Lonergan, Meaning and Method: Philosophical Essays 9781501318665, 9781501318696, 9781501318689

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Lonergan, Meaning and Method

Lonergan, Meaning and Method Philosophical Essays Andrew Beards

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Andrew Beards, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beards, Andrew, author. Title: Lonergan, meaning, and method : philosophical essays / Andrew Beards. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015049415 (print) | LCCN 2016005829 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501318665 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501318672 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501318689 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Classification: LCC B995.L654 B38 2016 (print) | LCC B995.L654 (ebook) | DDC 191—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049415 ISBN: HB: PB: ePub: ePDF:

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To The Right Reverend Philip Egan, Bishop of Portsmouth, friend and fellow Lonergan scholar

Contents Preface

ix

1

Generalized Empirical Method

1

2

Knowledge and Our Limits: Lonergan and Williamson

49

3

Aesthetics: Insights from Eldridge, Aquinas and Lonergan

77

4

Cartwright, Critical Realism and the Laws of Science

119

5

Scott Soames on Meaning: A Critical Realist Response

163

6

Lonergan on Meaning

203

Epilogue

259

Bibliography Index

269 277

Preface The present work is offered as a complement to my earlier collection of essays, Insight and Analysis: Essays in Applying Lonergan’s Thought (London and New York: Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2010). Accordingly, the format of the book reflects that of the earlier work, with the essays flanked by a Preface and a concluding Epilogue, which serves, hopefully, to bring together and develop some themes to be found in the essays in a manner that rounds off the whole. The primary intention of this book is not to provide an introduction to the thought of the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904– 84) for readers completely unfamiliar with his work. However, I believe the essays that make up the work will serve to introduce the fundamental aspects of his thought as it is outlined and applied to debates and discussions in current philosophy. The opening essay focuses on Lonergan’s fundamental philosophical approach, which he describes as a generalized empirical method. While that essay has other aims beyond simply outlining the basic contours of his approach in philosophy and theology, it does also serve, I believe, to give the reader basic insights into what Lonergan is up to. Lonergan’s ‘way’ of self-­appropriation invites us to engage in a process in which we come to know some basic truths about our own knowing, moral deciding and affective consciousness. This process of self-­appropriation, then, opens out into philosophical and theological investigations into diverse yet related areas from metaphysics to philosophy of science, from philosophy of the human person to social, political and economic theory. While the opening and closing essays are more concerned with understanding Lonergan’s own thought, these essays are also at once directed outward to dialogue and debate with other traditions in philosophical thinking. The essays that they enclose, as bookends, examine the contributions of major current philosophers introducing Lonergan’s thought as offering illumination for the questions raised and the debates that ensue. A secondary theme in one of these essays, on Timothy Williamson’s philosophy, has to do with Lonergan’s own intellectual development, which began at the Jesuit house of studies, Heythrop in the Oxfordshire countryside, in the late 1920s. Lonergan’s subsequent life as a doctoral student and then as a professor of theology was divided between

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periods in Italy and North America, in his own native Canada and in the United States of America, where for a brief period in the early 1970s, he was Stillman Professor at Harvard University, and then in his final academic phase, across the Charles at Boston College. As with the pieces collected in the book Insight and Analysis, a central theme of the essays offered here is the relationship between Lonergan and analytical philosophy. The examination of arguments advanced in the work of some leading current analytical philosophers, including Timothy Williamson, Nancy Cartwright and Scott Soames, in the light of Lonergan’s thought thus constitutes a major part of the book, while the essay on Lonergan and aesthetics is also a dialogue with a significant philosopher in this field from the analytical tradition, Richard Eldridge. Unlike the previous book of essays, which featured an extended essay on Alain Badiou’s philosophy, there is no piece in this volume dedicated solely to engagement with continental thought. However, I hope readers will not take that as indicating a lack of interest on my part in that avenue of philosophical dialogue and debate. The albeit brief references to and comments on philosophers from the continental tradition in a number of the essays indicate, I hope, my continued interest in the relationship between Lonergan’s thought and the ‘other’ philosophical tradition.1 Indeed, a question I find fascinating pertaining to the sociological developments underway in the world of philosophy has to do with the future of the distinction and relation between these two philosophical worlds as the new century unfolds: Is continental philosophy in decline? The rapid advance of analytical philosophy in Europe over the last two decades, which have seen not only the emergence of national organizations of analytical academic philosophers in several European countries, but also the creation of the pan-European Society for Analytical Philosophy, may give us pause when reflecting on that intriguing question. Given the understandable degree of sensitivity in Germany to the increasing appreciation of Heidegger’s links with Nazism, another symbolic event relevant to the question was the closing in 2015 of the historic chair at the University of Freiburg, once occupied by Husserl, and thereafter, by Heidegger, in favour, of the appointment of an analytical philosopher. A significant contribution to this dialogue, with which I had the pleasure of being associated to some extent, not long ago, is the Ph.D. thesis of Dr. David Blake (for the University of Limerick) on Jean Luc Marion and Lonergan. Blake offers a highly sensitive and sympathetic reading of Marion, which opens out into a dialectical analysis drawing on Lonergan’s work. Given the need for such a contribution to the current literature, my hope is that Dr. Blake will make available his research in a published version of the work.

1

Preface

xi

Some optimistically advance the view that now the ‘Berlin Wall’ between the two traditions has come down, the traffic between these once opposed academic worlds is free and easy. But informed commentators know this is far from the truth. Timothy Williamson tells us that he did his best at one time to appreciate the supposed riches of the continental tradition, but was disillusioned, and one of the major figures in current European analytical philosophy, Pascal Engel, narrates a Plato-­like tale of his emergence from the cave of continental philosophy, under the tutelage of his teachers Levinas and Derrida, into the sunlight of analytical lucidity! Perhaps one of the fairest, most sympathetic and illuminating analyses of the remaining differences between these philosophical traditions is offered by Gary Gutting of the University of Notre Dame.2 There are also indications, apposite to our theme, that more discerning distinctions are made by certain groups of philosophers as regards the specificity of elements within what can be globally labelled ‘the analytical’ or ‘the continental’ traditions. So, I believe, there are a good number of analytical philosophers who take a keen interest in the early Husserl, seen as offering a form of clear and careful analysis in accord with their own professional values. Whatever the sociological trends in the near future in academic philosophy may be, in an ever shrinking world, I would make a case that Lonergan’s thought, a ‘third way’ of the interiority born of self-­appropriation, promises an analysis that not only reverses counterpositions, as Lonergan calls them, and advances the positive positions in these two philosophical traditions, but in that very process provides a mediation of the two. This comes about also insofar as Lonergan’s thought stands within, and is a critical hermeneutical retrieval of, the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. Earlier versions of the essays on Timothy Williamson and on Generalized Empirical Method appeared in The Lonergan Review (May 1, 2014; March 1, 2011), the aesthetics essay first appeared in The Modern Schoolman (78, 2010) and that on Cartwright in Revista de Filosofia (Universidad Iberoamericana, 135, 2013). Presentations based on the longer versions of the essays, which constitute chapters 1, 5 and 6 were given at conferences – in person or by paper – in Venice, Washington, DC, Rome and Boston. I would therefore like to acknowledge and thank the relevant editors and conference convenors, including the following: Rev. Professor Richard Liddy; Prof. Gerard Whelan, S.J.; Prof. Francisco Galán

See Gary Gutting, ‘Bridging the Analytical-Continental Divide’, New York Times, February 19, 2012.

2

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Vélez; Prof. Lucio Guasti; Prof. Frederick Lawrence; Br. Dunstan Robidoux, O.S.B.; and Dr. David Fleischacker. As ever, I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife Christina Beards for her careful proofreading of my texts and her incisive observations on the improvement of expression and style. I also wish to thank my colleague and fellow Lonergan scholar Dr. Timothy Walker for his invaluable assistance in drawing up an index.

1

Generalized Empirical Method Arguably one of the most off-­putting aspects for many encountering Lonergan’s work at this time in our cultural history is his attachment to the word method as a designation for the path he identifies for fruitful discovery and exploration in both philosophy and theology. Is not a work emblematic of our current cultural moment Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method? H. G. Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode is somewhat ironic in its inclusion of method in its title since it also is an argument to counter the methods for discovering truth vaunted in their putative exclusivity by the creators and scions of the Enlightenment. The story of Anglo-Saxon twentieth-­century philosophy is also one of increasing disenchantment with the deductive methods elaborated as systems of symbolic logic over a century ago in a phase of overweening confidence in their ability to sort out once and for all the sheep from the goats of meaningful and meaningless discourse. Yet, Lonergan’s attachment to the epithet method is perhaps potentially all the more effective as a philosophical maieutic precisely because of this provocative aspect. If someone asks me ‘Do you know where my toothbrush is?’ or ‘Have you read Critchley on Žižek?,’ I may – making the question immediately my own in consciousness – answer, perhaps, ‘No’ and ‘Yes’, respectively. If I am not joking but sincere, I will be aware of what I take to be the evidence I have in mind for the respective answers. But evidently, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ as conscious performances are distinct from, yet related to, the evidence I have in mind to back them up and also from the question I am asked – which I at once make my own – but are related also to it. Further, I may be aware, in certain circumstances, that I have actively to attend to what the questions were about and make the effort to reflect a little on how I will respond. Now perhaps to give such mundane and quotidian events and processes the grandiose title of ‘Method’ will seem too overblown. But it is Lonergan’s contention that great lessons may ultimately be drawn from apparently insignificant features of

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our conscious lives.1 By teasing out further similar details of consciousness and asking us to verify whether or not we do find them in conscious life, Lonergan develops his philosophical method, then taken up into further and fuller contexts including that of theology. This ‘method’ of our intelligent, reasonable and responsible conscious activities is operative, so he argues, in the most recondite and convoluted of intellectual endeavours as in the most simple and everyday. It is the method deployed by every deconstructionist or antideconstructionist, and accordingly, Hugo Meynell, inspired by the satirical wit of Anthony Trollope, suggests the method be characterized as one of ‘archdeaconstruction.’2 Surely, aspirant comedian-­philosophes such as Slavoj Žižek may be enticed to participate in the experiment when it is proffered seasoned with such delicious humour? Lonergan’s principal lifelong project was to develop a method for theology. In Insight, he laid the groundwork for doing this by working out a method for philosophy. In so doing, he not only offered a methodological approach to arguing for a sound philosophy, which would be sublated or taken over into theology to be applied in the myriad ways in which, explicitly, theology does in fact apply philosophy in its work, but also in an even deeper and broader way Lonergan had sketched out a method, a way, of authentic self-­appropriation that the theologian too can follow to better identify what is operative in his or her mind and heart. The book Insight is itself the result of the years Lonergan devoted to ‘reaching up to the mind of Aquinas’ and behind Insight stand, among other writings, Lonergan’s doctoral work and the Verbum articles. Verbum, Insight and these other works are the fruit of Lonergan’s own self-­appropriation of his intellectual, moral and affective intentionality as this occurred principally through his study of Aquinas, but also as a result of his work on other thinkers, notably St. Augustine and Bl. Newman, and through his immersion in the world of modern mathematics, physical science and hermeneutics. Empirical method, already referred to in the Verbum articles,3 had in modernity become synonymous with the method of the physical sciences; the technological improvements that these sciences had brought about in the industrial revolution had elevated them to a status in Western culture to which their forbear, the old natural philosophy, Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 27. Hugo Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 203–4. 3 Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL, Vol. 2, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 89. 1

2

Generalized Empirical Method

3

could never have aspired. As a result, and for other cultural reasons, the ‘scientistic philosophies’ of empiricism (in epistemology) and materialism (in metaphysics), philosophical options since ancient philosophy, appeared with a new lustre and aspired to achieve cultural hegemony, replacing the religious worldview of Christianity. The appeal to experience, to controllable experiment as seen to be opposed to jejune and ideal speculation, would rid the civilized world of dangerous and superstitious flights of fancy. Such was the cultural manifesto of the Enlightenment. A paradigmatic example of this new vision for true progress is identified by Lonergan in the ground rules laid by the English Royal Society, one of the new scientific collaborative communities appearing across Europe, in its constitutions written in the 1660s.4 Theories are to be admitted for consideration only if they are empirically testable. Of course, as those familiar with current philosophy of science well know, just how empirically testable a given scientific theory is in practice and whether in the history of science an immediate rush to cast aside all and only those that are not validated empirically has been evident in every case are complex questions. Nevertheless, any critical realist approach to physical science, such as would be implied in Lonergan’s philosophy, would insist that in the long run, empirical test is a crucial factor in evaluating whether or not we may claim that a given scientific theory is probably true of reality (with greater or lesser degrees of probability to be assigned to this rational estimation). Arguments in support of such a position are furnished by the canons of empirical inquiry Lonergan works out in Insight, taken together with other arguments in his work for critical realism.5 On the other hand, Lonergan was equally convinced that arguments appealing to experience, to be settled by critical experiment on the basis of the relevant data, were central to the hermeneutical work through which he laboured to reach up to the mind of Aquinas and bring the fruits of that labour to bear in a philosophy adequate to the level of the times. These times were characterized not only by the cultural dominance of empirical science, but also by the dissemination of the fruits of the other science, La Scienza Nuova, of Vico: the hermeneutical ‘science’ bringing about an increasing awareness of the diversity of human cultures across time and space. As is clear from the mid-1930s onwards, Lonergan’s own appropriation of Aquinas, and through that appropriation his own further self-­appropriation, was effected through his reading of St. Augustine Lonergan, A Third Collection (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), 42. Lonergan, Insight, chapter 3.

4 5

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Lonergan, Meaning and Method

and Bl. Newman. Their phenomenological approach allowed Lonergan to evaluate what he read in St. Thomas and Aristotle on the basis of critical experiments appealing to self-­conscious experience. Thus, the hermeneutical circle, ever widening or spiralling, constituted by the interpreter’s self-­appropriation as point of entry into the reading of Aristotle and St. Thomas, could itself be critically assessed and expanded through that reading. That this circle was not vicious but virtuous could be validated, at the limit, through self-­verifying or self-­ contradicting arguments that themselves rested on the foundation of really and truly known cognitional activities. Knowing these cognitional activities and their dynamic interrelation was a case of knowing reality, being, and since this knowing occurs through the repeated application of the self-­same intelligent and reasonable operations, such knowing is no different in general form from the knowing of being, reality aspired to in common sense and in every other form of cognitive endeavour. This allowed Lonergan to critically assess and appropriate, through a hermeneutic of retrieval and suspicion, the enduring and positive fruits of the labours of Aristotle and Aquinas in philosophy, theology, metaphysics and in their own thoughts and practice concerning method. In his lectures, Lonergan in the 1950s and 1960s drew attention to texts in which Aquinas explicitly refers to the conscious experience of the individual in order to validate a philosophical claim,6 and in his 1967 Introduction to the publication of the Verbum articles in book form, Lonergan describes the way in which he drew out an implicit phenomenology of self-­knowing from the texts of Aristotle and St. Thomas, to make it an explicit tool for critically assessing and appropriating their thought.7 In this journey of self-­discovery, at once a discovery of the genius of these giants of the intellectual tradition, the contributions of modern science and mathematics proved vital. In turn, the fruits of the appropriation of the philosophical and theological past would enable Lonergan to focus in a new way on the methods of mathematics and empirical science in order to show what these methods involve, and in addition, to make some prescriptive judgments concerning these disciplines and the philosophies about them. Since the label Generalized Empirical Method is as vast in scope as the entirety of Lonergan’s thought, my aim in the rest of this book is to focus on some limited

Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 325–26; A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 53. 7 Verbum, 3. 6

Generalized Empirical Method

5

aspects of the topic. In the next section, I look at some texts that show the emergence of the term GEM in Lonergan’s thought and the intriguing way in which it seems to disappear only to reemerge with some force in the last years of his academic writing. I offer a suggestion by way of a possible interpretation of this decline and return regarding his use of the term in describing his overall project. I also offer some reflections on the uniqueness of Lonergan’s philosophy of ‘the given’ in a section entitled ‘Lonergan’s “empiricism” ’. Since one of his uses of the expression in a lecture in the 1970s refers to his lifelong interest in the ongoing genesis of methods,8 I follow this lead in devoting a section to that theme. A final section returns us to questions concerning Lonergan’s reflections on scientific method, and to the place in which he first introduces us to the notion of Generalized Empirical Method.

The history of Lonergan’s use of the expression GEM My remarks in this section are based on the evidence of principal works by Lonergan now readily available in the collected works series and in other published works. A more detailed and fine-­grained investigation may be left to the student of Lonergan’s thought who wishes to pursue the issue further through comparative study of other writings available in manuscripts. However, even my initial trawl through these texts seems to provide convincing evidence of a pattern that I myself found surprising. The expression Generalized Empirical Method appears explicitly in Insight as a designation for Lonergan’s overall approach, although even in this magnum opus its occurrence is very limited.9 I have failed to find the expression GEM in the lectures of the late 1950s given in Boston, Halifax and Cincinnati or in the texts of the theology lectures at the Gregorian. In the 1962 Toronto institute on method in theology, we see Lonergan using the expression transcendental method as an illuminating way of referring to his position.10 GEM, then, seems to disappear to be replaced by transcendental method as the preferred term. The essays from the 1960s gathered in A Second Collection and Method in Theology witness to this.11 The 1972 lectures at Gonzaga Lonergan, ‘The Ongoing Genesis of Methods’, in A Third Collection, 146–65: 150–52. Insight, 95–96, 268. 10 Bernard Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 1, CWL, Vol.  22, Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 29, 30, 34. 11 Cf. A Second Collection, 6–7, 203, 205, 207. 8 9

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University and the 1973 essay on Christology follow this pattern,12 but from the 1974 Aquinas paper onwards, we see a reversal of this trend.13 The disappearance of the expression and its replacement with transcendental method was what I had expected. What was a ‘hermeneutical surprise’ for me was to find the reemergence of GEM as a self-­designation for Lonergan’s thought and to see the way this was not a one-­off affair in his writing of the 1970s: there is a repetition in its use and it seems to be used very deliberately in contexts in which Lonergan is concerned to drive home what he thinks a method in philosophy and theology should involve. The usage in this period is of a greater frequency than that found in Insight. In the second of the lectures on religious studies and theology from 1976, GEM is used as a section heading.14 Lonergan also employs GEM to describe his position in his preface to Matthew Lamb’s book History, Method and Theology, and in his answer to the relevant question in the 1977 Jesuit Questionnaire on the teaching of philosophy.15 Finally, and in a way that reveals that the return of the expression is deliberate, Lonergan refers to GEM as his preferred designation for his approach as opposed to ‘transcendental Thomism’ in the interviews he gave in 1982 gathered in the book Caring about Meaning.16 I return to the latter text below. As mentioned above, we find Lonergan referring to empirical method as the method of the physical sciences in the Verbum articles. Early on in the manuscript on economics of 1944, we notice in a discussion of method that Lonergan draws attention to two aspects characteristic of method as he understands it.17 First, a method is always a matter of the intersection of mind and data taken together, and secondly the notion of generalization as part of the development of empirical method is introduced. As regards this second point, Lonergan observes that as science develops, theoretical constructs emerge that have a greater generality to them; they cover more data and at once explain with greater success data already

See Lonergan, Philosophy of God and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), 15, 18, 49. See Lonergan, ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation’, in A Second Collection, 35–54: 45. See Lonergan, ‘Religious Knowledge’, in A Second Collection, 129–45: 140. See Lonergan, Shorter Papers, CWL, Vol. 20, Robert C. Croken, Robert M. Doran and D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 294; for references in the ‘Questionnaire’, see Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, CWL, Vol. 17, Robert M. Doran, and Robert C. Croken, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 377, 381. See also in this volume references to GEM at pp. 294, 295 and 431. 16 Bernard Lonergan, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, P. Lambert, C. Tansey and C. M. Going, editors (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982), 68. 17 Lonergan, For a New Political Economy, CWL, Vol. 21, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 6–8. 14 15 12

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taken up into prior theories. In so doing, the new, more general theory may correct the earlier particular theories. With these elements in place, we can see that the step to the description of his method as GEM given in Insight is, for Lonergan, a matter of now indicating that a further generalization of the methods of science to also include the data of consciousness is possible. This is what he suggests we can do when he first introduces the notion of GEM.18 The second mention of GEM in Insight occurs after the sections on common sense and the dialectical analysis of group and individual bias.19 Lonergan now informs us that the elements are in place for us to grasp the meaning and significance of GEM as a designation for the method he follows. Since it is a method, we would not expect its heuristic potentialities to be exhausted by what is said so far. A method, as later defined in Method in Theology, is ‘a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results’.20 However, it is at this point in Insight that Lonergan believes he has given us sufficient information in the preceding analyses of the canons of empirical, scientific inquiry and on the social dynamics of common-­sense living to allow us to understand the fundamentals of this heuristic enterprise. The attentive, intelligent and reasonable method of inquiry that is implicit in scientific method has been rendered explicit and further delineated qua empirical scientific method through the analysis of the canons of scientific inquiry. But now this method itself has been generalized to include the data on those attentive, intelligent and reasonable operations themselves, as operative in common-­sense knowing and communal living. Implicit in Lonergan’s discussion at this point are, naturally, the conscious operations on the further level of responsibility. While Lonergan does not describe these explicitly at this stage of the discussion, nevertheless they are implicitly the issue, as his promised generalization goes on to include not only the data of consciousness of the levels of coming to know, but the data on moral deciding and acting, constitutive of the growth of individuals in community. But, of course, the data here are ambivalent. The facts of human sin, bias and the intertwined decline of persons and communities are only too evident. Thus, the notion of dialectical analysis must enter in as soon as we generalize to the context of human consciousness.

Insight, 95–96. Insight, 268. 20 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 4. 18 19

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Dialectical analysis involves not only insight into positive intelligibility, but also the identification of the lack of intelligibility in inverse insight. The earlier discussion in Insight of inverse insight and its role in mathematics and science now must be further generalized to include the analogous case of the surd of sin. Already at this point in Insight, Lonergan anticipates what he will write in the Epilogue on the need for the social scientist to take cognizance of this need for inverse insight even though he or she may be reluctant to do so, given the powerful societal pressure to make the social sciences conform to the physical sciences;21 in so doing, he or she may very easily be involved in oversight of inverse insight and attempt to describe evil and sin as positive realities ending up, ultimately, in the anthropological position that makes the false inference from the reality of human fragility to the denial of human freedom. According to Lonergan, this dialectical analysis should, therefore, enter into the theorizing of the social scientist. He writes: ‘dialectic stands to generalized method as the differential equation stands to classical physics, or the operator equation to the more recent physics.’22 In a helpful note, the editor of the CWL volume Topics in Education, Philip McShane, draws attention to the complementarity between this passage in Insight on GEM and a similar discussion in the 1959 lectures.23 At this point in his 1959 lectures, Lonergan is explaining the meaning and importance of the canon of selection in science. This canon specifies that a theory must have testable empirical consequences and must be supported by these. But Lonergan emphasizes that a simplistic empiricism can mistakenly downplay the movement from the upper blade (to use Lonergan’s scissors analogy) to the lower blade data. The methodical interplay of upper blade and lower blade is very evident in the physical sciences, which presuppose the conceptualizations of the mathematician. While a naïve empiricism has resisted this proper methodological procedure in social science hitherto, Lonergan notes the hopeful signs of change evident in the work of Talcott Parsons. He writes: But Talcott Parsons, for example . . . makes it plain from the start that . . . his concern is to supply sociology with a conceptual system. Unless an empirical science develops for itself a conceptual system similar to what mathematics is for

Insight, 766–68. Insight, 268. 23 Lonergan, Topics in Education, CWL, Vol. 10, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 142, n. 10. 21 22

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physics, you cannot proceed as in the successful physical sciences. . . . To have that canon of selection you need the conceptual structure provided by a mathematics for physics, and by a conceptual scheme for social sciences. And that conceptual system must be rich in implications.24

Ultimately, then, since social sciences are concerned with the intelligible that is also intelligent, human persons in community, their rich theoretical constructs should include the materials provided by Lonergan’s dialectic analysis of community bias. As we note further below, this is only one among a good number of cases in which Lonergan’s GEM will have implications for diverse, particular methodologies, which implications Lonergan himself is not reticent in spelling out. We might also note in passing that Lonergan’s stress on the desirability of ‘rich, testable theoretical constructs’ in cognitive disciplines is one echoed in his own way by Karl Popper; although I believe Lonergan’s work would endorse some of what Popper says in this regard only to part company with him and side with some critics who claim that Popper overdoes the notion of falsifiability in his account of scientific rationality and progress – on that issue I have more to say below. We can also recall in this context what Lonergan has to say in Method in Theology on ‘Ideal-­types’ in historical explanation, drawing on the work of Henri Marrou.25 In history, science or social science, a plausible explanatory construct needs to be somewhat adventurous and ‘rich’ in potential if it is not to be little more than a tame redescription in cataloguing seemingly relevant data. Turning now to ‘transcendental method’ as a self-­designation for his approach, we can observe that Lonergan uses the phrase in the 1962 Toronto institute on method.26 I think it significant that Emerich Coreth also appears in the lectures for this institute and it is in this period that Lonergan wrote his generally laudatory review of Coreth’s Metaphysik for Gregorianum. But as Lonergan will later suggest in his remarks on the title, the sources that influence his adoption of the phrase ‘transcendental method’ are not only transcendental Thomism, involved as it is in a dialectical engagement with Kant’s transcendental idealism. There is the scholastic notion of the transcendental that influences this choice of words,27 and in addition, the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl.28

26 27 28 24 25

Topics, 142. Method in Theology, 227. See Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method I, 27–28, 30, 33, 34. Method in Theology, 13, note. A Third Collection, 145, n. 8.

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Lonergan discusses Husserl in Insight, and in a more sympathetic way, in the 1957 Boston lectures. While in the footnote on Otto Muck’s book in Method in Theology, Lonergan draws attention to the parallels among his method, the transcendentals of the scholastics and the transcendental thought of Kant, in a footnote in the later essay, his purview expands to include the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. Lonergan’s GEM is transcendental also in the Husserlian sense of an analysis of intentional act and content as correlative. Why, then, the shift away from the expression ‘transcendental method’ back towards GEM in Lonergan’s final phase? Towards the conclusion of his generally enthusiastic review of Coreth’s book on metaphysics, Lonergan registers some points of disagreement. The principal point is that without a prior exploration of human intentional consciousness that is also dialectical in aim, the ‘mythic’ elements in our consciousness will not be differentiated sufficiently clearly so as to yield a critically viable metaphysics. The point indicates in a highly compact way the methodological thrust of Insight and its implications for method in metaphysics. The implementation of the heuristic structure of proportionate being is the way to a critical metaphysics. This implementation will also involve the therapeutic aspect of helping the self-­appropriating subject to differentiate the mythos, which is the natural result of the polymorphism of our consciousness, from metaphysical results obtained through the application of intelligent and reasonable operations. Without the phenomenology of Verstehen which, building on the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, Lonergan offers us, we cannot have a hope of even sufficiently noticing the problems, let alone moving to their resolution in a metaphysics that can be critically validated through an appeal to the data of consciousness supported by self-­referentially validating arguments. Many and great are the labours of the new publications we see coming forth with regularity that celebrate and develop the deconstructive analyses of Derrida and others concerning the subversion of the long vaunted victory of logos over mythos; they purport to show the fluid interpenetration of the two.29 But because these exponents of the Heideggerian tradition are steeped in a forgetfulness, which knows not the way through a phenomenology of Verstehen, an oversight of the ways logos and mythos are inevitably operative in their own work indicates a self-­subversion.

For a recent example, see Anais N. Spitzer, Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2011).

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The ‘friendly’ debate between Lonergan and Coreth was pursued further at the Florida Conference in 1970;30 and since Lonergan took it that Coreth was expressing philosophically Rahner’s position, the scope of the debate suggested other thinkers were implicated.31 One aspect of Lonergan’s writing that is worth noting in the present context is his generally charitable attitude to other thinkers. His own philosophy argues that a critical dialogue with the tradition implies that we should seek to reverse counterpositions, but at the same time develop the positions that can be found even in the thought of philosophers apparently very much at odds with our own views. Lonergan’s way of drawing diverse thinkers into his discussion of various topics reflects this irenic aspect of his thought. When writing of the thought of philosophers such as Collingwood, Voegelin or Gadamer, Lonergan is out to learn from the positive things they have to teach, he appears little preoccupied with the fact that from the viewpoint of GEM, their overall philosophical positions are massively counterpositional. Here and there a footnote may be inserted that alerts us to the problematic side of things via some publication critical of their deficiencies. This Lonerganian charity has to be borne in mind, I believe, when we consider his relationship to the ‘transcendental Thomists’. Lonergan willingly acknowledged his indebtedness to certain ideas from Maréchal passed on to him by a fellow Jesuit student.32 But he went on to say that what Maréchal had initiated was more of a ‘way’ than a school, and we have noted above that Lonergan both approved of some aspects of Coreth’s work, yet distanced himself from it in their debate. On the other hand, Lonergan’s disagreements with the transcendental Thomists went further and were more serious than perhaps the ‘friendly debate’ with Coreth suggested. This is brought out by a most telling remark Lonergan made at the 1969 Toronto institute on method: ‘. . . Kant does not know about insight, neither does Maréchal. Rahner has the same problem. They do not understand the action of intelligence.’33 I have devoted a chapter in a recent book to drawing out the implications of this remark for a Lonerganian critique of Rahner, and I think that Lonergan scholars have become aware of deep divergences between the philosophies of the two

E. Coreth, ‘Immediacy and Mediation of Being’, and ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds’, in Language, Truth and Meaning, Philip McShane, editor (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972), 33–48, 306–12. 31 See Andrew Beards, ‘Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique’, in Insight and Analysis: Essays Applying Lonergan’s Thought (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2010). 32 A Second Collection, 276. 33 For this reference, see Insight and Analysis, 224, n. 7. 30

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thinkers once their theological positions in such areas as Christology and Trinity are explored.34 Yet, these theological differences are not at all unrelated to the difference between Lonergan and Coreth, which Lonergan himself registered in a somewhat mild fashion. The general theological categories with which the systematic theologian works will emerge from his or her philosophy.35 The metaphysics a person deploys in theology, therefore, will be pre- or post-­critical in terms of the dialectic operative in GEM. That is, our inherent mythic consciousness, if not identified sufficiently in self-­appropriation, will express itself in the presencing metaphysics, which is the corollary of the myth of knowing as seeing. The transcendental Thomists, therefore, are still to a greater or lesser extent stymied by this mythic consciousness in their elaboration of metaphysics, insofar as their phenomenology of Verstehen is still wanting in sufficiency and self-­critical validation. This is not to say that metaphysics is, so to speak, distant from us. For Lonergan, too, it is immediate in our cognitional experience, and he would certainly endorse the view of the analytical philosopher Michael Dummett, who holds that metaphysics is ‘part of everyone’s equipment’. On Lonergan’s view, a method in metaphysics involves integrating the positive results for metaphysics already present in our common-­sense and scientific knowing. However, this integration is a dialectical process, separating the positive from the problematic elements arising from the natural orientations of our animal, psychosomatic dynamisms. My thesis is, then, that Lonergan shifted away from the expression ‘transcendental method’ and returned to GEM as a more adequate designation for his enterprise because of an increasing realization of the differences between himself and these other Catholic thinkers. In Caring about Meaning (1982), Lonergan responds to a question put about his relationship with the transcendental Thomists: ‘Transcendental Thomism’ was a hold-­all invented by an Austrian named Muck. He didn’t know much about Insight – he just quoted it – and he put me in the basket. I didn’t mind being associated with Rahner, Coreth and Maréchal, so I didn’t object. But my own thinking is generalized empirical method.36

See items listed in Insight and Analysis, 222, nn. 2–5. Method in Theology, 283. 36 Caring about Meaning, 68. 34 35

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Further, I suggest this shift or return to the older expression may have had two aspects to it: an outer and an inner context, as it were. The ‘inner context’ was the increasing awareness on Lonergan’s part of serious differences between himself and these other thinkers as outlined above. The ‘outer context’ contributed to this. To some extent, the 1960s saw the ascendancy of transcendental Thomism within Catholic intellectual circles. It seemed to offer a new way of preserving what was of value in the neo-­scholastic heritage while bringing this into some harmonious relationship with the anthropological turn of modern philosophy; it offered the prospect of keeping alive the Catholic attachment to St. Thomas while acknowledging at the same time the value of what was being said by Heidegger, Scheler, Marcel and Merleau-Ponty. After the Vatican Council, and in the decade of the 1970s, new perspectives were, however, in the ascendant. The concrete issues of politics and liberation and the perspectives of the human sciences of psychology and sociology appeared as the key areas for exploration, offering transformation and emancipation to both individuals and society. Thus, J.B. Metz’s Theology of the World published in the late 1960s seemed to mark a watershed, and liberation theology was now the way ahead; the ‘anthropological’ turn had been superseded by the ‘social turn’. From these perspectives, ‘transcendental Thomism’ began to appear to some to be too ‘idealist’, too other-­worldly to be able to address issues of politics and of social and personal transformation. While renowned theologians such as Rahner were anxious to endorse the new work of the political theologians, it could still seem to many that writings by these philosophers and theologians had little to offer and were, at worst, an ‘idealistic opiate’. In this context, Lonergan was stimulated to return to his work on economics. But the point is that this was a return. Since the 1930s, Lonergan had been preoccupied with the very concrete issues of social justice, and with finding ways that might convince even the hard-­headed economists of the essential role that Christian values must play if a just democratic way of life was to survive in the turmoil of the twentieth century. This concern with economics itself took place within a broader preoccupation with history and the dynamics of society. All these concerns find their place in the chapters of the book Insight. And together with them, we find Lonergan now writing on depth psychology as he explores the interplay between the dynamics of personal and social development and decline. It is as if when Insight was first received by its intellectual audience these very different concerns from those expressed in the works of ‘the other transcendental Thomists’, in works such as Spirit in the World or Hearers of the

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Word, were hardly registered, as if they were put down to the idiosyncratic foibles of the author. Thus, when Lonergan took up the work on economics again in the 1970s, it was not some desperate attempt to get up to date, in a breathless dash, with intellectual fashion. It was a return to aspects of Lonergan’s work always integral to his thought. Lonergan, I think, was well aware of this, and thus, we have another reason for the return to the earlier designation GEM. For GEM is concerned with applying our intelligent, reasonable and responsible operations to all available data: the data of our emotional and symbolic life, of our interpersonal relations (revealed in the work of various schools of psychology), and equally the data on the dynamisms of the economy.37 Before leaving the topic of the change of names Lonergan uses to designate his method, I wish to offer a further consideration pertaining to a slight difference between ‘transcendental method’ and GEM. While it is the case that GEM and ‘transcendental method’, as outlined by Lonergan, overlap, and are to be seen as different ways of describing fundamentally the same method, I think we might also suggest that GEM has something of a priority over ‘transcendental method’ – a priority in the sense of GEM being a ‘first for us’. This is even suggested, I think, by the fact that Lonergan introduces us to the possibility of GEM fairly early on in Insight at pages 95–96. The implication is that through following a method that applies intelligent and reasonable operations, as applied in science and common sense, in a way that extends it beyond the data of sense to include the data of consciousness, what will emerge as a result is all that follows in the rest of the book Insight. What Lonergan says in a compact way about the nature, validation and application of his transcendental method in, say, chapter 1 of Method in Theology, can also be said of GEM. But in an initial stage, it is an explicitly acknowledged GEM we embark on in order to arrive at the delineation of this transcendental method (also itself described as GEM).

Lonergan’s ‘empiricism’ It would be hard to believe that the full title of Insight – Insight: A Study of Human Understanding – is not a deliberate calling to mind of the classic texts of the Irony is to be seen in the way Lonergan’s circulation analysis shows that many of the new political theologies on offer were not empirical or concrete enough. Rather than engaging in debate that might have a chance of changing economic realities for the better, these attempts remained at the level of the homiletic. See Lonergan’s remarks in Caring about Meaning, 165.

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British empiricist tradition in epistemology, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Lonergan’s first experiences in moving beyond the Suarezian textbook philosophy he encountered as a student at Heythrop in Oxfordshire were in the direction of the British philosophical tradition as mediated to him via the works of Bl. John Henry Newman and H. W. B. Joseph’s book on logic. It was the tradition largely dominated by the empiricist thinkers who saw in the developments in science and logic the way forward for the salvation of philosophy.38 Insight, as a work determined to situate itself at the centre of the most advanced thought going forward in science, mathematics and logic in the mid-­twentieth century, necessarily is intended to bring about an encounter between the traditions Lonergan had critically appropriated and those philosophical traditions which at that point in cultural history seemed to be most bound up with work on scientific and logical method – the empiricist tradition. Lonergan’s introduction, on pages 95–96, of the notion of Generalized Empirical Method as a generalization of the method seen in science, of applying our intelligent and reasonable operations in coming to know beyond the data of sense to include also the data of consciousness, indicates the strategy he is to follow in this encounter between the traditions: between the traditions of Aristotelian-Thomism as critically appropriated by Lonergan and the empiricist tradition that prides itself on being the ablest philosophical advocate of the progressive worlds of science and logical methodology. The strategy will be one of a type of subversion, of deconstruction – to use that overused expression – as Lonergan ‘out does’ empiricism in terms of even more fine-­grained attention to data than it has achieved thus far. In this sense, GEM is proposed as an ‘authentic empiricism’ precisely because it shows up ‘popular’ empiricism of the philosophical tradition to be in truth mediated immediacy. Indeed, this mediated immediacy is dual in nature: sense data are mediated to us through our other cognitional activities, and our knowledge of those activities comes about not solely through attention to conscious data, but also through intelligent and reasonable inquiry into that data. We might say that while the ‘new empiricism’ of phenomenology successfully deconstructs crude empiricism, through advertence to the first type of mediation of immediacy, it is with regard to the

This tradition brought together strands of British empiricism and the anti-Kantian perspectives of what we might best name ‘Hapsburg philosophy’. On the latter, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: La Salle: Open Court, 1995).

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second type of mediation that it normally comes to grief. The failure is due to an inadequate phenomenology of Verstehen – more on that below. In order, then, to successfully meet crucial issues at the ‘level of our times’, Lonergan strove in Insight to engage with philosophies that were dominant within the cultural milieu in which advances in science and mathematics were taking place. Such positivistic philosophies tended to work with an empiricist paradigm of knowing. Within analytical philosophy such positivism was itself to come under increasing attack as incompetent naïve realism. Wilfred Sellars’s celebrated attack on the ‘myth of the given’ was among a good number of important philosophical critiques that helped to shift analytical philosophy beyond the positivist phase. Lonergan’s approach to the ‘empirical’ avoids such naivety from the outset. Early on in Insight, Lonergan is at pains to point out that we do not normally confront ‘naked data’, but rather, to use his later expression, we come at a world ‘mediated by meaning and motivated by value’.39 The world of immediacy is what we approximate to in states of sensation in early infancy or in an alcoholic trance. The ‘empirical’ is encountered by us within various patterns characterized by our diverse individual and social orientations and expectations. Further, in an explanatory account, the ‘empirical’ is to be characterized as a term in a set of terms and relations that specify cognitional structure. The ‘empirical’ is, then, given the heuristic designation as ‘what our inquiries begin with and that in which our judgments find their fulfilling conditions’. On the other hand, Lonergan also stresses the ‘obstinacy’ of the empirical, of the data that is insisted on in common-­sense knowing. To this, he draws attention in his account of ‘objectivity’ in chapter 13 of Insight.40 As opposed to all forms of subjectivist idealism and social relativist epistemology, such ‘obstinacy’ of the empirical is not to be gainsaid. Even if we are at a stage in translation that seems to support W. V. O. Quine’s views on indeterminacy, we can pretty soon get to the point at which both interpreter and tribes folk at least agree that ‘gavagai’ is

Insight, pp.  95–96. We should also take into consideration in this context further aspects of Lonergan’s phenomenology of ‘noticing’ the significant in the data. His favourite story illustrating his point was of the ‘bug on the desk’. We can notice what we would be prepared to call ‘a bug’ on the desk before us. But the trained entomologist can notice many, many more features of the animalculous beast, thanks to his or her scientific training. See Lonergan, Understanding and Being, CWL, Vol. 5, Elizabeth A. Morelli, Mark D. Morelli, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 99. 40 Insight, 406–8. 39

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present or absent in the shared visual field, even if the determination of the meaning of what gavagai is remains elusive at this point.41 An empirical datum that I name ‘the Sun’ can be described by me as a rather hot star and by my friendly tribesman as ‘the sun god’; but we can still agree whether he/it is visible or not visible in the sky today. At the limit, of course, the idealist and social relativist arrive at self-­refuting and self-­reversing contradiction if they attempt to deny completely the empirical, the obstinate data since we can, and they can, advert to the presence of that data in their very denial: the data on their very judgment as a conscious cognitional act and the other given conscious interrelated acts of sensation, understanding and judgment, present in their conscious activities of argument and denial. We can reinforce this latter point by drawing attention to the way Hugo Meynell’s humourously labelled ‘archdeconstruction’ can be carried out on the likes of Derrida and his epigones, and more generally, on philosophers who seem to want nothing to do with the dangerous enterprise of ‘introspection’. Thus, we can see in such classic instances as Derrida’s critique of Husserl, Hume’s critique of anything smacking of Cartesianism, and Wittgenstein’s critique of inward directed phenomenology that a cognitional theorizing will covertly or overtly arise. Hume makes appeal to what we are conscious of and not conscious of when he asks us to introspect in order to judge reasonably on the basis of the evidence his view that we do not have intuitions about causation in the way we do about simple arithmetic conclusions. Derrida tells us that Husserl demonstrated for him the incompetence of empiricism, but he would have done so by getting Derrida to make reasonable judgments on the basis of attention to his own cognitional activities, and Derrida refers to those activities (and makes judgments about what they do and do not reveal) in his further critique of Husserl.42 And as for the later Wittgenstein, we can refer to the study by the eminent philosopher Jaakko Hintikka in which it is shown that despite Wittgenstein’s assiduous attempts to keep his phenomenology outwardly directed, his references to what we do and do not do in our thinking reveal him to be, in Hintikka’s words, ‘a closet Cartesian’.43

For a critique by influential analytical philosophers of the implausibility of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis, see Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth-Century Volume II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 42 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 43 Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 41

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Clarity, precision and rigorous argument should not be seen as the enemies of the desires of the heart and their expression in the poetic and the mystical expressions of humanity. Lonergan’s thinking, I believe, always tries to do justice to these factors, which for some thinkers and some traditions of thought appear as polar opposites – a sad reflection of the schizophrenic perspectives of modernity, perhaps. The potential appeal Lonergan’s work has for the analytical, or more generally, positivist tradition is precisely in terms of its rigour and precision – even when treating of things of the heart and spirit. I believe Lonergan sensed this, and that it is one of the motives behind the use of the expression ‘generalized empirical method’. In this regard, it is interesting that the philosophical-­theologian John Macquarrie, in his brief summary of Lonergan’s contribution, singles out for his Anglophone readership Lonergan’s introduction of the notion of ‘transcendence’ in Insight as worthy of note: forget the grandiose gestures of idealism, by ‘transcendence’ we can mean simply the process of ‘going beyond’, which occurs in the down-­to-earth experience of raising further questions.44 It is interesting that in one of the places in his last writing in which we see again the expression GEM, the 1977 Questionnaire on Philosophy, Lonergan returns again to the distinction found in Insight between analytical propositions and analytical principles. In Anglophone philosophical circles in the 1950s, the ‘analytic’ was, again, a major issue. Quine had caused a stir in 1952 with the publication of his essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, which had attempted to deconstruct the logical positivists’ reworking of Kant’s ‘analytic/ synthetic’ schematism.45 Lonergan’s discussion was even linked into this debate in an oblique way through his approving reference to A. Pap’s book The A Priori in Physical Theory.46 One of the key features in Lonergan’s account is that the fully ‘analytical principles’ that characterize the core of metaphysics are again founded on the empirical: they are judgments that make reference to the data of our consciousness as providing their fulfilled conditions as a priori principles; as

I have not been able to trace the precise location of this comment, but I believe it is to be found in one of the later editions of John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Religious Thought (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). 45 Analytical philosophy has moved on since Quine’s essay, which some analysts today see as too restricted to the terms in which the analytic/synthetic debate was couched at the time. For one view on work on the ‘analytic’ in current analytical philosophy, see G. Ray, ‘A Naturalistic A Priori’, Philosophical Studies 92 (1998): 25–43. 46 The work is a somewhat transitional one for Arthur Pap, in what was a rather short carrier. The A Priori in Physical Theory shows the influence of the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer, while it also demonstrates Pap’s increasing involvement in the mainstream debates of current analytical philosophy. 44

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such, they are found both as given in our heuristic anticipation of being and as validated in de facto instances of knowing, including the crucial instances of knowing in self-­appropriation. It is for this reason that Lonergan acknowledges the rightful claims of the positivists even in the chapters in Insight on the existence and nature of God. They are right, he tells us, to insist on some kind of verification principle in discussion of arguments for God’s existence and nature. However, their own formulation of a verification principle overlooks, is forgetful of, the empirical data on our awareness of principles of metaphysical import.47 In the section from the 1982 interviews, Caring About Meaning, which was referred to above, Lonergan goes on to expand on the significance of his renewed commitment to the expression Generalized Empirical Method by referring to Karl Jaspers. In Method in Theology, Lonergan had already selected Jaspers as an interlocutor whose work exemplifies both the positive and the problematic in phenomenology in order to indicate something of what is involved in the functional specialty ‘dialectic’.48 In 1982, Lonergan again points to Jaspers’ introspective phenomenology, his Existenzerhellung, and goes on to comment that Jaspers ‘. . . thinks it is extremely important – it will make you feel better and know yourself better – but it isn’t science. There is an answer to that, namely, that you find in it exactly the same structure as you find in any empirical science.’49 At this point, then, we encounter the dialectical moment in Lonergan’s relation with the phenomenological tradition. We return here to the point made above, that Lonergan’s ‘authentic empiricism’ means not only an overcoming of naïve empiricism, but of the sophisticated perceptualism in much phenomenology. To reiterate: this overcoming is, however, again in some basic sense in the name of, a matter of being true to, the data, the empirical. The story of Lonergan’s dialectical relationship with phenomenology is a fascinating one, which I believe, deserves extensive treatment. Such a discussion would build on the very fine work by William Ryan and others on Lonergan’s relationship to key thinkers such as Husserl, but it would also do justice to the theme of the dialectical encounter between Lonergan and phenomenology as this pertains to the unfolding of Lonergan’s thought as a whole. Looking back, we can see, as observed above, that it was Lonergan’s own type of phenomenological approach growing out of a reading of, among others, St. Augustine and Bl.

Insight, 694. Method in Theology, 262–65. 49 Caring about Meaning, 68. 47 48

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Newman that enabled him to begin the hermeneutical and critical appropriation of St. Thomas in the 1930s. The encounter with the phenomenological tradition of Husserl begins in some of Lonergan’s earliest published writing. In his review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Die Ehre, Lonergan had found much to praise in the insightful way von Hildebrand had enlivened the Christian theology of marriage through a development and application of the phenomenological skills learned from Husserl.50 However, Lonergan also identified potentially misleading ambiguity. Von Hildebrand had distinguished between the ends of marriage, on the one hand, and the meaning of marriage, on the other. Yet, could we not say that both such sets of values are meanings, in some sense? The ambiguity in the question of the meaning of ‘meaning’ in this context led to the attempted clarification of the debate through its transposition into metaphysical terms in Lonergan’s early published essay ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’.51 Already then, in this encounter with the phenomenological approach so skilfully deployed by von Hildebrand, we see features of Lonergan’s attitude to phenomenology that will be present throughout his work: from his positive and negative comments on Husserl and Heidegger in the 1957 Boston lectures to his appropriation of various approaches from phenomenological writers in his work up to and including Method in Theology to his negative critique of the downside of phenomenology seen in his comments on thinkers such as Leslie Dewart and Bernhard Welte.52 In the first encounter with von Hildebrand’s phenomenology, we can detect the dialectical approach that is spelled out in greater methodological detail in the 1957 lectures and in the treatment of Jaspers in the chapter on dialectic in Method in Theology. What are to be praised in phenomenology are the enormously enriching contributions it can make to descriptive knowledge of ourselves and of our relationships with others and our world. Let us recall that for Lonergan, ‘descriptive knowledge’ is nether false nor illusory nor inferior; our descriptive accounts can be wrong or right, more or less accurate or complete. However, there is the further issue of the transposition to explanatory knowledge

Lonergan, ‘Review: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Marriage’, in Shorter Papers, CWL, Vol. 20, Robert C. Croken, Robert M. Doran and D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 153–56. 51 Lonergan, ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, Collection, CWL, Vol.  4, F. E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 16–47. 52 Lonergan, ‘The Dehellenization of Dogma’, A Second Collection, 11–32; A Third Collection, 185–88, 192–94. 50

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and such knowledge is or can be very important for our lives. The shift is one we need in life to distinguish between such areas as astrology and astronomy, chemistry and alchemy, history and legend. On Lonergan’s view, the descriptive orientation of phenomenology means that this shift to the explanatory becomes problematic. As I have expressed the issue elsewhere, we might read a beautiful homily on the face of God, but we have to respect the question of a Richard Dawkins (because it is our question also): Does the deity really have a face?53 The problems for phenomenology in breaking through to an explanatory, critically validated metaphysics are seen by Lonergan in its inability to give an adequate answer to this type of metaphysical question. The issue resolves, for Lonergan, into the cognitional one. It is here that the phrase I have repeated above from his 1957 lectures, ‘a phenomenology of Verstehen’ has its relevance. For in those lectures, Lonergan affirms that in his reading of the phenomenologists he could not detect an adequate phenomenology of Verstehen, and that if we were to carry through such a phenomenology, we would be in a somewhat different place than we normally find ourselves when reading the work of those in the tradition of Husserl: We would have entered the horizon of Insight. In the Boston College lectures, Lonergan praises much that we can read in Husserl – particularly his account of horizon and perspectival orientation – and in other thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Marcel. On the other hand, Lonergan identifies a failure in Husserl to carry through the endeavour of authentic empiricism since aspects of the given data are also our intelligent and reasonable operations and our grasp of evidence sufficient to affirm knowledge of reality. Also given is the undeniable knowledge of being, reality had in the process of self-­referential knowledge by the one who adverts to the cognitional data as evidence refuting his or her denial of some aspect of cognitional structure. This is the import of Lonergan’s point in the 1957 lectures that Husserl is mistaken in thinking that the Cogito is the most fundamental datum; it is, rather, our intelligent and reasonable anticipations of being and their application in knowing an instance of being, namely, in this instance of the ‘cogito,’ my conscious activities, that are more fundamental.54 Scholars of Husserl may point out how poor Derrida’s genuine knowledge of Husserl was. Be that as

Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 92. Phenomenology and Logic, 261–62.

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it may, it is hard to imagine, nevertheless, that Derrida could criticize Husserl on self-­knowledge, as had Heidegger before him, if there was not some truth in their accusation that Husserl strove for an account of self-­knowing that was unmediated and understood on the analogy of some direct inner looking at self.55 For Lonergan, our knowledge of self is mediated though the attentive, intelligent and reasonable operations that the self deploys both in knowing the empirical sciences and in coming to know itself: it is mediate knowledge. It is, perhaps, significant in this regard that, as Cyril McDonnell points out,56 while his former teacher Brentano always seems happy to acknowledge his sources and indebtedness to previous philosophers – notably the medievals and their understanding of intentionality – Husserl’s writing seems to want to shield itself from all previous authorities. Thus, Descartes is followed in bracketing the tradition in order to get to the ‘things themselves’. For Lonergan, on the contrary, we have an acknowledgment of dependence on the long tradition from Socrates to Plato, from Aristotle to St. Augustine, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Bl. Newman. We come to knowledge of self through the contribution of these others. Yet, it is a two-­way process. The appropriation of their thought is not uncritical, because mediated immediacy does not render self-­knowledge suspect. Such is the assumption of Derrida, given the Husserlian principles which ironically, he has assumed in his own critique. A person who denies cognitional structure (and other philosophical items emerging from it) can, through arguments that point to self-­refutation be led back to acknowledge de facto certainty in such cases. As we have seen, Lonergan takes over Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of being’ to make it a ‘forgetfulness’ of the inner light, and as such, he turns the phrase against its originator. On Lonergan’s view, there is indeed a failure on Heidegger’s part to carry through any adequate phenomenology of Verstehen. We can see this in apparently small matters as in great. Thus, Heidegger’s analysis of the knowing of a lizard, and of its difference from our cognition, is insufficient in analysis and confused;57 and his utter bewilderment at the epistemological challenges thrown up by mid-­twentieth-­century physics contrasts dramatically with the engagement with those issues seen in the same period in Insight.58 In that book,

Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. Cyril McDonnell, ‘Brentano’s Revaluation of the Scholastic Concept of Intentionality into a RootConcept of Descriptive Psychology’, Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2006): 125–72. 57 See Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticisms in Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999), 45 and chapter 5. 58 See Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 1915–1970 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 256–57. 55 56

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Lonergan warns us that oversight of insight in apparently small matters will issue in confusion when we turn to deal with matter of greater moment.59 And so it is that Heidegger’s metaphysical musings on being are caught up in a presencing metaphysics which, as it appears in other guises, he himself labours to denounce; it is an incoherent metaphysics of being apart from intelligibility.60 In this way, I do not think it surprising that in his responses to papers delivered at the 1970 Florida Conference, Lonergan chose to address together the issues pertaining to being, and our knowledge of being, raised in papers both by the Heideggerian William Richardson and Emerich Coreth.61 Only by acknowledging what is inevitable, that our access to being is through our knowing, and by critically handling the epistemological challenges that ensue, can we hope to distinguish between both meaning and nonsense, and truth and falsity, when speaking of the ‘being of beings’. This is not to say that those who follow the way of ‘realist phenomenology’ – following the example of philosophers such as Roman Ingarden – cannot make important contributions to metaphysics. In fact, eminent and notable philosophers such as von Hildebrand himself, St. Edith Stein and Robert Sokolowski in our own day, have chosen this path to enrich the metaphysical tradition.62 Fundamentally, we might say this is the path followed by Lonergan himself. The endeavour is to reappropriate the metaphysical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, taking the anthropological and intersubjective analyses of phenomenology as a starting point. Certainly, we would want to encourage such work and prize its valuable contributions as we would those arising from phenomenology in general. But the problems and challenges of method cannot be dodged. For instance, St. Edith Stein’s admirable metaphysical work Finite and Eternal Being suffers, from the perspectives of Lonergan’s philosophy, from its lapse

Insight, 22–23. See Phenomenology and Logic, 275–76; also Insight and Analysis, 234–35, n. 20. 61 Language, Truth and Meaning, 311–12. The absence of an adequate phenomenology of knowing, the forgetfulness of the ‘inner light’ in Heidegger becomes manifest in his alternative Kant-­bound metaphysics of the history of being. The ineluctable consequences for ethics of this tragic and menacing narrative are brilliantly exposed in the recent work of the renowned Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny; see his Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). We have to wonder whether the more influential philosophical vectors operative in Heidegger’s thought are not Parmenides and the pre-Socratics, but in reality, Nicholas of Autrecourt and William of Ockham: fathers of a modernity so repugnant to Heidegger. We may recall that his Habilitationsschrift focused on Scotus. 62 Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002); Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978). 59 60

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into unnecessary and misleading scotism at crucial points of the argument.63 In other words, approaching scholastic metaphysics via the path of phenomenology is no guarantee that we will avoid becoming bogged down in the metaphysical debates of neo-­scholasticism. It was precisely the Gordian knot of disputed scholastic questions that Lonergan attempted to untie through a method in metaphysics, critically grounded in an adequate phenomenology of Verstehen.

