issue
of how free acts are to be conceived of. It addresses the question of what
free acts and free choices are. The question of whether this or that particu-
lar act is free—or indeed even the question of whether there are any free
acts at all—is left open.
But what is not left open is how this idea figures functionally in the
conceptual scheme we standardly use in thinking and telling about human
agency. Our entire conceptual operations in this area is committed to the
idea that we—and our fellows—are free agents.
Is this pre- or sub-scientific view of things compatible with what we
know of brain physiology?
It is clear that how our decisions get made makes a difference to the
course of natural events. How, then, can they stand apart from nature
given mind’s dependence on the operations of the brain. If all natural
processes are causality pre-determined via nature’s laws and conditions
then this is something that will hold for our brain activities as well. Will
this not thereby hold good for all of the occurrences that issue from their
operations, choices and decisions included.
This is how it may seem. But here, as elsewhere, appearances are de-
ceiving. For the fact of it is that there need be no determinative one-to-one
connection between the nature-bound events that represent the activities of
the brain and the instantaneous decisional eventuations of the mind that is-
sue—holistically—from its operations. For if the present perspective holds
good, the sum-total of physiological brain-states is psychologically under-

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

determinative in relation to mental acts. For what we characterize as acts of

will are, in effect, editorializations superimposed by minds on the flow of
causality. And this no more fixes in place a unique psychological result
than a written text, no matter how elaborate, constrains its own interpreta-
tion. A particular decisional issue-resolution is something literally super-
added by an active human mind to the workings of a functioning human
brain. The range of opportunity at issue is doubtless limited (even as is the
case with the interpretation of an earlier analogy). But it is not uniquely
and decisively fixed. To some extent, though within limits—and these
limits may be very extensive—the mind is independent and autonomous of
the brain in relation to our so-called “acts of will.”
Thus regarded, the coupling of mind to brain is to some extent not tight
but loose akin to the relation between the wording of a text and its mean-
ing. Abandoning the idea of total mind-on-brain supervenience is the price
one must pay for an adequate theory of free will. But while this is indeed a
price, nevertheless it does not unravel nature’s order of lawful causality
and does not render any occurrence in the realm of brain events inexplica-
ble, because that just isn’t the sort of thing that decisions and choices are.
As Thomas Aquinas said, reason is the root of freedom. So which
would you rather have: the causal exceptionalism of an autonomous order
of reasons or an all-encompassing order of natural causality that subordi-
nates reason to nature (i.e., “naturalized-reason”). You pay your money
and take your choice. But, contrary to widespread belief, there really is a
choice here—freedom once more comes onto the scene. And it is a choice
that our scientific considerations regarding the causally of nature’s proc-
esses cannot settle one way or the other.
Yet there is a wider range of considerations at work that prevent the
choice from being arbitrary. For what blocks its being so is morality—
seeing that, as Kant already stressed, moral responsibility as we know it
presupposes freedom of the will. After all, we do—or should—insist on
being seen by others—and by reciprocity are prepared to see them—as free
responsible agents. Enmeshment in the moral point of view is a formative
aspect of the human condition. And the endorsement of free will—at
whatever the price—is accordingly something pretty much inevitable for
us if we are to qualify as the sorts of beings we think ourselves to be.
It is instructive to compare the present approach with that of White-
head’s Process and Reality. With Whitehead, if there were only being
(concretized events) everything would be causally determined by the
world’s past history; only becoming (processual concrescence) can open

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

the door to a freedom which, while subject to causal influence, is not ruled
by the causal determinism of a block universe. So in a way the present
treatment, while analogous to that of Whitehead, inverts his approach. For
him freedom is a factor operating within the framework of broadly con-
strued. For us it pivots on a Kant-reminiscent distinction between a law-
governed and largely deterministic causality of nature and an autono-
mously indeterministic causality of nature encompassed agency. In the
end the same result is achieved by different means, in the one case by a di-
versification that amplifies the range of natural causality, and in the other
by dividing causality at large into the impersonally natural and the agent-
driven.

* * *

Postscript. Philosophical problems are generally resolved by drawing

distinctions. And the problem of free will is no exception. The cognitive
knots that entangle this particular philosophical problem-situation are un-
raveled by means of such distinctions as

free vs constrained actions

events vs. eventuations

natural vs. hypernatural occurrences and processes

agent causality vs. causality of nature

influence vs necessitation (or supervenient determination)

distributive vs collective explanations of existence and occurrence

And to the reader who is dissatisfied with the particular proposed problem
resolution that have been canvassed here we can at least offer a comforting
assurance that there is some set of viable distinctions that will in the end so
functions as to accomplish the job at issue. The difference between free
and constrained action is simply too basic and portentous to elude the reach
of any and all distinctions.3

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 CAUSAL NECESSITATION AND FREE WILL IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1
On issues of conceptual perspectives vs. ontological clarifications see also the au-
thor’s Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
2
On this principle in its relation to the cosmological aspect for the existence of God
see William L. Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity 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. 43 (1988), pp. 149-65.
3
This chapter was originally published under the same title in Process Studies, vol.
35 (2006).

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Chapter 6

KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL
PERSPECTIVE

1. A PROCESSUAL VIEW OF COGNITION

A processual view of cognition is very much in order. For the reality of

it is that the knowledge which rational inquiry delivers into our hands
is nothing fixed irreversible and categorically certain. Our knowledge is
putative knowledge. Insofar as it is substantially informative (rather than
vague or infinitely insignificant like “Rhode Island is larger than Peoria, Il-
linois”) it is not certain and irrefragable but fragile and fallibilistic. Con-
sider the following apory:

(1) Induction (and scientific method in general) does not yield absolute
(cast-iron, irreversible) certainty.

(2) Anything that qualifies as knowledge must be established with ab-

solute certainty.

(3) Science (i.e. the product of induction and scientific method) yields
knowledge.

This is a logically inconsistent triad. Something has to give.

As long as we are being reasonable about it, we cannot abandon (1).
There thus remains a choice. We can adopt a modestly fallibilistic (i.e.,
pragmatic) view of knowledge, and in its wake abandon (2). Or we can
hold on to a hyperbolic view of knowledge, thus being science-sceptics and
thereby abandon (3).
The best prospect here is clearly to abandon (2), and accept a defeasi-
bilistic view of knowledge. Accordingly, it seems a contradiction in terms
to say “I know that p, but realize that p is not absolutely certain.” But what
is actually at issue here is “I take myself to know that p, but realize the p is
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

not absolutely certain.” And this more accurate claim is unproblematic, and
the first being simply a megalomaniacal reconstruction of it. The crux, in
sum, lies in an unrealistic construal of what is at issue with human knowl-
edge.
This in effect is the view of knowledge that various pragmatists have
urged since the days of C. S. Peirce—that at the level of maximal exact-
ness and detail, knowledge, as we have it, is provisional and that not only
its constitution but also its contextual constitution is provision and devel-
opmental.

2. CONCEPTUAL INNOVATION

Conceptual innovation manifests itself by way (1) of novelty in regard

to new items by which to express the related ideas and experiences, and (2)
of new truths through which the relevant items are specified. It involves an
expansion on the side both of what can be said at all, what is being said as
(presumptively) true. Accordingly, a new concept open the door not only
to new information—to a new body of (presumptive) truths that can be as-
serted by its means but also to new speculation—to a new body of possi-
bilities that can be acknowledged by its means. Conceptual innovation
enlarges the realm of contemplatable possibilities.
The realm of possibility is coordinate with the conceptual machinery
available for its expression. A possible state of affairs will and must find
its expression in terms of some correlative set of concepts.
While concepts serve to determine possibilities, those concepts them-
selves are not subject to possibilistic qualification. The only possible con-
cepts are the actual concepts that are in fact available. To be sure, once a
concept manifold is given—ours for example—we can contemplate possi-
ble additions to this manifold, actually available concepts that could be
added through supplementation or revision.
What is new about a “new concept” is not the concept as such (which is
by nature something extra-temporal) but its availability to people on whose
inventory of concepts it had not previously figured. It is access to the con-
cept by certain users that is at issue in conceptual innovation, not the con-
cept itself which, as such, is timeless.
Caesar did not have the concept of radioactivity; we do. When a new
concept comes upon the scene, is it found or created? Historically there
are three positions on the subject:

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 KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

• Platonism. Concepts are timeless or (better) extra temporal. They

function in a realm of their own, outside the sphere of human knowl-
edge. They are abstracta that function apart from the natural world’s
concreta. When people supposedly “new” concepts upon the stage of
human cognition bring these are found rather than created.

• Nominalism. Concepts are human artifacts. They are coordinate

with the linguistic practices that give them embodiment. New con-
cepts (like new words or new thought) are made; they do not merely
uncover something preexistent. Like other human artifacts, concepts
have a natural history.

• Conceptualism. Concepts are neither mere human artifacts nor time-

less platonic objects subsisting in an extra-temporal realm of their
own. And new concepts are neither datable inventions nor discover-
ies of preexistences. They are emergent abstractions: timeless, or
better extra-temporal realities that undergo a phase change to avail-
ability when people “discover” them. Being timeless, they do not
have a reality (or quasi-reality) that predates their. (Possibility is not
a shadowy quasi-actuality of some sort.) When a “new concept”
comes upon the scene it is neither made (created) nor found (revis-
ited) but born (i.e., transmuted into actuality).

Concepts project (and we coordinate with) a realm of possibility. The

manifold of available concepts spans out its coordinate domain of possibil-
ity.
The inventory of concepts available to a mind sets a horizon to the
manifold of specific possibilities that that mind can contemplate.
There are two sorts of cognitive horizons: that of accessible truth (or
knowledge), and that of possibility (of conceivability).
In both cases there will be the distinction between the real (the actually
realizable) and the ideal (which would be available in absolutely idealized
conditions). In the one case we have the realm of truth as such, and in the
other the realm of possibility. But in neither case can we actually get there
from here. The reality of it is that our truth is never more than our bet (but
potentially imperfect) estimate of the truth, and that our possibility is no
more than an imperfectly envisioned sector of the realm of actual possibil-
ity.

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

Of course we can never secure a detailed view of the relation of our

truth to the truth. (“Tell me what is true independently of and without ref-
erence to what you think to be true” is an unrealizable request.) All we can
ever do is to scrutinize the processes by which our view of the truth is
formed and come to realize their inherent imperfections.
And the same sort of story holds on the side of possibility as well. The
realm of possibility as such extends beyond the limits of the us-
envisionable. But we ourselves cannot of course say where and how it so
extends. Realizing our limitations (at the level of generality, not detail) we
can say that it extends further. But it remains an inaccessible idealization
with which we can deal only at the level of generality. We realize that
possibilities, like facts, outrun the limits of our cognitive vision. But we
cannot say where and how they do so.
We can, of course, compare the present with the past. We can say in
detail that this or that item that lay outside our ken. But neither can we
compare the present with as-yet unrealized future, nor can we compare that
future to an idealization that lies yet further beyond it.
We realize full well that there is a process of cognitive advance in re-
gard to the realization both of truths and of possibilities. But we can never
get a full vision of what lies there. In cognitive as in terrestrial progress
the horizon always recedes before us.

3. ARE ANALYTICAL TRUTHS IMPERVIOUS TO CHANGE?

To verify the truth of some propositions it suffices to investigate how

language (broadly construed to encompass symbolic systems in general) is
actually used. To establish that “All forks have tynes” we would not go
forth into the world to examine the forks in our kitchen drawer or in the
cutlery department of department stores to determine that they all had
tynes. This sort of thing would be unnecessary and indeed stupid. It suf-
fices to attend to how language is used. We would not call something a
fork that did not have tynes. The ground-rules of language use suffice, any
further empirical inquiry is entirely otiose. And this sort of thing is of
wide currency. Take “A patch that looks green cannot also (concurrently)
look red.” Again we need not go about inspecting leaves and blades of
grass. Language alone does the job. We would not call something green
that we chose to call red.
There are accordingly two fundamentally different types of truths: ana-
lytic and synthetic. The latter, the synthetic, find their validating basis in

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 KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

the way things work in the world. “Dogs have ears” is one example. To
verify such a contention we have to investigate how matters stand in na-
ture—we have to go forth and look at dogs. The former, analytic truths,
are exemplified by “Knives have blades.” To verify such a truth we need
not consult nature; it suffices to investigate how words and concepts work.
It is a matter of examining usage and custom with respect to the use of lan-
guage in communication. The crux is that one would not—and properly
could not—call something a knife (a whole, unbroken knife) that did not
have a blade. In sum, what we must investigate here is not nature but in-
vention—not how nature works but how words and concepts get used by
people. Here custom and convention is the crux—not natural reality as
such.
Those truths for whose ascertainment the investigation of language use
suffices and which require no further observational inquiry into how mat-
ters stand in the world can be characterized as analytic. And those with
which more would be needed are synthetic.
Are the truths which are analytic in the presently specified sense thereby
also necessary? It all depends.
There is nothing necessary about how we use language: the facts of lan-
guage use are every bit as contingent as those of chemistry and physics,
and indeed even more so. For language is a human artifact whose proc-
esses are at our disposal, as those of physics and chemistry are not. Hoe
we use language is clearly a contingent business.
But—and this is the important thing—once our linguistic modus oper-
andi is settled and the rules and customs governing language use are in
place, there is no further contingency to those analytic propositions. At
that point, then truth-status is settled. And so they are minded condition-
ally necessary—that is, necessary subject to the established conditions of
language use. Language is indeed conventional, but once those conven-
tions are fixed various (individual) necessities ensue. That we use “cat”
and “dog” as we do is a matter of totally contingent convention. But once
this is settled along the existing lines it becomes (conditionally) necessary
that cats cannot be dogs. For while it indeed is altogether contingent that
the words “dog” and “cat” mean what they do in English—that dog is the
kind of critter that barks and a cat the kind of critter that miaus—the point
is that once those contingent and conventions that characterize usage are in
place there is no further contingency to such propositions as “Dogs differ
from cats.” It is not that analytic propositions are totally freed from contin-
gency, but just that no further contingency is invoked above what is in-

81
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

volved with the contingencies at issue with linguistic/conceptual practices

and customs.
In sum, analytic truths are indeed necessary, albeit only byway of being
conditionally necessary subject to the prevailing “rules of the game” at is-
sue with language use.
Having dealt with the two key distinctions of analytic/synthetic and
necessary/contingent we come next to that of a priori/a posteriori. The
former is traditionally construed as a matter of being establishable “inde-
pendently of experience” and the latter, by contrast, as requiring experien-
tial findings for their establishment. To establish an analytic truth one must
investigate not nature as such, but rather the size of the lines of reference
that we employ as its characterization.

4. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN AN ERA OF SURFEIT

It is by now a trite observation that the volume of available information

has in recent times been growing at an exponential rate. More scientific
papers have been published during the last generation than over the entire
course of previous history. The library of Alexandra, founded by Ptolemy I
in the third century B. C. with the intention of collecting together copies of
all extract writing on every imaginable subject, is estimated to have accu-
mulated some 500,000 scrolls in its hey-day. By contrast the Library of
Congress now has some 30,000,000 books and similar printed items and is
increasing its holding at a rate of some 400,000 items annually. Currently,
some 40,000 scientific journals publish come 800,000 new papers each
year. The annual output of the Shakespeare industry far exceeds the scale
of the collected works of the Bard of Avon. We are being deluged by a
flood of information reminiscent of the fable of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.1
Admittedly, information—actual knowledge, but includes much chaff
beside its wheat. So let us accept the plausible proposal that knowledge is
propositional merely to the logarithm of information. Then our actual
knowledge has less than doubled since the days of antiquity—rather than
increased by a sizable multiple. (Of course here we look to plain work-day
knowledge of basic fact, rather than solely to the specifically scientific
where the situation is indeed greatly magnified.)
It is obvious that the explosion of information has been accompanied by
a corresponding growth in the information-manipulation institutions of our
culture: its libraries, universities, publishers, research institutes, and so on.
It has witnessed the balkanization of the domain of luring into a vast pro-

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 KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

liferation of displaces, fields, and specialties under the imprint of speciali-

zation and division of labor. And it has sent the proliferation of works of
information compression: textbooks, encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionar-
ies, and the like. However our interest here will focus specifically on its
import upon individuals. The salient consequences at issue here include:

• Cognitive impoverishment. Faced by the mass of available informa-

tion, the individual knower is like an ant before a haystack. Wrap-
ping one’s mind around that plethora of information is an effective
impossibility.

• Ever-narrowing specialization. This arises are every field of cogni-

tive endeavor people’s area of expertise shrinks to ever smaller sec-
tors of the overall field.

• Inescapable superficiality. There are only so many hours in a work-

day, in a workyear, in a worklife. Irrespective of one’s field of spe-
cialization an individual confronts an increasingly less imaginable
volume of relevant information that demonstrates the range of exper-
tise and enhances that of vague comprehension.

• Apprenticeship elongation. The timespan of education that marks the

transit to the frontier of knowledge is ever-growing. The training
process is ongoingly elongated thanks to the lengthening route to the
research frontier. In part this can be offset by—

• Diminished autonomy. Many problems require crossing the bounda-

ries of specialization. They call for collaboration and teamwork in
ways that curtail the independences of individual investigators.
Problems spill amass the limited boundaries of individuals expertise.

• Cognitive Distancing—not only between different specialists in a

stance field but in particular between the consumers and produces of
knowledge. Creating at the frontier of research requires an extent of
information that far exceed that requisite for a passive understanding
of the issues.

• Contracting colleagueship. As subspecialties and problem-areas

contract ever more narrowly, the propositional significance of an in-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

dividual’s research contributions becomes ever smaller. The result is

an increasing isolation enjoined by a narrowing orbit of colleague-
ship.

• Problematic Quality Control. With contracting colleagueship there

are fewer gatekeepers. And less intensive discrimination between
sheep and goats make fraud and cheating easier and more tempting.

These considerations combine to make a significant general point. The

characteristic difficulties of modern knowledge management in general and
scientific inquiry in particular have not arisen through the sociological drift
of fashion but rather are the products of one single driving mechanism—
the explosion of information under conditions of exponential growth.
A process of effectively Malthusian propositions is at work. The ability
of individuals to transmute information into knowledge no doubt in-
creases—but it does so at an at best linear rate. Yet the volume of informa-
tion that must be managed and exploited has been growing exponentially.
And the inevitable result is a discrepancy that requires an inevitable but
also inevitably painful accommodation. Adjust we must.
Of course neither with information nor anything else in this world—
possibly exempting the universe itself—can exponential growth continue
indefinitely. But the damage is done; in the present instance, at least, there
is no reason to think that the state of things it has created is not here to
stay.
People often think that internet search engines have brought the prob-
lem of contemporary information management under control. They see
such search engines as the solution. But they are in fact emblematic of the
problem.
To draw knowledge out of information we need to make a qualitative
assessment which growing quantity makes ever more difficult. To get
state-of-the-art knowledge on a single Shakespearean play is now more dif-
ficult than getting it on the whole corpus was fifty years ago. A hundred
years ago someone could learn all the physics there was. Today he could-
n't manage it with physical cosmology. The person doesn't live who can
get atop of the whole field of Kantian studies today—Kant himself couldn't
manage it. Google any one of thee topics and you will find that there is
neither the time nor the inclination to examine, analyze, evaluated, synthe-
size.

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 KNOWLEDGE IN PROCESSUAL PERSPECTIVE

And just this is the case. Turning all that information into examined,
analyzed, evaluated, categorized, coordinated knowledge is an increasingly
impracticable job. Google does not solve the problem. It puts us before a
mountain that is increasingly difficult to climb. It itself affords a measure
of the problem.2
NOTES TO CHAPTER 6
1
Admittedly, information—actual knowledge, but includes much chaff beside is
wheat. So let us accept the plausible proposal that knowledge is propositional
merely to the logarithm of information. Then our actual knowledge has less than
doubled since the days of antiquity—rather than increased by a thousandfold. (Of
course we here look to plain work-day knowledge of basic fact, rather than solely
to the specifically scientific where the situation is indeed vastly magnified).
2
This chapter draws upon the author’s “Causal Necessitation and Free Will,” Proc-
ess Studies, vol. 35 (2006).

85
Chapter 7

COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

1. QUESTION EXFOLIATION

H uman knowledge should be thought of in terms of process rather than

simply as product. For it is clearly not stable but is a matter of phases
and stages that emerge through the processes of an ever-changing state of
the art seeing that ongoing inquiry leads to new and often dissonant find-
ings and discoveries. And the coordination between questions and bodies
of knowledge means that in the course of cognitive progress the state of
questioning changes no less drastically than does the state of knowledge.
Cognitive change regarding answers inevitably carries in its wake erotetic
change with respect to questions. For alterations in the membership of our
body of knowledge will afford new presuppositions for further questions
that were not available before.
The course of erotetic in relation to questions change is no less dra-
matic than that of cognitive change in relation to knowledge. For a change
of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the en-
tire fabric of questions that presupposed this earlier answer. For if we
change our mind regarding the correct answer to one member of a chain of
questions, then the whole of a subsequent course of questioning may well
collapse. If we abandon the luminiferous aether as a vehicle for electro-
magnetic radiation, then we lose at one stroke the whole host of questions
about its composition, structure, mode of operation, origin, and so on.
Epistemic change over time thus relates not only to what is known but
also to what can be asked. The accession of “new knowledge” opens up
new questions. And when the epistemic status of a presupposition changes
from acceptance to abandonment or rejection, we witness the disappear-
ance of various old ones through dissolution. Questions regarding the mo-
dus operandi of phlogiston, the behavior of caloric fluid, and the character
of faster-than-light transmissions are all questions that have become lost to
modern science because they involve presuppositions that have been aban-
doned. The question solved in one era could well not even have been
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

posed in another. The British philosophers of science W. Stanley Jevons

put it well over a century ago:

Since the time of Newton and Leibniz realms of problems have been solved
which before were hardly conceived as matters of inquiry . . . May we not re-
peat the words of Seneca . . . Veniet tempus, quo posteri nostri tam aperta
nos nescisse mirentur. [“A time will come when our posterity will marvel
1
that such obvious things were unknown to us.”]

Questions cluster together in groupings that constitute a line of inquiry.

They stand arranged in duly organized and sequential families; the answer-
ing of a given question yielding the presuppositions for yet further ques-
tions which would not have arisen had the former questions not been an-
swered. (Think here of the game of 20 questions—not until after we estab-
lish that a species of dog is at issue does it become appropriate to ask
whether a large or small sort of dog is involved.)
Inquiry is a dialectical process, a step-by-step exchange of query and
response that produces sequences within which the answers to our ques-
tions ordinarily open up yet further questions. This leads to a cyclic proc-
ess with the following structure:

[Presupposition] [Question] [Answer] [Implication Thereof]

Such a cycle—an “erotetic cycle”—determines a course of inquiry which

is set by an initial, controlling question together with the ancillary ques-
tions to which it gives rise and whose solutions are seen as facilitating its
resolution. One question emerges from another in such a course of inquiry
whenever it is only after we have answered the latter that the former be-
comes posable. There is accordingly a natural stratification in the devel-
opment of questions. A question cannot arise before its time has come:
certain questions cannot even be posed until others have already been re-
solved, because the resolution of these others is presupposed in their articu-
lations. The unfolding of such a series provides a direction of search—of
research—in question-answering inquiry. It gives the business of knowl-
edge a developmental cast, shifting matters from a static situation to a dy-
namical one.
The conception of a course of inquiry has important ramifications. For
one thing, it indicates graphically how, as our cognitive efforts proceed,
our questions often come to rest on an increasingly cumbersome basis,

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with the piling up of an increasingly detailed and content-laden family of

available presuppositions. Moreover, it serves to clarify how a change of
mind regarding the appropriate answer to some earlier question then the
whole of the subsequent questioning process may collapse as its presuppo-
sitions become untenable. When people abandoned the luminiferous
aether as a vehicle for electromagnetic radiation, they abandoned at one
stroke the whole host of questions about its composition, structure, mode
of operation, origin, etc. The aspect of process is crucial, and the course of
erotetic change is no less dramatic than that of cognitive change regarding
matters of accepted knowledge.
Cognitive progress is commonly thought of in terms of the discovery of
new facts—new information about things. But the situation is actually
more complicated, because not only knowledge but also questions must
come into consideration. Progress on the side of questions is also a mode
of cognitive progress, correlative with—and every bit as important as—
progress on the side of information. The questions opened up for our con-
sideration are as much a characteristic of a “state of knowledge” as are the
theses that it endorses.

2. KANT'S PRINCIPLE

New knowledge that emerges from the progress of knowledge can bear
very differently on the matter of questions. Specifically, we can discover:

1. New (that is, different) answers to old questions.

2. New questions.

3. The inappropriateness of illegitimacy of our old questions.

With (1) we learn that the wrong answer has been given to an old question,
thereby uncovering an error of commission in our previous question-
answering endeavors. With (2) we discover that questions have not hereto-
fore been posed at all, thereby uncovering an error of omission in our for-
mer question-asking endeavors. Finally, with (3) we find that one has
asked the wrong question altogether, thereby uncovering an error of com-
mission in our former question-asking endeavors, which are now seen to
rest on incorrect presuppositions (and are thus generally bound up with
type (1) discoveries.) Three rather different sorts of cognitive progress are

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

thus involved here—different from one another and from the traditional
view of cognitive progress in terms of a straightforward “accretion of fur-
ther knowledge.”
The coming to be and passing away of questions is a phenomenon that
can be mooted on this basis. A question arises at the time t if it then can
meaningfully be posed because all its presuppositions are then accepted as
true. And a question dissolves at t if one or another of its previously ac-
cepted presuppositions is no longer accepted. Any state of science will
remove certain questions from the agenda and dismiss them as inappropri-
ate. Newtonian dynamics dismissed the question “What cause is operative
to keep a body in movement (with a uniform velocity in a straight line)
once an impressed force has set it into motion?” Modern quantum theory
does not allow us to ask “What caused this atom on californium to disinte-
grate after exactly 32.53 days, rather than, say, a day or two later?” Scien-
tific questions should thus be regarded as occurring in an historical setting.
They arise at some juncture and not at others; they can be born and then
die away.
And this leads to the theme of fallibilism once more. A body of knowl-
edge may well answer a question only provisionally, in a tone of voice so
tentative or indecisive as to indicate that further information is actually
needed to enable us settle the matter with confidence. But even if it does
firmly and unqualifiedly supports a certain resolution, this circumstance
can never be viewed as absolutely final. What is seen as the correct an-
swer to a question at one stage of the cognitive venture, may, of course,
cease to be so regarded at another, later stage2. Given the answer that a
particular state of science S sees as appropriate to a question Q, we can
never preclude the prospect that some superior successor to S will eventu-
ally emerge and that is will then transpire that some different answer is in
order—one that is actually inconsistent with the earlier one.
The second of the three modes of erotetic discovery is particularly sig-
nificant. The phenomenon of the ever-continuing “birth” of new questions
was first emphasized by Immanuel Kant, who saw the development of
natural science in terms of a continually evolving cycle of questions and
answers, where, “every answer given on principles of experience begets a
fresh question, which likewise requires its answer and thereby clearly
shows the insufficiency of all scientific modes of explanation to satisfy
reason.”3 This claim suggests the following Principle of Question Propa-
gation—Kant's Principle, as we shall call it: “The answering of our factual
(scientific) questions always paves the way to further as yet unanswered

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

questions.”
Note, however, that Kant's Principle can be construed in two rather dif-
ferent ways:

i. A universalized mode: EACH specific (particular) question Q that

can be raised on a basis of a state-of-knowledge S engenders a (Q-
correlative) line of questioning which leads ultimately to a question
Q' whose answer lies outside of S—a question that forces an eventual
shift from S to some suitably augmented or revised modification
thereof.

ii. A particular modes that arises when the capitalized EACH of the
preceding formula is replaced by SOME.

