[Lonergan_l] heuristic concepts
Joe F
Lonergan distinguishes heuristic concepts from explanatory concepts
and I think suggests that a series of explanatory concepts are unified
by a single heuristic concept. He mentions 'the nature of' and
'function to be determined'. Would it be fair to say that a heuristic
concept runs a course of centuries and are slow sea changes of
thought?
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Phil McShane
"Lonergan distinguishes heuristic concepts from explanatory concepts
and I think suggests that a series of explanatory concepts are unified
by a single heuristic concept. He mentions 'the nature of' and
'function to be determined'. Would it be fair to say that a heuristic
concept runs a course of centuries and are slow sea changes of
thought?"
I quote here Joe's question to us all. It nudges me forward, as all good
questions should do.
My focus is on that neat phrase, "would it be fair to say?" My neat answer
is "it depends"! But I am not being facetious. Lonergan begins the final
paragraph of chapter 5 of Insight with the words "the answer is easily
reached". Was it fair of him to say that? Well, not really: unless he was
just talking to himself. So, to Joe's question "the answer is easily
reached" and it is Yes. But who is asking, and who is answering? AND what
are they talking about?
There is a major difficulty in Lonergan studies of us not talking ABOUT -
round and about - our minds. If we genuinely become self-empirical then we
push towards distinguishing [for a pointing towards the meaning of
'distinguising' here and in the second word of Joe's question, see Insight,
middle of page 665] in our psychic skin - mediated by as much neurochemistry
as we can ingest - the lonely WHAT that infests that neurochemsitry [one can
take "fest" in the festive sense and rejoice in the emergence of that spark
of infinite loneliness] as it turns ABOUT itself to generate the deeper
intelligibility [but I think of "the profounder meaning of the name
'intelligible' "(Insight, 670) named 'heuristic'.]
You see the difficulty? Are we talking about that loneliness, that "cell of
self knowledge"[see the attached article at note 17], as we address each
other? If we are, then we are in an advanced state of self-appreciation, way
beyond contemporary Lonerganism.
I decided to attach the odd article "LUSTY COPON", since I have just
finished it this morning: it is a piece of the push of the new society, "The
Society for the Globalization of Effective Methods of Evolving" [SGEME for
short], a society - with now over 80 members - pointed to on my website in
Fusions 6 and 8. Joe's question, it seems to me, deserves a long answer, and
there it is: his question really is asking for a lusty cop-on. The issue is
the "fair saying" that is to emerge in the third stage of meaning, when
language is to be luminously the "Home of Wonder" (see note 13 in the
article), so, a HOW language in any language. This is a very distant
possibility and a slimly-scheduled probability. Might we humbly work towards
it? Then we have to make the effort to "comeabout" [see note 16] to our
lonely desire and leave behind what I describe e.g. in notes 28-36 of the
article.
And is it fair of me to say this? Well, as fair as it was for Annie Sullivan
to "say " the word 'water' to seven-year old Helen on March 5th of 1887: it
took until April 7th - five weeks - for Helen to "hear" it, in its embrace
of water. I suspect that HOW-language is not five weeks, but five centuries,
away. Helen easily learned the five hand-moves for 'water'. We are like
Helen with the word-moves of Lonergan's "easily reached" answer ABOUT
heuristic and explanatory concepts: we need the twists of the five
whatever - weeks, months, years, centuries - in between to reach "the
joyful, courageous, wholehearted"(Insight, 745) embrace of the psychic
reality.
Phil
Joe F
Thank you for a fluent reply to my query about heuristic concept. It
is not to be understood in five minutes and I want to read the
attachments. A 'psychic reality' is an interesting and good term. I
was looking for the expression of what 'explanatory conception' is for
me and in me at this time. Is it a province of the mind, a mode of
thought etc.
I thought of the many explanatory concepts such as those listed about
fire: fire as element, as manifestation of phlogiston, and type of
oxydation (his spelling) and that series of successive explanations
are unified by a(n) heuristic concept but also that something called
'explanatory conception' is a self-same something of which there is
one. There is a change in explanatory conception, or a development in
explanatory conception when there is a change or replacement of
heuristic concept. Practically I wanted to get an idea of the
development in explanatory conception in the transition from the
approach of Galileo to Darwin. Practically i wanted to understand what
Lonergan was saying about that. But, lest I be thought to be my old
conceptualist self, I am trying these meanings on for size. Am I to
notice, I ask my self, in my thought a change in an explanatory
concept as I gradually improve my understanding of some matter? So it
is my back-door attempt to enter into self-affirmation. But it is also
exportable because changes in explanatory conception, changes of
explanatory concept, and even if we are lucky to stand at the
crossroads of history: changes of heuristic concept: can be found
ubiquitously in any mind.