‘The Ongoing Genesis of Methods’ In his paper for the Boston workshop of 1979, Lonergan, while describing his thought as a Generalized Empirical Method, also refers to his lecture ‘The Ongoing Genesis of Methods’, from three years before, as expressing something of the meaning and scope of what he intends.64 Specifically, he refers to the theme of the ongoing genesis of methods highlighted in that paper. Lonergan’s interest in the historical process of the ongoing genesis of methods was central to two complementary aspects of his lifelong project: to outline a method for Catholic theology and to do so in a way that would do justice to the impact on theology made by the historical sciences, developing apace since the Renaissance. Again, some of the themes I wish to touch on in this section of the chapter deserve a monograph each. But my aim is to flag up some of the fascinating multifaceted aspects of the way Lonergan’s work throws light on the subject of the diversification and multiplicity of methods, and his contribution to some of these methods. Clearly, if we are to appreciate the significance of GEM for Lonergan, we need to understand something of the complexity of the issues surrounding ways in which his own work both highlights progress and decline in various methods, and attempts to make contributions to that process in a number of areas.

On this, see for a sympathetic analysis, Sarah Borden, ‘Edith Stein and Individual Forms: A Few Distinctions regarding Being an Individual’, Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2006): 49–69. Stein seems to feel the need for some kind of unique individual form for human persons, a haecceity over and above a general human form. If we follow the way of ‘resolution to causes’, that Lonergan deploys in the metaphysical analyses in works such as The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ (CWL, Vol.  7, M. Shields, F. E. Crowe and R. Doran, editors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002]), I think we will see that the hypothesis of unique individual form is unnecessary, unverifiable and leads to anomalies. The same notion, with its attendant defects, is at work in current metaphysics in analytical philosophy. See Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics, Chapter 7. 64 Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, 431. 63

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We can begin with a first stab at making a list; that is, a list of the methods to which Lonergan himself attempted to make a contribution. Among these, we can distinguish larger wholes, larger sets and also subsets pertaining to various disciplines. So within the larger whole we call ‘philosophy’, Lonergan clearly intended that his adumbration of a GEM when applied to philosophy itself would yield fruits for such areas as: philosophy of mind, epistemology, anthropology, philosophy of science, cosmology, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of politics and economics, philosophy of hermeneutics, metaphysics, metaethics, philosophy of aesthetics, philosophy of education, philosophy of culture, philosophy of symbolism, philosophy of myth. Among the areas in theology to which he wished to make contributions were: theology of the Trinity, Christology, soteriology, fundamental theology, sacramental theology, theology of grace and glory, method in theology, and theology of dogmatic development. In the early 1960s, Lonergan began to note the significance for the historically aware methodologist of the diversification of various ‘philosophies of . . .’, and we sense that he does so in a manner that indicates the relevance of his own work for these various subdivisions of philosophical labour. We should also point out immediately that the items in the lists above do not necessarily reflect Lonergan’s own terminology. Indeed, his position sometimes indicates that even the designations of some divisions may be unhelpful. Beyond making contributions to these and other areas of philosophy and theology, however, we can say that Lonergan’s work aims to make some contribution to other methods. Some of these contributions will be more proximate in nature, some more remote. So through his contributions to, what some would call ‘philosophy of science’, we can say that he offers methodological points helpful to work in relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The questions concerning the way philosophical issues intrude into the work of these areas of science are controversial, but it is generally agreed that these are philosophical questions. In addition to offering insights he believed helpful for methodological issues that arise for physics, in Insight, Lonergan also has advice to offer on method in zoology.65 Central to Lonergan’s idea of ways in which his GEM can make contributions both towards a positive

Insight, 290–91.

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flourishing of existing methods and to the development of new methods is his vision of ongoing collaboration. The hope is that works such as Insight will be emancipatory in assisting practitioners of different disciplines to become more authentic seekers of truth and value, and thus, freer to make genuine contributions in their specific, interrelated areas of investigation. Thus, the ‘remote’ contribution of GEM is also, and indeed primarily, of this nature. Already, however, I think we can note areas in which GEM has borne fruit in this way. I mention, as an example, the way Lonergan’s methodological work has had not a little impact on historical Jesus studies through its influence on the exegete Ben F. Meyer and his influence, in turn, on the scholarly work of N. T. Wright, which has generated something of a new movement in this area of biblical exegesis. If we turn to the interesting case of Lonergan’s other long-­term interest, economics, we can observe an area in which his contributions bring together both direct work on the matter in hand, macroeconomic theory, and the more general perspectives of his methodology. Thus, the circulation analysis is a theory of economics to which Lonergan devotes himself as directly as he does to the psychological analogy in his work in Trinitarian theology. But it is the case, in both these areas of analysis that the matter in hand benefits from the more general perspectives worked out as implications and applications of GEM. So in his method in economics, Lonergan draws on his wider thought, in order to emphasize ways in which, in a post-­deterministic theory of economics, the probable variables of statistically emergent, surviving and declining economic cross-­over cycles, at once involve the inputs of authentic or inauthentic human subjects and communities. And his broader methodological perspective also provides him with the heuristic perspective for a clearer differentiation between the descriptive and the explanatory in economic theory. Such background perspectives, furnished by GEM are, we might say, the schematic images, the quasi-­operators, which facilitated Lonergan’s own insightful shift to an explanatory economic theory. In fact, the topic of the ongoing genesis of methods invites us to reflect on further differentiations and delineations of subset methods as Lonergan’s own thought develops. Thus, the more compact treatment of hermeneutics in Insight is further differentiated in Method in Theology. As such, we see Lonergan in the later work outlining for us in greater detail the differentiated yet related methods in research, interpretation, history and dialectic. One of the helpful features of this further methodological differentiation is that Method in Theology presents

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us with chapters that enable us to engage more expeditiously with current philosophy of historiography.66 In the later essays referred to above, in which the expression GEM makes its reappearance, Lonergan illustrates the ongoing genesis of methods by pointing to the historical diversification of the physical sciences and the rise to prominence of the Geisteswissenschaften from the Renaissance on.67 But how, on Lonergan’s view, does this ongoing genesis happen? Again, this is a wide-­ranging question, and I think one well worth pursing at far greater length than is possible in this chapter. There are various analyses to be found in Lonergan’s work, which we can bring to bear on answering this question, not to mention all manner of tantalizing hints pertaining to the understanding of the genesis of methods found throughout his work. A possible starting point is Lonergan’s insistence on the necessity of the shift from logic to method. Lonergan makes it clear in Verbum that this is a lesson he has learned from St. Thomas.68 It is a lesson that entails the rejection of the deductivist method in philosophy, evident in the medieval conceptualists who over-­emphasized the importance of certain elements of Aristotelian logic so as to eclipse other contributions of the Stagirite. The deductivist mindset had to be jettisoned as, possibly from Boscovitch on, non-Euclidean geometries began to enter the field suggesting a finitist approach to mathematics. Ironically, at a time when the realization of the implications of this shift were gaining ground among mathematicians, Bertrand Russell, inspired by Frege’s work, again opted for the deductivist way in Principia Mathematica. The reactions to that failed experiment characterize a good deal of the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the twentieth century to follow, and as a consequence, the debates over the philosophy of language in analytical philosophy. It would seem that now, Lonergan suggests, mathematics itself is involved in method that is better characterized as hypothetico-­deductive. Lonergan’s contributions to ‘philosophy of logic’, spelled out with particular clarity in his 1957 Boston College lectures, could not fail to

See Thomas McPartland, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010); also, Andrew Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding (Aldershot and Brookfield, MA: Ashgate, 1997). These works draw attention to the fact that, as Lonergan insists in Method in Theology (p. 153, n. 1), philosophies of hermeneutics like that of Gadamer may be lacking in their insufficient attention to what are distinct but interrelated aspects of hermeneutics. One such area is that of historiography. 67 A Third Collection, 146–65. 68 Verbum, 55. 66

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welcome this collapse of the deductivist ideal, while at once indicating the deeper issues for metalogic identified by GEM.69 The rejection of deductivism also signifies that for GEM Hegel’s logic, while attempting to register the philosophical significance of the dynamics of history, is as problematic as Russell’s experiment. The stifling rigidity of the logical system Hegel outlines is belied by the facts of contingency. These facts, which for us human beings are known only post hoc, given the contingency of the future, may have a probability assigned to them within a given stage of development, but that is all – intelligible dependence does not mean necessity. Lonergan’s heuristics of historical development and decline are, then, in some sense more modest than Hegel’s proposals, yet have greater depth and reach in other ways. As long as we are speaking of beings like ourselves, then we have good evidence to detect in their communal history the dialectical forces at work of authenticity and inauthenticity as these are spelled out in GEM. ‘Deductivism’, then, is one of the philosophical targets, one of the counterpositions, at which Lonergan takes aim in his application of the dialectical hermeneutic implied by GEM. As we noted above, in Insight, Lonergan informs us that GEM has both a dialectic as well as a genetic strand. The analysis of development, both genetic and dialectical in Insight, is then another place to look to understand what Lonergan offers by way of explanatory insight into the ‘how’ of the ongoing genesis of methods.70 Lonergan’s work as a whole indicates subtle and complex ways in which these vectors in the genesis of methods may function and be related. In the development of mathematics emergence of higher viewpoints has to do with the lower manifold of operations in an earlier stage providing the schematic images, the data on the basis of which, about which arise the insights that structure the next, supervenient stage in mathematical operations. In the physical sciences, this emergence of higher viewpoints has to do with our drive for full explanation as an operator, and the merely coincidental manifold of data at any given lower level is the puzzle intelligence has to confront. The life habits of a rabbit are not explained simply by the physics of the object moving around in my visual field; we need the insights of chemistry, biology and zoology to move us towards a more adequate explanation of those phenomena of animal movement. These two types of the emergence of

Phenomenology and Logic, 111–12. Insight, 476–504.

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higher viewpoint, a result of our operations within the intellectual pattern of experience, are then, also crucial factors in the story of ongoing methods. We might also note that what Lonergan has to say about the function of ideal-­types in historical study shows some parallels with the account of the higher viewpoint in the emergence of the physical sciences. The ideal-­type historical explanation might ultimately turn out to be partially or completely wrong. But part of its purpose will have been to highlight data relevant to certain historical investigations that we would not have noticed before without the given ideal-­type hypothetical explanation. In that sense, in addition to its own potential explanatory power, the ideal-­type serves to alert us to an unexplained residue of data. It is in light of the analysis of genetic development in chapter 15 of Insight that we can appreciate what Lonergan is up to in presenting us with his account of cultural development as differentiations of consciousness, in his writing subsequent to ‘his little book’. As Insight would lead us to expect, these cultural differentiations of consciousness are the later unfolding of incipient tendencies evident in earlier phases of human consciousness and human culture. Thus, the later specialization and differentiation Lonergan calls ‘interiority’, within which he places his own GEM, is there in germ in the earlier ‘theoretical consciousness’ of the great philosophers such as Aristotle and Aquinas. As the 1967 Introduction to Verbum makes clear, these earlier thinkers practised a phenomenology of consciousness in implicit ways and sometimes, sporadically, in an explicit fashion; the refutations of scepticism and of Averroism – in the case of St. Thomas – witness to this. In the later phase of specialization identified as ‘interiority’, this implicit and sporadic approach can be explicitly developed to yield a basic philosophical method. The same is true of the emergence of historical consciousness and the modern Gesiteswissenschaften. It would, in fact, be historical naivety on our part to overlook the presence of a ‘critical’ sense operative in some notable cases of ancient historical writing and hermeneutics. So in the third century, Dionysius of Alexandria shows considerable sophistication in his application of literary-­critical methods to the question of the authorship of the Book of Revelation. And modern scholars point to the critical sensitivity towards his sources shown by the Greek historian Polybius. But it would be equally exaggerated to deny that such authors functioned in a very different world from that of the modern historian or scholar who works within an international community of academics, and who pursues research in accord with critical methods and procedures developed in such communities over the last two to three centuries.

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There are then some aspects of Lonergan’s thought that are clearly focused on analysing the historical process of the genesis of methods. However, there are other features of his work that can be brought into play here and that may stimulate some interesting further questions. For instance, how, if at all, is the emergence of higher viewpoints related to the process of the differentiation of consciousness? Further, is dialectical method, as well as genetic method, relevant to understanding the ongoing genesis of methods? My responses to these questions will only be sketchy – such questions may well be worth further consideration and research. It is not difficult to discern that the very process of the emergence of higher viewpoints in mathematics and the sciences is inherent in the differentiation of theoretical from common-­sense consciousness. Further, it is interesting to note that one type of abstraction or higher viewpoint Lonergan has a good deal of interest in is that of ‘implicit definition’. This notion, derived from Hilbert, is applied by Lonergan to, among other areas, modern symbolic logic as a whole: such logic identifies intelligible structures common to diverse areas of both mathematics and nonmathematical thinking.71 This is a type of method that still remains within the theoretical differentiation of consciousness we may say. However, not surprisingly, perhaps, it can also be applicable in interiority. Lonergan explains how implicit definition can also be fruitfully applied to the subject of cognitional structure itself, so as both to bring out the heuristic nature of ongoing, but nonrevisable, self-­ appropriation, and to identify this as explanatory and moving beyond the solely descriptive domain.72 I find the second question even more intriguing. As we have seen above, Lonergan writes of dialectical method as one applicable to processes manifesting linked but opposed principles of development. In Lonergan’s work, early and late, such dialectical analysis is applied both to the dynamic of growth and decline in community and to the processes of the reversal and development of positions and counterpositions in philosophy and in human thought in general. These two areas are not unrelated. ‘Philosophies’, taken in both wide and narrow senses of the term, are not isolated from life; they can beget or at least contribute to intellectual, moral and religious positions and counterpositions. If this is the case, then we can argue that, de facto, dialectic is relevant to understanding some

Phenomenology and Logic, 328. Understanding and Being, 55.

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aspects of the differentiation of consciousness in the case of the shift from theory to interiority in philosophy (and theology). For the dialectic of the process of authentic philosophy, on Lonergan’s view, has involved such developments as the overcoming of, say, Hume and Kant via a fuller turn to interiority and exploitation of the resources for this in St. Augustine, St. Thomas and others. In addition, there is the issue of the role of inverse insight in the ongoing genesis of methods. Does understanding that role invoke an application, in some fashion, of dialectical method? It would seem that, perhaps in an analogous manner, it does. Dialectic as applied to the dynamics of human community involves understanding that one of the linked opposing principles is human inauthenticity, bound up with the surd of sin. In this sense, then, inverse insight, an understanding that here there is nothing to understand and intelligibility is to be sought elsewhere in a given context, comes into play. But then this is similar to the understanding of processes in intellectual history that, according to Lonergan, have been marked by shifts in direction due to investigation that runs up against an absence of intelligibility. To invoke Lonergan’s metaphor of the river and riverbed, the stream has encountered an obstacle such that it must find another way to flow. This has characterized the ongoing genesis of methods in cases such as relativity in physics, symbolic logic after Gödel and Turing, and as Lonergan sees it, the breakthrough in theology to the nature/grace distinction of Philip the Chancellor in the thirteenth century.73

And back to empirical method In Insight, Lonergan first introduces us to the notion of GEM as he outlines his position on fundamental aspects that he considers to be operative in the empirical method of the physical sciences. In the final section of this essay, then, I offer a few observations on this area of the application of GEM and its implications for philosophy of science. Turning to the topic of GEM’s contribution to issues in the philosophy of science, I can do no better at this point than refer the reader to Philip McShane’s

See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, CWL, Vol. 1, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 20. On the dangers for modern theology inherent in an oversight of Philip’s inverse insight and accompanying direct insights, see the important article by Guy Mansini, O.S.B., ‘The Abiding Significance of Henri De Lubac’s Surnaturel’, The Thomist, Vol. 73, 2009, 593–619.

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perspicacious outline of Lonergan’s ‘logic of discovery’ in his book Randomness, Statistics and Emergence,74 and to Hugo Meynell’s deployment of Lonergan’s approach in order to illuminate debates over the epistemology of science by such notables as Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.75 There are, of course, a good number of other significant contributions that bring out the importance of GEM for debates over scientific methodology as a whole and also for particular contested areas in philosophy of science.76 In his contribution to what must have been the earliest collection of essays on Lonergan’s thought, the celebrated scholar of the history of science, the late Ernan McMullin drew attention to the fact that it was difficult to place Lonergan’s treatment of empirical, scientific method in the opening chapters of Insight within the contemporary taxonomy of the early 1960s.77 We can have some sympathy for McMullin’s perplexity if we recall that, in these early chapters of the work, Lonergan’s discourse may appear to straddle discussions in the history of science, in the epistemology of science and in certain areas, which in some quarters are denoted ‘cosmology’. What, in fact, can be difficult to keep in view is that Lonergan’s overall purpose is to provide us with five-­finger exercises in self-­ appropriating the conscious processes leading to direct and reflective insights. He pursues this objective through the way of mathematics and physical science because those are the pedagogical pathways that de facto in modernity allowed him to pass that way himself. We might add that what goes on in those chapters are not only five-­finger exercises but brief études, which at once expand our technique and offer profound perspectives on how GEM might help us approach issues in the philosophy of space and time, quantum mechanics and notions of

Philip McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970). Hugo Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy, chapters 6 and 7. Among these, we should mention books and articles by Patrick Byrne, Patrick Heelan, Frank Budenholzer, David Oyler, Michael Vertin and V. Colapietro. A very helpful exploration of Lonergan’s contribution to philosophical debates concerning quantum mechanics is: Michael Vertin, ‘The Noumenal Import of Quantum Mechanics: Four Views’, paper presented at the LMU Fallon Memorial Symposium, April 2009. Meynell does not include Larry Laudan among his interlocutors. In the estimation of many, Laudan, in such works as Progress and Its Problems, has further advanced the debate begun between Popper and his critics. One aspect of his work that deserves praise, I believe, is the way he has expanded the parameters of the debate to include the methodologies of social science, history and other cognitive disciplines. Laudan opts for the postulation of certain ‘privileged intuitions’, and in effect, subscribes to the Quinean-Duhem thesis that these too can be revised, but revised rarely and with difficulty. As such, his position runs into the difficulties Lonergan identifies concerning the specification of what revision can, at the limit, mean and the self-­referential problems attendant on trying to postulate possible revisability. 77 Ernan McMullin, ‘Insight and the Meno’, Spirit as Inquiry, F. E. Crowe, editor, Continuum 2, Chicago (1964): 369–73. 74 75 76

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species and genus in scientific biology. And to top it all, Lonergan laconically throws off the aside that if someone with a scientific bent finds some examples deficient, then he or she can substitute them with others more suitable! We can best place what Lonergan offers on scientific methodology if we start by considering two approaches that have in some way or other been centre stage in debates over scientific methodology since the late Middle Ages: the way of deduction and that of induction. To put the problem very simplistically, we can observe that while a conclusion may necessarily follow from the premises in a sound piece of syllogistic deduction that will not get us very far when it comes to scientific discovery: Which premises are we to start with? On the other hand, if induction is thought to be the way to universal laws then we can quickly see that counting white swans is not going to settle the issue as to whether ‘all swans are white’, unless we already know that there are no other instances of ‘swan’ past, present or future. Following Lonergan’s hermeneutic hints, however, Patrick Byrne has shown in a book-­length study that Aristotle did far more with syllogism than simply deduce trivialities from trivialities.78 Deductive syllogism was also employed by Aristotle to express scientific discovery – the goal was to discover an explanatory middle term – and thus, also suggest a heuristic of discovery. If we think that counting white swans is a rather deflationary way to arrive at a scientific law, it would appear that logical positivists in the mid-­twentieth-­ century such as Carl Hempel advocated a method not much more sophisticated than this in their ‘covering-­law’ account of science. In a devastating, retrospective critique of this line of thinking the influential philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has shown how this ruse manifested a dread of causal explanation as metaphysical.79 Despite her reputation as being something of a sceptic regarding scientific laws, Cartwright goes on to argue that no serious philosopher of science today should doubt that science is all about finding causal explanations. Lonergan has something to say on both these topics, of course. ‘Logic’, as understood in various philosophies of logic past and present, is necessary but not sufficient for scientific progress. There is the creative, enriching act of insight providing a possible explanatory unification of the data. In the case of modern and current physical science, this insight aims at grasping the ontological correlate of a formal cause – such is the import of Lonergan’s canon of relevance. Patrick Byrne, Analysis and Science in Aristotle (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). Nancy Cartwright, ‘From Causation to Explanation and Back’, in The Future for Philosophy, Brian Leiter, editor (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 230–45.

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Before Lonergan there was C. S. Peirce’s notion of abduction, which is cognate in meaning, but Peirce is certainly not the first.80 Despite their fierce disagreements, J. S. Mill did come to accept William Whewell’s concept of ‘colligation’ in science: the idea that scientific progress occurs in part because of the ingenious explanatory hypothesis formulated by scientists to account for the data.81 While Mill came to accept this, he remained convinced that more was required by way of critical testing if genuine advance in science was to be had. Thus, the famous methods of hypothesis ‘elimination’ and confirmation formulated in the System of Logic (1843) – methods with which the young Lonergan became familiar through his reading of H. W. B. Joseph’s Introduction to Logic. But Lonergan’s work on Aquinas would point us still further back in history, primarily to Aquinas’s systematic attempts to provide some modest but still fruitful theological understanding of the mysteries of faith, such as the Trinity. Aquinas’s exploitation of the psychological analogy to offer a ‘probable’ understanding, convenientiae, concerning this central truth of faith was for Lonergan a paradigmatic example of the insight of genius yielding some comprehensive, explanatory account of relevant data – in this instance, the data of revealed truth. Lonergan also has something to say on induction. What Lonergan has to say directly on induction in Insight and Understanding and Being may seem on first reading to be so innocuous as to appear an insult to the great philosophical struggle over this concept in modernity.82 Lonergan informs us that the ‘problem of induction’ dissolves once we grasp two fundamental points. In the first place, the validity of induction is based on the undeniable cognitional law that similars are similarly understood. In the second place, this provides no easy solution to the problem since the onus is on the one who generalizes to show that his or her general claim is reasonably justified.83 Before we look at this line of argument in

C. S. Peirce is, of course, in many ways a great pioneer in the philosophy of science. However, I do not think the claim that Lonergan labours to explain in cognitional depth and detail what Peirce describes in a more general fashion can been seen as too harsh a comment when we bear in mind that even Peirce scholars admit that the great American philosopher’s linguistic expressions can often suffer from being rather vague and rhetorical. See Michael H. G. Hoffmann, ‘Problems with Peirce’s Concept of Abduction’, Foundations of Science, 4.3 (1999): 271–305. 81 William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 1837. This work serves to remind us that philosophy of science pursued with reference to the history of science did not come into being with the publication of Logik der Forschung in the 1930s. 82 Insight, 313, 326; Understanding and Being, 67. 83 For an expansion of Lonergan’s meaning and its application in science, see McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, 123–26. This book, linking Lonergan’s work with discussions in both philosophy of science and analytical philosophy, is surely among the most significant works of secondary literature on Lonergan yet to appear. 80

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a little more detail below, I draw attention to one methodological point Lonergan holds that others might find surprising. For a theologian, it is not surprising that we could grant the existence of singular entities, or perhaps, one-­off statistical states that might require unique and unrepeated types of explanation. For a theologian, such types of ‘explanation’ (in the sense of probable convenientiae) are sought in systematic theology with regard to unique truths such as those concerning God as Trinity. In Insight then, Lonergan grants that we might have a scientific explanation of unique phenomena.84 Our response might be to protest that surely, physical science is all about generality, about the repeatability of experiments and the universality of laws; the physics operative in Birmingham, United Kingdom, is not different from that in Birmingham, Alabama. While it is true that in entertaining a possibility, grasped through insight into some intelligible structure of a scheme of recurrence or a substantial unity, we cannot rule out that there is more than one instance of the same in reality, the fact that there are many such instances is only contingent; it is only to be established by intelligent and reasonable inquiry regarding the world as we find it. Turning to Lonergan’s approach to the problem of induction, we may begin with a little historical excursus. Famously, Hume, in his Inquiry, denies any necessary connection between our quotidian experience of the coming of a new day and the rising of the sun.85 The inductive inference we make is due to subrational conditioning. Interestingly, in Joseph Butler’s Analogy, published in the previous decade, the same example is used, but the celebrated Anglican divine avers that the connection we make is founded on reasoning to a probable judgment, rather than intuition of a necessary connection.86 In a passage in the Summa Theologica, which as far as I am aware Lonergan does not discuss, St. Thomas also introduces the issue of our conviction that the sun will rise at a given time each day.87 Aquinas does assert that this is a necessary connection,

Insight, 161. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 24. 86 Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), (New York: Harper, 1860), 85–86. The Analogy is certainly part of Lonergan’s intellectual background. It was a massive influence on Newman, who took from it the lesson that ‘probability is the great guide to life’ (as he acknowledges in the Apologia). Thus, Butler was a major influence on the Grammar of Assent, which in turn, played a significant part in Lonergan’s education. It thus gives me pleasure to contemplate the fact that the Analogy was written in the pretty village of Stanhope, in the Durham Dales, not many miles from my home. Butler was rector there in the 1730s, and tradition tells of him composing his great work while riding his black mare along the banks of the river Wear. 87 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 57, art. 3. 84 85

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and what is at work is, no doubt, the background of Aristotelian necessitarian physics. But what is also significant in Aquinas’s discussion at this point is that he contrasts such knowledge of necessity with other types of scientific knowledge, in the area of medical expertise, which will yield not certain knowledge of future effects, but only probable judgments (expressing the matter in language that is not quite that of St. Thomas at this point). St. Thomas writes of such predictions of future events, contrasting them with the necessary knowledge of the rising of the sun: But events which proceed from their causes in the majority of cases are not known for certain, but conjecturally (per coniecturam) thus the doctor knows beforehand the health of the patient . . . doctors who penetrate more deeply into causes of an ailment can pronounce a surer verdict on the future issue thereof. But events which proceed from their causes in the minority of cases are quite unknown; such are casual and chance events.88

Now, we know that the issues St. Thomas is touching on here Lonergan will recast in terms of his in-­depth analysis of statistical emergence and probability. We also know that Lonergan indicates the way his own work on this was a further development of the medieval distinction between contingens ut in maiori parte et contingens ut in minori parte, a distinction at work in this passage from St. Thomas.89 But also worthy of note in the passage is Aquinas’s bringing together, in an anticipatory way at least, what Lonergan distinguishes in terms of v-­probabilities and f-­probabilities, respectively – to use Philip McShane’s vocabulary. Probabilities of verification regard a quality of judgment, while f-­probabilities refer to frequencies of emergent, continuing or declining states. While we make a probable judgment of the v-­type about a state of the f-­type, not all v-­type judgments are about frequency states or depend on them. That proposition x is probably true of reality may simply be a judgment based on the fact of the cogency of the theory and that some evidence is in for its being true.

ST, I, Q. 57, art. 3. A further refinement on probabilistic predictions in science arises in quantum mechanics. Lonergan, following Heelan, points out that the intelligibility grasped in a single formalism in quantum mechanics can be interpreted in one way as an explanatory statistical frequency, and in another way, as a prediction of, what are on the theory, possible, permissible errors. Lonergan’s generalization of the statistically emergent intelligibilities of quantum mechanics to wider scientific domains receives support from recent work in ‘quantum biology’: see Markus Arndt, Thomas Juffmann and Vlatko Vedral, ‘Quantum Physics Meets Biology’, HFSP Journal, vol. 3, no. 6 (2009): 386–400. 89 Lonergan, Collection, CWL, Vol. 4 F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 22, n. 16. 88

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It is important to observe in passing that discussions of probability, as these began to increase in Western thought after the work of Grotius, Pascal, Bernoulli and Bayes, can often tend to elide these two types of probability, clearly separated in Lonergan’s thought. The same is true for Butler’s great work of Christian philosophical apologetics, which stands behind Newman’s Grammar of Assent, and is thus another remote influence on Lonergan.90 Relevant to the question of induction is Aquinas’s point that the depth of an expert’s or scientist’s knowledge of causes will have a bearing on the degree of probability that may be assigned to their prediction of future effects. With these historical instances from the debate on induction in mind, let us return to Lonergan’s contribution to the issue. Lonergan is simply pointing out that generalization to be rational must itself depend on our intelligent and reasonable inquiries, which will, in turn, normally result in at best probable judgments about reality – with varying degrees of probability attached to them. Science itself is a refinement of the intelligent and reasonable operations we deploy in our common-­sense thinking. So let us take a common-­sense example. Pace Hume an adult of average intelligence who daily awaits his bus to work at the usual bus stop does not react to anticipated interconnections in the world in the fashion of one of Pavlov’s hungry, brain-­washed dogs. As Lonergan would insist, we should see this person as one who through accumulated insights, reasonable judgments and well-­grounded social beliefs has gained a familiarity and mastery over the conditions that obtain in the situations of daily life, at home or at work. On the basis of reasonably assessed data, this person informs a fellow bus stop attendee that the no. 997 has an excellent record of arriving on time, and thus, predicts the same result on this occasion. However, neither he nor his companion at the bus stop undergoes some species of mental breakdown when the bus fails to arrive after 25 minutes. As intelligent adults brought up in the world of modern Western urban, technological life, they know that there are

On the development of probabilistic thinking in early modern thought, see Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Daston draws our attention to Hume’s admiration for Butler’s work, albeit Hume was doubtful of his theological convictions. Hume had intended to send Butler a draft of the Inquiry for his comments (Daston, 205, n. 69). Within the ‘Bayesian tradition’ we certainly find thinkers who separate ‘subjective’ from ‘objective’ probability. But there are other problems. In Bayes’s original essay of 1763, ‘chance’ and ‘probability’ are deemed synonymous. This, for Lonergan, is an error. See Insight, 148. For a wider historical survey of philosophical approaches to probability, see James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

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many causes that come into play, and can fail to come into play, to either facilitate or delay the arrival of the no. 997. In fact, were the daily traveller to hear explosions and gun fire coming from the quarter of the city from which the bus begins its round or were there to be a very heavy and sudden fall of snow, his estimation regarding the probable arrival of the bus might be drastically revised downwards. Now our traveller is neither an expert in urban traffic flow, nor in the politics of terrorist operations, meteorology nor the physics affecting engineering design of bus engines, but he knows enough of the world to make an intelligent and reasonable assessment of the situation, as far as he is able, in order to offer advice to the fellow bus traveller, which involves the inductive generalization ‘the no. 997 has an excellent record for arriving on time and I see no reason why that should be different today’. If intelligence and reason detect that the data are similar in all respects, we have no reason to postulate a different explanation in each case; if there is difference in data, we may have reason to judge that there are, in fact, significant differences in explanation between two cases. In between the writing of the passage on expectations of the sunrise in the Summa Theologica and that in Butler’s Analogy had intervened several centuries in which Christian theology and philosophy had served to undermine the necessitarian physics of Aristotle that lie behind Aquinas’s stance on the matter – the 1277 condemnations being a significant and early example of this long and fascinating history of separation of Christian from Aristotelian cosmology.91 But this only serves to free up for wider application Aquinas’s more general point on knowledge of causes and scientific prediction. And that wider application is given further breadth and depth in Lonergan’s thought. The more scientific knowledge we have of the workings of the solar system, the more confident can be our predictions regarding the regularity of the schemes of recurrence that place our planet in a position relative to our nearby star, so that we can reasonably say we expect that the sun will rise tomorrow and that, de facto, we have no reason to think it will not. For St. Thomas, this would only be necessity relative to the created world order (and his Aristotelian understanding of certain aspects of it), rather than ‘absolute necessity’ – which pertains only to God. On the significance of the 1277 condemnations as understood in recent scholarship, a good place to begin is the Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article by T. M. Thijssen, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/condemnation/. On the history of the shift away from Aristotelian necessitarianism and demand for certitude in science, see A. C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking, 3 Vols. (London: Duckworth, 1995); Brian Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 1992); James Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); William A. Wallace, ‘Certitude in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 3 July (1986): 281–91.

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We often enough come across references in analytical philosophers to the putative paradox regarding statistical estimation: it would seem, according to this view, that our intuitive sense is that studying the form of a given race horse will have implications for a rational decision on whether to place a bet, yet the ‘theory of probability’ denies this rationality. Given the confusions that abound in this regard, it is to be lamented that Philip McShane’s ground-­breaking application of Lonergan’s insights to such debates is routinely overlooked.92 That discussion makes evident how we are to distinguish the operation of rationality in betting from that operative in mathematical theory of probability, and both from that at work in empirically applied theory of statistical estimation. Let us now turn our attention to the question of the testing of our theories by empirical means. Lonergan’s canons of selection and operations affirm the central role that empirical verification plays in scientific method.93 However, when we further investigate what the upshot of Lonergan’s position as a whole is for debates over the role of experimental validation in science, some perhaps surprising results arise when, taking his position into account, we examine the debates over this area between Mill and Whewell in the nineteenth century, and Popper and his critics in our own period. Anyone who is in some way familiar with twentieth-century philosophy of science will know that Popper’s falsification criterion relies on a point of logic also highlighted by Mill and Kuhn: experimental identification of relevant data may conclusively disconfirm a theory, but it cannot conclusively confirm a theory. As Lonergan remarks, there is nothing shocking about this elementary piece of logic.94 It is also what distinguishes self-­appropriation (and certain metaphysical theorems derived from it) from the empirical verification of science: if I deny that I make conscious judgments the evidence of my conscious operations in doing so provides conclusive evidence that the contradictory of what is affirmed is the case – there is no further relevant evidence necessary for

McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, chapters 2–5 and 8. Prior to the appearance of McShane’s book, Lonergan had already observed, apropos of J. Albertson’s criticism of his opinion on statistical probability, that the exclusive identification of such theorizing with the pure mathematical work on probability of the tradition of Bernoulli, was indicative of an oversight akin to that which once gave the privilege of exclusivity to Euclidean geometry (Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 74; McShane, 169). McShane’s skilful hermeneutic of R. von Mises’ work on probability pinpoints the clue for correctly understanding how the shift to the empirical is to be carried through in probability theory: see chapter 2. 93 Insight, 94–99. 94 A Third Collection, 138. 92

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the judgment that ‘I do make judgments’ needed.95 But if I deny that theory x is the reason for why green leaves appear from the brown branches of trees in spring, I am not placed in a similarly advantageous cognitive position to adjudicate on the merits of the theory. Further, the debates that Popper’s work stimulated showed that we should not naively imagine that, in the history of science, we find everywhere or even often ‘knock down’ crucial experiments that serve to confirm or disconfirm a theory such that the whole scientific community is instantaneously converted.96 There is the celebrated story of the Astronomer Royal who, on failing to observe what Newton’s theory implied should be observed in the heavens, was told by the great man ‘look again’. All this being granted it is, however, quite implausible to imagine that Newtonian physics would have continued to gain ground in eighteenth-­century Europe and America had Newtonians simply repeated such an injunction on virtually every occasion on which supporting evidence was supposed to be observable. One element of Lonergan’s canon of operations has to do with what Ernan McMullin would call ‘retroduction’. The fact that some basic hypotheses concerning principles of aeronautics appear to be confirmed by every successful aeroplane flight since the Wright brothers tends to add to our reasonable convictions that these hypotheses are probably true of reality. Lonergan’s canon of selection, however, does not ask of scientific experiments exactly what Popper asks of experiments.97 Lonergan’s canon stipulates only that scientific hypotheses should have ‘sensible consequences that can be produced or at least observed’.98 Criticisms of Popper’s demand for an empirical falsification criterion as intrinsic to authentic science argue that, in some way, it asks too much, and in another way, is too thin a criterion. We can start with the latter point first. The scientist Jacob Bronowski, a contributor to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Popper, was also a well-­known TV and media personality in the

Insight, 358–59. We recall Lonergan’s rather Kuhnian’s remark, following Schilpp, in Insight, 194. We can also note that the role of experiment in science does not seem to be exclusively to do with confirmation or disconfirmation. The experiments concerning electricity between the invention of von Guericke’s electrostatic generator in the 1650s and Franklin’s work exploiting the Leyden Jar over a century later seem to have as much to do with further production of relevant data for theory as they do with theory confirmation/disconfirmation. That is not to say that important theoretical advances were lacking in this period, as Franklin’s differentiation of positive and negative charge makes evident. 98 Insight, 94. 95 96 97

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1970s.99 In his essay, he points out that as a scientist well known through media he often received the most outlandish and fanciful theories from members of the public. Now according to Popper’s methodology, such theories as bold and eminently falsifiable should be welcomed and put to the test. In other words, Popper, Bronowski thought, had not paid sufficient attention to criteria relating to the intrinsic coherence, cogency and plausibility of proposed scientific theories. On the other hand, this lack of attention on Popper’s part to the ‘inner strengths’ of a hypothesis prior to any future testing was the subject of criticisms on the part of those who thought that he placed too much stress on decisive experiments of disconfirmation. Among the philosophers who criticize Popper in this way are Paul Thagard100 and the philosopher of historical method B. T. Wilkins.101 Philosophers of science such as Thagard argue that, in certain important instances in the history of science, theories have come to be accepted on the basis of their explanatory power as regards a certain range of relevant data, yet these theories have not stipulated falsifying empirical tests nor have been subject to them. Of course, they still regard the relevant empirical data, and those data constitute evidence for or against the theory. In fact, we see here a rerun of the debate between Whewell and Mill. It is not that Whewell denied the importance of empirical tests when possible; in fact, he bequeathed to us the expression ‘hypothetico-­deductive’, but he also argued that in some cases the decisive factors were the explanatory cogency and simplicity of the theoretical construct. B. T. Wilkins goes on to add to these debates the perspectives of the historian and student of hermeneutics. Wilkins argues that Popper sets the bar too high for historians and interpreters if we are to take his work as indicative of what is required for rational explanation in these areas of cognitive endeavour. Indeed, Wilkins suggests, Popper shows inconsistency both in what he writes on the possibilities of authentic explanation in historical writing and text interpretation, and in his own interpretative work on Plato. Lonergan’s own work also testifies to the possibility of an explanation of the data for which no further critical experimental confirming or falsifying method

J. Bronowski, ‘Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge’, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper I, Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XIV, P. Schilpp, editor (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1976), 606–31. 100 Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 101 B. T. Wilkins, Has History any Meaning? A Critique of Popper’s Philosophy of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 99

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is required in order to render the explanation a good one. I have in mind the methodological point Lonergan makes concerning his metaphysical account of explanatory genus and species.102 Unlike other elements to be determined by a methodical metaphysics, as Lonergan understands it, he claims only ‘unique probability’ for his position on genus and species. However, the position is highly probable, Lonergan avers, because it covers all the relevant data (data from the various sciences, common sense, cognitional research and philosophical anthropology) and offers a more complete, satisfactory and ‘simple’ explanatory account than any other philosophical alternative; and insofar as it ‘covers the data’ it meets the requirements of the canon of selection. Thus, while the testing methods ingeniously formulated by Mill and the way of ‘disconfirmation’ of Popper may, in some, perhaps many instances of reasonable, empirical investigation be highly desirable, they may not always be necessary for a reasoned acceptance of a theoretical construct as the best and most probable explanation of the relevant data. This, Lonergan holds, is the case with his philosophical position on genera and species, and is the case with St. Thomas’s theological ‘model’ of the triune life of God. It is also the case in textual interpretation, historical investigation, and even in some instances, of empirical scientific theory. It is after all what we accept in many cases of criminal investigation. ‘Whodunit?’ in the case of a suspicious death, remains a great mystery until the great Poirot’s little grey cells furnish the materials for his brilliant insights and make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together in a convincing way. This will often happen without the great detective being able to produce any further data or evidence through experimental testing beyond that already collected by the befuddled police inspector first assigned to the investigation. The notion of ‘Ockham’s razor’ is naturally invoked in discussing the issues we have been treating. GEM does in fact help us to unpack and make more precise what is implied by the notion of ‘Ockham’s razor’ as wielded in the name of the sciences. We can subdivide this between the level of understanding and the level of judgment. We have seen that criticisms of Popper’s overemphasis on falsification point to a rather thin account of what we might already want in a theory prior even to bringing it to the level of judgment – thus, Bronowski’s worry that any crackpot can waste our time if he passes along to the scientist a ‘bold’ theory that he is very

Insight, 466.

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willing to have tested and possibly falsified thereby. Of course, in general terms, it is not at all easy to specify how to determine that a postulated theory is overly ‘fanciful’ in a given context. Here, we simply have to refer to what Lonergan describes as the way we acquire familiarity and mastery in various areas of life, including science. Neither Poirot, nor his slow-­witted foil Inspector Japp, are likely to entertain the notion that goblins were guilty of the murder, and in any given context, there are many far less fanciful hypotheses that the trained detective will still rapidly dismiss as totally unlikely. Of course, we may claim in hindsight that certain hypotheses well established later on in the history of science could have been, and possibly were, dismissed as outlandish at an earlier stage. However, we should not be led into an anachronistic fallacy in this regard. No doubt, bound up in the resistance to the innovative in many historical cases have been the irrational social and professional group biases rightly highlighted in Kuhnian history of science. But the resistance and subsequent acceptance in such cases may also have rested on rational grounds: here and now there was not deemed to be sufficient evidence to accept this apparently counterintuitive theory, whereas later there was judged to be so. And it would not be a matter of evidence alone, but also, and rightly, the internal coherence of the proposed theory as it cohered in the network of other probable and interconnecting hypotheses. In addition to these general considerations, Lonergan’s canon of parsimony adds a further element of precision into this ‘level of understanding’ phase of the implementation of ‘Ockham’s razor’, as far as the explanatory sciences are concerned. This element has to do with the requirement that truly scientific hypotheses aim at an understanding of a formal causality in the data, which as independent of all observers, is a nest of intelligible terms and relations relating things-­among-themselves rather than things as located and described simply and solely from the perspectives of our daily interests and concerns.103 Lonergan allows, on the other hand, that this may often be a heuristic ideal aimed at in scientific work rather than a realized achievement since as science is on the way to its goal it will inevitably have to make use of descriptive predicates often and for longer than the ideal would have us wish.

Insight, 102–7.

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A clarification from the viewpoint of GEM of what is entailed in applying ‘Ockham’s razor’ also involves the further level of judgment. If there is sufficient reason, evidence to posit the existence of one causal factor in a situation, there may not be sufficient evidence to posit more than one causal factor.104 This is the meaning of the requirement that scientific theories be ‘simple’ or ‘elegant’ if their purported explanation of the data is to be deemed more probable than that of rival theories. If the investigation of someone’s death yields strong evidence that this is a case of murder, it may also reveal that we have sufficient evidence to posit one human being as murderer. If that is the case, we do not have sufficient evidence to posit that ten or twenty people were involved in the perpetration of the crime – although this might alter as the investigation continues. The desired criteria of ‘simplicity’ or ‘elegance’ have to do with the familiar cognitional activities of making a probable judgment that x is so, and the further judgment that there is, however, not sufficient evidence for saying y and z are also the case. Realizing this means that we can avoid muddled notions that somehow scientists are all really poets at heart; that theory preference in terms of ‘elegance and simplicity’ implies that science is ultimately about aesthetic preferences. I may find Ptolemy’s epicycles a far more ‘elegant’ and aesthetically pleasing account of the cosmos than post-Newtonian and post-Einsteinium cosmology. But this does not provide me with rational grounds for dismissing the rather massive evidence that Ptolemy’s system has been rightly superseded. Before I conclude this section of the chapter on GEM and scientific method, I would like to highlight a further implication of Lonergan’s cognitional analysis for our thinking and linguistic usage concerning the way we make judgments through which we claim that a given theory is probably true of reality. I draw attention also to our linguistic usage in this matter as it seems to me that often in debates over the relative strengths or weaknesses of a theory in, say, history, exegesis and even science, our linguistic expressions may mislead us into thinking that a theory, ours or another’s, is being put forward with more or less rational support than is, in fact, the case. Clearly, our probable judgments with reference to reality, which are relative, as Lonergan explains, to our notion of the virtually unconditioned, the de facto certain,105 are put forward by us as being more or less probable in

We can note that in Insight (p. 682) one of the arguments Lonergan brings against the idea that there might be more than one God is an application of this principle, in Latin, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. 105 Insight, 324–29. 104

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varying degrees.106 Indeed, we can also make judgments to the effect that theory x is somewhat improbable or highly improbable. Sometimes, perhaps when we have reached a certain point in some investigation underway, we may be prepared to say that ‘the evidence is at least consistent with this theory’. Are we at that point saying that the theory is probably true of reality or that it is improbable? I think we would most likely admit that the expression means that the theory is not, or is no longer, improbable, but has some, as least minimal, degree of probability attached to it. But it is at this point in the cognitive quest and debate that the modal expression ‘possible’ is sometimes introduced in a confusing way. The expert informs us that he now thinks theory x is possible. The trouble is, of course, that in other possible worlds, flying pigs and unicorns are also possible. In the world in which we and the expert live, improbable theories and even false theories are possible. What then is really meant? And what might it sometimes be helpful to be a little clearer about in scholarly and other academic debates? Possible, used in the context which we are considering will normally mean ‘probable but with an, at present, low degree of probability attached’. In fact, what is being referred to in such linguistic contexts is not abstract possibility, but what Lonergan writes of as ‘the objective possibility of potency’ – nor is the potency referred to ‘remote’ but fairly ‘proximate’. In other words, the researcher is at this stage sufficiently convinced to say that the data under consideration manifest a real potential for being understood through the hypothesis proposed. Yet, more work, experiment and reflection are required if this insight into real, ‘promising’ potential for coming under this interpretation is to move forward up the scale of probability, or perhaps, slide back. I am not here, of course, advocating a reform of ordinary language, but I am suggesting that this kind of criteriological awareness is not irrelevant for sorting out some cases of confusion and ‘talking past one another’ in academic and scientific debates.

My discussion here relates also to a little discussed section in Insight (pp.  574–75) in which Lonergan raises the intriguing question of degrees of certitude. Clearly, truths arrived at through self-­referentially validating arguments for self-­affirmation are de facto certain. But short of this limit – a limit without which ‘probable’ has no cognitive meaning or conscious reference – there are highly probable judgments that are of such a nature as to warrant us calling them ‘certain’ although not beyond the possibility of revision. Some of these involve belief in truths proposed by others; some would seem to be akin to ‘Moorean certainties’. Lonergan’s treatment of the issue certainly has a background in Aquinas. We saw how in the passage quoted above from the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas distinguishes between certain knowledge, on the one hand, and the probable ‘conjecture’ of the expert, on the other. In De Veritate, Q. 10. a. 8, St. Thomas maintains that self-­knowledge, the science of the soul – that acquired through self-­appropriation – is ‘most certain’ certissima.

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Conclusion John Dewey tells us that finding the right question is being half way to a good answer. Wittgenstein was always reserved in his praise for other philosophers, nevertheless lauded Aquinas’s ability to ask the right questions. The young Bernard Lonergan admired the intellectual gifts of his mathematics tutor at the old Heythrop College, Fr. Charles O’Hara – a man whose abilities are manifest in publications that drew the, rather critical, attention of Wittgenstein.107 But what Lonergan admired most in Fr. O’Hara were his gifts as a pedagogue, his ability to educate his students in a way, a method, a heuristic approach for the expeditious solving of mathematical problems. It was a lesson Lonergan remembered all his life as he sought to provide a method for theology at the level of the times. A method, in the sense we have been discussing, is a scheme of recurrence that is not only intelligible, but also is the expression of human intelligence. It is acquired by individuals and communities as a habit and a skill. As explicitly delineated by intelligence it is a forma artificialis. The wheel of human development turns and turns again. From the skills or methods of the primitive hunter gatherers emerge the skills associated with stable agricultural societies. On the basis of these, there emerged, in accordance with an intelligible probability, the early, great civilizations. Mathematical methods of accounting and other reflexive methods supervened on earlier cultural schemes of recurrence. As the world of ‘theory’ emerges into full view, philosophy appears as a reflexive method, attempting to order and understand how these other human skills and methods should have their place in human life, inserted as it is into the cosmic dynamisms. In the 1920s, the recondite discussions of F. P. Ramsey or Russell concerning the methods for recurrent deductions in mathematical logic had little interest for the man on the Clapham omnibus. But within a few years, these deliberations had played their part in the construction by Turing and Flowers of the first electronic computers, used by British war-­time intelligence at Bletchley Park, to crack German military codes. The impact of that invention, taking its place among so many other

See Caring About Meaning, 1–2. In his Lectures on Religious Belief, Wittgenstein is critical of Fr. Charles O’Hara’s contribution to a symposium on science and religious belief, the papers from which were published in 1931 (Science and Religion: A Symposium [London: Gerald Howe, 1931]). Perhaps, O’Hara was preparing this paper while Lonergan was still his student. Some decades later, we might be in a position to bring Lonergan’s philosophy to bear on a defense of his old teacher’s thought from the fideistic criticisms of Wittgenstein, while no doubt conceding to Wittgenstein some critical points that are justified.

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technological advances, moulds and fashions our communal life and cultural self-­perceptions in the early twenty-­first century. And so we have the discourses on our current Western, technological existenz of Ellul, Lyotard, Baudrillard and others. In the spirit of Husserl’s Crisis, however, Lonergan’s Generalized Empirical Method invites us to move beyond the intentio intenta to the intentio intendens. GEM is certainly in some respects techné, but it is also fundamentally sapiential. As metamethod, it is at once integrative as it refers in an explanatory way to the diverse and ever subdividing methods we devise, and at the same time, self-­ referentially authenticating. Lonergan’s GEM provides a heuristic that identifies both radical change and profound continuity in the cultural processes that give rise to new methods and are, in turn, conditioned by them. His ‘universal viewpoint’ is a fairly modest indication of the conditions of possibility of our intelligent and reasonable affirmations regarding the existence of beings, in very different times and places from our own, who we can still affirm to be ‘human beings’ like ourselves – neither stones, nor photons nor angels.108 In his remarks on Hao Wang’s post-Gödelian logical ‘method’, Lonergan points to the anthropological significance of Wang’s notion of stratification among logical levels, according to which we may ‘sublate’ lower levels into higher ones in an open-­ended, ongoing fashion: ‘In other words, the human mind’, as St. Thomas says, ‘has a natural desire for the beatific vision; it is infinitely open.’109 It is a similar point to that Lonergan makes in Insight when he writes: . . . there can be in man a perennial source of higher systems because the materials of such systemization are not built into his constitution. For an animal to begin a new mode of living, there would be needed not only a new sensibility but also a new organism. . . . But in man a new department of mathematics, a new viewpoint in science, a new civilization, a new philosophy has its basis, not in a new sensibility but simply in a new manner of attending to data and of forming combinations of combinations of combinations of data . . . [in man] . . . genus is coincident with species, for it is not just a higher system but a source of higher systems.110

This is the context for Lonergan’s quip that his work reveals the truth of ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, only a little worse!’ 109 Phenomenology and Logic, 66. 110 Insight, p. 292. 108

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But as Lonergan often insists, by ‘method’ he does not mean the daily spinning of the machinery in the laundrette. Methods emerge in the minds of human persons in a way that is dependent on the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value; such methods, in their turn, further transform the cultural environment. Methods are forms of meaning, and as such, are cognitive, constitutive and effective in nature. At best, they promote and facilitate the movement of human beings towards the self-­transcendence of knowing truth and true value. But even when they are indeed ‘ways’ to truth and value, their discovery, elaboration and application remains the work of finite, historically developing, and we must add, morally flawed beings. More often, however, methods themselves require revision, correction or even replacement in the light of the authentic, ongoing application of GEM, understood as intrinsic to our nature as human persons. Earlier in the chapter I traced the development of Lonergan’s use of the expression ‘Generalized Empirical Method’. While the expression ‘transcendental method’ is embedded in the development of Lonergan’s thought, and as argued above, plays a permanent and vital role in his work, his return to GEM as his preferred designation for his overall project is, I believe, welcome. When we are considering the eighth functional speciality, ‘communications’, as it regards philosophy – and philosophy in its role vis-à-­vis theology – then I believe the expression GEM to be most apt for our times. It is certainly a designation that those working in the world of analytical philosophy might find less off-­putting than some alternatives. But beyond this academic community, in our world, dominated as it is by the hegemony of scientific technology, mention of the ‘empirical’ is more likely to be a helpful starting point than is the word transcendental. In other words, we touch on a matter of apologetics. And Lonergan was, in fact, not uninterested in the project of a sober and nuanced apologetics for our times.111

See Insight, 764; see also Early Works on Theological Method I, 272, 280.

