Abstract

In fact, Rescher’s system divides rather neatly into two components, which seem to be only loosely connected with each other, one of them predominantly pragmatic and one predominantly idealistic. The pragmatic component is an elaborate and highly complicated epistemological theory, expounded mainly in CTT and MP, which offers a coherentist account of epistemic justification together with a pragmatic meta-justification or validation of this account. The idealistic component, presented mainly in CI, centers around the thesis that our ordinary common sense conceptual framework involves essential reference to mind, and thus that the world-as-we-conceive-it is conceptually mind-dependent. Since it is the former component, the epistemological theory, which appears to have the greater philosophical importance, most of this study will be devoted to it. A brief sketch and critique of Rescher’s rather idiosyncratic version of idealism will be offered in the final section.