On the first construction, science is an essentially divergent process,

with questions leading to more questions in such a way that the erotetic
agenda of successive stages of science is ever increasing in scope and size.
This view was endorsed by W. Stanley Jevons, who wrote: “As it appears
to me, the supply of new and unexplained facts is divergent in extent, so
that the more we have explained, the more there is to explain.4 “ However,
the second construction is a far more modest proposition, which merely
sees science as self-perpetuating with some new questions arising at every
stage, thereby opening up a window of opportunity for the investigation of
new issues. On this basis, the question agenda of science is not necessarily
a growing one, since questions may well die off by dissolution at a rate
roughly equal to that of the birth of new questions.
Kant himself intended the principle in the first (universalized) sense, but
it would actually seem more plausible and realistic to adopt it in the sec-
ond, more modest (particularized) sense. This yields a thesis amply sup-
ported by historical experience: that every state-of-the-art condition of
questioning ultimately yields, somewhere along the road, a line of ques-
tioning that engenders the transition. The states of science are unstable:
the natural course of inquiry provides an impetus by which a given state is
ultimately led to give way to its successor.
How can this principle possibly be established? What is at issue here is
not, of course, simply the merely logico-conceptual point that whenever we
introduce a new claim p into the family of what we accept, we can inquire
into such matters as the reasons for p's being the case and the relationship
of p to other facts that we accept. Rather, the issue pivots on the more in-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

teresting fact that new answers generally change the range of presupposi-
tions available for new questions. As we deepen our understanding of the
world, new problem-areas and new issues are bound to come to the fore.
Once we have discovered, for example, that atoms are not really “atomic”
but actually have an internal composition and complexity of structure, then
questions about this whole “subatomic” domain become available for in-
vestigation. At bottom, Kant's Principle rests on the insight that no matter
what answers are in hand, we can proceed to dig deeper into the how of
things by raising yet further questions about the matters involved in these
answers themselves. When physicists postulate a new phenomenon they
naturally want to know its character and modus operandi. When chemists
synthesize a new substance they naturally want to know how it interacts
with the old ones.
Accordingly, the motive force of inquiry is the existence of questions
that are posable relative to the “body of knowledge” of the day but not an-
swerable within it. Inquiry sets afoot a process of a cyclic form depicted in
Display 1. Here the body of “scientific knowledge” S and the correlative
body of scientific questions Q(S) undergo continual alteration. This proc-
ess gives rise to successive “stages of knowledge, (with increasing t) to-
gether with their associated state-of-the-art stages with regard to questions,
Q(St). From a statically conceived “body of (scientific) knowledge,” K or
S, we are led to a temporalized Kt or St, indicative of the inherently dy-
namical nature of inquiry theory of progress through an ongoing enlarge-
ment in point of question resolution is patently untenable.
A second theory of progress takes the rather different approach of asso-
ciating scientific progress with an expansion in our question horizon. It
holds that later, superior science will always enable us to pose additional
questions:
(t1 < t2) ⊃ [Q* (St1) ⊂ Q (S t2 )]

Scientific progress is now seen as a process of enlarging the question

agenda by uncovering new questions. More questions rather than more an-
swers are seen as the key: progress is a matter of question-cumulativity,
with more advanced science making it possible to pose issues that could
not be envisaged earlier on.

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

___________________________________________________________

Display 1

THE EROTETIC DYNAMIC OF INQUIRY.

Determine Q(S) the

Set out from an set of explanatory Endeavor to determine
initial body of questions that can the K-relatively true
knowledge S. appropriately be framed answer for the questions
on the basis. of the question set Q(S).

Insofar as does
afford answers to
Readjust S to a revised Q(S) seek out the
body of knowledge able new S-unavailable
to accommodate these answers.
new answers.

___________________________________________________________

However, this second approach to progressiveness is also untenable.

For just as progress sometimes involves abandoning old answers, it also of-
ten involves rejecting old questions. Paul Feyerabend has argued this point
cogently.5 New theories, he holds, generally do not subsume the substan-
tive issues of older ones but move off in altogether different directions. At
first, the old theory may even be more comprehensive—having had more
time for its development. Only gradually does this alter. But by then “the
slowly emerging conceptive apparatus of the [new] theory soon starts de-
fining its own problems, and earlier problems, facts, and observations are
either forgotten or pushed aside as irrelevant.” This phenomena of prob-
lem loss invalidates the theory of scientific progress as question cumula-
tion.
A third theory sees scientific progress in terms of an increase in the vol-
ume of resolved questions. Thus, Larry Laudan has argued against Popper
that scientific progress is not to be understood as arising because the later,
superior theories that replace our earlier ones answer all the questions an-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

swered by their rival (or earlier) counterparts, plus some additional ques-
tions, but rather simply because the replacing theories answer more ques-
tions (although not necessarily all of the same questions answered previ-
ously).6 On such a doctrine, progress turns on a numerical increase in the
sheer quantity of answered questions, that is, it is a matter of simply an-
swering more questions:

(t1 < t2) ⊃ [# Q*(S t1 ) < # Q*(S t2 )]

(Here the operation # applied to a set represents a measure of its member-

ship.) But this position also encounters grave difficulties. For how are we
going to do our bookkeeping here? How can we individuate questions for
the counting process? Just how many questions does “What causes can-
cer?” amount to? And how can we avoid the ambiguity inherent in the fact
that once and answer is given, we can always raise further questions about
its inner details and its outer relationships?
Moreover, this position is unpromising as long as we leave the ade-
quacy of the answers out of account. In its earliest, animistic stage, for ex-
ample, science had answers for everything. Why does the wind blow?
The spirit of the winds arranges it. Why do the tides ebb and flow? The
spirit of the seas sees to it. And so on. Or again take astrology. Why did
X win the lottery and Y gets killed in an accident? The conjunction of the
stars provides all the answers. Some of the biggest advances in science
come about when we reopen questions—when our answers get unstuck en
masse with the discovery that we have been on the wrong track, that we do
not actually understand something we thought we understood perfectly
well and need new answers to old questions.
A fourth theory sees scientific progress in terms of a decrease in the
sheer number of unanswered questions, that is of answering fewer ques-
tions:


(t1 < t2) ⊃ #Q*(St1 ),_______,#Q (St1 ) <
#Q*(S t2 ),_______,#Q (S t2 )

This approach views progress as a matter of agenda-diminution. Progres-

siveness turns on a numerical decrease in the register of unanswered ques-
tions. But the same line of objection put forth against its predecessor will
also tell against this present conception of progress. New discoveries can

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

all too easily raise more questions than we had before. To be sure, the size
of this gap between Q and Q* is something significant—a measure of the
size of the second agenda of a given state of the cognitive art. The striving
to close this gap by reducing the agenda is a prime mover of scientific in-
quiry. But it is emphatically not an index of progress.
An increase in the volume of unanswered questions is compatible with
a more than compensating increase in the volume of answered questions.
A fifth cognate theory of scientific progress uses the ratio of answered to
unanswered questions as touchstone and accordingly sees progressiveness
in terms of a decrease in the relative proportion of answered questions:


(t1 < t2) ⊃ #Q*(St1 ),_______,#Q (St1 ) <
#Q*(S t2 ),_______,#Q (S t2 )

But just why should one think this relationship to be essential to progress?
It is perfectly possible, in theory, that scientific progress might be diver-
gent, that particular increases in question-resolving capability might be
more than offset by expanding problem-horizons. (Ten percent of 107
questions is still a substantially bigger than twenty percent of 106 ques-
tions.) In such circumstances, we could make striking “progress” by way
of substantial increases in question-resolving capacity, while nevertheless
having a smaller proportion of answered questions because of the larger
volume of new questions. Then too, questions are not created equal.
Clearly, one question can include another, as “What causes lightning?” in-
cludes “What causes ball lightning?” In the course of answering the one,
we are called on to provide an answer for the other. Such relations of in-
clusion and dominance provide a basis for comparing the “scope” of ques-
tions (in one sense of this term) in certain cases—though certainly not in
general. They do not enable us to compare the scope of “What causes
lightning?” and “What causes tides?” (And even if we could—per impos-
sible—measure and compare the “size” of questions in this content-volume
oriented sense, this would afford no secure guide to their relative impor-
tance.)
Other approaches to progress are also possible. Some theoreticians
have favored yet another, sixth theory—one that sees scientific progress as
essentially ignorance-enlarging. That is, they regard scientific progress as
a matter of increasing the relative proportion of unanswered questions,
thus simply reversing the inequality of the preceding formula. Along these

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

lines, W. Stanley Jevons wrote:

In whatever direction we extend our investigations and successfully harmo-

nise a few facts, the result is only to raise up a host of other unexplained
facts. Can any scientific man venture to state that there is less opening now
for new discoveries than there was three centuries ago? Is it not rather true
that we have but to open a scientific book and read a page or two, and we
shall come to some recorded phenomenon of which no explanation can yet be
7
given? In every such fact there is a possible opening for new discoveries.

This theory sees scientific progress as a cognitively divergent process, sub-

ject to the condition that the more we know, the more we are brought to the
realization of our relative ignorance. But this position also has a serious
flaw. For it totally fails to do justice to those—by no means infrequent
stages of the history of science when progress does go along in the manner
of the classical pattern of an increase in both the volume and the proportion
of resolved questions.
Yet further variant theories along analogous lines see progress as lying
in increasing the proportion of answered questions or in decreasing the
proportion of unanswered questions (i.e., ignorance reduction), respec-
tively. For reasons closely akin to those already considered, these theories
also have vitiating disabilities.
In sum, none of these approaches to progress through question-agenda
comparisons offer much promise. The process of scientific inquiry is such
that its progress will have to be characterized in altogether different terms
of reference. In relating the questions sets Q (St) and/or Q*(St) at different
times in the manner of the progress theories we have been considering one
operates merely in the realm of appearances—how far the (putative) sci-
ence of the day can go in resolving the visible problems of the day. And
this whole approach is too fortuitous and situation specific to bear usefully
on anything so fundamental as authentic progress. Apparent adequacy
relative to the existing body of knowledge (which, after all, is the best we
can do in this direction) is a very myopic guide.
The lesson of these considerations is simply that the perceived ade-
quacy of science reflected in the relationship of question sets is a roller
coaster that affords little useful insight into the fundamentals of scientific
progress.

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

3. QUALITY POSES PROBLEMS

It is time to step back from the proliferation of doctrines relating pro-

gress to size comparisons among question agendas and view the matter in a
different perspective. The salient point is that even if the historical course
of scientific inquiry had in fact conformed, overall, to one or another of the
patterns of question-answer dialectic envisaged by these various theories,
this circumstance would simply be fortuitous. It would not reflect any
deep principle inherent in the very nature of the enterprise. For the com-
mon failing of all the approaches to progress that we have been consider-
ing is that they deal (in the first instance, at any rate) simply with questions
as such, without worrying about their significance. To render such theories
at all meaningful, this factor would have to be reckoned with. The theory
would have to be construed as applying not to questions per se but to im-
portant questions—questions at or above some suitable level of signifi-
cance.
Now, the “importance” of a factual question Q, where Q Q (S), turns
in the final analysis on how substantial a revision in our body of scientific
beliefs S is wrought by our grappling with it, that is, the extent to which an-
swering it causes geological tremors across the cognitive landscape. But
two very different sorts of things can be at issue here: either a mere expan-
sion of S by additions, or, more seriously, a revision of it that involves re-
placing some of its members and readjusting the remainder so as to restore
overall consistency. This second sort of change in a body of knowledge,
its revision rather than mere augmentation, is in general the more signifi-
cant matter, and a question whose resolution forces revisions are likely to
be of greater significance than one which merely fills in some part of the
terra incognita of knowledge. However—and this is crucial—the fact of
the matter is that the magnitude of the transformation from an earlier S1 to
a later successor S2 can only be retrospectively, only assessed once we
have actually arrived at S2.
The crucial fact is that progressiveness, insignificance, importance, in-
terest, and the like are all state-of-the-art relative conceptions. To apply
these ideas, we must already have a particular scientific corpus in hand to
provide a vantage point for their assessment. No commitment-neutral ba-
sis is available for deciding whether S1 is progressive vis-à-vis S2 or the
reverse. If the test of a theory is to be its problem-solving capacity—its
capacity to provide viable answers to interesting and important ques-
tions8—then merely quantitative considerations that prescind from quality

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

will not be up to doing the job.

This issue of quality is the sticking point. For the importance or inter-
est of a question that arises in one state-of-the-art state is something that
can only be discovered with hindsight from the vantage point of the new
bodies of knowledge S to which the attempts to grapple with it had led us.
In science, apparently insignificant problems (the blue color of the sky, or
the anomalous excess of background radiation) can acquire great impor-
tance once we have a state-of-the-art that makes them instances of impor-
tant new effects that instantiate or indicate major theoretical innovations.
To reemphasize, the importance of questions is something that we can only
assess with the wisdom of scientific hindsight. Accordingly, to secure an
adequate standard of progressiveness we had best look in an altogether dif-
ferent direction, going back to square one and beginning with fundamen-
tals.

4. THE EXPLORATION MODEL AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Natural science is not a fixed object—a finished product of our inquir-

ies—but is an ongoing process. In developing natural science, we humans
began by exploring the world in our own locality, and not just our spatial
neighborhood but—more far-reachingly—our parametric neighborhood in
the space of physical variable such as temperature, pressure, and electric
charge. Near the “home base” of the state of things in our accustomed
natural environment, we can operate with relative ease and freedom—
thanks to the evolutionary attunement of our sensory and cognitive appara-
tus—in scanning nature with the unassisted senses for data regarding its
modes of operation. But in due course we accomplish everything that can
be managed by these straightforward means. To do more, we have to “ex-
plore” further—to extend our probes into nature more deeply, deploying
increasing technical sophistication to achieve more and more demanding
levels of interactive capability, moving ever further away from our evolu-
tionary home base in nature toward increasingly remote observational fron-
tiers. From the egocentric starting point of our local region of parameter
space, we journey outward to explore nature's various parametric dimen-
sions ever more distantly. For it is the very essence of the enterprise that
natural science is forced to press into ever remoter reaches of parametric
space.
This picture is not, of course, one of geographical exploration but rather
of the physical exploration—and subsequent theoretical systematization—

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

of phenomena distributed over the parametric space of nature's physical

dimensions. This approach in terms of exploratory processes provides a
conception of scientific research as a prospecting search for the new phe-
nomena required for significant new scientific findings. As the range of
telescopes, the energy of particle accelerators, the effectiveness of low-
temperature 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 paramet-
ric space of the physical world is enhanced—new phenomena come into
view. After the major findings accessible via the data of a given level of
technological sophistication have been achieved, further major findings
become realizable only when one ascends to the next state-of-the-art level
of sophistication in data-relevant technology. Thus the key to the great
progress of contemporary physics lies in the enormous strides that have
been made in technological capability.9
No doubt, nature is in itself uniform as regards the distribution of its di-
verse processes across the reaches of parameter space. It does not favor us
by clustering them in our own natural parametric vicinity. However, cog-
nitively significant phenomena in fact become increasingly sparse because
the scientific mind has the capacity to do so much so well early on. Our
power of theoretical triangulation is so great that we can make a dispropor-
tionately effective use of the phenomena located in our local parametric
neighborhood. In consequence, scientific innovation becomes more and
more difficult—and expensive—as we push out farther and father from our
evolutionary home-base toward ever more remote frontiers. After the ma-
jor findings accessible at a given capacity level in data-relevant technology
have been achieved, further major findings become realizable when on as-
cends to a higher level of sophistication. We confront a situation of tech-
nological escalation. The need for new data constrains looking further and
further from man's familiar “home-base” in the parametric space of nature.
Thus, while further significant scientific progress is in principle always
possible—there being no absolute or intrinsic limits of significantly novel
facts—the realization of this ongoing prospect for scientific discovery de-
mands a continual enhancement in the technological state-of-the-art of data
extraction or exploitation.
This ever more far-reaching exploration of the parametric spectra asso-
ciated with different conditions in nature demands continual increases in
physical power. To enable our experimental apparatus to realize greater
velocities, higher frequencies, lower or higher temperatures, greater pres-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

sures, larger energy-excitations, stabler conditions, greater resolving

power, etc., requires ever more powerful equipment capable of continually
more enhanced performance. The sort of “power” at issue will of course
vary with the nature of the particular parametric dimension under consid-
eration—be it velocity, frequency, temperature, etc.—but the general prin-
ciple remains the same. Scientific progress depends crucially and un-
avoidably on our technical capability to penetrate the increasingly dis-
tant—and increasingly difficult—reaches of the power-complexity
spectrum of physical parameters, to explore and to explain the ever more
remote phenomena encountered there. Only by operating under new, pre-
viously inaccessible conditions of observational or experimental interac-
tions with nature—attaining ever more extreme temperature, pressure, par-
ticle velocity, field strength, and so on—can we bring new impetus to sci-
entific progress.
This idea of the exploration of parametric space provides a basic model
for understanding the mechanism of scientific innovation in mature natural
science. New technology increases the range of access within the paramet-
ric space of physical processes. Such increased access brings new phe-
nomena to light, and the examination and theoretical accommodation of
these phenomena is the basis for growth in our scientific understanding of
nature. As an army marches on its “stomach,” (its logistical support), so
science depends upon it “eyes”—it is crucially dependent on the techno-
logical instrumentalities which constitute the sources of its data. Natural
science is fundamentally empirical, and its advance is critically dependent
not on human ingenuity alone, but on the monitoring observations to which
we can only gain access through interactions with nature. The days are
long past when useful scientific data can be gathered by unaided sensory
observation of the ordinary course of nature. Artifice has become an indis-
pensable route to the acquisition and processing of scientifically useful
data: the sorts of data on which scientific discovery nowadays depends can
only be generated by technological means.
We arrive therefore at the situation of technological escalation. The
need for new data forces us to look further and further in parametric space.
For while scientific progress is in principle always possible—there being
no absolute or intrinsic limits to significant scientific discovery—the reali-
zation of this ongoing prospect demands a continual enhancement in the
technological state of the art of data extraction or exploitation. In science,
as in a technological arms race, one is simply never called on to keep doing
what was done before. One is always forced further up the mountain, as-

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

cending to ever higher levels of technological performance—and of ex-

pense.
Without an ever-developing a process of technological advance, scien-
tific progress would grind to a halt. The discoveries of today cannot be
advanced 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 natu-
ral sciences, technological progress is a crucial requisite for cognitive pro-
gress. we are embarked on an endless endeavor to improve the range of ef-
fective observational and experimental intervention. Only by operating
under new and previously inaccessible conditions—attaining extreme tem-
perature, pressure, particle velocity, field strength, and so on—can we real-
ize those circumstances that enable us to put our hypotheses and theories to
the test. As an acute observer has rightly remarked: “Most critical ex-
periment [in physics] planned today, if they had to be constrained within
the technology of even ten years ago, would be serious compromised.”10
The salient characteristic of this situation is that, once the major find-
ings accessible at a given level of sophistication in data-technology level
have been attained, further major progress in any given problem area re-
quires 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 real-
izable only by enhancing our sophistication in data-relevant technology.
As science endeavors to extend its “mastery over nature,” it becomes en-
meshed in a technology-intensive arms race against nature, with all of the
practical and economic implications characteristic of such process.

5. THEORIZING AS INDUCTIVE PROJECTION

Theorizing in natural science is a matter of triangulation from observa-

tions—of making leaps of inductive generalization from the data. And
(sensibly enough) induction as a rational process of inquiry constructs the
simplest, most economical cognitive structures to house these data com-
fortably. It calls for searching out the simplest pattern of regularity that
can adequately accommodate our data regarding the issues at hand, and
then projects them globally across the entire spectrum of possibilities in

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order to answer our general questions. Accordingly, scientific theorizing,

as a fundamentally inductive process, involves the search for, or the con-
struction of, the least complex theory-structure capable of accommodating
the available body of data—proceeding under the aegis of established prin-
ciples of inductive systematization: uniformity, simplicity, harmony, and
such principles that implement the general idea of cognitive economy. Di-
rectly evidential considerations apart, the warrant of inductively authorized
contentions turns exactly on this issue of the efficient and effect we ac-
commodate on data—on consilience, mutual interconnection, and systemic
enmeshment. Induction is a matter of building up the simplest theory
structure capable of “doing the job” of explanatory systematization. The
key principle is that of simplicity and the ruling injunction that of cognitive
economy. Complications cannot be ruled out, but they must always pay
their way in terms of increased systemic adequacy.
Simplicity and generality are the cornerstones of inductive systematiza-
tion. And one very important point must be stressed in this connection.
Scientific induction's basic idea of a coordinative systematization of ques-
tion-resolving conjecture with the data of experience may sound like a
very conservative process. But this impression would be quite incorrect.
The drive to systematization embodies an imperative to broaden the range
of our experience—to extend and to expand insofar as possible the data-
base from which our theoretical triangulations proceed. In the design of
cognitive systems, implicity/harmony and comprehensiveness/inclusive-
ness are the two sides of one unified whole. And the impetus to ever am-
pler comprehensiveness indicates why the ever-widening exploration of
nature's parameter space is an indispensable part of the process.
With the enhancement of scientific technology, the size and complexity
of this body of data inevitably grows, expanding on quantity and diversify-
ing in kind. Technological progress constantly enlarges the window
through which we look our upon nature's parametric space. In developing
natural science continually enlarge our view of this space and then general-
ize 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 comes our way.
Our exploration of physical parameter space is inevitably incomplete.
We can never exhaust the whole range of temperatures, pressures, particle
velocities, etc. And so, we inevitably face the (very real) prospect that the
regularity structure of the as yet inaccessible cases will not conform to the

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

(generally simpler) patterns of regularity prevailing in the presently acces-

sible cases. By and large, future data do not accommodate themselves to
present theories. Newtonian calculations worked marvelously for predict-
ing solar-system phenomenology (eclipses, planetary conjunctions, and the
rest) but this does not show that classical physics has no need for funda-
mental revision. 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 medi-
ated entry into new regions of parameter space constantly destabilizes the
attained equilibrium between data and theory.
The theoretical claims of science are not spatiotemporally localized and
they are not parametrically localized either. They stipulate—quite ambi-
tiously—how things are always and everywhere. And it does not require a
sophisticated knowledge of history of science to realize that our worst fears
are usually realized—that it is seldom if ever the case that our theories
survive intact in the wake of substantial extensions in our access to sectors
of parametric space. The history of science is a history of episodes of leap-
ing to the wrong conclusions.
At each stage of inquiry in physical science we try to embed the phe-
nomena and their regularities within the simplest (cognitively most effi-
cient) explanatory fabric to answer our questions about the world and to
guide our interactions in it. Breadth of coverage in point of data and econ-
omy of means in point of theory are our guiding stars.
Against this background let us contemplate an analogy. Let us suppose
that we investigate some domain of phenomena on such a basis, and that in
the first instance the picture we arrive at is one showing a certain sort of
regularity as shown below.