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Knowledge and Our Limits: Lonergan and Williamson The primary purpose of this essay is to suggest ways in which Bernard Lonergan’s critical realist philosophy might contribute to the epistemological debates discussed in Timothy Williamson’s influential book Knowledge and Its Limits. The book has played an important role in work produced in epistemology in analytical circles in the first decade of the twenty-­first century; it has already occasioned at least one collection of critical essays and has provided the stimulus for the endeavours of a younger generation of analytical philosophers, as can be witnessed from the publications of Jason Stanley.1 Knowledge and Its Limits also bears the hallmarks of the type of analysis pursued in Williamson’s earlier work on the philosophy of linguistic vagueness. As the current occupant of the Wykeham Chair of Logic at Oxford University, Williamson is the successor of such illustrious analytical philosophers as A. J. Ayer and Michael Dummett.2 Together with other former students of Dummett, such as John McDowell and Crispin Wright, Williamson is one of the major voices in current analytical philosophy. In order to provide some insight into his influence, I also extend the discussion of his work to incorporate briefly other works of his beyond his book on epistemology.

Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard, editors, Williamson on Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jason Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2 The current occupant of the Waynflete Professorship in Metaphysical Philosophy, another of the prestigious Oxford philosophy chairs, is John Hawthorne. [Note: In 2015, Hawthorne moved to USC, being replaced by Ofra Magidor.] Successor to R. G. Collingwood, Gilbert Ryle and Peter Strawson, Hawthorne is a Christian, while it would appear that Williamson has no religious affiliations. However, as noted in the body of the essay, Williamson is critical of the taken-­for-granted reductionist naturalism that underpins the atheism prevalent among a number of analytical philosophers. 1

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Oxford philosophy in Lonergan’s development Before turning to that primary task, however, I would like to indulge in a historical excursus regarding Lonergan’s thought and its relation to ‘Oxford’, and thus, analytical philosophy. Given that the present essay is an exercise in comparison and contrast between Lonergan and a significant figure in current analytical circles, I do not think some such observations on Lonergan’s relationship with the tradition from which Williamson emerges to be inappropriate. It was certainly a journey of transformation that the young Canadian Jesuit undertook as, in the company of two other Jesuit students, Lonergan traversed the Atlantic in 1926 to begin studies at Heythrop College, deep in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside. It was to this neo-Palladian edifice, built by Thomas Archer for the Duke of Shrewsbury in the early eighteenth century, that the English Jesuits had moved their philosophy and theology students in 1924.3 It is clear that the intention of at least some of the authorities concerned was to have a house of studies in some way within the orbit of the great university city.4 As well as the study of prescribed philosophy texts – of a Suarezian provenance, as Lonergan later commented – the students studied for a London University B.A. An elective on that course, for which the young Lonergan opted, was devoted to logic and methodology, for which one of the set texts was H. W. B. Joseph’s Introduction to Logic. In addition to his reading of Bl. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent, the reading of Joseph played a crucial part in the young Jesuit’s philosophical awakening. The fact is attested to by one of Lonergan’s earliest published essays, which has to do with Joseph’s work, and in interviews later in life; significantly, in the latest of these, he remarks that it was thanks to Joseph that his eyes were first opened to the methodological questions of modern science.5

On Lonergan’s formative years at Heythrop College, see William A. Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), chapter 3; Richard M. Liddy, Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier Books, 1993). 4 In a presentation given on the first day, held at the old Heythrop College (now Heythrop Park Hotel), of the conference Journey of Transformation (June 2013), Fr. William Mathews informed Lonergan scholars that Roman Jesuit authorities had mistakenly understood the English county postal abbreviation ‘Oxon’ to mean that Heythrop College was in the university city itself. 5 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ‘The Form of Inference’, Collection, CWL, Vol. 4, F.E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 3–16; Lonergan, A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 38, 263, 276; Lonergan, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, P. Lambert, C. Tansey and C. M. Going, editors (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982), 3–4. 3

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The influence of the British philosophical tradition on Lonergan’s development has received welcome attention in the form of a fine monograph by Mark Morelli on Lonergan’s reading in the 1930s of the Oxford Plato scholar, J. A. Stewart.6 Since the publication of M. Jamie Ferreira’s work on Newman, we have been in a better position to appreciate the ways in which the Grammar of Assent is an expression of the apologetic debates on the philosophy of religion as these unfolded in the previous two centuries of British philosophy.7 Consequently, students of Lonergan’s thought should be in a better position to appreciate the way Lonergan’s close reading of the Grammar was an assimilation of that tradition by osmosis. The valuable studies of Lonergan’s early intellectual development by Richard Liddy and William Mathews serve to draw our attention to the concomitant influence of Joseph’s thought on Lonergan, while I am sure they would both allow that further work could profitably be done in this area. If we look at the lengthy Introduction to Logic, the prospects for such further research start to manifest themselves. To begin with, this is no ‘philosophy free’ technical introduction to formal logic for the neophyte, such as might be had in cases of classic texts on Aristotelian syllogistic technique or in such works as Richard Jeffrey’s Formal Logic, through which I was introduced to symbolic logic in the 1980s. In his 1957 Boston College lectures on mathematical logic, Lonergan remarked that the debates surrounding philosophy of logic in mid-­ twentieth-century analytical philosophy demonstrated that logic was no longer a ‘philosophy neutral’ activity.8 His comments, I take it, were directed at the logic courses that were standard in the Catholic seminary curriculum of the time; for thirty years earlier, he would have read the same point made by Joseph in the beginning of his text.9 Joseph’s work is, then, a philosophical text. It takes its place in the philosophy of logic and methodology debates that raged in British philosophy through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even as the revival of logic was underway. That revival was seen in Whately’s text of the 1820s, to which the young Newman made a contribution, and then in the important work by J. S. Mill. Of further significance, when we consider Lonergan’s reading of the text, is the way that Joseph sides with Mill’s adversary, the polymath Anglican Divine William Mark D. Morelli, At the Threshold of the Halfway House (Boston College: Lonergan Institute, 2007). It is, perhaps, time for a work of similar quality to be produced on Lonergan and Joseph. 7 M. Jamie Ferreira, Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt: The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid and Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 8 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 89–93. 9 H. W. B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 12. 6

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Whewell in debates, originally conducted in the 1830s and 1840s, over the methodology and logic of scientific discovery. From his own historical investigation of science, Whewell insisted, pace Mill, that more was needed beyond deduction, induction, and even, Mill’s ingenious methods of testing, to account for scientific progress and rationality. Thus, before C.S. Peirce had come up with the notion of abduction, Whewell spoke of the need for ‘colligatory concepts’. By this expression, he meant the ingenious bringing together of data in an explanatory way under some conceptual and formal rubric.10 Now while it would be a long shot indeed to suggest that this lay behind Lonergan’s subsequent elaboration of insight as a conscious grasp of intelligible, unifying form in the data, a result of Lonergan’s reaching up to the mind of Aquinas, it is not far-­fetched to suggest that, at the very least, his reading of such opinions failed to throw up any obstacle on his path towards these later intellectual discoveries. As we read Joseph’s philosophical work, we can also observe the way debates are joined with the British idealist tradition – Bradley and Bosanquet – and that there is also criticism of the emerging school of symbolic or class logic, as represented by Bertrand Russell.11 During the nineteenth century, British mathematicians, such as Venn, De Morgan, Babbage and Dodgson, also contributed to the revival of logic, suggesting ways in which the Leibnizian ideal of a formal language might enhance logical techniques; a parallel development was also underway with Peirce in the United States. In 1900, Bertrand Russell underwent his own species of ‘intellectual conversion’ on encountering Peano’s mathematics in Paris, and this conversion was further reinforced by his discovery of Frege. In light of subsequent developments, we can note that not all intellectual conversion may be for the better! Lonergan’s philosophical oeuvre, in fact, provides us with a rich and insightful dialectic regarding both the strengths and weaknesses of this symbolic turn.12 Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 468–73. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, pp. 6 n. 1, 27 n. 3, 357 n. 2, 228 n. 2. Remarks made by Lonergan in later years help confirm the view that it is British idealists whom he has in his sights in the section in Insight headed ‘Contrast with Relativist Analysis’: Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 366–71; and Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, CWL, Vol. 17, Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 348. 12 See Andrew Beards, ‘Logical Foundations’, João Vila-Chã, S.J., editor, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Tomo 63 (2007): 919–39. A further point I would underline here concerns Lonergan’s warnings as to the dangers of an uncritical surrender to ‘technique’, illustrated by Behmann’s relegation of the conditional to the realms of mythic ‘folk psychology’ (see Phenomenology and Logic, 98–100). Given such developments in the early 1950s, it is little surprise that Quine went on to advocate the possible revision of logical principles such as noncontradiction and that Graham Priest has taken him seriously. 10 11

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Joseph and his philosophical mentor at Oxford, John Cook Wilson, however, remained unimpressed by the results of a good number of these developments, believing that the shift to a formal language had the effect, in a number of crucial cases, of obfuscating cognitional and logical points rather than clarifying them. John Cook Wilson, a convert from idealism, was the major figure in the Oxford philosophical movement of which Joseph was a part. Cook Wilson died in between the production of the first and second editions of Joseph’s Logic, but his influence continued in Oxford through Joseph and other Oxford direct realists such as H. A. Pritchard.13 The story of the development of analytical philosophy has as one of its principal strands the battle joined between the new realists and the older generation of British idealists – another occurring at the heart of the Habsburg Empire, with the Vienna circle. In Cambridge, this campaign was conducted by G. E. Moore and Russell. But it was Russell’s contribution to effect a mathematical turn, the turn to symbolic logic as a new philosophical therapy. In Oxford, things happened differently. Cook Wilson and his circle also attacked idealism and proposed in its stead a direct realist epistemology, although the idealists were not so easily defeated. Succeeding Cook Wilson as Wykeham Professor during the time of Lonergan’s sojourn in Oxfordshire was the idealist Joachim. And R. G. Collingwood, an idealist, remained in place until 1941. It was not until the 1930s, when the young Gilbert Ryle and A. J. Ayer began to make their mark, that Oxford philosophy could also be seen as moving in the direction of what we now take to be characteristic features of analytical philosophy.14 This is part of the story of the development of British, and thus, analytical philosophy in the twentieth century, a story into which, it is no exaggeration to say the young Lonergan was caught up through his reading of a contemporary philosopher. For this is what Joseph was in the late 1920s: a contemporary

See H. A. Pritchard, ‘H. W. B. Joseph, 1867–1943’, Mind, 53 (210), (1943): 189–91. I recall a pleasant meal, about thirty years ago, with Bishop B. C. Butler. One of the topics that came up in conversation was Butler’s very able fellow philosophical-­theologian in the Downside Benedictine community, Dom Illtyd Trethowan. Bishop Butler commented that Dom Illtyd had remained a faithful adherent to the intuitionist, direct realism of Pritchard, another disciple of Cook Wilson, in which he had been schooled as a philosophy student at Oxford in the 1920s. The remark goes a long way in explaining the tenor of Lonergan’s gracious yet critical 1950 review of Dom Illtyd’s 1948 book on certainty: Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ‘Review of Dom Illtyd Trethowan, Certainty: Philosophical and Theological’, Shorter Papers, CWL, Vol. 20, Robert C. Croken, Robert M. Doran and D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 180–82. 14 One of the first works to draw philosophical attention to Ryle was his 1932 paper ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’. The paper, which offers, what analytical philosophers would currently call, a deflationary analysis of our talk about ‘existence’ is discussed in Lonergan’s 1957 lectures. See Phenomenology and Logic, 133–35. 13

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Oxford philosopher, a Fellow of New College and an active teacher during the time Lonergan studied his work so closely at Heythrop. Mathews informs us that the Heythrop students would often take a trip to Oxford on days off. Perhaps Lonergan brushed sleeves in Oxford bookshops with Joseph, Collingwood and Stewart!15 What is certain is that in immersing himself in Joseph’s lengthy philosophical work, Lonergan was immersing himself in the contemporary Oxford philosophy of the day, and it was that philosophy, which according to Lonergan’s own later testimony, had a very significant effect on his intellectual development.

A post-Gettier epistemology One of the central themes of Williamson’s work on epistemology is what he terms an ‘anti-­luminosity’ doctrine. Williamson argues that we do not enjoy a luminous self-­presence in consciousness. In the first two chapters of Knowledge and Its Limits, he explores some of the implications of this view, arguing that we can often be surprised at our own conscious reactions to a turn of events: one professed indifference to the outcome of the Ashes cricket series, but one is surprised to discover just how pleased one is when the final results emerge. Not all our ‘beliefs’ then, according to Williamson, are transparent to us. He writes, ‘Given that knowing p is a mental state, we will not expect knowing whether one is in it to be always easy.’16 This advertence to the distinction, between what is present in consciousness (and subconsciousness), on the one hand, and on the other, what is present in the explicitly professed judgments we make about ourselves, would certainly be welcome from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s philosophy. Indeed, Williamson believes analytical epistemology needs to be fleshed out in this direction and in other complementary ways in order to manifest that philosophy of mind and epistemology are intimately connected. While the ‘anti-­luminosity’ thesis is a step in the right direction, we might wish that it were further developed in the book and that some of its implications, as drawn out by Lonergan, might be observed. Lonergan’s distinction between

Before Dr. Beeching went to work axing railway routes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was possible to make the eighteen-­or-so-­mile journey from Heythrop College into Oxford by train from the nearby town of Chipping Norton. We know Lonergan would take the train to London for examinations at London University. 16 Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, 24. 15

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conscious self-­presence, on the one hand, and conscious self-­knowledge, on the other, is of crucial importance in clarifying the issues. In our knowing process, for instance, we consciously attend to the data of sense (or of consciousness itself), asking questions of it. As intelligently conscious, we may enjoy insights and consciously strive to express these in words and well-­articulated concepts. Going on to ask further conscious questions as to the correctness of our concepts, theories or ideas, we can operate consciously as reasonable in assessing the evidence and in making definite or probable judgments on the basis of that evidence. All this is consciously done; some or all of it in a given instance may not be formulated or expressed in an explicit way in judgments that express self-­ knowledge. In everyday circumstances, we can shift between consciousness-­of and self-­descriptive knowledge-­of, at least to a certain extent. If I am busy, concentrating on trying to sand down the side of a door and my wife calls out to me ‘What are you doing?’, my answer will not normally just be some attempt to describe in a neutral way the movement of my hands and the objects they hold; rather I will mix such descriptions with account of my mental, conscious intentions and insights regarding the work. The shift happens naturally and spontaneously, but as I have said, only ‘to a certain extent’. Lonergan’s Aquinas-­inspired detailed account of our conscious cognitional and evaluative operations overlaps to some extent with what analytical philosophers call ‘folk psychological’ descriptions. And this is to be expected: we can all speak about our looking at things, hearing sounds, and about our asking questions and making judgments that we might claim are reasonable, able as we may be to go on to enumerate at least some of our reasons. But a detailed and subtle account of these acts and their interrelation is another matter, as is the answering of questions about how and why engaging in such activity can result in objective knowledge of reality. In short, we can observe in this context that Lonergan is committed to a massive historical ‘anti-­luminosity’ thesis insofar as he gives an anthropological account of the way the polymorphism of human consciousness tends to obfuscate a correct and detailed account of our own cognitive processes. Philosophers down the ages have, like the rest of us, deployed cognitional structure in coming to know the human and physical world. But if self-­consciousness were so self-­luminous, why would there ever be such deep differences and divergences among philosophers and schools in their theories of knowledge and mind? This process of rendering explicit in knowledge of self that which occurs already in self-­consciousness is the challenge Lonergan attempts to meet in his philosophy.

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Williamson often comments that we may not be in a position always to give an account of what is going on in our consciousness, even if we are in a position to raise a question regarding it. This is quite correct; for our knowing of ourselves or of anything else is a contingent matter. In this regard, he alludes to states of deluded consciousness, and at other places in the book, we find the kind of fine-­ tuned arguments concerning the gradation of mental states and their possible description that evince Williamson’s ability to handle the kind of sorites conundrums that have brought his earlier work on vagueness to the attention of analytical philosophers. Suppose we feel cold and damp at 6.45 a.m., and warm and dry by midday: if we were asked at a series of possible intervals about our feeling state between those two times, we might not always be in a position to give a clear answer. Williamson does not, of course, deny that sometimes we are in the kind of state where self-­knowledge is possible. Indeed, he is insistent that, ‘. . . we have some non-­observational knowledge of our own knowledge and ignorance and not of the knowledge and ignorance of others.’17 Were he to deny this his position would, of course, be incoherent: his whole analysis rests at crucial points on the evidence he points to regarding what we can say we are and are not conscious of. While, naturally, he does not deny this, I think some of the weaknesses in his work have to do with an analysis that is insufficiently nuanced as regards why and how such a denial would be incoherent. Some of those weaknesses will be highlighted below. Arguing that we can be subjected to deluded states (e.g., taking mesmeric orders from a guru)18 is implicitly a claim not to be subjected to such delusions in the intelligent and reasonable conscious operations deployed to make these judgments about human reality. If we were to indulge in such incoherent argument the incoherence can be pointed out to us, or we can notice it ourselves, insofar as we attend to, understand and judge that these self-­same conscious acts with their implicit claims to successful knowledge are occurring, while intrinsic to the same argumentative process is also the conscious claim to disqualify all such knowledge claims from success. Incoherence is known and judged to be so, then, as we successfully shift from certain conscious intelligent and reasonable operations to an explicit knowledge of the same, itself an expression of our conscious intelligence and reason in action.

Knowledge and Its Limits, 25. Knowledge and Its Limits, 14.

17 18

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The implications of this for many classic (and not so classic) philosophical discussions are not so readily admitted. So when Hume or Kant, or Heidegger, Derrida and Marion commenting on Husserl, argue that we do or do not experience such and such in our consciousness, and that, therefore, we are or are not capable of doing what Husserl, perhaps, holds that we can do, they often enough do not advert to the conscious intelligent and reasonable activities they de facto deploy in claiming that we cannot noetically achieve x: and under the heading ‘achieving x’, we can include the successful knowledge of consciousness itself. Their conclusions entail that they and we can know, by deploying the intelligent and reasonable conscious operations, the facts about consciousness, its capabilities and its limitations. Edmund Gettier’s 1963 article on epistemology is considered a watershed in analytical philosophical circles, and accordingly, its legacy plays a major role in Williamson’s book. Prior to Gettier’s article knowledge, in analytical philosophical circles, had been happily and generally characterized as ‘warranted true belief ’, or ‘warranted true assertion’. That was now challenged. Imagine a scene in which two academic philosophers lost in wise ruminations suddenly realize the hour is late and rush off to a university meeting. Both, being absent-­minded sorts, are bereft of a wrist watch. As they hurry past a lecture room, one says that there is still time before the midday meeting, while the other contradicts him. Glancing at the lecture room clock as they pass, he remarks ‘no, it’s twelve o’clock!’ Now it happens that this assertion corresponds with the way the world is: it is truly midday. However, the evidence provided by the clock glanced at furtively does not warrant the belief since, in fact, the clock, unbeknown to its beholder, stopped at twelve midnight two weeks earlier. The belief is true, but it is not warranted by the evidence. We can think of more interesting examples from history, perhaps. Galileo was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but his principal evidence for the assertion, the movement of the tides, does not justify the claim. The upshot of all this for current epistemological debates in analytical philosophy is the division between externalists and internalists. Given the acknowledged strength of Gettier’s critique of earlier analytical assumptions, the externalists believe they are the winning team, especially as their position is further supported by Hilary Putnam’s position that meaning is not in the head. The internalists attempt to rebut this view in various ways, one of which is to point to apparent instances in which our own consciousness of states and our knowledge coincide. But as we have seen, Williamson is not convinced by such attempts, pointing out, in accord with his anti-­luminosity thesis, that

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(to put it in Lonergan’s terms) self-­consciousness is in no way coextensive with self-­knowledge.19 It would seem, then, that victory should be accorded to the externalists, and that as a consequence, knowledge cannot be thought of as a psychological state pure and simple. Williamson, referring to a claim made by both Jaegowan Kim and Stephen Stich, sums up this position as holding that whether a belief is true or not, constitutes real knowledge or not, is not something that can have any internal manifestation in the psychology of the individual putting forward the claim or holding the belief. Two psychological states of belief could be just the same, but we might count one as knowledge and the other not, solely because the state of affairs in the world confirms the one but not the other.20 But Williamson refuses to accept this consequence. Rather, he argues that knowledge is a mental, psychological phenomenon, and is uneasy about giving up the prospect of seeing genuine knowing as a conscious, psychological reality. For he remarks that, ‘mere believing is botched knowing; belief aims at knowledge’.21 On his view, ‘To call knowing a mental state is to assimilate it, in a certain respect, to paradigmatic mental states such as believing, desiring, and being in pain.’22 How can this follow given that he accepts the failure of any internalist project? The answer is seen in what we might describe as Williamson’s ‘psychological pragmatism’. Knowledge, in terms of overwhelming or strong conviction that x is the case, is still to be understood as a psychological phenomenon. Employing various examples, Williamson concludes that we would all acknowledge that there is a difference in our behaviour when based on a claim ‘I know that . . .’ from that which ensues on the basis of the weaker assertion, ‘I think that . . .’. This is the case, ‘all things being equal’, as, however, Williamson allows.23 So the burglar is more likely to spend the night ransacking a house he has entered if he says to his accomplice he ‘knows’ the lady occupant possesses valuable jewellery, than if he simply professes his opinion that this is likely. While I think we can grant this is the case in human actions, the ‘all things being equal’ is surely a caveat the sceptic will exploit. Stories abound from history of those

Williamson does not mention them in the book, but the arguments of the late Oxford philosopher J. L Mackie also point in this direction. For a critical appraisal of these, see Andrew Beards, Insight and Analysis: Essays Applying Lonergan’s Thought (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2010), chapter 1. 20 Knowledge and Its Limits, 50. 21 Knowledge and Its Limits, 47. 22 Knowledge and Its Limits, 27. 23 Knowledge and Its Limits, 62. 19

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who have risked life, limb and the bank account in pursing this or that Eldorado, the existence of which remained an abiding and motivating conviction throughout ultimately disappointing but daring exploits. Thus, it is difficult to see how Williamson’s notion, that what counts as true ‘knowledge’, rather than mere belief or opinion, is decided simply in terms of the strength of an individual’s psychological conviction that something is the case, this conviction manifesting its force in the determination with which that individual pursues goals reliant on the fact that the situation is as believed. While on the subject of scepticism, it may be opportune to skip forward to a chapter Williamson devotes to countering one strand of sceptical thought that he considers significant.24 He modestly admits, however, that he does not pretend to be able to counter scepticism by entirely decapitating the hydra.25 His argument, again characterized by the kind of reductio seen in his analyses of sorites paradoxes,26 is with the assumed premise of some sceptical moves concerning the identity of experiential states between which there is no way of deciding that one is caused by the world in the ‘right way’ – to give us objective knowledge – and the other is not. Examining the example of experiential data over the stretch of a period of over an hour or so that we might have in watching a sunset, he points out that we are rarely, if ever, in a position to give a detailed description or account of all the minute shades and nuances of our divergent perceptual experience over such a period. The conclusion is, therefore, that we are rarely, if ever, in a position to say that two sets of experiential data are the same, and thus, the sceptic’s initial premise is flawed. While we can readily grant the subtlety and precision of Williamson’s argumentation in this case as in others, cases in which informal argument is buttressed by impressive displays of technical, symbolic reformulations of the same, we are left wondering how significant for actual philosophical debates the results of some of these arguments are. It appears that higher animals, at least, also perform cognitional activities that can be categorized as abstractive: thus, they apply lessons learned in one context to numerous others. Human beings do the same, yet add to this repertoire higher and further types of intelligent and reasonable abstractive processes. In doing so, we are able confidently to identify

Knowledge and Its Limits, chapter 8. Knowledge and Its Limits, 26. 26 Such arguments are typical of his earlier, controversial book: Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 24 25

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one situation as ‘the same’ as another, while discounting numerous experiential differences as being irrelevant to such cognitive evaluations, be these of the type we share with higher animals or of those specific to human intelligence and reasonableness. That the sky is cloudy today on my revisiting Staindrop village, is discounted by me as irrelevant to the judgment that this is the same place as I visited before on a day of fine weather. No doubt detailed analysis of my perceptual experiences would reveal that there were other numerous differences between the experiences of the two visits; perhaps my eyesight has deteriorated by a degree so slight that it could be detected only with scientific equipment. All that the sceptic needs, surely, to make his point is that we do often have situations – with practical jokes or CIA ruses – in which, with the very best effort on the part of the subjects involved no significant difference can be detected between the normal experience of the data and that, in fact, on this occasion fabricated by the trickster or spy. In other words, while admitting the point Williamson labours to establish, the effective contribution made to the stock of antisceptical responses is rather paltry. All the sceptic needs to make his or her point is to draw our attention to the rather universal human experience of sometimes making mistakes when, despite our very best efforts, we fail to detect any significant difference between two sets of data that are, in fact, data on different situations or things. Despite, then, acknowledging the force and cogency of externalist, postGettier arguments against knowledge as being a psychological state, Williamson wants to hold on to this philosophical view of the phenomenon, and he does so by way of arguing for a kind of probabilistic pragmatism.27 For him, knowledge is intrinsically a ‘factive state’. He writes, ‘A propositional attitude is factive if and only if, necessarily, one has it only to truths. Examples include the attitudes of seeing, knowing, and remembering.’28 For students of Lonergan’s philosophy, the claim will certainly alert them to some fundamental questions regarding Williamson’s thought, as yet a further expression of the kind of ‘knowledge as perceptual experience’ view that Lonergan finds endemic in the tradition; the

The other major source of inspiration in current analytical philosophy for attacks on the notion of knowledge as primarily psychological arises from Putnam’s criticisms of the idea that ‘meaning is in the head’. Since I have dealt with this at length in my book on metaphysics, I refer the reader to that discussion: see Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 of Knowledge and Its Limits, on ‘Primeness’, takes a position in this debate that has features similar to the one I opt for. 28 Knowledge and Its Limits, 34. 27

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concern will be that it is yet another philosophical manifestation of the confusing conflation of the noetic experiences we enjoy as specifically human with those we share with the higher animals. Williamson does qualify this, in the first chapter of the book, by pointing out that we may see someone doing something without understanding what they are doing. It is that qualification that we would like to see unpacked further and its implications for epistemology worked out with further precision. It is, of course, the domain that Lonergan explores at length in the analysis of intelligent, conscious insight, both direct and reflective. Williamson rightly calls for the closer collaboration of epistemology and philosophy of mind in analytical philosophy. But we may point out that such a merger needs to produce fruit in terms of an appreciation of how understanding and knowing are related and how our ‘what is it?’ questions are related in this process to our ‘is it so?’ questions, asked with regard to the putative theories and explanations put forward by ourselves or others to account for the data. Employing Lonergan’s terms, we can say that a phenomenology of Verstehen is as much a crying need in analytical philosophy as it is in the continental tradition.29 To talk of ‘seeing’ as ‘factive’ is, on the position of the critical realist, also misleading. Imagine that I have been looking at a student notice board in a university; the board is a mosaic of notices of various sizes, shapes and colours. Later, a police officer, investigating some possible drug dealing operation, asks me if I saw on the board a small green notice of a particular shape, which subsequently disappeared. I was certainly not focusing on that notice at the time, searching as I was for something on an upcoming musical performance, but after some reflection I do affirm that, such a notice was indeed in my purview. To describe everything that is within my purview at any time as ‘factive’ or ‘factual’ is therefore unhelpful, since, to begin with, it elides the distinction between what is merely there as experiential data, unattended to, and data to which I am attending. More seriously, it also runs together the ‘facts’ I come to know through reasonable judgments on the basis of my understanding of the data, with each and every possibly identifiable item of the contents of my experiential encounter with the world at a given moment. But what, then, are we to make of the externalist argument, and indeed the Gettier arguments, from the perspective of Lonergan’s critical realism? In answering this question, we can remind ourselves of one of the criticisms

Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 365.

29

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Lonergan offers of Husserl’s philosophy as elaborated in the Crisis – a criticism that indicates some fundamental aspects of Lonergan’s dialectic. In an evaluation that includes much that is positive, Lonergan points out that Husserl’s notion that the conscious cogito provides the necessary philosophical fundamentum is flawed: for if that conscious self and its intentionality are known, through intelligent and reasonable inquiry – as they must be – then we affirm them as numbered among the beings; we affirm that they exist. Our knowledge of being, of what is, reality, is therefore more fundamental, both as achieved in such instances and as what is operative as consciously intended even when, as Williamson reminds us, we are not making such operations themselves objects of explicit knowledge of self. Recalling that dialectic, we may now turn to the externalist conclusions and the Gettier arguments that Williamson takes as his starting point.30 If I claim (judge) that knowledge is not warranted assertion because the way things are in the world makes a statement true, and the warrant in certain cases does not guarantee this, then this itself is a case in which I am claiming to know what is true in the world (reality) because of the sufficiency of the rational warrant of my argument. If, as an externalist, I judge (claim) that never is true knowledge of reality achieved as something which is consciously, psychologically achieved as a grasp of sufficiency of evidence (warrant), then, it may be pointed out to me, that in this instance I claim to know what really and truly is the case because I consciously grasp a supposed sufficiency of evidence. Further, if these instances are understood to be self-­destructive and incoherent, then this reasonable acknowledgment can provide the cognitional basis for a positive account. For the knowledge that these judgments are not so, is itself a case of correct judgments knowing reality, and in such an instance, the reality is known because the prior cognitional claims and acts are known to be such. And in addition, they are known not to reach their goal (of correct knowledge) because of the incoherence involved in them. This positive knowledge (of these externalist, Gettier-­inspired judgments as incoherent) is itself a genuine instance in which we consciously grasps that reality is correctly known, and is indeed known because of a psychologically grasped sufficiency of evidence.

We can also recall that, most fundamentally knowledge for Lonergan is analysed in Aristotelian terms as identity between knower and known, not as warranted assertion, or better, judgment. However, Lonergan very fruitfully deploys the various aspects of the possible Thomistic analysis of truth, as verum est medium in quo cognoscitur ens, id quod est, in his evaluation of mid-­twentieth-­ century debates on truth in analytical philosophy in his 1957 lectures: see Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 69–76.

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These examples of cognitional self-­reversal and the positive judgments that arise as a result serve in a peremptory fashion to draw our attention to what is present in our reasoned judgments as to what is the case, what is true of reality, be these concerned with our consciousness or with any other beings in the world: all of them, insofar as they are reasoned judgments proper to human beings, will involve a conscious, psychological grasp of evidence as sufficient or as approaching (as probable) sufficiency. A further significant observation to make is that the Gettier arguments should not conceal the fact that the cases and instances under discussion imply that other interlocutors or contributors past or present are the source of any corrections involved; other human knowers are the source of either the corrections as to the supposed erroneous judgments as to the facts of the person in the imagined or real cases invoked, or of the errors concerning the way reasons or evidence were taken to be sufficient warrant but were, in fact, not so. It is other human beings who inform us that we are right about the time, but wrong in thinking this evidence (the broken clock we attend to) warrants the judgments. Since this is so, no one escapes from making claims to know what is the case, which are at once psychological, conscious activities of intelligent and reasonable judgment on the basis of evidence. To think otherwise is to chase the chimerical ‘view from nowhere’, free of all human knowers. The cases of genuine epistemological interest arising from the Gettier discussions, therefore, have to be dealt with in other ways. In the light of Lonergan’s cognitional analysis, I think we would need to say that in the examples often given, as that of the broken clock glanced at in passing, on the basis of which the professor makes, what is, in fact, a true affirmation about the time, we have cases where, in truth, there is evidence for judgments that we can say are probable; perhaps often cases in which judgments are highly probable but not certain. We might briefly consider in this connection the little discussed section of Lonergan’s Insight in which he writes of degrees of certainty.31 In his 1964 essay ‘Cognitional Structure’, Lonergan allows that supposed ‘Moorean certainties’, such as ‘I have two hands’, can be rationally challenged by the idealist, who rephrases the claim as ‘it appears that I have two hands’.32 In the same article, he argues that, while it is true that objects outside ourselves play a causal role in our knowledge of them, this is established in a rational way only through our Lonergan, Insight, 574–75. Lonergan, Collection, 216–17.

31 32

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own intelligence and reason as applied to the data, not by direct contact – as Scotus seems to have held.33 Further, in his 1958 Halifax lectures, he allows that in the context of, say, a boarding school, where April Fool’s Day tricks and pranks are to be regularly anticipated, our judgments regarding what is the case vis-à-vis our everyday surroundings may need cautious qualification and correction from time to time.34 These epistemological caveats seem to be in line with the treatment of the ‘degrees of certainty’ in Insight. The kind of self-­reversing and self-­confirming judgments regarding our own cognitional activities that we have deployed above in showing the incoherence of the externalist view can, according to Lonergan, achieve de facto certainty; denying that I am a knower, in the sense specified by Lonergan, will only provide definitive evidence that I am. And we can also argue for the definitive knowledge of certain metaphysical principles and theorems, to be verified in consciousness, in the same manner. In this, I believe Lonergan is following Aquinas who, in De Veritate, claims that self-­knowledge is ‘most certain’, a terminology that implies degrees of certitude.35 One way we might understand Lonergan’s thesis on degrees of certainty is in terms of lesser types of certitude as pertaining to what is de facto possible, but what is at once de facto so highly improbable as to be foolish to entertain as real. So I know from reading and other sources what kind of personal and interpersonal behaviour those unfortunate enough to be suffering from mental delusions suffer from, and I know that such persons often think themselves to be quite sane. But I have every reason from the contrasts I can rationally draw between that background knowledge and my present mental states and behaviour, to believe that I am de facto, not in such an unfortunate state of mind. If I take my dog Bella out in the car to reach a favourite destination for a walk in the hills, it may be possible that MI5 and the CIA in collaboration have set up such a massive delusion that the visible, supposedly familiar horizon of hills and valleys stretching out before me is some fabulous hoax; but, on the other hand, I have absolutely no reason to think this extravagant hypothesis is realized and very many reasons to think that it is not. Thus, we dismiss many a far-­fetched conspiracy theory as downright silly.

See Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Great Medieval Thinkers) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77. 34 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 122. 35 St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate X, 12 ad 7. 33

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Given the contingencies that Williamson rightly identifies regarding our ability to know our own conscious states, and the ways in which these may be conditioned by our ability to apply linguistic categories to them (such linguistic categories having a communal semantic stipulation), we glimpse a certain kind of argument as perhaps waiting in the wings. Although I do not, however, find Williamson making the argument in question in a fully explicit fashion, it is a hypothesis that I have found at least one other analytical philosopher entertaining in more explicit terms. The objection would be an application to putative self-­ knowledge of the approach suggested by Wittgenstein’s anti-­private language argument: since it is the case that I cannot know with certainty, on any given occasion, that my use of a set of linguistic expressions does not contain errors vis-à-vis the stipulated communal meanings of the same, it is not possible for me to reach definitive knowledge of my conscious mental activities or states, given that this knowledge must deploy the said linguistic expressions. However, as the modal expressions in the claim ‘not possible’, ‘cannot’, ‘must’, make evident, the claim itself is a claim to definitive knowledge. As such, this claim or judgment is self-­referentially invalidating. Further, our positive judgment or judgments in which we grasp this incoherence is so, since they are definitive, manifest the achievement that the original claim denied was possible: They grasp that the linguistic expressions, words, intended in a particular way in the judgments do have their conditions known to be fulfilled definitively in the data of our consciousness. They are fulfilled and grasped to be so in the conscious judgments (regarding the prior false conscious judgments), irrespective of what, on the given occasion, may be the correct interpretation of the meaning of these linguistic elements when considered from the perspective of the communal stipulation of their meaning. We do no better by trying to shift ground, in this case, to offer a weaker judgment to the effect that ‘we probably cannot have definitive self-­knowledge due to the dependency of words on common meaning.’ If we already know definitively that a given judgment is false, then providing a weakened, putatively probable version of the same is not a rational possibility.36 The moral of this story

It is incoherent to affirm: ‘It is definitively the case that my wife is not out shopping, yet it is probably the case that she is out shopping’. It is quite coherent to affirm: ‘Despite very good evidence to the contrary, my wife is not out shopping’. In the cases of the judgments discussed above, it is also true that we opt for the weaker, probable judgment because we have grasped definitively that the prior putative definitive judgment (the judgment utilizing Wittgenstein’s point) is false.

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is clearly not that, on some given occasions, I de facto know definitively the correct common meaning of some linguistic expressions I use, but rather that, on some occasions, I can reach definitive judgments as to what is the case, concerning, say, some conscious activities, irrespective of whether my usage at that point is wholly correct by the standards of meaning in my linguistic community. The argument suggests that it may be worthwhile to carefully consider again just what is and what is not rationally achieved by Wittgenstein’s anti-private language position. One question I would like to see philosophers follow up is whether, and to what extent, it is possible to reconcile the anti-private language arguments in the Philosophical Investigations, with the type of argument deployed in On Certainty, which charges the sceptic with self-­refuting incoherence. Both arguments are, of course, from Wittgenstein’s later period. In light of this discussion, it is interesting to find Williamson, later in the book, remarking in parenthesis that it may be the case that knowledge of our own existence is indefeasible, definitive.37 Given his own concessions to the externalist argument and the manner in which he rightly castigates any form of Cartesian or ‘self-­luminosity’ thesis, we wonder how he would set about elaborating such an argument himself. Chapter 9 of Knowledge and Its Limits is devoted to the subject of evidence. In a way that a good number of philosophers would find challenging, Williamson argues that evidence is always already knowledge; this he expresses as the E = K theorem. In reversing the expectations of many philosophers regarding the priority of evidence vis-à-vis knowledge, Williamson holds that he is following the lead of C. S. Peirce, while clearly taking issue with the tradition represented by Rudolf Carnap, the logical positivist tradition that emphasizes the rational basing of our beliefs on the prior evidence of sense data. While we can quibble, as I do below, with some of the examples Williamson brings forward to support the thesis, overall I think that, from the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy, he is on to something important, even if the position as a whole requires some crucial refinements and amendments; and these again can be supplied, I am convinced, by Lonergan’s cognitional analyses. As I understand it, one of Williamson’s principal supporting arguments for his case is that ‘data’ are not raw, but are always ‘informed’ in some mental/linguistic fashion. Thus, a piece of evidence for a subsequent judgment (I will use ‘judgment’ here rather

Knowledge and Its Limits, 266.

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than ‘belief ’, as Williamson also seems to use them interchangeably) is inevitably already so ‘informed’; it is ‘propositional’, as Williamson avers. Further, cases seem to abound in which one piece of knowledge provides evidence for further possible knowledge: if I say the pavement is wet this morning, and on the basis of this evidence, argue for the truth of the claim that it rained last night, even if I am wrong on the latter count (someone was, in reality, using a hose), the proposition concerning the evidence of the wet pavement remains as an item of knowledge.38 Now to a quibble: Williamson expresses his point as meaning that one belief is evidence for another belief. However, if we are not thinking of cases of cognitional self-­affirmation, or the like, then it is surely more accurate to say that it is the state of affairs, which we believe, or judge to be the case that is the evidence for prospective judgment x, rather than a prior judgment or belief per se. If I say that I believe my wife has gone to get groceries because she is out in the car and has taken her supermarket discount coupons, it is those states of affairs that I hold to be evidence for the claim, rather than the belief, judgment, concerning the situation. However, to reiterate, the strong points of Williamson’s position have to do with his attack on the ‘raw data as prior evidence’ notion. And in addition, we can surely agree that in very many instances prior knowledge, more often than not, as both Williamson and Lonergan would concur, enters in a probabilistic fashion into our consideration of a prospective further judgment. In introducing Lonergan’s cognitional theory, it is very easy to give the impression that he is implicated in the ‘raw data’ view, which has been the target of so many criticisms from both continental and analytical philosophers in the last century or so. But Lonergan emphatically distances himself from such an empiricist view of data, not only through the expressions adopted in his later work concerning the shift from the world of immediacy to the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value, but already in the section on ‘sensible data’ early in Insight, which, to some extent, the later themes simply underline.39 On Lonergan’s view, we do not ‘begin from the raw data’. Rather, the data are defined heuristically as that into which our inquiries occur and within which are to be found the fulfilment of conditions for reasoned judgments regarding the real, being. If we are not talking about extreme or marginal cases of, for example, early infant experiences, then the ‘data’ are normally

Knowledge and Its Limits, 201. Lonergan, Insight, 95–97.

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already informed by some configuration of prior insights and conative/emotive interests. Thus, often the progression from common sense to scientific investigation is a shift to a new orientation towards data as already in some way configured by human understanding and interests. Of course, as scientific investigation and other forms of investigation too, proceed, the experience of being faced with hitherto unknown objects increases in frequency. Then the new data, as detected through the electron microscope or electromagnetic telescope may be described in, perhaps, some combination of ordinary language and relevant scientific predicates as we move along the path of further investigation. But in that case, Williamson’s observation, with which Lonergan would agree, obtains; the descriptive propositions describing the new data are still knowledge claims. Having granted all this, however, a far from insignificant problem remains. In a footnote, referring to John McDowell’s discussion of related issues, Williamson admits that, of course, he does not intend to deny that the evidence as expressed in propositions can have some perceptual content.40 But I think we could wish for a more detailed cognitional analysis of just how all these aspects hang together. Further, a significant conundrum seems to arise: if evidence is always already knowledge, then it would seem that there is never an instance in which a judgment through which we claim to know is not based on prior knowing. For a position like that of Lonergan, this is a particular challenge as it would imply that there must be some prior, foundational acts of knowing that are not judgments as Lonergan analyses them. Knowledge (properly human knowledge) would be, in part at least, direct and intuitive, not mediate and discursive, as Lonergan adamantly holds. In fact, however, such a conundrum draws our attention back to the details of Lonergan’s subtle analysis of judgment as this is found in classic instances such as in Insight. We can then recall that for Lonergan, essentially a rational act of judgment arises as a conscious act from a grasp of the de facto fulfilment of conditions in the data. And here talk of ‘evidence’, if not handled properly can mislead us. Such conditions are specified for us on the prior level of understanding, the second ‘level’ or phase of coming to know. These conditions are the terms and relations that intelligence has understood and formulated as a conceptual ‘possibility’, as a result of our inquiries into the data resulting in insight. We may then raise the question ‘Is it so?’ and we may find that the specified conditions of the conceptual possibility,

Knowledge and Its Limits, 198, note.

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the conceptual package are, in fact, given in the data of sense or of consciousness. Thus, in the case of self-­affirmation, I might have some understanding of what Lonergan means by ‘a question for reflection’ and a corresponding ‘rational judgment’. I might engage in a discussion with an interlocutor who, in response to my doubts and affirmed reservations about all this, points out to me that I have in fact just asked such a question and given a judgment in response to it, on some area relevant to our discussion. Thanks then to our exchange, I may indeed notice that the conditions of these conceptual possibilities as specified in Lonergan’s account are, in fact, fulfilled in the data of my consciousness: the penny drops, I do get the point and realize, rationally, that this is so. Now this is not an instance in which the relevant data were already known as evidence for the judgment in the sense Williamson intends; not as in the case where I know the pavement is wet, and thus, make the reasoned inference to the judgment ‘it rained last night’. In the case of self-­affirmation that we are discussing, the data of my consciousness provide the fulfilling conditions and are rationally known to do so in the moment of my rational reflective insight (expressed in the judgment) itself. They are rationally known to be what they are in that moment, and thus, ground the rational conscious act of judgment; they are not known to be what they are prior to this. In this way, then, to talk of the data of consciousness as ‘evidence’ is only to use an analogous term, if we are also to include in the same ambit of our terminology ‘evidence’ in cases (and there are very many of them), in which prior judgments of knowledge provide evidence for subsequent reasonable judgments of fact; it is to those latter cases Williamson rightly draws our attention. But in so doing, there is also manifest an oversight on his part regarding the nature of knowing, of judgment, as essentially mediated, as essentially the rational term of a properly human cognitional process in which knowledge is not prior. Rather, the ‘spontaneities and inevitabilities’ of our conscious intelligence and reason are the relevant a priori factors. In those conscious operations, there truly resides the luminosity that Williamson correctly denies to philosophical accounts that would collapse the distinct domains of self-­consciousness and self-­knowledge one into the other.

The move into metaphysics Welcome from the perspective of Lonergan’s critical realism is Williamson’s repudiation of the naturalism or materialist reductionism that appears to be the

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default position taken by a good number of analytical philosophers. In an article in the New York Times, Williamson has given these philosophers a salutary reminder that this naturalism currently in vogue is seldom thought through as regards its philosophical cogency or the consequences that follow from it.41 The intelligent and reasonable inquiries of the historian in his or her domain are no less intellectually reputable and well founded than those of the physicist; and there are no a priori reasons for thinking that the entities identified in the former domain are to be reduced, qua epiphenomena, to the entities identified in the domain of the latter. This critique coming, as it does, from a highly regarded analytical philosopher with no apparent religious affiliations has caused quite a stir in the circles within which it deserves to have done so. However, such forays into metaphysics are not merely sporadic episodes in Williamson’s work. He has now brought out a book on metaphysics, reinforcing the trend towards the renewal of metaphysics that has been underway in analytical philosophy during the last few decades.42 While I do not intend to deal with the work at length, I offer a brief evaluation of an interview Williamson has recently given in the course of which he has expounded some of the major themes of the book.43 Williamson concedes to his interviewer that it is (was) possible for Wittgenstein to have had a daughter, but stresses that his ‘necessitarianism’ implies that necessarily no one ever was, is or will be ‘Wittgenstein’s daughter’. The concession implies, however, that the way the world did turn out was a contingent affair, since at one time it was possible that Wittgenstein fathered a girl (it would, naturally, be better to speak of more remote or proximate potentiality when we speak of past possibility in such instances). If the necessity ‘extended any further’ in this case (if we may put it thus) than Williamson allows, then there would have been no contingency about the matter and the counterfactual possibility of a daughter of Wittgenstein would, of necessity, not be allowed. What is going on in the argument therefore, is, as I see it, what Aquinas and Lonergan, following him, identify as ‘conditional necessity’. Since, de facto, Wittgenstein did not father a girl, then it is necessarily the case that no one can be that individual.

Timothy Williamson, ‘What is Naturalism?’ New York Times, the Opinion Pages, September 4, 2011. Timothy Williamson, Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 43 Timothy Williamson, Interview with Richard Marshall, 3: AM Magazine: Available at http:// www.3ammagazine.com/3am/modality-­and-metaphysics/. 41 42

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Williamson expresses his position as entailing: ‘necessarily everything is something’. This seems to be an expression of the principle of identity, as is also expressed in the scholastic transcendental ‘one(ness)’. However, such a principle does not tell us if anything exists, only that if it does then the principle must apply to it. To know that something exists, we must grasp that a possibility truly does exists, that its conditions are (at least, in most cases, we know) simply de facto, given. Aquinas’s point about conditional necessity then also reminds us that if a contingent thing exists, then necessarily a contingent (possible) being exists since its contingency is intrinsic to what it is, necessarily it is contingent. Oddly, Williamson seems to want to distinguish between such necessity in the case of ‘things’, on the one hand, and on the other, their ‘accidents’ (as we might express the idea). But the point about conditional necessity returns in the case of accidents too: if Peter sits, then necessarily he sits, yet his sitting is not necessary. If it is true that at time t1 it was possible that (there was a real potential that) Wittgenstein would father a daughter, then, necessarily at time t1 it was a contingent matter whether or not he did. A different type of necessity is involved when we say that, for example, parts of a whole must necessarily be such and such for there to be the intelligible form of the whole; so necessarily to have a circle, in Euclid’s definition, the series of coplanar points must be equidistant from the centre. The debates that Williamson has with the ‘contingentists’, as he names them, then are not always those that would be readily recognized by someone with a background in Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy; we should not imagine that he is affirming or denying points that the terms ‘contingentist’ ‘necessitarian’ might imply to those formed in such traditions. However, at first glance, confusions do seem to multiply, and they are such as to remind us of the need for a method in modal metaphysics such as Lonergan’s ‘foundational logic’ can, I believe, supply.44 We may recall that, as Lonergan affirms, such a methodical metaphysics can semantically sort out confusions as regards relations: it would help us to determine which relations are real, which nominal.45 And from the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy, it is no surprise, given the polymorphism of human consciousness and our proneness towards describing our knowing and even what we know in terms of animal extroversion, that the confusions on such metaphysical matters as relations to be seen in, for instance, See Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, 375–76. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 343.

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Scotist thought are replicated in latter day analytical modal metaphysics. They are then duly built into the technical apparatus. Williamson admits that a defect in his own necessitarian metaphysics is the way his logic seems to generate numerous types of relation and self-­relation. We can already see this danger looming, I believe, in Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, one of the founding works of twentieth-­century modal metaphysics. How do we control the blossoming and burgeoning of such endless relations and properties? Such notional relations, expressed in a formal system, appear to be such as we can create indefinitely and at will. Again the question of method arises and the need for some kind of canon of parsimony or Ockham’s razor is attested to by these dilemmas. Williamson’s method is simply to argue that his necessitarianism has more going for it, has fewer problems, than the alternative that he describes as ‘contingentism’, while, as we have noted, he allows that his own position does have problems. Although this is not at all a bad methodological procedure, as Williamson avers, we see it in science, I think we can do a good deal better by deploying Lonergan’s method in metaphysics. But then that involves a process by which we verify, at least in part, some key metaphysical terms and relations in the data of our consciousness. Since, as we have seen above, Williamson’s epistemology, his philosophy of mind, is in some serious ways truncated that avenue is not open to him.