Which brings me to another question, if I may. Since Lonergan listed
Einstein on two lists, Galileo, Newton, Clerk-Maxwell, and Einstein of
the classical heuristic structure and Darwin, Freud, Einstein and
proponents of Quantum mechanics of the newer heuristic, are we to look
into the thought of Einstein to identify subjectively the psychic
reality of the exact moment of a momentous shift in explanatory
conception. I find myself buying used books on Einstein. I don't
understand him much.
Regarding Helen Keller, I can only marvel at how wonder, the wonder of
her repair to a garden for example unfolded to a certain maturity of
mind. Were there any serious studies of that?
Joe
Joe
_______________________________________________
Joe F
service and of awareness of the issues facing our world. May our
national leaders be guided in the spirit of 'political specialization
of common sense'.
Phil McShane
you'll find that the job we are tackling is indeed a
cross-roads job, one that spans an axial period of at least 5000 years, we
being in the middle!! .... some points on this in that attached article. And
I wont go on here ... that would simply be summarizing the summary of the
challenge in the article.
Re Einstein: yes the two lists relate to his two pushes, classical
and statistical. It is a tough job getting into his stuff... the best
semi-pop introductioin is the three volumes of Feynman, *Lectures in
Physics", but they are hard work.
Re Helen: I gave a reasonalbe introduction to the self-attentive
task on pp. 31-37 of *A Brief History of Tongue* (Axial Publishing, 1998)
but it is not an area into which truncated consciousness goes. Linguistics
generally is a truncated mess, as Benton shows: and it desperately needs
functional collaboration.
Doug Mounce
Joe, I don't think with Insight that Lonergan reflects on this problem
which is that we have no explanation for the relation between a general
psychology and the individual experience. BL imagines a collective
process, for example in chapter VII, but doesn't address why this
biological foundation of civilization cannot predict the behavior of an
individual (like the individuals in the news that everyone wants to
understand.)
A different insight, beginning with Chapter VI and BL's understanding of
personal dialectic, might invert the higher viewpoint and consider how
degrees of freedom emerge with individuals rather than with an intelligent
history by groups responding to their neural psyche.
In that regard, those individuals you mentioned are not explained by
listing them as physicists, just-like society is not explained as biology,
psychology and physics. We can specifically describe that Einstein was a
physicist, Maxwell a genius, Newton a mathematician, and Galileo an
experimentalist, and those labels do more to get us started in directions
of useful explanation.
Still, why Freud demanded an ideology, or why Darwin couldn't face
changing the world by saying that change is natural goes deeper into this
feature of *interdividuel* desire. All of those characters behaved in
ways that you couldn't predict just-by examining by their individual
ability to think, even when it was thinking about thinking. Newton,
Galileo, and Einstein all acted apart from science, or knowledge,
much-less wisdom, for personal reasons that were just selfish, (although I
don't know any stories like that about Maxwell).
Reporters once arranged a meeting between Freud and Einstein, and both
simply said that they didn't understand the other's work. Change might be
ubiquitous in the mind, but changing the mind is not, and hence the
relation between an individual and the society remains unexplained.
regards, Doug
Lowell Cochrane
unless we come up with a workable political economic theory for the
free enterprise economy, things will swing to totalitarian systems.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5A701320091108
-----------------------------------------------
Lowell Cochrane
Show Communications
cell: 613-331-5609
low...@showcommunications.com
Lowell Cochrane
Joe F
individual to psychology through a study of William James
psychological crisis. He overcame determinism it seems with an
affirmation that 'the first act of freedom must be to affirm that one
is free'. But in the setting of his discussion of determinism he
described with great enthusiasm the type of explanation of Charles
Darwin and classified 'our doctrines of evolution' among the
'magnificent achievements' that spoke against determinism. How his
psychological relief was connected to an intellectual achievement and
what possible relation it has to the Darwinian is a matter of study.
Lonergan touted Stekel for a kind of psychoanalysis that lent itself
to retrospective education and an intellectual achievement.
Joe