We say: “Aha, this sector of the world's processes proceeds in the manner
of a mountain range.” But at the next level we investigate those zigzags
more closely. We note now that they have the following distinctly more
complex form:

We say: “So—we did not quite have it right to begin with. This sector of
the world's processes actually has the character of fluctuating castella-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

tions.” And so, at the next level we investigate those castellations more
closely. We now note that they in turn have changed form:

We now say: “Aha, this sector of the world is made up of regularly con-
figured zig-zags.” And so this sort of observation-driven revisionism con-
tinues at every successive stage of further technological sophistication in
our experimental and observational interactions with physical nature. At
every level of detail nature's apparent modus operandi looks very different
and its “governing regularities” take on an aspect markedly different from
what went before and crucially disparate from it.
Note, however, that at each stage we can readily comprehend and ex-
plain the situation of the earlier stage. We can always say, “Yes, of course,
given that that is how things stand, it is quite understandable that earlier
on, when we proceeded in such-and-such a cruder way, we arrived at the
sort of findings we did—incorrect and inaccurate though they are.” But, of
course, this wisdom is one of hindsight only. At no stage do we have the
prospect of using foresight to predict what lies ahead. The impossibility of
foreseeing the new phenomena that awaits us means that at no point can
we prejudge what lies further down the explanatory road.
Let us now turn from a concern with the lawful comportment of the
world's phenomena to the constitution of its things. An analogy may prove
helpful. Suppose when we initially investigate objects of a certain type.
Proceeding at the first level of sophistication we see them as constituted of
parts whose structure is O-like. However, on closer investigation we find
(at the next level of sophistication) that these “component parts” were not
actually units, but mere constellations, mere clouds of small specks as per
. But when we investigate still more deeply, it emerges that the compo-
nent specks that constitute these “clouds” themselves have the rectangular
form . And then suppose further that at the next level those rectangular
configurated “components” themselves emerge as mere constellations,
composed of triangular constituents of the form ∆, and so on. As this anal-
ogy indicated, physical nature can exhibit a very different aspect when
viewed from the vantage point of different levels of sophistication in the
technology of nature-investigator interaction.
Thus both as regards the observable regularities of nature and the dis-

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cernible constituents of nature, very different results that invite very differ-
ent views of the situation can—and almost invariably do—emerge at suc-
cessive levels of the observational state-of-the-art. Almost invariably we
deal at every stage with a different order or aspect of things. And the rea-
son why nature exhibits different aspects at different levels is not that na-
ture herself is somehow stratified in its make-up, but rather that (1) the
character of the available nature-investigative interactions is variable and
differs from level to level of sophistication in matters of inquiry, and (2)
the character of the “findings” at which one arrives will hinge on the char-
acter of these nature-investigative interactions. For—to reemphasize—
what we detect or “find” in nature is always something that depends on the
mechanisms by which we search. The phenomena we detect will depend
not merely on nature's operations alone, but on the physical and concep-
tional instrumentalities that we ourselves deploy in investigating nature.
For as Bacon saw, nature will never tell us more than we can forcibly ex-
tract from it 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.
As noted above, Newton's third law of countervailing action and reac-
tion becomes a fundamental principle of epistemology because we can
only learn about nature by interacting with it. Everything depends on just
how and how hard we can push against nature in situations of observa-
tional and detectional interaction. And we cannot “get to the bottom of it”
where nature is concerned. Nature always has hidden reserves of power.
Successive stages in the technological state-of-the-art of scientific inquiry
thus lead us to different views about the nature of things and the character
of their laws. But the sequence of successively more powerful and sophis-
ticated instrumentalities on the side of inquirers need not be matched by
any coordinated succession of layers in the constitution of physical exis-
tence somehow captured “correctly” by out inquiry at corresponding levels
of sophistication. The “layers” we encounter principally reflect our own
procedures.
Accordingly, it is a wholly unwarranted supposition that there is a se-
quence of nature-levels placed conveniently alongside our inquiry levels,
in a parallel coordinations, that makes for an elegantly ladder-like configu-
ration. Nature just goes along “doing its thing.” Nature has no layers, no
differentiated physical strata of levels.11 The only physical levels are proc-
ess-relative, hinging on the character of our technologically mediated
modes of observation and manipulation.

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

6. SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS AS POTENTIALLY UNENDING.

Some theorists regard science as an essentially closed venture that will

ultimately come to the end of its tether. They see the scientific project as
an inherently bounded venture, subject to the idea that since nature is gov-
erned by a finite family of fundamental laws, it follows that in scientific
inquiry, as in the geographical exploration of the planet, we are ultimately
bound to reach the end of the road.12 But this position is eminently prob-
lematic. For there is good reason to think of nature as cognitively inex-
haustible: as we extend the re range of our interactions, we can, in theory,
always learn more and more about it, attaining ever new horizons of dis-
covery, with the new no less interesting or significant than the old.
This perspective on the processes that underlie the development of sci-
ence has important implications. It means that science cannot be a com-
plete system, a finished structure of knowledge, but is and will ever remain
a process—an inquiring activity whose ultimate goal may be the comple-
tion of a finished and perfected system, but which proceeds in the full rec-
ognition that this aim is ultimately unreachable. Neither theoretical issues
of general principle not the actualities of historical experience suggest that
scientific progress need ever come to a stop.13 Of course, it is possible that
for reasons of exhaustion, of penury, or of discouragement, we humans
might cease to push the frontiers forward. But should we ever abandon the
journey, it will be for reasons such as these and not because we have
reached the end of the road.
But how can unlimited scientific discovery be possible? To underwrite
the prospect of endless progress in the development of natural science,
some theoreticians deem it necessary to stipulate an intrinsic infinitude in
the makeup of nature as a physical structure make up nature itself.14 The
physicist David Bohm, for example, writes: “at least as a working hy-
pothesis science assumes the infinity of nature; and this assumption fits the
facts much better than any other point of view that we know.”15 Bohm
and his congeners thus postulate an infinite quantitative scope or an infinite
qualitative diversity in nature, assuming either a principle of unending in-
tricacy in its makeup or one of unending orders of spatiostructural nesting.
But is this sort of thing needed at all? Does the prospect of potentially lim-
itless scientific progress actually require structural infinitude in the physi-
cal composition of nature along some such lines? The answer is surely
negative.

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

The prime task of science lies in discovering the laws of nature, and it is
law-complexity that is crucial for this purpose.16 Even the workings of a
structurally finite and indeed simple system can yet exhibit an infinite in-
tricacy in operational or functional complexity, exhibiting this limitless
complexity in its workings rather than at the spatio-structural or composi-
tional level. While the number of constituents of nature may be small, the
ways in which they may be combined can be infinite. Think of the exam-
ples of letters, syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs, different sorts of
books, libraries, library systems. There is no need to assume a “ceiling” to
such a sequence of levels of integrative complexity. The emergence of new
concept-concatenations and new lays can be expected at every stage. Each
level exhibits its own order. The laws we attain at the n-th level can have
features whose investigation lift us to the (n + l)st. New phenomena and
new laws can arise at every new level of integrative order. Knowing the
frequency with which individual letters like A and T occur in a text will
not tell us much about the frequency with which a combination such as AT
occurs. When we change the purview of our conceptual horizons, there is
always, in principle, more to be learned. The different facets of nature can
generate new strata of laws that yield a potentially unending sequence of
levels, each giving rise to its own characteristic principles of organization,
themselves quite unpredictable from the standpoint of the other levels.
The usual recourse to an infinity-of-nature principle is strictly one-
sided, placing the burden of responsibility for the endlessness of science
solely on the shoulders of nature herself. According to this view, the poten-
tial endlessness of scientific progress requires limitlessness on the side of
its objects, so that the infinitude of nature must be postulated either at the
structural or at the functional levels. But this is a mistake.
Science, the cognitive exploration of the ways of the world, is, a matter
of the interaction of the mind with nature of the minds exploitation of the
data to which it gains access in order to penetrate the “secrets of nature”.
The crucial fact is that scientific progress hinges not just on the structure of
nature but also on the structure of the information-acquiring processes by
which we investigate it.
Ongoing cognitive innovation thus need not be provided for by assum-
ing (as a “working hypothesis” or otherwise) that the system being investi-
gated is infinitely complex in its physical or functional makeup. It suffices
to hypothesize an endlessly ongoing prospect of securing fuller informa-
tion about it. The salient point is that it is cognitive rather than structural or
operational complexity that is the key here. After all, even when a scene is

107
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

itself only finitely complex, an ever ampler view of it will come to realiza-
tion as the resolving power of our conceptual and observational instru-
ments is increased. And so, responsibility for the open-endedness of sci-
ence need not lie on the side of nature at all but can rest one-sidedly with
us, its explorers.
When we make measurements to accuracy A, the world may appear
X1-wise; and when to accuracy (l/2)A it may appear X2-wise; and when to
accuracy (1/2)nA it may appear Xn-wise. At each successive state-of-the-
art stage of increased precision in our investigative proceedings, the world
may take on a very different nomic appearance, not because it changes, but
simply because at each state it presents itself differently to us.
Accordingly, the question of the ongoing progressiveness of science
should not be confined to a consideration of nature alone, since the charac-
ter of our information-gathering procedures, as channeled through our
theoretical perspectives, is also bound to play a crucial part.17 Innovations
on the side of data can generate new theories, and new theories can trans-
form the very meaning of the old data. This dialectical process of succes-
sive feedback has no inherent limits, and suffices to underwrite a prospect
of ongoing innovation. Even a finite nature can, like a typewriter with a
limited keyboard, yield an endlessly varied text. It can produce a steady
stream of new data—“new” not necessarily in kind but in their functional
interrelationships and thus in their theoretical implications—on the basis of
which our knowledge of nature's operative laws is continually enhanced
and deepened.
These various considerations combine to indicate that an assumption of
the quantitative infinity of the physical extent of the natural universe or of
the qualitative infinity of its structural complexity is simply not required to
provide for the prospects of ongoing scientific progress. Ongoing discov-
ery is as much a matter of how we inquirers proceed with our work as it is
of the object of inquiry itself. And this fact constrains us to recognize that
even a finitely complex nature can provide the domain for a virtually end-
less course of new and significant discovery. There is no good reason to
think that the natural science of a finite world is an inherently closed and
terminable venture, and no adequate basis for the view that the search for
greater “depth” in our understanding must eventually terminate at a logical
end.18 On all indications, historical as well as theoretical, the prospect of
ongoing “scientific revolutions” is potentially unending. Scientific inquiry,
in sum, is a potentially endless process.

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7. IS LATER LESSER?

Some theorists, however, find it tempting—to follow C. S. Peirce in

seeing the ongoing process of scientific change as tending to be a fixed and
stable product by way of convergent approximation.19 This calls for envis-
aging a situation where, with the passage of time, the results we reach
grow increasingly concordant and the outcomes attained become less and
less differentiated. In the face of such a course of successive changes of
ever-diminishing significance, the reality of ongoing change is now irrele-
vant as with the passage of time the changes matter less and less. We in-
creasingly approximate an essentially stable picture. This prospect is cer-
tainly a theoretically possible one. But neither historical experience nor
considerations of general principle provide reason to think that it is actu-
ally possible. Instead, quite the reverse!
Any theory of convergence in science, however carefully crafted, will
shatter under the impact of the conceptual innovation that becomes neces-
sary to deal with the new phenomena encountered the wake of technical
escalation. Such innovation continually brings entirely new, radically dif-
ferent scientific concepts to the fore, carrying in its wake an ongoing
wholesale revision of “established fact.” And new and different concepts
is just that—new and different: there just is no matter of degree here.
Ongoing scientific progress is not simply a matter of increasing accu-
racy by extending the numbers at issue in our otherwise stable descriptions
of nature out to a few more decimal places. Significant scientific progress
is genuinely revolutionary in involving a fundamental change of mind
about how things happen in the world. Progress of this caliber is generally
a matter not of adding further facts—on the order of filling in a crossword
puzzle. It is, rather, a matter of changing the very framework itself. And
this fact blocks the theory of convergence.
In any convergent process, later is lesser. But since scientific progress
on matter of fundamental importance is generally a matter of replacement
rather than mere supplementation, there is no good reason for seeing the
later findings of science as lesser the significance of their bearing within
the cognitive enterprise—to think that nature will be cooperative in always
yielding its most important secrets early on and reserving nothing but the
relatively insignificant for later on. (Nor does it seem plausible to think of
nature as perverse, luring us ever more deeply into deception as inquiry
proceeds.) A very small scale effect at the level of phenomena—even one
that lies very far out along the extremes of a “range exploration” in terms

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

of temperature, pressure, velocity, or the like—can force a far-reaching

revolution and have a profound impact by way of major theoretical revi-
sions. (Think of special relativity in relation to aether-drift experimenta-
tion, or general relativity in relation the perihelion of Mercury.) It didn't
appear to be a realistic prospect to all those late nineteenth-century physi-
cists who investigated the properties of the luminiferous aether that no
such medium for the transmission of light and electromagnetism might ex-
ist at all.
Given that natural science progresses mainly by substitutions and re-
placements that involve comprehensive overall revisions of our picture of
the processes at issue, it seems sensible to say that the shifts across succes-
sive scientific “revolutions” maintain the same level of overall significance
when taken as a whole. At the cognitive level, a scientific innovation is
simply a matter of change. Scientific progress is neither a convergent nor a
divergent process.20 It is a matter of ongoing change, confronting us with a
situation in which every major successive stage in the evolution of science
yields innovations, and these innovations are—on the whole—of roughly
equal overall interest and importance. Accordingly, there is little alterna-
tive but to reject a convergentism of increasingly minor readjustments as a
position that lacks the support not only of considerations of general princi-
ples but also of the actual realities of our experience in the history of sci-
ence. Substantive convergentism does not do justice to the scope of the
processes at work in scientific progress where then are we to look?

8. APPLICATIVE EFFICACY AS KEY TO PROGRESS

The arbitrament of applicative praxis—not theoretical merit but practi-

cal capability—affords our best available standard for the assessment of
scientific progress. For it is clear that the most promising prospect calls for
approaching the issue of scientific progress in terms of pragmatic rather
than strictly cognitive standards. As seen from the angle of such an ap-
proach, progressively superior science does not manifest itself as such
through the sophistication of its theories (for, after all, even absurd theories
can be made very complex), but through the superiority of its applications
as judged by the old Bacon-Hobbes standard of scientia propter poten-
tiam—that is, through affording us increased power of prediction and con-
trol. This means that, in the end, praxis is the arbiter of theory. To under-
stand scientific progress and its limits, we must look not towards the cogni-
tive dialectic of questions and answers but towards the scope and limits of

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human power in our interactions with nature. For progress one must, in
sum, look not so much to what we can say as to what we can do. The
pragmatic dimension is paramount.
An instructive lesson emerges from these deliberations. On the one
hand, our knowledge of ourselves and of the world about us is always a
work in progress because our capacity to answer questions is limited. But
beyond this there is even a limited significance to the whole business of
question-resolution. For even substantial success along these lines need
not by itself betoken real progress in the project of advancing our under-
standing of how things really work in the world. Instead, progress be-
comes manifest through greater power—in improved technology, if you
will—so that is crux lies in enhancing the range of our practice. Successful
application is the key: superior science is as superior science does when
and as it establishes its superiority in point of its greater operational effec-
tiveness. Knowledge development is a process both fueled by and mani-
fested through our technologically mediated capabilities for interacting
with nature.21
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1
W. S Jevons, The Principles of Science (2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1877), p.
759.
2
The progress of science offers innumerable illustrations of this phenomenon, as
does the process of individual maturation: “After three or thereabouts, the child
begins asking himself and those around him questions, of which the most fre-
quently noticed are the “why” questions. By studying what the child asks “why”
about one can begin to see what kind of answers or solutions the child expects to
receive. . . . A first general observations is that the child's whys bear witness to an
intermediate precausality between the efficient cause and the final cause. Specifi-
cally, these questions seek reasons for phenomena which we see as fortuitous but
which in the child arouse a need for a finalist explanations. “Why are there two
Mount Salèves, a big one and a little one?” asked a six year-old boy. To which
many of his contemporaries, when asked the same question, replied, “One for big
trips and another for small trips” (Jean Piaget and B. Inhelder, The Psychology of
the Child, trans. by H. Weaver [New York: Basic Books, 1969], pp. 109-110).
3
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (1783), sect. 57; Akad., p.
352.
4
W. S. Jevons, Principles of Science (op. cit.), p. 753.

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
5
See Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Humanities Press, 1975), p.
176.
6
Larry Laudan, “Two Dogmas of Methodology,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 43
(1976), pp. 585-597. See also his Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley, Los An-
geles, London: University of California Press, 1978).
7
W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, (op. cit), p. 754.
8
Compare Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Lon-
don: University of California Press, 1978).
9
A homely fishing analogy of Eddington's is useful here. He saw the experimental-
ists as akin to a fisherman who trawls nature with the net of his equipment for de-
tection and observation. Now suppose (says Eddington) that a fisherman trawls the
seas using a fishnet of two-inch mesh. Then fish of a smaller size will simply go
uncaught, and those who analyze the catch will have an incomplete and distorted
view of aquatic life. The situation in science is the same. Only by improving our
observational means of trawling nature can such imperfections be mitigated. (See
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World [New York: The Macmillian
Company, 1928]).
10
D A. Bromley et. al., Physics in Perspective: Student Edition, NRC/NAS Publica-
tions, Washington D.C., 1973; p. 16.
11
Recall Goethe's stricture: “Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale, Alles ist sie mit ei-
nem Male.”
12
The geographic exploration analogy is an old standby: “Science cannot keep on
going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. . . . It is
like the discovery of America—you only discover it once. The age in which we
live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that
day will never come again.” (Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965, p. 172. See also Gunter Stent, The Coming of
the Golden Age, Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969, and S. W. Haw-
kins, “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?,” Physics Bulletin, vol. 32
(1981), pp. 15-17.)
13
In this regard, E. P. Wigner seems altogether correct in reminding us: “. . . that in
order to understand a growing body of phenomena, it will be necessary to introduce
deeper and deeper concepts into physics and that this development will not end by
the discovery of the final and perfect concepts. I believe that this is true: we have
no right to expect that our intellect can formulate perfect concepts for the full un-

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 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

derstanding of inanimate nature's phenomena.” “The Limits of Science,” Proceed-

ings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 94, 1950, p. 424.
14
Marxist theoreticians take this view very literally—in the manner of Lenin's idea of
the “inexhaustibility” of matter in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism. Purporting
to inherit from Spinoza a thesis of the infinity of nature, they construe this to mean
that any cosmology that denies the infinite spatial extension of the universe must
be wrong.
15
“Remarks by David Bohm,” in Observation and Interpretation, ed. by Stephan Ko-
erner (New York and London, 1957), p. 56. For a fuller development of Bohm's
views on the “qualitative infinity of nature,” see his Causality and Chance in Mod-
ern Physics, (London and New York: Routledge and Paul, 1957).
16
“If by the 'infinite complexity of nature' is meant only the infinite multiplicity of
the phenomena is contains, there is no bar to final success in theory making, since
theories are not concerned with particulars as such. So too, if what is meant is only
the infinite variety of natural phenomena . . . that too may be comprehended in a
unitary theory,” 'Scientific Revolutions for Ever?', British Journal for the Philoso-
phy of Science, vol. 19, 1967, p. 41. For a suggestive analysis of “the architecture
of complexity,” see Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge,
Mass., 1969.
17
The idea that our knowledge about the world reflect an interactive process, to
which both the object of knowledge (the world) and the knowing subject (the in-
quiring mind) make essential and ultimately inseparable contributions, is elabo-
rated in the author's Conceptual Idealism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
18
Compare D. A. Bromley's observation: “Even if physicists could be sure that they
had identified all the particulars that can exist, some obviously fundamental ques-
tions would remain. Why, for instance, does ascertain universal ratio in atomic
physics have the particular value 137.036 and not some other value? This is an ex-
perimental result: the precision of the experiments extends today to these six fig-
ures. Among other things, this number relates the extent of size of the electron to
the size of the atom, and that in turn to the wavelength of light emitted. From as-
tronomical observation it is known that this fundamental ration has the same nu-
merical value for atoms a billion years away in space and time. As yet there is no
reason to doubt that other fundamental ratios, such as the ratio of the mass of the
proton to that of the electron, are as uniform throughout the universe as is the geo-
metrical ratio pi equals 3.14159. Could it be that such physical ratios are really,
like pi, mathematical aspects of some underlying logical structure? If so, physicists
are not much better off than people who must resort to wrapping a string around a

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

cylinder to determine the value of pi! For theoretical physics thus far sheds hardly
a glimmer of light on this question.” D. A. Bromley et al., (op. cit.), p. 28.
19
See the author's Peirce's Philosophy of Science, (Notre Dame and London: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 1978).
20
The present critique of convergentism is thus very different from that of W. V. O.
Quine. He argues that the idea of “convergence to a limit” is defined for numbers
but not for theories, so that speaking of scientific change as issuing in a “conver-
gence to a limit” is a misleading metaphor. “There is a faulty use of mathematical
analogy in speaking of a limit of theories, since the notion of a limit depends on
that of a 'nearer than,' which is defined for numbers and not for theories” Word and
Object, (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 1960), p. 23. The metaphor of substantial and insignificant differences
among theories, makes perfectly good sense, but the idea that the course of scien-
tific theory-innovation must eventually descend to the level of trivialities certainly
does not.
21
This chapter draws on the author’s essay on “The Unpredictability of Future Sci-
ence” in R. S. Cohen et. al. (eds.), Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis
(Dordretch: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 153-68.

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Chapter 8

DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

1. THE DIALECTIC OF NATURAL SCIENCES

T he present chapter will focus upon the role of dialectics in the cogni-
tive methodology used for the “production of knowledge.” It will, in
specific, endeavor to show how the theory of knowledge can helpfully be
clarified from a dialectical angle of approach.
Logic is a matter of “if-then,” of what follows from given premisses (be
they established or assumed). But how are premisses ever established?
The Western tradition of epistemology affords two answers here: induc-
tion and dialectic. Dialectic, so regarded, is a procedure of confirmation—
a process for establishing factual contentions that is in a way analogous to
but different from inductive reasoning from observation.
Cognitive dialectics in its investigative form as an inquiry method has
the structure pictured in Display 1. Overall, such a dialectical procedure
seeks to canvas both the pro- and the con-consideration regarding some
proposed idea or hypothesis for the sake of assessing just where in its gen-
eral neighborhood the truth of the matter lies. On this basis. rational in-
quiry proceeds in a dialectical cycle of Display 2, with information sifted
in a dialectically typical cyclic manner, moving in a circle that turns back
upon itself, presuming at the outset a cogency which, if indeed there, is
achieved only at the end.1
____________________________________________________________

Display 1

THE STRUCTURE OF INQUIRY DIALECTICS

CON-CONSIDERATIONS PRO-CONSIDERATIONS

Affirmation Negation Revision

RECIPROCAL ACCOMMODATION
____________________________________________________________
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

____________________________________________________________

Display 2

COGNITIVE DIALECTIC

A state of Questions to which

knowledge K K gives rise

Knowledge Answers to the

revision questions
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________

Display 3

INQUIRY DIALECTIC IN NATURAL SCIENCE

THEORISTS EXPERIMENTALISTS

Design a body Make observations

of theory to fit under heretofore
the available data unexplored conditions

____________________________________________________________

It might go without saying that the only inquiry procedures of any inter-
est for us are those that satisfy the minimal conditions of rationality. For
one thing, they must be consistent in that such a procedure must not enjoin
us to accept both some thesis P and its contradictory denial not-P. More-
over, they must encompass certain minimal principles of logical cogency,
especially in enjoining acceptance of anything that follows logically from
theses whose acceptance it has already authorized. They may well, how-
ever, be incomplete in being prepared to suspend judgment between a pair
of contradictories P and not-P, so that nonacceptance of P does not entail

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 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

____________________________________________________________

Display 4

THE EXFOLIATION OF DATE

Specification of the Revision via systematization Context enhancement

“data” or plausible and coordinative co- and introduction of
truth prospects adjustment in the light of new data
internal stresses

____________________________________________________________

acceptance of not-P. Only inquiry procedures that satisfy such minimal ra-
tionality conditions can deserve serious consideration.
In specific, the dialectics of natural science unfolds as a dialogue be-
tween theorists with their speculations and experientialists with their ob-
servations. The overall process results in an alternatingly cyclic exchange
between theory and observation that strives for an ever smoother attune-
ment between the two. Display 3 offers a schematic view of this situation.
Unlike demonstration which always needs previously established inputs
for use as premisses, dialectic is not other-dependent but self-sufficient. It
reflects and deliberates without assuming or requiring anything pre-
established for its determinations. Dialectic does not reason from preestab-
lished givens but through the evaluation of plausibilities. It does not yield
proofs and demonstrations but merely indicates plausibilifies. Its basis is
not previously secured knowledge but a fragile experience assesses by test-
ing them against each other. Display 4 indicates the structure of this situ-
tion. Dialectics does not deduce conclusions but evaluates candidates for
truth-imputation (Aristotelian endoxa) through assessing their strengths
and weaknesses.
In his interesting study of dialectic Roland Simon-Schaefer takes latter-
day dialecticians to task for imputing insufficiency and inadequacy to stan-
dard theoretical logic for cogent reasoning.2 But what is actually at issue
here is a division of labor. For standard logic deal with what follows IF
AND WHEN certain premisses are true, while dialectics is concerned with
the truth-claims of those premisses themselves and their substantive
congeners. The job of dialectic is thus something quite different and dis-
tinctive from that of logic; they are different tools created for different pur

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

____________________________________________________________

Display 5

THE PRODUCTION-PROCESS VIEW OD KNOWLEDGE

Initial Inquiry procedure Putative

information
for extending and knowledge
refining given
information
____________________________________________________________

poses. Neither one can justly be criticized on grounds of dispensability

through replacement by the other.

2. THE QUALITY CONTROL PROBLEM

The functioning of an inquiry procedure in providing of putative factual

knowledge can thus be viewed in essentially systems-theoretic terms, on
the model of a production process. The resources of plausible supposition
serve as the input, and items of (putative) knowledge constitutes the out-
put—as shown in Display 5. Here the “initial information” would at first
include a good deal of misinformation—of mere supposition, surmise,
and conjecture—so that the inquiry process is not just a matter of extend-
ing the quantitative volume of information, but also one of confirmation,
satisfaction, substantiation, with the result of a qualitative upgrading of
what is already in some sense “available.”
In this manner, the conception of an inquiry procedure implements the
idea of a cognitive methodology employed in the “production” of factual
knowledge about the world. This methodological perspective brings to the
fore the question of quality control, that is, the problem of assessing how
well a cognitive method is able to accomplish its intended task.
But how is one to determine that a fact-oriented inquiry procedure is
adequate? What sort of check can be put on whether the procedure is in-
deed “doing its job”?
On first thought, it might perhaps seem that one can simply employ here
the standard quality-control procedure of assessing the adequacy of a proc-
ess in terms of the merits of its product. Unfortunately this will not do. For
we immediately run up against one of the key issues of the problem dis-

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 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

puted in antiquity between the Stoics and the Academic Sceptics under the
rubric of the criterion—the problem, that is, of the test-process that is to
represent our standard of truth.
Now to all appearances the question of the appropriateness of a cri-
terological acceptance-standard C is simply this: Does C yield truths?
But how could one meaningfully implement the justificatory program
inherent in this question? Seemingly in only one way: by looking on the
one hand at C-validated propositions and checking on the other hand if
they are in fact truths. But if C really and truly is our working criterion for
the determination of factual truth, then this exercise becomes wholly point-
less. We cannot judge C by the seemingly natural standard of the question
whether what it yields as true is indeed actually true, because we ex hy-
pothesi use C itself as the determinant of just this.
At this point it becomes crucial that C really and truly is the criterion we
actually use for truth determinations. Clearly, if the issue were that of justi-
fying a proposed procedure C′ the preceding methodology would work
splendidly well. For we would then simply check whether the C′-validated
propositions are indeed truths-that is, whether they are also validated by C.
But with respect to C itself this exercise is patently useless.
This line of reasoning has been known from the days of the sceptics of
antiquity under the title of the “diallelus,” a particular sort of self-
validating circulus in probandi. Montaigne presented this Wheel Argument
(as we may term it) as follows:

To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of
things we need to have a distinguishing method (un instrument judicatoire);
to validate this method we need to have a justifying argument; but to validate
this justifying argument we need the very method at issue. And there we are,
going round on the wheel.3

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this extremely simple line

of reasoning. It proves, in as decisive a manner as philosophical argumen-
tation admits of, that our operative standard of factual truth cannot be vali-
dated by somehow exhibiting directly that it does indeed accomplish prop-
erly its intended work of truth-determination.4 The routine tactic of assess-
ing process in terms of product is thus seemingly not practicable in the
case of an inquiry procedure of the sort at issue: it is in principle impossi-
ble to make a direct check of this sort on the functioning of our truth-
determining methods.
The quality control of information cannot just look to information it-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

self—it has to be geared to application. The lesson of the Wheel Argument

(diallelus) is that there simply is no direct way of checking the adequacy of
an inquiry procedure—at any rate with that inquiry procedure to which we
are seriously committed. So where to turn?