Conclusion: Methods in philosophy In this essay, I have attempted an overview of some of the principal recent philosophical works of Timothy Williamson, critically evaluating some of the arguments found in these works with the aid of Lonergan’s philosophy. Even my more sustained discussion of his work on epistemology, Knowledge and Its Limits, I would, however, emphasize has not attempted an in-­depth study of the whole. Rather, with regard to that work, I have focused on some central themes that I have found may expeditiously be treated in the light of Lonergan’s critical realism. To complete the thematic circle of this essay, it is interesting to note that the work of the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford John Cook Wilson, H. W. B. Joseph’s mentor and friend, has once again been taken up by philosophers such as John McDowell and Timothy Williamson. Williamson’s description of

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our knowledge as ‘factive’ is inherited from Cook Wilson.46 These intimations of a reconnection between early twenty-­first-century Oxford philosophy and that of a century ago are all the more interesting in light of the fact that Williamson has distanced himself from his former teacher, the late Sir Michael Dummett in expressing the view that analytical philosophy is no longer to be characterized as an investigation that, distinctively, ‘begins with language’.47 Dummett himself had done much to break down the barriers that separated the analytical school from other philosophical traditions, but had held on to the linguistic turn as its hallmark.48 While Williamson informs us that he has had some experience of the continental philosophical world, and was none too impressed by it, he now believes there is no hard and fast way to characterize analytical philosophy other than by its traditional commitments to rigour, clarity and careful argument, all of which characteristics are enhanced by the skills analytical philosophers acquire through a training in formal, symbolic logic. The reconnection with former philosophers such as Cook Wilson is made even more intriguing once we recall what was said above concerning the history of analytical philosophy as it developed along somewhat different lines in Cambridge and Oxford. In An Introduction to Logic, the young Lonergan read of Joseph’s and Cook Wilson’s reservations regarding Russell’s emerging philosophical programme utilizing the formal languages of the new symbolic techniques. The generation of Oxford philosophers of which Williamson and McDowell are representative now appears to have repudiated, as did Joseph and Cook Wilson, the notion that the salvation of philosophy would be found by ‘starting from language,’ but still – perhaps ironically – they continue to discover

Cook Wilson’s claim is also, however, that in knowing we know that we know. As we have seen above, Williamson, since he holds that we are not always in a position to know our knowing, denies this. In that sense, he is nearer to Lonergan, whose analyses serve to illuminate these issues by helping us to understand the difference between being conscious as we rationally know, on the one hand, and on the other, making the further, rational judgment that a prior conscious rational judgment has occurred or is, even, occurring. On the revival of interest in Cook Wilson and his circle, see Mathieu Marion, ‘John Cook Wilson’, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilson/. In this enlightening article, Marion points out that Cook Wilson’s influence did not entirely disappear from the work of the next generation, that of Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin. 47 Timothy Williamson, ‘Past the Linguistic Turn?’ in Brian Leiter, editor, The Future of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 48 See Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 46

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in the tradition of symbolic techniques, fostered by Russell and Whitehead, a vitally important ancillary philosophical tool.49 However, if I am here offering a few closing reflections on historically emergent trends in Anglo-American philosophy, another observation, significant in the light of Lonergan’s philosophical dialectic, may be allowed to detain us a little longer. McDowell and Williamson clearly find in Cook Wilson a ‘direct realism’ (born of Cook Wilson’s anti-­idealism) that is attractive. They, like other current influential analytical philosophers, including Crispin Wright, have not followed the anti-­realist path of their teacher Michael Dummett, albeit the orientations, perspectives and questions that are evident in their work are, as they would I am sure confess, deeply indebted to his philosophy. This I think is in large measure a step backward from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s critical realism. For Dummett’s thought was in no way implicated in the anti-­realist philosophies of a continental or analytical stripe as popularly understood. His thought is avowedly and robustly realist, but in its questioning and probing of language, thought and metaphysics there is a good deal that is cognate with Lonergan’s critical realism. There is much in Dummett’s thought with which I have taken issue.50 But I would take this opportunity to say that, given the urbanity and lucidity of Dummett’s writing and his evident philosophical ability to unsettle accepted lines of thought, through the raising of questions of profound intellectual import, Dummett continues to occupy a place second to none among the philosophers to have emerged from what we call the analytical tradition. Thus, I find that too often the differences between thinkers such as McDowell and Williamson, on the one hand, and Dummett, on the other, are indications of a retreat into naïve realism on the part of these younger philosophers.51 A third voice in this dialogue is that of Collingwood. In his autobiography, Collingwood reveals himself as a trenchant critic of the Cook Wilson set, from which he had defected under the influence of Italian idealists. Opposing their static, cognitionally thin, ahistorical logic and naïve realism, Collingwood offers in its stead his ‘logic of question and answer’; see, R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Pelican Books, 1944), chapter V. We might say that Lonergan’s critical realism is a form of Aufhebung of the naïve realist thesis of the one group and the opposing discursive (but problematically idealist) antithesis of this opposition. 50 See Andrew Beards, Insight and Analysis: Essays Applying Lonergan’s Thought (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2010), chapter 5. 51 In the decade before Williamson’s book on epistemology appeared, McDowell’s Mind and World was undoubtedly the most significant work on epistemology to emerge from analytical philosophy (John McDowell, Mind and World [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994]). McDowell’s book is replete with stimulating argument, and it is, in its way, a sophisticated critique of crude empiricism. But it suffers from the weakness inherent in a philosophy that cannot properly distinguish between animal knowing and distinctively human knowing. I believe such naïve realism comes to the fore in 49

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However, perhaps a more hopeful development in current analytical philosophy is the soul-­searching regarding method that is emerging in the genre known as ‘metaphilosophy’; and to that genre Williamson has himself contributed.52 In his book on method in philosophy, Williamson has, like a number of recent philosophers, identified a major neuralgic issue in the methodology of analytical philosophy.53 He writes: ‘Intuition’ plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy’s self-­ understanding. Yet there is no agreed or even popular account of how intuition works. . . . Since analytic philosophy prides itself on its rigour, this blank space in its methodological foundations looks like a scandal.54

The hopeful sign here is in the admission of a problem. If you know Lonergan’s oeuvre, you will appreciate what a massive task you are faced with in mounting a hermeneutic that has any chance of disambiguating the strands, positive and negative, that you might identify in the philosophical use of the term ‘intuition’. Such a critical hermeneutic was the issue as battle was joined by Lonergan in his attempt, consequent on his retrieval of Aquinas, to clear an intellectual path through the luxuriant jungle of mid-­twentieth-century scholastic philosophical theology. The task involves the application of a hermeneutic of an anthropological and therapeutic kind as, identifying the influences of the polymorphic vectors in our consciousness, we endeavour to further positions and undermine counterpositions manifest in the ‘intuitions’ of philosophers. Reading analytical philosophers and engaging in dialogue and debate with their work serves to attest, with a sometimes exasperating regularity, to Lonergan’s contention in Insight that the key to philosophical dialectic is found in an appreciation of the polymorphic nature of human consciousness.55 Still, though the task facing a philosophical tradition that desires coherence and truth might be gargantuan, acknowledging a problem is a first step in the right direction. McDowell’s exchange with Dummett in which, to my mind, Dummett undoubtedly has the upper hand. See John McDowell, ‘Dummett on Truth Conditions and Meaning’ (351–66), and Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to John McDowell’ (367–81), in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers Vol. 31, R. Auxier and E. Hahn, editors (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007). Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). Herman Cappelen’s recent book Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) is a relevant contribution to the debate. However, some critics see Cappelen as tending to dodge the essential issues: see the review by Anna-Sara Malmgren, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013.04.27: available at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/39362-philosophy-­without-intuitions/. 54 The Philosophy of Philosophy, 215. 55 Lonergan, Insight, 452. 52 53

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Aesthetics: Insights from Eldridge, Aquinas and Lonergan We would be hard put to it to find a more accomplished guide to current philosophical work in the English-­speaking world on aesthetics than Richard Eldridge. Eldridge, Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, has a distinguished record of publications in the field of aesthetics and can also draw on the expertise acquired through his many years as a member of the American Society for Aesthetics. His book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art1 goes far beyond what is required for the initiation of the neophyte. The work also presents a philosophy of aesthetics that has matured through the many years Eldridge has spent researching, reflecting and writing in this area of philosophy. Eldridge is wise in taking as his approach to the subject a phenomenology influenced by the later Wittgenstein. We do not expect to find definitions of aesthetic phenomena specifying all necessary and sufficient conditions, rather we labour to achieve some fruitful insight into the varied facets of this key aspect of the world of human experience. Through ten chapters and an epilogue, Eldridge travels along a path of investigation and invites us to participate in the fascinating debates and discussions he initiates with various interlocutors into areas of aesthetics. These touch on such issues as representation and imitation in artistic creation; the nature of beauty and form; views on what constitutes expression in art works and the place of emotion, originality and imagination in aesthetic creation; the identification and evaluation of art; art and morality; and art in the light of social and postmodern critiques. I do not think Eldridge would deny that one of the principal thinkers to influence his overall philosophy of aesthetics is John Dewey. However, while the work emerges from the

Richard Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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English-­speaking philosophical context, as we might expect when encountering a work on current aesthetics, the range of philosophers brought into the discussion extends well beyond the boundaries of late-­twentieth-century Anglophone philosophies to include thinkers such as Derrida, Adorno, Barthes, Heidegger, Foucault and Benjamin. Naturally, the German idealist thinkers also play a prominent role in the discussion and the contributions of Kant, Hegel and Schelling enter into a number of the debates to which Eldridge introduces us. In fact, it is the breadth of his vision that is one of the most impressive characteristics of Eldridge’s writing. Philosophers and other writers on the arts from Aristotle to Tolstoy, from Hume and Wordsworth to Collingwood and Croce make their appearance in the pages of the book. Among recent thinkers on aesthetics philosophers such as Arthur Danto, Roger Scruton, Peter Kivy, Nelson Goodman, Noël Carroll and Stanley Cavell are brought into the discussion. We are also impressed by the clarity and incisiveness of Eldridge’s evaluations of the various contributions these thinkers make. But the most striking aspect of his writing is the way Eldridge is prepared, in a critical yet sympathetic way, to listen and to learn from this great variety of thinkers in his quest for insight into the aesthetic, one of the most fascinating and significant of anthropological realities. In this chapter, I intend to contribute to some of the debates on the nature of aesthetic experience found in Eldridge’s book. I do so by drawing on the work of thinkers who stand in a tradition that is not represented in his work: St. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan. There are, of course, other notable philosophers who have written on aesthetics who do not appear in the pages of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, such as the Thomist philosophers J. Maritain and É. Gilson, and Dietrich von Hildebrand and Suzanne K. Langer, whose work emerges from continental phenomenology. Given the scope and breadth of Eldridge’s generous inclusion of so many philosophical voices, it would be churlish to bring this as a complaint against his work. Nevertheless, my intention in what follows is also to show how perspectives arising from the work of some of these other thinkers, in particular, Aquinas and Lonergan, can throw considerable light on some of the central issues discussed in Eldridge’s book. Lonergan, I believe, in various ways combines something from both the Thomist and phenomenological traditions in his treatment of the aesthetic. Two of the dominant themes that run through the chapters of Eldridge’s book are highlighted in the questions: (1) What elements go into the work of art as its constituents? (2) How are we to evaluate works of art, if this is possible? Naturally,

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the answer we give to the first of these questions determines in large measure how we answer the second. A good place to begin, if we are to give some idea of the development of Eldridge’s thinking in the book, is Chapter 3, entitled ‘Beauty and Form’. In this chapter, Eldridge provides a historical sketch of the movement that went forward in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the ascendancy of the mathematical ideal of rationality as expressed in deductive systems, philosophical thinking on art shifted away from Aristotelian approaches to aesthetic experience in terms of some blend of thought and feeling, to lay emphasis on ‘pleasurable sensations’.2 In reaction, Kant strove to reassert the interconnected nature of thought and feeling in aesthetic judgment, taking over into his analysis what he saw of value in the eighteenth-­century work of writers such as Burke, who extolled the importance of the sublime in human feelings. Kant’s profoundly influential thought on the ‘indefinite quality’ of the great work of art can be seen as influencing diverse thinkers in the centuries to follow, including Gadamer, in his analysis of the inexhaustible nature of the ‘classic’, and Marion, in the phenomenology of ‘saturation’. Eldridge uses the opportunity of this, his first lengthy discussion of Kant, to evaluate formalist theories of aesthetic experience. While Eldridge endorses the notion of aesthetic enjoyment as ‘absorbative engagement’ with the art work,3 he is critical of formalist views arising from Kant’s aesthetics such as those of Dewey and Monroe Beardsley. On this position, aesthetic taste is understood as the pleasure of the absorption of the cognitive faculties in the arrangement of data in the art work. At once continuing his historical outline of aesthetic theories, Eldridge invokes Wordsworth’s attack on eighteenth-­century theories of aesthetic taste. For Wordsworth, Eldridge and Arthur Danto, art has meaning and message; it is transformative of spiritual, political, social and personal realities. Picasso’s Guernica is meant to disturb us, to unsettle us. But in that case, we might object, how can we reconcile the aesthetically enjoyable with art that expresses and represents the horrors of cruelty, cruelty in the natural world and the moral cruelty of the human world? Eldridge’s response to this is well taken: in such works of art, the message occurs through aesthetic attraction; we are morally repulsed precisely through the aesthetic attraction of such successful works.4

Eldridge, 48–49. Eldridge, 55. 4 Eldridge, 64. 2 3

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Wordsworth’s insights into the aesthetic are also of fundamental importance for Eldridge in the chapter in which he considers originality and imagination in art. The celebrated passage from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in which Wordsworth writes of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ draws our attention to the fact that expressiveness is a basic feature of artistic creation and thus enters into our evaluation of the art work.5 The poet feels on our behalf and identifies feelings that we may have experienced but not be able to express. These the poet weaves together in novel and creative ways, which serve to further develop our feelings. The aesthetic process of the refinement of feelings brings about a new delicacy and sensitivity in a given cultural context. The significance art has for social education and formation is evident in the aesthetics of both Wordsworth and Tolstoy. If the cultural diet of artistic productions is restricted to light opera and frivolous verse, we are failing to educate feelings in the way Aristotle says that art should. At this point in his argument, it seems only natural to widen the scope of the discussion to include Hegel’s overarching vision of the cultural meaning and significance of art. The expressiveness of art is its expression of the spirit of the age; high art renders manifest philosophical and religious ideas of a given worldview in the ongoing history of human freedom. However, this universal Hegelian vision of the aesthetic has, as Eldridge demonstrates, come in for criticism. It has been argued by a number of philosophers that the ‘mongrelization’ of modern societies means that we cannot identify one, overarching spirit in a particular cultural stage. There are competing traditions in a given culture, and it may be impossible to discern dominant themes of communal aspiration as might be expressed in the varieties of aesthetic expression on offer. At the other end of the spectrum from Hegel stands Arthur Danto. Danto espouses a deflationary or minimalist theory of aesthetics that places emphasis on the pluralistic and heterogeneous nature of aesthetic expression across cultures and within a given culture.6 Danto holds that art works invite us to see the artist’s way and what he sees. The meanings employed are communal, but the artist embodies these and his individuality is also embodied. Eldridge, however, criticizes Danto for underestimating the idea of art as an expression of freedom.

Eldridge, 69–70. Eldridge, 79. Danto’s minimalism involves him in attempting to mark off the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic in some modest fashion. Eldridge, however, does not consider Danto’s attempts very successful. For one thing, Eldridge points out that Danto’s notion that ‘aboutness’ is the mark of the aesthetic fails to distinguish it from any form of language.

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In artistic failures there can be discerned a failure to achieve a ‘fullness of meaning’. Further, since Danto’s stance is one of cosmopolitan pluralism, can it succeed in appreciating some of the most serious art that is, in fact, ‘salvationist’? Eldridge suggests we should strive to combine something from both Hegel and Danto in our appreciation of art: ‘. . . to see works of art as expressing something of both personal-­cultural contingencies and of a defining human aspiration, hence as really mattering’.7 Focusing further on the question ‘what are we doing when we enjoy art, or create art?’, Eldridge offers an assessment of various psychodynamic and physiognomic aesthetic theories. Collingwood emphasizes the way that artistic creation brings to attention emotional states such as joy, fear, anxiety or peace, which accompany our activities but which are ‘suppressed’ as we concentrate not on our feelings but on the tasks in hand. Eldridge is certainly sympathetic to the positive aspects of this idea. In his overall estimation of the significance of art for human living, he stresses the liberating functions of art and draws on Dewey and Collingwood to highlight the therapeutic processes operative in aesthetic experience, as we come to acknowledge and embrace through art ethical and psychological aspects of personal and social living otherwise repressed, marginalized or forgotten. However, Eldridge also indicates limitations to Collingwood’s view: it tends to overemphasize emotional discharge as the sole feature of the aesthetic at the expense of the conceptual. In this part of his book, Eldridge strives to do justice to both sides in the debate. On the one hand, P. Kivy and Nelson Goodman analyse aesthetic creations as both expressions and exemplifications of feeling states, such feelings being then applied in a metaphorical way in the art work. On the other hand, there are approaches that stress the cognitive. Croce argues that what can be expressed in a work of art may not be an emotion at all. Here, stress is laid on the successful arrangement of materials. Such cognitive theories are, in turn, attacked by Goodman and Scruton. Eldridge concludes his assessment of these competing lines of argument by suggesting that, in some way, both reason and emotion are involved, although he does not offer much by way of insight into how this may be the case. Certainly, so much art is about our emotions, yet an emotional outburst without a ‘working through’ of material would not constitute a work of art.8

Eldridge, 84. Eldridge, 93–94.

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The maxim de gustibus non est disputandum is itself, of course, a contentious issue in debates in aesthetics. The question of ‘objective judgment’ in art comes up in one way or another throughout Eldridge’s book, although Chapter  7 is dedicated entirely to issues related to identifying and evaluating works of art. As Eldridge points out, in the modern period a significant episode in the discussion of aesthetic judgments and their evaluation is seen in the transition from Hume’s view, that our aesthetic judgments are sound if they conform to those of the relevant experts in the field, to Kant’s writing on aesthetic judgment itself arising in part from his disagreement with Hume. Kant asked how we are to know whether the judgments of ‘experts’ are sound. As we have noted above, Kant elaborated an analysis of aesthetic experience in terms of the free, harmonious interplay of our faculties in the contemplation of the forms of nature and art. However, we might be disappointed if we were to expect too much from Kant’s arguments to the effect that we can distinguish between true, objective aesthetic judgments, on the one hand, and false ones, on the other. Objective judgments are those that are an authentic expression of the results of the free interplay of faculties in our experience of art, whereas false judgments are inauthentic ones: judgments that are mere expressions of social conformity. This does not take us very far, we may feel, in the direction of offering any criteria for distinguishing between true, ‘objective’ aesthetic judgments and false ones, or between more well-­founded judgments and less well-­founded ones. Are such judgments, then, as the Latin tag suggests, impossible? Eldridge is far from thinking that this is the case, as are a good number of the philosophers whose views he brings into the discussion. There are complete subjectivists or those who espouse an out-­and-out social relativism like Barbara Smith and Pierre Bourdieu.9 At the other end of the spectrum, A. Savile argues for a strong objectivity thesis: eventually the judgment of history will sort out the great works of art from the trivial, bogus or ephemeral. However, Savile’s position raises the same question as that of Hume’s: how do we know what criteria enter into the ‘aesthetic judgments of history’ to render them sound? Hume, in fact, does identify one significant criterion of aesthetic success, which is that of artistic skill. However, this does not take us far enough; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a judgment as to the success of the art work.10

Eldridge, 153ff. Eldridge, 164.

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While Kant holds that some judgments on art can be false and some objective, in the minimalist sense, we noted above, philosophers such as Scruton and Stanley Cavell have taken him to task for conceding truth to the old Latin tag as regards a level of sensate judgments. While Kant affirms that there is no disputing judgment of preference regarding, say, food tastes, the two recent philosophers of aesthetics deny this. We can, through a process of critical education, through a ‘refinement of feelings’, come to ‘see more’ in one cheese than another, more in one type of wine than another; our palate can be educated such that the ‘plonk’11 that was once drunk with gusto is now disgusting.12 If this is so even with regard to judgments of sensible taste, it will a fortiori be true of our more sophisticated aesthetic appreciation. Through the basic processes of inculturation, which occur through family, friends and social authorities, our aesthetic sensibilities can become refined and altered. The work of the successful art critic or musicologist can not only help us identify what we have already, in some conscious way enjoyed in a work of art but have not hitherto expressed conceptually, it can also help us notice, attend to, qualities that we did not notice or appreciate before. Thus, the success stories we come across in the media (such as in the recent popular BBC documentary The Choir) in which teachers of excellence have succeeded in opening up the world of, say, classical music to young people who up to that point would have considered anything beyond rap music as meaningless cacophony. Eldridge follows Dewey, then, in arguing that while judgments of value on art works will be comparative and will have vague and shifting boundaries, we still do and can make them. We can revise them through study, further listening or viewing, and through debate and discussion. We can be attached to certain works of art as we are to good friends, and we can and do defend the qualities of these works as we may do the qualities and attributes we find in close friends.13 Eldridge does also suggest that we can identify some criteria on the basis of which our comparative judgments are made, albeit these tend to be negative in character, and thus more readily identify failure than success. We can ask: is there a coherent working through of the story in this narrative? Is the piece marred by sentimentality?14 A colloquial term employed in the United Kingdom meaning cheap, inferior wine. Eldridge, 180. It is perhaps no accident that Scruton is also a wine connoisseur. See Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2009). 13 Eldridge, 150–51. 14 Eldridge, 202–23. In his Principles of Art, Collingwood rejects the notion of objective judgments of beauty, but, as Eldridge points out, this seems to be at odds with other things that Collingwood writes in the book, implying that we do possess criteria for evaluating art works. 11 12

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Eldridge does not bring into the discussion of possible evaluative criteria at this point other aspects that his discussion nevertheless suggests might also be relevant to the debate. I have in mind here what he has to say on the importance of originality in evaluating the success of a work of art and what he writes concerning art and morality in the final two chapters of the book. We do criticize works of art for being wholly or in part unoriginal, formulaic or predictable. The originality of a work, then, is important. Such originality may regard the novelty of ideas or depth of insight into human experience and the ingenuity of the skilled working through of such insights and values in the material. But as Eldridge indicates, the issue of artistic originality has become problematic in modernity and postmodernity. He criticizes Adorno for elevating beyond proportion the significance of the aesthetic value of original, iconoclastic rebellion and rejection of the past. Even Wordsworth, he notes, tends to overdo the nature of art as unsettling traditional social patterns.15 Indeed, Eldridge acknowledges that he has been criticized himself for linking too tightly the value of human freedom, as being at the centre of the aesthetic, to a vision of that freedom solely in terms of breaking free from past, bourgeois social convention. In his treatment of the nuanced and delicate process of possible aesthetic judgment and evaluation, Eldridge points out that we cannot avoid running the risk of being duped by works of art. We might observe in this context that prima facie there is a higher risk of being duped by minimalist or more abstract forms of art than by those that more obviously place before us a complexity of forms.16 Eldridge also acknowledges that both critics (some at least) and public have become wary and weary of modernist dependence on the ‘shock of difference’ as a substitute for an originality in aesthetic creation that should involve more than simply divergence from what went before. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that in the penultimate chapter of his book, Eldridge chooses to begin a discussion of art and morality or the ethical from the question of censorship. Important though this issue is, it might have been more productive to give the reader some sense of the deeper and wider interconnections between the aesthetic and the ethical. In fact, such a broader perspective does begin to

Eldridge, 112. This is not to deny the phenomenon of fake classic art. In this regard, Eldridge refers to Goodman’s point that once we know something is a fake, we can no longer evaluate it in the same way. We may acknowledge considerable skill at work, but other aesthetic values such as originality in the working of materials and/or in the depth of insight and values will be compromised by the realization of a different intentionality enshrined in the work.

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emerge in the succeeding, final chapter, which deals with various modern and postmodern forms of a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ vis-à-­vis art as a social expression. Eldridge’s own view is one he shares with Nussbaum and Carroll: some but not all works of art have a moral content or value. Carroll cautions, however, that ‘Art works are immensely subtle in their moral commitments.’17 Again, Eldridge agrees with Nussbaum that the moral value of an aesthetic work resides in its ability to free us from prior restrictions, its capacity to usher us into a fuller, richer world. However, we need to recall here that Eldridge himself has noted that his critics have accused him of overemphasizing such liberation in negative terms, as simply a ‘freeing from’. Eldridge’s own strictures against the morally didactic in works of art18 may, again, appear to rule out too much since a great deal of western art has been bound up with communicating a moral message. It is worth noting, on the other hand, that Eldridge does set limits to a moral free-­for-all in what he writes on censorship: Clearly art works that involve torturing animals are ruled out.19 Further, he cites with approval Carroll’s view that sometimes a moral defect can count against a work aesthetically.20 The final chapter of Eldridge’s work is very helpful in outlining ways in which late-­twentieth-century and current aesthetic theory have closed the path to the ‘innocence of the aesthete’. Aesthetic creations are inevitably expressions of individuals and groups which, according to various ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, promote the interests and biases of the said individuals and groups at the expense of other groups and individuals to the point of the social exclusion, oppression of the latter. The legacies of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche are seen to be at work in such hermeneutical works on aesthetics. Eldridge, in this context, refers to the work of Hal Foster as indicating ways in which works in the visual arts have become preoccupied with themes of social antagonism.21 As a response to the impasse which the Arts seem to have reached, because of their inability to reach beyond such self-­denying scrutiny, some have suggested that we now focus on art for the sake of sheer ‘fun’. We should celebrate the lights of Las Vegas, rock music or TV sitcoms as the new way of aesthetic meaning for a wider audience. In response, Eldridge, while not denying something of value in these observations,

19 20 21 17 18

Eldridge, 213. Eldridge, 226. Eldridge, 223. Eldridge, 213. Eldridge, 245.

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argues that if we restrict the aesthetic to socialist propaganda, ‘boy meets tractor’ stories, or western consumerist TV sitcoms, we close off paths to social and individual meaning. Eldridge, on the contrary, shares Dewey’s conviction that art products are the expression and sharing of common cultural meanings.22 He concludes by expressing the hope that aesthetic works of genuine value and depth may emerge (and indeed there are some hopeful signs of this) that once again connect with wider circles of diverse social groups.

The Thomist perspective Eldridge’s treatment of debates and discussions in aesthetics, both as these arise from the tradition and in current philosophy, is deserving of praise for its breadth and depth of perspective. However, I now wish to turn to the work of Aquinas and Lonergan since I am convinced that their thought offers perspectives that enlarge further the horizons of the discussion so far. Such expansion of the horizon of aesthetic debate also suggests avenues of analysis of detail not yet considered. Below, I consider briefly some salient features of what St. Thomas has to say about the aesthetic. In doing so, a primary concern will be to attempt to highlight features of his thought that might serve to help us overcome some of the difficulties which arise from attempting to ‘translate’ his rather different approach to aesthetics into terms understandable in current discussion. I then go on to identify aspects of Lonergan’s writing on aesthetics, which may throw light on some of the key issues raised in Eldridge’s work. One of my aims, however, is to see how certain insights into the aesthetic from Aquinas and from Lonergan may be brought together so as to enrich our understanding of the aesthetic. To begin with, I observe that the thought of Aquinas and Lonergan taken together presents us with a universality on both the side of the object and on the side of the subject. I have in mind here (1) the Thomistic notion of the beautiful as a transcendental, and (2) what Lonergan has to say about the all-­pervasive nature of the aesthetic in the experience of the human subject. Turning to the latter point first, Lonergan writes in Insight:

Eldridge, 249.

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Not only, then, is man capable of aesthetic liberation and artistic creativity, but his first work of art is his own living. The fair, the beautiful, the admirable is embodied by man in his own body and actions before it is given a still freer realization in painting and sculpture, in music and poetry. Style is the man before it appears in the artistic product.23

With the assistance of Dewey and Hegel, Eldridge does, at one point, come near to saying something similar to this, which is central to Lonergan’s analysis of the ‘dramatic pattern of experience’, but we can argue that he does not exploit the universality of the aesthetic in the analyses put forward in the book.24 Let us turn to point (1): That ‘the beautiful’ is a metaphysical transcendental and that it is convertible or coextensive with being, as are truth and goodness, is held to be a truth of Thomistic philosophy by many philosophers in this tradition, including J. Maritain, whose Art and Scholasticism has become a classic.25 Beginning from these two universal aspects of the aesthetic, the anthropological and the ontological, we can understand how some of the debates concerning identification and evaluation of the aesthetic take the form they do. One of the features of the radical, ‘anti-­bourgeois’ aesthetic gestures of modernity has been a desire to ‘shock’ by the profession of an aesthetic doctrine of ‘all is art’. Such a deliberately disruptive ideology has often been behind forms of modern art such as ‘presentation’ art, as in the photography of, say, beer cans in a city street.

Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol.  3, F. E. Crowe and R. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 210–11. 24 Eldridge, 232. Lonergan is making a point similar to Heidegger’s dictum ‘man dwells poetically’. It is made, however, in the context of a philosophy and anthropology quite different to that of Heidegger. Lonergan’s analyses of the aesthetic nature of the dramatic pattern are further deployed and developed in what he writes on hermeneutics later in Insight, and on ordinary and aesthetic differentiations of consciousness in his subsequent works. 25 This interpretation of St. Thomas’s thought is contested. See the article by F. J. Kovach, ‘Beauty as a Transcendental’ in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 205–7. See also F. J. Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin: Eine genetische und systematische Analyse (Berlin, 1961); U. Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Mark D. Jordan, ‘Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 29 (1989): 394–407. I am taking the view that those who think beauty is to be classed a transcendental according to St. Thomas are right. However, even if it be the case that the ‘aesthetically en-­joyable’, the beautiful, is not a transcendental in the strict sense, I think that even the limited number of Thomist texts referenced here are sufficient to show that for St. Thomas the beautiful is intrinsically connected with being, with the good and the intelligible. Such is what we would expect from the neoplatonist origins from which arises Thomist thought on the beautiful. And that is sufficient for my purposes in this chapter. Lonergan mentions the scholastic transcendentals in both his early and later work; he does not normally list the beautiful among them, nor, as far as I am aware, does he enter into the Thomistic debate on the matter. However, John Dadosky draws attention to Lonergan’s remarks at a question-­and-answer session in Dublin in 1969, during which he allows that beauty is a transcendental but of a different kind from the others: The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 53. 23

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With the above notions of aesthetic universality in mind, we might be able to contribute to this debate so as to help some contributors avoid talking past each other. Thus, the notion of beauty, the aesthetically en-­joyable, as being universal, found everywhere, indeed, supports the aesthetic intuition behind presentation art: Anything in existence has an aesthetic quality to it that human beings, as aesthetically oriented, may be led to appreciate. However, while this philosophical point, on the one hand, supports the modernist, it at the same time may be used to sound a note of caution – a note of caution useful in the evaluative process vis-à-­vis a given work of art. First, because the philosophical point is not a novel one, the aspect of ‘novelty’ or of ‘shock’ might be removed from the given work of presentation art in, say, a photographic display. Perhaps, then, we may notice that the genuine aesthetic value of novelty or originality is absent from, or at least, has a diminished presence in the work. Second, the given work might then be seen to be overly reliant on didacticism (in Lonergan’s sense), rather than on a genuine, ingenious and original working through of the message expressed in the presentation itself. Let us suppose I set up an exhibition to express the message of the universality of the transcendental of beauty in the following way: I place in a room a blackboard on which is written in chalk the closing stages of Gödel’s arguments for incompleteness in second-­order logic and next to it a chair on which is placed a tattered copy of Principia Mathematica. On the floor next to this, I place a copy of St. Thomas’ Summa theologiae open at a section pertaining to beauty in creation. Perhaps I leave other hints around in the notes to the exhibition to let on that my point is that mathematical proofs are also things of beauty according to the Thomistic theory of the transcendental of beauty. The point would be made through this presentation, not simply through a series of philosophical arguments. However, I for one would find the whole thing pretentious and aesthetically unsatisfying. While the message is true, the medium, the working through of the artistic presentation would be thin, contrived and unimaginative. However, is this Thomistic notion of the beautiful as being ontologically ‘synonymous’ with being, ‘truth’ and the morally good, a viable notion for current debates in philosophy on aesthetics? While showing sympathy for St. Thomas’s philosophy, Scruton, in his recent little book Beauty, has raised objections to the idea of beauty as a transcendental.26 Scruton no doubt voices the hesitancy of Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. To be fair, Scruton writes that perhaps St. Thomas’s thought itself offers ways of answering his objections.

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many modern philosophers when encountering St. Thomas’s three well-­known aspects of the beautiful: integrity, harmony and clarity.27 Below, I attempt, however, to show that such negative reactions may be allied to an oversight of these criteria as to be applied analogously across the domains of the aesthetic, and that when rightly understood, the three aspects point to the beautiful as coextensive with the intelligible. It is not the case, then, that St. Thomas’s notion of the aesthetic is irrevocably bound up with some historical period of art such as classical Greek sculpture.28 Scruton also raises the objection of ‘dangerous beauty.’ When, however, we grasp something of the subtlety of Aquinas’s thinking on good and evil, and further, realize the relevance of this to the topic in hand given the convertability of the good and the beautiful, such objections disappear. For the Thomist position readily acknowledges that we are attracted by the good, real or apparent. And concrete situations and persons will be an admixture of the intelligible good and the unintelligible absence of that reality of the good. The physical beauty of the adulteress is real enough and good enough, but this does not mitigate the evil, and thus, ugliness of the betrayal of self and others in the sin of adultery. Below I return to the issue, relevant in this context, of the way comparative judgments in aesthetics mirror the mixed and variously weighted moral judgments we make about the ‘bad’, ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘best’ in the actions and lives of human persons. I noted above that Eldridge does a good job of explaining how the description or expression in art of the morally objectionable and of suffering can still be aesthetically satisfying – how it can be ‘good’ aesthetically. It is sometimes thought that the medieval views on the beautiful as a transcendental, influenced as they are by the Neoplatonic heritage, cannot withstand the portrayal of ugliness and meaninglessness, which comes to the fore in modern and postmodern art. But such an objection appears too simplistic once we observe, for instance, the prominence of the increasingly detailed portrayal of the sufferings of the crucified Christ that is such a feature of the development of painting through the medieval period. Both Dante’s Satan and the antichrist in

See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 39, a. 8. Maritain was too sophisticated a thinker and interpreter of St. Thomas to think so. But his views on Thomistic aesthetics led him to make prescriptive remarks and to argue for the superiority of certain genres in a way to which other Thomist philosophers such as Gilson took exception. On this and other differences between Maritain and Gilson on aesthetics, see Francesca Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004).

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Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescos are portrayals that aim to be aesthetically en-­joyable for a premodern audience. Signorelli’s genius is manifest in the way his depiction of this figure expresses the charismatic dynamism and attractiveness of the antichrist, qualities at once suffused with an alluring and disturbing depth of evil. Given the moral and spiritual aims of these works, we can recall that for St. Thomas knowledge of evil can itself be a good. No doubt, a general suspicion regarding the Thomist idea of the ontological transcendental of the beautiful has to do with the sense communicated by the word beauty and its counterparts in modern Western languages. Are we not inclined to restrict the word to contexts in which we are admiring something sublime, or at least, to use it as a really strong term in comparative aesthetic judgments? How, if it is a universal aesthetic term, can it apply to the merely pretty or to a rather good, foot-­tapping country and western ballad as equally well to Beethoven’s Third Symphony? Further, it appears often enough from the contexts in which pulchritudo appears in, say, St. Thomas’s Summa theologiae that we are faced with uses which refer to the loftiest metaphysical realms: the beauty of the order of creation or of the Second Person of the Trinity. Does this imply that the alternatives are either to dismiss anything but the highest of high art as being aesthetically flawed or to say the Thomistic notion of the transcendental of beauty has nothing much to offer modern discussions on aesthetics? We can respond to such challenges but pointing out that, in the first place, there are other less exalted contexts for the use of references to the beautiful in the Summa theologiae, some of these are mentioned below. Second, a Latin dictionary such as the Lewis and Short (generally thought to be reliable as regards Medieval Latin usage) extends the meaning of pulchritudo to include the handsome and the fine. Third, the most significant piece of evidence for taking the term ‘beauty’ in Aquinas’s work to refer across the various domains of aesthetic en-­joyment comes from St. Thomas himself. He provides us with the following cognitive definition, which is also clearly intended to be heuristic, and thus, ordered to a reference which is general: Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that ‘good’ means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend.29

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I–II, q. 27, a. 1, ad. 3.

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I have already on occasion hyphenated en-­joyment as referring to aesthetic experience. This has been inspired by St. Thomas’s reflections on the nature of ‘joy’ gaudium as arising from the apprehended presence of the person or thing loved (see ST, II–II, q. 28, a.1.). I think that if we link this to Aquinas’s discussion of the cognitive appreciation of the beautiful, then it can be seen that the identification of ‘joy’ as being a fundamental characteristic of aesthetic experience helps in understanding how beauty as a transcendental is, according to a Thomist view, all-­pervasive in our aesthetic appreciation of nature and of art. Since we have difficulty in applying the term ‘beauty’ to all and every instance of the aesthetic, it might be more helpful to translate the Thomistic notion of the aesthetic transcendental in terms of the modern English word enjoyment as this receives specific meaning in ‘aesthetic enjoyment’.30 It is understandable if Scruton and other modern authors who know something of St. Thomas’s philosophy may be misled into thinking that he is laying down some very culture-­bound, classical norms for aesthetic appreciation of artistic products on the occasions in his work when he enumerates three features of a being or art work that the transcendental of beauty enables us to identify: integrity, proportion, clarity.31 However, if we realize the implications of the fact that, as aspects of a transcendental, these three features are to be understood as heuristically and analogously predicated, such difficulties can be obviated. We can perhaps identify ascending phases or levels of such predication, which in its increasing generality, points to the fact that, as a transcendental, the beautiful is convertible and coextensive with being, reality as intelligible and good. Understanding that the beautiful, the aesthetically satisfying is the intelligible will be crucial. Typical of the very down-­to-earth realism of Aquinas is the way he points to a first level of aesthetic experience as one that we share with the higher animals.32 Lonergan also notes this ‘for kittens play and snakes are charmed’.33 The delight taken by higher animals is in objects that have some connection to eating, mating and to other factors supportive of health and well-­being. Thus, humans and higher animals feel spontaneous attraction to certain organic forms, given the

Lonergan too sees in aesthetic experience the apprehension of the value of self-­justifying joy. See, Insight, 207–8. 31 ST, I, q. 39, a. 8. 32 ST. I, q. 91, a. 3 ad. 3. 33 Lonergan, Insight, 207. 30

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biological basis of such psychosomatic sources of delight. This is the basis of the attraction of the sexes. Structuralists such as Gilbert Durand, psychologists and phenomenologists of the body in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty can contribute a great deal to our understanding of this basic level of aesthetic attraction shared by animals and human persons. But beyond this, as Aquinas observes, human beings take delight in objects for ‘their own sake’. Here arises the human capacity for aesthetic appreciation of nature and of products of human artistic and creative skill. It is the domain of insight into the aesthetic qualities of material objects and situations. However, St. Thomas’s thought moves us beyond this level of aesthetic appreciation towards the beauty of intelligibility as not simply realized in sounds, colours or sensate experience. Thus, he indicates the sources of beauty that are to be found in the right ordering of human virtuous living, in the aesthetic quality of the intelligibility of the good ordering of the human person. This we see in his discussion of the virtues of honesty, temperance and in the ordering of the virtues in general.34 It is, of course, the case that while such intelligible orderings are not those realized in the sounds of a sonata or the colours of a Degas painting, such intelligibility as both good and aesthetically attractive becomes manifest in the physical face and body of human persons. In one of Lonergan’s earliest works, he highlights Aquinas’s reflections, in his Commentary on John (6, lect. 5, 935), on the incarnate Son who as truth and happiness draws us, attracts us – a Thomistic exegesis that would surely have some appeal for von Balthasar.35 Moving from the microcosmic order that is the human person to the macrocosmic, Aquinas’s indebtedness to Pseudo-Dionysius is evident in what he

ST, II–II, q. 145, a. 2; ST, II–II, q. 141, a. 2, ad. 3; ST, I–II, q. 55, a. 2, ad. 1. Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, J. Patout Burns, editor (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 136, n. 94. In his 1959 lectures on education, Lonergan also drew attention to the way the aesthetic attraction of value manifest in the human face can lead to conversion: see Lonergan, Topics in Education, CWL, Vol. 10, F. E. Crowe, R. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 37. A helpful work on the aesthetic in Hans Urs von Balthasar and Lonergan is Hilary Mooney, The Liberation of Consciousness (Frankfurter theologische Studien: J. Knecht, 1992). Continuing the dialogue with von Balthasar is John D. Dadosky’s important work The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). The book had not yet appeared when this essay, in the form of an article, was first published. The reader may now be referred to Dadosky’s very helpful discussions. A reader of his book and of the present essay, however, will note that some of my concerns do not always coincide with those of Dadosky. James Pamburn has offered an analysis bringing together Lonergan and the aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne (‘Interiority, Cognitional Operations, and Aesthetic Judgment’, Philosophy and Theology, September (2014): 307–41). It is difficult to see, however, how Dufrenne’s phenomenology could be open to the cognitive/evaluative rereading of the transcendentals I have argued for here in light of Lonergan’s work on the dialectic of the ‘conversions’.

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writes of the goodness, and thus, beauty of the world order.36 While world order includes what we encounter in sensible experience of the cosmos, it goes beyond this to the intelligibility of the relationships and natures of things and systems in the cosmos that we have very good reason to think science reveals in ever more breadth and depth to us; but philosophy and theology, on St. Thomas’s view, reveal to us further intelligibility in the world order beyond that which we learn about from the human sciences, physical and social. In this sense, the beauty of the intelligibility in question is not that of what can only be discerned by intelligent and reasonable insight into patterned sensible data, as in the art work, but into intelligibility without a counterpart in sensible experience. Finally, in speaking of the Second Person of the Trinity, we can truly while analogically predicate beauty of the Son in terms of the three identifying characteristics of integrity, proportion and clarity.37 The hermeneutic point I would emphasize is that, since what is at issue is the intelligible as the beautiful, as the aesthetically en-­joyable, and since the three identifying qualities of the beautiful can be predicated of suprasensible realities, we should not think of them as indicators of aesthetic success to be applied to artistic products in a simplistic fashion. ‘Integrity’ has to do with the comparative aesthetic judgments we make regarding a token as relative to the completeness we expect of a type. Thus, despite the antics of the deconstructivist, ‘playfully’ (often boringly) inverting ‘traditional’ binary hierarchies, few of us are ever going to be convinced that a magnificent stallion is simply no more beautiful, or even less so, than a poor, decrepit nag in need of careful attention from the vet; we inevitably evaluate these examples with reference to the ‘type’ of a healthy horse. The Thomistic position is indeed that there is always beauty to be found in the less complete token insofar as it is; it is what it lacks relative to other tokens of a type that is the basis for our comparative aesthetic evaluations. So Quentin Massys’ An Old Woman has aesthetic value not only for the skill and beauty of the artistic presentation, but also because this presentation succeeds in conveying the beauty that is there to be found in the subject, despite the fact that we are never going to say that she is a woman as aesthetically attractive as Raphael’s La Donna Velata.

ST. I, q. 23, a. 8, ad. 2; ST, I, q. 66, a. 1. ST, I, q. 39, a. 8.

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The notion of ‘proportion’, given the contexts in which we find St. Thomas using it, clearly refers to the intelligible patterning in a nature or a work of art. In discussions of an art work, we may argue over whether the working through of the materials is coherent or not, given the driving insights, aims and inspiration behind the work. Any work, however abstract, will instantiate the quite general metaphysical principle that things and structures exemplify some ordering of terms and relations.38 Prima facie the quality of ‘claritas’ does seem to indicate some kind of preference for the simple, uncomplicated or transparent as applied to the art work. But again, we should be very careful here since, if Aquinas is willing to predicate this analogically of the transcendent mystery who is the Second Person of the Trinity, what is meant cannot be so easily captured in this way. On the Thomist view the affirmation of ‘God’s simplicity’ is anything but a denial of the infinite richness of God as the fullness of intelligibility, of which the most complex inventions of the human mind are but the dimmest and most distant reflection. Rather, from the way Aquinas deploys the term, we can perhaps understand this when applied to the domain of artistic products in terms of the relative degree of success that has been achieved in the working through of the artist’s insights in the materials. The role that opacity, mystery, hidden layers of meaning play in artistic creation is not to be denied. The religious art that Aquinas knew himself would hardly have been valued did it not at once suggest an infinity of inexpressible meaning and mystery that the religious art works only dimly reflected. However, we can see the point when we consider that, in aesthetic evaluation, someone well educated in the field may conclude, after much debate about and revisiting of an art work, that ‘what he (the artist) wanted to communicate is still not clear to me’. And the meaning here would be that this is a failure on the artist’s part. The judgment regarding artistic success depends, to some degree, on the clarity achieved in conveying some key aspects of the work to an audience, while at once communicating that there are always further depths to be explored. Before turning to some of the contributions Lonergan’s thought makes to philosophy of art, I want to highlight a further area in St. Thomas’s metaphysical discussion of the beautiful: originality.

See Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), chapter 10.

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Aquinas’s profound insight regarding variety and difference in creation has to do precisely with the aesthetic and the transcendental of beauty. The infinite perfection and beauty of God can only be reflected by contingent reality, ‘participated in’ by the created world order through the beauty of finite variety and multiplicity.39 A similar insight lies behind many current discussions of environmental ethics. The value of biodiversity often turns out, on reflection, to be an aesthetic value. Our appreciation of the beauty of nature as a diversity of related intelligibilities always has a foundational level in aesthetic appreciation of organic shapes, colours, tones, smells in relation to each other. But this appreciation deepens as the sensate experience becomes informed by common-­ sense knowledge, through the practical knowledge of things-­in-relation of the woodsman and naturalist and through the contributions of the relevant sciences.40 This insight also has relevance for the arts. In our discussions regarding the relative worth of an art work, its originality relative to what has gone before is a serious consideration. The notion of an aesthetic ‘landscape’ is therefore an important one. As in our aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of nature, so in the moving, historical ‘landscape’ of the arts a single work is understood and appreciated relative to the whole. Each individual grass blade makes a contribution to the whole, which is the alpine meadow, but we think ourselves justified in saying that it is not as indispensable or significant for the landscape as the peak of a mountain. Similarly, in evaluations of works of art, we think of some as being great or epochal, but this does not mean that we would be content with the dramatic impoverishment that would result from many lesser works being lost.41 For a good number of years, a programme has been broadcast on BBC radio called Desert Island Discs. The format of this consists in a prominent

ST, I, q. 66, a. 1. There are losses and gains here. While growth in scientific knowledge can deepen our aesthetic appreciation of the intelligibilities in nature, growing older, as Wordsworth lamented, can also mean a loss of the vibrancy and immediacy of natural aesthetic experience once had as a child. Growth in scientific knowledge also plays a role in the phenomenology of aesthetic perception, as Lonergan following Collingwood observes (see Lonergan, A Third Collection [London: Chapman, 1985,17]). Increase in scientific and other knowledge about nature not only enhances our awareness of the intelligibilities involved, but also makes our powers of discernment and observation keener: We notice more, we are aware of small, significant variations in the objects in nature. 41 It might be objected that, in some cultures, ‘sameness’ and tranquil repetition of forms is more a value than in the West. This can be readily granted, but the minimum required to satisfy the notion of the value of originality discussed here is found in any instance in which significant difference is valued in, say, the production of pottery of a new design, or the performance of a musical piece that has slight, but significant differences within it. 39 40

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guest being interviewed and invited to make selections of favourite music. Towards the end of the programme, the guest is asked to make a final selection of just a few pieces that could be taken to an imaginary island on which the interviewee is to be cast away. The scenario is indeed cruel aesthetically. Not only would our appreciation of Duruflé’s Requiem be severely diminished were this to be one of only three recordings available to us for a considerable period of time, but we would have to sacrifice the many other works, bad, good, and great, in our estimation, among which the work takes its place. This placing of works in a landscape makes evident the fact that we would not want to be without many enriching art works that we genuinely judge to be good but not great. We may not want to do without many songs in the pop or rock genre, pieces of jazz, or works of Gilbert and Sullivan, while at the same time recognizing that these do not have the place in the aesthetic landscape occupied by the symphonies of Brahms or the songs of Schubert. With his well-­rounded and generous anthropology, Aquinas is only too willing to acknowledge the role of leisure in human life, and such leisure encompasses the domain of healthy aesthetic fun, of which Eldridge also takes note.42 The important role that variety plays in aesthetic evaluations, then, is not simply that of difference, but of difference as originality in terms of richness or depth of intelligibility. Does moving a cup on a table or banging a spoon on the same constitute art? Such questions are often raised in the context of the aesthetic debates of modernity and postmodernity, and deflationary and minimalist definitions of art are offered that imply that we must give a positive answer. The implication of such views is often then taken to be that our comparative judgments about art works are in some way vitiated. But while the Thomist position, in advocating the universality of the aesthetic, seems to support such moves, in reality, it clips the wings of many such arguments. It does hold that anything, insofar as it is, has aesthetic worth. However, we need to understand that, in the first place, ‘art’ as used in ordinary parlance, is an ordinary language concept, and therefore has vague boundaries – as such borderline cases may not be decidable.43

Thus, Erik Satie may write a piece poking fun at the pretensions of high, romantic musical art. Both trenchant satire and milder, affectionate poking fun can be of value in human life, and are thus values to be expressed in artistic form. Such works take their place in the artistic landscape both as relative to the objects of their humourous cavils and as, perhaps, good but not sublime or great works of art given their theme and content. 43 On Lonergan and the philosophy of vagueness, see Andrew Beards, ‘Logical Foundations’, João Vila-Chã, S.J., editor, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Tomo 63 (2007): 919–39. 42

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Even if we were to accept a minimalist account of what marks off ‘art’ from ‘nonart’, this of itself would do nothing to rob of their validity our standard comparative value judgments on art works. For, as we saw above in reflecting on the example of the beauty of the Gödel proof, art works are not simply or solely the aesthetically enjoyable object, but the presentation of that object. The work of art is marked off from the general aesthetic nature of everything else as such a presentation, a human communication. If the banging of the spoon is like the case of the presentation of the Gödel proof above, then, from the Thomist perspective, it may be communicating the philosophical point of the aesthetic quality of anything, but as a presentation of this it is aesthetically thin and poor itself. In our deliberations about the relative merits of a work of art, we look for success in the qualities of the presentation itself. We try to identify insightful originality and ingenuity in the conception behind the work and in the skilful working through of the project. A further implication of this analogy, between the variety and intelligible originality of the individuals-­in-relation of the natural world and the dynamic, developing landscape of the arts, is the historical nature of the evaluation of artistic originality. I readily acknowledge the historical nature of development and decline in a discipline like philosophy, that concepts have dates, that philosophy is a tradition-­based conversation across time. But I would also argue, against the self-­ referentially inconsistent views of historicism and relativism, that there are common principles of logic and reasonableness discernible in the debates between Greek philosophers, medieval philosophers and philosophers in the Hindu tradition, and that appeal is made, explicitly or implicitly, to the same principles both by the disputants in question and by us who now assess their controversies. On the basis of these, we and they discern and discerned which the better arguments are and were. In the case of the originality of the art work, however, the criteria invoked will be those embedded in the artistic historical tradition from which the work emerges and against which its novel contribution is evaluated.44 Profound originality in some philosophical idea is, naturally, a point in favour of a work. But while Levinas rightly prizes Shakespeare as a great philosopher of

This is not to say that truth is not important in aesthetics. On the contrary, the Thomist notion of the convertability of truth, the good, being and beauty suggests the opposite. We might enjoy the film of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons and appreciate the aesthetic quality of Bolt’s writing, the drama of the narrative, the strength of characterization and the cinematographic qualities of the film, while thinking it a complete fiction. However, our aesthetic appreciation of the whole would, surely, be considerably enhanced were we to learn that the story is fundamentally historical and that such a man as Thomas More existed.

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human life, we also think of him as a great playwright because of the beauty of his language, and the development of character and plot that occurs in many of his dramas. In the domain of linguistic meaning, the aesthetic works of poetry, the play and the novel have their place as does the writing of philosophy. The author of linguistic works with a primarily aesthetic aim will, like any artist, celebrate, exploit, or at the very least, learn to live with, the polyvalence of words and language as an aesthetic medium. In any aesthetic expression, the insights and apprehensions of value on the part of the audience will not only be with regard to the primary and secondary communications of meaning the artist intends, but will also arise from the conscious and preconscious sources that reside in the forces at work in the individual and in the sedimented, traditional meanings from which the work emerges and of which the artist may be barely aware, if at all. Works of symbolic logic may strive to avoid the ‘casual insights’ (as Lonergan calls them), which abound in works whose aim is primarily aesthetic or which are, perhaps, philosophical but at the same time more literary in form. In this way too, there are borderline cases: the language and narrative drama of St. Augustine’s Confessions mean the work is of interest both as a work of literature and philosophy. Modern philosophers such as Marcel, Sartre and Wojtyla write philosophy in the form of the play and the novel. Nevertheless, if the primary aim of the work is aesthetic, we will want to see more in it than profound philosophical ideas, even though these will certainly weigh in its favour. On the other hand, the great works of art of a tradition are about the great themes of human life, and it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. Gödel’s proof of incompleteness is rich in intelligibility, and therefore also has an aesthetic attraction (we can say ‘that’s a beautiful proof!’); the Thomist notion of the transcendental is also itself rich in a similar way. But the banging of a spoon on a table is poor as a working through of any point, including, if this is its message, the universality of the aesthetic. Such considerations may be of assistance in seeing that the claim made for a given art work, said to realize the aesthetic value of originality as identified in Aquinas’s metaphysical insight, is hollow insofar as the element of novelty is a counterfeit version of genuine intelligibly rich originality and diversity brought about through original, ingenious working through of materials.45 In a way that complements what is being argued here, Hugo Meynell, in criticizing the aesthetic free-­for-all proposed by some postmodernists, also draws attention to fundamental criteria according to which we can and do evaluate art works. See Hugo Meynell, ‘Literary Theory – What Is to Be Done?’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, Vol. 14, 2 (1995): 201–16; see also his book on aesthetics, The Nature of Aesthetic Value (New York: SUNY Press, 1986).

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Insight and objectification Eldridge, as we have observed, argues that since art works cannot be simply outbursts of emotion, or mere imitations of the same, ‘reason’ must play its part. It is precisely in this area of discussion, on the relation between the cognitive and the emotive in art, that Lonergan’s philosophy can make a significant contribution. Lonergan deploys his own detailed analyses of conscious preconceptual and conceptualized intelligent and reasonable insight in his writing on the aesthetic. However, we can also complement these analyses with further reflections pertinent to aesthetics that arise from Lonergan’s treatment of feelings as apprehensions of value; such reflections on feelings occur in his later writings.46 Bringing these analyses together is, I believe, helpful for throwing light on the subtle interrelationship between the emotional and the cognitive in art. Below, I also combine these approaches with the notion of the transcendental of beauty as this is understood in the Thomist tradition. If our notion of reason is of a series of tidy, verbalized concepts running through the mind, or of the passage through consciousness of a catena of syllogisms, we will hardly be inclined to stress the role of ‘intellect’ in aesthetic experience when we consider the elusive, allusive meaning episodes, often fleeting in nature, which we experience in the progress of, say, a sonata. On the other hand, it appears undeniable that, if I gaze at writing on a page that evidently is formed into a poem (it has a title and the stanza form typical of modern Western poetry), but do not understand it because it is written in Magyar, a language I do not know, then I cannot appreciate what it says; it cannot evoke feelings or suggest to me values. Lonergan’s subtle and variegated phenomenology of conscious intellectual and reasonable insight is extremely pertinent to this discussion. In the opening chapter of his work Insight, Lonergan invites his readers to experience in themselves evidence that we can distinguish between conscious insight, on the one hand, and conscious, verbalized conception, on the other, deploying

Lonergan’s understanding of certain types of feeling as involving apprehensions of value developed through his reading of von Hildebrand and Scheler. On this, see Mark J. Doorley, The Place of the Heart in Lonergan’s Ethics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). I believe that one of the more conspicuous places in Lonergan’s earlier Insight in which such an understanding of feelings is already operative is to be found precisely in a discussion of the aesthetic apprehensions, which accompany our transcendental orientation towards the known unknown, towards the divine: see Insight, 555–56 and 744.

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examples from geometry.47 So we are invited to realize for ourselves how a person arrives at Euclid’s definition of a circle as ‘a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre’ by manipulating the images of point and line as exemplified in the case of a cart wheel. If the spokes are of unequal length, we will not arrive at the continuous curve that is required if the wheel is to be circular in form. In these thought experiments, Lonergan further invites us to advert to our conscious awareness of modalities such as possibility, impossibility and necessity: if the spokes are unequal in length, a circular wheel is impossible; if they are equal, a circle necessarily results. In his philosophical works, Lonergan goes on to argue that, as the history of geometry demonstrates, not every conscious insight relevant to the formulation of conceptual axioms and definitions that Euclid and other geometers enjoyed and aimed to elaborate was successfully expressed by them. It seems, for example, that only in the 1890s did Pasch formulate in verbal expressions some of the insights key to understanding the Euclidean formulations. However, it is evident that these conscious insights were, nevertheless, enjoyed by the older geometers. The conscious insight is one thing; its explicit verbal expression in the concepts of definitions and axioms is another. Lonergan’s account of the history of symbolic logic also suggests that the move to symbolism was an attempt to render explicit and controllable these hitherto casual conscious insights. But if this is so with regard to a ‘rigorous discipline’ like geometry, then it is a fortiori the case in other areas of human conscious activity. And we can readily acknowledge this once we grasp the distinction. From the intelligent play we witness in the case of very young children with, as yet, limited linguistic capacity to the cases in which our insights seem so fleeting that we are hard put to it to express them in words to the poetry appreciation group in which we may experience frustration in not being able to formulate successfully what we have, we are convinced, understood in the poem, we can find myriad examples of the same distinction. The last example mentioned does, of course, lead us directly back to the issue in hand. Given what many philosophers, particularly many analytical philosophers would consider necessary for something to qualify as ‘cognitive’, it is no wonder that philosophers of aesthetics such as Scruton take an ‘anti-­cognitive’ line. Etheridge cites with approval Scruton’s view that in aesthetic appreciation we see

Lonergan, Insight, 26–36.

