Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher (born July 15, 1928) is a German-American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the Co-Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of thought from Continental idealism and American pragmatism. He is the exponent of a realistic pragmatism which, rejecting the deconstructive approach of the neopragmatists, construes pragmatic efficacy as an evidential index for such normative features as truth and validity rather than being a substitute or replacement for them. And apart from this larger program Rescher’s many-sided work has made significant contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-valued logic), to the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), to the philosophy of science (in particular in its economic aspects and as regards the relation of science and religion). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. The Encyclopedia of Bioethics credits Rescher with writing one of the very first articles in the field.

One of the first among the increasing number of contemporary exponents of philosophical idealism, Rescher has been active in the rehabilitation of the coherence theory of truth and in the reconstruction of philosophical pragmatism in line with the idealistic tradition. He has pioneered the development of inconsistency-tolerant logics and, in the philosophy of science, the logarithmic retardation theory of scientific progress based on the epistemological principle that our knowledge in a field does not increase in proportion with the volume of information but only with its logarithm.