Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: 2 Freiheit - Moral; wesentliche - tatsächliche Freiheit; Unterschied: Tatsache - Wert -> entsprechend: verschiedene Bedeutung von Möglichkeit

Kurzinhalt: The word possibility here denotes what is grasped at a relatively incomplete stage in a chain of acts whose intentional object is the intelligent actuation of a next stage in world process.

Textausschnitt: 58/5 A number of qualifications would be in order here to specify more clearly Lonergan's intent. The first qualification concerns the relation between knowledge of fact and intelligent, responsible grasp and actuation of a possible course of action. In chapter eighteen of Insight, Lonergan explains rational self-consciousness (what he later comes to call responsible decision)1 as the demand for a consistency between knowing and doing.2 His formulation here is misleading. For it is rooted in a failure to make an adequate distinction between knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, a distinction which is operative implicitly in Insight but only differentiated explicitly in Method.3 (146f; Fs)

59/5 An insight about a matter of fact is a possibility inasmuch as what is understood in the insight might or might not be so. Such an insight grasps an intelligibility in a manifold of experential data and that intelligibility might or might not correspond to the intelligibility immanent in world process. The question as to the correspondence (or v-probable correspondence) is only settled in the judgment of fact which assembles the conditions for rejecting incorrect insights and accepting correct ones. And so the word possibility here denotes what is grasped at a relatively incomplete stage in a chain or scheme of acts whose intentional object is the cognitional actuation of an intelligibility already actuated in world process. The possibility of the insight is the possibility of a more or less complete cognitional correspondence; a possibility which is actualized only in another type of intelligent act further on in scheme and which, when actualized, transforms the subject (the person) but not immediately the object (the known). (147; Fs)

60/5 A possible course of action, on the other hand, is a possibility inasmuch as the relevant conditions for the emergence (the performance) of the course of action are, in part, fulfilled, inasmuch as such conditions are known to be fulfilled (more or less completely), and inasmuch as the course of action is grasped or actuated in an insight or unified set of insights which extrapolates from present and past stages of world process to constitute imaginatively and cognitionally one or more alternative future stages. While such possibilities are occasionally somewhat original, most usually they involve the re-actuation of socially, economically, culturally current routines. The cognitional act which grasps the possibility stands to be followed by a further set of acts in the chain which reflect on the possibility, judge it to be worthwhile, and actuate the intelligibility immanent in the projected course of action in an integration of the skills of the subject (or of the group of subjects if it is a collaborative effort). Such reflection is generally more or less expeditiously executed. The final act, the decision, completes the chain; it constitutes the next stage in that sphere of world process, and thus transforms the objects of world process (the known or to-be-known) as well as the subject(s). (147; Fs)

61/5 The word possibility here denotes what is grasped at a relatively incomplete stage in a chain of acts whose intentional object is the intelligent actuation of a next stage in world process. Consequently inasmuch as the performance of acts of understanding and judgment of truth are themselves intelligent actuations of a next stage to world process, the program or plan which outlines a project of empirical inquiry into matters of fact is a possibility of the second type designed to lead to and actuate a possibility of the first type. And inasmuch as knowledge of fact yearns to be integrated into action programs oriented towards improving the life conditions of people around the world, possibilities of the first type are dynamically ordered towards integration into possibilities of the second type. In this sense knowing is a subset of praxis. (147f; Fs) (notabene)