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a gestalt or form in the work of art. However, if we do not get beyond taking the ‘see’ in this idea in a physical or basic psychological sense, then we would be hard put to it to distinguish between the attractive gestalt experienced by a lion, which eyes us up as a particularly delicious type of prey, from the gestalt, which is the intelligible pattern or series of patterns that we understand as we grow in appreciation of, say, the movements of Martinů’s 1938 double concerto. In the latter case, ‘seeing’ is a metaphor for conscious insights that grasp intelligible patterns and values. Of the role of conscious insight in the creative work of the artist, Lonergan writes: . . . just as the mathematician grasps intelligible forms in schematic images, just as the scientist seeks systems that cover the data in his field, so too the artist exercises his intelligence in discovering ever novel forms that unify and relate the contents and acts of aesthetic experience. . . . The artist establishes his insights not by proof or verification but by skilfully embodying them in colours and shapes, in sounds and movements, in the unfolding situations and actions of fiction. To the spontaneous joy of conscious living there is added the spontaneous joy of free intellectual creation.48

Wholly or in part, art works, then, have their place in the domain of what Lonergan calls ‘elemental meaning’. Of this, he writes: . . . meaning has an initial stage, which is the Aristotelian identity, and a second stage when it moves on to a meant, and by elemental meaning I mean the first stage. When meaning is fully developed, we have distinctions between objects; but prior to the fuller development there is an elemental meaning.49

When I read some work of art criticism, what may be occurring is a process in which the hitherto preconceptualized or preverbalized meanings in the art work, into which I have enjoyed insight in appreciating the work, become conceptually and verbally expressed by the critic. I may find myself agreeing or disagreeing with what I read on the basis of how well this written explication fits with what I can verify as regards my prior preverbalized insights into the work under scrutiny. Further, as Eldridge indicates, a work of critical appreciation can also serve to direct my attention to aspects of the ‘data’ of the artistic production so

Lonergan, Insight, 208. Lonergan, Topics in Education, 216.

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that meanings and values that I have not yet noticed, and have not yet had insight into, are drawn to my attention. As I observed above, the artistic works of poetry, theatre and the novel also arise from the domain of what Lonergan terms ‘linguistic meaning’. Unlike most of what occurs in meaning communication in music, painting, photography, sculpture and architecture, the art forms that also participate in linguistic meaning will, in part, work with conceptualized and verbalized conscious insights of meaning and value. Thus, as we noted, Shakespeare is also a great philosopher of human existence. However, as art forms such linguistic works will also communicate through preconceptual conscious insights. This is seen in the way meaning and values are communicated in the poetic language used and in the way plot and character descriptions are devised and laid out. Lonergan writes of the way literary works are composed in a fashion that ‘suggests’ or hints at certain insights of meaning and value: . . . the skilful writer is engaged in exploiting the resources of language to attract, hold, and absorb attention. But if there is no frontal attack on the reader’s intelligence, there is the insinuation of insights through the images from which they subtly emerge. If there is no methodical summing up of the pros and cons of a judgment, there is an unhurried, almost incidental, display of the evidence without, perhaps, even a suggested question.50

A further aspect of Lonergan’s distinctive approach to artistic creation and enjoyment is to be found in his notion of art as ‘an objectification of experiential patterns’.51 In attempting to unpack this idea, we realize that, given Lonergan’s analyses of ‘the experiential’, we are faced with a notion that is indeed protean. By ‘the experiential’, taken in a broad sense, Lonergan means anything and everything of which we are conscious. Thus, these ‘patterns’ include the configurations of the shapes and colours, tones and rhythms of objects of sight, hearing and sensation in general; our related feeling or emotional states, such as dejection and elation, anxious tension and peaceful resolution, with their bodily expressions; they include our apprehensions of value, and our awareness of

Lonergan, Insight, 593. Lonergan, Topics in Education, 211. The definition is taken over by Lonergan from Suzanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form. However, the basic elements of what Lonergan has to say in the 1959 lectures are already there in Insight, 207–9. The editors of the Collected Works of Lonergan point out that the section on the ‘Aesthetic pattern’ in Insight was written prior to Lonergan’s encounter with Langer’s work, in which he found confirmation for some of his ideas on aesthetics. See Insight, 791, editorial note g.

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virtuous and vicious actions and lives of heroism and generosity, cowardice, treachery and cruelty; they include our conscious experience of the desires of the heart and mind; further, they include the micro- and macro-­narratives of our conscious experience with their attendant drama, from particular instances of attentive, intelligent and reasonable investigation into some area of life to life projects to the unfolding of an entire life and of a ‘life together’ as in marriage.52 The fact that conscious preconceptual insights of meaning and value are present in an artistic work in a way that may make them difficult to render explicit in conceptual, linguistic form, implies that already at a fundamental level art is experienced as the ‘mysterious’. In encountering works that we truly begin to evaluate as good, and perhaps great, we begin to understand that there is a plenitude of meaning still waiting to be discovered, that there is an opacity that has to do not with paucity of meaning, but which is an intimation of a ‘known/ unknown’ of ever further discovery. These experiential patterns are in some sense the ‘stuff ’ of which art works are made. The artist ‘translates’ his or her insights into these life experiences and values into the sensible materials that become informed and moulded so as to re-­express, in conscious preverbal or conscious verbal form something of these experienced patterns. However, we can, perhaps offer one or two further considerations relevant to understanding this ‘process of translation’. We can say that an objectification of experiential patterns is also evident in the work of a phenomenologist philosopher such as Husserl. Indeed, the efforts of a literary author such as Marcel Proust would, perhaps, reveal an overlap with the work of phenomenological explorations of human consciousness. But what makes us say

We might argue that the macro- and micro-­narratives in our experience, which include our own conscious development in relation to others and the development of the natural and social world, become objectified in, for instance, music as melodic and rhythmic patterns. The interweaving of such patterns mirrors our intersubjective relationships, and the narrative dramas of threatened failure, the tragedy of collapse, the triumph of success are all objectified in art. Since, at least, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the tension between tonality and atonality, and following this, the tension between the collapse of all melodic patterns and their ‘recovery’ have marked some of the most exciting innovations in music in the last century and a half. However, we could conjecture that, in the last few decades, the complete abandonment of such discernable, anthropologically significant patterns has contributed not a little to the sense on the part of many that musical compositions became radically inaccessible. Not all mathematical patternings resonate with anthropological significance. To gaze over into the abyss can, indeed, contribute to the tension and drama of a situation, but to land at the bottom of it usually signals the end of the story. I am in agreement, then, with Eldridge when he sees emerging signs of a greater accessibility in newer art forms in the last few years as a positive development. That composers have again turned to such narrative elements in music, in minimalist works and others, is not, I believe, simply the result of exasperation at the obtuseness of obscurantist philistinism.

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À la recherche du temps perdu is, primarily, a literary work are the consciously intended aesthetic aims realized in the work. These considerations bring us back to the debate Eldridge outlines between emotivists and cognitivists. In my response to this, I wish to bring together what Aquinas has to say on the transcendental of the beautiful, the aesthetically en-­joyable, and what Lonergan has to say on the insightful objectification of experiential patterns and their insightful, skilful redeployment in art works. When I take time to enjoy a recording of a Bach keyboard concerto, I may take note of the way the three movements are marked Allegro, Adagio, Allegro, respectively. Allegro, Adagio are clearly emotive ‘mood’ words that indicate characteristics to be found in the movements of a given concerto. However, sometimes my listening to one of these concertos will be more characterized by attention to, participation in, its feeling-­evoking features and sometimes less so. The music always has a potential for eliciting such feelings, and my foot may inevitably begin to tap as I hear the sprightly concluding Allegro, brimming over with triumphant energy and joie de vivre. My admiration for the work, however, will always be because of my enjoyment of Bach’s brilliant and ingenious, intelligible organization and patterning of sounds. The Adagio ‘mood’, emotive atmosphere, will be one to be found in many other works by Bach; it will be found equally in works by Berlioz and Bartók. The difference between these instances may or may not have to do with further objectifications of experiential features of human consciousness or insights into the human or natural world. It will, however, always be different in terms of the ingenious, intelligible formal structure of the composition. A given cadence in a sequence of chords may have its origin in the human sigh, and this may remain evident in its use in various works by various composers. But it is the way these ‘material’ elements are integrated and exploited in the intelligible structure of the composition that makes the piece what it is. In this way, we might use, with due caution, the analogy of language: the objectified experiential patterns are akin to a vocabulary that has been deployed and put to use in musical compositions in a long creative tradition. Thus, a composition is an intelligible patterning of patterns. Part of this intelligible patterning of composition can be understood in terms of the deployment of skills in such areas as harmony and counterpoint, as these are studied by the student of music. Indeed, the novice, struggling with the apparently mathematical intricacies of harmony and counterpoint in the first months of study, may be forgiven for thinking that the difference between all this and the aesthetic

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enjoyment of a great work is comparable to that between the warmth of a radiator and the laws of thermodynamics that are invoked to explain the phenomena of heating. However, the part played by such structural elements is not the whole, and the analogy of grammatical structure in language might be useful here too.53 Thus, the whole, original communication by the human speaker is, in some senses, equivalent to the whole of a musical composition, into which the grammar of harmonic and rhythmic intelligible relations enter as constituent elements, but do not account for the novelty of the communication in any exhaustive fashion.54 In a stimulating discussion in which she draws on the philosophy of aesthetics of her late husband Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alice von Hildebrand takes issue with the stress Jacques Maritain places on the Thomist transcendental of the beautiful in his understanding of art. She argues that while the Thomist notion of the beautiful has relevance for the transcendent, metaphysical realm, the aesthetics of human art are better served by an analysis focused on values and their apprehension.55 She asks how we can possibly think the beauty of a mathematical proof is equivalent to that of a Beethoven symphony; we wish to return again and again to the latter, but not to the former, seeking aesthetic enrichment in the same way. I have noted above the importance of feelings as apprehensions of values for understanding art. Not only does art involve the objectification and use of values, the values of love and family, faith, hope, charity, loyalty, among many others, in the creation of works, but also we may say there are even specifically aesthetic values. These may be of a very general kind, such as the value of ingenious originality in artistic creation discussed above, or of a particular kind relative to some genre or period of art: a certain way of concluding a passage in the second movement of a quartet may be seen as a ‘value’ in, say, the classical period of

In Topics of Education, 218–19, Lonergan distinguishes between the form of an experiential pattern that is abstracted in conscious insight, on the one hand, and its expression, not in conception, but in an idealization in the art work, on the other. What I am attempting to do here is to tease out the implications of what Lonergan says and develop these a little further. Thus, the ‘form’ of a chord progression, which, say, represents a sigh, is itself but one element that can, in an historically developing musical tradition, be taken up into further musical forms, compositions of increasing intelligible complexity and diversity. 54 We think here not only of the analogical relation between form and matter in Thomist metaphysics, but also of Lonergan’s development of the idea in his analyses of ‘higher viewpoints’: see Insight, 37–42. Artistic creativity can also result in the emergence of novel nuances, new aspects of feeling as hitherto unexperienced, rather as prior to the introduction of chocolate into Europe certain flavours were unknown in that part of the globe. 55 Alice von Hildebrand, 2009, ‘Debating Beauty – Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand’, available at www.catholicity.com/commentary/hildebrand. 53

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Western music. The contribution of the von Hildebrands in the area of investigation into value apprehension in art is of great importance for aesthetics. However, I think Alice von Hildebrand overstates the case somewhat and overlooks ways in which a flexible, yet hopefully authentic, reading of the Thomist tradition on aesthetics can still contribute a great deal to the discussion. First, Maritain, I take it, would not advocate that the notion of beauty as a transcendental implies that everything is equally beautiful. Second, there may be passages in the writings of some great philosopher to which we return again and again because of the sheer beauty, not of style, but of the intelligible unfolding of the argument. No doubt, we see more and learn something new on each revisiting, but then that is surely also true of our revisiting a Beethoven symphony. On the other hand, Alice von Hildebrand sees an important point. While the realities of the natural world and of the human world have an aesthetic quality to them, a quality that has to do with the intelligibility of their being, this is, so to speak a ‘collateral effect’. Those preoccupied with artistic creation, operating within the aesthetic differentiation of consciousness, as Lonergan calls it, aim specifically and primarily at the production of aesthetically enjoyable objects. Since we are sensate beings, the appeal will, for the most part, be made in such artistry to the whole person, body, mind and heart. But a fundamental oversight would be involved in holding that value analysis alone is sufficient. If such analysis means failing to appreciate the aesthetically en-­joyable, the beautiful in terms of the intelligible structure, the ingeniously elaborated ‘form’ which ultimately constitutes the reality of a given poem, sonata, or painting, then it does not go far enough. The transcendental of the beautiful is, then, directly relevant to understanding the aesthetic qualities of human art works and their composite reality. For it indicates the relation between the degree of intelligibility of a reality and the aesthetic worth of that reality. Further, since the values we apprehend are surely instances of the good, and these are the good of certain actions, persons, things, events, dispositions and the like, the Thomist idea of the convertability of the real, the good and the aesthetically enjoyable is certainly not rendered redundant.

Art, morality freedom and transcendence Eldridge agrees with Carroll, as we saw above, that on occasion a moral defect in an art work is also a defect in its aesthetic quality. He also agrees with Nussbaum

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that sometimes art has a moral message to communicate, and on the other hand, he warns against moral didacticism in art as a defect. However we have also seen how, in his final chapter, Eldridge expands the discussion to look at the perspectives on art and society, art and politics of Marxist, post-Marxist and postmodernist critiques. He does not seem quite to appreciate how this radicalizes the issue of the connection between art and morality, art and the good. Eldridge gives us a good understanding of how various critiques in these traditions manifest the suspicion that art genres are subtle and not so subtle forms of social and cultural control, which inevitably exclude or oppress individuals and social groupings. In the work of Jacques Rancière, we see the advocacy of the view that art and politics are one.56 In Foucault-­inspired aesthetics, we see a negativity that is Manichean; in Foucault’s world, we have but to raise a finger to be involved in some form of oppression. Such a radical vision of the interrelation between aesthetics and morality, between art and the human good, both individual and political is a most eloquent reaffirmation of the premodern understanding of the relation between art and morality as expressed in the Thomist notion of the transcendental: the good is convertible with the beautiful. Modern and postmodern pessimisms about art arise from a hermeneutic of suspicion of Manichean proportions that is a kind of shadow image of the Thomist vision of our world order as being fundamentally good, and thus the source of aesthetic joy, while at once in desperate need of redemption from the shadow of evil. Some of Eldridge’s views on the relation between art and morality are, then, in need of correction and development in the light of a broader perspective. To begin with, the art work is never free of ethical dimensions. Here, we need to think through the implications of the Thomist insight that human acts are never simply neutral: if they are not good as contributing to the proper flourishing of human persons, then they are evil. Naturally, in some works of art, a moral message will be stronger and more evident than in others. But any human act or activity that like art is expressive and communicative: (1) is done for some end, with some value in mind; and (2) communicates some meaning that is understood as being of value. That works of art can suffer the defect of ‘moralizing’

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Oxford: Polity Press, 2009). For an analysis of how Rancière offers a critique of ‘classical aesthetics’ from the eighteenth century up to and including key works such as that of Dufrenne, see Maryvonne Saison, ‘The People are Missing’, Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 6, 2008, available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.0006.012.

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is not to be questioned. However noble the moral message might be, the vehicle of communication of the art work may be a poor working through of insights and values, a work lacking in skill or subtlety. In art, the medium is at once part of the message. Lonergan usefully distinguishes, in this context, between the ‘didactic’ and ‘didacticism’.57 Good and great art can be didactic in nature, but will not suffer the defects of didacticism. At one point in his work, Eldridge, as we noted above, seems too excessive in his claim that good and great art avoids the didactic: this would rule out most of the art of, for instance, the West in the last two millennia, which has been Christian in inspiration. Reflecting on the way the appreciation of the good and beautiful go hand in hand is important for understanding further the processes of aesthetic evaluation. Let us imagine that I am taken to view a new building adorned with a series of sculptures representing the freedom of woman, executed by an artist of good standing whose previous work I have very much admired. If it is then explained to me that these works have been deliberately fashioned to express something of the function of the building, which is, in fact, an abortion clinic, my moral horror at the prospect would utterly obliterate any aesthetic enjoyment I might derive from the works. The moral factors would be so grave as to outweigh other aesthetic considerations. Since the good and the beautiful are convertible the Thomist notion, bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu applies equally to both; the good (or the beautiful) is formed through many factors coming together; an evil is some particular defect or lack. Eldridge’s point that we debate with others over the relative merits of art works important to us just as we might over the qualities of our friends is a very useful one to bear in mind in thinking about aesthetic evaluation. We can enlarge on this point in the present context. Some moral defects will be so grave as to vitiate the aesthetic worth of the art work, as in my example above. As Nelson Goodman indicates, in the cases where our evaluations are altered by discovering that a work is a fake, the ‘formal cause’ of a work is inextricably bound up with something of the intentionality of the artist whose work it is. Once our understanding of that intentionality is altered radically, we cannot view the work in the same way as before. In the case of human persons, we make similar moral evaluations that also inevitably result in our finding some people more attractive than others. We may read biographies of Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, on the one

Lonergan, Topics in Education, 214.

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hand, and those of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. John Vianney or St. Francis of Assisi, on the other. Clearly, our moral appreciation of the first three historical characters will be radically different from the latter three, and our estimation of how ‘attractive’ these persons are will vary accordingly. However, most characters we read about in history will come somewhere in between; they will have defects that are perhaps sometimes serious, but will have some ‘redeeming’ features too. So it is with our estimation of the aesthetic and moral whole of the art work. A moral defect, for instance, may not be so grave as to rob the whole of value, while the very noble message of another work may render the work too moralizing to be valued highly as a good, artistically skilful working through of important insights and values. This reflective equilibrium in aesthetic judgments, and in discussions with others on the relative merits and/or demerits of art works, has been a major theme of our discussions so far. Since I have now also drawn attention to the moral as an important ingredient in such evaluation, it might be useful to draw some of these criteria together at this point. The criteria themselves are variables that enter into our aesthetic evaluations, discussions and debates: (1) Skilful ‘working through’, to use Eldridge’s felicitous phrase, of the materials. Skill in bringing about a worthwhile end is something we hold as a value, a good and an aesthetically admirable feature of human living. Just as we say the skill of a great tennis player is ‘beautiful’, so part of our aesthetic appreciation of the performing and nonperforming arts is to be found in our aesthetic enjoyment of skilful artistic performance, construction, and the results and expressions of this in, for example, the fine work of the designs of the furniture carver. In such instances, we admire the habits that combine practical insights, motor skills and bodily operations that result from years of dedicated training and human effort. (2) Our evaluation of an art work also depends on the originality of conception and working through of an artistic project.(3) In my discussion of the ‘aesthetic landscape’ above, I pointed out that our evaluation of art works as being either ‘good’ or ‘great’ has to do with whether or not they are concerned with the great issues of human life: love, death, heroism, life’s ultimate meaning and purpose and so forth. (4) Moral considerations: There is a connection between art and morality, as I have argued above. (5) I would also mention here a slightly more composite criterion, and one that is, perhaps, even more difficult to pin down than the others. This has to do with the ‘personality’ of the artist manifest in the artist’s work. We do come to appreciate single works as, normally, part of a larger whole that is the artist’s oeuvre. In this totality, the

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psychological, aesthetic, moral and philosophical profile of the creator of the works becomes manifest, and inevitably we come to evaluate the ‘parts’ of this totality, the individual works, influenced by our knowledge of the whole; we are influenced by our more or less positive appreciation of the composite that is the aesthetic personality manifest in the whole. As I say, these factors in evaluation are variables. Thus, while a composer may show great skill in all his works, the subject matter of this particular operetta will mean that we cannot think of it as ‘great’, rather than ‘good’ music, when compared with an opera by another or even the same composer that treats of great themes of human life. An artist may show great originality in conceiving of a thematic content for one of her paintings, but it is generally agreed that she has failed to work the themes through in a sufficiently skilful, subtle enough way.58 In coming to apply these criteria, we do so as persons formed in certain social, religious and familial traditions. Lonergan, along with most writers on aesthetic formation, will then indicate the vital role that education plays in a refinement of our feelings.59 Since the aesthetic is universal in human living, such refinement is at work from our earliest years, and it forms the basis on which we will come to learn to appreciate art as we grow. Such appreciation will, in turn, be a further education of our feelings, which may be more or less ecstatic relative to what came before in our lives: we may go through conversions. We may say that what we were brought up to denigrate, to find aesthetically disgusting before was due to a ‘biased’ training that we have now come to reject. We can return, then, to the larger themes of Eldridge’s final chapter on art in an age of ‘post-­aesthete innocence’. According to the various hermeneutics of suspicion, there is no creation or appreciation of art for art’s sake that is not allied in some way to ethical and thus political perspectives. In light of this, we can ask the questions, echoing the title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s book: which education? Whose sensibility? The end of the age of ‘aesthetic innocence’ implies, therefore, that what Lonergan writes concerning the need for ‘dialectic’ in a method for theology also

That the criteria we can invoke in our deliberations about art will be heuristic in nature and may more readily help us pinpoint defects rather than specify the qualities we come to appreciate in works of art also follows from the Thomist notion, bonum ex integra causa malum ex quocumque defectu. As with the human good, so with art, the endless creativity of genuine goodness, intelligibility, and therefore, beauty cannot be captured in exhaustive formulae in an a priori fashion. 59 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 32. 58

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applies, with due modifications, to the realm of the aesthetic and aesthetic formation in a culture.60 In order to assess what in culture contributes to authentic human flourishing and progress, and what to human decline, Lonergan argues that a dialectical assessment of individual and cultural developments in terms of three, ongoing forms of conversion needs to take place. These are, respectively, intellectual conversion, moral conversion and religious conversion. Intellectual conversion indicates the turning away of the human subject from forms of empiricism and idealism to a critical realism that, Lonergan argues, is the rendering explicit of the implicit exigencies of the human subject’s conscious intelligent and reasonable capacities in coming to know. This rendering explicit occurs through various self-­referential arguments establishing basic positions, and their corresponding counterpositions, in epistemology, metaphysics, anthropology, ethics and natural theology. Moral conversion is the shift away from inauthenticity to authenticity in the life of an individual. Such a shift would involve a real, rather than simply a notional, assent to the ethics that could, in part at least, be spelled out in intellectual conversion. By religious conversion is meant the embracing by the human subject, and community, of the call to self-­ transcendence towards the holy, otherness of God as the origin of the intelligibility, goodness and beauty of creation; such a call, Lonergan will argue, is written into the human heart and mind as oriented to full intelligibility, goodness and love. It may seem a tall order to say that this multifaceted dialectic must enter into an assessment of the relative merits of works of art. Given the variables, outlined above, that enter into aesthetic judgment and discussion, surely both the ardent atheist and the believing Christian can find common ground in aesthetic appreciation of, say, Michelangelo’s Pietà? Further, we can surely ask whether wide-­ranging and transcendental philosophical arguments are required here, when we can recognize that aesthetic joy is self-­justifying, when we see how, in the conversion stories of writers such as G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis the surprises of joy, often in aesthetic form, are what lead to an acknowledgment of ultimate meaning in God. Do not atheists and agnostics often claim that it is in laughter and in other manifestations of the aesthetic in nature and art that they find meaning and purpose in life? The pessimist Schopenhauer, as Nietzsche wryly remarked, played the flute.

Lonergan, Method in Theology, chapter 10.

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All these points I would readily concede.61 The dialectic envisaged by Lonergan would also involve drawing attention to the importance of all the true aesthetic values that we as human beings are drawn to. But we have to acknowledge the other side of the coin. A Manichean hermeneutic of suspicion applied to art and life ultimately entails the breakdown of values aesthetic and otherwise; it points in the direction of the dissolution of any kind of harmonious individual and collective consciousness, towards the collapse of meaning. The extinction of aesthetic enjoyment is then a real possibility. The roots of the chestnut tree are not a natural source of aesthetic delight for Sartre’s character Roquentin, but rather nausea. The viewpoint of those who find meaning and value in the universe only in aesthetic moments of joy is Janus-­headed. In one direction, it points towards the reality that without complete intelligibility there is no intelligibility, no meaning at all; in the other, it points in the direction of the nihilistic extinction of enjoyment. Philosophical reflection and argument can not only contribute to showing that such double vision is inherently unstable but to an unfolding of the implications of our apprehensions of aesthetic value in the direction of genuine transcendence.62 As in my example above, the ethical objections I have to abortion clinics would destroy any aesthetic appreciation on my part of skilfully wrought designs on the building. Similarly, while acknowledging the ingenuity of the craftsmanship involved, the anthropological, ethical and theological problems I have with the erotic-­religious art of the Hindu temple are grave enough to remove aesthetic joy from my viewing of it. But others will disagree with me. One viewer of Joshua Reynolds’s portraits will see them as so suffused with patriarchal and elitist political themes as to rob them of aesthetic worth; another viewer will disagree. The antagonisms perhaps increasingly evident in our culture witness once more to the truth of the premodern insight of the interrelation among the transcendentals of the good, the true and the beautiful. Perhaps sooner, rather than later, we may have to turn to the kind of dialectic envisaged by Lonergan, the dialectic of the related conversions, in order to contribute to these aesthetic

Although as the discussion to follow suggests, I would question whether the atheist could discern the same degree of beauty in the Pietà as the believer. See footnote 44 above. 62 That a Foucault-­inspired Manicheanism is self-­refuting can be shown by indicating that the person who argues that every human act is evil does so because he or she intends reasoned discovery of truth (the truth of this position) as a good, a value. To attain this good end, a person has also to exercise power, the power of being attentive, intelligent and reasonable. On this, see Andrew Beards, Insight and Analysis: Essays in Applying Lonergan’s Thought (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2010), chapter 7. 61

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debates something more than mere emotional advocacy. But, again, we should not deny the common ground that already exists in aesthetic discussion. What someone holds to be a moral/anthropological or political defect in a work may not mean that for them it even ceases to be a ‘great’ work. The considerations above concerning the variables invoked in aesthetic judgment and their relative weighting are relevant in this context. While not going all the way with Hegel, Eldridge, as we have seen, sees freedom as a fundamental characteristic and value in art. For him, art has the capacity to move us beyond our present ethical horizons, beyond the horizons of our current practically oriented, common-­sense world. It invites us to participate in a richer, more expansive world and to explore other possibilities for living. As Glen Hughes rightly observes, for Lonergan too freedom is a fundamental characteristic of art.63 However, I also noted above that questions arise for Eldridge’s view of art as freedom: is freedom on this view too tied to ‘breaking away from’ previous convention? is it not freedom from rather than freedom for? Once again, the dialectical issues become evident: what are ‘richer possibilities’ for human living and what diminishing ‘impoverishments’? On Lonergan’s view, the most fundamental form of freedom is a ‘vertical freedom’, a freedom for the ever fuller realization of the three types of interrelated conversion we have mentioned, and the application of the fruits of these conversions in the lives of the individual and the community.64 Understanding art includes appreciating the way art is a movement of freedom, of going beyond, and thus of transcendence throughout. At the most fundamental level, it frees us from mere biological orientation towards sounds, colours and shapes, and from our practical, everyday preoccupation with objects.65 In this way, as Collingwood rightly observes, it has a therapeutic meaning and value. In good and great art, this moving beyond present horizons continues as the great, and

Glen Hughes, ‘Lonergan and Art’, João Vila-Chã, S.J., editor, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Tomo 63, 2007, 991–1000. 64 On this, see Fred Lawrence’s essay ‘The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good’, in The Importance of Insight: Essays in Honor of Michael Vertin, John J. Liptay Jr. and David S. Liptay, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 127–50. Lawrence argues that Lonergan’s thought offers resources for understanding what the values are to which freedom, so valued in modern and postmodern thinking, should aspire. This understanding of the ulterior significance of the aesthetic is already implied in what Lonergan, in Insight, writes concerning humour and satire. See Insight, 647–69. 65 Lonergan, Insight, 208. 63

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even not so great, themes of human life are explored in an arresting, entertaining and sometimes disturbing manner that engages and captivates us. On Lonergan’s view, the artistic in human life also points beyond this world to the most enriching possibilities for human life, which are those found in the ultimate intelligibility, goodness and beauty of God and in God’s answer to our human questing and to tragic situations in which human beings find themselves. Art is an apt vehicle for the communication of this ultimate transcendence since it participates in the revealing, and at once concealing, opacity of the symbol. It communicates in an allusive, elusive fashion and great art is always encountered as at once an invitation to explore ever further, to discover the meanings and values intimated but yet undiscovered. Art, then, has a numinous, mysterious quality, an alterity. The human orientation towards the mystery of being as the known/unknown is, for Lonergan, made palpable for us in art.66 In a chapter such as this, we cannot hope to reproduce, let alone attempt to substantiate through argument, the philosophical and theological viewpoints on the basis of which Lonergan offers his dialectic, involving the triple conversion of persons-­in-community. I have simply attempted to indicate the relevance of this for the discussion, and to make some brief remarks on what this dialectic is and how we might begin to argue for its cogency and effectiveness. But that something like it is inevitably required emerges from the fact of the antagonisms between worldviews affecting our aesthetic judgments and valuations. I offer a final consideration before concluding. In our evaluation of art works, we cannot avoid being affected by, or taking into consideration, the worldview and values the works display and express. Sometimes these will be more or less overt in the conception and aim of the work; sometimes they may appear as cultural assumptions and orientations on which the author or composer may not have explicitly reflected;67 on occasion, they will be expressed more clearly as combined with the ‘personality’ of the artist as expressed in individual works, as this was described above. Depending on our own worldview, we will assign various degrees of weight to these factors, positively or negatively, in our deliberations and discussions with others concerning the relative merits of a given work.

Lonergan, Topics in Education, 222. See Lonergan, Insight, 615. Since, in addition, preconscious forces are operative in the art work, the hermeneutics of psychic conversion, as related to the other three conversions, is of enormous importance. Thinking on this fourth type of conversion was developed by Robert Doran with Lonergan’s encouragement. See Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006).

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Given the position I take, as expressed in what has been written in this chapter and in accord with Lonergan’s dialectic of conversions, I must take it as a disvalue, something that counts against an art work, if the work more or less deliberately espouses an atheistic worldview. I not only find this problematic as a philosophical position, but I also see it as inherently contradictory. Why I hold this has already been indicated in the discussion above concerning the instability of the atheistic appreciation of art as an enrichment in meaning: is there really meaning, intelligibility, and if so, how can this be without complete intelligibility? For incomplete intelligibility is no intelligibility at all.68 In addition, we can also add that such an artistic expression appears to be in tension with itself insofar as it proclaims the death of mystery, the truncation of the movement to transcendence, which is yet at the very centre of art as the numinous, as the embodiment of a saturated intelligibility intimating infinite, unplumbed depths. Not only in its numinous quality, as an invitation to explore ever further horizons of intelligibility and meaning, is art a symbol of the divine, but the place of the single work in the ‘whole’, which we understand in appreciating any art work, is again an intimation of immortality. St. Thomas’s understanding of created beauty as variety is relevant here. Just as in the natural world, so in the world of truly original artistic creation, we value the individual work as relative to the whole, the landscape, to the tradition from which it emerges. The historical, developing horizon in which the individual art work has its place is one constituted by the ongoing variety of new, ingenious, aesthetically satisfying creations. We do not think such development will come to a dead end, or that any one creation will exhaust the intelligibility and beauty that is gradually realized among the many.69 Yet, if the individual works are not to be part of a

‘So implicitly we grant that the universe is intelligible and, once that is granted, there arises the question whether the universe could be intelligible without having an intelligent ground. But that is the question about God’. (Lonergan, Method in Theology, 101.) See also Lonergan, Insight, chapter 19. 69 The anthropological implications of this for the human person as the originator of aesthetic, mathematical, scientific and social developments are brought out by Lonergan, see Insight, 291–92. See also Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic: CWL, Vol.  19, Philip McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 66. What I endeavour to sketch out in the final section of this essay would be the beginning of a dialectical encounter between Lonergan and a philosopher such as Rancière; ultimately, this would need to include Lonergan’s work on economics and his philosophy and theology of politics. Lonergan’s thought, I suggest, would assist in a recovery of what is genuine in premodern, pre-‘aesthete’ thinking on art. From Kant to Dufrenne, there is an emphasis on the art work as an-­end-in-­itself. A dialectic invoking the conversions Lonergan outlines would also transpose this perspective of modernity in terms of Lonergan’s fuller vision of horizontal and vertical finality. This is not only the context for the art work, but also enters into its constitutive meaning. 68

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series that is in effect just ‘one damn thing after the next’, then the ultimate horizon of meaning, intelligibility against which we value them cannot be denied. It is denied in any work that dismisses the divine and thereby offers us a massively diminished vision of the natural world and of ourselves. However, the points I have made on the variables operative in our judgments on art should also be applied to these matters. A further refinement pertaining to these variables, which we employ in weighing up merits and demerits in art work arises from the present discussion. Art, especially ‘great art’, insofar as it has depths of meaning and value yet to be plumbed even by the creator of the work slips beyond the immediate ‘control’ of its originator. Polyvalence is willed and embraced by artists. Thus, while a given message may be the denial of ultimate intelligibility in the universe and human existence, the mysteriousness, the polyvalence of the work may, in reality, give the lie to this stated intention; it may subvert the expressed intentions of the author. There is ample room for a sympathetic theistic and even Christian deconstructive reading of the great works of art that may ostensibly oppose such a worldview.70

Conclusion Analysis of what elements constitute an art work and reflection on the ways we can or should evaluate art are, clearly, two central preoccupations of philosophy of aesthetics. They have been the two dominant themes of this chapter. To help our investigation of these areas, I began by surveying the urbane and generous introduction to some of the most influential work on aesthetics of Richard Eldridge. I moved on to introduce into the discussion perspectives from Aquinas and Lonergan, a thinker himself deeply influenced by St. Thomas. I argued that Lonergan and Aquinas could take us beyond the already wide-­ranging and

I think here of some of the music of Vaughan Williams. I cannot help seeing the rather ardent profession of a self-­assured Victorian agnosticism in his first, choral symphony as a significant aesthetic defect. However, when we listen, for instance, to the numinous final movement of his sixth symphony, a different reaction is, I think, appropriate. Although he suggests in programme notes that the music expresses a bleak cosmic vision at this point in the symphony, the delicate and subtle questioning and questing evident in the music itself has a ‘reverence’ to it that opens out on alternative possibilities. The questing, questioning quality of Vaughan Williams’s aesthetic agnosticism means, in my view, that he can write good liturgical music. It has to be borne in mind that he also, deliberately, allows himself to be ‘carried’ by earlier harmonic themes and moods that arise from the modal music of a strongly religious past.

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insightful reflections of Eldridge. Among the important contributions these thinkers make to aesthetic debate are universal perspectives on the aesthetic, both in terms of the Thomist transcendental of the beautiful and in an analysis of the ubiquitous nature of the aesthetic in human life. Given these approaches, it was seen that we are quite justified in asking for more than simply some kind of basic aesthetic experience when we attempt to classify an art work as ‘good’ or ‘great.’ I argued that Aquinas’s insight regarding originality, as significant and rich intelligible diversity, also throws light on the ‘novelty’ we value in a work of art. Combining the approaches to aesthetic creation of Aquinas and Lonergan also facilitates an appreciation of the role that both values and the transcendental of the beautiful play in art. This allows us to bring together points from both the aesthetics of von Hildebrand and of Thomists such as Maritain, while arguing for the relevance to art of the beautiful as a transcendental. An art work has a metaphysical reality characterized by the intelligible structure realized in it through the ingenuity of human aesthetic creativity. Such a creation while appealing, normally and for the most part, both to mind and emotions, is as an intelligible, formal structure analogous to the realities in nature and in other areas of human creativity, which we can also judge to be aesthetically satisfying, beautiful. Lonergan’s subtle analysis of art as insight and objectification was seen to be a potent resource for understanding how the transcendental of beauty does not only apply to the transcendent realm, but also to the concrete reality of human art. The continued relevance of the notion of the transcendental of beauty as convertible with the good and the true was brought out in our reflections on modern and postmodern aesthetics deeply influenced, as they are, by various hermeneutics of suspicion. It was argued that, while common ground may always be sought and often found as regards agreement on how art works are to be evaluated, at the limit, and in some cases perhaps sooner rather than later, we might have need of a way of discerning between an hermeneutic of suspicion and one of retrieval such as is offered in Lonergan’s dialectic. That dialectic identifies and explains the implications of a threefold conversion in the areas of philosophy, moral life and religious orientation towards ultimate meaning that is found in God. It is inevitable, then, that these factors can and do, implicitly or explicitly enter into our personal and communal estimations of what constitutes bad, good and great art. In the chapter, I attempted to place these factors alongside others,

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which then function as variables that are to be invoked in the weighing up of pros and cons in assessing the relative merits of works of art. As Eldridge so ably demonstrates, this is not a solitary exercise of critical evaluation, but one that we embark on formed by our tradition and in discussion and debate with friends, and with those who, perhaps, hold very different values from our own. The criteria for artistic evaluation offered by Eldridge and those put forward in this chapter, while necessarily heuristic and quite general in nature, do, I believe, assist us in thinking about the merits and demerits of particular instances of art. It would have been premature and hazardous for me to offer my own considerations concerning particular works or genres, while I have made some comments in this direction in footnotes. Certainly the research and writing of this piece has, I sense, sharpened my own thinking in the area of aesthetic evaluation. However, I am also in complete agreement with Eldridge when he maintains that given the delicacy and difficulty of the task of applying evaluative criteria to particular works, while there will be many broad areas of agreement in well-­substantiated artistic judgments, there will also always be ample scope for agreeing to disagree.

4

Cartwright, Critical Realism and the Laws of Science For the student of Bernard Lonergan’s thought who is also interested in the significance of his work for analytical philosophy, the philosophy of science proves to be a fruitful bridge between the two domains of thought. Indeed, some of the earliest secondary literature on Lonergan’s philosophy that sought to relate it to debates in Anglo-American philosophy had as its focus the relevance of Lonergan’s work for the philosophy of science.1 Within the world of analytical thought, Nancy Cartwright is regarded by not a few philosophers today as one of the most important philosophers of science currently writing.2 She is then a worthy successor to Karl Popper at the London School of Economics; she has divided her academic labours between this base in the United Kingdom and the University of California, San Diego.3 In this chapter, my intention is to bring these two thinkers into dialogue. Given the scope offered by a single chapter, what follows will of necessity be little more than an initial sketch offering avenues for further discussion and debate. Lonergan’s contributions to philosophy of science, placed as they are in the context of his philosophy as a whole, are of such breadth and depth as to constrain the scope of such a comparative study. Nor is Cartwright’s output meagre. I offer some critical judgments on Cartwright’s philosophy, which arise from Lonergan’s critical realism, particularly with regard to what I see as deficiencies in her epistemology – or to be precise, her lack thereof. However, I

See Patrick Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965); ‘The Logic of Framework Transpositions’, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 72 (1971): 690–716; Philip McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970); Hugo Meynell, ‘Science, Truth and Thomas Kuhn’, Mind, Vol. 84 (1975): 79–93. 2 A recent collection of essays on her work witnesses to her growing influence: see Stephan Hartmann, Carl Hoefer and Luc Bovens, editors, Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science (New York: Routledge, 2008). 3 In 2012, Cartwright moved from the LSE to University of Durham. 1

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hope that the reader will be more readily impressed by the notable points of convergence there appear to be between the thought of these two philosophers in the area of philosophy of science. And it is that convergence which I wish to emphasize. I believe the projects in the philosophy of science with which Cartwright is engaged and which are, as she points out to us, ongoing are such that Lonergan’s work could serve to enhance and progress further these investigations. While my critical standpoint will, then, be that of Lonergan’s critical realism,4 it is also the case that in such an essay, I cannot attempt to justify that philosophy in any detailed fashion. Suffice it to say that I hope that as the argument unfolds points of justification will emerge, and beyond that, I would direct the reader to other works of mine in which I have argued at length for the fundamental validity of Lonergan’s basic positions.5 Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Lonergan’s work will know that he believes his philosophy to emerge from the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Lonergan aims at a retrieval of the basic perspectives of those ancient and medieval thinkers through a process of self-­appropriation, to which we as readers of his thought are invited. This phenomenology of self-­reflection and self-­knowledge regarding our cognitive, moral and affective conscious operations and states is then unfolded in Lonergan’s writing to yield positions in epistemology and metaphysics that have a bearing on a variety of areas in philosophical and non-philosophical subjects. Such a retrieval serves, in its turn, as a critical tool to advance what is of permanent value in the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, and on the other hand, offers a way of separating this from aspects of their thought, which it can be argued, are to be seen as superseded.

Readers familiar with analytical philosophy and philosophy of science will also be aware of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism. While perhaps sharing some common ground with Lonergan’s critical realism, we might suggest that it is Lonergan’s approach that argues critically for the foundations of a realist position in a way that Bhaskar’s critics claim his philosophy does not. For a very helpful and insightful examination of Bhaskar and Lonergan, see Chris Friel, ‘Lonergan and Bhaskar: The Intelligibility of Experiment’, Heythrop Journal (2014) doi: 1111/heyj. 12162. In the philosophy of religious education, Andrew Wright has drawn on both Bhaskar and Lonergan for inspiration; see his Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth and Theological Literacy (London: Routledge, 2014); in the same field, Timothy Walker, whose work focuses primarily on Lonergan, points out connections between the two types of critical realism in Science, Religion and Education: Perspectives from Bernard Lonergan (Ph.D. thesis, Maryvale/Liverpool Hope University, 2015). 5 See Andrew Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Insight and Analysis: Essays Applying Lonergan’s Thought (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2010). 4

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Naturally the challenges that arise from the development of modern science are crucial in this regard. Lonergan’s phenomenology of self-­appropriation also draws on the resources offered by developments in science and mathematics, insofar as these offer further data on the way our knowing occurs. As Lonergan explores these further sources that offer the possibility of insight into the nature of insight, he also deploys the philosophy he is developing to throw light on questions in science pertaining to, among other matters, the relation between classical and statistical laws, the relationship among the sciences, the ontological nature of the interdependent levels of reality – the worlds of physics, chemistry, biology, human anthropology – and issues arising from the theory of relativity.6 One of the salient methodological features of Lonergan’s approach in the philosophy of science is the manner in which his account of cognition and epistemology is used in analysing the correlated aspects of scientific knowing with the various objects known. This methodology works to increase our appreciation of the ways abstraction, on the one hand, and concrete judgment of fact, on the other, are interrelated in scientific knowing. The confusion and conflation of these phases in accounts of scientific knowing are a source of a good many confusions in debates on science. In the company of virtually all other realists in philosophy of science, Lonergan is clear on the revisability of scientific theories. Our best theories allow us to claim that propositions x and y are probably true of reality; and we can say that some scientific views are far more probable than others. It is very unlikely, for instance, that our knowledge that the planets in our solar system are of certain mathematically calculated distances from each other – knowledge achieved through scientific progress – will be radically revised. However, some standard forms of fallibilism, such as those of Peirce and Popper, Lonergan finds unacceptable. They are indeed susceptible to the kind of sceptical attack launched by the likes of Feyerabend. On Lonergan’s view, such positions fall foul of what we can definitely come to know through self-­ appropriation. Thus, if everything is subject to revision, the meaning of revision itself is lost. But even deeper problems of self-­referential inconsistency arise: to deny all of the consciously interrelated acts of our process of coming to know, such as attention to data, questions, the enjoyment of insights, the judgments

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), chapters 2–5.

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that something is or is not so, is to land in a self-­contradictory position of claiming to know that I do not know. I do not have evidence to contradict my claim in my own consciousness of that claim itself if I say that theory z is not the explanation of why green leaves pop out from the brown bark of trees every spring. But if I argue that I do not consciously experience data (words, images, etc.), ask questions, formulate ideas and theories, and make judgments on their probable or definite truth, I will find in the data of my own conscious activities the evidence that definitely refutes such denials and establishes the truth of their contradictories. For Lonergan, then, cognitional theory and normal scientific theory are seen to be different in the way we have described. However, the similarities between them are even more striking: in both cases, I use my intelligence and reason to ask questions of that which I experience, and I attempt to assess the reasonableness of the theories proposed to explain what these data are, weighing the evidence in order to judge as to the truth, falsity or probable nature of the theory. This may not be a popular line to adopt at present in some quarters of philosophy. But if we are to give up the naïve foundationalism of crude empiricism, is the only alternative an out and out scepticism? That scepticism will, in its endeavour to be persuasive, precisely as such show itself to be self-­contradictory, as the sceptic consciously experiences his or her intelligent and reasonable philosophical labours. And modest talk of ‘probable’ and ‘perhaps’ only makes sense at all – once we pursue cognitional investigation at any length – relative to our awareness of, and sometimes successful achievement of de facto non-probable but definitive judgments about what is so. Nancy Cartwright does not claim to have produced significant philosophical contributions to philosophy of mind, cognition or epistemology. Indeed, on occasion, she claims that she is not interested in how scientific knowing arises.7 On the other hand, she shows considerable interest in what are, in fact, cognitional issues in science, such as the methodological implications of abstraction and idealization in scientific thinking.8 In general, however, she is adamant that hers is an empiricist epistemology. However, we explore further below just what kind of empiricism this turns out to be on closer examination of her work.

Nancy Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3. 8 Nature’s Capacities, chapter 5; Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58ff. 7

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Suffice it to say here that in its positive aspects this frank profession of empiricism on Cartwright’s part can be taken as a commitment to realism in science, and perhaps also as a commitment, as we shall see, to a realist ontology of an Aristotelian stripe. For it is Cartwright’s growing commitment, as her work develops, to a type of Aristotelian ontology that makes for a particularly fruitful discussion when her work is brought into conversation with that of Lonergan, arising in good measure, as his does, from the Aristotelian-Thomist traditions. This growing sympathy for Aristotelianism is also manifest in the influence on Cartwright’s thought of thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Ernan McMullin; both of these philosophers are considered to have carried forward in different ways the conversation between the Analytical and the Aristotelian-Thomist traditions.9

Hume versus Aristotle Nancy Cartwright came to prominence in the world of analytical philosophy as her first book, from the early 1980s with the unforgettably provocative title How the Laws of Physics Lie, began to exert its influence on the philosophy of science.10 As a representative of the so-­called Stanford school of philosophy of science, prominent among whose advocates were also Brian Skyrms, Patrick Suppes and Ian Hacking, Cartwright has had a well-­defined adversary in her sights from the beginning of her writing career: the positivist heirs of the eighteenth-­ century Hume and the twentieth-­century philosophers of science in the mould of Carnap and Hempel. The leading light of this opposition, during Cartwright’s academic career, has been Bas van Fraassen. As Cartwright acknowledges, van Fraassen has jettisoned some of the more objectionable ideas of the older generation of logical positivists, such as a verificationist theory of meaning, and has developed in their place new and sophisticated accounts of a higher-­ order semantics, supposed to express the nature of scientific law; but for all that

See Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities, chapter 5 and p.  105; Cartwright, The Dappled World, 135. Ernan McMullin was a contributor to the first collection of essays on Lonergan’s work: see E. McMullin, ‘Insight and the Meno’, Spirit as Inquiry, F. E. Crowe, editor, Continuum 2, Chicago (1964): 369–73. Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper ‘Causality and Determination’, which has influenced Cartwright and a number of analytical philosophers, was her inaugural lecture at Cambridge, given in 1971. The previous spring in Florida, she had given a version of the paper as her contribution to the first international conference on Lonergan’s thought. 10 Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 9

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it is, she contends, the old Humean anti-­realist, yet universalist notion of scientific law repackaged. Cartwright’s doctorate, directed by Skyrms, was on the philosophy of quantum mechanics and her earliest published work in the 1970s further pursued this interest. Three of her major books11 end with sections in which she returns to the analysis of problems that arise in this vexed area of philosophy of science. It is her very professional and technical treatment of these issues that demonstrates to the reader her ability to pursue theoretical questions in a fashion way beyond armchair reflection. In fact, it is evident that she has worked closely with scientists and technicians in areas such as laser construction and experiments on superconductivity.12 In the closing sections of her 1999 book The Dappled World: A Study in the Boundaries of Science, Cartwright returns to the mysteries of quantum mechanics to argue for a certain methodological sobriety regarding some of the more outlandish theories proffered in the light of paradoxes such as ‘Einstein’s expanding bed’, and the twin-­slit experiment outcomes. She does so, not in the name of any metaphysical squeamishness apropos of dividing ‘possible worlds’ or whatever, rather she follows the work of the quantum physicist Willis Lamb13 in arguing that the methodological issues involved are usually handled in a confused and confusing fashion. Thus, as Lamb maintains, it is hardly surprising that paradoxes and mysteries arise in this area when we realize that it is routine in texts for students on quantum physics to dismiss issues to do with the setting up of experiments as pertaining, not to the pure and abstract work to be considered, but as the concern of another area, that of ‘applied science’. Yet, Willis and Cartwright believe that such Platonism is not simply leaving out the applied side of the physics, it is leaving out the physics! In the light of Willis’s work and her own in this area, Cartwright argues that the generalizations regarding the supposed application of quantum phenomena are, at the very least, over hasty from the perspective of scientific verification. On the key methodological issue, she claims that work in quantum mechanics is not so much a matter of solving

See How the Laws of Physics Lie, chapter 9; Nature’s Capacities, chapter 6 and appendices; The Dappled World, Part III. 12 See, for example, The Dappled World, 196. 13 The Dappled World, 230–31. Lamb also provides an enthusiastic endorsement of the book on its back cover. 11

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the measurement problem regarding quantum states, but rather that of hunting it down in the first place!14 The sections of her books that treat quantum mechanics are at once arguments for the wider theses on the nature of scientific understanding, which she espouses, and the application of some of these to the technical issues peculiar to the philosophy of quantum mechanics. While Lonergan did not attempt to write at any length on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, in the way he did on questions arising from relativity, his interest in the subject is evident from the numerous references to quantum mechanics in his writing. Further, his general philosophical position and his approach to the philosophy of science have influenced some philosophers in their work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics.15 What strikes us about Cartwright’s work in this area, however, is her sensitivity to the same methodological, and we might say, epistemological issues relevant to this area of scientific work as are evident in Lonergan’s thought. Among such methodological questions are precisely those that ask whether a platonizing abstractness, concerning some supposed state or law, has not confused and conflated distinctions between what is abstract and what is concretely verified in the data at some point in a given scientific investigation. In his incisive and persuasive work Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, Philip McShane, deploying Lonergan’s insights, indicates possible areas of epistemological and ontological confusion in late twentieth-­century thinking on quantum mechanics, pointing to ways beyond some of the paradoxes. For McShane, as for Lamb and Cartwright, a number of such paradoxes seem to arise from a confusion resulting from a running together of the abstract and the concrete in the theory.16 Another conspicuous aspect of Cartwright’s philosophy of science is that it is, what I would call, a post-Laudan approach. By that, I mean that it was a merit of Larry Laudan’s contributions to philosophy of science, notably in his work Progress and Its Problems, to draw attention to artificial demarcations drawn in philosophy of science, discussions between ‘hard sciences’ such as physics, and

The Dappled World, chapter 9. See McShane and Heelan referred to in note 1; see also Michael Vertin, ‘The Noumenal Import of Quantum Mechanics: Four Views’, paper presented at the LMU Fallon Memorial Symposium, April 2009. 16 McShane, 81–99. McShane highlights scepticism on the part of E. Schrödinger regarding some of the aspects of quantum theory, now somewhat mythologized, that is redolent of a similar reserve on Cartwright’s part: 83, n. 34. 14 15

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on the other hand, other areas of cognitive research.17 Cartwright has certainly no such prejudices and a salient feature of her work is her interest in econometrics or economic theory and the philosophical analyses of such theories. In fact, her 2007 book Hunting Causes and Using Them18 largely focuses on the examples of diverse forms of causality, and our tracing of these, as are to be seen in economic theories. Such interests allow her to research fruitfully for authentic comparisons and contrasts between, say, theories of scientific law in physics and the laws proposed in various theories of economics. In the spirit of Laudan’s work, she normally finds the claims of the older positivists such as Hempel that, when compared to physics there are no economic laws or reputable theories, to be bogus. Again, for students of Lonergan’s work, this presents the prospect of further significant comparative research on these two thinkers since Lonergan also laboured for many years to develop what he considered a viable theory of successful economic functioning. While the match is not completely symmetrical, given that Lonergan worked on economic theory itself, it is still the case that his work in this domain includes methodological reflections on the nature of economic theory, which are, in turn, conditioned by his more general philosophical positions.19 Perhaps a good place to start in reading Cartwright is her essay ‘From Causation to Explanation and Back’. This is her tightly argued contribution to a 2005 ‘state of the art’ collection of essays on analytical philosophy.20 Cartwright begins by giving us a historical outline of the development of Hempel’s 1966 Deductive-Nomological account of scientific law, which he expanded to include probabilistic laws. But, she explains, this is simply a Humean account of causation and probabilistic causation with a linguistic inflection. The idea was to offer a deflationary account of statistical laws in terms of the linguistic

Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (London: Routledge, 1977). Nancy Cartwright, Hunting Causes and Using Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 19 See Bernard Lonergan, For a New Political Economy: CWL, Vol. 15, P. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Bernard Lonergan, Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, CWL, Vol. 21, F. G. Lawrence, P. H. Byrne and C. Hefling, Jr., editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Lonergan’s work as a whole would alert us to added complexities in studying explanation in economics. In part, economic realities are constituted by dynamic intelligible relations, and these Lonergan attempts to elucidate in his circulation analysis. But economic reality also always includes the de facto operations of human persons and groups operating more or less intelligently, reasonably and responsibly. Thus, a complexity in studying human affairs in the economic sphere is added that is not present in, say, physics or biology. 20 Nancy Cartwright, ‘From Causation to Explanation and Back’, in Brian Leiter, editor, The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 230–45. 17 18

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connection, the connection between cause and effect propositions that we use: this connection would then be the justification for ‘cause talk’. Philosophers of the Stanford school joined the debate, and the arguments of Suppes, Skyrms and Eells served to demonstrate how, according to Cartwright, the positivist ruse was exposed since formulations and reformulations of probabilistic laws cannot prescind from real world causal situations that they aim to express. Thus, analysis reveals how a given probabilistic law may have to cover cases of increasing complexity in which, for instance, B may increase the probability of A or leave it unaffected, and C is probabilistically conditioned by both.21 Insight into real-­world cases is unavoidable if we are to correctly formulate such laws and interpret their results in scientifically meaningful ways. The fact that there is a statistical correlation that can be made between eating sweets (or candy) and low divorce rates needs to be understood in terms of the fact that children do more of the former and less of the latter – there is no other causal significance in the correlation. On the other hand, Cartwright also argues for the significance of statistical law against those who would deny this in the name of an abstracted or pure mathematics of probability. Thus, A. Hájek maintains that if we take an object such as a key, then any probability whatever of its landing on one side or the other can be verified in a given run of series of tosses. However, Cartwright observes that Hájek’s own account of his experiment, in fact, serves to support her argument for the significance of probabilistic law rather than to undermine it. His description of his experiment shows that he is creating a ‘chance-­setup’ (in Cartwright’s terms). Thus, he says he will be careful not to scuff the object or alter in significant ways the manner of tossing so as not to alter the probabilities of the results.22 In other words, probabilistic calculations can, if properly performed (and that is not a negligible caveat for Cartwright), yield real knowledge about the tendencies or capacities of things in the world to regularly

‘From Causation to Explanation and Back’, 234. The same argument occurs in The Dappled World, 174–75. Again, Cartwright’s argument with Hájek witnesses to a sensitivity on her part to the distinction between the abstract and the concrete, which is also a crucial aspect of Lonergan’s approach. Lonergan was forced to clarify his own position on statistical emergence and probability in the light of criticisms of J. Albertson, who had approached the subject in a Bernoulli-­inspired fashion similar to that of Hájek. See Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being, CWL, vol. 5, M. Morelli, E. Morelli, F. Crowe, R. Doran and T. Daly, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 74–75. We have more to say on Lonergan’s work on statistical intelligibility in science below.

