Abstract
This chapter follows Mario Bunge’s unswerving dedication to the idea that philosophical deliberations should be precise in formulation and cogent in substantiation. In deliberating about the range of human knowledge from a quantitative point of view it emerges that three very different ranges of consideration have to be addressed. The range of what we human individuals can actually and overtly know is bound to consist of a finite number of items. And given the recursive nature of language the range of what is knowable—i.e. propositionally formulated truth—is at most denumerably infinite. But the range of what is theoretically knowable—the manifold of actual facts—is going to be transdenumerably large, if only due to the role of real-valued parameters. A proper heed to this quantitative disparity has interesting implications for the status of our knowledge in a world where we must deal with digital conceptualization of an analogue reality.
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Notes
- 1.
For details see the author’s “Leibniz’s Quantitative Epistemology.” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 36 (2004), pp. 210–231.
- 2.
It is, to be sure, possible that as my friend Patrick Grim stressed the idea of a totality of fact—the fact of all facts—in epistemology will encounter the same theoretical difficulties as the idea of a set of all sets in mathematics (Grim 1991).
References
Grim, P. (1991). The incomplete universe. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Rescher, N. (2004). Leibniz’s quantitative epistemology. Studia Leibnatiana, 36, 210–231.
Rescher, N. (2010). Epistemetrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rescher, N. (2019). Quantitative Epistemology. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_10
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