Nicholas Rescher

Epistemic logic is the branch of philosophical thought that seeks to formalize the discourse about knowledge. Its object is to articulate and clarify the general principles of reasoning about claims to and attributions of knowledge. This comprehensive survey of the topic offers the first systematic account of the subject as it has developed in the journal literature over recent decades. Rescher gives an overview of the discipline by setting out the general principles for reasoning about such matters as propositional knowledge and interrogative knowledge. Aimed at graduate students and specialists, _Epistemic Logi_c elucidates both Rescher's pragmatic view of knowledge and the field in general.

Enlightening Journey brings the life of the American philosopher, Nicholas Rescher, into the new millennium. The latest in a quartet of autobiographical works, this latest installment charts—in a single volume—the many twists and turns of Rescher's life and career. It takes the reader from Rescher's childhood in Weimar and then Nazi Germany through life as a first generation American during the Depression; as a high school student during World War II and a graduate student at Princeton; as a serviceman during the Korean War to work as a Cold War warrior with the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War. It traces the evolution of Rescher's career as a professional philosopher and his contribution of over seventy books and more than two hundred articles, many written in the construction of his signature system of pragmatic idealism. The very best in biography, Enlightening Journey offers new insight into the intellectual power and restless curiosity of an extraordinary modern scholar seeking to live out a very ordinary American life

This collection of essays originated from an interdisciplinary conference on 'Evolutionary Epistemology' held in Pittsburgh in December of 1988 under the sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science. Contents: Epistemological Roles for Selection Theory, by Donald T. Campbell; Evolutionary Models of Science, by Ronald N. Giere; Should Epistemologists Take Darwin Seriously? by Michael Bradie; Natural Selection, Justification, and Inference to the Best Explanation, by Alan H. Goldman; Interspecific Competition, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Ecology, by Kristin Shrader-Frechette; Toward Making Evolutionary Epistemology into a Truly Naturalized Epistemology, by William Bechtel; Confessions of a Creationist, by C. Kenneth Waters. Co-published with the Center for Philosophy of Science

In _Error,_ Nicholas Rescher presents a fresh analysis of the occurrence, causality, and consequences of error in human thought, action, and evaluation. Rescher maintains that error-avoidance and truth-achievement are distinct but equally important factors for rational inquiry, and that error is inherent in the human cognitive process (to err is human). He defines three main categories of error: cognitive (failure to realize truths); practical (failure related to the objective of an action); and axiological (failure in evaluation), and articulates the factors that contribute to each. His discussion also provides a historical perspective on the treatment of error in Greek philosophy, and by later thinkers such as Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, James, Royce, Moore, and Russell. _Error _is an important reexamination of the significance of error to the fields of philosophical anthropology, epistemology, ontology, and theology. As Rescher’s study argues, truth and error are inexorably intertwined—one cannot exist without the other. Error is an unavoidable occurrence in the cognitive process—without missteps on the path to truth, truth itself cannot be attained. The risk of error is inherent in the quest for truth.

When this book was originally published in 2006, Epistemetrics was not as yet a scholarly discipline. With regard to scientific information there was the discipline of scientometrics, represented by a journal of that very name. Science, however, had a monopoly on knowledge. Although it is one of our most important cognitive resources, it is not our only one. While scientometrics is a centerpiece of epistemetrics, it is not the whole of it. Nicholas Rescher's endeavor to quantify knowledge is not only of interest in itself, but is also instructive in bringing into sharper relief the nature of and the explanatory rationale for the limits that unavoidably confront our efforts to advance the frontiers of knowledge. In particular, his book demonstrates the limitations of human knowledge and will be of great value to scholars working in this area.

Recent discussions in the philosophy of science have devoted considerable attention to the analysis of conceptual issues relating to the methodology of explanation and prediction in the sciences. Part of this literature has been devoted to clarifying the very ideas of explanation and prediction. But the discussion has also ranged over various related topics, including the status of laws to be used for explanatory and predictive purposes, the logical interrelationships between explanatory and predictive reasonings, the differences in the strategy of explanatory argumentation in different branches of science, the nature and possibility of teleological explanation, etc. The aim of the present article is to examine the issues involved in such questions from the specialized perspective afforded by one particular kind of physical systems--namely, systems, here to be characterized as discrete state systems, whose behavior has been studied extensively in the scientific literature under the general heading of Markov chains. These systems have been chosen as our focus because their behavior over time can be analyzed at once with great ease and with extraordinary precision