3. COGNITIVE TELEOLOGY: THE RECIPROCAL

ACCOMMODATION OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

This deceptively simple-seeming question of the quality control of our

information poses profound and far-reaching issues. In particular, it con-
strains us to give prominence to a recognition of the tritely familiar but still
fundamental fact of the amphibious nature of man as a creature of mind
and body, intellect and will, reason and action, theory and practice.
In keeping with this duality, our knowledge answers to two distinct
categories of purpose, the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical sec-
tor of purpose is pure (action prescinding) and the practical sector is ap-
plied (action involving) in orientation. The theoretical relates to the strictly
intellectual interests of man—the acquisition of descriptive information
and explanatory understanding (to what and why)whereas the practical re-
lates to the material interests of man that underlie the guidance of human
action: avoidance of pain, suffering, frustration, etc. The functional role of
our knowledge encompasses both the intellectual/theoretical aspect of the
purists’ knowledge for knowledge’s sake and the activist/practical aspect
of knowledge as a counsel in the conduct of affairs and a guide to life. Our
acceptance or nonacceptance of factual truths, of course, has profound in-
volvements on both sides of the theoretical/practical divide, since such ac-
ceptance furnishes a guide both to intellectual belief and to overt action in
the pursuit of our practical goals.5
The crucial lesson of such considerations is that the teleology of inquiry
is internally diversified and complex, and spreads across both the cogni-
tive/theoretical and active/practical sectors. Accordingly, a truth-criterion
comes to be endowed with a duality of objectives, and the relevant teleol-
ogy of inquiry is both cognitive and practical.6 Truth-acceptance is on the
one hand a determining factor for belief in purely intellectual and theoreti-
cal regards, and on the other a guiding standard for the practical conduct of
life. The two are inseparably interrelated. And this second cluster of the
goals pertinent to inquiry is by no means of a stature inferior or subordi-
nate to the first. If anything, the reverse is the case: stress upon explanation
and prediction can be viewed as derivatively subsidiary to practice. For on

120
 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

the one hand, explanatory adequacy is a crucial factor in guiding the prac-
tice of specifically rational beings. And on the other hand, prediction is an
inevitable aspect of adequate control—even of that merely negative control
of “letting nature take its course.” The correct canalizing of expectations in
predictive contexts is a crucial aspect of the control over nature essential to
the successful guidance of practical affairs.7
The lesson of the diallelus argument is that we cannot judge theory by
theory alone. Success in matters of practice—of applicative efficacy—is
something very different from “success” in the sphere of theory (viz., “be-
ing right” about something). The success of the pragmatic context is of the
affective order, ranging over the spectrum from physical survival and
avoidance of pain and in jury on the negative side to positive satisfactions
such as those attending the satiation of physical needs on the other. Merely
intellectual accomplishment like “predictive success” (which, to be sure,
can be attended by affectively positive satisfaction) is but a small part of
the picture. After all, a world external, disembodied spectator can make
predictions about the world and utter a pleased” aha-there it is” to himself
when his predictions work out. But the core factor is that of the “success”
of a being emplaced in this world in medias res who must intervene in the
course of events to make matters eventuate so as to conduce to his survival
and well-being. The issue here is thus not to be construed as one of cogni-
tive success but rather in terms of the affectively satisfying and pur-
posively adequate guidance of action, i.e., intervention in the course of
events so as to make things work out “satisfactorily.” In the final analysis,
then, the teleology relevant for the evaluation of cognitive methods must
ultimately be located in applicative “success” in the practical area.
But how is such an approach to be implemented? Let us now try to ex-
ploit in the special case of an inquiry procedure the generic process of in-
strumental justification as previously outlined, recognizing the specifically
pragmatic aspect of the relevant teleology. Approached from this angle,
the justificatory process will have the essentially dialectical structure ex-
hibited in Display 6.
This schema presents—at least in barebones outlines—the process of
the “pragmatic justification” of an inquiry procedure or truth criterion. Its
workings are virtually self-explanatory. The pragmatic factor of the practi-
cal success realized in applying the findings of the procedure comes to rep-
resent the governing consideration for the evaluative issue of its legiti

121
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

____________________________________________________________

Display 6

THE PRAGMATIC JUSTIFICATION OF A METHODOLOGY OF

INQUIRY

MERELY PLAUSIBLE THESES

REASSESSMENT IN THE LIGHT
Presumptions Matters of OF THE PRODUCTS OF M
Record

Presumptively Attributably M M-validated

Warranted Theses Truths

Pragmatic Applications
Validation of M
____________________________________________________________

macy. In all, then, validity a dialectical inquiry procedure is a process that

itself proceeds along substantially dialectical lines.8

4. PRAGMATIC EFFICACY AFFORDS A “REALITY PRINCIPLE”

One important consideration has, however, thus far been left out of
view. For the preceding account shows merely how various elements are
connected, but does not indicate which of these elements lie within the
range of our manipulative control, and which ones merely react to varia-
tions in those determining variables which, so to speak, hold the reins in
their hands. In this regard it is clear that: (I) we can alter and readjust our
Weltanschauung. (2) We can change our inquiry procedure (and hence,
mediately, the range of “truths” that result from its application). (3) We can
modify and reorient our actions. But the one thing that we cannot control
are the consequences of our actions: those results which determinate ac-
tions bring in their wake. In short, while we can change how we think and
act, the success or failure attendant upon such changes is something
wholly outside the sphere of our control. In this crucial respect, our cogni-
tive and active endeavors propose, and nature disposes-and does so in pre-
sumably blithe independence of our wishes and hopes, and our beliefs and
conceptions or misconceptions about the world. Here we come up against

122
 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

the ultimate, theory-external, thought-exogenously independent variable.

Pragmatic success constitutes the finally decisive controlling factor.
These considerations highlight a critically important aspect of the whole
enterprise, namely that of a theory-external quality-control upon theoreti-
cal performance. The over-all process of justification thus involves the
proper closing of two interlocked cycles, the one theoretical/cognitive and
the other practical/applicative in orientation. We can see this most clearly
by reconsidering the elements of the preceding double circle from the vari-
ant point of view presented in Display 5 above.
As long as one remains in the domain of “theory”—one moves about in
the realm of one’s own views and beliefs. At this level nothing precludes
the whole process from being a pure idealism, confined to the realm of
mind alone; the pragmatic element of action and reaction is still absent.
And even when one moves on to the domain of action, one still remains
within an area where we ourselves are masters, the realm of thought and
action whose elements lie within our own control. Only in moving from a
secure, man-dominated realm to encounter the harsh realities of a world
not of our making whose workings lie in predominant measure beyond the
reach of our control.
The process at issue is thus a complex of two distinct but interlocked
cycles-the theoretical cycle of cognitive coherence and the pragmatic cy-
cle of applicative effectiveness. Only if both of these cycles dovetail prop-
erly-in both the theoretical and the applicative sectors-can the whole proc-
ess be construed as providing a suitable rational legitimation for the in-
quiry procedure at issue.
Everyone is familiar with the occasional surfacing even today of some
occult or pseudo-scientific views of the world which substantiate fact-
purporting theses of the strangest sort. It is always striking here how beau-
tifully everything meshes at the theoretical level-one bit of strangeness be-
ing supported by others. The crunch comes only with the tough question:
Does this world-view enable its proponents to navigate more successfully
through the rocks and shoals of this world? The proof of such a theoretical
pudding is its applicative eating.
The pivotal element of action and reaction thus provides for the opera-
tion of a “reality principle.” And this is vital to the justificatory capacities
of the whole process, because it blocks the prospect of a futile spinning
around in reality-detached cycles of purely theoretical gyrations. Some-
place along the line of justification there must be provision for a corrective
contact with the bedrock of an uncooperative and largely unmanipulable

123
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

reality—a brute force independent of the whims of our theorizing. This

crucial reality-principle is provided for in the framework of the present
theory by the factor of the reactive success consequent upon implementing
action.
There is no hors de texte says Jacques Derrida. The only validating rea-
son for a belief is yet another belief says Donald Davidson. But this sort of
“wisdom” is error. The world of thought is not self-contained; it is integral
to the wider world of nature, part of a realm in which events happen and
experiences occur. And it is the course of experience that can and does
validated many of our beliefs. A perfectly good reason for believing that
the cat is on the mat is that we experience (i.e., observe) it to be there. The
acceptability of beliefs lies not with other beliefs but with experience—and
experience must here be understood in rather general and broadly inclusive
terms.
On this approach, then, the linkage between pragmatic utility and the
truth of theses can be broken apart, and methods are inserted into the gap
that opens up. Pragmatic considerations are not brought to bear on theses
directly. This mediation of methods between pragmatic considerations and
thesis-acceptance is central to, and indeed definitive of, the specifically
methodological pragmatism at issue here.
By its very nature as such, a thesis-oriented pragmatism cannot afford to
concede possible discrepancies between success and truthfulness. But a
methodological pragmatism is in a very different position here. Theses
perish in unfavorable circumstances, but methods can live on to fight an-
other day. For the success of a method is a factor whose systematic nature
gives it great probative weight in spite of occasional failings. A cognitive
methodology is something so general and so open-ended in its orientation
that gratuitously lucky success in the implementation of its products on a
systematic basis can be ruled out as a genuine prospect.
After all, the systematic success of an inquiry method cannot plausibly
be dismissed as a sheerly fortuitous piece of luck owing to the inherent
generality of methods. After all, the applicability range of an inquiring
methodology is literally boundless: no factual issue is to lie outside its in-
tended province. Here it is effectively assured that probatively irrelevant
side effects by way of fortuitous benefits or disasters will become canceled
out in the larger scheme of things. That inappropriate processes might
prove pervasively successful at this synoptic level of generality is theoreti-
cally possible but affectively unlikely—a prospect so farfetched that it can
be dismissed with confidence. Fundamental mistakes at this level of gen-

124
 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

erality are bound to have applicative repercussions across a limitless fron-

tier that would not only be discernible but would ultimately prove catastro-
phic in implementation. These considerations indicate a critically impor-
tant aspect of the generality of such a methodological approach to pragma-
tism—an approach whose generality is crucial to its capacity to overcome
the shortcomings inherent in thesis-pragmatism.
Precisely because the later, “progressive” stages of the application of
our inquiry procedures are more fully warranted on the basis of a dialecti-
cal feed-back via the ampler and more successful body of praxis that they
underwrite, we can take the stance that is rational to view their deliver-
ances as better qualified for endowment with the presumption of truth. It is
on this basis alone that we can be increasingly confident that our currently
accepted picture of nature affords a comparatively better estimate than our
past pictures do.
In valid deductive logic the premisses constrain the conclusion: when
and if the premisses are true, the conclusion is inevitably true as well. In
dialectics the situation is different. The premisses invite the conclusion;
they instruct it but do not constrain it. Given the impact of an antithesis
upon a thesis, there are always alternatives, various options for responding
with one specific alternative forced and inevitable. Dialectics does not ne-
cessitate: a certain aura of contingency is always present. Insofar as cogni-
tive dialectics determines truth it does so not with demonstrative certainty
but with plausibility.
Accordingly, our dialectivity formed beliefs about the world should be
seen as having two interrelated aspects: on the one hand, they are indeed
estimates of the truth and not definitive demonstrations thereof, but on the
other hand they are not mere estimates: they are responsible estimates of
the truth that rest on the most amply authenticated methodological basis
that it has been within our power to devise.

5. ISSUES OF MEANING

Apart from for the cognitive dialectic of inquiry, of truth-determination,

there is also the cognitive dialectic of hermeneutics, of meaning-
clarification. For dialectic can serve for clarification as well as for substan-
tiation. After all, many if not most of our affirmations are vague and im-
precise and thereby in some respect untenable as is so that there is some-
thing that can be said for its denial. And conversely, where we issue deni-
als there is often as not sufficient imprecision to leave some room for

125
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

saying something on behalf of the continuing affirmation. One of the key

tasks of dialectic is accordingly a matter of negotiation, as it were, between
affirmation and denial for the sake of greater clarity and precision in our
cognitive commitments. Thus consider: “The cat is on the mat.” What
could be a simpler, more categorical truth than that? And yet consider the
following dialogic exchange between Proponent and Opponent:

P: The cat is on the mat

O: But his left front paw is somewhat off the mat. And for that matter his
whiskers aren’t on the mat at all but up on his face, which is considerably
above the mat.

P: But what is meant by asserting “The cat is on the mat” doesn’t claim that
every part of the cat is touching the mat—paws and whiskers included.
For the cat to be on the mat it need not be that all its parts are in contact
with that mat, an evident impossibility; it suffices that most of the largest
should be so.

This sort of exchange is clearly a matter of explanatory rather than justifac-

tory (probative or evidential) dialectic. But this process too exemplifies
the typical dialectical format of moving from a consideration via counter-
considerations to a more sophisticated re-consideration.
Epistemic dialectic has a composite aim: it seeks concurrently and in-
teractively to clarify a thesis and to establish its credentials. The object is
to recast and revise an otherwise unclear claim and to do this in a way that
makes it more plausible, less open to objection. Sharpening a contention in
the direction of tenability is the aim of the enterprise.
Such a process finds its work in the fact that many or most of our de-
scriptive and classifactory concepts are imprecise and have some element
of unclarity about them. And so, in endeavoring to provide an exact con-
strual for an imprecise thesis there is a “dialectical” opposite between two
much and too little.
Any imprecise term presents us with the situation depicted in Display 7
No matter where that proposal border is placed within that region of inde-
terminateness, there will be some post-border outs that are actually in and
some post-border ins that are actually out. So there will be errors of both
types: errors of omission and errors of commission. And for this reason
there will arise contradictions between what is in (according to the border)

126
 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

and what is out (according to fact)—or the other way around. The thesis at
issue fixes a border by overgeneralization with too many errors of commis-

____________________________________________________________

Display 7

TERMINOLOGICAL IMPRECISION

Definite in proposed
border
Definite out

Undecided
____________________________________________________________

sion: too many OUTS included. The anti-thesis goes too far the other way:
too many errors of omission: too many INS excluded. And in the next dia-
lectional cycle the same story recurs—albeit none (hopefully) at a level of
lesser severity. Potentially the process goes on and on. What Eduard von
Hartman called Hegel’s commitment to the instable fluidity (Flüssigkeit)
of concepts turns on the imprecision of those we generally use.9 Truly sci-
entific categories grow more and more precise. In the ideal end (the “Ab-
solute”) there is perfectly precise and detailed thought. No more conflicts,
no more dialectic.
In the face of merely imprecise rather than rationally confused and
seflcontradictory concepts, dialectic can play a positive and constructive
role as a clarifactory rather than a negatively deconstructive process. How-
ever given that imprecision, the achievement of perfection is in principle
impossible here. But with a (hopefully) convergent dialectic—driven at
each stage by the endeavors to reduce the volume of contradictions—there
will in the end be a superior product, or a condition which, thought still in-
correct, reduces the level of totality of errors (omission plus commission)
by a border drawn with increasing refinement and judiciousness.
Where Hegel spoke of the instability of finite categories one can also
speak of the indefiniteness of finite categories. Every taxonomy and every
descriptive characterization of the real things we encounter in the course of
our interactive experiences with the world is imperfect, imprecise, fuzzy-
edged. There will always be some excluded things that should, properly

127
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

considered and ideally be included (errors of kind one), and some included
things that should, properly considered and ideally be excluded (errors of
kind two). In sum errors of omission and commission are inevitable. The
only wholly unproblematic reality-geared category is “being an object of
thought” which defined the totalistic set T. Here there can be no mistakes
and there are no borderline cases: whatever the item may be that is at issue
is at deliberation, it will inevitably and unavoidably be a member of this
set. No dialectical staggering is needed here. But of course while we
know that there are increasingly many items in this set T, we cannot hope
to offer anything like a complete inverting or indication of what they are.
Explicative dialectic (of the sort practical by the Platonic Socrates) is
seemingly more fundamental than probative dialectic (of the sort provided
by the Schoolmen) if only because any assertion above X presupposes that
one has already settled the meaning-coordinate issue of just what is at issue
with X. But this does not do justice to the later version of probative dia-
lectic derived from Fichte and Hegel. For here the issue of meaning and
tenability are heisted in interactive juxtaposition. The enterprise is seen as
one of negotiation between meaning and tenability, with meaning seen as
reconstructable and fluid in the interaction of developing a version of the
initial target-thesis that is more tenable and less open to objection.
Historically, this sort of dialectic has stood at the forefront of philoso-
phy. With Plato, dialectic was often a matter of elucidation—of bringing to
light just how various misconceived and misunderstood conceptions should
properly be understood—of bringing their constituting idea to light.10
However, such a clarifactory dialectic need not simply discount the earlier
conception as totally mistaken and erroneous but can endeavor to find
within it a level of insightful truth that can be carried forward. Since a
process reconstitutes rather than discounts the conception at issue. A key
element of what there was is retained (Hegel’s aufgehoben) and high-
lighted (i.e., raises up into the light and in this way also aufgehoben—thus
capturing both senses of the German term). In emphasizing this sort of dia-
lectic in Hegel, H. G. Gadamer wrote that it:

Restored a way of doing philosophy which is the natural inheritance from the
first Greek thinkers. Hegel’s methodological principle . . .[is] the require-
ment of an immanently developing progression in which concepts move to
11
ever greater differentiation and concretization.

And just this is the crux of Hegelian dialectic in its bearing on conceptual
hermeneutics.

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 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

____________________________________________________________

Display8

PHYSICAL COMPLEMENTARITY

specificity locus of feasible combinations

regarding
momentum

specificity regarding
position
____________________________________________________________

6. CONCEPT COMPLEMENTARITY AND DIALECTICAL TENSION

With complementarity in physics we confront a situation of clash or

conflict. There are two things about a subatomic particle that we would
ideally like to know: an exact and accurate specification of the particle’s
momentum and an exact and accurate specification of its position. But
quantum theory teaches that one can only improve matters as regards one
of these two factors at the expense of worsening them with respect to the
other: greater exactness with respect to momentum enjoins less exactness
with regard to position—and conversely. We thus have to come to terms
with the situation of Display 8. In respect to what is at issue here one can-
not improve matters beyond the limits set by the laws of nature.
However, in the course of time Neils Bohr, a founding father of quan-
tum theory, himself came to view this sort of complementarity as a very
general principle with applications far above and beyond the limited do-
main of quantum physics. As one eminent physicist summarized the situa-
tion:

129
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

In later years Bohr emphasized the importance of complementarity for mat-

ters far removed from physics. There is a story that Bohr was once asked in
German what is the quality that is complementary to truth (Wahrheit). After
some thought he answered clarity (Klarheit). (Stephen Weinberg, Dreams of
a Final Theory [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], p. 74 footnote 10.)
____________________________________________________________

Display 9

FEATURE COMPLEMENTARITY VALUES

Parameter 1 ↑

→
Parameter 2
____________________________________________________________

And it would seem that here Bohr’s instinct was very much on the right
track. For the situation of quantum-physical complementarity in fact ex-
emplifies a very general phenomenon that occurs across a wide spectrum
of situations, and indeed has substantial ramifications in various key areas
of philosophy. In seeking to clarify this issue the subsequent discussion
will focus on the presently pivotal idea of what might be called conceptual
complementarity.
The reality of it is that the constitutive components of our concepts are
frequently competitively interactive. A conflict or competition among fac-
tors so functions that more of the one can only be realized at the expense of
less of the other. Such conceptual complementarity thus arises when two
(or more) parametric features are linked in a see-saw or teeter-totter inter-
connection, be it nature-imposed or conceptually-mandated interrelation-
ship where more of the one automatically ensures less of the other, as per
the situation of Display 9. Situations of trade-off along these general lies
occur in a wide variety of contexts, and many concepts afford instances of
this phenomenon.
For the sake of illustration, let us begin with Bohr’s own example from
epistemology. It is a basic principle of this field that increased confidence
in the correctness of our estimates can always be secured at the price of de-

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 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

creased accuracy. For in general an inverse relationship obtains between

the definiteness or precision of our information and its substantiation: de-
tail and security stand in a competing relationship. We estimate the height
of the tree at around 25 feet. We are quite sure that the tree is 25±5 feet
high. We are virtually certain that its height is 25±10 feet. But we can be
completely and absolutely sure that its height is between 1 inch and 100
yards. Of this we are “completely sure” in the sense that we are “abso-
lutely certain,” “certain beyond the shadow of a doubt”, “as certain as we
can be of anything in the world,” “so sure that we would be willing to stake
your life on it,” and the like. For any sort of estimate whatsoever there is
always a characteristic trade-off relationship between the evidential secu-
rity of the estimate, on the one hand (as determinable on the basis of its
probability or degree of acceptability), and on the other hand its contentual
detail (definiteness, exactness, precision, etc.).
And so it emerges that there obtains a complementarity relationship of
the same structure as that of Display 8 above. This was adumbrated in the
ideas of the French physicist Pierre Maurice Duhem (1981-1916) and
may accordingly be called “Duhem’s Law.”12 In his classic work on the
aim and structure of physical theory, Duhem wrote as follows:

A law of physics possesses a certainty much less immediate and much more
difficult to estimate than a law of common sense, but it surpasses the latter by
the minute and detailed precision of its predictions. . . The laws of physics
can acquire this minuteness of detail only by sacrificing something of the
fixed and absolute certainty of common-sense laws. There is a sort of teeter-
totter of balance between precision and certainty: one cannot be increased
13
except to the detriment of the other.

In effect, these two factors—security and detail—stand in a teeter-totter re-

lation of inverse proportionality, much as with physical complementarity.
Continuing with epistemology, let it be noted that there are two signifi-
cantly different sorts of errors, namely errors of commission and errors of
omission. For it is only too clear that errors of commission are not the only
sort of misfortune there are. Ignorance, lack of information, cognitive dis-
connection from the world’s course of things—in short, errors of omis-
sion—are also negativities of substantial proportionism, and this too is
something we must work into our reckoning. Both are negativities and ob-
viously need to be avoided insofar as possible in any sensible inquiry proc-
ess.

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

With error-avoidance in matters of cognition the tradeoff between errors

of type 1 and errors of type 2—between improper negatives and false posi-
tives—is critical in this connection. For instance, an inquiry process of any
realistically operable sort is going to deem some falsehoods acceptable and

____________________________________________________________

Display 10

THE PREDICAMENT OF COGNITIVE ERRONEOUSNESS

errors of
commission

errors of
omission
____________________________________________________________

some truths not. And the more we fiddle with the arrangement to decrease
the one sort of error, the more we manage to increase the other.
The familiar teeter-totter relationship obtains here once more. For un-
fortunately the reality of it is that any given epistemic program—any sort
of process or policy of belief formation—will answer to the situation of
Display 10. In discerning between the sheep and the goats, any general
decision process will either allow too many goats into the sheepfold or ex-
clude too many sheep from its purview. The cognitive realities being what
they are, perfection is simply unattainable here.
To be sure, agnosticism is a sure-fire safeguard against errors of com-
mission in cognitive matters. If you accept nothing then you accept no
falsehoods. But error avoidance as such does not bring one much closer to
knowing how pancakes are actually made. The aims of inquiry are not nec-
essarily enhanced by the elimination of cognitive errors of commission.
For if in eliminating such an error we simply leave behind a blank and for
a wrong answer substitute no answer at all we have simply managed to ex-
change an error of commission for one of omission.
As such examples illustrate concepts like propositional informativeness
(with its conflicting components of security and detail) or erroneousness
(with its conflicting components of commission and omission) are en-

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 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

meshed in a situation of conceptual complementarity where two salient

constitutive features are in a situation of trade-off. There is, in such cases,
a dialectical tension between the concept-constituted features.
With such concepts we become concerned with the situation of what
might be called an estimation quandary.
____________________________________________________________

Display 11

ESTIMATIONAL MERITS

Deficiency
avoidance

Excess
avoidance
____________________________________________________________

Estimation quandaries arise in connection with the quest for a “happy

medium” between too much and too little of something in the assessment
of a problematic parameter. This sort of thing is typified by the classic
Heap paradox (Sorites) which pivots on the question “How many grains of
sand will make a heap?” Two potential disvalues (negativities) loom here.
On the one side stands the excess of too many. (A zillion grains form a
sand-dune or beach, not a heap). And on the other side stands the defi-
ciency of too few. (Two or even three grains of sand are not yet a heap.)
But the corresponding merits that are at issue here pose problems: excess
avoidance risks deficiency, and deficiency avoidance risks excess. Those
corresponding merits or positivities at issue with over- and under-
estimation avoidance stand in a condition of desideratum complementarity.
For in specifying the n-value at issue with “It takes n grains of sand to
make a heap” we arrive at the situation of Display 11. With overly large n
and underly small n alike we unravel the tenability of our purportedly
heap-characterizing contention. As with any estimate we must negotiate
between the competing merits of deficiency avoidance and excess avoid-
ance.

133
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

Let us return to our problem in the light of these generalities. In the

special case of communication it transpires that the claims we assert will
divide the overall realm of possibilities into two regions: those that our
statement admits (its truth-range) and those it excludes (its falsity range).
The state of things is depicted in Display 12.

