Autor: Vertin, Michael -- Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 8

Buch: Lonergan's "Three Basic Questions" and a Philosophy of Philosophies

Titel: Byrne, Patrick H., Insight and the Retrieval of Nature

Stichwort: Lonergan: Natur; "erklärendes" (explanatory notion) Verständnis der Natur; schemes of recurrance; primäre Relativität - sekundäre Bestimmungen; Beispiel: Relation -> nicht-systematische Elemente

Kurzinhalt: Explanatory nature is neither a thing nor the "immanent nature" of a thing ... It lacks a precise name in classicist terms, so Lonergan called it "primary relativity" and contrasted it with "secondary determinations":

Textausschnitt: 2.3 Primary Relativity and Secondary Determinations

34b The foregoing are meant to provide some illustrations and insights into just what is meant by Lonergan's explanatory notion of "nature." Explanatory nature is neither a thing nor the "immanent nature" of a thing. It is also not Nature as a whole. It entails a wholly new differentiation of thinking, and this new differentiation is at the heart of the normative achievement in modern science. It lacks a precise name in classicist terms, so Lonergan called it "primary relativity" and contrasted it with "secondary determinations":

It is necessary to distinguish in concrete relations between two components, namely, a primary relativity and other secondary determinations. Thus, »if it is true that the size of A is just twice the size of B, then the primary relativity is a proportion and the secondary determinations are the numerical ratio, twice, and the two observable sizes. Now 'size' is a descriptive notion that may be defined as an aspect of things standing in certain relations to our senses, and so it vanishes from the explanatory account of reality. Again, the numerical ratio, twice, specifies the proportion between A and B, but it does so only at a given time and under given conditions; moreover, this ratio may change, and the change will occur in accord with probabilities ... so the numerical ratio, twice, is a non-systematic element in the relation. However, if we ask what a proportion is, we necessarily introduce the abstract notion of quantity and we make the discovery that quantities and proportions are terms and relations such that the terms fix the relations and the relations fix the terms. For the notion of quantity is not to be confused with a sensitive or imaginative apprehension of size (1958:491. Emphasis added).1

35a This distinction between primary relativity and secondary determinations is due to the kind of intelligibility characteristic of any explanatory functional correlation. Such correlations possess an inherent indeterminacy. So far from determining distances and times, Galileo's law presupposes them; likewise, Boyle's law presupposes variations in volumes and pressures in order to understand their intelligible relationship; and likewise, both Galileo and Boyle presupposed entities whose explanatory conjugate, mass, happened to have certain definite values. They likewise presupposed temperatures; and they presupposed patterns of energies which would have given the universe a Euclidean character. The classical correlations always carry the implicit proviso, "other things being equal," but do not themselves determine when, where, how, and so on, this proviso is realized. So far from implying the kind of determinism in which Descartes, Newton, Laplace and Einstein believed, by itself the explanatory notion of nature determines nothing in the concrete. (Fs)

36a Hence, there is a proper and indispensable field of statistical study. The statistical is concerned with the question, "What is the state of this population?" A population can be a population of heavenly bodies, an enclosure of gas molecules, a distribution of dandelions in a field, or a congregation of macaques in a forest. Moreover, statistical studies can also be explanatory for two reasons. (Fs)

36b First, contemporary statistical studies (especially those employing the methods of quantum mechanics) have improved upon Laplace's original definition of probability: "the ratio of the number of favorable cases to that of all the cases possible" (Laplace, 1952: 11). Laplace's definition singled out the "favorable"; but favorable to whom? Behind the definition there stands, implicitly, a subject with a concrete constitution and orientation. To that subject, certain events are more favorable than others.2 Fully scientific statistical studies, on the other hand, seek to determine with as great an accuracy as possible the ideal frequencies of all classes of events, even those with exceptionally remote probabilities. Hence, statistical studies require determination of the complete set of ratios, p, q, r, ..., such that, p + q + r + ... = 1. These two requirements serve to constitute a statistical study as explanatory, for they relate the occurrences, Pi, Qi, Ri, both to the total population, N, (since Pi/N = p) and, through the sum, to one another. (Fs)

36c Second, the classifications of the occurrences themselves come from the terms of explanatory correlations: what are the frequencies of various values of M? How frequently is d small relative to the radius of the earth? How often is T constant? Where and when is the distribution of energy in the universe such that g?? has Euclidean values? (Fs)

36d Aristotle clearly did not think a science of this sort was possible. Rather, he distinguished what comes to be by "chance" both from what "always comes to be in the same way" and what comes to be "for the most part." The latter, he thought, could be traced in some fundamental fashion to the regularities of the celestial movements, but the former was utterly devoid of intelligibility. Hence, despite the enormous differences between Aristotle and Laplace on almost every other issue, on this one point there is a great similarity: with respect to the field of the statistical, they both operated in a fundamentally descriptive rather than an explanatory context. Developments subsequent to Laplace have effected a massive methodological turn away from descriptive statistical thought toward explanatory statistical thought.3 (Fs)

37a Now probabilities have an odd kind of regularity about them. While statistical events do not have the kind of regularity associated with classical schemes, nevertheless events "conform to probable expectations" (Lonergan, 1958: 59) to "an ideal frequency from which actual frequencies may diverge, but only non-systematically" (110). This regularity bears a partial relationship to the regularity Aristotle observed to be a fundamental feature of Nature. By determining these probabilities, statistical studies provide a first approximate explanatory transposition of Aristotle's "Nature as a whole."