Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Asking for More Than Truth: Duhem's Law of Cognitive Complementarity
- 2 Kant's Conception of Knowledge as Systematized Information
- 3 Spencer's Law of Cognitive Development
- 4 Gibbon's Law of Logarithmic Returns
- 5 Adams's Thesis on Exponential Growth
- 6 Quality Retardation
- 7 How Much Can Be Known? A Leibnizian Perspective on the Quantitative Discrepancy Between Linguistic Truth and Objective Fact
- 8 On the Limits of Knowledge: A Kantian Perspective on Cognitive Finitude
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
6 - Quality Retardation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Asking for More Than Truth: Duhem's Law of Cognitive Complementarity
- 2 Kant's Conception of Knowledge as Systematized Information
- 3 Spencer's Law of Cognitive Development
- 4 Gibbon's Law of Logarithmic Returns
- 5 Adams's Thesis on Exponential Growth
- 6 Quality Retardation
- 7 How Much Can Be Known? A Leibnizian Perspective on the Quantitative Discrepancy Between Linguistic Truth and Objective Fact
- 8 On the Limits of Knowledge: A Kantian Perspective on Cognitive Finitude
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
Summary
(1) The issue of importance is obviously a crucial factor for the utilization of information. (2) This, however, is something subject to decidedly different degrees, ranging from the pedestrianly routine to the uncontestably first-rate. (3) The phenomenon of quality retardation so functions that as our information grows, the rate of growth at increasingly higher quality is ever diminished. (4) Higher quality elites are not just increasingly exclusive but slower growing as well. (5) The quality of information is reflected in the structural constitution of texts and in the taxonomies that such structural divisions reflect. (6) In approximation, at least, importance can also be assessed in terms of citations that reflect the utilization of texts in the literature of their subject.
The Centrality of Importance
The previous discussion has conceived of knowledge in terms of top quality, first-rate information. But this is something of an oversimplification. For in cognitive matters, our questions and answers, problems and findings, come in various sizes – some virtually trivial, others portentous, and many somewhere in between. And the difference matters a great deal here. For it is the biggies that figure prominently in textbooks and histories, while the smallies get a footnote at best and blank omission for the most part. Prizes, recognition, and career advancement reward the big, while indifference befalls the small.
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- Epistemetrics , pp. 57 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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