____________________________________________________________

Display 12

HOW STATEMENTS COORDINATE WITH POSSIBILITIES

realm of statement-included possibilities

possibilities

statement-excluded possibilities

____________________________________________________________

And here in staking our informative claims by means of statements we

in effort offer an estimate of the truth-range at issue. Adequate communi-
cation requires both the reliability and contentual informativeness. But if
the truth-range is too large we have a situation of excess with its correla-
tive demerit of compromising the informativeness of our claim. And if it is
too small we incur the corresponding demerit of compromising its reliabil-
ity since ampler information is required to validate greater specificity.
But of course both informativeness and reliability are crucial for suc-
cessful communication. A statement, however definite and informative,
whose claims to truth are weak is useless in communication, and the same
goes for a statement which, despite strong claims on truth is vague and un-
informative. Any cognitively useful contention must be both substantively
informative and circumstantially well evidentiated. For be it ever so in-
formative, it is useless acceptable as true or at least likely; and conversely,
no matter how probable or certain it may be, it will be useless when its
substantive content is vacuous.
But with communication managed in the imperfect medium of language
there is no boundary between the two that is at once readily specifiable and
razor-sharp.

134
 DIALECTIC AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

On this basis the interplay of deficiency avoidance and excess avoid-

ance enter upon the stage in such a way as to entail the desideratum com-
plementarity at issue with the security/detail relationship, which actually is
no more (but also no less) that yet another instance of an estimation quan-
dary.
Situations of concept complementarity and estimation quandaries be-
long to the realm of what might be called conceptual dialectics. For in ap-
plying such concepts to specific instances one must carefully weigh and
balance the argument for and against in the specific case that lies before us.
Validating the application of any such concept is a quintessentially dialec-
tical process.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
1
G. W. F. Hegel, Werks ed. H. Glockner, Vol. II (Stuttgart, Published, 1949), p. 613.
2
Roland Simon-Schaefer, Dialektik: Kritik eines Wortgebrauches (Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog,1973).
3
“Pour juger des apparances que nous recevons des subjects, il nous faudroit un in-
strument judicatoire; pour verifier cet instrument, il nous fault de la demonstration;
pour verifier la demonstration, un instrument: nous voila au rouet.” Essaies, Bk II,
ch. 12 (“ An Apologie of Raymond Sebond”); p. 544 of the Modern Library edition
of The Essays of Montaigne (New York, 1933). Francis Bacon, with the character-
istic shrewdness of a lawyer, even managed to turn the diallelus into a dialectical
weapon against his methodological opponents: “no judgment can be rightly formed
either of my method, or of the discoveries to which it leads, by means of . . . the
reasoning which is now in use, since one cannot postulate due jurisdiction for a tri-
bunal which is itself on trial.” (N ovum Organon, Bk I, sect. 33).
4
Notwithstanding its intrinsic significance, this line of reasoning has lain dormant in
modern philosophy until Désiré Joseph Mercier’s monumental Critériologie ou
théorie générale de la certitude (Louvain, 1884; 8th ed. 1924). This book gave the
argument a currency in Catholic circles; see, for example, Peter Coffey, Epistemol-
ogy (2 vols, London and New York: Longmans Green and Company, 1917). It
figures centrally in two later coincident publications, my own book, The Primacy
of Practice (Oxford, 1973), and Roderick Chisholm’s interesting lecture on The
Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1973).
5
This is not the place to enlarge on the problem of how knowledge and belief serve
in guiding rational action. The large (and rapidly growing) literature on “practical
reasoning” throws much light on the relevant issues. The crucial point is the na-
ively elemental fact that we cannot move from the objective to quench our thirst to
drinking a certain liquid save by the mediation of a belief that drinking it will (or

135
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

may) conduce to this goal (without offsetting side-effects).

6
A fuller development of these considerations regarding the teleology of inquiry is
given in the author’s Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1970).
7
Though many philosophers of science maintain the primacy of prediction over ret-
rodictive explanation in assessing the adequacy of scientific theories, others have
found this puzzling. They view it as implausible that future-oriented applications
should receive more weight than past-oriented ones. Thus J. M. Keynes wrote:
“The peculiar virtue of prediction or predesignation is altogether imaginary. The
number of instances examined and the analogy between them are the essential
points, and the question as to whether a particular hypothesis happens to be pro-
pounded before or after their examination is quite irrelevant” (A Treatise on Prob-
ability [London, 1921], p. 305). A pragmatic point of view that stresses the central-
ity of control immediately rationalizes the difference between past and future in
this regard: the two cases may be logically symmetric but there is a decisive prag-
matic asymmetry-the past lies beyond the prospect of intervention whereas we can
often still do something about the future. For an interesting treatment of some rele-
vant issues see Alan Musgrave, “Logical versus Historical Theories of Confirma-
tion,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 25 (1974), pp. 1-22 (see
especially pp. 1-3).
8
These theories are further developed in the author’s Methodological Pragmatism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
9
Edmond von Hartmann, Ueber die dialektische Methode (Dramstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), pp. 95-100.
10
In thinking of himself as the founder of positive dialectic Hegel failed to do justice
to the ancients. See H. G. Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1976), especially Chapter 1, “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient
Philosophers.”
11
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976), p. 31.
12
Here at any rate eponyms are sometimes used to make the point that the work of
the person at issue has suggested rather than originated the idea or principle at is-
sue.
13
La théorie physique: son objet, et sa structure (Paris: Chevalier and Rivière,
1906); tr. by Philip P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Prince-
ton, Princeton University Press, 1954), op. cit., pp. 178-79. Italics supplied.

136
Chapter 9

COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX

WORLD: DESTABILIZATION AND
COMPLEXIFICATION
1. SPENCER’S LAW: THE DYNAMICS OF COGNITIVE
COMPLEXITY

B e it at the level of cosmological development, of biological evolution,

or of technological invention, every major innovation in the world
opens up a new “range of possibilities” which soon gets exploited in the
natural course of things. But as this exploitation proceeds, there comes
into operation a process of selection—be it natural or rational—that soon
reduces the possibilities to a greatly diminished subgroup of survivors.
With every step of this innovation-proliferation-selection cycle, the real-
ized products are more complex than what existed before, more closely at-
tuned to the needs of new conditions and circumstances.
We naturally adopt throughout rational inquiry—and accordingly
throughout natural science—the methodological principle of rational econ-
omy to “Try the simplest solutions first” and then make this do as long as it
can. And this means that historically the course of inquiry moves in the di-
rection of ever increasing complexity. The developmental tendency of our
intellectual enterprises—natural science among them—is generally in the
direction of greater complication and sophistication.
In a complex world, the natural dynamics of the cognitive process ex-
hibits an inherent tropism towards increasing complexity. Herbert Spencer
argued long ago that evolution is characterized by von Baer’s law of de-
velopment “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous” and thereby pro-
duces an ever-increasing definition of detail and complexity of articula-
tion.1 As Spencer saw it, organic species in the course of their development
confront a successive series of environmental obstacles, and with each suc-
cessful turning along the maze of developmental challenges the organism
becomes selectively more highly specialized in its bio-design, and thereby
more tightly attuned to the particular features of its ecological context.2
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

Now this view of the developmental process may or may not be correct for
biological evolution, but there can be little question about its holding for
cognitive evolution. For rational beings will of course try simple things
first and thereafter be driven step by step towards an ever enhanced com-
plexification. In the course of rational inquiry we try the simple solutions
first, and only thereafter, if and when they cease to work—when they are
ruled out by further findings (by some further influx of coordinating in-
formation)—do we move on to the more complex. Things go along
smoothly until an oversimple solution becomes destabilized by enlarged
experience. For a time we get by with the comparatively simpler op-
tions—until the expanding information about the world’s modus operandi
made possible by enhanced new means of observation and experimentation
insists otherwise. And with the expansion of knowledge those new acces-
sions make ever increasing demands. And so evolution, be it natural or ra-
tional—whether of animal species or of literary genres—ongoingly con-
fronts us with products of greater and greater complexity.3
Rational inquiry is a process of optimization—that is, maximization un-
der constraints. In particular, it strives for comprehensiveness: we require
enough amplitude to take synoptic account of the whole range of available
experience. But, subject to this limitation, we seek the simplest, the most
economical theory framework that is conveniently available to resolve our
explanatory questions. We want, in sum, to find the most economical the-
ory-accommodation for the amplest body of currently available experience.
Induction—here short for “the scientific method” in general—proceeds by
way of constructing the most straightforward and economical structures
able to house the available data comfortably while yet affording answers to
our questions.4 Accordingly, economy and simplicity serve as cardinal di-
rectives for inductive reasoning, whose procedure is that of the precept:
“Resolve your cognitive problems in the simplest, most economical way
that is compatible with a sensible exploitation of the information at your
disposal.” In the course of resolving our cognitive problems we honor—
and generally hold—the calls for implementing the general idea of rational
economy. But we always encounter limits here.
Our cognitive efforts manifest a Manichaean-style struggle between
complexity and simplicity—between the impetus to comprehensiveness
(amplitude) and the impetus to system (economy). We want our theories
to be as extensive and all-encompassing as possible and at the same time to
be elegant and economical. The first desideratum pulls in one direction,
the second in the other. And the accommodation reached here is never ac-

138
 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

tually stable. As our experience expands in the quest for greater adequacy
and comprehensiveness, the old theory structures become destabilized—
the old theories no longer fit the full range of available fact. And so the
theoretician goes back to the old drawing board. What he comes up with
here is—and in the circumstances must be—something more elaborate,
more complex than what was able to do the job before those new complica-
tions arose (though we do, of course, sometimes achieve local simplifica-
tions within an overall global complexification). We make do with the
simple, but only up to the point when the demands of adequacy force addi-
tional complications upon us. An inner tropism towards increasing com-
plexity is thus built into the very nature of the scientific project as we have
it.
And the same is true also for technological evolution, with cognitive
technology emphatically included. Be it in cognitive or in practical mat-
ters, the processes and resources of yesteryear are rarely, if ever, up to the
demands of the present. In consequence, the life-environment we create
for ourselves grows increasingly complex. The Occam’s Razor injunction,
“Never introduce complications unless and until you actually require
them,” accordingly represents a defining principle of practical reason that
is at work within the cognitive project as well. And because we try the
simplest solutions first, making simple solutions do until circumstances
force one to do otherwise, it transpires that in the development of knowl-
edge—as elsewhere in the domain of human artifice—progress is always a
matter of complexification. An inherent impetus towards greater complex-
ity 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.5

2. THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST EFFORT AND THE

METHODOLOGICAL STATUS OF SIMPLICITY-PREFERENCE
IN SCIENCE

An eminent philosopher of science has maintained that “in cases of in-

ductive simplicity it is not economy which determines our choice . . . . We
make the assumption that the simplest theory furnishes the best predic-
tions. This assumption cannot be justified by convenience; it has a truth
character and demands a justification within the theory of probability and
induction.”6 This perspective is gravely misleading. What sort of consid-
eration could possibly justify the supposition that “the simplest theory fur-

139
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

nishes the best prediction”? Any such belief is surely unwarranted and in-
appropriate. There is simply no cogent rationale for firm confidence in the
simplicity of nature. To claim the ontological simplicity of the real is
somewhere between hyperbolic and absurd.
The matter becomes far less problematic, however, once one approaches
it from a methodological rather than a substantive point of view. For con-
siderations of rational economy and convenience of operation obviously
militate for inductive systematicity. Seeing that the simplest answer is (eo
ipso) the most economical one to work with, rationality creates A natural
pressure towards economy—towards simplicity insofar as other things are
equal. Our eminent theorist has things upside down here: it is in fact
methodology that is at issue rather than among any factual presumption.
Suppose, for example, that we are asked to supply the next member of a
series of the format 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, 11, 12, 13, 14, 101, 102, 103, 104, . . . , with
the correct answer thus eventuating as 11 rather than 5. But while we can-
not rule such possibilities out, they do not for an instant deter our inductive
proceedings. For the inductively appropriate course lies with the produc-
tion rule that is the simplest issue-resolving answer—the simplest resolu-
tion that meets the conditions of the problem. And we take this line not
because we know a priori that this simplest resolution will prove to be cor-
rect. (We know no such thing!) Rather we adopt this answer, provision-
ally at least, just exactly because it is the least cumbersome and most eco-
nomical way of providing a resolution that does justice to the facts and
demands of the situation. We recognize that other possibilities of resolu-
tion exist but ignore them until further notice, exactly because there is no
cogent reason for giving them favorable treatment at this stage. (After all,
once we leave the safe harbor of simplicity behind there are always multi-
ple possibilities for complexification, and we lack any guidance in moving
one way rather than another.)
Throughout inductive inquiry in general, and scientific inquiry in par-
ticular, we seek to provide a descriptive and explanatory account that pro-
vides the simplest, least complex way of accommodating the data that ex-
perience (experimentation and observation) has put at our disposal. When
something simple accomplishes the cognitive tasks in hand, as well as
some more complex alternative, it is foolish to adopt the latter. After all,
we need not presuppose that the world somehow is systematic (simple, uni-

140
 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

form, and the like) to validate our penchant for the systematicity of our
cognitive commitments.
Henri Poincaré has remarked that:

[Even] those who do not believe that natural laws must be simple, are still
often obliged to act as if they did believe it. They cannot entirely dis-
pense with this necessity without making all generalization, and therefore
all science, impossible. It is clear that any fact can be generalised in an
infinite number of ways, and it is a question of choice. The choice can
only be guided by considerations of simplicity. . . . To sum up, in most
cases every law is held to be simple until the contrary is proved.7

These observations are wholly in the right spirit. As cognitive possibilities

proliferate in the course of theory-building inquiry, a principle of choice
and selection becomes requisite. And here economy—along with its other
systematic congeners, simplicity, and uniformity, and the like—are the
natural guideposts. We subscribe to the inductive presumption in favor of
simplicity, uniformity, normality,8 etc., not because we know or believe
that matters always stand on a basis that is simple, uniform, normal, etc.—
surely we know no such thing!—but because it is on this basis alone that
we can conduct our cognitive business in the most advantageous, the most
economical way. In scientific induction we exploit the information at hand
so as to answer our questions in the most straightforward, the most eco-
nomical way.
Throughout inductive situations, our objective factual claims outreach
the available evidence. Here we are invariably called on to answer ques-
tions whose resolution is beyond the secure reach of information at hand.
And to accomplish this we our problem resolutions along the lines of least
resistance, seeking to economize our cognitive effort by using the most di-
rect 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 conven-
ient to use. The rationale of the other-things-equal preferability of simpler
solutions over more complex ones is obvious enough. Simpler solutions
are less cumbersome to store, easier to take hold of, and less difficult to
work with. It is indeed economy and convenience that determine our regu-
lative predilection for simplicity and systematicity in general. Our prime
motivation is to get by with a minimum of complication, to adopt strategies
of question-resolution that enable us among other things: (1) to continue

141
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

with existing solutions unless and until the epistemic circumstances com-
pel us to introduce changes (uniformity) be; (2) to make the same proc-
esses do insofar as possible (generality), and (3) to keep to the simplest
process that will do the job (simplicity). Such a perspective 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.”
When other things are anything like equal, simpler theories are bound to
be operationally more advantageous. We avoid needless complications
whenever possible, because this is the course of an economy of effort. It is
the general practice in scientific theory construction, to give preference to

• one-dimensional rather than multidimensional modes of descrip-

tion,

• quantitative rather than qualitative characterizations,

• lower- rather than higher-order polynomials,

• linear rather than nonlinear differential equations.

The comparatively simpler is for this very reason easier to work with. In
sum, we favor uniformity, analogy, simplicity, and the like because they
ease our cognitive labor. On such a perspective, simplicity is a concept of
the practical order, pivoting on being more economical to use—that is, less
demanding of resources.
As a fundamentally inductive endeavor, scientific theorizing accord-
ingly involves the search for, or the construction of, the least complex and
most straightforward theory-structure capable of resolving our questions
while also adequately accommodating the currently available data. The
key principle is that of the rational economy of means for the realization of
given cognitive ends, of getting the most effective answer we can with the
least complication. Complexities cannot be ruled out, but they must al-
ways pay their way in terms of increased systemic adequacy! It is thus
methodology and not metaphysics that grounds our commitment to sim-
plicity and systematicity.
The rational economy of process is the crux here. And this methodo-
logical commitment to rational process does not prejudge or prejudice the
substantively ontological issue of the complexity of nature. Natural sci-

142
 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

ence is emphatically not bound to a Principle of Simplicity in Nature.

There really are no adequate grounds for supposing the “simplicity” of the
world’s make-up. Instead, the so-called “Principle of Simplicity” is really
a principle of complexity-management: “Feel free to introduce complexity
in your efforts to describe and explain nature’s ways. But only when and
where it is really needed. Insofar as possible “keep it simple!” Only intro-
duce as much complexity as you really need for your scientific purposes of
description, explanation, prediction, and control.” Such an approach is
eminently sensible. But of course such a principle is no more than a meth-
odological rule of procedure for managing our cognitive affairs. Nothing
entitles us to transmute this methodological precept into a descrip-
tive/ontological claim to the effect that nature is simple—let alone of finite
complexity.
Our systematizing procedures in science pivot on the injunction always
to adopt the most economical (simple, general, straightforward, etc.) solu-
tion that meets the demands of the situation. This penchant for inductive
systematicity reflected in the conduct of inquiry is simply a matter of striv-
ing for rational economy. It is based on methodological considerations that
are governed by an analogue of Occam’s razor—a principle of parsimony
to the effect that needless complexity is to be avoided complicationes non
multiplicandae sunt praeter necessitatem. Given that the inductive
method, viewed in its practical and methodological aspect, aims at the
most efficient and effective means of question-resolution, it is only natural
that our inductive precepts should direct us always to begin with the most
systematic, the thereby economical, device that can actually do the job at
hand.9
It clearly makes eminent sense to move onwards 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, inves-
tigated, etc. The regulative principles of convenience and economy in
learning and inquiry suffice to provide a rational basis for systematicity-
preference. Our preface for simplicity, uniformity, and systematicity in
general, is now 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 not because
it is truth-indicative, but because it is teleologically more effective in con-
ducing to the efficient realization of the goals of inquiry. We look for the
dropped coin in the lightest spots nearby, not because this is—in the cir-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

cumstances—the most probable location but because it represents the most

sensible strategy of search: if it is not there, then we just cannot find it at
all.
To be sure, only time will tell to what extent we can successfully move
in the direction in which systematicity and implicity point. This is some-
thing that “remains to be seen.” (This is where the importance of ultimate
experiential retrovalidation comes in to supplement our commitment to
methodological convenience.) But they clearly afford the most natural and
promising starting point. The systematically smoothest resolution of our
questions is patently that which must be allowed to prevail—at any rate
pro tem, until such time as its untenability becomes manifest. 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 eco-
nomical—in whatever modes of simplicity and economy are relevant. In
such a perspective, induction is seen as a fundamentally regulative and
procedural resource in the domain of inquiry, proceeding in implementa-
tion of the injunction: “Do all you reasonably come to enhance the extent
to which your cognitive commitments are simple and smoothly system-
atic.” In the absence of such a principle—or some functional equivalent of
it—the venture of rational inquiry could not get under way at all.
On such a view, inductive systematicity with its penchant for simplicity
comes to be seen 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 considera-
tion 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 re-
course to a substantive (or descriptively constitutive) postulate of the sim-
plicity 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 sys-
tematicity is ontologically neutral: it is a matter of conducting our ques-
tion-resolving endeavors with the greatest economy. The Principle of
Least Effort is in control here—the process is one of maximally economic
means to the attainment of chosen ends. This amounts to a theoretical de-
fense of inductive systematicity that in fact rests on practical considera-
tions relating to the efficiencies of method. Accordingly, inductive sys-

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

tematicity is best approached with reference, not to reality as such—or

even merely our conception of it—but to the ways and means we employ
in conceptualizing it. It is noncommittal on matters of substance, repre-
senting no more than a determination to conduct our question-resolving
endeavors with the greatest economy. For in inquiry, as elsewhere, ration-
ality enjoins us to employ the maximally economic means to the attain-
ment of chosen ends.
At this point we must distinguish the substantive from the methodologi-
cal considerations and separate economy of means from substantive econ-
omy. For process is one things and product another. Simple tools or
methods can, suitably used, create complicated results. A simple cognitive
method, such as trial and error, can ultimately yield complex answers to
difficult questions. Conversely, simple results are sometimes brought
about in complicated ways; complicated methods of inquiry or problem
solving might arrive at simple and uncomplicated solutions. Our commit-
ment to simplicity in scientific inquiry accordingly does not, in the end,
prevent us from discovering whatever complexities are actually there.
Of course, our theories regarding nature should not oversimplify—they
should not picture the world as simpler, more uniform, etc., than it indeed
is. But the striving for cognitive systematicity in its various forms can and
should persist even in the face of complex phenomena. The ontological
systematicity of nature is thus ultimately irrelevant for our procedurally
regulative concerns: the commitment to inductive systematicity in our ac-
count of the world remains a methodological desideratum regardless of
how complex or untidy that world may ultimately turn out to be.

3. COMPLEXIFICATION AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF SCIENCE

It is worthwhile to examine somewhat more closely the ramifications of

complexity in the domain of cognition, now focusing upon science in par-
ticular. Progress in natural science is a matter of dialogue or debate in a
reciprocal interaction between theoreticians and experimentalists. The ex-
perimentalists probe nature to discern its reactions, to seek out phenomena.
And the theoreticians take the resultant data and weave about them a fabric
of hypotheses that is able to resolve our questions. Seeking to devise a
framework of rational understanding, they construct their explanatory
models to accommodate the findings that the experimentalists put at their
disposal. Thereafter, once the theoreticians have had their say, the ball re-
turns to the experimentalists’ court. Employing new, more powerful

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

means for probing nature, they bring new phenomena to view, new data for
accommodation. Precisely because these data are new and inherently un-
predictable on the basis of earlier knowledge, they often fail to fit the old
theories. Theory extrapolations from the old data could not encompass
them; the old theories do not accommodate them. A disequilibrium thus
arises between available theory and novel data, and at this stage, the ball
reenters the theoreticians’ court. New theories must be devised to accom-
modate the new, nonconforming data. Accordingly, the theoreticians set
about weaving a new theoretical structure to accommodate the new data.
They endeavor to restore the equilibrium between theory and data once
more. And when they succeed, the ball returns to the experimentalists’
court, and the whole process starts over again.
Scientific theory-formation is, in general, a matter of spotting a local
regularity of phenomena in parametric space and then projecting it “across-
the-board,” maintaining it globally. But the theoretical claims of science
are themselves never small-scale and local—they are not spatiotemporally
localized and they are not parametrically localized either. They stipulate—
quite ambitiously—how things are always and everywhere. But with the
enhancement of investigative technology, the “window” through which we
can look out upon nature’s parametric space becomes constantly enlarged.
In developing natural science we use this window of capability to scruti-
nize parametric space, continually augmenting our data-base and then gen-
eralizing upon what we see. What we have here is not a 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
comes our way. Instead it does not require a sophisticated knowledge of
history of science to realize that our worst fears are usually realized—that
our theories seldom if ever survive intact in the wake of substantial exten-
sions in our cognitive access to new sectors of nature’s parametric space.
The history of science is a sequence of episodes of leaping to the wrong
conclusions because new observational findings indicate matters are not
quite so simple as heretofore thought. As ample experience indicates, our
ideas about nature are subject to constant and often radical change-
demanding stresses 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.
Physical nature can exhibit a very different aspect when viewed from the
vantage point of different levels of sophistication in the technology of na-
ture-investigator interaction. The possibility of change is everpresent. The

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

ongoing destabilization of scientific theories is the price we pay for operat-

ing a simplicity-geared cognitive methodology in an actually complex
world.
The methodology of science thus embodies an inherent dialectic that
moves steadily from the simpler to the more complex, and the develop-
mental route of technology sails on the same course. We are driven in the
direction of ever greater complexity by the principle that the potential of
the simple is soon exhausted and that high capacity demands more elabo-
rate and powerful processes and procedures. The simpler procedures of the
past are but rarely adequate to the needs of the present—had they been so
today’s questions would have been resolved long ago and the issues at
stake would not have survived to figure on the present agenda. Scientific
progress is of a nature that inherently involves an inexorable tendency to
complexification in both its cognitive and its ideational dimension. What
we discover in investigating nature always must in some degree reflect the
character of our technology of observation. It is always something that de-
pends on the mechanisms with which we search.10
Induction with respect to the history of science itself—a constant series
of errors of oversimplification—soon undermines our confidence that na-
ture operates in the way we would deem the simpler. On the contrary, the
history of science 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
1900’s this had gone to eighty, and nowadays we have a vast series of ele-
mental stability states. Aristotle’s cosmos had only spheres; Ptolemy’s
added epicycles; ours has a virtually endless proliferation of complex or-
bits that only supercomputers can approximate. Greek science was con-
tained 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 gravita-
tional 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.11 It would be na-
ive—and quite wrong—to think that the course of scientific progress is one
of increasing simplicity. The very reverse is the case: scientific progress

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

is a matter of complexification because over-simple theories invariably

prove untenable in a complex world. The natural dialectic of scientific in-
quiry ongoingly impels us into ever deeper levels of sophistication.12 In
this regard our commitment to simplicity and systematicity, though meth-
odologically necessary, is ontologically unavailing. And more sophisti-
cated searches invariably engender changes of mind moving in the direc-
tion of an ever more complex picture of the world. Our methodological
commitment to simplicity should not and does not preclude the substantive
discovery of complexity.
The explosive growth of information of itself countervails against its
exploitation for the sake of knowledge-enhancement. The problem of cop-
ing with the proliferation of printed material affords a striking example of
this phenomenon. One is forced to ever higher levels of aggregation, com-
pression, and abstraction. In seeking for the needle in the haystack we
must push our search processes to ever greater depths.
Consider the books and documents that outfit our libraries. At the base
level there are topical materials, novels, say or mathematical treatises, or
biographical works. At the next level of aggregation we have such things
as collective plot summaries, comparative critical studies, synthetic mono-
graphs, and collective author biographies. This in turn leads to the next
level of reference works: bibliographies, encyclopedias, topical dictionar-
ies, citation studies, and the like. And then there remains the yet higher
level of catalogues, document indices, and the like. Such a hierarchical
structuring betokens our unavoidable but also unwinnable struggle for
cognitive unity.
The ongoing refinement in the division of cognitive labor that an infor-
mation explosion necessitates issues in a literal dis-integration of knowl-
edge. The “progress of knowledge” is marked by an ever continuing pro-
liferation of ever more restructured specialties marked by the unavoidable
circumstance that the any given specialty cell cannot know exactly what is
going on even next door—let alone at the significant remove. Our under-
standing of matters outside one’s immediate bailiwick is bound to become
superficial. At home base one knows the details, nearby one has an under-
standing of generalities, but at a greater remove one can be no more than
an informed amateur.
This disintegration of knowledge is also manifolded vividly in the fact
that out cognitive taxonomies are bursting at the seams. Consider the ex-
ample of taxonomic structure of physics. We may assume a three-layer
taxonomy: the field as a whole, the branches thereof, and the sub-branches

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

____________________________________________________________

Table 1

THE TAXONOMY OF PHYSICS

IN THE 11TH EDITION OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (1911)

Astronomy
—Astrophysics
—Celestial Mechanics

Acoustics

Optics
—Theoretical Optics
—Spectroscopy

Mechanics

Heat
—Calorimetry
—Theory of Radiation
—Thermodynamics
—Thermometry

Electricity and Magnetism

—Electochemistry
—Electrokinetics
—Electrometallurgy
—Electrostatics
—Thermoelectricity
—Diamagnetism
—Electromagnetism

Pneumatics
Energetics
Instrumentation

Note: Adapted from the Classified List of Articles at the end of Vol. XXIX (Index
volume).
____________________________________________________________

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

____________________________________________________________

Table 2

PHYSICS SPECIALTIES IN THE “NATIONAL REGISTER OF

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL PERSONNEL” FOR 1954 AND 1970

1954 1970

Astronomy (16 specialties) Astronomy

Acoustics (7 specialties) —Solar-Planetary Relationships
Optics (8 specialties 9 specialties)
Mechanics and Heat (13 specialties) —Planetology (6 specialties)
Electromagnetism (6 specialties) —11 Further Astrophysical
Solid State (8 specialties) Specialties
Atomic and Molecular Physics Acoustics (9 specialties)
(5 specialties) Optics (10 specialties)
Nuclear Physics (9 specialties) Mechanics (10 specialties)
Theoretical Physics: Quantum Physics Thermal Physics (9 specialties)
(4 specialties) (= Elementary Electromagnetism (8 specialties)
Particles and Fields) Solids (25 specialties)
Theoretical Physics: Classical Fluids (9 specialties)
3 specialties) Atmospheric Structure and
Electronics (7 specialties) Dynamics (16 specialties)
Instrumentation and Miscellaneous Atoms and Molecules
(4 specialties) (10 specialties)
Nuclei (3 specialties)
Elementary Particles and Fields
(6 specialties)
Physical Chemistry
(25 specialties)
Biophysics (6 specialties)
Solid Earth Geographics
(10 specialties)
Instrumentation (28 specialties)

Data from American Science Manpower: 1954-1956 (Washington, 1961; National

Science Foundation Publications) and “Specialties List for Use with 1970 National
Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel” (Washington DC: National Science
Foundation Publication, 1970).
____________________________________________________________

of the branches. The taxonomic situation prevailing towards the beginning

of this century is given in Table 1.

