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: Rekursive Schemen (schemes of recurrande); Beispiel: Karten; Schemen: möglich - wahrscheinlich - tatsächlich

Kurzinhalt: Schemes of recurrence can combine sets of classical and statistical normative correlations into the actual schemes that go beyond the field of classical and statistical laws to reach what actually and concretely occurs.

Textausschnitt: CHAPTER FOUR: SCHEMES OF RECURRENCE

99b The card game also illustrates Lonergan's idea of classical and statistical laws as complementing one another through what he calls "schemes of recurrence." A casual assessment of the way the best players keep winning at the game of chance might lead one to overestimate the role of classical intelligibility by thinking of the game as a regular systematic cycle that operates in the same way as Newton thought that the planetary cycle operates as it provides the regular recurring seasons of fall, winter, spring, and summer for us on earth. Yet both the winning cycles in the card game and the periodic cycling of planets result not just from systematic processes alone, but from the successive states of systems that must have supplied underlying sets of continually changing conditions. Most importantly, these "continually changing conditions" do not change in a systematic fashion but are made up of lower coincidental manifolds of conditions which, despite their divergence or randomness, happen to be continually mastered respectively by the higher strategic playing of the winners in the case of the cycle of card games; or by the higher gravitational pattern that fixes each of the planets' changing velocities through the recurring and changing velocities of each of the others as well as of all in relation to the centering force of the sun's gravitational field. (Fs)

100a Note the concrete and descriptively accessible quality of the recurring patterns in the examples of the card game and the planetary system. Recall that descriptive relations occur and recur in our sensible field of awareness and are observable by our senses. But explanatory correlations such as Newton's or Einstein's basic equations (e.g., f = ma or E = me2) abstract from descriptive relationships in their understandings and formulations; but still must be verified in concrete observables that are correlative to our own sensory-motor reference frames. Moreover, the concrete observables have to be carefully selected since the assumption behind the verification is that all other relevant data would be the same as the data selected. Considering all the other relevant data, however, reveals that some are the same but some are not only different but randomly different. (Fs)

100b Thus, to return to the example of playing cards, when you keep reshuffling the cards the relevant data in each successive hand keep diverging in unpredictable ways. Yet despite the recurrently random pool of cards, the better players take what they are dealt, choose alternatives from among their wide range of strategies, and keep on winning. Now to explain the strategies you would have to abstract from the description of any actual concrete set of plays and enter through the abstraction of both the classical and statistical kinds into the realm where you can determine, first, how many possible combinations of cards a player can receive; and, second, what the probabilities are of these possibilities actually emerging (or more clearly, how many times in how many hands one can reasonably expect these alternative possible combinations). Even after all the alternative probabilities are worked out, one has approximated but still not reached the actual, concrete, unique set of events that do in fact occur. (Fs)

101a It may perhaps be more clear now why Lonergan distinguishes, (1) schemes that are possible, which include any and all combinations that can occur; (2) schemes that are probable; and finally, (3) the actual schemes. The concretely possible schemes make up the largest group and are determinable by classical correlations. The concretely probable schemes combine some concretely possible combinations with a series of frequencies, while the actual sequence of events is singular, unique, and thus distinguishable from what could and might have happened but did not in fact occur. Schemes of recurrence can combine sets of classical and statistical normative correlations into the actual schemes that go beyond the field of classical and statistical laws to reach what actually and concretely occurs. (Fs) (notabene)

101b Lonergan cites such physical schemes as the planetary system, the hydrological cycle, and biological schemes such as the nitrogen cycle as examples of actually occurring schemes. As we see, actually occurring schemes of recurrence can be hierarchically coordinated with the planetary schemes that explain and describe the seasonal cycle which sets the gravitational and thermodynamic conditions for the possible, probable, and actual weather patterns that occur in any particular place and time in the world's geographical history. Note the linking of conditions: the nitrogen cycle cannot emerge unless the hydrological cycle is already operating, but the nitrogen cycle (like the successful winning cycle of card playing) is conditioned by the lower cycles and it in turn orders the recurrent recycling of the complex series of inorganic and organic events whose patterns cannot be explained by laws of inorganic chemistry alone but also involve higher organic, normatively oriented correlations. Similarly, the biological schemes of plants in turn condition psychic schemes of animals. (Fs)

102a Lonergan call this conditioned series of schemes, with lower schemes setting conditions for the emergence and survival of higher schemes that in turn condition further higher schemes, "emergent probability." It is the key to his explanation and description of the design of concrete world order. (Fs)