An Unfathomable World

Abstract Nicholas Rescher contends that the world is unfathomable: that facts outrun language and thought, that the world is complex and determinate while thought and language are relatively simple and indeterminate; and that inquiry is methodologically idealist, employing coherence as a criterion of truth, while presupposing metaphysical realism. These theses emerge from an appealing view of our sensory, conceptual, and cognitive faculties as modeling the world through a process of successive idealization, approximation, and abstraction.