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

It is interesting to contrast the preceding picture of the taxonomic situa-

tion in physics with the picture of the situation in subsequent decades as
given in Table 2.
These tables tell a significant story. In the 11th (1911) edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, physics is described as a discipline composed of
9 constituent branches (e.g., “Acoustics” or “Electricity and Magnetism”)
which were themselves partitioned into 20 further specialties (e.g.,
“Thermo-electricity: of “Celestial Mechanics”). The 15th (1974) version
of the Britannica divides physics into 12 branches whose subfields are—
seemingly—too numerous for listing. (However the 14th 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 12 areas with 90 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 pro-
ject at all.
Substantially the same story can be told for every field of science. The
emergence of new disciplines, branches, and specialties is manifest every-
where. And as though to negate this tendency and maintain unity, one
finds an ongoing evolution of interdisciplinary syntheses—physical chem-
istry, astrophysics, biochemistry, etc. 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.13 The ex-
pansion of the scientific literature is in fact such the natural science has in
recent years been disintegrating before our very eyes. An ever larger num-
ber of ever more refined specialties has made it ever more difficult for ex-
perts in a given branch of science to achieve a thorough understanding
about what is going on ever in the specialty next door.
It is, of course, possible that the development of physics may eventually
carry us to theoretical unification where everything that we class among the
“laws of nature” belongs to one grand unified theory—one all-encompassing
deductive systematization integrated even more tightly than that Newton’s
Principia Mathematica.14 But the covers of this elegantly contrived “book of
nature” will have to encompass a mass of every more elaborate diversity and
variety. Like a tricky mathematical series, it will have to generate ever more
dissimilar constituents which, despite their abstract linkage are concretely as

151
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

different as can be. And the integration at issue at the principle of a pyramid
will cover further down an endlessly expansive range and encompassing the
most variegated components. It will be an abstract unity uniting a concrete
mishmash of incredible variety and diversity. The “unity of science” to which
many theorists aspire may indeed come to be realized at the level of concepts
and theories shared between different sciences—that is, at the level of idea-
tional overlaps. But for every conceptual commonality and shared element
there will emerge a dozen differentiations. The increasing complexity of our
world picture is a striking phenomenon throughout the development of mod-
ern science.
The lesson of such considerations is clear. Scientific knowledge grows not
just in extent but also in complexity, so that science presents us with a scene
of ever-increasing complexity. It is thus fair to say that modern science con-
fronts us with a cognitive manifold that involves an ever more extensive spe-
cialization and division of labor. The years of apprenticeship that separate
master from novice grow ever greater. A science that moves continually from
an over-simple picture of the world to one that is more complex calls for ever
more elaborate processes for its effective cultivation. And as the scientific en-
terprise itself grows more extensive, the greater elaborateness of its produc-
tions requires an ever more intricate intellectual structure for its accommoda-
tion. The complexification of scientific process and product escalate hand and
hand. And the process of complexity amplification that Peirce took to be re-
vealed in nature through science is unquestionably manifested in the cognitive
domain of scientific inquiry itself. The regulative ideal of science is to inte-
grate our knowledge of the world’s modus operandi into a coherent and cohe-
sive unifying system. Nevertheless, the world’s complexity means that this
will be an aspiration rather than an accomplished fact. It represents a goal
towards which we may be able to make progress but which we will never be
able to attain.15
Yet complexity is not an unqualified negative. It is an unavoidable con-
comitant of progress. We could not extend our cognitive or our practical
grasp of the world without taking its complexification in stride. Throughout
the realm of human artifice—cognitive artifice included—further complexity
is part and parcel of extending the frontiers of progress. The struggle with
complexity that we encounter throughout our cognitive efforts is an inherent
and unavoidable aspect of the human condition’s progressive impetus to do-
ing more and doing it better.16

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

4. COMPLEXITY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES

The complexity of the world as we know it also reflects back upon our-
selves. The mind of a being able to achieve knowledge of a complex ob-
ject can hardly be simpler than that object whose complexities it must en-
compass. The psyche of beings able to internalize cognitively the opera-
tions of a complex world and responding in due resonance with these
complexities must itself be an elaborate manifold of unified elements. To
whatever extent we can achieve mental adequation to a complex environ-
ment we ourselves must be intellectually complex beings.
And this state of affairs at the level of individual psychology is also nar-
rowed at the level of human interaction that constitutes the domain of sub-
ject-matter concern for the social sciences.
Nineteenth century German theorists (Dilthey, Rickert, etc.) maintained
that there are fundamental differences between the natural and the human
sciences in that the former can discover natural laws that provide for the
explanation and prediction of its phenomena and the latter cannot, but
must, instead, satisfy themselves with such weaker aims as insight and un-
derstanding. And in the twentieth century, thinkers of the Austrian school,
such as Friedrich Hayek17 and Karl Popper18 have argued that just the same
sort of difference exists between the natural and the social sciences. It is,
so they insist, impossible and thus an in-principle hopeless venture to seek
to discover rigid scientific laws for social phenomena.
Now one of the key reasons generally adduced for this infeasibility is
the supposedly greater complexity of the phenomena at issue in the social
domain.19 And so, theorists such as Mary Brodbeck,20 and Alex
Rosenberg21 agree with Hayek and Popper that the difference between the
social and natural science is to be accounted for in terms of complexity.
But this is a view that seems questionable. After all, physical systems too
can be immensely complex. The difference between the merely clarifactory
social science and the predictively efficacious natural sciences is not a
product of differential complexity and had best be located elsewhere. Per-
haps the most effective account of the difference in view would seem to be
one that proceeds in terms of volatility rather than complexity. For to all
appearances the “laws” we encounter in the social sciences are not strict
and omnitemporal but rather represent the merely transitory regularities of
particular centuries of societies, and institutions that fail to achieve strict
permanence and universality. Take history for example. The historical
generalizations we use for explanation in this domain are well-confirmed

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

statements concerning the actions of an organized group of agents under

certain restrictive conditions (such group actions being intended to include
those of systems composed conjointly of men and nonhuman instrumen-
talities under their physical control). Examples of such laws are “A census
takes place in the United States in every decade year”; “Heretics were per-
secuted in 17th century Spain”; and “In the sea fights of sailing vessels in
the period 1653-1803, large formations were too cumbersome for effectual
control as single units.” Such historical generalizations are not unrestricted
or universal in the manner in which the laws of the physical sciences are:
they are not valid for all times and places. For instance, the statement
about sailing-fleet tactics has (among others) an implicit or tacit condition
relating to the state of naval ordnance in the 18th century. In elaborating
such conditions, the historian delineates what is typical of the place and pe-
riod rather than what is so with rigid universality.
And so, we face in the human sciences a situation different from that of
the natural sciences. Here, the prominent role of phenomenological nov-
elty due to innovation makes for a different situation with respect to the
objects at issue. (Carbon atoms are ever the same whereas socio-
technological units like movies are ever-changing.) The comparative anar-
chy (i.e., lawlessness) of the social science in point of strict universality is
thus best explained obliquely through their volatility—the fact that chance
and change propels us into the region of quasi laws. For the fact is that de-
liberate innovation and functional destabilization pervades this domain.22
The complexity of social science lies in the final analysis not so much in
the multiplicity of its internal parameters as in the changeability of their in-
terrelationships.23
In any case, however, science—our knowledge of the world and best ra-
tional inquiry reveals it to us—is a work in progress. In its endeavor to in-
form us about the world and its ways, science is not an object but a proc-
ess.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 9
1
Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 7th ed. (London: Methuen, 1889); see sect's 14-
17 of Part II, “The Law of Evolution.”
2
On the process in general see John H. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation
Builds Complexity (Reading MA: Addison Wesley, 1995). Regarding the specifi-
cally evolutionary aspect of the process see Robert N. Brandon, Adaptation and
Environment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.)

154
 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9
3
On the issues of this paragraph compare Stuart Kaufmann, At Home in the Uni-
verse: To Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
4
For further details see the author's Induction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
5
An interesting illustration of the extent to which lessons in the school of better ex-
perience have accustomed us to expect complexity is provided by the contrast be-
tween the pairs: rudimentary/nonanced; 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.
6
Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1938), p. 376. Compare:

Imagine that a physicist . . . wants to draw a curve which passes through [points on
a graph that represent [the data observed. It is well known that the physicist
chooses the simplest curve; this is not to be regarded as a matter of convenience . . .
. [For different] curves correspond as to the measurements observed, but they differ
as to future measurements; hence they signify different predictions based on the
same observational material. The choice of the simplest curve, consequently, de-
pends on an inductive assumption: we believe that the simplest curve gives the
best predictions. . . If in such cases the question of simplicity plays a certain role
for our decision, it is because we make the assumptions that the simplest theory
furnishes the best predictions. (Ibid., pp. 375-376.)
7
Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover Press, 1914), pp. 145-146.
8
Note that in explaining the behavior or people we always presume normalcy and
rationality on their part—a presumption that is, to be sure, defeasible and only
holds “until proven otherwise.”
9
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 idea that the systematicity of
nature is a regulative matter of scientific attitude rather than a constitutive matter of

155
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

scientific fact. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 7 (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), sect. 7.134.
10
On this process see sections 2-3 of Chapter 5.
11
See B. W. Petley, The Fundamental Physical Constants and the Frontiers of
Measurement (Bristol and Boston: Hilger, 1985).
12
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 rea-
soning in philosophy see The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1985).
13
See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Meraphysical Foundations of the Dis-
unity of Science (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
14
See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Formal Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
See also Edoardo Amaldi, “The Unity of Physics,” Physics Today, vol. 261 (Sep-
tember, 1973), pp. 23-29. Compare also C. F. von Weizsäcker, “The Unity of
Physics” in Ted Bastin (ed.) Quantum Theory and Beyond (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1971).
15
For variations on this theme see the writer's The Limits of Science (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

16
Some of this chapter's themes are also explored in the author's Scientific Progress
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
17
F. A. Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” in his Studies in Philosophy,
Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 22-42.
18
Karl R. Popper, “Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Science” in his Conjectures
and Refutations (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
19
For a good survey of the lay of the land here see Lee C. McIntyre, “Complexity
and Social Scientific Laws,” Synthese, 97 (1993) 209-227.
20
Mary Brodbeck, “On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences” in E. C. Harwood
(ed.), Reconstruction of Economics, 3rd ed. (Great Barrington: American Institute
for Economic Research, 1962), pp. 39-58.

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 COGNITIVE PROGRESS IN A COMPLEX WORLD

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9
21
Alexander Roseberg, Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Boulder CO: Westview
Press, 1988; 2nd ed., 1995).
22
Some further ramifications of this state of affairs are discussed in Olaf Helmer and
Nicholas Rescher, “The Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences,” Management Sci-
ence, vol. 6 (1959) 25-52.
23
This chapter draws upon a discussion in the author’s Complexity (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1998).

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Chapter 10

PROCESS AND COGNITIVE

PROGRESS

1. ONCE AND FUTURE PROGRESS

P rogress is not just a matter of change but of change in a direction of

betterment of some sort, and so not of change per se but of improve-
ment. This will have two dimensions: retrospective in relation to how far
we have come, and prospective in relation to where we have yet to go. On
this basis, the idea of progress has a crucial future dimension. But where
do we stand vis-à-vis the future?

2. PROBLEMS OF PREDICTABILITY

What Virgil said of the after-life—that it is “the land from which no one
returns” (illuc unde negant redire quemquam)—seems to be true of the fu-
ture as well; there are none among us who have actually been there. But in
this regard the actual future differs crucially from the contemplated future.
For we can certainly return to the present from the future as we envision it
with the mind’s eye, and act either to make its actualization more certain or
else—where we do not like what we see—to try to avert its realization.
Knowing, evaluating, and doing—our involvement with knowledge,
value, and action—are three principal spheres of human endeavor. And,
correspondingly, our prime concerns with the future relate to its predict-
ability, its welcomability and its tractability. At the level of generality, the
main aspects of the future into which we would like to have deeper insight
are three:

• To what extent is the future knowable? How large is the scope of

feasible predictive foreknowledge? (Predictability)

• To what extent does the future bode good or ill? What does it por-
tend for our human interests and concerns? (Welcomability)
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

• To what extent can we humans shape the future? How far does it lie
within our power to control or influence the shape of things to come?
(Tractability)

These factors represent the major issues over which theoreticians have
quarreled and controverted in their doctrinal disagreements regarding the
future. Let us consider each of them somewhat more closely, beginning
with the first.
This world of ours is a mixed bag as regards prediction—some things
we can foresee, but many not. The circumstance which—above all—
renders detailed knowledge of the future infeasible pivots on the distinction
between the particular and the general. For in this world, particular
things—be they people or planets—have a finite lifespan and the issue of
their successes is subject to the operation of chance and contingency. Ac-
cordingly, our claims about the particulars of the distant future have to be
made in a generic and hypothetical way: “If my grandchildren have grand-
children they will carry some of my genes,” “Whoever is elected president
of the U.S. in 2400 will be over 20 years old,” and the like. The fact that
the make-up of the distant future pivots on contingencies (Will the USA
still exist as such in 2400? Will I have grandchildren who themselves will
have grandchildren?) means that our validatable claims about the condi-
tion of things at this time will have to be made under assumptions and can-
not be made in a detailed and categorical way. For this reason, our knowl-
edge of the more distant future in which even fewer of the particular and
concrete individuals we know of continue to survive grows ever more
vague and indefinite.
And so, perhaps the most pervasive and portentous theme of the theory
of prediction is that of limits. For we are faced with limits to the prospects
of prediction that have the most far-reaching consequences. Above all,
since truth is adequate to reality (adaequatio ad rem), it lies in the nature
of things that we shall never know the whole truth because we cannot get
to the whole future because this section of reality lies outside our cognitive
reach. Is this a bad thing?
The diurnal activity schedule of a crow, a termite, or a sheep is in large
measure predictable; such lifestyles leave effectively no room for discre-
tionary choice. When such an animal is born we can say precisely what it
will be doing halfway through its lifespan. But not so for a member of
homo sapiens. Intelligence liberates us from the iron shackles of biological

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determination and creates room for differential responses to the vagaries of

chance and choice. And as an instrument that enables us to deal with im-
predictability when and where it arises, intelligence actually requires the
challenges afforded by (a manageable degree of) impredictability as a
structure essential to its adequate development and effective maintenance.1
From our point of view, impredictability—though a shortcoming—is per-
haps no unalloyed negativity—since in many ways, and perhaps in all of
the most important ones, we are just as well off not knowing what the fu-
ture has in store for us.

3. FUTURISTIC ONTOLOGY: THE TRUTH STATUS OF CLAIMS

ABOUT THE FUTURE

Only where the future is somehow foreshadowed in the discernible pat-

terns of the past-&-present will rational prediction become possible.
And—fortunately—this is often the case. For our observation of the
world’s ways provide extensive scope for prediction. In general, patterned
regularities of natural occurrences come in the form of structured proc-
esses. The past leaves its traces in the present, as with the fossilized ani-
mals we find embedded in rocks; and similarly, the future has its foreshad-
owings, its portents. Future developments are generally pre-designed into
present structures: in the present and we can already hear their approach-
ing footsteps, as it were. Once any familiar process has started, we can by
and large predict its course; Hens’ eggs yield chicks and not eaglets; kit-
tens do not develop into adult giraffes. The future’s makeup and com-
portment is largely pre-figured in the present physical endowment of na-
ture’s productions, programmed into the prior condition of things through
the operation of natural laws. This aspect of reality is crucial for rational
prediction.
Prediction is a venture in describing the future. But the future has not
yet entered upon the scene; it does not exist—at any rate not yet. As St.
Augustine maintained, its very being depends on what is yet to happen.2
and, in just this vein, most philosophers agree that the future is unreal, or at
any rate presently unreal.3 As far as we are concerned, here and now, the
future just is not there; it is unavoidably unreal, presently actual not in real-
ity but only in anticipation or imagination as a creature of the mind. Here
and now, as of this point in time, my breakfast on New Year’s day of the
year 2000 is something as unreal as Napoleon’s hypothetical victory at
Waterloo—at this stage both are merely figments of imagination whose
only “existence” is their substance as objects of thought.4

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

In making predictions we endeavor to fathom in advance what people

will or would be saying after the fact. The factor of imaginative projection
is crucial here. Nowhere save in the realm of mind—of imaginative fore-
sight—is it possible to have a present encounter with the future; to no ca-
pacity or power at our disposal is it currently accessible as such. Ontologi-
cally speaking the future is nonexistent (as long as we leave the supra-
natural out of it—as, given our limited powers, we must). Nor can the fu-
ture as such exert any causal influence on the present—though of course
our ideas about it will have a major formative impact in what we think and
do.5 All the same, prediction is not a matter of describing the utterly in-
existent; rather it is an attempt to foretell what will be there when the time
comes and what will have been there when the time has come and gone.
There is thus a fundamental reason why predictions are not (or should
not be) categorized as being true/false but rather as correct/incorrect. For
truth, as traditionally conceived, is a matter of correspondence with fact
(adequatio ad rem), and there is, in general, no present fact as regards fu-
ture matters—apart from the spurious presentness of such contentions as
“Today is a day whose successor (viz. tomorrow) will be rainy”—an un-
helpful circumlocution for “Tomorrow will be rainy.” Perceptively sensi-
tive to the proprieties of the Queen’s English, a British law court recently
insisted that predictions are neither true nor false, but only come to be
characterizable as such ex post facto:

A statement that a fact exists now, or that it has existed in the past, is ei-
ther true or false at the time when the statement was made. But that is not
the case with … a prediction about the future. A prediction may come
true or it may not … But [it] cannot be such to have been true or false [al-
6
ready] at the time when it was made.

Whether a prediction is correct or incorrect depends on how matters even-

tually turn out: it is eventual truth or falsity that matters for predictive cor-
rectness. Informative (non-vacuous) statements about the authentic future
are only potentially true/false; we can as yet attribute to them only a pro-
spectively putative and not an actual truth-status. And this is in general
something that is, determined (and usually determinable) only after the
fact, with the wisdom of ex post facto, hindsight. On the other hand,
whether a proposition is antecedently true or false depends on whether its
truth-status is fixed and determined (be it logically or causally) by condi-
tions prevailing before the fact.7 Accordingly, we have it that the truth
status of predictive claims is not, in general, something that can be as-

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 PROCESS AND COGNITIVE PROGRESS

sessed antecedently with unconditional and unqualified confidence. But,

of course, no such ex ante inevitability is required for plausible prediction.
And a prediction’s coming true (or, loosely speaking, being true) does not
prevent the outcome at issue from being contingent nor prevent the truth-
status of the coordinate claims from antecedent indetermination.8
Yet it would be something of an oversimplification—and thus an inac-
curacy—to say flatly that the future does not exist; what should be said in
precise accuracy is that it does not yet exist. One should not deny exis-
tence flat out to the future, but only present existence. For that which in-
deed is presently future will—by hypothesis—someday be currently pre-
sent. It simply would not be part of the (presently) future were its time not
to come. In the same timeless way that every (real) dog has its day, every
(real) future has its actual present.9 And such irreality as the future has
certainly cannot prevent our present predictive attempts at (pre-) describing
its nature from qualifying as sensible and appropriate (or the reverse).

4. PREDICTABILITY VS. PREDETERMINATION:

THE LAPLACEAN VISION

But perhaps what is to come is already fully encompassed in the present;

perhaps the future should be seen as foreordained—as somehow fully con-
tained in what already exists? Perhaps all prediction is a pseudo-prediction
that renders explicit the accomplished facts and established fixities of the
past?
In the introduction of his Théorie analytique des probabilités, the emi-
nent French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace made
the following notorious claim:

An intelligence which, for a given instant, knew all the forces by which
nature is animated, and the respective situation of the beings which made
it up, if furthermore it was vast enough to submit these data to analysis,
would then embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest
bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be
uncertain for it, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.10

This hypothesis of a supremely knowledgeable observer/calculator gives

expression to the standpoint of classical mechanistic view of Newtonian
physics that all of the world’s physical processes proceed in a manner
completely pre-programmed through the laws of classical dynamics. The
stance at issue here sees all of the world’s doings as causally predeter-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

mined—with all states of the future in principle calculable in complete de-

tail via natural laws on the basis of a sufficiently complete characterization
of the past-&-present.11 Already before Laplace’s day, the famous mathe-
matician Jacques Bernoulli envisioned this situation in the following terms:

All things past, present, or future that exist or are done under the sun are
always perfectly certain, both in themselves and objectively. Things pre-
sent or past are established facts; since, by mere fact that they are or have
been, they cannot not be or not have been: but it cannot be doubted that
12
the same holds for future things.

