Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Einsicht - Intelligibilität: psychologischer Akt, Fixierung systematischer Relationen in einem Mannigfaltigen, Bestimmung des Objekts durch einen Akt; systematische - nicht-systematische Relationen

Kurzinhalt: the constitutive characteristic of an insight is that somehow, the performance of a psychological act called insight results in the fixing of concrete elements in an experiential manifold in the relations of identity and non-identity such that ...

Textausschnitt: 3.2 Systematic and Non-Systematic Relations

9/3 The terms 'systematic' and 'non-systematic' have specific meanings in the works of Lonergan and McShane, meanings that will not be intelligible immediately to anyone who is not familiar with their works. As a first step towards these meanings McShane provides a set of examples. (64; Fs)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ...
6 7 5 6 4 7 6 7 5 5 6 4 ...
5 1 8 4 3 9 2 7 4 6 9 3...

10/3 One understands immediately - and this is usually taken to be the full meaning of the dots at the end - how the first series would be continued. The series is systematic, with a formula for the nth term. The behaviour of the series is lawful and that lawfulness is 'mathematically expressible' in an elementary way.1 'Systematic' is defined in terms of the performance of the cognitional act noted above, the act of insight.2 And in an effort to help turn attention to that public but oddly private data base upon which his definition draws, I will reproduce, here, some of the features of insight noted by Lonergan.

What we have to grasp is that insight
(1) comes as a release to the tension of inquiry,
(2) comes suddenly and unexpectedly,
(3) is a function not of outer circumstances but inner conditions,
(4) pivots between the concrete and the abstract, and
(5) passes into the habitual texture of one's mind.3 (64; Fs)

11/3 The stages in the genesis of understanding include clues, concepts, images, questions and anticipations. Women and men ask questions, we wonder, we seek to understand, we look for clues, we check out the clues. We conjure up images and draw diagrams, write sentences, tear up paper, erase sketches, rewrite, suppose and manipulate the suppositions. And then suddenly we have insights that answer the questions. (64; Fs)

12/3 The answer is a patterned set of concepts. The image strains to approximate to the concepts. The concepts, by added conceptual determinations, can express their differences from the merely approximated image. The pivot between images and concepts is the insight. And setting the standard which insight, images, and concepts must meet is the question, the desire to know, that could have kept the process in motion by further queries, had its requirements not been satisfied.4 What is grasped or 'abstracted'5 in an act of insight Lonergan names intelligibility. And the characteristic that is common to acts of insight, the characteristic that constitutes the basis for his distinction between systematic and non-systematic relations, is the fact that intelligibility regards the essential as essential, the significant as significant, the important as important, and it excludes and disregards the incidental as incidental, the irrelevant as irrelevant, and the negligible as negligible. The terms 'essential,' 'significant,' 'important,' 'incidental,' 'irrelevant,' and 'negligible' always have a concrete meaning that is particular to each act of intelligence. But while their concrete referents are always particular the relations among these terms themselves are generalizable as either identity (or similarity) or non-identity (or opposition). And so the constitutive characteristic of an insight is that somehow, the performance of a psychological act called insight results in the fixing of concrete elements in an experiential manifold in the relations of identity and non-identity such that what is fixed in the identity constitutes a unified psychological presence called intelligibility. Thus insight and intelligibility are defined 'implicitly' as, respectively, the act whose occurrence specifies an object and an object whose nature is defined in terms of the occurrence of an act. (64f; Fs) (notabene)

13/3 Hence, relative to any given insight or cluster of insights the essential, significant, important consists

(1) in the set of aspects in the data necessary for the occurrence of the insight or insights, or
(2) in the set of related concepts necessary for the expression of the insight or insights.

On the other hand the incidental, irrelevant, negligible consists
(1) in other concomitant aspects of the data that do not fall under the insight or insights, or
(2) in the set of concepts that correspond to the merely concomitant aspects of the data.6 (65; Fs)