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bring about certain states of affairs. Laws, statistical or otherwise, are, in reality, about that: They are about the ontologically significant capacities of things. Continuing her argument through an examination of the history of recent philosophical debates on law and explanation, Cartwright draws attention to the potentially promising 1966 paper by Sylvain Bromberger ‘Why Questions’. Yet, she complains that the promise of the paper as a heuristic model for research was not realized, due to the fact that in its wake van Fraassen and others began to examine the multiplicity of practical aims we can have in asking questions in general and questions in science in particular; the promising avenue of research identified by Bromberger was never really explored. Her present paper, she informs us, is something of a manifesto for the project underway at the London School of Economics, which aims to follow up Bromberger’s questions in a more fruitful way by investigating the variety of causes in science and the variety of ways in which causes come about and interact. In doing so, researchers will certainly want to be cognizant of the lessons to be learned from Anscombe’s seminal paper on causality and pay attention to types of causal relation that are ‘hasteners’, ‘delayers’ and ‘sustainers’.23 Returning to her book Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement (1989), we can identify some of the major themes of her work already noted above and examine further some of the arguments she deploys in her philosophy of science. The book opens with the threefold affirmation that science is measurement, capacities can be measured and science cannot be understood without them. As we have seen above, then, ‘laws’ are ontologically grounded in the capacities of things, according to the nature of those things. A further bold opening affirmation in the book is Cartwright’s assertion that she will not be overly concerned with the epistemic origins of science, but that her epistemology is an out and out empiricism. To drive the point home, she approvingly quotes a passage from the address by Joseph Glanvill to the Royal Society in 1664, in which Glanvill professes his belief that prelapsarian Adam would have seen the causes of things directly.24 In accord with the strategy we have seen operative in the 2005 article, we then witness the progress of Cartwright’s argument as she proceeds to ‘reduce’, we might say, the laws of science first to singular causes, and then, further, to

‘From Causation to Explanation and Back’, 242. Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, 3–4.

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capacities. We can see this as a kind of semantic, and at once ontological, reduction, which turns the tables on the positivist, Humean reductionism that takes laws to be at best mere general regularities, and at worst, our linguistic fictions about putative generalities. Singular causes come first. ‘Aspirins cure headaches’ means that this aspirin and that aspirin have a causal capacity such that, all things being equal, they will ease the pain of one’s headache.25 Chapter 5 on capacities, therefore, reaches the heart of the matter. If we are not to follow the deflationary way of those who think of mere modality talk without ontological bite, then the methodological point pertaining to capacities follows: ‘. . . the amount of metaphysics assumed in their use is far greater.’26 But Cartwright in no way sees this as a negation of the equally vital methodological point, ‘. . . the crucial question for an empiricist must always be the question of testing.’ Both Carnap, and later van Fraassen, espoused the modalist view. But Cartwright’s argument against them runs in the same direction as her 2005 piece: once we admit ceteris paribus conditions as background conditions for the operation of statistically estimated causal sequences, such an admission conceals the ‘capacity’ facts of ‘interaction’. And making our accounts fit reality as far as possible through, among other things, scientific methods of testing will inevitably lead to such admissions. Already in 1963, Wilfred Sellars had made an incisive point against the then dominant positivist view of scientific law as (solely) a matter of verified, regular correlation. We may have scientific laws about the behaviour of earthworms, but whether they account for the facts in this particular case may be contingent on the facts of the neurological condition of this particular worm. Its behaviour may be abnormal because of some further factors not covered in the law.27 Sellars’s objection here also serves to draw our attention to questions as to how scientific laws are formulated, tested and discovered in the first place, and how they may be refined or replaced. Cartwright objects to the lack of an adequate discussion of these issues in some works of philosophy of science; she comments ironically that van Fraassen’s (1980) The Image of Science is an image, a snapshot of scientific theory that appears before us like Athena, fully-­clad and battle-­ready. A question of consistency regarding her own work does arise, however, when we note her claim that she is not so concerned with the epistemic origins of

Nature’s Capacities, chapter 3. Nature’s Capacities, 142. 27 Nature’s Capacities, 162. 25 26

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science. Does this suggest an oversight similar to that which she sees in van Fraassen? Further, is it, in fact, an entirely correct characterization of her work? The second question arises as we turn to the next chapter in Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, in which we encounter another central area of interest for Cartwright: abstraction and idealization in science. Cartwright finds an ally in J. S. Mill, insofar as he too argued that the capacities or tendencies in things were more fundamental than laws. In isolating these, some form of ‘abstraction’ is involved in scientific thought. In the history of science decisive progress was made, it is thought, in the discovery of laws through Galileo’s method of idealization. Certain mathematically calculable physical forces are to be discovered by a process that is in large measure a thought experiment that prescinds from given factors in a situation, to focus only on a few manageable interrelations in the data. Following McMullin, Cartwright points out that the Aristotelians were critical of the kind of process adopted by Galileo as a falsification of the complexities of a situation.28 This is a prelude to her argument for the importance of abstraction in scientific method and she holds that, in fact, both Duhem and Kelvin among others conflated idealization with abstraction. She is adamant that, ‘. . . we cannot get by without an account of how abstraction works in science. . . ’.29 However, Cartwright is anxious to restrict abstraction to what she takes to be a more Aristotelian notion. To clarify her meaning and use of the term she writes: Consider a triangle, a real triangle drawn on a blackboard. Even when the chalk and the colour and all the other incidental features are subtracted, the shape that is left is never a real triangle. But let us pretend that it is, and use the label abstraction for the process of isolating an individual characteristic or set of characteristics in thought, for that will allow us to set aside one extremely difficult problem while we focus on another. The central question I want to pursue is: what do abstract or symbolic claims say about reality?30

Expanding her account of how idealization and abstraction function in science as the way to isolate causal capacities, or tendencies, she turns to Lesek Novak’s

Nature’s Capacities, 186–88. Nature’s Capacities, 202. 30 Nature’s Capacities, 187. She follows this with some inconclusive reflections on questions as to the ontological status of properties and second-­level properties of properties (pp.197–98). For suggestions, inspired by Lonergan, on how such questions might be tackled, see Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), chapter 7. 28 29

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work on Marx’s view of scientific method. In this context, she espouses the radical position that it is the method of idealization and abstraction, as opposed to the hypothetico-­deductive method, that characterize scientific reasoning. Responding to the objection that idealization and abstraction could lead us to think of any fanciful explanatory theory we choose, she underlines Novak’s argument that it is in return to the concrete details of a situation that the idealization is corrected and modified. While I intend to restrict critical evaluation to a later part of the chapter, it would be apposite here to observe that she does not seem to have met the objections of her critics on this point. Yes, naturally we can and do modify an initial theory through return to the varied aspects of a concrete situation, but this leaves as unexplained how we verify the essential aspects of the idealization that we do finally accept as probably true of reality. In short, we need more detail on the cognitional process, not only of the modifications, as we return to the concrete, but of how and why the central idea of the idealization is verified (or not) in the return to the concrete. In the remainder of chapter 5, Cartwright pursues the methodological and ontological issues that arise from applying her Aristotle-­inspired notion of abstraction in scientific thought. First, she acknowledges that the Aristotelian ideas of form, matter and function she invokes are diametrically opposed to the Humean covering-­law view of laws.31 On her view of this Aristotelian process of abstraction, one is engaged in stripping away the inessential to get at the core aspects of a thing and its capacities. And it follows that the more concrete an object is the more properties it has. Second, she also entertains the possibility of some type of genus/species ontological hierarchy, as higher types, are grasped in, understood in an initial abstraction and seen to be embedded in lower types – also understood through abstraction. However, this line of Aristotelian thought cannot be pushed too far in light of modern science. Physics may reason about objects in the abstract. But we can, in this regard, contrast levers and oscillators, on the one hand, with helium atoms and electrons, on the other. For the former ‘are characterized in large part by what kinds of stuff they are made from’ – two electrons, two protons, two neutrons = helium atom. But when we take the cases of a lever or an oscillator, the matter does not matter so much!32 Thus, she takes it that the Aristotelian position implies that, ‘Matter will appear in the account

Nature’s Capacities, 210. Nature’s Capacities, 215.

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of the concrete objects, but it cannot appear in the account of the abstract object.’33 To round off her frank profession of an, albeit modified, Aristotelianism, she concludes this remarkable chapter by affirming the importance for scientific explanation of the Aristotelian four causes. She agrees with McMullin, however, that, for modern science, the Aristotelian formal cause is the key methodological tool.

Pied beauty With a title perhaps as memorable as that of her first book, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science appeared in the late 1990s. The title makes reference to a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, quoted in the opening sections of the work, and is an affirmation of Cartwright’s Scotism, which she believes she shares with Hopkins.34 It is an affirmation of what she refers to as ‘metaphysical pluralism’, which contrasts dramatically with a deterministic, reductionist view of science, a ‘fundamentalist’ view.35 This Scotist spirit, she holds, leads us to be chary about the rash claims to universalist knowledge, which are present in some views of the philosophy of science, and we might add, are often found in the popular cultural view of science. Rather, while celebrating its genuine achievements, an authentic philosophy of science needs to grasp both the scope and limits of science. Cartwright puts the point made in her first book How the Laws of Physics Lie in a more positive manner: the laws of science need to be understood as having a place within, and making a contribution to, a larger whole.36 We might say that contrary to the expectations of not a few, these laws don’t cover everything! Modern biology and philosophy of biology, a quite vigourous growth area in analytical philosophy, demonstrate the complete implausibility of reductionism ‘downwards’. This implies, Cartwright argues, that notions of supervenience, according to which a ‘higher’ level of reality appears as a rigorously determined ‘outgrowth’ of a lower level, are inadequate. What is needed is an emergentist

35 36 33 34

Nature’s Capacities, 222, n. 52. The Dappled World, 19. The Dappled World, 25. The Dappled World, 182.

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account that does justice to the independence and flexibility of the higher level reality relative to its conditioning base.37 However, not only must we reject reductionism ‘downwards’, but also another type of reductionism ‘sideways’, as she puts it. Here, Cartwright indicates one of her principal preoccupations: the necessity of our appreciating fully the way all laws, be they of the classical or statistical type, are ceteris paribus in nature. Problems emerge in the over-­hasty turn to abstract generalization. Thus, we may read Newton’s second law as a universal: ‘For any body in any situation, the acceleration it undergoes will be equal to the force exerted on it in that situation, divided by its inertial mass.’ In diverse areas of science, we always presume an ideal setup in terms of a given quantum field, a tensor or a hamiltonian, in quantum physics. But we ought, rather, to appreciate that laws, such as those of Newtonian physics, are ceteris paribus: they only hold all things being equal, and we know that all things are not always equal in terms of the right setup and suitable conditions. Invoking Otto Neurath’s imagined scenario of a banknote fluttering to rest in a windy courtyard, she rebuts the ‘fundamentalist’s’ claim that the laws, if known, would determine the exact position and time of the coming to rest of the note. Only in very controlled environments can we verify that certain laws obtain (even then, the verification is tolerant of occasions when it does not work). But once even slightly more complex situations outside the controlled environment are taken into account, we do not have rational grounds for extrapolating and generalizing the law. Theories are successful in their domain, be it small or large, and Cartwright is happy to extend these if there is empirical warrant to do so – but not otherwise, as do the fundamentalists with their laws.38 Because we say that some theory in science is true, this does not necessarily entitle us to claim that it is universal. Further, when Newtonian and other scientific laws are understood as ceteris paribus laws, these laws indicate natures. Thus, what we are claiming in such situations may be that ‘The force will have a tendency to do x, even if other factors intervene to prevent this.’39 We are referring to capacities. This initial discussion of laws and their limits is carried further in chapter 3 of the book. There, Cartwright begins by giving a definition of the Humean, In a 2008 paper, Cartwright highlights the importance for these discussions of work in the philosophy of biology by Sandra Mitchell and John Dupré. See Nancy Cartwright, ‘God’s Order’, available at res:// ieframe.dll/acr_error.htm#lse.ac.uk,http://personal.lse.ac.uk/cartwrig/PapersGeneral/. 38 The Dappled World, 31. 39 The Dappled World, 28. 37

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positivist or ‘fundamentalist’ view of law that she is attacking. On that position, ‘A Law is a necessary regular association between properties antecedently regarded as OK. The association may be either 100% – in which case the law is deterministic, or, as in quantum mechanics only probabilistic.’40 Empiricists differ on what kinds of properties are ‘OK’; this may mean that they are sensible, or perhaps measurable. Cartwright’s worries are not of that order; rather she believes that these kinds of associations are hard to come by. The notion of necessity is problematic, for these associations hold ceteris paribus, relative to the successful repeated combination of crucial environmental factors. To illustrate her point, she turns to a notable historical example. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were taken as what had to be explained by Hooke and Newton. Newton hit on the notion of the magnitude of the force required to keep a planet in an elliptical orbit, as the explanatory solution. But, she remarks, to see how this planetary setup works we need to recognize that nothing gets in the way – no other body of size interposes itself. The causal setup is one in which we have the right arrangements and the right shielding conditions to keep this ‘machine’ running properly. The topic of abstraction once more enters the discussion at this point. In order to understand a given situation, such as the planetary system, we construct, according to Cartwright, a nomological machine, and in doing so, abstract from various conditions. The notion of a ‘nomological machine’ is, in fact, central to Cartwright’s thinking on the way, or on one of the important ways, in which models function in scientific work. Such nomological machines are theoretical constructs in which we attempt to take into account a variety of factors as we use them to understand the world. Thus, the nomological machine theory includes not only laws of the classical and statistical types, but also our factoring in of expected ceteris paribus conditions for the functioning of these laws; such conditions include the anticipated shielding conditions that prevent interference events, for instance. Later, she defines such ‘machines’ as ‘. . . stable configurations of components with determinate capacities properly shielded and repeatedly set running’.41 In addition, she remarks that the nomological machines used in scientific theorizing, ‘. . . like my old bicycle can give us regular behaviour even though the descriptions under which the behaviour falls are in no way

The Dappled World, 49. The Dappled World, 151.

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quantitatively precise’.42 Because positivists such as Hempel had a mythical notion of scientific law, as apart from the concrete instantiations that involve conditions, implying that the laws are not ceteris paribus, they denied that economic laws are laws at all since these, they admitted, are ceteris paribus. But Cartwright counters by arguing that the laws of physical science are in the same boat as the economic laws. If the law ‘masses attract’ tells us something it does not tell us what happens in each specific situation. Depending on the circumstances, the second mass may sit still or move away. Thus, the law really indicates capacities that can have different manifestations.43 Thus, we can compare Coulomb’s Law, in its canonical expression, say, with the economic law of ‘taxation increases prices’. In both cases, the law will not determine exactly what is to happen in a given situation. Cartwright draws on the work of economic theorists to argue that the ‘law’ which, in fact, really lies behind the affirmation ‘taxation increases prices’, has to do with the relationship between prices and taxation such that in some, albeit non-normal circumstances, it will imply that taxation, in fact, depresses prices. If laws are in some sense an abstraction that gives us an insight into part of the intelligibility in a given situation, but do not determine the whole, then we are back to capacities, dispositions or what some philosophers in the past have called ‘potencies’. This is because the concretely occurring event shows that the law is grounded in the capacities of a thing or setup, which may or may not manifest themselves or may, depending on a variety of conditions, have different manifestations. The Dappled World, then, also carries forward Cartwright’s project of thinking through the notion of capacity, the relation of capacities to individual natures and the significance of these ontological moorings for science. Drawing on some distinctions made by Ryle, regarding our mental and emotional dispositions as being more or less general or specific in kind, Cartwright argues that we may distinguish between capacities, on the one hand, and dispositions, on the other. The latter she sees as tied to single, typical manifestations, while the former ‘give rise to highly varied behaviour’; an example would be attributing a ‘humourous’ nature to an individual. This would imply a wide variety of types of activity and behaviour.

The Dappled World, 58. The Dappled World, 65.

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We find in ordinary language that such capacity and disposition attributions are myriad. Ordinary language notions such as, ‘to brake’, ‘to court’, ‘to anchor’, can have various and even contrary manifestations. Indeed, Cartwright goes on to say that ordinary language terms of this kind are taken over into physics and remain within its vocabulary. Examples include, ‘attraction’, ‘repulsion’ and ‘stress’.44 Naturally, there are analytical philosophers of science who, like other analytical philosophers working in metaphysics, deny the reality of such ontological states. These deflationary accounts typically explain away dispositional talk in terms of modal accounts, claiming we can make do with counterfactuals to do the work. Cartwright briefly examines van Fraassen’s and Arthur Fine’s versions of this position, which is, in fact, classically Humean. Their objection runs: ‘Evidence for your view is from occurrences and so that’s all we have.’ Her response is to say that it is unlikely that these philosophers would really be committed to the kind of stringent phenomenalist account of the world that is required to follow through on their proposal for wielding Ockham’s razor. For causal talk is knitted into the warp and weft of even our quite basic talk about the world around us.45 It is also worth noting that Cartwright sees her dispositions/capacities account of scientific knowing as doing justice to the social constructivist perspective, while maintaining scientific realism. Yes, our ‘nomological machine’ models for parts or aspects of the world are our construction and reflection, based on our current knowledge and interests, but this does not mean that nature fails to give us answers, often surprising ones to the questions we put. Thus, we may find in some testing or use that some materials are better conductors than others; these are real capacities that these objects have, but they would not have been revealed as such prior to, say, human construction of certain electrical devices. Chapter 4 of The Dappled World develops further Cartwright’s hermeneutic engagement with Aristotle. A praiseworthy feature of Cartwright’s thought is her interest in, and willingness to learn, philosophical lessons from scholarship on

The Dappled World, 66. The Dappled World, 68. Cartwright’s work is seen as contributing to the debates over dispositions that analytical philosophers of metaphysics have been engaged in over the last couple of decades. The general drift is towards taking the ontological option that Cartwright espouses. For two very helpful recent articles on these developments, which also draw into the discussion Aristotelian and Scholastic perspectives, see Travis S. Dumsday, ‘Dispositions, Primitive Activities and Essentially Active Objects’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 93 (2012): 43–64; Travis S. Dumsday, ‘Using Natural-Kind Essentialism to Defend Dispositionalism’, Erkenntnis, forthcoming.

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the history of science. In this spirit, she begins by examining some of the antiAristotelian opposition of early modern philosophy, referring to Gassendi’s 1624 Exercises Against the Aristotelians. Gassendi’s canards are directed against the Aristotelian penchant for ever further refinements of the ‘as such’ qualified predicates attributed to things. The contrast to such otiose exercises is found, by Glanvill, in the clarity and precision of mathematics – the worthy handmaid of the physical sciences. According to a notable strand in early modern thought, knowledge of natures is simply beyond our grasp. Returning to van Fraassen’s work, Cartwright refers to his gloss on this historical development. According to van Fraassen, we witness the shift in Aquinas from talk of secondary causes, in terms of Aristotle’s substance, which is followed by a further shift in the seventeenth century to necessary laws in the science of nature. However, Cartwright argues that we have not lost ‘nature’ to ‘law of nature’: ‘For our basic knowledge – knowledge of capacities – is typically about natures and what they produce.’46 On the other hand, she maintains that other aspects of the Aristotelian legacy should be abandoned. Thus, while we need to retain the notions of ‘nature’ and ‘disposition’, we should, perhaps, no longer tie these as Aristotle did to the idea of ‘substance’. Bacon’s method, she continues, was exemplary: he attempted to collect different phenomena on, say, heat to see what is common among these, and in this way, he isolated ‘motion’ as fitting the bill. However, we need to go beyond Bacon’s naivety in thinking that natures may all be revealed to the naked eye, for ‘We need very subtle and elaborate experiments to see them.’47 Pursuing this hermeneutic of both suspicion and retrieval further, Cartwright goes on to itemize further aspects of the Aristotelian approach that, she believes, we must leave behind. Thus, modern science, she holds, has broken the connection between what a nature is and what it does, and we should rather think of a nature as a ‘configuration of structure’. In addition, we no longer think that a nature will be directly observable.48 Having granted these amendments to the Aristotelian worldview she goes on, however, to argue for a strongly Aristotelian view of nature in the face of the Humean alternative. So while Humeans say laws are about what things do, Cartwright counters by claiming that they, laws, are about ‘what it is in their

The Dappled World, 80. The Dappled World, 80. 48 The Dappled World, 81. 46 47

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nature to do’. For instance, Coulomb’s law gives the notion of the force due to the charge between two bodies. But in observation, we do not see the law as stated, but rather the fact that the two charged bodies have exercised their capacity to repel or attract. In the process of Galilean idealization, we want to know how the bodies interact in this given situation or that – where other complicating factors intervene. If we turn to the idea of generalization, again we cannot escape the notion of nature and its capacities. A well-­performed experiment yields a type of generalization: if a, b, c, then probably x, z, y; however, ‘We get no regularities without a nomological machine to generate them. . . ’.49 The idea of generalization has, ineluctably, to do with a ‘nature’, since the testing is for the discovery of a possibly similar nature. We are saying that if we build this exact, same ‘machine’, we will, probably, get the same result. The closing chapters of the book, in line with the pattern we noted above, turn to matters concerning the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Here, we only focus on some points of a general nature that emerge from these discussions, general philosophical points that Cartwright is always at pains to underline herself. Cartwright rejects as unrealistic the contention of Peter Spirtes, and others working on the Markov condition scheme of causal explanation, that the macro world is deterministic, and only the micro, quantum world is probabilistic.50 She follows Ian Hacking’s view in The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965) that probabilities are characterized relative to chance setups and do not make sense without them. These chance setups are another type of ‘nomological machine’, and we must strive to construct models of such ‘machines’, with their causal inhibitors and promoters, if we are to gain some insight into the situations that obtain in nature.51 The modal language of ‘necessity’ is used with abandon in the Humean tradition when speaking of laws; the modal issue here is not without complexity. But Cartwright suggests that ‘necessity’ is the wrong modality when speaking of laws. The right modality is what she calls ‘objective possibility’; this is the modality appropriate to discussion of capacities and dispositions.52 At the very least, talk of ‘iron laws’ when referring to, say, the statistically average number of suicides in Paris each year, appears to be problematic.

51 52 49 50

The Dappled World, 89. The Dappled World, 109. The Dappled World, 152. The Dappled World, 140.

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Bas van Fraassen has posed the question as to why we should consider ourselves justified in going beyond the empirical content of a theory to saying the theory is true. Yet, in the tradition he represents, Cartwright contends, the answer is side-­stepped: the position taken is that what gets justified is confidence in the theory to predict new phenomena – and that is all. Her view is, rather, that the models we construct, which involve laws but are not exhausted by such laws, will be ‘machines’ that we know have all the relevant factors built in to produce predicted effects. Our models should resemble the situations they represent, but, she adds the caveat, ‘. . . without a broader notion of representation than one based on some simple idea of picturing we should end up faulting some of our most powerful models for being unrealistic.’53 Finally, her response to van Fraassen is rounded off with the methodological observation that we believe in the truth of our theories ‘because of their precision and their success’ (in predicting effects).54 Before addressing, in the second part of this chapter, Lonergan’s philosophy of science insofar as it may be brought into dialogue with Cartwright’s philosophical concerns and questions, we can briefly note some of the points, promising for such a dialogue, which Cartwright underlines in the later, 2008 paper, referred to above. In this paper, Cartwright stresses once again her commitment to an emergentism, which registers the failure of vertical reductionism. The more ‘basic’ levels of reality do not determine or fix completely what happens at ‘higher’ levels; new phenomena, new characteristics, even new laws of nature emerge at larger dimensions, as we see operative more mass, higher velocities or increased complexity. Philosophical support for emergentism can be found in wide-­ ranging work in philosophy of science and in philosophy of mind over the last thirty-­five years, she informs us. Further, she contends, we may describe the possibility of making order where none is dictated as a kind of emergentism, that is, distinct from the conventional one that argues solely – and rightly – that downward reduction fails.55 Laws are not the immutable and exceptionless governors of a nature completely ordered under them. Laws, on the contrary, emerge historically and so are not universal in an atemporal way. The sources of

The Dappled World, 193. The Dappled World, 194–95. 55 ‘God’s Order’, 2. 53 54

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these historically emergent laws are contingent; so the laws too are contingent. Laws emerge only in structured environments. We can witness that mechanisms which function properly, in the right places, can generate regular behaviour; for instance, we see this in the interactions of the structures of non-RNA strands with RNA molecules and ribosomes which underwrite protein synthesis.56 Congruent with the theme in her work of the de facto ‘untidiness’ of science, Cartwright, in the paper we are discussing, also goes on to draw attention to Peter Galison’s work. Galison’s study highlights the way a linguistic form of pidgin is seen in the interactions between theoreticians and those involved in the applied side of work in the hunt for the Higgs particle and neutral currents. This language is far from that of the pure mathematical logician; again another positivist myth about science as some kind of computer-­generated map of the world, continually being printed out in tidy formulas, is seen to be illusory.

Critical realism and laws To begin our, necessarily brief, investigation of what Lonergan has to say on the philosophy of science, and the ways in which this engages with some of the concerns manifest in Cartwright’s work, we can reflect a little on the notion of ‘law’ and its attendant modalities. In ordinary language or the common-­sense domain, we perhaps think of law as having two basic characteristics. First, we think of generality. We have the laws of the land that function precisely because they have a generality to them; they apply across the whole of our country and some, perhaps, across various countries, internationally. Second, we may think, albeit a little less readily, of the ‘laws’ pertinent to the functioning of an individual thing: the ‘laws’ of a dog’s nature, say, mean that it can’t go for too long without a drink. The notion of generality enters in here too. Since the dog’s actions and functions recur repeatedly, there is the notion that this general need for fluids applies across the whole of its life. And then, of course, since other creatures equally qualify as dogs, in our estimation, presumably this requirement is a general one in that sense also as applying to many. Third, the modal aspect in our thinking emerges. The dog needs water, or another suitable fluid, if it is to survive. ‘Law’, then, in our

‘God’s Order’, 5.

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thinking implies both generality and exigency; it is about ‘requirements’. Naturally, in ordinary speech the latter becomes readily expressed as ‘necessity’. But further reflection can help us to qualify this. We tell foreign visitors to the United Kingdom that it is necessary to drive on the left-­hand side of the road; but we can understand that this is a loose kind of ‘necessary’ since they seem to get on perfectly well in their own country, where they drive on the other side of the road. Then the philosopher can enter the conversation. We can be reminded that, perhaps in another possible world, dogs or creatures very like them could be made in such a way as to live without fluids. Even that exigence in dog nature, as we know it, will not be worthy of the name ‘necessary’, in this proper sense. However, if we are to have the kind of dog nature that we do have in our world, then it will be necessary to have these laws of its nature. We can see, then, how the kind of modality and generality talk that Cartwright finds objectionable in the Humean tradition of philosophy of science can easily arise from certain of our ‘intuitions’. She is warning us, at the very least, however, to be more cautious in our thought and language. In cognitional terms, or in terms of the cognitional investigations Lonergan pursues (inspired in good measure by Aristotle, and primarily, Aquinas), the notion of ‘law’ arises spontaneously for us from a cognitional law that we can make explicit: similars are to be similarly understood. But as Lonergan goes on to point out, in his apparently disarmingly simple but incisive account of the problem of induction, while this allows for generalization across cases, it is at once a chastening of the would-­be generalizer. For we have to determine, through intelligent and reasonable inquiry on the basis of the evidence, data, whether this concrete case is, in fact, similar in the relevant fashion to that. In Lonergan’s fine-­grained analysis of cognition, the notion of ‘probability’ appears both as a quality of judgment and as referring to types of laws or intelligibilities we can detect in nature.57 Something was already said in the opening section on the notion of probable judgment in Lonergan and the way these judgments can only be understood as relative to definite judgments. The latter can be found in the self-­affirmations of cognitional structure and derived metaphysical theorems, while probable judgments are the judgments we make

Philip McShane felicitously differentiates these by speaking of verification or v-­probability, on the one hand, and frequency or f-­probability, on the other.

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with great frequency in ordinary life, in scholarship and in science – some being far more probable than others. Since this is the case, the process of generalization as it occurs in science involves an, at least, implicit double application of such intelligent and reasonable probable judgments. The theory we may come up with to explain the data x, can be said to be probable, perhaps highly probable, as it explains all the data in the most economical manner and is supported by experimental testing. However, a further probable judgment or set of judgments is involved in the affirmation of the generalization creating a ‘law’, insofar as we deploy our intelligence and reason to affirm that cases, a, b, c, d, . . . and so on, are significantly similar to case x such that the explanation of the one probably applies to all the others. There is no discernable difference, here and now, between the data on the one case and that on the other cases. The situation is, naturally more complicated since in coming up with the theory we would normally be using many samples, cases thought to be similar. But the cognitional and logical point still holds. Lonergan is at one with Cartwright, therefore, in critiquing a naive, or as she variously labels it, fundamentalist or platonizing rush to affirm laws. For Lonergan, the crucial error here is oversight of insight: oversight of insight into the ways in which our conscious insights as both intelligently grasping possibilities, and further, as judging these to be probably true of reality function. Such oversight can lead to, among other errors, the failure to distinguish the respective roles of abstract theorizing, on the one hand, from our reasonable activities in returning from the abstract to the concrete in particular judgments, on the other. From a linguistic, logical perspective, Lonergan analyses scientific laws as ‘provisionally analytic principles’. These provisionally analytic principles are to be distinguished from mere analytic propositions, on the one hand (logical propositions whose terms and relations are stipulated definitions), and on the other, properly analytic principles. These latter are metaphysical principles, which Lonergan argues, will nevertheless be arrived at through concrete verification in judgment.58 Lonergan finds an ally supportive of some of what he has to argue on this in Arthur Pap.59 Of these provisionally analytic principles, Lonergan writes:

Lonergan, Insight, 333. Insight, 334; Bernard Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL, Vol.  4, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 77. In their recent reappraisal of the significance of Arthur Pap for the development of twentieth-­century analytical philosophy, A. Keupink and S. Shieh point out that Pap’s work of the 1940s on the a priori – to which Lonergan refers with approval – anticipates some of the major conclusions of Quine’s celebrated essay of 1952, ‘Two Dogmas of

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Thus, consider the assertions: (1) water probably is H2O; (2) what I mean by water is H2O; (3) This water contains impurities; (4) There are two kinds of water, heavy and ordinary. The first is an empirical conclusion. The second is a definition. The third is a concrete judgement of fact; its meaning is that this sample is water in the sense of the empirical conclusion but it is not solely water in the sense of the definition. The fourth introduces a new basis of definition that has its ground in fresh experimental work.60

(1) and (4) are definitions, or point in the direction of formulated definitions, but neither are analytical principles. We can note that Lonergan’s position as a whole leads us to identify two sources of revision in such instances. First, there is the judgment that some instance of data is to be explained by theory x. That judgment will be a probable judgment since another possible, even if unlikely hypothesis, cannot be completely ruled out. Second – and this is the issue relevant to the discussion in hand in the passage quoted – even if we accept as well founded, and therefore probably true of reality, theory x, we may revise our judgment as to whether x applies to data y as well as to data a and b. The view that Cartwright attacks suggests the image of scientific laws offered us in the most positivist passages of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: these laws provide a grid, a map of the world, the finer details of which, as science progresses, are filled in by further laws, be these classical or statistical. This neat, tight and determined grid is described in neat logical formulations, from which further formulations may be deduced. Cartwright wages war against this worldview as we have seen. For Lonergan, such a view is equally problematic. Lonergan’s philosophy of science has its foundation in his account of the three-­phased cognitional progress of our coming to know; his analysis of how we move from insight into data, to formulated conceptions and hypotheses, on to the raising of the further question ‘is it so?’, and our attempts to reach a

Empiricism’. They also argue that Pap’s work in the 1950s on necessity anticipates Kripke’s contributions (significant in this regard is the fact that Pap was a fellow graduate student of Ruth Barcan Marcus at Yale). See Alfons Keupink and Sanford Shieh, The Limits of Logical Empiricism: Selected Papers of Arthur Pap (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), introduction. Pap died at the age of 37. An examination of Pap’s 1946 work demonstrates how, in reading it, Lonergan would have immersed himself in the minutiae of debates over analyticity, considered crucial in mid-­twentiethcentury analytical philosophy of science, logic and language, encountering the luminaries with whom Pap engages, such as Russell, Carnap and Neurath. 60 Insight, 333.

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reasoned answer as to whether the given hypothesis is true or probably true of reality. This phenomenology of knowing, which we can verify in our own conscious experience (and to deny that would be self-­referentially contradictory) develops from his detailed study of Aquinas’s Aristotle-­inspired position on knowing. It was his study of Aquinas that led Lonergan to affirm that one crucial move that needs to take place in philosophy is the shift from logic to method.61 By the shift ‘from logic to method’, Lonergan certainly does not mean some irrational abandonment of the former. Rather by ‘method’, he means the full sweep of the application of our conscious intelligent and reasonable operations, as in coming to know we are moved by our questions to attend to the data, come up with some possible understanding of the same and reach some judgment as to the fruits of our understanding – whether these truly correspond or probably correspond to what is so. Nor is this a matter of generalities, as in his work, Lonergan has far more to say on the details of these intelligent and reasonable operations and their application than can be captured here. Logic plays its essential role in all of this. Indeed, one strikingly insightful application of this method is seen in the way Lonergan deploys it in his contribution to the debates in the philosophy of logic; the debates that revolve around the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, systems of logic that have been developed in the twentieth century.62 The fuller and broader account provided by cognitional method is seen in the way it helps us attend to and analyse such ‘non-logical’ operations as attention to data and creative, intelligent insight into that data. We can, after the event, attempt to express in logical syllogisms something of the rational process that has led Sherlock Holmes to conclude that Moriarty is implicated in this crime. But the logical structures that we come up with to express some of his deductions in this instance, do not capture in their completeness and complexity the way, through accumulated insights and habits of reasoning, Holmes ingeniously hits on intelligible relations of dependency in the given data. The nineteenth-­century philosopher of science Whewell describes this insightful process as arriving at ‘colligatory concepts’, and later, Peirce elaborated his account of abduction. The fruits of Lonergan’s long, attentive study of Aquinas are seen in his analysis of insight into the data through

See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL, Vol.  2, F. E. Crowe and R. M Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 68. 62 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, chapter 3. 61

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which we may grasp an intelligible form, perhaps the formal cause, which may explain why these data appear as they do. Cartwright too wishes to stress this creative moment, overlooked, she thinks, by, among others, van Fraassen whose ‘textbook image’ of science tends to presents it as a well-­ordered system of logical formulas.63 This is not to deny the value of the role of logic in science, as its systematization may bring to light anomalies to stimulate further work and challenge insufficiently developed theses. But it is not the whole story, and its work should not derail the somewhat pragmatic and tentative work of scientific projects that are on their way; science is ever in via. It is in this context that Galison’s study, praised by Cartwright, of the ‘untidy’ pidgin of the technicians and theorists at work on a scientific project finds its place. Lonergan, too, remarks on this somewhat untidy pragmatism of working scientists.64 However, while this acknowledgment of the features of scientific work in via is important for reflecting on the de facto logic and language of science, it should not lead us to think this is a free-­for-all. Of course, Lonergan’s cognitional method indicates the general heuristics of scientific inquiry in terms of our intelligent and reasonable operations; it also specifies a number of canons of scientific inquiry, not all of which I explore in this chapter.65 However, a further fundamental heuristic of scientific inquiry identified in Lonergan’s work, which is explored below, is the shift this inquiry involves from things as described in terms of their relation to us and our concerns, towards the goal of explaining things as they are in relation to themselves. That is, the goal of discovering the formal causes, perhaps, which are the intelligible patternings of terms and relations constitutive of both individual things and of those things in relation to other things, in the processes obtaining in the world. This is a heuristic goal, better attained in some instances perhaps than in others. Since science is in via, we will find at any one time an admixture of terms and language, which is now more descriptive and now more explanatory (in the sense Lonergan gives these expressions). This crucial area is explored further, since it also has to do

The Dappled World, 185; See also Cartwright’s criticisms of an obsessive concern with ‘deductivism’, The Dappled World, 67; students of Lonergan’s work will know of his sustained attack on deductivism and its deleterious effects in the history of philosophy; see Insight, 427–33. 64 See Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 76, 385; Bernard Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, CWL, Vol.  17, R. C. Croken and R. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 201. 65 Insight, chapter 3. 63

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with Lonergan’s analysis of conscious insight as grasping intelligibilities – sets of terms and relations – and the all-­important yet demanding shift from the perspective we share with the higher animals, to that we attain through intelligent and rational answers to questions about the world. Suffice it to observe that it would lead a student of Lonergan’s thought to sound a note of caution concerning Cartwright’s view of the way science also takes over, without more ado, the dispositional language we are happy to use in ordinary speech. Without wishing to appear too mysterious, we can simply affirm here that causal language is not simply to be understood as expressive of our quotidian experience of pushing, pulling, feeling effort and contrary resistance, and the subsequent sense of release as this is overcome.66 Causality, of the formal and other types, is, rather, a matter of intelligible ordering and intelligible dependence, which in the case of natural science, is also but by no means exclusively, understood in terms of mathematical ratios.67 Understanding natures and capacities, understood also in terms of mathematical relations, implies a transition: the radiator feels hot or cold, but as we make the shift towards the domain of things understood among themselves, we speak in explanatory terms of the variable of the state named temperature.68 Further, knowledge is discursive, not intuitively direct. Properly human knowledge (again we are also higher animals, and thus also possess cognitive abilities shared with animals) involves not only the data provided by sensitive capacities, but also understanding and reasonable judgment, assessing the likely veracity of what we think. I believe many discussions in current analytical philosophy would benefit from grasping the quite radical nature of the paradigm shift, which is implied by working through the implications of this perspective. Clearly, the crude, Humean empiricism that Cartwright eschews is undermined, but other, subtler forms of empiricism are also called into question. Understanding the implications of Lonergan’s critical realism leads to a critical reappraisal of, for example, the way such matters as linguistic ‘vagueness’ are debated in current

Insight, 563. Insight, 188–90. Lonergan, A Third Collection, 53–54, n. 9. Of interest to anyone, who like Cartwright, would wish to see connections between the methods of modern science and the thought of Aristotle, is Lonergan’s further point in this passage that we now see a duplication of Aristotle’s ‘first for us’ and ‘first in itself ’. A first for us is expressed in the ordinary language terms ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, and the ‘first in itself ’ is the variable of the state named temperature. But the fruits of applied science and technique also mean that an additional ‘first for us’ is seen in our thermometer readings.

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discussions. And this is, in fact, relevant to our present examination of the scope and limits of scientific knowledge. The worry among some realists in analytical philosophy is that, if we fail to resolve the threat to realism that conceptual vagueness offers, then we would have to give up realism altogether. But this realism is understood as a one-­to-one correspondence between our concepts and the bits and pieces that make up the map of the world. Thus, the kind of fundamentalism in science that Cartwright attacks offers us the image of scientific knowledge and scientific progress as entailing an immediate seeing that our concepts have a one-­to-one correspondence with the bits of the world, mapped out by science; this ‘map,’ this picture, is filled out in ever greater detail as science progresses. Now critical realism, in Lonergan’s sense, also holds the view that science progresses and gives us improved and more probable judgments as to what is the case in the world. But the map-­picture image is wrongheaded. Even in the realistic judgments of common-­sense things are otherwise. Thus, while a person of sound common sense will be prepared to say that this is an x and that is not an x, he or she may not be able to settle borderline cases. This is not a threat to realism. If the shop assistant says he will be back with my purchased item ‘in just a moment’, then, given my understanding of the generally accepted meaning of ‘moment’, I can judge it really is the case that he has failed to follow through on what he has said to me if he returns with the items in half an hour; while it is unreasonable of me to judge that he has let me down if he appears back at the shop counter with the items in thirty seconds. These judgments about reality are well grounded or ill founded, respectively, without there being a precise picture on the world map, or precise information based on an atomic clock of what constitutes a ‘moment’. The point has its counterpart in the philosophy of science, while clearly there are also differences. In science, we will aim, at least at the limit, for a greater precision in the conceptual scheme than is required for common-­ sense judgments. This is said while at the same time acknowledging all the de facto conceptual untidiness that both Cartwright and Lonergan emphasize is present in the pragmatic day-­to-day work of scientists. However, as observed above, Lonergan still maintains that while science is a matter of journeying, it is journeying towards a goal heuristically anticipated: that goal involves an understanding of the intelligible pattern of the terms and relations that constitute the formal cause of a given x. Such defining terms and relations move us beyond descriptive predicates, and therefore aim at a clarity and precision not required in our common-­sense judgments; or not always or typically

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required.69 Therefore, the analogy between the vagueness operative in ordinary language judgments and scientific judgments remains and is significant. The analogy is manifest in the argument in Insight, in which Lonergan examines the questions raised for philosophy of science by a certain type of indeterminist. The indeterminist argues from the vagueness of data to the unverifiability of classical laws. Lonergan’s response is typically subtle and develops through several stages of argument.70 The principal oversight behind the objection that Lonergan identifies, he claims, has to do with the cognitional difference between a level of conceptual understanding, on the one hand, and the return to the concrete in verifying judgments, on the other. It is a theme that we have observed to be common both to Lonergan and Cartwright, but which, thanks to Lonergan’s careful and detailed analysis of cognitional process, is elaborated by him in a way that is, I maintain, more fruitful. The indeterminist sees the problems inherent in the kind of Tractarian ‘science as a look at the conceptual map’ view. But from the critical realist viewpoint, the debate is a comedy of errors, for Lonergan writes: . . . there is no need to interpret classical laws concretely. They can be statements of elements in abstract system where (1) the abstract system is constituted by implicitly defined relations and terms, (2) the abstract system is connected to data not directly but through the mediation of a complementary set of descriptive concepts, and (3) the laws of the abstract system are said to be verified inasmuch as they assign limits on which, other things being equal, vast varieties of data converge. [Thus] . . . the closed structure is proved relevant to data, not by exact coincidence, but by assigning the limits on which data converge.71

A further example of critical realism’s view of limitations in science can be mentioned in this context. This has to do, again, with the discursive nature of

In a short but well-­honed comment on Stephen Hawking’s opinion that physics has rendered otiose the labours of philosophy, the philosopher of science Tim Maudlin draws attention to John Bell’s remarks on the potentially obfuscating vague terms that appear in current work and textbooks on quantum mechanics, including the assumed, undefined terms ‘environment’, ‘apparatus’, ‘microcosmic’ and ‘macrocosmic’. Maudlin concludes his piece with a quotation from Einstein, which testifies to the eminent scientist’s awareness that philosophical analysis of such vagueness is often the way to further breakthroughs in science (Tim Maudlin, ‘Why Physics Needs Philosophy’, The Nature of Reality, PBS Blog, April, 2015). On Lonergan’s position, we do not make a virtue out of current vagueness in scientific vocabulary, while allowing for its inevitability. Rather, Lonergan’s heuristics, or ‘canons’ for scientific inquiry, central to which is the differentiation of explanation and description, and in addition the tools of formal logical analysis, both contribute to this ongoing exigency for clarification of terms and relations. 70 Insight, 157–61. 71 Insight, 159. 69

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knowledge, for which Lonergan argues. Such discursive progress in knowing entails that we shift from the concrete data to possible explanations of the same, expressed in our elaborations of concepts, hypotheses and back again to verification in judgments based on the data understood as evidence. This cognitional analysis yields an uncertainty principle, Lonergan argues, that is a generalization of, or higher-­order case of, the particular uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics.72 The background to Lonergan’s position here is his analysis of statistical laws. Something has already been said on this and more will be said below when we draw out some contrasts between what he has to say and Cartwright’s work. Briefly, Lonergan holds that, given the concrete world of events always includes a nonsystematic component, any attempt to elaborate an axiomatic structure for statistical laws will stop short before reaching a full determination of concrete processes. There will always remain an element of uncertainty. Later in the book Insight, he teases out further the implications of this position.73 Lonergan agrees with Einstein’s contention that statistical laws do not give us complete knowledge and that in principle such knowledge is possible. But it is not possible for us mere mortals, and therefore Einstein’s indeterminist critics are right as regards our de facto knowledge.74 Given knowledge of the relevant scattering of events that lie behind the occurrence of event x, together with the relevant classical laws, complete knowledge of the intelligible conditioning of all events is in principle possible. But there is a paradox that arises for the merely mortal knower: in order to know the concrete sequence fully, we have to work from its place within the intelligible ordering, which is the totality of patterns; yet to know such an intelligible totality, we have to begin from the individual sequences of events! Finally, we can register here a further point Lonergan makes, which is not to do so much with the ‘limitations’ of science, but runs counter to the kind of fixation with ‘universalization’ and law Cartwright sees as an intractable vice of the logical positivist view of science. Lonergan argues that, despite the methodological challenges it may pose, we should not rule out scientific

Insight, 122–23. Insight, 672–73. 74 This is not to agree, even in principle, with the view that holds statistical laws to be a mere cloak for our ignorance. Lonergan’s work on statistical emergence and probability is an argument for the objective reality of the causal significance of statistical laws indicating significant regularities, and their emergence, continuation and decline. 72 73

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explanations of single or unique phenomena.75 The point is allied to the position on scientific law discussed above. No doubt, we arrive at an explanation by testing and working with various samples, instances. But implicit in all this is the reasonable, probable judgment that these samples are all similar in the required respect. The further extrapolation to a ‘general law’, covering a number of instances, is also a judgment of this kind: it does not follow immediately without further intelligent and reasonable inquiry. Furthermore, unique instances may be found in other areas of cognitive investigation, in history perhaps, and there is no reason to rule them out a priori in the physical sciences.

Contrasts I turn now to areas of divergence in the work of Cartwright and Lonergan. Some of these have already been noted, but we can now explore further some fundamental points of difference. However, my principal aim remains one of encouraging a dialogue between these two positions. While I am convinced that the positions taken by Lonergan are correct – and the reasons for that conviction cannot all be laid out in a single chapter such as this – I am also persuaded that Cartwright’s intellectual development witnesses to an openness on her part to learn further from the Aristotelian tradition. And it is evident from some of the philosophers whom she has turned to for guidance, and from works to which she refers, that this ‘tradition’ includes the Thomist appropriation and development of Aristotelian thought.76 Given this openness, what I have to say below is an invitation to examine further the resources of the AristotelianThomist tradition, as these are retrieved and enlarged in Lonergan’s work, so as to carry forward in a more effective way the project Cartwright has championed in current philosophy of science.77 We saw above that abstraction is a cognitional phenomenon that Cartwright identifies as key in the epistemology of science. Her discussion of it is more elaborate in Nature’s Capacities, but it is clear from her later work that it never ceases to be seen as vitally important in her philosophy. For Lonergan,

Insight, 161. See her reference in Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, 213 n. 48, to M. D. Phillippe’s 1948 article in Revue Thomiste. 77 Students of Lonergan’s work will know that what I am alluding to is his project of developing positions and reversing counterpositions in philosophy. 75 76

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abstraction also plays a fundamental role. However, I believe that when we peruse his book Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, which is virtually a book-­ length study of abstraction and its implications in Aquinas, we may realize that Cartwright’s examination of the same cognitional phenomenon is, in comparison, exceedingly thin and rather confused. The quotation from her work given earlier manifests a notion of abstraction that describes it in terms of arriving at a picture that is then taken to be paradigmatic. She elucidates the notion of abstraction by way of a picture of a triangle that is taken to represent all triangles in such a way that we can deny that the colour of the paradigm or the material from which it is constructed are relevant to our generalization. However, this type of abstraction corresponds roughly, as Lonergan shows, only to the first level or type of abstraction identified in Aquinas’s phenomenology of cognitional consciousness. Beyond this ‘objective’ abstraction, Lonergan avers, which is pretty much also within the cognitive reach of my dog, there occur ‘apprehensive’ and ‘formative’ abstraction. It is ‘apprehensive’ abstraction, its nature and pivotal role, that are so easily overlooked, according to Lonergan. Nor is this simply, or, from a philosophical viewpoint primarily, a matter of the exegesis of Aquinas’s texts. Rather, Lonergan argues that these conscious stages of understanding can be verified in our own intelligent and reasonable experience. What Lonergan and, he argues, Aquinas mean by apprehensive abstraction is illustrated by, among other things, Euclid’s definition of a circle as a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre. In understanding what this jumble of words in the definition mean we have to experience the conscious insights that give rise to them. We have to imagine a cartwheel, perhaps, and then use our intelligence to consciously play around with the image such that we have the insights that make it evident to us that, if the spokes of the wheel are of unequal length, then a circle is impossible; if they are equal in length circularity will follow necessarily. We can also note our conscious ability to be aware of these modalities in this exercise of conscious intelligence: we are aware of necessity, impossibility. The images or pictures play an important role, then, but the definition is a set of terms and relations – lines (spokes), points on the circumference – that are intelligibly related. That intelligible package, that formal cause, is not in any literal sense simply seen in looking at pictures of wheels or circles. Lonergan uses a good number of other examples from geometry and its history to illustrate the point, but it is one that we can validate in our own conscious experience in myriad instances in life. We can recognize, for instance, the difference between consciously ‘getting the point’, on the one hand, and on

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the other, conceptually formulating the point in words and concepts. ‘Formative’ abstraction is precisely the further insightful activity of our intelligence, as we strive to express our conscious insights in words and concepts in as coherent and complete a way as possible. And we are aware that this does not always happen as successfully as we might at first wish. Finally, the activity of our intelligence that is signified by Aquinas’s reference to ‘formative’ abstraction is also the type of generalization that we commonly think of in speaking of Scholastic ideas on abstraction. Since it is a cognitional rule for us that similars are similarly understood, once we have conceptually formulated our understanding of x in a satisfactorily enough way, we can say that there may be more than one instance in reality of something that has such an intelligible form. But we may not be saying that here is a picture to which all other pictures of the type conform; we are, rather, speaking of intelligible patterns grasped in ‘apprehensive’ abstraction. We should add, however, that our conscious intelligent insights may not result in, or be aimed at acquiring, the kind of explanatory definitions, involving mutually defining terms and relations, aimed at in certain types of geometrical or mathematical work. Such conscious, intelligent grasp of meaning is also evident in our ‘demonstrative definitions’: ‘What I mean by y is one like that’, we say, pointing to an object. Further, the work of intelligence is behind the insightful formulations that give us nominal or dictionary definitions of things for ready use. These too may need to be quite ingenious. We only have to consider Dr. Samuel Johnson’s ingenious dictionary definition of a ‘net’, to be reminded of that! Lonergan’s earlier work Verbum, which stands behind his magnum opus Insight, extends the discussion of the subtle ways Aquinas develops Aristotle on abstraction to include, among many other things, a fascinating treatment of, what Lonergan terms, ‘the analogy of matter’.78 The notion is deployed in various ways in Lonergan’s later philosophical work, but what is interesting to observe in the present context is the way his discussion of this topic can be of use in resolving some of the further questions Cartwright raises concerning the significance of abstraction in the epistemology of science. In Nature’s Capacities, Cartwright briefly examines the implications of abstraction for our understanding of the various levels in reality that science, in some significant ways supporting

Lonergan, Verbum, 154–58.

