Re: [lonergan_l] Re: The IJK of Insight

[David Bibby]

One of Lonergan’s recurring themes is that there are three levels of cognitional operations: experience, understanding, and judgement. But the level of understanding is often divided in two, because understanding involves two steps: i) having an insight into a presentation, or experience, or some empirical residue that is given, ii) having an insight that formulates what has been understood as an expression, definition, or other description.

How can we conceptualise this distinction? One way is to use a diagram. This diagram is a heuristic, not a replacement, for understanding Lonergan’s cognitional theory, distinguishing cognitional operations from their products and highlighting the mediating role of expression between insight and judgement:

Acts: X = eXperience, I = Insight, J = Judgement.

Products: P = Presentations,  E = Expressions,  K = Knowledge

If we focus on the acts first, we recognise Lonergan’s familiar triad. What distinguishes the acts is their relations: experience X has no prior operation, while insight I depends on the presentations provided by experience, and judgement J depends on both, the content of the insight (what is it?), and the validity (is it so?), grounded in the presentations of experience.

The acts are represented by arrows in the diagram, and the three cognitional acts may be distinguished structurally by the number of antecedent sources on which they depend. Experience is represented by an arrow entering the diagram from outside. This does not imply that experience has no causes or conditions, but only that, within cognitional theory, it is the first cognitional operation and therefore has no antecedent operation represented within the diagram.  The arrow starts from nowhere, not because experience has no source, but because it cannot be captured in a diagram. Insight arises from the presentations provided by experience, so the arrow starts from P, and points to E. Judgement has two sources because the conditions are formulated by intellect, but the fulfilment of those conditions is to be found in the presentations of experience. Therefore, the two arrows of judgement point from P and E to K.

But each cognitional operation also has an associated product, P, E, and K. The one we are most likely to overlook is the first one, P, because experience is not a purely passive operation. Rather, it is patterned from the start according to our attention and interests, as we become more aware of the experiences on which we focus. When sensory experience is received, it is not merely retained in the memory, but is organised into a mental presentation P which is not a direct replica, but an apprehensive abstraction of what is received. For sight this may be an image, and for hearing an echo, but the presentations arise in the mind itself as the product of experience X.

The insight I is the “Aha!” moment between the presentations P and the expressions E. It is a cognitional act and, being dynamic, necessarily has a relation both to its source, P, and its product, E. These two relations correspond to the two steps referred to at the beginning. The first relation is the natural orientation of the intellect towards P, by which intelligibility is sought in the presentations of experience. In this orientation, attention is directed towards those aspects capable of yielding insight, while irrelevant particulars recede into the background. The second step is the intellect forming for itself an expression for the intelligibility it has discerned. It is also an abstraction, but (in Thomist terminology) a formative abstraction rather than an apprehensive one.

The judgement J is an act that leads to a single increment in overall knowledge K. Unlike insight, judgement depends upon two antecedent sources. Insight I formulates the conditions that must be satisfied if knowledge is to be attained, but judgement J asks whether those conditions E are in fact fulfilled in the presentations P of experience. Both sources are indispensable. Without the first there would be nothing to verify; without the second verification would become a purely conceptual exercise, detached from what is given. 

This depiction of judgement as a binary, not a unary, operation, guards against the counterposition that thinks of knowing as “taking a look”. This “looking” could manifest itself in two ways: either by looking at P, which would lead to a naive realism, or by looking at E, which would lead to a naive idealism. The intellectual position combines the products of both experience and understanding, using E to formulate the conditions for judgement, and P to determine whether those conditions are fulfilled.

In summary, the IJK diagram offers a possible formalisation of Lonergan’s cognitional theory, distinguishing the operations from their products and representing their structural relations as shown in the following table:

Act/ Operation	Antecedent Sources	Product
eXperience	0	Presentations
Insight	1	Expressions
Judgement	2	Knowledge

The diagram should not be taken as a “picture” of insight, but as a lens for self-examination. By inviting us to attend to the operations of experiencing, understanding, and judging within our own consciousness, it provides a heuristic aid to the reflective affirmation, I am a knower. In that sense, it is less a picture of consciousness than a heuristic for self-appropriation.

[Doug Mounce]

Interesting analytics David!  I guess the general idea is that we should think in terms of presentations as a heuristic aid?  I know Rahner was interested in the relation between intellect and imagination in our experience, and we've had some discussions about what exactly is the nature of what is presented.  Is this a particular aid to the reflective affirmation, I am a knower, or a general aid?  Lonergan, for example, doesn't specifically reflect on his terminology but in the case of a subject noticing evidence, like a knife in the back, there's a sense that the meaning is already there.  If I correctly recall, Adrial via Vertin has suggested an incontrovertible movement between collecting data and making meaning.  In the example of the Fraser Spiral illusion, in contrast, the immediate presentation (because the eye participates in the data collection) is a spiral in the data of ink on paper (or pixels nowadays) and it's not until you proceed to test that idea and falsify it that the meaning of the experience can be verified as an illusion.  

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[David Bibby]

Dear Doug,

Thank you for your comments.

One point that may help explain what I was trying to do is that my concern was not primarily with analysing objects of knowledge, but with reflecting on the operations by which knowing occurs, rather than on the objects known. 

