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

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

Titel: Flanagan, J., Insight: Chapters 1-5

Stichwort: Heuristische Struktur (heuristic structure) am Beispiel Galileo; klassische Naturgesetze als Möglichkeit; klassische, statistische Gesetze

Kurzinhalt: ... Newton gave scientists the means of anticipating comprehensive and concrete judgments about the order of our universe. The further laws or normative correlations still needing to be discovered were in some sense already known, ...

Textausschnitt: 95a Chapter two, then, is about the modern ways of doing science that emerged in the Renaissance-new ways to collect data, new ways to select data for study, new ways to conceive hypotheses, new ways to test and verify these guesses, and finally, new ways to keep generating further data for new understandings that would require further testing. Lonergan names these new ways a "heuristic structure." Let me use Galileo to illustrate what this means. (Fs)

95b Medieval scientists looked for the material, formal, efficient, and final causes that explained why things were what they were and why they behaved the way they did. It has been stated frequently that Renaissance scientists eliminated efficient and final causes and focused on material and formal causes; and this often has been interpreted to be a loss of a higher viewpoint. Surprisingly perhaps, Lonergan regards this prescinding from final and efficient causes as a major advance. He notes with approval that Galileo did not wonder why bodies fall, or even about what caused their falling; but suspected instead that their motion could be understood as an invariant correlation between distances and durations. Galileo's wondering was an anticipation of a new kind of understanding of the formal cause of falling motions: motion was the matter and the form was the unchanging correlations governing the motions. Galileo's unchanging correlation of distances and durations was a new form or law-a normative or standard correlation that governed the changing distances and durations of a freely falling body. Kepler followed this same path, anticipating an invariant correlation between the different periods or orbital speeds of planets and their greatest distances or locations from the sun. Finally, Newton formulated a set of laws grounding all prior standards, laws, or normative correlations in a systematic structure that permitted scientists to anticipate and predict how any two masses, whether celestial or terrestrial, would function with respect to their gravitational actions and reactions. Combining the rectilinear, curvilinear, and parabolic normative correlations of Galileo with the elliptical correlations of Kepler, Newton gave scientists the means of anticipating comprehensive and concrete judgments about the order of our universe. The further laws or normative correlations still needing to be discovered were in some sense already known, since scientists would anticipate a priori these laws to be correlations of the type that Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Hooke, Huygens, and others had already discovered. Even so, such scientists would be puzzled by Lonergan's question in chapter two, "What can you infer about the concrete from classical correlations or norms or laws of the type invented by Galileo?"-very puzzled indeed. (Fs) (notabene)

96a If we take Newton's law, or normative correlation of terms and relations, F = G m.m/d2, as an example, and ask, "What can you infer from this theoretical statement about the actual order of our universe?" some scientists would be apt to say that you can deduce from this statement how every resting and moving mass in this universe is related to every other resting and moving mass. But Lonergan's quite different and surprising answer is that if a classical law like Newton's has been verified, you cannot deduce anything about the actual order of the universe from it, nor can you predict what probably has, is, or will happen, but only what possibly has, is, or will happen. Classical laws like f = ma or E = me2 reveal concrete possibilities, not concrete probabilities or concrete actualities. (Fs) (notabene)

96b This restriction of classical laws comes as a surprise because when you ask a friend, "Did you attend the lecture?" and he assures you that he did, then you know a fact, something that actually happened. Verifying a single fact, however, is quite different from verifying a system of meanings. But Newton's system of equations or laws are so interconnected that in verifying one aspect of this system you become involved directly or indirectly in verifying the whole system. That system is intended to explain not how this or that planet or this or that star attract one another and mutually determine each other's accelerations and successive positions in the universe but rather how every mass in this universe has, is, and will cooperate with every other mass. Verifying that a person attended a lecture is verifying a particular event in human history, a common sense fact. But scientists are not intending to verify any singe fact but to verify completely and comprehensively their understanding of how this entire universe actually operates. (Fs) (notabene)

96c When Lonergan asks what you can infer from classical laws, he is referring to this comprehensive explanatory context. Before you can infer anything concrete from classical laws, first, you must understand the laws or normative correlations of the system you are going to use; second, you must understand how you are going to combine these laws; finally, you need to particularize the combination of equations you have worked out by assigning particular values to the variables in the equations. This is where measurement comes in. However, since scientists are not always able to deal directly with concrete givens, they set up idealized situations to particularize the combination of equations they are seeking to validate. But an overwhelmingly important assumption about this practice constitutes the basic anticipation of classical method, namely, that all the normative equations can be put together to yield a single, cumulative, and comprehensive understanding of the concrete functionings of the universe; and that this understanding can be tested in any given concrete situation in the universe since every situation will eventually be found to be similar to every other situation. But for Lonergan this assumption begs further questions. (Fs)

97a Lonergan has no doubt about the significance of classical laws, but they offer only partial understandings of the actually and probably recurring happenings in this universe. A quite different assumption that scientists can and do make will lead to quite different kinds of laws which also are measurable and verifiable. Instead of assuming that all situations are similar to all other situations they may anticipate that conditions in other places or at other times are not similar and do not converge toward a moment when every part of the process becomes intelligible in a single insight or in a single set of insights. Scientists may assume that successive situations diverge from rather than converge with one another, as happens for example when water in clouds condensing from a vaporous state into a liquid state begin to descend to the earth with constantly accelerating velocities. As the rain falls the air resistance keeps changing the direction and the accelerating velocities of the raindrops. One may question whether the resisting actions of the air molecules on the falling raindrop exert regular or irregular resisting effects. Answering such questions divides the research of the statistical from that of the classical investigator. (Fs)