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our common-­sense notions, appears to establish.79 The student of Lonergan’s work will observe here a welcome gesture in the direction of the notion of genus and species, which, however, Lonergan insists needs reworking into a properly explanatory account if this ‘hierarchical’ idea is to play the role it should in the modern scientific worldview.80 Cartwright goes on to observe that, while the ‘stuff ’ of which certain things identified in physics are made is more important to what they are, in the case of such human constructions as lasers and oscillators the ‘stuff ’ is not so significant. In physics, she avers, a helium atom is largely a matter of there being two electrons, two protons and two neutrons.81 With Lonergan’s work on the explanatory notion of genus and species in mind, we would need to ask a number of questions in this regard. It may be, since science is in via, that some postulated entity turns out, rather, to be some kind of group of entities that for various causal reasons act in cooperation; then we will not expect that giving this group or situation a name implies that there is a unity in this instance such as we have reason to believe is found in the cases of trees, animals and human beings. Indeed, in the case of the latter, our own conscious cognitional and evaluative structure witnesses to a unity found in diverse conscious activities of, say, questioning, having experiences of seeing and hearing, making conscious judgments about the same. The unity among these conscious activities is itself given in our consciousness; further, we can also verify that this conscious unity of oneself is not inert, but is consciously dynamic, moving now in this goal-­ directed orientation and now in that. The argument is again that were we to deny such a conscious unity, entity exists, this would be a self-­defeating exercise for our intelligence and reasonableness. For we can notice not only those intelligent and reasonable conscious activities being deployed in the very process of denial, but also the conscious unity between them: there is a conscious awareness of, I am conscious of the conscious unity between my understanding of the position outlined, and my conscious questions about it. If there is an entity, an intelligible unity in this sense in the case of a helium atom, then while understanding the helium atom may largely be a matter of understanding it as a combination of the other elements noted, it will not exclusively be so; and this is what Cartwright also admits. However, this

Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, 214. See Insight, chapters 8 and 15. 81 Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, 215. 79 80

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remainder in our understanding will not be negligible; it will be the intelligibility we grasp as some unity, some formal cause, which is required as the further explanation of why the data behave as they do. Without the subtler tools offered by the Thomist analogy of matter, certain confusions result. Thus, Cartwright maintains that there are shortcomings in the Aristotelian account of abstracting a universal form from matter, since, ‘Matter will appear in the account of the concrete objects, but it cannot appear in the account of the abstract object.’ Lonergan’s hermeneutic of the ‘analogy of matter’ helps us to throw light on this. The abstraction, definition of ‘snubness’ will always include, necessarily, reference to noses; whereas the definition of ‘curve’ will have a greater freedom from relation to specific material conditions. Accordingly, unlike some other abstract definitions, the abstraction: ‘human being’ will include bones, heart and so forth. Such types of abstract definition include, therefore, these material parts, partes materiae, as intrinsic to the definition. However, we can still say this is an ‘abstraction’: it is a grasp of a potentially general intelligibility, possibility named ‘human being’, which prescinds from particulars in this movement in our thought. Return to the concrete, the particular, involves more than merely listing further specifications regarding the attributes of the object: it requires a reasonable concrete judgment of fact stating that this x actually exists.82 With this discussion of abstraction, we necessarily return to the neuralgic issue of Cartwright’s empiricism. Approaching the cognitional and epistemological questions through a phenomenological analysis of consciously intelligent operations of abstraction, or as Lonergan would put it, of insight, inevitably returns us to Lonergan’s position on explanatory accounts. Such accounts are aimed at in science, but they are also aimed at in other cognitive investigations, cognitional analysis itself being, for Lonergan, a conspicuous instance. For the methodological import of Einstein’s heuristic anticipation of explanations in science as independent of observers is not, when rightly understood, that there is a viewpoint of some meta-­observer, some meta-‘looker’ at data. Rather, it calls for a shift in our thinking to embrace the explanatory domain as not at all intrinsically connected to our observational capacities. It is a domain rather, which we may hope to reach through our intelligent and reasonable operations – always relying on sensed and apprehended data, of

Lonergan, Verbum, 154–58.

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course. If we look at a circle, we do not literally ‘see’ the Euclidean explanatory definition, nor do we see it as a smaller, hidden ‘picture’ detectable with a microscope. The same is true for any geometrical images, say, on the computer screen that in their form attempt to serve as stimuli for us to have the requisite explanatory insights regarding the images. If this holds true for the ‘formal causes’ of geometrical shapes and diagrams, it also holds true for the explanatory accounts of science in general regarding not only formal causes (Why is this thing as it is? Why do these data appear as they do?), but also any other of the causes in the world that we have reasonable evidence to affirm as operating. Cartwright’s myth of prelapsarian human powers as directly ‘seeing’ causes could not then be more mythical! But as we have already emphasized in reading her work, there is, in reality, considerable tension to be seen in her own epistemological stance. So, on the one hand, we find the agreement with Glanvill’s myth, yet on the other, we see the attacks on ‘crude Humean empiricism’, which she understands to be bound up with the positivism and ‘fundamentalism’ that she excoriates. There are also striking examples where her thought appears to point in quite another direction. She argues that some scientific experiments are of such complexity, in terms of the delicately tuned apparatus and the higher principles that have to be invoked in the operation of the experiment, such as to nullify the Humean idea that causation needs to be seen as a ‘before’ and ‘after’: one billiard ball has to be seen as imparting momentum to a second, separate ball.83 Further, I drew attention above to her statement that ‘. . . without a broader notion of representation than one based on some simple idea of picturing we should end up faulting some of our most powerful models for being unrealistic’.84 W. V. O. Quine was also forced to admit that, given the way scientific theories have moved away from explanations which are ‘pictureable’, we should face squarely the philosophical implications involved.85 I believe it is Lonergan’s philosophy that does this, and it offers a way beyond the instability that inevitably emerges when we examine the cognitional and epistemological underpinnings of Cartwright’s project.

The Dappled World, 92; in her work on quantum mechanics in the 1980s, she is even prepared to entertain the anti-­empiricist notion of causal action at a distance. See Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement, 247–48. 84 The Dappled World, 193. 85 See Quine in conversation with Bryan Magee, Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (London: BBC Publications, 1978), 175–76. 83

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Both Lonergan and Cartwright are engaged in, what Paul Ricoeur terms, a ‘hermeneutic of retrieval and suspicion’ regarding Aristotle. For Lonergan, this involves an engagement with Aristotle that is mediated both by the perspective provided by Aquinas, and more fundamentally, through the ‘reception’ of Aristotelian thought critically grounded in the philosophy that emerges from cognitional self-­ appropriation. Cartwright, as we have seen, is also open to a rereading of Aristotle in the light of later thinkers, including a number influenced by Aquinas. We can note some interesting points of convergence in these hermeneutical engagements with the Stagirite. While Cartwright argues with vigour that we need something like the Aristotelian notion of nature in modern science, she also comments that, in comparison with modern scientific thought, Aristotle’s thinking is thin on natures as structural configurations.86 Lonergan makes a similar critical observation.87 While the increasing mathematization of nature in modern science does not mean that what a thing is is simply a matter of mathematics, and Aristotle does speak of natures in terms of relational patterns, still the intelligible interlocking of terms and relations, related tightly to mathematical formulae in modern science, further underlines the importance of the relational in understanding ‘natures’ in the world. From the perspective of critical realism, however, some of Cartwright’s choices for what needs to be jettisoned in the Aristotelian heritage are wide of the mark. These include, (1) according to Cartwright, the naïve epistemological notion that what a nature is can be simply read off by observation; (2) the notion that how a thing acts and its nature are bound up together; and (3) the idea of substance.88 In view of my critique of Cartwright’s own epistemological weaknesses, point (1) is indeed ironic. Aquinas’s discursive, rather than ‘intuitive immediate’ epistemology, as taken up by Lonergan, is anything but a naïve realism. As one who stands as in some way within the ‘Aristotelian tradition’, Aquinas thought that we have immense difficulty, given the nature of our mental access to reality, in discovering what are the natures of so apparently accessible objects as stones, flies and bees.89

88 89 86 87

The Dappled World, 81. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 136. The Dappled World, 81. On Aquinas’s thoughts on how we might come to know a stone scientifically, as given us in his commentary on St. John, see Lonergan, Verbum, 45. St. Thomas’s remarks on the way that, given our knowing processes, scientific knowledge of a fly or a bee is an immensely challenging affair are found in his Catechetical Instructions. See Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C, translator and editor, The SermonConferences of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostles’ Creed (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005), 21.

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It would be most expeditious to discuss points (2) and (3) together. The notion of ‘substance’ has been attacked in various ways in modern philosophy by such notables as Cassirer and Whitehead. Behind such critiques, Lonergan again sees quite far-­reaching epistemological confusions at work. The discussion of substance, however, needs to be brief. We can begin with some observations Cartwright makes on capacities and dispositions. This is again another fruitful area of interchange between her thought and that of Lonergan, who draws on Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy in order to elaborate a detailed and differentiated account of various types of disposition or ‘potency’.90 At one point in her examination of capacities, Cartwright, with admirable candour, points to her own emotional life by way of illustration: she has a disposition towards irritable behaviour, she admits. However, we might hasten to add that her capacities also include many obvious talents: she has the ability of a gifted mathematician, of an able philosopher, and given the use she makes of her daughter’s art work in her book The Dappled World, we can say she is a parent who strives to foster the talents of her children. These various dispositions and capacities are attributed by us to ‘one locus of predication,’ namely, ‘Nancy Cartwright’. Her own attempt to differentiate between capacities, on the one hand, and dispositions, on the other, also witnesses to the need for a ‘locus of predication’; for the discussion indicates that we may have grounds for attributing both dispositions and capacities (as she describes them) to one and the same x. Yet, this locus of predication is not a mere bundle of matter, stuff. We reasonably want to move towards an explanation of why these attributions are made to the same x, and how and why they are related. And so through the myriad insights of common sense, of philosophers, of religious and literary writings, of modern psychology and other social sciences, we come to fill out the picture of what it is to have a ‘human nature’, such that we attain to some explanatory account of why this ‘locus of predication’ is such a locus; we come to understand further why this person is capable of generous behaviour, irritable behaviour, why she or he can play the piano, cook, write philosophy books and so on. By such a locus, then, we mean an intelligible unity that, as Aristotle and Aquinas would put it, ‘stands alone’. Such is the unity of a substance. And the contrast to be made is between a substance as a unified structure (in a certain

Lonergan, Verbum, 116–27.

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sense), and on the other hand, the aspects, elements that it unifies; those ‘parts’ of the whole are variously called ‘accidents’, ‘attributes,’ ‘differentiae’, or by Lonergan, ‘conjugates’. The point is to see that the latter are intelligibly dependent on substance in a way that is non-reversible. The eye does not exist alone in the same way as the human person does have a certain type of independence. While we at once recognize that a human person is certainly not independent from all the causal relations on which such a being does depend: the terms ‘substance’, ‘accidents’ are to be understood as diverse types of intelligible dependency. In the case of such unified structures as plants, animals and human beings, we are also referring to dynamic and self-­assembling, or to some extent, self-­moving unities. Such are substances. Lonergan’s treatment of explanatory genus and species, alluded to above, shows that this kind of reasonable inquiry, leading to the affirmation of an intelligible unity in the data, a substance, is what grounds the scientific claims involved when it is said there is a ‘new particle’, a ‘new thing’. The ranges of capacities manifest in various types of behaviour are detected as being systematic in such a way as cannot be accounted for given the already known potentialities of the data. Therefore, there are sufficient grounds to posit yet another ‘locus of attribution’, the nature of which is in some way manifested, but which can be further investigated to understand better why x does a, b, c in situations e, f, g and why it appears to do h, i, j in situations p, q, r. In this way, Cartwright’s objection (3) is also met: science cannot do away with the maxim ‘action follows nature’, any more than it can with the notion of substance, when this is rightly understood. For the maxim ‘action follows nature’, agere sequitur esse, is at once a criteriological maxim: we only arrive at well grounded or probable explanations in science of what natures there are in the world through extrapolating from manifest and diverse actions of those same objects. Finally, in this section on contrasts, I return to the topic of statistical laws. I have already hinted that there is substantial agreement between Lonergan and Cartwright that both classical and statistical laws are only instantiated ‘all things being equal’, and on the realist interpretation of statistical laws as indicating causally significant factors at work in the world. There is, from the standpoint of critical realism, an oversight in Cartwright’s work, however, regarding some aspects of the intelligibility to be sought in ‘the statistical’. The problem may be spotted in her interpretation of her slogan ‘singular causes first’, and in her endorsement of Ian Hacking’s contention that statistical laws are found in a situation (a nomological setup) the conditions for which are solely a matter of

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chance. Yet, in some of her more recent work, Cartwright seems to be looking for something akin to Lonergan’s analysis of the further import of the statistical when she suggests that we need to investigate the way laws emerge historically in a given context; her suggestion is that the philosophical themes of antireductionist emergentism should be brought into our analysis of laws that are only instantiated ceteris paribus. In pursuing this further, we can begin by bringing to bear on our discussion the theme of capacities, dispositions and potencies recently discussed. In discussing matters of daily life, or of the political or economic world, we may say that in a given situation, there is now a real potential for x to happen because we recognize various required factors have now fallen into place. The significance of this kind of talk is recognized by Cartwright in a manner that can only be warmly applauded by the critical realist. In discussing the modal language to be used of statistical laws, she rejects the positivist talk of ‘necessity’ and hits on the expression ‘objective possibility’. This is, in fact, precisely the expression used by Lonergan to refer to potentiality; the potential in a given situation for it to provide the context, the ecology for a new situation to emerge is an objective possibility (not something in a possible world that is not our own). Thus, scientists speak of the conditions on various planets and tell us how near or how remote they are from being able to support life, while this allows for some evolution in the present situation on a given planet that can increase this objective possibility, this potential, in the situation. Now the further significance of the statistical is, for Lonergan, seen in such situations. He presents us with an analysis of statistical estimates of the emergences, continuation and decline of schemes of recurrence. These schemes of recurrence themselves render more or less statistically probable certain types of events. Given such schemes, their emergence and survival in its turn can increase the probabilities of further schemes emerging or declining. In this way, we begin to see the intelligible or causal significance of statistically occurring group phenomena. When we begin to investigate further the ceteris paribus conditions for the occurrence of a given classical law, or statistical law, our investigations may lead us to identify certain schemes of recurrence, the occurrence and maintenance of which is again statistically calculable. To illustrate what is meant, we can think of the water cycle on our planet. This is a scheme of recurrence of events, or perhaps better, the interlocking web of schemes that renders the occurrence of certain events statistically probable. These events, through their combined frequency, promote and/or inhibit other

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possible events in such a way as to make effectively probable the emergence of the schemes of recurrence on the planet that are the ecologies of plant life; these, in turn, increase the probability of the emergence and survival of herbivorous animals, which in their turn, serve the same purpose in providing the frequently occurring conditions for the flourishing of carnivorous animals. The setup behind a statistical law, on this view, may be a chance setup, but on the other hand, it may be a statistically probable regularity or combination of (in the context) probable or less probable regularities. There is, then, a causal significance in such regularities as regularities, an intelligibility analogous to the intelligibility understood in data in classical laws. Cartwright’s present position overlooks this possibility. This possibility is underlined by Lonergan when he points to the intelligible significance of large numbers and long intervals of time: Given the potentialities in individual things and in their various possible combinations, the more opportunities there are for x to emerge, the more probable is its occurrence. Lonergan also, then, restricts the notion of chance to give it a particular meaning. Understanding a given scheme of recurrence allows us to say that relative to this scheme – since it is not necessary but only statistically probable – an individual instance of some train of, or recurrence of, events can be nonsystematic. That is, it can diverge from the systematic ideal that is the statistically estimated frequency we have identified for some good reasons. But it cannot diverge systematically, for the simple reason that this would then constitute a different system (our initial calculation of there being a systematic frequency in the first instance would turn out to be wrong). Thus, ‘chance’, for Lonergan, means such non-systematic divergences of events and sequences of events from a reasonably affirmed actual frequency. Lonergan goes on to offer a rich and subtle analysis of such schemes of recurrence, their scientific significance and what he terms the ‘complementarity of statistical and classical laws’.91 I believe it is such an idea of complementarity that Cartwright is gesturing towards in her later thought when she encourages us to look at ways in which historically emergent conditions provide the ecologies for the emergence of laws of the classical type. Further investigation of the ceteris paribus conditions that allow the functioning of a given ‘nomological-­machine’ (a given setup in which some classical or statistical law is found) will be a return from the abstract, ‘ideal’

Lonergan, Insight, chapter 4.

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notion to the concrete conditions in which it is realized; a return to the concrete data which, as Lonergan argues, converges in such a way as to provide a sufficient, probable affirmation of the law. But this investigation, observing as it will do, the ‘how often’ and the ‘where and when’ of certain events that make up the relevant data, may lead to insight into the possibility of various schemes of recurrence, into various statistically probable, repetitive occurrences that act as promoters, protectors in such a way as to be a ‘group disposition’ promoting the occurrence of the given ‘nomological-­machine’. This possibility, grasped in an abstractive insight, will be the possibility expressed in a hypothesis regarding some causally significant frequency of events. Such a possibility will itself require verification through judgments regarding the data. This ‘to and fro’, from the abstract to the concrete in verification, which can occur repeatedly, is a feature of our cognitional activity highlighted by Lonergan’s method that we have remarked on already. The interplay of abstract and concrete is also a theme in Cartwright’s work. In a passage that focuses on the interplay between the complementarity of classical and statistical laws, Lonergan gives us a most telling indictment of the shortcomings of positivist or ‘fundamentalist’ epistemological analysis: The root fallacy in determinist opposition to the objectivity of statistical knowledge is an oversight of insight. The determinist begins by overlooking the fact that a concrete inference from classical laws supposes an insight that mediates between the abstract law and the concrete situation; and once that oversight occurs there is precluded a discovery of the difference between systematic processes and coincidental aggregates.92

Conclusion Reading Nancy Cartwright’s work leaves me impressed by both her capacity for fine-­grained analysis and her ingenious ability to bring into synthesis methods from diverse disciplines, including physics and economic theory. She is skilled in working through complex mathematical arguments in quantum theory, but at the same time, she never loses sight, and never lets her readers lose sight, of the larger philosophical questions involved. Her openness to learn from the philosophical traditions of the past, notably Aristotelianism, is another

Insight, 120–21.

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praiseworthy quality of her work. It is one I have highlighted in this chapter as I have attempted to bring her thought into dialogue with that of Lonergan. That she is considered one of the luminaries of philosophy of science in current analytical philosophy is evident from the way her work is used universally by analytical philosophers; it is brought into the discussions of philosophers currently working not only in philosophy of science, but also in allied areas such as metaphysics. Cartwright’s fascinating philosophical arguments contrast sharply with so much writing today of a more popular nature on questions pertaining to science, philosophy and religion that we see receiving wide attention in the media. Even though scientists, eminent in their own sphere, sometimes contribute to this literature it, unfortunately, all too often calls to mind Matthew Arnold’s darkling plain ‘Where ignorant armies clash by night.’93 Cartwright’s muse is another nineteenth-­century British poet, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’s celebration of the curious, the unique and the particular in the universe provides the credo for Cartwright’s metaphysical pluralism. She also believes that this is part and parcel of Hopkins’s Scotism, which she, therefore, also wishes to endorse. But while I believe myself to be as enthusiastic for Hopkins’s poetic vision and genius as Cartwright, I have argued in this chapter that she would be better served by the twentieth-­century Jesuit thinker Bernard Lonergan as a guide to the treasures of medieval philosophy. For Lonergan argues with conviction that what Scotus opens up for us is, in fact, the royal road of naïve realism that leads directly to the kind of Humean and positivistic crude empiricism, the consequences of which for philosophy of science Cartwright finds abhorrent.94 While I have suggested that there are important lessons Cartwright might learn from critical realism, my final thought is of how much we owe to Nancy Cartwright’s benign influence in current analytical philosophy. Her work has served to enlighten many as to the fact that, after four hundred years of the accelerated development of modern science, we still cannot do without metaphysics, nor can we do without some form of Aristotelianism.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach. Two examples from among many in Lonergan’s writing are, Lonergan, Verbum, 39, n. 126; Insight, 396–97.

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Scott Soames on Meaning: A Critical Realist Response Bernard Lonergan commented, on more than one occasion, that a concern for meaning had been a particular characteristic of twentieth-­century philosophy.1 In what came to be named continental philosophy, this concern with meaning focused in an overt fashion on the global questions of meaning as these arose in nineteenth-­ century reactions to the Enlightenment subversion of the Christian worldview. In this tradition, then, thinkers responded in various ways to Nietzsche’s ‘death of god’ thesis, some advocating an existentialist anthropology implying a freedom that creates human meanings, while others argued, in the spirit of St. Augustine’s way of the heart and mind, that the new cultural horizons were an opportunity for a renewed proclamation of Christian faith as the place of authentic human meaning and love. The continental perspective on questions of meaning did not, however, imply disinterest in investigation of particular areas or dimensions of meaning. It was the philosophical tradition that provided the matrix from which emerged depth-­psychology, with its aim of analysing the meaning of the expressions of the unconscious; it was also the tradition that inspired work on the meaning of the symbolic and aesthetic, and above all, the tradition within which arose an explicit concern with hermeneutics as the domain of philosophy preoccupied with meaning across time and cultures. Structuralism, too, to be challenged later by deconstruction, made contributions to the understanding of anthropological meaning in both the case of the individual and of society, while Ferdinand de Saussure’s influential work on linguistics contributed to a strand in continental philosophy; thus, concern with linguistic meaning was not solely the interest of the alternative analytical or Anglophone philosophical tradition.

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, CWL, Vol.  5, Elizabeth A. Morelli, Mark D. Morelli, F. E. Crowe and R.M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 154; Lonergan, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, P. Lambert, C. Tansey and C. Going, editors (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982), 202.

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If we are not simply to allow our dreams, nightmares, competing passions and our delusions in the interpersonal sphere to overwhelm us to the point of psychosis, if we are not to fall prey to every demagogue or trickster in the political domain, if we are to make distinctions between chemistry and alchemy, history and legend, quacks and physicians, or between admittedly fascinating and potent mythology, on the one hand, and on the other, a theology, that while celebrating profound mystery does not succumb to the irrational anthropomorphic projections of idolatry, then the need for a control of meaning will be admitted. Lonergan’s Aquinas-­inspired critical realism, in one way, and both continental and analytical philosophies, in other ways, have all offered methods for such control of meaning. In fact, Lonergan’s own exploration of the meaning of meaning was pursued in a fashion that involved an open-­eyed dialogue and debate, sometimes more obvious, at other times implicit, with the avenues of investigation of meaning opened up by these other two philosophical traditions. Naturally, the deconstructionist epigones of the masters of suspicion will excoriate the very notion of the ‘control of meaning’ as a phrase that smacks of aggressive, patriarchal, and perhaps, Eurocentric provenance. But, in fact, such criticisms, if backed up by anything with a remote resemblance to intelligent and reasonable argument, will themselves be attempts to control meaning; at the very least they will be attempts, to argue that, to use Lonergan’s terminology, certain full acts of meaning, namely, the judgments made in the positions under review, do not correspond to a meant, do not correspond to the realities intended or envisaged by the philosophical judgments and conclusions being criticized. Scott Soames, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, is acknowledged to be one of the most significant analytical philosophers currently writing. Among numerous publications, his two-­volume work on analytical philosophy, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century,2 is widely acclaimed as something of a minor classic. The volumes, based on his postgraduate seminars delivered while at Princeton, are not only an in-­depth survey of the major stages of the unfolding of analytical philosophy from Moore and Russell down to Kripke, but also are at once a critical engagement with the thinkers discussed, demonstrating Soames’s impressive philosophical acumen. The work that will be the primary focus of my discussion here will be the shorter work,

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1, The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, The Age of Meaning (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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What Is Meaning?3 However, given our topic, it is worth pausing briefly to note a relevant moment or two in the longer work. For students of Lonergan’s thought, a number of analytical and dialectical avenues explored by Soames should appear welcome. Lonergan regularly argues for the self-­reversing nature of certain philosophical positions, which deny what he terms ‘the positions’, by indicating that they are in some way incoherent and that the very conscious intelligent and reasonable activities deployed to make the said argument by themselves, or by implication, undermine the argument itself. At the conclusion of his lengthy examination of Quine’s thought, Soames mounts an argument akin to such retorsive moves against Quine’s metaphysically minimalist and semantically stringent positions. Soames carries forward this reductio of a number of Quine’s central theses by showing them to be self-­ destructive; among these is Quine’s ‘indeterminacy of translation’ thesis. Soames writes: ‘(iii) Quine argues for something – his indeterminacy theses – by producing a series of meaningful sentences that has the consequence that there are no meaningful sentences.’4 Since the topic of this essay is meaning, it may also be helpful to note Soames’s views on the contributions of the later Wittgenstein to the matter in hand, given that the latter philosopher does not feature in What is Meaning? If we are thinking of the broad outlines of the history of analytical philosophy’s preoccupation with the nature of meaning during the last one hundred years or so, then some of the salient contours of the story can be summarized by thinking of the movement that took place between the first and second phases of Wittgenstein’s philosophical career. Early in the twentieth century, the question of the control of meaning absorbed Moore and Russell in their critical engagement with the idealist tradition. In order to demystify and deflate what he took to be the metaphysical extravagances of idealism and find a method for philosophy, Russell looked to the advanced techniques of mathematics and mathematical symbolic representation of logical structures in language suggested by Peano’s work and by Frege. The programme, developed together with Whitehead, resulted in a logic that went beyond the syllogistic techniques of Aristotle, in recasting the logical constituents of language. The proposition took pride of place in this system, which symbolically represented the Scott Soames, What is Meaning? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, The Age of Meaning, 284. In this assault on Quine’s philosophy, Soames is supported by the Oxford philosopher John Hawthorne, see 286, n. 21.

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logical connectives – disjunction, negation, conjunction, implication – and placed greater emphasis than older logics on the symbolic representation of quantification. In expressing reference to ‘one/some’ or ‘all,’ the historically recent techniques of mathematical set theory were to play a central role. This new arsenal of logical, symbolic techniques was deployed with the aim of retranslating the apparently often confused expressions of ordinary language – taken to be ever more opaque when compared to the increasingly rigorous language of science – so that a method would be found to distinguish between sense and nonsense in all domains of linguistic expression. This was the experiment in meaning control to which Wittgenstein was introduced when he took up philosophy in England in the years before the First World War. That it had its effect is seen in his first major work, the Tractatus (appearing in 1922). The work appealed greatly to Russell and the Viennese logical positivists in its expressions of commitment to commonly shared ideals regarding the reform of bewitching and confusing language. Yet, the book’s odd ‘mystical’ statements and its final judgment, that the argument of the work itself, as standing outside the framework of propositions on the world which Wittgenstein held to be alone meaningful, was therefore itself nonsense, caused consternation on the part of an otherwise sympathetic audience. Such consternation was indeed justified. We cannot intelligibly invoke intelligibility and meaningfulness to fight one corner and then arbitrarily move the goal posts to say they are not required in other areas. While much of the rest of Wittgenstein’s subsequent career was occupied with rejecting his earlier positivist advocacy of the reform of language in the name of symbolic techniques, proclaiming now that ordinary language was the true repository of all linguistic meaning, one factor of continuity was precisely his penchant for gnomic, guru-­like pronouncements. As Michael Dummett has observed, in a real sense, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is more often the expression of a ‘mood’.5 This ‘mood’ cast its spell over a good section of analytical philosophers in the decades of the 1950s to 1980s. However, Soames’s critical evaluation of Wittgenstein’s contributions is in one sense simply an expression, an example among many, of the way analytical philosophy has moved on beyond this phase, with Wittgenstein now seen by most as one other canonical figure in the tradition,

Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to Brian McGuinness’, in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers Vol.  31, R. Auxier and E. Hahn, editors, (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007), 54.

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but not one who any longer elicits the devoted fascination evident, although by no means universal, that he did some decades ago. Along with other significant analytical philosophers who have written on Wittgenstein, such as Jaakko Hintikka, Soames makes the point that we have very often to tease out and formulate into an elaborated argument the hints or pointers towards possible argumentation for Wittgenstein’s theses that are found here and there in his later major work, Philosophical Investigations. Indeed, as Soames comments, there is a consistency in this regard, since the ‘method’ of the Investigations is in good measure tied to an assertion that no substantial philosophical argument is needed to make the case: the proof of what Wittgenstein is saying about meaning and its true, and seemingly sole, locus in ordinary usage, is there to be observed by anyone.6 But then again, Soames, in the company of an increasing number of analytical philosophers, is no longer content to take Wittgenstein’s word for it; to express the point with irony, they are no longer taken in by the mood, no longer bewitched by Wittgenstein. The disenchantment results in critical examination of the rhetoric involved and a consequent evaluation of just how well the theses advanced are rationally supported by evidence and argument.7 The background assumptions about what philosophy is, and therefore what, given a conception of it that is simply that of Wittgenstein’s earlier position, can or cannot be achieved, are flushed out in such analysis. These, then, can be placed alongside those somewhat disingenuous claims that no real philosophical argument is needed simply to see the obvious linguistic phenomena in question. One of the celebrated central arguments of the work is the anti-private language argument. This, Soames subjects to a lengthy analysis only to conclude that what may be proven by the argument is a fairly minor, non-controversial point, and certainly not all that Wittgenstein had intended to establish through its deployment.8 Lonergan, too, agrees that the notion of ‘meaning as use’ is a very important one, which he gives a historical, hermeneutical inflection.9 In order to establish Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, 30. The rhetoric abounds. Take, for instance, the claim (PI 126) that philosophy ‘simply puts everything before us’ and neither explains nor deduces anything. If we ask the irreverent and apparently idiotic question as to whether philosophy literally puts everything before us, from scotch eggs to supernovas, from equations to etiquette, the answer, at least as regards what Wittgenstein is up to, is ‘no’. But this is so because it is evidently the case that Wittgenstein offers us insights that both select from among the data and characterize the data selected in light of the critical positions he advances (cf. Lonergan, Insight, 562–63). These selections and characterizations are no less contestable than the critical positions they serve, and indeed, all have been contested. 8 Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, 33–59. 9 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 1, CWL, Vol. 22, Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 183. 6 7

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the meaning of an expression in, say, Shakespeare, that for today’s audience sounds obscure, it may be important to establish, from various sources, what the meaning was in terms of the current ordinary language and/or literary language usage in late sixteenth-­century England. But if the slogan ‘meaning as use’ is to be of any use, then our investigations have also to focus on and understand very diverse domains of linguistic usage past and present: the use and meaning of an expression may differ in the worlds of science, common sense, theology, literature and so forth, and across time.10 Thus, it is that, while he finds a good deal in Wittgenstein’s legacy of value, included among his concluding criticisms of the Austrian’s thought, Soames lists: (iii) the conception of meaning as essentially transparent, (iv) the closely related deflationary conception of philosophy and philosophical analysis, and (v) the unwaveringly informal and antitheoretical approach to the study of meaning.11

Expressing the view of not a few current analytical philosophers, Soames remarks, ‘From today’s perspective, all of these appear highly questionable at best, and misguided at worst.’12 Before turning to an examination of Soames’s own proposals for the way the analytical tradition needs to develop in order to handle more efficaciously questions of linguistic meaning, I should now add a qualification to my earlier comments on the characteristics of the treatment of meaning in the two dominant philosophical traditions of the last hundred years. That the continental tradition has been one in which the great questions of meaning, of human and thus cosmic meaning, have been aired is undoubtedly true. Husserl’s 1936 Crisis of the European Sciences was both a response to the crisis of meaning in post-Enlightenment European culture, and a reaction to the Heideggerian response to this same crisis, which Husserl found disturbingly irrational. Victor Frankl’s compelling little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, published in the late 1940s, and arising from his own experiences in the concentration camps was hailed by many as a work of ‘existentialist psychology’. These works are to be understood against their continental European background.

It is perhaps in light of such perceived further questions that Wittgenstein appears, in some of his last writings, to retreat into a form of subjectivist relativism as regards the very notions of scientific rationality or objectivity. 11 Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, 60. 12 Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, 60. 10

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However, just as continental philosophy was not uninterested in the questions of linguistic meaning, so the philosophical movements initiated or greatly influenced by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein played their role in the perennial human quest for ultimate meaning and value as this unfolded in certain cultures in the twentieth century. Those of us who began our philosophical and theological studies in the 1970s will know that texts such as the collected essays New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Flew and MacIntyre, in the 1950s were still regarded as classics of philosophical theology influenced by the analytical tradition. While logical positivists, and after them, some advocates of ordinary language philosophy saw themselves as heirs to the atheism of Hume, others with a religious faith sought refuge in a form of Wittgensteinian fideism. Further types of ‘semi-­fideism’ were seen in Christian philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, and the resources of the analytical tradition were harnessed in the name of religious faith by philosophical-­theologians with approaches as diverse as Ian Ramsey, on the one hand, and on the other, those who have come to be named ‘analytical Thomists’; the pioneer of this latter approach was, I believe, J. M. Bocheński, who in the 1930s gathered together like-­minded Thomists keen to make use of the new symbolic techniques.13 The perspectives on the great questions of human and cosmic meaning emerging from the analytical tradition might have to do with apparently pedantic issues concerning semantics and linguistic coherence. Yet, if the upshot of this work was the challenge that the very questions of ultimate meaning, and not only the answers that religion might proffer, were perhaps meaningless, then the only alternative to obscurantist flight from insight would be to face these challenges with the required background and philosophical acumen needed to be at the level of one’s times.

Meaning and propositions Scott Soames’s What is Meaning? is both a critical evaluation of some notable moments in the history of attempts made by analytical philosophers over the last

Work by this group features in the collection of essays on Aquinas put together by Anthony Kenny in the late 1960s. See Anthony Kenny, ed., Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

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one hundred years to understand meaning, and the outlining of positive proposals, admittedly still unfinished, for, what Soames believes to be a more satisfactory way forward. The book is critical of the linguistic Platonism of Frege and Russell, and of the later, Tarski-­inspired endeavours of Donald Davidson to elaborate a formalized account of linguistic meaning; in particular, the meaning of propositions, linguistic sentences of the form ‘Grass is green’ or ‘Snow is white.’ To go beyond these failed experiments – more on those below – Soames proposes in their stead what he calls the ‘cognitive-­realist’ approach, according to which meaningful sentences, propositions emerge from the cognitive encounter between human agents and the world. That the book comes with the attendant endorsements of MIT’s Robert Stalnaker and Princeton’s Gilbert Harman, two luminaries of current analytical philosophy, is perhaps a further indication that Soames is not here a solitary voice, but that his work attests to a trend in Anglo-American philosophy towards reconnecting philosophy of language and of linguistic meaning with philosophy of mind and epistemology. In a passage that succinctly encapsulates his programme, Soames writes: Unlike the platonic epistemology required by the classic Frege-Russell account – according to which acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions involve an obscure sort of intellectual intuition – the epistemology of naturalized propositions sees acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions as rooted in acquaintance with, and knowledge of, the acts and events that make up one’s cognitive life.14

Soames’s cognitive realism on meaning certainly finds common ground with Lonergan’s critical realism. For Lonergan, the domain of meaning is the domain of the intentional; as our ordinary discourse witnesses, and as Lonergan avers, ‘to intend’ and ‘to mean’ are virtually synonymous.15 Lonergan’s writing on meaning is found throughout his oeuvre, and for present purposes, only some features of his discussion need detain us. Further aspects of his thought on the meaning of meaning will be brought into the discussion below, but we may begin by pointing out that a salient feature of his thought in this area is observed in the way in which he connects meaning with the phases or levels of the distinctively human activity of coming to know. We attend to, and inquire concerning that which we experience in sensation or in conscious activity itself. In answer to these

Soames, What is Meaning? 106. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 42.

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conscious questions, we may be fortunate enough to experience insights. These insights then may be verbally expressed by us in concepts, theories or hypothesis concerning all manner of subjects, from our ideas on trends and explanations regarding favourite sports events to the theories of science or history to our ideas, perhaps opposed by those of others, on the way to understand the unfolding of some interpersonal situation at home or at work. Since ‘to know’ is not to rest content with any bright or pleasing idea but to attempt to answer reasonably the question ‘is it so?,’ ‘is my idea true of reality?’ the third phase, or level, of cognitional structure, according to Lonergan, is the level on which we attempt to arrive at reasonable judgments and may succeed in so doing. Lonergan identifies the expressed concepts, ideas, hypotheses we arrive at on the second level as ‘formal acts of meaning’, while our judgments, be they positive, or negative, of a probable or certain modality, are ‘full acts of meaning’.16 The ‘proposition’, then, would, on this position, be a linguistic expression of some key aspects of the cognitional, intentional act of judgment. Reasonable judgment, as an answer to the question ‘is it so?’ grasps that understood conditions are indeed, de facto, fulfilled, and that if so, the question ‘is it true of reality?’ is to be answered in the affirmative. Lonergan’s subtle analysis of reasonable judgment, as the term of cognitional process, is a source of illumination when we turn to debates in analytical philosophy concerning the ‘possible deflation’ of the proposition. For various purposes, analytical philosophers have advanced in different ways the point made by Tarski that to preface the proposition ‘Grass is green’, with ‘It is true that . . .’ is redundant. This type of deflation, with regard to the word existence – seen to be an unnecessary linguistic adornment – was at the centre of an early paper by Gilbert Ryle, which Lonergan discusses in his 1957 Boston College lectures.17 Lonergan’s observations on Ryle’s argument are peremptory and of general relevance in this debate. Lonergan’s approach to the meaning of propositions through an analysis of the cognitional process, terminating in rational judgment, which propositions in some manner express linguistically, sets the limits to what such deflationary linguistic reformulation may arrive at.

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 73–76. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 133–34. One example, among many, in current analytical philosophy of waving the deflationary wand in order to duck out of unwanted consequences is seen in Michael Devitt’s work: see M. Devitt and G. Rey, ‘Transcending Transcendentalism’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 72 (1991): 87–100.

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Other forms of deflationary analysis of the proposition concern the copula. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks that in Russian an equivalent of ‘The stone is red’ dispenses with the copula, and asks provocatively whether we are to imagine that something nearer to the English version secretly ‘runs through the head’ of a Russian when he makes the assertion;18 Derrida, too, makes much of the fact that in cases of assertion some languages do not express the copula. If we may hijack Wittgensteinian nomenclature to turn it to Lonergan’s purposes, we can say that the ‘surface grammar’ of a linguistic proposition or assertion may be one thing, the ‘depth grammar,’ identified in cognitional analysis of a rational judgment, may be another. Dummett is on the right track in this regard when he observes that a well-­formed proposition in English is meant in one way when a speaker utters it while musing on its meaning, or again, begins to consider its possible truth, it is meant in another way as asserted.19 It is Lonergan’s analysis of conscious reasonable judgment, some of the elements of which were noted above, that clarifies what the difference in question is; indeed, were we to engage in debate with that position, and make judgments on its cogency or truth, we would find that the cognitional elements identified in the theory are present in our conscious dialectical endeavours themselves. In fact, while Lonergan’s cognitional analysis sets a limit to deflationary moves, it is at once itself tolerant of quite meagre possibilities in terms of the linguistic expressions emergent on a reasoned judgment; in short, it allows further deflation beyond that normally tolerated among analytical philosophers whose work allows only specified types of formal, linguistic expression. The only linguistic expressions of a reasoned judgment, or of what Lonergan terms, the act of reflective insight, in given cases may be an exclamation of ‘Yes!’ or perhaps ‘Eureka!’; or a non-linguistic expression of the same might take the form of a ‘high-­five’. Imagine that I am listening to a radio programme with my wife in which someone is giving facts and figures to back the claim that ‘x is the best tennis player ever’. At the conclusion of the programme, I say simply, ‘The best ever!’ Now, given that my wife knows me well, she may discern my meaning in various ways, partly in this case, perhaps, by my facial expression and tone of voice, thus by the way the words are uttered as well as the words themselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 20. Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to Brian McGuinness’, in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers Vol.  31, R. Auxier and E. Hahn, editors, (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007), 224.

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From all this, then, she has the insight that I am indeed making a reasoned assent to the claim made, or on the contrary, that my tone is sarcastic and I mean ‘I very much doubt it!’ The form of the standard proposition in English, and other similar languages, does articulate important elements of the cognitional activity of reasoned judgment regarding reality. But, strange to say, its form can also lead to confusion in philosophical analysis. This is evident, I believe, in the debate, which exercised Russell, over whether existence is a predicate. The form of the proposition, which has played an important role in debates on meaning in analytical philosophy over the last hundred years, up to and including Soames’s work, involves the logical subject/predicate structure, with the copula as expressive of the operation of predication. Lonergan’s analysis of cognitional process, however, starts our investigations off in a somewhat different direction. In his work on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, Verbum, Lonergan is emphatic that rational judgment is not further synthesis but rather ‘positing of synthesis’.20 If propositions express rational judgment, then we should see them as set within the larger context of the genesis of our knowledge of reality, of being; such knowledge comes about through an ever increasing set of interrelated judgments, which are themselves the term of repeated instances of cognitional process, each building on our past noetic achievements. It often happens, therefore, that an increase of knowledge of reality is had as we make a judgment about a quality, act or attribute of an individual whose existence we already think is reasonably established. But it also happens that our reasoned judgment, establishing knowledge of the existence of an individual, occurs together with knowledge of a given attribute: I come to know that ‘Mr Cameron’s brother is a barrister’; I knew neither of his existence nor of his real skills and qualifications beforehand.21 In such instances, a linguistic articulation of the reasoned judgment knowing reality might be truer to the cognitional facts, if somewhat barbaric linguistically, which has the form ‘ “Mr Cameron’s brother is a lawyer” is.’ The full act of meaning, the positing of synthesis, which is a judgment claiming to know reality, claiming to know that

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL, Vol. 2, F. E. Crowe, and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 62. The whole discussion of ‘Composition or Division’ on pages 61–62, with the references Lonergan there makes to St. Thomas’s cognitive-­linguistic analysis of est, is very illuminating for our purposes. Aquinas was clearly ahead of the game, by a few centuries, when it comes to the kind of deflationary analysis practised in this context by analytical philosophers. 21 Of course, instances of propositions expressing judgments on the existence of an individual are also conspicuous in our discourse: ‘So Big Foot does exist after all!’ 20

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the meaning corresponds with a meant, occurs both in such cases and in those where we may be only claiming reasonably grounded knowledge of reality in terms of an attribution to an individual whose existence is already held to be known. The answer to the question ‘is existence a predicate?’ then is ‘it depends what you mean by “predication” ’. If the response to that question is that by predication is meant what happens in the readily understood instances of predicating an attribute of an individual, one way of moving the discussion towards the illumination had through critical realist cognitional analysis, is to inquire whether such predication is merely of the logical, or hypothetical type, or are we positing as true of reality, on rational grounds, the said predication? Rather different cognitional operations are involved in the latter case than in the former two; and such cognitional operations, as the making of a judgment of existence, about reality, being, are the same whether they regard the affirmation of an individual’s existence, or are cognitional constituents of a claim to new knowledge regarding the attributes or activities of an individual. In chapter 2 of What is Meaning? Soames offers his readers a critical evaluation of the positions of Frege and Russell. For both these philosophers, propositions are meanings of sentences, bearers of truth and objects of attitudes. For both, they are mysterious. They are a unification of parts, but this unification is mysterious. Frege understands the proposition ‘John is a man’ as properly meaning ‘“John” falls under the concept of man’; but Soames, given his aim of grounding meaning in the reality of our concrete cognitional performance, retorts that this is not what an ordinary language user means when he or she says ‘John is a man’.22 Turning to Russell, Soames examines in some detail the contours of the position first developed in the 1903 work Principles of Mathematics.23 To dissolve, what he takes to be, certain linguistic obfuscations of logical sense, Russell holds that in a proposition such as ‘Socrates is a man’, ‘Socrates’ occurs as a term, while ‘humanity’ does not. Since Socrates can only occur in a proposition in this way, ‘Socrates’ counts as a thing. On the other hand, since ‘humanity’ can occur other than as subject of predication it is a concept. However, Russell believes that everything can occur as a term in some proposition, as humanity does in the case he outlines. Russell then proceeds to argue that ‘Socrates is human’ is a proposition having one term. The rest is made up of a verb and a What is Meaning? 14. What is Meaning? 23.

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predicate. What is the verb? Russell responds by claiming that ‘is’ is not a relation in the ordinary sense. We may say it is a relation, but it is distinguished from other relations, yet it does not regard its linked terms indifferently; and it is to be seen as an assertion concerning the referent. Soames thinks all this unnecessarily confusing. Why not say that, although the proposition does not contain a third constituent, this relation is implied by the assertion of the truth that Socrates exemplifies humanity? Ultimately, as Soames points out, the ‘mysteriousness’ of propositions, which is hinted or more explicitly stated in Frege and Russell, arises from their view that ‘propositions are not things that have meanings, or get interpretations from us’.24 Russell, given his approach, puzzles over this, since there is no formal way in which the parts that constitute the proposition can be seen to require this, and only this logical arrangement: he admits that the various bits can be arranged in any haphazard order. We can take the point further: why cannot letters in the word difference, say, simply be arranged in a different order, as we attempt to do in the game of Scrabble? Or why can we not simply place the symbols, letters in an arbitrary heap, as are the letters in the pile from which we pick several as we play that game? The obvious answer, surely, seems to be one that Russell must resist. Lonergan’s study of conscious cognitional process would heighten our grasp of what we sense already in common-­sense appreciation of this: the ordering of letters in a word, or of words in a sentence or proposition is an intelligible ordering of terms and relations performed by human intelligence. The data, the materials of the physical images, become ordered in this way as conscious intelligence gives them a formal cause of ordering. These ‘elements’ of meaning, or ‘partial terms,’ as Lonergan names them,25 are thus endowed with an intelligibility that is manifest in higher, emergent levels, as physical objects are understood as elements to be used as terms, and simpler linguistic parts enter into higher and further, intelligible orderings. So words, already ordered by the formal cause given by intelligence to bundles of letters, enter into sentences; the latter enter into larger wholes of discourse. This emergent, hierarchical ordering is a manifestation of a ‘matter’ relative to higher ‘form’ pattern. It also manifests, and can be appreciated in terms of, an ascending ‘potency/act’, ontological

What is Meaning? 32. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 330.

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distinction. The lower relevant level of potency concerns the aptitude certain objects have for use as fundamental letters, or symbol-­parts by human beings. So, hitherto in human history, sub-atomic particles, far-­distant galaxies or parcels of active volcanic lava have not been seen to have such potential or aptitude, whereas marks on stone, wood or parchment have. Similarly, as we ascend to higher orders, certain arrangements of letters and symbols have a greater aptitude, potential to facilitate and indeed elicit the relevant insights than do others. As Lonergan indicates, Roman numerals are less useful for the performance of complex mathematical operations than are later forms of symbolism.26 With such tools for analysis, I suggest below further avenues for approaching questions that arise from Soames’s own proposals for understanding aspects of linguistic meaning. Chapter 3 of What is Meaning? is a critical evaluation of the truth-­conditions theory of meaning, a theory defended, for much of his career at least, by Donald Davidson. The notion that the meaning of sentences is to be understood in terms of their truth-­conditions begins with Rudolph Carnap’s semantic use of Tarski’s work on truth, a tradition then taken up and developed in the work of Davidson. The idea was that if a formal, mathematical language could be understood in terms of its propositions having truth-­conditions, then this could be extended to natural languages, while acknowledging that this would involve serious difficulties and complications. But, asks Soames, is the basic premise justified? Is the notion that we can give a theory of meaning for a given language, L by giving a theory of truth for L justified to begin with? Using a theory of truth to interpret a language is saying something more than what is simply contained in the given language. It is a claim that this theory can interpret the language L. So in such an exercise, we attempt to provide paraphrases of the sentences already in the language, and we need a way to decide which interpretations are appropriate. The results, following Davidson, are too modest, on Soames’s view: If ‘S iff p’ is given as an interpretation of sentence z, it implies that the meaning of z must entail p and some other logical deductions that can follow. But this is exiguous when we are asking what z means in any full sense: we might have something of a logical skeleton but no flesh on the bones as regards the meaning of sentence z. Soames is equally unconvinced by psycholinguistic theories that attempt to plant these logical schemes in the minds, conscious or unconscious, of the

Lonergan, Insight, 42.

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human agents in questions.27 According to Soames, we have no evidence for these ‘languages of thought’. Psycholinguistic processing notions still do not tell us what given sentences in a language like English mean. Soames continues: Since his [Davidson’s] truth theories neither state what sentences mean – by issuing theorems ‘S means that P’ – nor pair sentences with entities that are their meanings, there is an immediate problem in justifying their status as theories of meaning. . . . Davidsonian theories of truth conditions can’t be theories of meaning, because the semantic information they provide is too impoverished.28

John Foster demonstrated that Davidson’s philosophy has no way of avoiding odd, anomalous consequences. Thus, Davidson’s logical structures, which supposedly serve as translations of a natural language, cannot operate as intuitively valid translations since they allow odd additions that while consistent with the logical structure are outside anything intended by an actual language user in a given context. For students of Lonergan’s critical realism, it might be helpful to think here of what Lonergan has to say on the theme of ‘implicit definition’, in order to illustrate something of what Soames finds objectionable in the Davidson position. The caveat should immediately be made, however, that Lonergan’s own use of the notion of ‘implicit definition’ is not quite what Davidson is intending. Lonergan, taking this over from Hilbert, sees it primarily as a positive tool in the control of meaning since this higher level type of abstraction can help, as in Hilbert’s geometrical theories, in abstracting intelligible patterns from concrete instances, the latter possibly having an obfuscating effect through tying geometrical theorems to concrete cases, thereby creating an ambiguous mix of concrete and abstract.29 In his 1957 Boston lectures, Lonergan also indicates that what various systems of symbolic logic attempt to provide are cases of such systematic implicit definition, of a generality of abstraction, which can indeed be useful, but I also take him to mean, can be tied up with positions that lead to oversights; and such cases are not dissimilar to that detected in Soames’s canards against Davidson.30 Positively, by implicit definition, Lonergan means an abstracted meaning of a generality that would be a set of terms and relations. This set of terms and relations can then also enter into an instance of the virtually

29 30 27 28

Soames, What is Meaning? 38. What is Meaning? 41–42. Lonergan, Insight, 37. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 32–34.

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unconditioned, of an analytical proposition or judgment, perhaps of the form: ‘if a, b, c, then x, but a, b, c (in the specified order), thus x.’ Such a structure is a genuine intelligibility abstracted from various cases similar in structure. These could be mathematical, logical or other cases of intelligible thought or discourse; perhaps, the reasoning in the argument of a historian or scientist. It could also reflect the intelligibility of the judgment on our own cognitional structure, with the letters a, b and c indicating the levels of coming to know, in a given ordering, which if found to obtain in consciousness are ground for the rational judgment ‘yes, I am a knower’, indicated then by x.31 So, such a structure can be applied to different cases. As a genuine abstraction from such cases, it does reflect something of the meaning intended by any given human agent or language user in those instances. But given such generality, it would be misleading, an oversight, to think that this is what such and such a person means in this case, if by that we are trying to identify something approaching the fuller concrete meaning intended. So, descending from this higher level of general meaning, applying to many similar cases of intelligible structure, to, for instance, the cases that are the deployment of cognitional structure operative in the thinking and acting of human agents, we would move from a more abstract to a more concrete case of a generality. That more concrete case of generality would, then, provide us with instances of cognitional operative norms, the ‘depth grammar’ mentioned above, which would be the operative semantics in the reasoning and judging of individuals. From that we would move to the more specific domains of discourse, a lower level of generalities to the various patterns of experience to the differentiated consciousness of historical periods to the deployment of cognitional structure in common sense, science, scholarship, art, all the while discerning invariant semantic similarities – reasonable judgment, for instance, as having its specific features throughout these variable contexts. From that proximate level of generality, we would then return to the concrete actual cases of individuals thinking, speaking and acting. The problem Soames sees in Davidson, is, from this perspective, one of oversight of such semantic hierarchical levels, an ignoratio elenchi, with the result that a most abstract level is thought to do all the work needed without the other more proximate levels of semantic generality, I have identified, being invoked.

Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 59.

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Lonergan sees this danger in a specific instance when discussing the rise of modern symbolic logic. Joining in the debates on the philosophy of logic, which such developments have further stimulated, and showing the effectiveness of his method thereby, Lonergan points to the problem of what he calls ‘mathesis’.32 While Lonergan is enthusiastic about the genuine achievements of modern symbolic elaborations, he warns, as do other philosophers of logic, that philosophical errors may become built into the systems or may arise from mistaken conclusions being drawn from otherwise positive results.33 A system of symbolic logic may, then, be a type of implicit definition that, in its generality, captures features of the intelligibility of both some area of logical technique – perhaps of a lower order – and of some area of mathematics. But the confusion may arise if, in accord with the aims it would seem of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia, we elide the semantics of mathematics and that of a more general logical structure. The semantics of the concrete operations of mathematics are intrinsically related to a type of abstraction from, insight into, the continuum, in a way that a higher order logical structure is not. Mathematics begins with counting pins, cups, clouds and the like, and in cutting up cakes into equal or unequal segments; the semantics are not captured in sufficient fullness by simply referring to the kind of virtually unconditioned, or logical structure, we see in such analytical propositions as that described above. At this point in the discussion, Soames sums up his conclusions thus far. The logical structures deployed by Frege and Russell to capture the meaning of meaning fail, he claims, Since it is only by being representational that anything becomes a candidate for being true or false, structured propositions of the familiar sort don’t have truth conditions, on their own. We can, of course, treat them as objects to be interpreted.34

Ironically, perhaps, Russell’s 1911 work The Problems of Philosophy, repudiating the earlier position taken in Principles of Mathematics, takes us, Soames argues, in a more promising direction. Russell had understood propositions to refer to an ‘object’, which was a unified conceptual package greater than the sum of its semantic parts. But he rejects this problematic view in favour of a cognitional emphasis. Russell writes: ‘What is called belief or judgment is nothing but this Lonergan, Insight, 339. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 96–97. 34 Soames, What is Meaning? 56. 32 33

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relation of believing or judging, which relates a mind to several things other than itself.’35 More troublesome aspects to be identified in the work notwithstanding, Soames believes this more cognitively sensitive development in Russell’s thought points us in the right direction.

