Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Einsicht, hermeneutischer Zirkel; Definition: Intelligibilität; inverse Einsicht

Kurzinhalt: ... 'intelligibility' is defined as that which satisfies the appetite of inquiring intelligence; ... they include the essential as essential and exclude the incidental as incidental

Textausschnitt: 14/3 At first glance it might seem that the approach proposed by Lonergan entraps him in what might be called a 'hermeneutic circle.' And so it would be useful here to describe more clearly what this approach involves. Lonergan never asks whether acts of understanding occur. To ask such a question is to give evidence of the prior occurrence of a set of acts of understanding of some sort or another. His question is always about the empirically verifiable characteristics of intelligent acts and their contents or terms.1 The fact is that acts of intelligence of some sort or another are experiences that are within the horizons of all human subjects. But although we experience such acts, prior to our investigating their distinguishing characteristics we do not know how they occur, what constitutes the essential characteristics of their objects, or what might constitute the difference between such acts competently executed and others incompetently executed. So intelligent inquiry is conceived2 by Lonergan as an appetite for 'intelligibility' and an act of understanding is defined as that act whereby the appetite for 'intelligibility' is satisfied.3 Implicitly, then, 'intelligibility' is defined as that which satisfies the appetite of inquiring intelligence. And at this point the procedure again becomes empirical. Lonergan turns his attention (inviting the reader to do the same) to actual occurrences of instances of investigation and discovery in an effort to discover if there are further distinguishable characteristics, classifiable stages, common orientations to various instances of acts of intelligence. (65f;

15/3 Thus it stands that Lonergan points to an appetite in humans, he notes that this appetite is for answers to concrete questions, he observes that the appetite is satisfied and its satisfaction is signalled when a psychological act occurs whose object meets the conditions of the question, and he attends to various occurrences of the psychological act in order to study its structure, its characteristics, and those of its object. He discovers that the single, universally distinguishable feature of acts of understanding (and of their respective intelligible contents) is that they include the essential as essential and exclude the incidental as incidental. And so the meaning of the term 'systematic' is to be understood in terms of what is included as essential in an insight. (66; Fs)

16/3 Let us define systematic processes by the already enumerated properties that, other things being equal,
(1) the whole of a systematic process and its every event possess but a single intelligibility that corresponds to a single insight or single set of unified insights,
(2) any situation can be deduced from any other without an explicit consideration of intervening situations, and
(3) the empirical investigation of such processes is marked not only by a notable facility in ascertaining and checking abundant and significant data but also by a supreme moment when all data fall into a single perspective, sweeping deductions become possible, and subsequent exact predictions regularly are fulfilled.1

16/3 Thus McShane's first numerical series above can easily be extended to the nth term.2 (66; Fs)
But there is a curious feature to this account of insights, a feature that links the definition of an insight with the definition of what Lonergan calls an 'inverse insight.'3 Systematic relations are defined not only in terms of what is included as essential for the occurrence of an insight, they are also defined in terms of what is excluded by this psychological act. The data, the relations, the other possible answers to the question were rejected as mistaken or irrelevant because they did not qualify in meeting the demands of the question or the intent of the inquiry. When intelligence grasps the unity in, let us say, the meaning of words in a written sentence and the meaning of such sentences in a paragraph in a book, then the size of the page, the style of the print, the various alternate dictionary meanings of the words are all rejected by the spontaneously selective reader as not significant or essential to that meaning. (66; Fs)

17/3 To give another example, if one has left one's car lights burning over a cold winter's night and if one wants to know, the next morning, why the battery does not start the car, the answer would be formulated as an explanation (a unified set of insights) relating the electro-chemical properties of a lead acid battery to the magnitude of the resistance of the car's incandescent headlamps and the fact of a closed switch over eight hours at a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. In this case the single intelligibility that unifies the data systematically is the set of chemical equations that explains the conversion of lead oxide and sulphuric acid to lead sulphate under certain determinable conditions. Neither the colour of the car, the address of its location nor the income bracket of its owner are related systematically to the process that resulted in the battery discharging.4 (66f; Fs)

18/3 It would seem, then, that some questions can be answered with insights that include and relate some data and exclude others.5 In other cases, however, questions need to be met with the admission that there is insufficient data to answer the intent of the question. And currently the natural and human sciences abound with questions of this type. But there remains a third type of case, distinct from the two above, that also seems to occur within the range of our experiences. Some questions deserve to be answered with the 'insight' that there is no answer; there is no intelligible unity to the data that satisfies the intent of the investigation. This brings us to consider the third series of numbers in the above citation from Randomness. (67; Fs)

518439274693...
The third series ends also with dots. But the dots added to it have no other significance than as indicating that the series be continued. There is no rule for its continuation in so far as there is no rule relating the first eleven members given. In so far as there is no law relating to it, it may be described as totally random. The terms follow each other in a non-systematic fashion and one does not expect to arrive at a systematic formula governing them or at a generating formula for further members.6

19/3 Lonergan has named the act which grasps that there is no single intelligible unity to be grasped in data an 'inverse insight.'7 Personal experiences of a devalued sort of such an inverse insight8 would include instances when what one grasped was not the answer to a question but the fact that one has asked the wrong question. Inverse insights are not simply the admission that the question cannot be answered at present, or that one's level of intellectual development in the relevant fields is insufficient. Neither are they an admission that relevant data are missing. An inverse insight is not the absence of an act of understanding. Rather, it is itself an act of understanding. And what it grasps is that there is no unified intelligibility be understood that will meet the demands of the inquiry. There is no systematic unity to the selected body of data.9 (67; Fs)