Epistemetrics

Epistemetrics is not as yet a scholarly discipline. With regard to scientific information there is the discipline of scientometrics, represented by a journal of that very name. Science, however, does not have a monopoly on knowledge. 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.

• A pioneering analysis of knowledge from a quantitative standpoint • A treatment that brings together and systemizes random ideas and undeveloped suggestions from a vast amount of literature • Explores the nature of the limits that confront our efforts to advance the frontiers of knowledge

1. Asking for more than truth: Duhem’s law of cognitive complementarity; 2. Kant’s conception of knowledge as systemized 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.