A totally deterministic world is thus one in which the future is causally en-
compassed in the present. Given nature’s fixed laws of operation, any and
all future contingency is absent; everything becomes causally inevitable
relative to the accomplished past. The unchanging and unchangeable laws
that characterize the modus operandi of such a world so function that all
physically possible world pictures that agree up to a certain time are bound
to agree after that time: that, in sum, its future is fully and uniquely deter-
mined by its past. It is always false to respond to a future-oriented predic-
tive question with “There are several possibilities …” because there is al-
ways just exactly one genuine possibility—though we may be ignorant
about it. In such a world, predictive incapacity must—wherever it exists—
root wholly in an insufficiency of knowledge regarding the world’s condi-
tion and modus operandi.13
Such a Laplacean world is generally characterized as completely pre-
dictable. But in a deeper sense there just are no genuinely predictive ques-
tions in a context where the only issue is that of the sort of eventuations
have been pre-programmed into this world by the causal structure im-
printed on it at its origination. In such a world the entire future has become
gaplessly encompassed in and preempted by the past through the accom-
plished fact of the world’s causal programming. It is not that a determinis-
tic world has no future, but rather that any question about its nature can in
principle always be resolved through answers to past-regarding questions
about the sort of world that has come into existence. Genuinely predictive
questions simply do not arise since there is no room for contingency: the
world’s future is an altogether foregone conclusion given its past.
That this world of ours indeed is such a deterministic, wholly predict-
able Laplacean world is—in the present state of our knowledge—
somewhere between implausible and false.14 The role of predetermination-

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blocking factors (chance, choice, and the like) is just real and prominent a
fact of life in the world as we know it.
However, the consequences of this situation for the issue of prediction
are not quite as drastic as they might at first seem. For a failure of deter-
minism does not stand in the way of rational prediction—as long as we do
not equate predictability as such with the vary special case of for-certain
predictability. And of course there is no good reason why one should
adopt so hyperbolic and exaggerated a standard. After all, even random
processes may yield securely predictable outcomes. (If the halflife of an
atom is 100 years one can safely predict that it will be not disintegrate in
the next nanosecond. If the fair coin is tossed 100 times, one can confi-
dently predict that it will not produce 100 heads. Yet in both cases matters
could eventuate otherwise—though the likelihood is almost vanishingly
small.) While the failproof certainty of an eventuation unquestionably pre-
sents us with a sufficient condition for its predictability, it would be deeply
problematic to see this as also a necessary condition. Even in a chancy
world, rational predictability is not—and need not be—a matter of ines-
capable unavailability: sure-thing prediction is not the only kind of predic-
tion there is.
Determinism is an ontological issue that pivots on the conformity of
phenomena to the antecedently fixed, pre-programmed exigencies of natu-
ral laws. Such predetermination amounts to all-pervasive and failproof
predictability-in-principle. And its absence neither precludes partial-
predictability-with-certainty or total-predictability-with-subcertainty. Pre-
dictability as such does not require predetermination and is available in its
absence; even in an indeterministic world, many of those eventuations that
are not ontologically preordained are safely predictable when one ceases to
demand an implausible certitude.
To be sure, some theorists do indeed take the implausible step of under-
standing “predictable” to mean predictable in precise detail and with cate-
gorical assurance. They labor under the peculiar impression that one
should adopt the equation: “to predict = to foretell exactly with absolute,
totally assured, failproof certainty,”15 and consequently regard as predict-
able such only those eventuations that cannot possibly fail to happen. This,
however, is confuse rational predictability with foreknowledge. Now it
may well be that St. Augustine was right with respect to
FOREKNOWLEDGE in that this requires a failproof correctness available to
God alone.16 But rational FORESEEABILITY does not go that far—at any
rate not as we operate with this concept in real life. One can confidently

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

predict a rain shower or a medical prognosis even in circumstances where

there is only a 99.9 percent chance of its realization. Nor are free human
choices rendered impredictable through the prospect of occasional error.
To know someone’s tastes and preferences is just exactly to be in a posi-
tion to predict (with reasonable confidence and a good chance of success)
how this person is going to resolve his or her free choices. After all, even
the acts that we currently set ourselves to perform cannot be forecast with
absolute certainty, since there are various slips between the cup and the lip
and even the continued existence of the universe is something for which
we can issue no categorical and failproof guarantees. (It is not for nothing
that pious Moslems qualify all claims about the future with inshallah,
“God willing,” Deo volente.) Predictability as such must not be equated
with the for-sure predictability of predetermination.
Accordingly, the crucial point for present purposes is that a predictively
benign world need not be one that admits of predictive certitude—it need
only afford a fair prospect of a predictive success whose efficacy is not
universal and invariable but probabilistic and “by and large.” With cogent
prediction, the information at hand must indeed provide good reasons for
accepting the predictive conclusion at issue; but it is altogether unrealistic
and inappropriate to insist upon having a failproof guarantee. Those even-
tuations too qualify as predictable that can be foreseen with substantial
probability—with a discernibly good chance of being right about it. To re-
emphasize: rational predictability goes beyond the limited range of the
sure thing.

5. STATISTICAL PREDICTABILITY

While it is indeed the case that, as indicated above, a predictive claim is

more than an assertion of probability, nevertheless predictions can rea-
sonably be based on probabilistic evidence.17 This fact that altogether sen-
sible predictions can be made on the basis of probabilistic/statistical infor-
mation means that an abandonment of determinism does not preclude pre-
dictability. For example, one can generally foretell with considerable
confidence how many burglaries, automotive fatalities, or suicides will oc-
cur in a particular large city in a given month. What one cannot—of
course—foretell is who the victims involved will be. (Indeed, the aggrega-
tion of merely individual predictions would be misleading—the probabili-
ties being very small, we could safely predict for any and every specific
individual that they will not be burgled or killed.) Insurance companies do

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a very successful business without ever predicting what will happen to any
particular one of their clients. It is clear that rationally warranted predic-
tions can quite appropriately be based on generalized patterns that are not
absolute and exceptionless but rather merely statistical.
One author of the last century wrote: “The social order stands under the
rule of statistics [which is] . . . a discouraging fact for those who believe in
the perfectibility of human nature. It seems as if free will exists only in
theory.”18 In opposition to such a perspective, it must be stressed that sta-
tistical predictability is emphatically not at odds with free will. If ever
there are free decisions, then the decision to marry or to travel by air is
so—but one can securely predict at the statistical level how many such oc-
currences there will be in certain conformity a particular month. The pivot
is not that free will operates but how it operates—that is, as subject to pro-
pensities or tendencies that reflect people’s individual tastes, habits, dispo-
sitions, etc.
Some writers do actually envision a sort of “statistical fatalism” here
and contemplate a determinism within the statistical framework. As they
see it, a certain set of people are required, as it were, to provide pre-
ordained quotas of murder-victims, suicides, etc. But such a view of the
matter invokes the strange and eminently problematic idea of a collective
force that operates so as to achieve a predetermined overall outcome by
somehow mysteriously constraining certain hapless individuals to offer up
their contributions to its achievement. This is scarcely a plausible proposi-
tion. For in its misunderstanding of the statistical/probabilistic lay of the
land it insists on turning things the wrong way around. What we actually
have in such cases is a matter of pressures and propensities or tendencies
embedded in the make-up of individuals and filtered through a systemic
context of interaction to produce a preordained aggregate overall result.
The situation is not such that the group’s statistical structure is fixed first
and independently, and that thereupon individual cases are mysteriously
constrained into conformity with it, but rather that a collective feature
emerges from the distributive dispositions and intrinsic tendencies of indi-
viduals. A systemic process is at work in the species that impels the con-
tributions of individual propensities towards a collective overall result.
(There is no way of telling which words will figure in next year’s lead
newspaper headlines, but can be virtually certain that there will be nouns.)
The fact of the matter is that the free-will compatible (and indeed free
will implementing) propensities that are built into the functional make-up
of the individuals at issue determine the collective character of the group in

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

a way that combine local randomness with global predictability. With the
toss of a fair coin the particular outcome is impredictable, but we can se-
curely predict that in a large number of tosses the proportion of heads to
tails will be roughly 50:50. Randomness generally functions within a
wider framework of lawfulness (albeit statistical lawfulness), exhibiting a
systemic modus operandi that is determinate and pre-specifiable, albeit
only in probabilistic terms. The individual reactions are unpredictable but
various aspects of large-scale aggregates can confidently be predicted on
the basis of the probabilistic “law of large numbers.”

6. PREDICTIVE REACH: FORECASTING HORIZONS/SHORT

RANGE VS. LONG RANGE FORECASTING

The range of a forecast indicates its temporal-horizon—the distance

into the future for which the prediction is made. There are short range
forecasts over the near term and long-range forecasts over the more ex-
tended term. And they generally offer very different prospects.
For us humans the future is veiled, as it were, in a cloud of unknowing.
Through our predictive efforts we peer into it much as we peer into a fog.
Very little can be seen at a distance—and that little with but little clarity.
But as things draw nearer, the fog of foreseeability dissipates somewhat
and we can begin make out some of the features of things with greater de-
tail. And so it is with the future too. “Can you forecast what the weather
is going to be?” “Of course—six seconds from now it is going to be just
exactly what it is now.” True enough, but what about six weeks from
now? That, clearly, is something else again. As our ocular vision grows
dimmer with distance, so our predictive vision usually becomes dimmer
with futurity—up to a point. (In the long run we are all dead, and in the
very long run the universe will presumably be so as well.) With most is-
sues, there are predictive “ time horizons” beyond which we cannot see.
This situation is illustrated by predictions which, like that of the world
population in the next millennium, involves a fanning out over an increas-
ingly wider range of uncertainty as one comes further into the future. This
situation typifies how our foresight generally grows dimmer in predictive
situations as the temporal distance increases. Present-day technology is
out there working away, and the technology of the near-term future is al-
ready “in the pipeline,” so that one can form a pretty good idea as to its na-
ture and implications. But long-range technological forecasting which de-

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pends on discerning the future course of scientific discovery itself is a

much more problematic proposition.
Given that the scope for change is almost inevitably less over short
time-horizons, the prospects of short-range prediction are bound to be bet-
ter than those for prediction over the longer term. Forecasting New York
City’s school attendance next year is safer than forecasting it a decade
hence. In the early 1970’s the Meteorological Office in Great Britain, em-
boldened by satellite photography began issuing long-range weather fore-
casts a month ahead. But complaints flowed in from all sides that these es-
timates were almost always incorrect. The Met Office canceled the fore-
casts, admitting that, in the volatile conditions of a North Sea archipelago,
it could get the weather right only for a day or two ahead.19 It lies in the
nature of things that the prospects of prediction are better when the scope
for change is less, seeing that “more of the same” is bound to be our
grounding principle here. Earthquake forecasting exemplifies the usual
situation where one is able to make fairly reliable predictions in the short
term (in particular with “aftershocks”) but where one is not (in the present
state of things) able to make reliable long term predictions.20
In general and by and large it is more difficult to predict matters in the
more distant future, because those lengthening causal chains make ever-
increasing room for the intervention of prediction-spoilers such as the three
C’s (chance, chaos, and choice).21 In this world, particular things—be
they people or planets—have a finite lifespan and the issue of their succes-
sors is subject to the operation of chance and contingency. The fact is that
the make-up of the distant future pivots on contingencies. Will the USA
still exist as such in 2400? Will I have grandchildren who themselves will
have grandchildren? Accordingly, our beliefs and claims about the par-
ticulars of the distant future have to be framed in a generic and hypotheti-
cal way: “If my grandchildren have grandchildren they will carry some of
my genes,” “Whoever is elected president of the U.S. in 2400 will be over
20 years old,” and the like. This circumstance means that our validatable
claims about the condition of future affairs will have to be subject to vari-
ous assumptions and cannot be maintained in an unqualified and categori-
cal way. And so, our knowledge of the increasingly distant future—in
which ever fewer of the particular and concrete individuals we know of
continue to survive—grows ever more vague and indefinite.
The longer the timespan at issue, the greater will be the opportunity for
the intervention of unforeseeable perturbations in the course of events and
the more room for their consequence to amplify. (The causal conse-

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 Process Philosophical Deliberations

quences of unforeseeable events spread over time like the ripples over a
pond, ever enlarging the region of unforeseeability.) To be sure, this will
not always happen. Thus a notable exception to the rule that short-term
predictions are generally safer than longer term ones arises in situations of
“dampening” where the short-term fluctuations involve considerable vola-
tility, while overriding large-scale processes render the larger-term situa-
tion stabler. I cannot safely predict the speed at which that passenger car
who is now passing me on the street corner will be traveling three minutes
hence, but can be pretty certain that its speed at 3 AM tomorrow morning
will be zero, most passenger vehicles being parked near their owner’s
dwelling at that time of day. Again, cyclic phenomena also yields illustra-
tions. It is March, a very changeable month for our region. And so we
cannot predict the weather for next week—though we can be pretty sure
that three months hence, in July, the weather will be sunny and warm. But
such predictability-restoring lines of development are no more than excep-
tions to a predominating general rule. In general and barring special cir-
cumstances, longer range predictions are more difficult than shorter range
ones.
Common practice accordingly treats the range of a forecast as a variable
geared to the prospects of success. The volatility of the phenomena at is-
sue becomes a crucial factor. A weather forecast is long range if it looks
ahead for more than a month, an economic forecast is long range if it looks
ahead for more than a year, a population forecast would have to look sev-
eral generations ahead to qualify as long range.

7. VOLATILITY AND THE PROSPECTS OF PREDICTION: THE

CIRCUMSTANTIALITY OF PREDICTION

What sorts of conditions must obtain for rational prediction to be feasi-

ble at all? What must the world be like for it to provide substantial scope
for foresight by imperfect intelligences?
Some processes move with startling rapidity, others move lethargically.
It is far easier to change the direction of a bicycle on the road than that of a
super-tanker at sea. From the temporal point of view, the processes of na-
ture can be classified into four groups:22

• highly stable: constant throughout long periods of relevant world

history (for example: the temperature of the earth’s core).

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 PROCESS AND COGNITIVE PROGRESS

• moderately stable: (for example) the climate of different regions

on earth.

• moderately volatile: (for example) the weather in temperate re-

gions.

• very volatile: given to sudden and fortuitous changes (for exam-

ple: cloud cover or ground level wind velocity in the English
Channel).

How matters stand here will prove crucial for prediction: volatility is the
pivot point. And ample experience shows that many of the world’s proc-
esses “take their time.” The thunderstorms now raging about us will not be
off beyond the horizon by half a minute hence.
Any phenomenon that is volatile and highly sensitive to variations and
fluctuations in environing conditions will for that very reason be the less
predictable in any context where there is room for the operation of chance.
Someone’s maximum body temperature during tomorrow will be easier to
predict than this person’s maximum pulse-rate, given that only a few rela-
tively foreseeable factors will influence the former while many imponder-
able (and highly contingent) factors will influence the latter, it is clear that
the less volatile, quantity will be more readily predictable. For the most
part, interactions in human societies manifest an inertia that resists rapid
changes of direction. It is safe to predict that the two party system will still
be in place in the USA ten years hence and that inner city problems and ra-
cial tensions will then still be part of the American scene.
The relative stability of the relevant factors is thus crucial for prediction.
And this means that local, problem-specific circumstances will be determi-
native. It is often said that astronomers can predict the relative positions of
celestial objects, but the issue is not quite that straightforward. They may
predict the positions of stars and planets, but meteorites and rocket debris
are something else again. It may be time that the stock market analyst
cannot predict where the U.S. stock market will stand next year, but one
can be pretty certain that the Dow-Jones average will not stand at 10 cents.
The prospects of prediction do not—cannot—follow from general prin-
ciples alone. All that the general principles of the matter can tell us is
something conditional: if rational prediction is to be possible, then such-
and-such conditions must be met. But the fact that those conditions are
met with respect to a certain issue is something that waits upon an empiri-

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cal study of the nature of things. No predictive process will work regard-
less of how the world is constituted; the cooperation of nature must always
come into play; the operation of chance, chaos, volatility, and the like, all
come into it. Accordingly, the effective validation of any predictive pro-
cedure must proceed on a basis of factual considerations—a priori general
principle alone will not do the job. There must be a harmonious coordina-
tion between the ways of the world and our methodology for inquiry into
its nature. A world whose predictive questions admit of rational resolution
must be one in which informative conclusions regarding a yet-unrealized
future can reasonably be drawn from the observable past-&-present. Such
a world will have to be one in which—as in ours—temporally stable pat-
terns of occurrence lie open to observational detection. In such a world,
there will be regularly recurring processes that establish patterns which
admit of discernment by perceptive intelligences in such a way that obser-
vational information provides reliable indications regarding of future de-
velopments.
To what extent, then, can we predict success for the predictive venture
in this world of ours? What can we reasonably expect in this regard?
The preceding deliberations make it clear that the prospects of predic-
tion will very much depend on the particular issue under consideration.
But the general principles of our understanding of nature nevertheless pro-
vides the material for a rough overall appraisal. The fact is that with pre-
diction-amenable phenomena we encounter a process fundamentally
analogous to the resistance that characterize our operations with many
other parameters of nature: pushing temperatures down towards absolute
zero, accelerating particles closer and closer to the speed of light, increas-
ing pressures or temperatures or field strength in experimental approaches,
creating increasingly perfect vacuums. In all such cases successive im-
provement get more and more difficult (and their realization more and
more demanding, complex, and expensive). Prediction affords a compara-
bly asymptotic situation. As we contemplate the more regular sectors of
the domain about us, we at first get to perform quite well. But as our de-
mands escalate, so do the problems that we encounter in trying to meet
them. The inherent volatility and disorderliness of reality (be it natural or
human) provides for increasing resistance to the extent of its cognitive
penetration. For in a world where chance, choice, and chaos are promi-
nent, our information-processing inputs can never be enhanced beyond a
certain level of quality—irrespective of effort—with the result that the
range of our predictive vision is inexorably limited.

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But this is not the whole story. For this world is not a complete chaos.
It not only exhibits order but continually extends it to an ever-expanding
degree. After all, order has a tendency to be self-perpetuating and self-
enhancing. Once it comes into being (in however unforeseeable and fortui-
tous a way) it tends to be self-potentiating. The role of entropy in thermo-
dynamics and information theory illustrates the ongoing attrition of varia-
tion and diversity. The salient fact is that we live in a condition of inter-
mediation between a cosmic confusion—the searing cauldron of the big
bang—and the cold uniformity of cosmic death. As regards predictability,
our situation is accordingly a halfway house a situation that offers few
guarantees but does hold some promise.
The salient fact, however, is that only detailed inquiry into the relevant
local situation can, in the end, inform us helpfully about its predictive
prospects. The basic question is that of the extent to which we have to deal
with stabilities in whose orbit future eventuations are lawfully and dis-
cernibly pre-figured in the conditions of the present. Only to the extent
that a world that is a cosmos—one whose occurrences fall into discernible
patterns—will rational prediction be possible at all. And with respect to
our world this is something that remains to be seen. Obviously, the course
of wisdom is to hope for the best as far as our world is concerned and try to
push the predictive project as far as we can. But the situation here does not
hinge on theoretical general principles; in the final analysis, it is a question
of the nature of the world—as best our investigations can reveal it to us.
(And, of course, it is a matter not just of the world’s condition as a whole
but of its various sectors and situations.)
Prediction, in sum, is a cognitive venture process whose successful pur-
suit is inseparably bound up with factual matters regarding the nature of
the world’s modus operandi. Only when this is duly benign—only if na-
ture’s detectable patterns can underwrite adequately informative estimates
regarding the future—will prediction be feasible. And this is something
we can never guarantee in advance on the basis of abstract general princi-
ples. In the end, only the course of experience can inform us about the ex-
tent to which the phenomena of a particular domain are predictable. And
with predictability in general, just as with specific issues of prediction, one
must simply wait and see. It cannot be overemphasized that the extent to
which issues of interest are amenable to prediction reflects a contingent
feature of the world’s arrangements in point of affording discernible sta-
bilities.

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This line of consideration puts the very issue of the world’s predictabil-
ity itself at the mercy of our success at prediction. We can achieve no sen-
sible predictions in the absence of established theories but can establish no
theories without success in prediction. This sort of circularity, however, is
not self-invalidating but rather virtuous. It is, in the final analysis, part and
parcel of the inevitable circularity of the fact that only sort of validation of
reason that it is even worth having is one that proceeds via the principles of
reason itself.23 In the end, rational deliberation must constitute one com-
prehensive and seamless whole. And rational prediction is caught up in
this web as well.

8. THE PROBLEM OF TRACTABILITY

Prediction is one thing; control another. Let us now turn to the issue of
the future’s tractability.
From the very start of the species, much human effort has regularly
been expended on the devising of practices, systems, and institutions to
make the future more tractable. Our early shift from hunter-gatherer to
farmer, from nomad to settler was clearly all designed to reduce the extent
of risk and uncertainty in our effort to make it possible to meet our needs
and achieve our ends with greater assurance. And, over the milennia, an
immense amount of human thought and effort has been expended in this
direction.
In particular, the issue of “control over nature” lies at the core of the sci-
entific enterprise. And it is clear that this matter of control has far more
complexity than appears on first view. For just how is this conception to
be understood? Clearly, control consists in 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 the rogue factor of our own con-
tribution. 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.
Power is a matter of the “effecting of things possible”—of achieving
control—and it is clearly science which, in teaching us about the limits of
the possible, is itself the agent that must shape our conception of this issue.
We cannot ask for the production of a perpetuum mobile for spaceships
with “hyperdrive” enabling them to attain transluminal velocities, for de-
vices that predict essentially stochastic processes such as the disintegra-

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tions of transuranic atoms, or for piston devices that enable us to set inde-
pendently the values for the pressure, temperature, and the volume of a
body of gas. We cannot, in sum, ask of a “perfected” technology that it
should enable us to do anything whatever that we might take it into our
heads to do, no matter how “unrealistic” this might be. Every law of na-
ture 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. Our science alone
can inform us about what is indeed possible. And science, ever changing,
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 of control is perfected, we would
need to preestablish the completeness of our science so as the establish the
ultimate correctness of our vision of the sphere of the possible. The idea
works in such a way that claims to perfected control can rest only on per-
fected science—something we clearly could not hope to obtain.24
Accordingly, the project of achieving the practical mastery of “doing
whatever we want” can never be perfected in a satisfactory way. For this
clearly hinges on what we want, and what we want is conditioned by what
we think possible, and this is something that hinges crucially on theory—
on our (unavoidably imperfect) beliefs about how things work in this
world. The very idea of perfecting control is something deeply problem-
atic. We can never safely move from apparent to real adequacy in this re-
gard; we cannot adequately assure that seeming perfection is more than
just that.
Realizing, then, that the extent of our control over the world’s eventua-
tions is going to have to be limited, exactly how much can we hope for in
this regard? Three main positions have emerged in discussions regarding
the future’s tractability: intractability theories, manipulability theories, and
mixed theories. The classic version of intractability theory is based on the
idea of synoptic predetermination. It holds that the shape of the future is
pre-ordained: world-history is pre-programmed from the very outset—be
it through necessitarian scientific law (as with Laplace), or the ordinances
of a controlling deity, or through the inexorable decrees of fate, destiny, or
“the stars” (as with traditional astrology). The die is cast; our future is al-
ready settled—and there is nothing further to be done about it. What is to
be is and ever has been unalterably pre-determined to be, and that’s that.

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On such a view, people are not masters of their fate and shapers of the
eventuations that transpire on the world’s stage; the most we can manage is
to do willingly whatever it is that has been pre-ordained—volentem facta
ducunt, nolentem trahunt: willy-nilly things must go on their inevitable
way, and we along with them. We can align our thoughts with the world’s
course of events, but cannot alter it. This in effect was the doctrine of an-
cient Stoicism, and the position of Spinoza in the 17th century was not far
removed from it.
Intractability theorists stand at the opposite end of the spectrum. They
regard nature’s operations as largely contingent and wide-open to human
intervention. Within broad limits it lies within the scope of human power
to shape the course of events—to align the future’s state of things with our
own wishes and desires. This sort of view has been particularly prominent
in times of technological optimism—in the Renaissance of Leonardo, the
Enlightenment of the Encyclopedists, and the era of technological confi-
dence prevalent in the U.S.A. immediately following World War II.
Finally, there is an intermediate position that views control as a mixed
bag. Admitting that an element of unforeseeability pervades all human af-
fairs,25 Renaissance humanists often inclined to the optimistic view that
rational endeavor can prevail against the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. For example, the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459),
in his tracts De miseria humanae conditionis and De varietate fortunae,
championed the efficacy of rational virtue: “The strength of fortune is
never so great that it will not be overcome by men who are steadfast and
resolute.”26 As he saw it, prudent action can control the future’s develop-
ments. Others took a much less sanguine line. Thus Machiavelli, in Chap-
ter 25 of Il principe (1513) after surveying the cruelties and haphazards of
the politics of his day, set more restrictive limits to human endeavor by as-
signing half of what happens in this domain to the intractable power of for-
tuna, though her rogue force might be partially tamed by prudently in-
stalled dikes and embankments. (On 20th-century indications, even this
estimate looks rather too cosy.)

9. THE PROBLEM OF WELCOMABILITY

The portent of the future—its potential for good and bad—turns on such
evaluative questions as the following: How are we to assess the future’s
prospects? Are its developments to be welcomed or to be seen with appre-
hension? Is it with eager anticipation or with uneasy foreboding that we

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should face the future? To be sure, predictability lies at the base of such
evaluation, since we cannot satisfactorily assess a future of whose descrip-
tive outlines we have no reliable idea.
Basically there are three major evaluative alternatives here, according as
we take a positive, a negative, or a neutral or mixed view regarding the
prospects for things to come. We can view the future’s developments on
the whole with optimism, with pessimism, or with neutrality. Optimism
takes the encouraging line that all is well. Pessimism, by contrast, reflects
the tenor of gloom-and-doom thinking: things are sliding downhill to-
wards disaster—the world is “going to hell in a wheelbarrow.” Neutralism
reflects a mixed position, that looks to the future with ambivalent feelings
and differentiated expectations as a mixed bag where some things are get-
ting better and others worse in a complex and changeable mix.
Optimism takes a positive view of things. But this can assume very dif-
ferent specific forms, depending on whether it is maintained that the condi-
tion of things

• is presently good order; or

• is tending toward the good—that in the natural course of events, mat-

ters will ongoingly assume a better condition; or

• is moveable toward the good—that matters can be impelled in this

direction provided only that we do the right things to bring this
about.

Three different questions are at issue: how things currently are, whither
they tend, and what opportunities are open. These three questions yield the
corresponding positions of actuality optimism, tendency optimism, and
prospect optimism, respectively.
Actuality optimism takes the stance that things stand in good condi-
tion—that, on the whole, all is right with the world in the prevailing order
of things. This idea was already voiced by Plato, who maintained that
“Since he judged that order was in every way for the better, God brought it
[the world] from disorder into order” (Timaeus, 30A). And, of course,
such a view is not necessarily bound up with belief in the benevolence of a
presiding deity—the good condition of things could be seen as the product
of contingency or of good luck or simply as the result of “nature’s way,”
the inexorable result of some aspect of the world’s natural modus operandi.

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Tendency optimism, also called meliorism, is something very different

from such an actuality optimism. It does not necessarily hold that all is
well with the world as is, but takes the future-oriented stance that things
are getting better. It compares the present with the relevant future and en-
visions an improvement in the confident conviction that, whatever might
be happening now, better times lie ahead. (To be sure, since improvement
as such is at issue, the alteration could in principle merely be a change
from terrible to bad, rather than one from good to even better.)
Prospect optimism compares the present as it stands with the possible
future that our efforts and opportunities put at our disposal. It pivots on the
tractability of things and looks to the presumably realizable future and
maintains that suitable actions on our part can pave the way to improve-
ment. It sees the issue in terms of the opportunities for our efforts to bring
things to a better pass. (By contrast, the belief that things will deteriorate
despite our best efforts to the contrary, represents a particularly gloomy
version of pessimism.) Both meliorism (tendency optimism) and prospect
optimism are oriented toward the future. But tendency optimism holds
matters will get better of their own accord, while prospect optimism holds
they can get better if only we do the right things. In the United States, the
postwar era of 1945-60 saw something of a high-water mark of such pros-
pect optimism. One heard loud and clear the siren call of a technological
optimism based on the idea of the application of science for the solution of
many or most of the pressing problems of human life on this planet (the
medical conquest of disease, abundant and cheap power from nuclear reac-
tors, etc.).
Optimism and its congeners are indissolubly linked to the dimension of
value. The positions at issue all take evaluative stances that contemplate
some manner of goodness:

• Actuality optimism: things are in good condition.