The diagram is intended as a heuristic for that task. Presentations are one component of the framework, but whether a presentation functions heuristically depends on its purpose. A scientific diagram, for example, may serve as a heuristic for discovery, whereas presentations more generally provide the material upon which understanding and judgement operate.

I liked your two examples, the knife in the back and the Fraser Spiral illusion. I wonder whether the movement is ever quite incontrovertible because it is always conditioned by the operations involved. The experience of a knife in the back has immediate practical significance, yet even here the meaning is not simply "given". One may not immediately know that it is a knife, or how it came to be there. Those judgements depend upon understanding and reflection.

The Fraser Spiral illusion illustrates particularly well the distinction between appearance, understanding, and reflective judgement, since the initial understanding can itself become the object of further questioning. That is why I found the examples helpful: they invite us to advert not merely to what is known, but to what we are doing when we come to know it.

Kind regards,

David

On 20 Jul 2026, at 18:36, Doug Mounce <doug....@gmail.com> wrote:



Interesting analytics David!  I guess the general idea is that we should think in terms of presentations as a heuristic aid?  I know Rahner was interested in the relation between intellect and imagination in our experience, and we've had some discussions about what exactly is the nature of what is presented.  Is this a particular aid to the reflective affirmation, I am a knower, or a general aid?  Lonergan, for example, doesn't specifically reflect on his terminology but in the case of a subject noticing evidence, like a knife in the back, there's a sense that the meaning is already there.  If I correctly recall, Adrial via Vertin has suggested an incontrovertible movement between collecting data and making meaning.  In the example of the Fraser Spiral illusion, in contrast, the immediate presentation (because the eye participates in the data collection) is a spiral in the data of ink on paper (or pixels nowadays) and it's not until you proceed to test that idea and falsify it that the meaning of the experience can be verified as an illusion.  

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On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 1:56 PM 'David Bibby' via Lonergan_L <loner...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

One of Lonergan’s recurring themes is that there are three levels of cognitional operations: experience, understanding, and judgement. But the level of understanding is often divided in two, because understanding involves two steps: i) having an insight into a presentation, or experience, or some empirical residue that is given, ii) having an insight that formulates what has been understood as an expression, definition, or other description.

How can we conceptualise this distinction? One way is to use a diagram. This diagram is a heuristic, not a replacement, for understanding Lonergan’s cognitional theory, distinguishing cognitional operations from their products and highlighting the mediating role of expression between insight and judgement:

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[PIERRE WHALON]

Hi Doug,

I wonder if by « presentation » you mean the same thing as « Vorstellung » for Hegel.

Pierre

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[Doug Mounce]

Thanks for asking Pierre (and thanks David for the conversation!)  If Hegel means a representation then I don't think that's what Lonergan means by apprehensive abstraction.  David's reference to what is organized in the apprehensive abstraction returns us to the interesting (for me) insight into phantasm.  Lonergan seems to be interpreting Thomas against a conceptualist view.  Hegel, I would say, expects there are elemental concrete concepts universally common to the many, but how apprehensive abstraction might relate to the universal existing in the particular is worth further investigation. 

"On the conceptualist interpretation of Aquinas,
formative abstraction is unconscious and non-rational; it precedes ap-
prehensive abstraction. On the intellectualist interpretation, which
we find more in accord with the text of Aquinas, the apprehensive ab-
straction precedes and the consequent formative abstraction is an act
of rational consciousness'   Verbum, Formative Abstraction

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[David Bibby]

Dear Doug and Pierre,

Thanks for your comments and reflections. Talking about phantasms led me to look again at what Lonergan and Aquinas said about the different types of abstraction. My initial explanation may need tightening, but I think we can still use the IJK diagram to illuminate it.

In his concluding summary to the chapter on Verbum and Abstraction, Lonergan says,

"There are three stages to physical and mathematical abstraction: the objective, the apprehensive, the formative. Objective abstraction is the illumination of phantasm, the imagined object... Next, with regard to apprehensive abstraction, one has to distinguish between first act and second act: first act is the possible intellect informed and actuated by a species qua; second act proceeds from first as esse from form and action from principle of action... Thirdly, there is the act of formative abstraction; this consists in an act of meaning or defining..."

Perhaps these three types of abstraction are best understood not as separate objects or processes, but as distinguishable moments within the single dynamic process of understanding:

• P → I: objective abstraction – the illumination of the phantasm, in which the intellect's natural orientation toward intelligibility becomes operative.
• I: apprehensive abstraction – the grasp of intelligibility in the presentation.
• I → E: formative abstraction – the expression or definition of what has been understood.

Within apprehensive abstraction itself, Lonergan distinguishes two acts: the first act, in which the possible intellect is informed by the intelligible species, and the second act, in which the intellect grasps that intelligibility in the presentation. Both belong to the single operation represented by I in the diagram, but the distinction helps explain why insight is not a passive reception but an active intellectual achievement.

P (presentation) is intended as a more general term corresponding to the role played by the phantasm in Aquinas and Lonergan. A phantasm is a particular kind of presentation, but the broader category of presentation includes the sensible materials of hearing, smell, touch, and other modes of experience.

Hegel's Vorstellung seems closer to an expressive representation (between P and E) than to the pre-conceptual presentation P itself. Unlike the phantasm, Vorstellung already contains a mediated meaning, although not yet the fully developed conceptual form of Begriff.

Kind regards,

David

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