• Tendency optimism (meliorism): things are moving toward the bet-

ter.

• Prospect optimism: things are moveable toward the better.

The whole issue of portent is unavoidably evaluative. An evaluative scep-

tic—let alone an evaluative nihilist like Spinoza—cannot take a position in
this domain.

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Like all believers in progress, Hegel was an optimist. And the optimism
of their master was shared alike by the Hegelian left and the Hegelian
right, albeit in very different ways. On the left lay the tendency optimism
represented by the eschatological posture of dialectical materialism—a
melioristic view predicated on the historical inevitability of a better order
of things (for the proletariat at any rate). And on the right lay the actuality
optimism of the German idealists—a position that is not comparably es-
chatological and predictive, but represents an optimism of attitude and in-
tellectual orientation rather than historical process—that the world has a
prominent and secure place for the operation of positive values. Such a
position is less predictive than attitudinal.
Attitudes, however, differ with time and place. Historically Americans
have generally—until quite recently at least—been optimistic, inclining to
a tendency optimism that looks to an ongoingly better condition of life for
one’s children and their successors. (And historically they have had a
great deal to be optimistic about.27) The situation has been more complex
in Europe where a more mixed view of the matter has been common. Thus
J.S. Mill envisioned a condition where people’s standard of living settled
into an equilibrium state but their spiritual and social condition continued
to improve:

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and

population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would
be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social
progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living and much more like-
28
lihood of its being improved.

To be sure, optimism does not have it all its way. There are pessimists
too, for whom, as Edmund Gosse put it, “The future comes as an unwel-
come guest.” Various people at various times thought they had seen the
future and found it bad. And never was this view more pervasive than in
the wake of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The first attack of
plague in the late 1340’s carried off 50,000 in Paris—half the existing
population. Grass grew in the streets and wolves attacked people in the
depopulated suburbs. In enclosed places like monastaries, convents, and
prisons, the death toll was often total. Throughout Europe, Froissart said,
“a third of the world died” when the plague struck. With wars, famines,
and brigandage contributing to the impact of the recurrent outbursts of
plague, Europe lost half her population by the end of the century. Dooms-
day seemed to be at hand. “In October of 1348, Philip VI of France asked

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the medical faculty of the University of Paris for a report on the affliction
that seemed to threaten human survival. With careful thesis, antithesis, and
proofs, the learned doctors ascribed it to a triple conjunction of Saturn,
Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius said to have occurred on
March 20, 1345.”29 Many, thinking the Apocalypse to be in process of
enactment, believed that the end of the world had come and that human-
ity’s future was over. Many—but not everyone. For some discerned a ray
of hope. If a bad conjunction of the stars caused the disaster, a good con-
junction could undo the damage. Petrarch wrote: “O happy posterity who
will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as
a fable.”
As individuals, people are inclined to be optimistic or pessimistic ac-
cording as nature and nurture shape them—in line with their dispositions
and the vicissitudes of their personal fates. But at the aggregate social
level there are wide swings in the pendulum of predominance. The impe-
tus of events and the drift of fashion makes for ongoing variation here.
The recent environmentalism and the greening of public concern in in-
dustrialized nations is an example. The discovery of major threats to the
human and biological environment—the “greenhouse effect” of global
warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, acid rain, the destruction of the
world’s forests, the contamination of the environment by pollution, atomic
waste, hydrofluorocarbon production, decaying toxic wastes and the like—
is a phenomenon of the past three decades. (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962) made the phenomenon prominent in the public consciousness in the
U.S.A., doing for the environment what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for
slavery.) Just as the post-war era of 1945-1965 was a time of technological
optimism in the developed world when people looked forward to techno-
logical solutions to human problems, so the era from 1965 to the present
has been an era of technological pessimism typified by the industrial disas-
ters at Soheto, Bhopal, Chernobyl. The resultant dismay has often found
expression in the panicky tone of various environmentalist doomsayers
whose prophesies are reminiscent of the apocalyptic ruminations of some
14th century writers. A tendency pessimism that sometimes approaches
catastrophism seems to be the dominant thought-style of the recent era.
Even the ending of the Cold War has unexpectedly intensified the gloom,
no doubt perhaps because it has brought to prominence a variety of social
and economic problems that seem even more intractable than the priority
problems of the past.

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Optimism and pessimism are also reflected in the public-opinion mood

swings that more through the population at large like waves through the
sea. In the USA, opinion pollsters like to keep track of this. Periodically
they ask people to rate (on a scale from 0 to 10) how well things are going
in the country—both presently and, as best they can foresee, five years
ahead. The arithmetical difference between the two is taken to reflect a
mode of tendency optimism or pessimism.
At the larger level of societies, optimism and pessimism seem to contain
the seeds of their own destruction. The conditions of human life being
what they are, optimism leads to disappointed expectations and pessimism
to a realization that, having expected the worst, what actually happens pre-
sents a pleasant surprise. The maintenance of a balanced, neutral state is
difficult for individuals and near impossible for societies; life is a matter of
waxing or waning—of up or of down. At the level of societies, a cyclic
oscillation between optimism and pessimism seems to be an ongoing phe-
nomenon.

10. A CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

For us humans the future is veiled, as it were, in a cloud of unknowing.

Through our predictive efforts we peer into it as we peer into a fog. Very
little can be seen at a distance—and that little with but little clarity. But as
things draw nearer we can—frequently—make out their features with
greater detail. And so it is with the future.
Is this an unmitigated misfortune? Would we even want the predictive
project to be perfectible? How much would we actually want to know
about the future—at any rate about that relatively near-term future that is
most relevant for the lives of ourselves and those we know of and care
about? Would we really want to have foreknowledge of the suffering that
the yet unturned pages of time and circumstance hold in store for us and
our children and their posterity—the catastrophes and misfortunes and suf-
fering that await us all? Would we—to take a more realistic example—
want to know of the untreatable diseases and decays that lie in wait for us
in the genetic alleys of our makeup ? Surely few punishments that could
be inflicted upon a person would be as bad as to be confronted with the
timetable of one’s future—to be informed station by station, as it were, of
all the major eventuations of one’s life on earth. What misfortune will not
be multiplied by anticipation, what triumph not diminished by foreknowl-
edge of its certainty and its impermanence?

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It is the element of openness—of uncertainty—that gives our human

present its savor and our envisioned future its special character of open-
ness. The factors of contingency and impredictability play a central and
definitive part here. There is a big experiential difference between the
original game and the replay where the outcome is already “a foregone
conclusion.” Sheer contingent impredictability gives life’s eventuations a
special interest. Not only in reading novels, plays, and mystery stories, but
also in living their everyday lives people generally welcome novelty and
surprise whenever this does not involve something that is inherently un-
pleasant. In general the unsurprising is, for that very reason, uninteresting.
(No one finds “yesterday’s news” all that intriguing.) We admire the tech-
nical skill of the tight-rope walker. But the ever-present chance that some-
thing may go wrong adds a special thrill to the process.
Our psychological and emotional condition is such that we would not
want to live in a pre-programmed world—a world where the rest of our
fate and future is pre-ordained and indeed pre-discernible in the realities of
the present. The human yearning for novelty—for new experiences and
prospects and possibilities—is surely a characteristic aspect of what makes
us into the sorts of creatures we are. A predictable world is one where the
future is already fully pre-figured in the condition of the present, and this is
something we naturally find repugnant. Even at the price of falling victim
to chance and haphazard we yearn for novelty and innovation—for a lib-
eration from an inevitability programmed by the past’s dead hand. Escape
from the ennui of established routines and predictable activities constitutes
an important objective in our lives. The feeling of open horizons—of new
developments that make for suspense and surprises—is inherent in our
human nature. (Had we been content with pre-figured predictability we
could have remained in the Garden of Eden.)
For a satisfying human life we need to exist in a halfway house with re-
gard to predictability. We need (and apparently have) a balance—a world
that is predictable enough to make the conduct of life manageable, and—
by and large—convenient. But we also require the presence of much that
is impredictable, novel, and surprising. A totally unpredictable world
would be a horror even if (contrary to hypothesis) we were able to live in
it. But the opposite extreme—a world that is—substantially predictable,
would equally be a horror.
Predictability, then, is not a be-all and end-all. We humans need nov-
elty and innovation—contact with the new, strange circumstances to nour-
ish our minds and spirits. Without some exposure to chance and uncer-

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tainty we cannot function as the creatures we are—the sort of creatures we

have become under the pressure of evolutionary development. We thrive
in the interstices of chance that pervade a world of predominantly lawful
order. We play games of chance, seek out stories and plays with unpre-
dictable “suspense” endings, and pursue novelty change and breaks in rou-
tine precisely so to make life less predictable—less dull, routine, and bor-
ing. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has given eloquent formulation to the salient
point:

I suppose the human yearning for knowledge of the future is insatiable. That
is why fortune tellers and astrologers and Tarot card dealers and palm readers
flourish. Yet how lucky it is that the future itself consistently frustrates those
who purport to unravel it. For, if the future could be predicted, what fun
would remain in life? Successful prediction, moreover, implies a determinis-
tic universe and would expose human freedom as an illusion. It is the very
indeterminacy of things that emboldens us to believe that, within limits, we
can make our own future. So let us bless history for continuing to outwit all
our certitudes. As General de Gaulle has said, “One should not insult the fu-
30
ture.”

To be sure, it is all a matter of degree. We humans very much need or-

der, routine, and predictability. Yet here, as elsewhere, there can be too
much of a good thing. We cannot be moral, happy, flourishing lives in a
world that is not predominantly predictable. Nor can we lead such lives in
a world where there is no room for uncertainty and impredictability. The
gift of total insight into our own future would be a poisoned chalice. For
life as we know and want it, our own human micro-environment needs a
peculiar combination of these two factors. Unless we are prepared to cease
to be what we are—to abandon the Spinozistic conatus se preservandi31
that impels every natural species to seek to perpetuate itself as the sort of
thing it is—we have to see the limits of predictability as a good thing. A
world that is substantially predictable is one in which we humans as such
would not really want to live, given (per impossible) the option of a free
choice.
An enjoyable life, like a good story, must have a judicious mixture of
uncertainty (suspense) and predictability (security). All the same, such es-
capes should themselves circumscribed, limited and predictable if they are
to prove benign. We need and seek novelty and change, but it remains
something we want in predictable ways. (Which is why we opt for the
predictability of genres such as “the detective story.”) To live in ways that

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render our circumstances substantially foreseeable—at least as regards

fundamentals—is an important feature of our human strategy for survival
in a complex world.
The analogy of a game is illuminating. For us, the world has something
of the character of a chess match played between grand masters: nature
and history. In one way there is predictability—we know perfectly well
how they’ll move their pieces: in line with the rules of chess (here, the
laws of nature). But we do not have foreknowledge as to which moves
they will actually make. And this aspect of the game resembles human
life: there is significant contingency within a framework of substantial
regularity.
It is surely of the essence of the condition of humanity as we know it
that we live in a halfway house as regards predictability—a mixture of
knowing and ignorance that may change in its proportions with the condi-
tion of the times but always hovers well between the extremes. For us,
constitutes as we are, a world that is too preponderantly predictable or too
preponderantly unpredictable would alike prove disastrous.

* * *

But back to progress. We began with the initial observation that pro-
gress is a matter not just of change, but of change in the direction of im-
provement. And this confronts one with the challenging question: Will the
future improve in the past. Will the human condition of our children’s
children—and their children’s children—be better than our own? Is his-
tory—at any rate over the near-term future—to be a matter of onwards and
upwards? The current state of things leaves much room for scepticism and
agnosticism here. It takes an individual of more daring than I possess to
offer any confident prognostication in this regard. I simply do not know if
we can count on much further progress in the quality of life of people on
this planet. But I do know that to move matters people of good will should
and will make an effort to do what they can to move matters in this direc-
tion.32
NOTES TO CHAPTER 10
1
It is not the least of the merits of the fine arts that they enable us to satisfy this re-
quirement.
2
“Si nihil adveniret, non esset futurum tempus.” (St. Augustine, Confessions, XI
xiv.) And again: “[non sunt] tria tempora, . . . praeteritum, praesens, et futurum,

184
 PROCESS AND COGNITIVE PROGRESS

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

sed tantum praesens, quoniam illa duo non sunt” (XI xvii). The future’s events,
Augustine has it, “exist” (as yet) only in the mind of its contemplators: “cum ergo
videri dicuntur non ipsa, quae nondum sunt, id est quae futura sunt, sed eorum
causae vel signa forsitan videntur, quae iam sunt: ideo non futura, sed praesentia
sunt iam videntibus, ex quibus futura praedicantur animo concepta” (XI xviii).
3
This position is common among Aristotle and his school (including the schoolman
and neo-scholastics). In recent days it has been espoused by philosophers as di-
verse as C.D. Broad, Charles Hartshorne, and Paul Weiss. It has also been popular
among contemporary logicians. See: Jan Lukasiewicz, Collected Papers, ed. L.
Borkowski, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1970, pp. 127-8; reprinted in Storrs
McCall, Polish Logic, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 38-9; A. N. Prior,
Past, Present, and Future, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 29-9; M. A. E.
Dummett, “The Reality of the Past,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol.
69 (1968-9), pp. 239-58; reprinted in M. A. E. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas
(London: Duckworth, 1979), ch. 21, 358-74; and “Bringing about the Past,” The
Philosophical Review, vol. 73 (1964), pp. 338-59, reprinted in Dummett’s, Truth
and Other Enigmas, ch. 19, pp. 333-50.
4
There is, to be sure, a rather grim alternative to this, the “block universe” doctrine
ably expounded by Donald C. Williams in his classic paper on “The Myth of Pas-
sage” (reprinted in Richard Gale (ed.), The Philosophy of Time (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1967). It is questionable however, whether the “future” can here main-
tain its status as such. In effect it ceases to be what it supposedly is, a future. And
the issue of prediction as such also vanishes once we exchange the furture’s unreal-
ized condition for some sort of subsistence in a timeless present.
5
To be sure “backwards causation” is a discussable thesis of contemporary physics,
but the effects at issue occur at a level of scale that precludes any substantial bear-
ing on issues of human thought and action.
6
Quoted in J.R. Lucas, The Future (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 67. The po-
sition at issue is, in essence, Aristotle’s.
7
For a cogent discussion of these issues see James W. Felt, “Fatalism and Truth
about the Future,” The Thomist, 56 (1992), pp. 209-27.
8
See Nicholas Rescher and Alasdair Urquhart, Temporal Logic (Berlin and Wien:
Springer Verlag, 1971), chapter XVII, and also Mario Bunge, Scientific Research
(New York, Heidelberg-Berlin Springer Verlag, 1967), pp. 107-11.
9
On these issues see Richard Gale, The Language of Time (New York: Humanities
Press, 1968), and J.R. Lucas, The Future (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

185
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

10
Paris, 1779; Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, tr. by F.W. Truscott and F.L.
Emory (New York: Wiley, 1902; reprinted New York: Dover, 1951). The basic
idea was not unknown to classical antiquity: “Si quis mortalis possit esse, qui col-
ligationem causarum omnium perspiciat animo, nihil eum profecto fallat” (Cicero,
De Divinatione, I, lvi, 127.)
11
For a discussion of the difficulties of actually implementing the predictive pros-
pects of a Laplacean Determinism, even in the setting of classical Newtonian phys-
ics, see Gerald Feinberg et al, “Knowledge of the Past and Future,” The Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 89 (1992), pp. 607-42.
12
“Omnia quae sub Sole sunt vel fiunt, praeterita presentia sive futura, in se et objec-
tive summam semper certitudinem habent. De praesentibus et praeteritis constat;
quoniam eo ipso, quo sunt vel fuerunt, non possunt non esse vel fuisse: Nec de fu-
turis ambigendum . . .” Artis Conjectandi Pars Quarta, tradens usum et applica-
tionem praecedentis Doctrinae in Civilibus, Moralibus et Oeconomicis, ed. Nico-
laus Bernoulli (Basel, 1713), p. 210. William James put it more picturesquely:
“What does determinism profess? It professes that those parts of the universe al-
ready laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The
future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we call the pre-
sent is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the
one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and
welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no
equivocation or shadow of turning.” (“The Dilemma of Determinism” in J. J.
McDermott (ed.), The Writings of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977), p. 590.)
13
On Laplacean determinism see John Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht
and Boston: Reidel, 1986). See also Gerald Feinberg et al., “Knowledge of the
Past and Future,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 89 (1992), pp. 607-42. The phi-
losophy of such a position is worked out in the Ethics of Spinoza.
14
On the physical issues involved see James W. Felt, Making Sense of Your Freedom
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
15
This mis-step underlies K.R. Popper’s contention: “The degree of corroboration of
a theory merely [serves] as a critical report on the quality of past performance: it
could not be used to predict future performance” (The Philosophy of Karl Popper,
ed. by. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974) p. 82). But this is just ab-
surd: of course past performance is a predictive indicator. (What could possibly
serve better?) But this is beside the point when plausible forecasts are at issue.
What past performance does not enable one to do is to predict with failproof accu-

186
 PROCESS AND COGNITIVE PROGRESS

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

racy. For a more fully elaborated critique of Popper’s position see Wesley C.
Salmon, “Rational Prediction,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol.
32 (1981), pp. 115-25.
16
De libero arbitrio, III iv.
17
The point is that here as elsewhere rational claims transcend their evidence. Note
that the content of claims about apples and pears certainly involve more than what
can be seen or smelled, so that such claims transcend their evidence. But of course
these claims nevertheless can be evidentiated by such sensory evidence.
18
A. d’ Angeville as quoted in Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 117. The whole of Chapter 14, “Society
Prepares the Crimes,” is relevant here.
19
See the account given in the editorial page of the London Times for 13 July 1993,
117. 17.
20
One can foretell with reasonable confidence where they will occur and also that
they will occur (“sooner or later”), but the when of the matter still remains prob-
lematic. On earthquake prediction see H.F. Judson, The Search for Solutions (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston; 1980). Some experts think that earthquakes
may follow a chaotic path, so that their exact spatial placement is inherently unpre-
dictable. This will of course also create problems for predicting their timing at a
particular place. See C. Scholz “Global Perspectives on Chaos,” Nature, vol. 338
(April 1989), pp. 459-60.
21
For a considerable variety of vivid illustrations of this situation see William
Ascher, Forecasting: An Appraisal for Policy Makers and Planners (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press,1978).
22
This classification follows Edmund R. Leach “The Political Future of Burma” in
Futuribles I, ed. by Bertrand de Jouvenel (Geneva: Droz, 1963), pp. 121-54.
23
For further details see the author’s Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
24
On these issues see the author’s The Limits of Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984).
25
Nam rerum humanorum tanta est obscuritas varietasque, ut nihil dilucide sciri pos-
sit. (Erasmus, Encomium Moraiae, XLV.)

187
 Process Philosophical Deliberations

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10
26
For an illuminating discussion see Antonino Poppi, “Fate and Fortune, Providence and
Human Freedom” in C.B. Schmitt, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 641-67.
27
See Robert L. Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1960), pp. 2-3 et passim. He says of optimim that “as an enduring trait of national
character it could almost be called exclusively American” (p. 17). But note also his
assertion that: “it is fair to say that in the 1920’s a degree of optimism never again
realized marked the general business tone” (p. 135).
28
Quoted in Meadows, et. al., Limits to Growth, p. 180.
29
Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 103. Overall, the present paragraph draws from
Chap. 5 of this book.
30
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Future Outwits Us Again,” The Wall Street Journal,
Op-ed page, 20 September 1993.
31
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. III, prop. VI ff.
32
This chapter draws upon an essay originally published in Arnold Burgen, et. al.
(eds.), The Idea of Progress (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997), pp. 103-109.

188
Name Index
Alexander, Samuel, 4
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 73
Aristotle, 2, 18, 147
Ascher, William, 187n21

Bacon, Francis, 110, 135n3

von Baer, Karl Ernst, 137
Bergson, Henri, 4, 10, 33
Birx, J. James, 25n4
Bohm, David, 106, 113n15
Bohr, Neils, 129-30
Boltzmann, Lugwig, 147
BonJour, Laurence, 59n1
Boscovich, Roudjet Yossif, 10
Bracciolini, Poggio, 176
Brandon, Robert N., 154n2
Brentano, Franz, 13
Brightman, E. S., 26n14
Broad, C. D., 30, 185n3
Brodbeck, Mary, 153, 156n20
Bromley, D. A., 112n10, 113-114n18
Browning, Douglas, 22
Buckley, Michael J., 26n13
Bunge, Mario, 185n8
Byrd, Robert, 25n5

Carson, Rachel, 180

Cassirer, Ernst, 30
de Chardin, Thilhard, 6
Chisholm, Roderick, 135n4
Christian, William Jr., 25n2
Cicero, 58, 186n10
Cobb, John B., Jr, 22
Coffey, Peter, 135n4
Croce, Benedetto, 30

Darwin, Charles, 8
Davidson, Donald, 124
de Gaulle, General, 183
Deledalle, Gérard, 11, 25n7
Democritus, 4
Derrida, Jacques, 124
Dewey, John 10, 11, John, 33
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 153
Duhem, Pierre Maurice, 131
Dummett, M. A. E., 185n3
Dupré, John, 156n13

Earman, John, 186n13

Eddington, A. S., 112n9
Edwards, 69-71
Epicurus, 4
Erasmus, Desiderius, 187n25

Feinberg, Gerald, 186n11, 186n13

Felt, James W., 185n7, 186n14
Feyerabend, Paul, 93, 112n5
Feynman, Richard, 112n12
Fichte, Johann Gottleib, 128
Ford, Lewis S., 22
Frege, Gottlob, 30

Gadamer, Hans George, 30, 128, 136n10-11

Gale, Richard M., 75n2, 185n9
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 112n11
Gosse, Edmund, 179
Gray, James R., 22
Griffin, David R., 22

Hacking, Ian, 187n18

von Hartman, Eduard, 127, 136n9
Hartshorne, Charles, 4, 19, 22-23, 27, 31, 185n3
Hawkins, S. W., 112n12
Hayek, Friedrich, 153
Hegel, Georg Wilhel Friedrich, 31, 127-28, 135n1, 179
Heidegger, Martin, 30

190
Heilbroner, Robert L., 188n27
Helmer, Olaf, 157n22
Heraclitus of Ephesus, 3, 4, 25n1
Heyek, F., A., 156n17
Hobbes, Thomas, 110
Holland, John H., 154n2
Hume, David, 69-71

Inhelder, B., 111n2

James, William, 4, 10, 11, 33, 46n2

Jevons, W. Stanley, 88, 91, 96, 111n1, 111n4, 112n7
Judson, H. F., 187n20

Kant, Immanuel, 39, 46n1, 73, 84, 89-97, 111n3, 155n9

Kaufmann, Stuart, 155n3
Keynes, J. M., 136n7
Kirk, G. S., 3, 25n1
Kline, George L., 25n2
Kotarbinski, Tadeusz, 13

Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 163-64, 175

Laudan, Larry, 93, 112n6, 112n8
Leach, Edmund R., 187n22
Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried, 4, 31, 88
Leighton, J. A., 26n14
Lenin, Vladmiir, 113n14
Leucippus, 4
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 26n14, 32, 34n1
Lucas, George R., Jr., 23, 25n2, 185n6, 185n9
Lukasiewicz, Jan, 185n3

Machiavelli, Noccolo, 176

McCall, Storrs, 185n3
McIntyre, Lee C., 156n19
Meadows, 188n28
Mendeleev, Dimitri Ivonovitch, 147
Mercier, Désiré Joseph, 135n4
Mill, J. S., 179

191
Montaigne, Michel, 119
Moore, G. E., 30
Morgan, C. Lloyd, 4
Musgrave, Alan, 136n7

Napoleon, 161
Newton, Isaac, 88, 105, 147, 151
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25n6

Palter, Robert M., 23

Parmenides, 2
Peirce, C. S., 4, 11, 16, 27, 31, 53, 78, 109, 152, 155-156n9,
Petley, B. W., 156n11
Petrarch, 180
Philip IV of France, 179
Piaget. Jean, 111n2
Planck, Max, 147
Plato, 4, 7, 54, 128, 177
Poincaré, Henri, 141
Pols, Edward, 25n3
Popper, Karl R., 93, 153, 156n18, 186n15
Poppi, Antonino, 188n26
Prior, A. N., 185n3
Pruss, Alexander R., 75n2
Ptolemy I, 82, 147

Quine, W. V. O., 31, 114n20

Ramsey, F. P., 31
Raven, J. E., 3, 25n1
Reichenbach, Hans, 155n6
Rescher, Nicholas, 23, 157n22, 185n8
Richardson, Peter J., 25n5
Rickert, Heinrich, 153
Rosenberg, Alexander, 153, 156n21
Rowe, William L., 75n2
Royce, Josiah, 26n14
Russell, Bertrand, 30

192
Salmon, Wesley C., 187n15
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 30
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 183, 188n30
Schofield, M., 3, 25n1
Scholz, C. H., 187n20
Sebond, Raymond, 135n3
Seibt, Johanna, 23
Seneca, 88
Shakespeare, William, 1, 82
Sherburne, Donald W., 25n2
Simon, Herbert A., 113n16
Simon-Schaefer, Roland, 117, 135n2
Socrates, 128
Spencer, Herbert, 137, 154n1
Spinoza, Benedict de, 113n14, 176, 178, 186n13, 188n31
St. Augustine, 161, 165, 184n2
Stent, Gunter, 112n12
Strawson, P. F., 11-14, 24, 25n8, 31
Sweet, Dennis, 25n1

Tuchman, Barbara W., 188n29

Urquhart, Alasdair, 185n8

Ushenko, Andrew Paul, 4

Weinberg, Steven, 156n14

Weiss, Paul, 4, 185n3
von Weizsäcker, C. F., 156n14
Whitehead, A. N., 10-11, 17-19, 24, 25n2, 27, 31, 33, 73-74
Whittemore, Robert C., 25
Wigner, E. P., 112n13
Williams, Donald C., 185n4

Zeno, 2

193