Meaning: Soames’s positive proposals In the remaining three chapters of What is Meaning? Soames sketches out for us his positive proposals for an understanding of meaning; that is, meaning as fundamentally located in the propositions we express in language. These proposals have two central features: they utilize, and develop in their own way, the formal language of the Frege-Russell tradition, but they do so in light of the aim to reflect faithfully the concrete semantic purposes enshrined in our language as expressive of our real cognitive encounter with the world. For Soames, language encodes these cognitive encounters and a theory of meaning must sensitively articulate this encoding of our meaning as expressing our knowing. The technical expression, then, of this encoding will attempt to capture in some formal way some basic constituents, some fundamental features of propositions as the prime locus, according to Soames, of our meaningful expressions. Accordingly, he states his aim as one involving the recognition that ‘. . . .propositions are structured complexes that are constructed out of, or at least encode, the semantic contents of the constituents of the sentences that express them’.36 A sound formal expression of the semantic content, therefore, must be based on the understanding that, ‘The constituents of the proposition are the objects, properties, relations and propositional functions that are, or encode, the meanings of the constituents of the sentence.’37 These may abstract from, say, a given syntactic structure, while retaining the meanings that constitute the sentence.38 A challenge may be that we face the problem, or pseudo-­problem, of identifying the ‘real propositions’. Soames then embarks on the attempt to outline part of a formal language that he intends to keep as close as possible to given English usage, but his insistence

37 38 35 36

What is Meaning? 59: reference to Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 126. What is Meaning? 69 What is Meaning? 70. What is Meaning? 71.

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that such formalization must express what agents in the real world mean in their cognitive operations is emphatic. He writes: . . . there is nothing intrinsic to the identity of a lexical item, thought of as a collection of syntactic and phonological features, or to its position in the hierarchical structure of a sentence S, that determines that an utterance of S is understood as predicating that item of something. At bottom what determines that which S predicates, as well as that of which it is predicated, is how S is understood by speaker-­hearers.39

And he concludes, ‘. . . we have no clue about how any abstract object could have representational content apart from such attitudes’.40 Accordingly, ‘Snow is white’, taken as a construction of syntactical and logical meaning, does not literally mean ‘Snow is white’, unless a human agent means it so. Soames then proceeds to sketch out part of a formal language that he intends to keep close to given English. In the course of doing so, he informs us that various meaningful propositions may be recast in his system, capturing their authentic semantic form. For instance, ‘predicating g of an object’ means, in formal terms, predicating ‘the property of being something to which g assigns a true proposition, of that object’. Some propositions assign ‘the property of being necessarily true’, while others assign ‘the property of being sometimes true’.41 That John believes someone loves Mary is expressed by Soames, in order to capture its semantic form, as John’s belief predicating ‘being instantiated of the property loving Mary’. Wishing to avoid the semantic Platonism he detects in Frege and Russell, in the next stage in the elaboration of his formal account, Soames takes over from James Pryor the notion of Act Types. Such Act Types track contingent, particular acts of meaning as expressed in propositions uttered by agents. The idea is then, of a type/ token arrangement: the concrete acts, propositions uttered by human agents, mirroring in their semantic form the given type.42 If we understand by ‘F is o’ a type of act predicating Fness of o, rather than a concrete act, then we provide an object to which all contingent acts bear the same relation for their meaning. When a human agent utters the proposition ‘Snow is white’ that utterance is both a particular act ‘and a token of the sentence type uttered’.43 We can see these 42 43 39 40 41

What is Meaning? 80. What is Meaning? 80. What is Meaning? 79. What is Meaning? 99. What is Meaning? 100.

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proposition types, then, as formal exemplars of concrete propositions uttered by real human agents, the enumeration of such exemplars being an abstraction from the concrete instances of the concrete propositions uttered in real life. Soames is aware that for some his ideas on type-­token semantics smack of the Platonism he attacks in others. For he holds that these types, or ‘event-­types’ as he also designates them, are bearers of truth and as such they are true universally. Thus, on his position, ‘Snow is white’ as type is true even in the period of prehistory, the time of the dinosaurs, before there were human agents. His riposte to the charge of implausible Platonism is to say that such types retain their validity, their truth-­conditions and truth-­bearing nature, even if no such actual propositions have been uttered, since were they to be uttered by a human agent at time t1 the given proposition would have been instantiated. He writes: Consider, for example, the simple proposition-­cum-event-­type, that snow is white, at a world-­state w at which it doesn’t exist because no one ever predicates anything of anything. For this proposition to be true at w is simply for it to be the case that, had w obtained, snow would have been as it is represented to be – namely white – . . . by any possible case in which an agent predicates the property of being white of snow.44

Soames’s own proposals for a semantic theory that remains faithfully close to actual human cognitive performance are, as he would stress, still at an initial stage of development; and, naturally, I have only given a general outline of these here, passing over details of the various formal structures sketched out in the book. Soames is also soberingly honest on the difficulties that he sees his theory must surmount, given his own attachment to elements within the tradition of Frege-Russell formal logical construction. The book concludes with a discussion of a problem for his position emerging from that tradition. The problem, which it is not to my purposes to outline in detail here, arises from the well-­known difficulties identified in Russell’s use of set theory and his moves to obviate these, in his logical system, through a hierarchy of levels of discourse or reference; Russell’s attempted solutions remain, of course, as controversial now as they did at the time of their appearance.45 The difficulties or paradoxes of Russell’s system take on a particular character in the context of Soames’s own type-­token

What is Meaning? 104. See the treatment of Richard Cartwright’s perspicacious examination of the root problems behind the paradox in Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), chapter 3.

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semantic approach to the meaning of propositions. Briefly, the types should authentically retranslate the formal meaning embedded in any given, relevant token propositions. But some universal propositions, given Soames’s manner of characterizing them, and given that they are self-­referential in import, will change in nature as we ascend something like Russell’s hierarchy of levels of reference. Given that a proposition may be self-­referential, a newer, higher, type-­proposition will express a richer or higher semantic content than its lower, putatively, token counterpart proposition; the higher expression will not maintain the same semantic content in the way that Soames’s system requires. To evaluate this in any depth would involve an examination of the insights invoked in Russell’s hierarchy of reference. I have written elsewhere on aspects of the issues relevant to this, taking my cue from Lonergan’s philosophy – indeed, Lonergan offered some perspicacious critical comments on the issues himself.46 Part, but certainly not the whole, of the problem as regards Soames’s dilemma, as I see it, has to do with the way Soames characterizes the semantic content of the proposition, and the metaphysics of the proposition that is to be detected in his account. But I return to that in a critical appreciation of his views, which are our next concern.

An evaluation of What is Meaning? A very laudable self-­critical honesty characterizes Soames’s attempt to adumbrate a meaning theory, focused on the proposition, which he hopes will prove to be more realistic and grounded in the conscious intentional life of human agents than is the case with some notable, alternative theories advanced during the last century or so of analytical philosophy. He admits that this is a work in progress, and as we have seen, is ready to highlight problematic areas which the theory itself must clarify if it is to progress. In the spirit of dialogue and constructive criticism that his position invites, what I now offer are some evaluations that indicate ways in which Lonergan’s critical realism, and his analysis of conscious intelligent and reasonable operations, unfolding through three basic phases or levels, may be of service to a view on meaning in construction; a view that wishes to ground itself in cognitional fact. Andrew Beards, Insight and Analysis: Essays in Applying Lonergan’s Thought (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2010), epilogue; Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 255.

46

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I return, in the first place, to the characterization of the contents posited in propositions that Soames outlines in his formal expression of meanings intended in propositions. As I have written above, these characterizations appear to reveal ontological commitments that require examination. That there are metaphysical implications evident in these explications of propositional intention would not of itself, I think, prove a problem for Soames were we to point to them: as his commitment to some kind of Kripkean account, manifest in the closing chapters of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century makes plain, he is one of many analytical philosophers currently writing who are active in the recrudescence of metaphysics in the Anglophone tradition. Whether his commitment to the implicit metaphysics be explicit or implicit, however, the problems remain. As noted above, Soames understands the content of propositions as positing ‘the property of being . . .’. From the perspective of, at least, Lonergan’s Aquinas-­ inspired philosophy this characterization is problematic in a number of ways. To begin with, there is an ambiguity in the notion of ‘property’. It is misleading to say ‘the property of being a dog’; for something has a property and not is a property. Further, if we say ‘x has the property of being a dog’ this is doubly misleading, since x would already exist as a dog in order to bear any subsequent attribution of a property to it. Thus, ‘x has the property of being a dog’, would be, to say the least, potentially confusing since there is a danger of reifying this ‘property’ in order to make it another metaphysical constituent of the thing alongside other properties of the individual. We do use ‘being’ as a gerund, as in ‘Being a mechanic, he fixed the car.’ However, a proper metaphysical analysis will distinguish between ‘being a human person’ as meaning, in some cases at least, ‘x is a human being’, on the one hand, and on the other, ‘x is a mechanic’ as meaning, ‘this human person possesses certain skills, habits, dispositions’. In addition, we need cautious metaphysical analysis of propositions about propositions – while we do not need here to go into the details of the ontological nature of propositions. Thus, referring to proposition x as ‘having the property of being a proposition making attributions to an individual’, would be misleading in the same way as the first case described above: the proposition is already that prior to any further attributions. Soames writes of the ‘property of being instantiated’ and of ‘being universally instantiated’, respectively.47 However, we

What is Meaning? 123.

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must respond, that these are not properties. He informs us that they are equivalent to: ‘being true of something’ and ‘being true of everything’. Truth is not a property of something – not in the basic metaphysical sense of property, whereas Soames takes ‘being true of everything’ to be a property. Truth is better characterized as a relation, as a relation between knower and known.48 A consequence of Soames’s characterization of propositions is that it creates an order of ever higher properties, with each proposition as a generalization. To put the matter, as Lonergan might understand it, in a somewhat challenging and apparently counterintuitive way, we can say that a proposition, as expressing a reasonable judgment, is not the attribution of a property to something, even when it does attribute the property to a subject: rather, it is the affirmation that such an attribution is the case, is true; that the considered state of affairs, the synthesis of subject and predicate, exists as a reality. This is the point made above concerning my new knowledge of both the existence of Mr Cameron’s brother, and at once, of his profession as a barrister. The moral is we cannot keep metaphysics out of semantics; and in holding this thesis we are agreeing with a number of notable analytical philosophers, working in the area of metaphysics, over the last forty years. Lonergan already put his finger on the point in the 1950s when he wrote of metaphysics as a basic semantics.49 A further serious flaw in Soames’s theory of meaning has to do with his notion of ahistorical events, or proposition types. We have seen above that he believes these types to obtain at any period in history, so that sentences of the form ‘Snow is white’ or ‘Grass is green’ are always truth-­bearing. If some would deny these proposition types exist in any sense at given times in world history when no such actual propositions have been or are being uttered, his response is to say that such types retain their validity even if no such actual propositions have been uttered, since were they to be uttered the given proposition would be instantiated. The quotation given above, which is Soames’s reply to this objection, clearly refers to this world scenarios, not to possible worlds. Were it to concern the latter, other problems would ensue, I believe, but the ‘time w’ he mentions is

For Lonergan, knowledge is most fundamentally identity between knower and known. However, his analysis of our making true judgments about reality also involves an understanding of correspondence between knower and known as a subsequent cognitional moment of ‘confrontation’ between our full act of meaning, as expressed in judgment, and the meant (being, reality). In light of this, ‘truth’ is seen to be the ‘medium’ through which we know being. 49 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 365. 48

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quite evidently a this world time, as is the time of the dinosaurs to which he refers elsewhere in explaining the notion of atemporal proposition types. Since this is the case, what is being invoked is not abstract possibility, but what Lonergan refers to as, the ‘objective possibility’ of potency. The first objection to the cogency of Soames’s idea, then, that such type propositions mean what actual propositions could be uttered at a time when, in fact, no propositions nor human agents are present to utter such, is that it is a metaphysical absurdity. The propositions ‘Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo’, ‘Kant is mistaken about Hume’s thought’ or ‘Gödel now shows Russell’s project to be impossible’ could not have been uttered in, say, 1484. To hold that, were a human agent to be present in that year who could have uttered these propositions, then such tokens of the proposition types might have been asserted, is to make a commitment, perhaps, to time travel. But like many other philosophers, I take that to be a metaphysically incoherent idea. At the very least, we would have to mount an auxiliary argument in its favour, and this Soames does not do. Attendant on such temporally situated propositions, thought to be uttered out of context, further problems ensue concerning the future contingent. In a fashion that is cognate with Dummett’s attacks on naïve notions of logical bivalence, Aristotle, Aquinas and Lonergan argue that present propositions referring to future events are, strictly speaking, neither true nor false here and now.50 How, then, could such proposition-­types be ‘truth-­bearing’? Even apparently wide-­in-scope temporal propositions, such as ‘Snow is white’ and ‘Grass is green’, encounter such objections since such propositions, as tokens, could not have been uttered as true in the early time period after the ‘big bang’. And to think that there could have been human utterers of such propositions again runs up against the same objection that relates to the actual potential of this world order to have had such human agents present at the said period. The root of the problem, surely, is an attachment to a linguistic Platonism that would prescind from the fact that propositions are the expressions of judgments made by historically located human beings; such judgments are the term of a process of coming to know, as Lonergan’s cognitional theory makes evident. Such a theory as Lonergan’s is anything but a commitment to historical relativism or to a denial of the possibility of metaphysical propositions. But the way the latter

On this, see Andrew Beards, ‘Foundations of Logic: Lonergan and Analytical Philosophy’, Revista Portuguesa di Filosofia, João Vila-Chã, S.J., editor, 63 (2007): 919–39.

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arise has to be handled in a more subtle fashion than might be suggested by the semantic theory under examination.51 No doubt, the overriding critical question that must be addressed to Soames’s project, which the reader may well have already identified, is how a work with the title What is Meaning? can be so astoundingly narrow in focus as to confine the discussion of meaning solely to the proposition. What of the diverse realms or dimensions of meaning as they appear in Lonergan’s oeuvre? What of intersubjective, aesthetic, symbolic meaning? What of the meaning of our dreams? What of the meaning of other speech-­acts with intentional content, such as questions or commands? Our opening discussion of twentieth-­century philosophical work on meaning highlighted the contributions of the continental tradition to these areas of philosophical investigation, but the analytical tradition has not ignored explorations of aesthetic meaning, ethical meaning, and even, religious meaning – Tillich’s realm of ‘ultimate concern’. In Soames’s defense, it might be pointed out that what he offers us in this work is only a first sketch of a theory of meaning, and more importantly, perhaps, given his aim of grounding meaning theory in the reality of human cognitional engagement with the world, his theory may offer possibilities for branching out, eventually, into these other diverse realms of human meaning. It might also be observed that Lonergan, too, particularly with his aims and objectives as a theologian, sought to highlight the crucial role played in human life by propositional truth; truth as expressed in propositions is not to be downgraded in the name of a complementary concern with non-propositional modes of meaning, in Lonergan’s view.52 Perhaps, then, we approach the nub of the issue, in asking just how promising is Soames’s philosophy as an investigation of the reality of human cognition, from which emerge acts of meaning, the act of uttering a proposition. It is encouraging to see that Soames is sensitive to certain aspects of our diverse cognitional activities. He duly distinguishes between mere entertaining and judging. To judge that o is red ‘is to predicate redness of o, while endorsing that predication’.53 Soames does, therefore, identify different intentional attitudes to the proposition. As Dummett recognizes and as Lonergan makes clear through the analysis of the three phases of coming to know, a proposition can be See, for example, Lonergan’s examination of St. Thomas Aquinas’s points on the way our metaphysical propositions arise and are situated in time: Lonergan, Verbum, 75–76. 52 See, for instance, Lonergan, ‘The Dehellenization of Dogma’, in A Second Collection, 11–32. 53 What is Meaning? 82. 51

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entertained on the level of coming to know prior to that phase in which it may or may not be reasonably affirmed in judgment. Thus, musing on, entertaining, the proposition ‘the earth is flat’ is not necessarily affirming it as true in a proposition used to express rational judgment. Soames goes on to explain the notion of ‘belief ’: ‘To believe that o is red is, roughly, to be disposed to judge that o is red.’54 While it is good that such differences are, in some fashion, observed, what is offered is hardly sufficient for a required analysis of formal and full acts of meaning, according to Lonergan’s analysis of these and their interrelations. For instance, ‘belief ’ described in the way it is by Soames may be unobjectionable, but it misses out on the further meaning, intentionality of belief as a reasonable or unreasonable assent to what another or others maintain. Such analysis of meaning in that context has also to bring in elements of what we might call ‘virtue epistemology,’ since believing another involves also the intending of certain values – the value of trusting another’s testimony.55 A further, encouraging point of contact with Lonergan’s philosophy is found in Soames’s affirmation that agents can not only predicate ‘Snow is white’, but come to know their conscious acts of such predication.56 Soames’s highly laudable programme of grounding meaning in the reality of human agents’ cognitional life is, however, stymied, I believe, by what is clearly a commitment, albeit assumed rather than carefully argued for, to a form of naïve realism. Thus, language propositions are understood as the encoding of what has already occurred in cognition. He avers that we predicate redness of o when we form the non-linguistic perceptual belief that o is red. Soames claims, ‘When we see an object o as red, we predicate redness of it.’57 To use an expression Lonergan seems to have become attached to in the 1970s, this is hardly a promising start for an account of what goes on in the ‘black box’ of human cognition.58 To begin with, there are many objects that enter my purview at any time to which I may not pay attention. Perhaps later, in response to the inquiry of another, I may recall one of these items, present in my stream of consciousness at any earlier moment, perhaps not. It is quite implausible to think that, even at that earlier moment, I had actually formed a proposition in response to each and What is Meaning? 107. For a very helpful study of the way Lonergan’s thought may be brought into dialogue with the new work on ‘virtue epistemology’ underway in analytical philosophy, see Dalibor Renić, Ethical and Epistemic Normativity: Lonergan & Virtue Epistemology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2010). 56 Soames, What is Meaning? 107. 57 What is Meaning? 81. 58 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, A Third Collection, F. E. Crowe, editor (London: Chapman, 1985), 197. 54 55

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every item in my purview, which then, later I pluck out from memory, like a file from a cabinet drawer. Many of our judgments are those that have become ‘snap’ or rapid due to an acquired mastery of a given situation; other cognitive responses we share with the higher animals, as when we dodge out of the way of on-­coming vehicles. But our truly human knowing, operative in all domains in human life is characterized by the unfolding of intelligent and reasonable conscious operations, of which our ‘what is it?’ and ‘is it true?’ questions are the intentional motivators (the habitual knowledge is the fruit of earlier applications of such). The contents of the black box are, to some degree, known explicitly in our ‘folk psychological’ accounts. But to know them in sufficient detail, in their nature and interrelation, is another matter. Timothy Williamson is absolutely right in this respect that, to use Lonergan’s vocabulary, the shift from self-­consciousness to self-­knowledge may not be an easy matter. We have been deploying the intelligent, reasonable and evaluative (moral-­responsible) operations of our consciousness since childhood. But the history of philosophy in both East and West testifies to the fact that it is no easy matter to give an explicit account, to shift to self-­knowledge on our black box, in a way as to settle philosophical disputes regarding the nature and interrelation of our mental activities. If it is no easy matter to give an account of, to offer reasoned judgments as responses to questions concerning, what enters the purview of our sensations, a fortiori an explicit account of our other cognitional conscious activities is a more daunting challenge still. To arrive at such a construct involves questions regarding the data of consciousness, insights into the same, conceptual elaboration of those insights and a reasoned judgment as regards the truth of such insights and concepts, such a judgment arising in response to an ‘is it so?’ question. In short, the shift from self-­consciousness to self-­knowledge regarding our black box is a reduplication of cognitional structure; a folding of that structure back on itself. It really is quite preposterous, therefore, to imagine all data of consciousness, both that of sensation and of cognitional activity itself, to be immediately processed and packaged into formed propositions simply by dint of its being experienced by a human agent.

An alternative proposal on meaning and propositions If the verdict on Soames’s endeavours above was somewhat harsh, I would reiterate that his realist-­cognitive approach to meaning is heading in the right

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direction. What I am engaged in, then, is what Lonergan describes as a dialectical engagement with a philosophy that aims to both reverse counter-­positions and develop positions. Without the resources and tools offered by Lonergan’s analysis of cognition and evaluation as the origins of human meaning, it is very difficult to see how we could progress further in the direction in which Soames wishes to go. Take, for instance, Lonergan’s deployment of his Aquinas-­inspired investigation of conscious insight, and further, his analysis of conscious apprehension of value – of values of different types – in the area of aesthetics or of the intersubjective meaning of human encounter, characterized, as these are, by the exchange of words within the complex context of body language and gesture. An insight into the meaning of a musical composition or painting may be one thing; the judgments, expressed in formed linguistic propositions of the art critic or trained musician may be another. Perhaps the pronouncements of the latter will leave me cold while the music itself had, in fact, inflamed me; perhaps my response to some of these judgments or propositions will be ‘yes, that hits the nail on the head! That’s just what Sibelius was “doing” in the second movement’, or I may agree or disagree in part with the art critic’s explication of what was ‘happening’ in the painting in question. According to Lonergan, the shift is one from conscious insight, to a fuller conceptual and verbal elaboration, to the expression of meaning in propositions arising from judgments and apprehensions of value. Without such subtle cognitional analysis, which Lonergan pursues in domains as varied as geometry, scientific theory and scholarship, as well as in aesthetics and intersubjective relations, otherwise very praiseworthy work by analytical philosophers in, for instance, aesthetics seems to reach an impasse: there is the insight on the part of such gifted philosophers that both meaning and feeling are involved in aesthetic appreciation, but they often enough appear to founder when it comes to expressing just how this meaning is embedded in the work of art or appreciated by the viewer. Of course, they recognize that it would be crass to suggest that some kind of well-­packaged, verbal narrative, such as might be attempted by the art critic, is at once running through the participant’s head as he or she engages with the art work.59

On these shortcomings in the otherwise impressive contributions to aesthetics of philosophers such as Richard Eldridge and Roger Scruton, see in this volume the essay ‘Aesthetics: Insights from Eldridge, Aquinas and Lonergan’.

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If Soames’s theory of type/token propositions remains, despite his best efforts, tied to an all-­too Platonic vision of linguistic meaning, what might be the alternative? I suggested above some avenues of analysis offered by Lonergan’s philosophy, which would attempt to examine some cognitive and at once ontological aspects of language and linguistic meaning. Soames is right to point out that the sentence “Snow is white” does not of itself mean ‘Snow is white’. What is intended here, to put it not in terms Soames uses, is that I mean, or can mean ‘Snow is white’ by using these words, this sentence. But the linguistic meaning is prior to my use. This is the point, I take it, of Soames’s labours to outline a theory of linguistic meaning that, while it does justice to the actual intentional use made of a sentence or proposition on a given occasion, it also does justice to a prior, linguistic general meaning, already embedded in the propositions and other expressions of a given natural language, such as English. I believe the latter observation is a hint at a more realistic way to proceed in thinking of a theory of linguistic meaning, than are the ideas Soames develops concerning ahistorical propositions of which the actual intentional uses of human agents are earthly avatars. In other words, I believe we may turn to the ‘concrete’ phenomena that are real natural languages if we wish to understand better the prior, pre-personal use aspects of linguistic meaning. Such prepersonal, natural languages are a conspicuous part of what Lonergan calls the ‘world mediated by meaning and motivated by value’ into which we emerge as we rapidly move away from the very early world of infant immediacy. If we were to respond to the question of an Italian learner, ‘Does La neve è bianco mean ‘Snow is white’?’ by saying ‘no’, such an answer would be confusing, not to say disingenuous! The phrase does mean that in Italian. If we wished to move beyond the confusion of our interlocutor to use the occasion for philosophical and sematic analysis, then the point could be made in this manner: ‘Knowing what Nevica a Bologna means when I say this Italian sentence does not necessarily imply that I mean to claim that it is now snowing in Bologna.’ What, then, is this prior linguistic meaning, prior to any intentional act of meaning on my part? Lonergan distinguishes among partial terms of meaning, formal terms of meaning and full terms of meaning. These are all the ‘material’ components to the formal components that are the intentional formal acts of meaning and full acts of meaning, respectively. The latter are our reasonable acts of judgment, which may become articulated into well-­formed propositions; uttering or asserting such linguistic expressions is a further type of meaning act, an instrumental act of meaning. Partial terms of meaning, as pointed out above,

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can be relative parts to wholes constructed according to syntactic rules. So the marks already endowed in a natural language with meaning as elements in the alphabet may be taken up into larger linguistic wholes such as sentences, some of which are propositions. Formal terms of meaning are the linguistic expressions (or other expressions) of acts of understanding; they are verbal or symbolic expressions of insights as these become expressed in concepts of larger theoretical wholes such as hypotheses or theories. Full terms of meaning are the linguistic or symbolic expressions of judgments that reasonably arise from a grasp of evidence. As we move into the post-­early infancy stage, into a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value expressed in language, we begin to catch on, through intersubjective interaction, and enjoy insights into the ways of our mother tongue. A dramatic and moving account of such insightful ‘catching-­on’ is seen in Helen Keller’s heroic struggle to break through into this articulate world of linguistic meaning and expression. But as her incredible story reminds us, this achievement was pursued and attained precisely because of Keller’s prior intelligent and reasonable, human capacities. It is those conscious capacities, then, which bring about the intentional ‘informing’ of material marks or elements as partial, formal and full terms of meaning, apt to be recurrently deployed in further formal or full acts of meaning. What is prior for any one of us, in the normal history of humanity at any rate, is then a natural language that already has meaning. Such meaning enters into our own development as a central aspect of the intersubjective encounters we experience with parents, siblings and others as we develop and begin to make the multifaceted resources of that language our own. We begin to use it in a vast variety of manners to communicate our own thoughts and feelings, and in this sense, our contributions are unique; albeit what we say can be recognized as expressions within the Standard English of our day. This joke originated with me, but the linguistic expression was not so novel that I had to somehow communicate new linguistic usages to my hearers. On the other hand, as ordinary language and other types of language interweave and interpenetrate, neologisms and whole new ways of speaking gradually emerge. So Lonergan, drawing on Snell, points to the mutual mediation of early Greek literary efforts and early Greek philosophy, and their influence on the language of the educated classes of ancient Greece. Similarly, the traditions of modern English when traced back can be seen to have been profoundly influenced by the Greek and Roman heritage and then the heritage of Christian civilization. Philosophy, theology, literary endeavours such as poetry and prose, and then

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later science and scholarship, can be seen to have played their role in the evolution of current English. And in the contrary direction, ordinary language at various stages was the basis from which these further differentiations of consciousness developed their linguistic articulation. What is prior, what is general for any given language speaker is, then, the linguistic repository of already sedimented intentionally informed materials, words and symbols; this repertoire, however, is, in fact, developing subtly in more or less obvious ways under our eyes as the dynamics of history move onwards. If we read a book or a newspaper or go online to peruse a text, we may encounter a set of words that semantically constitute a proposition. This set, of terms and relations, will be perhaps, a phrase the formal elements of which constitute a formal act of meaning – the proposition was simply being understood by the writer or mused on – or a full act of meaning: the writer was asserting it. Lonergan’s category of meaning as constitutive enters into our considerations at this point as further specifying what type of formal cause is operative in such cases of arrangement of terms of meaning, arrangement of letters or signs. The formal cause in the cases of such expressions of habitual usage is the intentional use made of this or that set of terms of relations, of this set of letters and words made up from them. The lines in a novel by Thackeray include such linguistic expressions. Those expressions have their material element in the symbols arranged; they have their formal element in the formal cause which is the intentional meaning as constitutive of the data. That constitutive meaning, that formal cause, arose in the consciousness of Thackeray as he wrote; but he in his turn, unless the usage in question originated in part or whole with the author, inherited from previous language speakers of English the sentences he used; sentences already constituted in their meaning, already having received their formal cause, from earlier generations of English speakers. We might ask ‘where is a natural language?’ and by this question, seek to understand something of the ontological nature of a given language, its mode of existence. An answer can be sketched out beginning with a thought experiment, not too far removed, I hope, from real historical cases. Imagine a scholar working to crack the code of an ancient dead language. There is sufficient evidence in the sign patterns to convince the scholarly community that these signs were part of such an extinct language. Thus, the data, there is strong evidence to suggest, had as its formal cause, its constitutive structure, human intentional meaning. The scholar begins to crack the code. He is at first the only one to do so, but soon

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convinces one or two others of his achievement and they too catch on to meaning, structure and grammatical forms. In the period in which only one scholar understands something of the language anew, then, we can ask ‘where is that language?’ It is present in the marks on texts and stone as data formally constituted by past human intentionality. The formal cause of why these marks are as they are was human meaningful use constituting the orderings. As such, they are potential sources of meaning for human insight, for meaning as communicative, in a more proximate way than are, say, the sheets of unmarked parchment or ancient blocks of carved-­out stone without symbols carved on them. This proximate potential for communicative meaning becomes actual once again through the ingenious and fortunate insights of the scholar. Once he advances in understanding the language and in bringing segments of it to life again, the language not only exists as the formal cause, the constitutive meaning long ago enshrined in the stones and parchment signs, but now begins to become a habitual skill of the scholar. His own translations and notations of it in his notebooks, in his online presentations, and his eventual production of a dictionary and grammar, are then new instances of data, ink marks, electronically produced symbols and so forth, which are constituted by his meaning, his intentional ordering of marks that is the formal cause of why those marks appear as they do. We can extrapolate from this particular case to have some kind of schematic insight into the vast complex that is the ontological reality of a widely spoken, living natural language such as English. To return to the question of what is prior or general as regards the meaning of propositions – as opposed to the concrete act of uttering a proposition – this notion of the generality of a given natural language can be invoked to shed light on the issue. Such generality is concrete rather than abstract; Aristotelian, we might say, rather than Platonic. Sentences, propositions such as ‘Snow is white’ or ‘Grass is green’ do have meanings prior to my use of such propositions in my either formal or full acts of meaning. They have the potential of being used in such acts by a given human agent. This potential is due to their constitution in meaning, to the ordering of a formal cause having already been realized through prior human intentional use. That use, as the formal cause of these signs, is found in the marks as words in everything from dictionaries and grammars, to works of literature and shopping lists. These partial terms of meaning as letters and then words coalesce through intentional human use into sentences, and then into still larger linguistic wholes, from poems to cake recipes. Such terms, as

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partial, formal or full are present in the books, monuments, online material that make up part of what we call a given, concrete natural language. For the rest, these terms are present in the minds of the current users of that language, as acquired skills, ready to be used, actualized, in ingenious, insightful and ever varied combinations in formal or full acts of meaning in thought and communication.60 What this implies, therefore, is that what is also general and prior to the usage of a given individual is the linguistic expression of others who share the similar cognitional structure. It is that cognitional structure which reaches its term, as regards ‘is it true?’ questions, at least, in reasonable judgments. These judgments have been expressed, through the work of previous instrumental acts of human meaning, to form standard types of the proposition now found in the repertoire of the natural language used by the human agent on this concrete occasion when he expresses his reasoned judgment in the phrase ‘Snow is white’. To pursue further the possibility of semantic ‘systematicity’ (Soames’s term) sought by analytical philosophers such as Davidson and Soames, we should next turn to metaphysics as a ‘basic semantics’. We can thereby further differentiate the full terms of meaning that are judgments of fact: Metaphysics, as Lonergan understands it, provides a semantics of the meant that we mean in these reasonable judgments. It is a fundamental aspect then of the sought after ‘control of meaning’. Truth as correspondence cannot be reasonably denied, since its denial will be a self-­refuting exercise in which a person claims that his or her denial does, in fact, correspond with the ways things are in reality. Already in his magnum opus, Insight, Lonergan shows a semantic turn to his epistemology, as he describes correspondence as that between a meaning – the rational act of judgment – and a meant, the real, being.61 Metaphysics, as specifying in heuristic but ontologically true or intrinsic categories, elements of being, is crucially part of how we might distinguish between sense and nonsense, between phantasy and reality. The metaphysical elements can be specified heuristically from cognitional structure as the ‘to-­be-known’, and some of them at least, may be verified in a particular manner in the self-­knowledge attained in coming to To enhance this analysis further, we would need to transpose what I have said into the historically dynamic context of statistically probable emergent, surviving and declining schemes of recurrence. An insightful application of Lonergan’s investigations in this area of applying them to the phenomena of communal language, and the individual’s place within it, is found in Kenneth R. Melchin, History, Ethics and Emergent Probability (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), chapter 6. 61 Lonergan, Insight, 381–82. 60

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know our own cognitive and evaluative structure; in that area, denial of the said elements will only serve to provide sufficient evidence for their reality in the conscious activities of denial. So we can come to know something of the self in this fashion as an instance of the metaphysical category of substance, or as Lonergan terms it a ‘thing’, an individual differentiated in its various activities and capacities, including the activities of cognitional structure themselves – the traditional designation of these being ‘accidents’ (or in Lonergan’s terms, ‘conjugates’). In myriad other areas of life, such metaphysical elements can also be seen as being identified as basic semantic markers in our more or less probable judgments. As Lonergan points out, ordinary language witnesses to these elements in its own way in such grammatical features as the distinction between nouns (substances) and verbs (one type of conjugate or accident). However, here our discussion of linguistic deflation above returns. While the natural languages like modern English attest in one way to these elements, we may not always find the same is the case when we look at other human languages across space and time in human history; thus, Wittgenstein and Derrida are right to indicate the absence of the copula even in some modern languages. While aspects of an authentic metaphysics will be reflected in the grammar of a natural language, at a given stage of its evolution, and perhaps, diverse natural languages may reflect diverse aspects of a genuine metaphysics, Lonergan’s philosophy, in various ways, draws attention to the fact that the ‘surface grammar’ of a particular natural language may not be so transparent to what, he believes, we can critically validate as an authentic metaphysics, and may in fact be ambiguous or misleading in certain areas. The surface grammar of a natural language may not well reflect, in certain aspects, the ‘depth grammar’ of cognitional structure, nor the metaphysical structures that are heuristically anticipated in our conscious intelligent and reasonable activities.62 But it is Lonergan’s contention that this ‘depth grammar’ is transcultural: there is not an authentic fundamental semantics of metaphysics for westerners and an opposing one for easterners on our globe; for there is not a diverse and opposed variety of human cognitional structures.63 The observation that these points add up to is that, if semantic investigation is to have the systematic core to it that has been sought in analytical philosophy

Lonergan, Verbum, 118 and 130. Lonergan, Insight, 756–58.

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over the last several decades by various luminaries in that tradition, including Davidson and Soames, then it needs to take a hermeneutical turn. A natural language, at a given stage of its historical development, may be understood to have particular grammatical structures. It may be understood to have idiomatic phrases and have various types of ‘body language’ embedded in its usage,64 such usage undergoing perhaps regional variations within a geographic area. Given what Lonergan terms ‘the psychology of words’, the emotional and conative aspects,65 the natural language in question may be seen to have certain specific resources for poetry and literary language, and to have itself been enriched by these in a type of feedback process stretching over time. All these factors may come to be appreciated in reflective investigations on the language. The grammar and usage are, however, ‘caught’ even more than taught by children growing up in the tradition, as moving into that world mediated by meaning they insightfully catch on to meanings and the resources for their own expression. The identifiable grammar of a natural language is then a structure of meanings, no doubt a historically fluid structure, which the philosophical investigation of semantics must acknowledge and appreciate. However, is that all there is to say? It certainly does not seem that the analysis of Davidson, Soames and others rests content at arriving at that level. For their work invokes, as we have seen above, logical, cognitive and even metaphysical structures to delve more deeply into what human agents mean when they think and discourse in language. But as the observations of Wittgenstein and Derrida, on the absence of the copula in assertions in some even current natural languages attest, we cannot rest content, as seems to be the case in much of this work in analytical philosophy, with plucking out well-­formed phrases in current American or British linguistic usage for semantic investigation as if this is the way the rest of the world really speaks or thinks and has done throughout history. Lonergan’s work on meaning, and linguistic meaning specifically, as students of that work will know, enters on protracted investigation of the development of language in order to attempt a viable hermeneutic of both massive historical flexibility and variety, and yet of some core continuity in human meaning. Thus, as the discussion above of the Snell work on the ‘Greek discovery of mind’ indicates, undifferentiated primitive languages seem to express things in a

Lonergan, Insight, 200. I recall having the meaning of various hand gestures routinely used in Rome, which I had not hitherto understood, explained to me. 65 Lonergan, Insight, 577. 64

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compact way and may perhaps project human emotions and feelings onto the gods or physical objects in the world. Socrates, in his later philosophical endeavours was engaged in an attempted control of meaning, as he tried to sort out the vague and obfuscating in ordinary language within the ethical domain; Greek thought to follow would attempt to distinguish between myth and reality. The progress of knowledge and the development of language are, as Lonergan insists, intimately knitted together.66 So Roman numerals give way to Arabic characters in mathematical language, and later algebraic symbolism is developed to serve and indeed stimulate the diversification of mathematics and the growth of ‘higher viewpoints’ in mathematical understanding.67 Lonergan’s analysis of the different patterns of experience, of the historical differentiation of stages of meaning and of the diverse types of consciousness – common-­sense, scientific-­ theoretical, scholarly-­theoretical and so on – and his observation that there can be great variation and variety through history given the possible combinations of various types of such differentiation in any human person, serves to highlight semantic flexibility across history.68 While not a few in academe will be prepared to join in Lonergan’s celebration of sematic diversity and plurality across time and cultures, and to take it that this is a choice manner in which to show up and embarrass the analytical philosophers for their crass naivety in seeking semantic structures common to all human agents, the same enthusiasts will no doubt balk at such notions as the ‘universal viewpoint’ or Lonergan’s identification of transcultural unity in such areas as the human person’s intention of being, as the ‘core of meaning’,69 as at the root of our attempts at meaning anything at all.70 At this point, it would seem there is a loss of nerve in Lonergan’s making common cause with these same hermeneutically insensitive analytical philosophers and their quest for the chimerical semantic core! Yet, we can surely approach such notions from a quite general perspective from the ‘outer limits’ of the question, as it were. When investigators find ancient or obscure objects and come to make intelligent and reasonable judgments, perhaps only probable and tentative, that these attest to the activity not of higher

69 70 66 67 68

Lonergan, Insight, 577. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 55–56. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 85–100. Lonergan, Insight, 381–83. Lonergan, A Second Collection, 41–42.

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animals but of creatures ‘like ourselves’, to wit intelligent and reasonable bodily beings, then this is not greatly different from what Lonergan is aiming to explain, in a little more detail admittedly, in his transcultural hermeneutics, and therefore, basic semantics. Were researchers to find similar data in outer space, the issues would fundamentally be the same: the evidence would suggest the presence of beings, intelligent, reasonable and responsible bodily creatures, much like human beings. If we are to reasonably conclude that such and such a group is not a heap of stones, a flower bed or a herd of animals, but a ‘human group’, ‘human group’ must have some meaning akin to what Lonergan intends by writing of the ‘universal viewpoint’, of the transcultural nature of generalized empirical method. Further, while Lonergan’s overview of the historical process of differentiations of consciousness and stages of meaning, linguistic and otherwise, involves a positive, or what he calls genetic developmental factor or vector, there is also always the need for dialectical analysis. In one sense, this dialectical analysis focuses on the moral aspect of human social and individual progress and decline. In another sense, the vector investigated has to do with the psychological dynamics we as human beings share with the higher animals. This is what Lonergan identifies as the ‘polymorphism’ of human consciousness which naturally also finds its expression in the diverse linguistic articulations of meaning across time and cultures. For those with a heightened sensitivity to the faintest whiff of supposed Eurocentric cultural imperialism, however, it might be indicated at once that, to a certain extent at least, we moderns are on a level playing field with all other human beings in this regard. The most up-­to-date philosophical analysis of, say, causality, an analysis perhaps bristling with state-­ of-the-­art symbolic formulations, may, given Lonergan’s hermeneutics, betray truly appalling, confusing and ‘primitive’ picture-­thinking intuitions when it comes to a proper appreciation of what the structured intelligibility of types of causes in reality are, or should be, identified as in a critically validated and authentic metaphysics.

Meaning and the future of philosophy The Age of Meaning is the subtitle of the second volume of Soames’s impressive work Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Soames guides us through the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Hare, Quine, Davidson

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and Kripke, indicating all the while the ways in which these philosophers find a central point of focus in the analysis of linguistic meaning. As noted above, Soames is no neutral observer. His criticisms are trenchant and carefully worked, while his praise for the enduring contributions of each are as generous as they are judicious. What is Meaning? is his own contribution to the debate, a contribution that he is at pains to point out is still in its initial stages of construction. In my evaluation of that work, I have deployed the resources of Lonergan’s critical realism, both to highlight shortcomings in Soames’s programme and to indicate ways in which its healthy instinct for a realist account of linguistic meaning might be supported and developed in a more positive direction. In the closing passages of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Soames writes of the apparent disarray evident in current analytical philosophy. This may not be the vice it at first appears to be, he holds, since analysis of the phenomena of human meaning needs to be sensitive to the manner in which the question of meaning appears in diverse areas of philosophical investigation.71 While I grant that the latter point is well taken, I would still emphatically advance the view that some form of general philosophical method is a crucial requirement for progress in analysis. If such a contention seems grandiose and totalitarian, I believe it need only be pointed out that Lonergan’s method, in a genuine sense, simply boils down to drawing attention to, and highlighting the implications of the fact that the analytical philosophers under examination, including Soames, engage in dialogue and debate, thus manifesting their native abilities as conscious intelligent and reasonable enquirers. To pay attention to such facts of our life as conscious beings is to identify sources and activities of human meaning. For if Soames wishes to embrace diversity in philosophical analysis, it is also a central aim of his philosophy to achieve some account of the systematic in the semantics of our language use. This is evident in his criticisms of the ordinary language philosophers of an earlier stage of analytical philosophy, including Austin and Strawson.72 Like many other analytical philosophers of his own generation, Soames finds this earlier celebration of semantic heterogeneity wanting and inconsistent. The book What is Meaning? is an attempt to move towards some semantic theory that is less haphazard. If what is desired is a philosophy of linguistic semantics,

Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, 474–76. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, 128–34.

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both flexible and yet systematic, I believe Lonergan’s cognitional theory, and the heuristic semantics that arises from it, is the best option available for indicating ways in which future fruitful investigations might move forward. At the heart of the matter of the dialectical issues discussed in this essay is the point identified with penetrating clarity by Lonergan in Insight when he writes: Grammarians distinguish nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, etc. Logicians distinguish subject, copula, and predicate, terms and relations. In both cases, the analysis is based on a consideration of the end products of cognitional process, of definitions formed in conception, of affirmations and negations uttered in reflection. On the other hand, metaphysical analysis has a quite different basis. It takes its stand, not on the end products, but on the dynamic structure of cognitional process. For it, the significant division has nothing to do with nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates, or even terms and relations . . . since metaphysical elements and true propositions both refer to being, there must be some correspondence between them. On the other hand, since metaphysical analysis has a quite different basis from grammatical and logical analysis, one must not expect any one-­to-one correspondence between metaphysical elements and grammatical or logical elements . . . until such exact conception [of metaphysics] is reached, metaphysics is apt to languish in a morass of pseudo problems that have no basis apart from a confusion of the metaphysical with the logical and grammatical.73

In their endeavours to elucidate the meaning of meaning, philosophers from Frege to Davidson, from Russell to Soames, have not succeeded in overcoming the impasse that results from confusing and eliding the domains Lonergan distinguishes in this passage. It was said above that analytical philosophers need to broaden their perspectives on human meaning to include not only diverse domains of meaning, but the very different natural languages to be found across time and cultures. Even more crucial than such breadth, however, is depth: the need to explore the ‘depth grammar’, as I have called it, of cognitional structure and the metaphysics, the fundamental semantics, which arises from it and is validated through it. Such a grammar, at the centre of human meaning, is indeed the grammar of assent.

Lonergan, Insight, 526–27; see also 684.

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Lonergan on Meaning In 1982, two years before his death, Lonergan gave a set of interviews gathered into a volume with the title Caring about Meaning.1 This concern for meaning, this Sorge,2 on Lonergan’s part is evident across the decades through which he wrote and taught. Forty years before, in a review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s book Die Ehe, Lonergan had raised the question of meaning explicitly.3 He had done so in a manner that indicated his awareness of the discussion of meaning current in both continental philosophy, phenomenology and in analytical philosophy. In discussing Lonergan’s concern with meaning, therefore, I will take these two moments in his intellectual development, forty years apart, as markers, bookends, indicative of a continuity of interest in meaning, and at the same time, indicative of the fact that Lonergan had a concern for ways in which his own philosophical and theological endeavours might interact with the research into meaning in twentieth-­century thought in both its continental and Anglophone expressions.

At the level of our times: The philosophies and insight into meaning I offer the current essay and the essay ‘Scott Soames: A Critical Realist Response’ as a thematic pair. The essay on Soames attempted to apply Lonergan’s thought on meaning to debates current in analytical circles on semantics and linguistic

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, P. Lambert, C. Tansey and C. M. Going, editors (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982). 2 We may note how Lonergan appropriates for his own ends this Heideggerian theme; see Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, CWL, Vol. 5, Elizabeth A. Morelli, Mark D. Morelli, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 183. 3 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ‘Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Marriage’, Shorter Papers, CWL, Vol. 20, R. C. Croken, R. M. Doran and H. D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 153–55. 1

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meaning. The present essay focuses on the development of Lonergan’s thought on meaning across the forty-­year period I mention – with, however, some necessary excursions into his thought prior to the von Hildebrand review. My essay on Soames, in fact, highlighted my own hermeneutical approach to this aspect of Lonergan’s thought. To engage in philosophical debates on meaning at the level of the times, as Lonergan intended, entails drawing on the resources of Lonergan’s thought in this domain, which are to be found across the works he produced throughout a life of literary activity. Take, for example, the domain of linguistic meaning, clearly of great interest to analytical philosophers: while what Lonergan has to say in the section devoted to this in Method in Theology is rich and illuminating,4 there is a great deal more to be found in Lonergan’s writing, in Insight and in work prior and subsequent to that magnum opus, which is of profound import for debates on meaning and language currently underway in some philosophical circles. Some of that material is explored below. In general terms, my hermeneutical approach to Lonergan’s work is to see fundamental continuity through the phases of his development. To employ Lonergan’s own analytical tools, this development is fundamentally genetic, as later works expand on points made in a compact way in earlier writing in a process of further differentiation. Some striking and notable creative novelties do appear to emerge, such as Lonergan’s later notion of value and the idea that values are apprehended in feelings. But, in the company of other Lonergan scholars, my own appreciation of this shift is not to see it as a repudiation of earlier perspectives.5 In his later phase, Lonergan would characterize a notable aspect of his own development as his realization that what was underway in Insight was a shift from faculty psychology to intentionality analysis to a firmer appreciation of the control of meaning offered by a phenomenology of interiority.6 However, what is significant here is the emphasis placed on the fact that this is what was occurring in Insight; it is precisely not a matter of a post-Insight move towards some kind of phenomenology. Indeed, we have to bear in mind that, as is clear from what we know of Lonergan’s development in the 1920s and 1930s, his approach to a serious study of St. Thomas Aquinas was to be one in which the hermeneutical key was already found in a species of phenomenology, of an exploration of

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 70–73. See, for instance, Kenneth R. Melchin, History, Ethics and Emergent Probability (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). 6 Method in Theology, 115. 4 5

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interiority acquired through his reading of Bl. John Henry Newman and St. Augustine.7 In other words, this phenomenology constituted his point of entry into an exploration of Aquinas and a way for the re-­appropriation of his thought. Later, in the 1967 Introduction he added to the version of the 1940s Verbum articles published in book form, Lonergan would highlight the fact that what Aristotle and Aquinas were doing (for the most part) was an implicit form of phenomenology of consciousness; it could not be otherwise, he avers, given their uncanny knack of identifying metaphysical subtleties that could only arise from a highly sensitized awareness of elements of human consciousness.8 His own labours in Insight would endeavour to exploit this psychological, phenomenological re-­appropriation of the achievements of Aristotle and St. Thomas, in the context of the advances of both modern science and scholarship, so as to manifest their enduring contribution to current philosophy and theology. Given the prior phenomenology of interiority that Lonergan brought to this task, a phenomenology indebted to his reading of Newman and Augustine, we can perhaps see a spiralling hermeneutical appropriation. The prior phenomenological approach is enriched, deepened and transformed through a reading of Aristotle and St. Thomas, which is alert to their incipient appreciation of conscious interiority expressed, in large measure, in metaphysical terminology. As a result, Lonergan is able in Insight to invite his readers by way of a critical self-­ appropriation to re-­enter the metaphysical philosophy and theology of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition in order to import the genius of Aquinas, far more effectively than hitherto, to face the intellectual challenges of a later day. But this spiralling hermeneutical movement was one also of suspicion and retrieval: the tools and resources gradually acquired which could be critically validated in terms of positions that could not be gainsaid without self-­referential incoherence, would serve further in tasks such as the necessary freeing of a permanently valid core of metaphysical positions from their historically conditioned context in Aristotelian science.9 William Murnion has recently

See William A. Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), chapter 5. 8 Bernard J. F Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, David B. Burrell, editor (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1968), preface. A careful reading of Verbum, however, should alert the reader to Lonergan’s identification of where in Aristotle and Aquinas there is an explicit phenomenology of consciousness and where it seems to be implicit. 9 Understanding and Being, 365. 7

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emphasized that often in Aquinas there is not only an implicit phenomenology of consciousness embedded in metaphysically expressed thought, but a clear and explicit witness to conscious interiority.10 I believe various comments made by Lonergan indicate that he was aware of this too,11 and so the remarks in the 1967 Verbum Introduction need to be complemented with this perspective; however, Murnion’s work is also to be valued as drawing our attention to further aspects of this kind in Aquinas not highlighted by Lonergan. Lonergan scholars, in the decades after Lonergan’s death in 1984, rightly reflected on the possible task of re-­appropriating Lonergan’s earlier ‘Latin theology’, now happily made widely available in the Collected Works series, in terms of the later hermeneutic of the phenomenology of interiority; this suggests a reduplication of the interpretative task carried out by Lonergan himself with regard to St. Thomas’s thought. While such suggestions have much to commend them, I believe we are perhaps in a better position, given the volume of work now available widely in the Collected Works, to approach this interpretative enterprise in a more nuanced fashion. To begin with, it is clear, as we have seen, that Lonergan’s own phenomenology was at work from the beginning in his appropriation of Aquinas’s metaphysical horizon. We should be on the lookout, therefore, for when, in Lonergan’s early theological writing, normally expressed in the contemporary scholastic style of the day, this prior sensitivity to conscious interiority makes itself manifest. Further, not everything in metaphysics can be recast entirely as that which can be validated in our own consciousness. The break with precritical pseudo-­problems and the obfuscations arising from the polymorphic nature of our consciousness effected by Lonergan’s method in metaphysics is massive: fundamental elements, terms and relations in metaphysics can be critically validated in interiority. They are validated in our consciousness both as the heuristic categories and notions we anticipate in questioning reality, and in the verification of some of the same in the affirmations of self-­consciousness. This core position then throws a whole new light on many disputed questions in metaphysics. However, as Lonergan himself makes clear,

William Murnion, ‘Aquinas’ Philosophy of Mind in Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritatae’, The Lonergan Review, Vol. 4, 1 (2013): 37–53. 11 Cf. Verbum, 77–79; Understanding and Being, 27 n. 23, 123; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, A Second Collection, W. F. Ryan and B. J. Tyrrell, editors (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 53. On the other hand, a section in Verbum that well illustrates Lonergan’s hermeneutic of detecting an implicit reference to introspective experience in Aquinas, where the latter’s texts do not explicitly do so, is on the ‘concept of being’: Verbum, 44–45. (Note: I am using the DLT version of Verbum.) 10

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this core is then the upper blade of an interpretative scissors to engage a lower blade provided by the results of common-­sense, scientific and scholarly knowing. While the metaphysics critically validated through interiority will play a decisive role in debates of a metaphysical nature touching on, say, science, it will not provide the sole necessary resource. In, for instance, the discussion in Insight of whether the modern scientific concept of energy may be identified as Aristotle’s prime matter, the resources supplied by interiority will not do all of the intellectual work required; there is still scope for creative, insightful metaphysical extrapolation.12 The point, then, has application with regard to a renewed appreciation of Lonergan’s earlier more ‘metaphysical’ work. In light of the discussion above, there is something of an intriguing hermeneutical circle that emerges in the early period of his writing with regard precisely to the text that has been mentioned above. In his review of von Hildebrand’s book, we witness the first explicit encounter in print between Lonergan’s developing thought and the world of continental philosophy, of the phenomenological movement; it is an encounter with one of the two dominant philosophical traditions that play a role in the cultural world mediated by meaning and motivated by value in which context Lonergan aims to adumbrate a philosophy and theology drawing on the genius of Aquinas. Lonergan’s dialogue and dialectic engagement with the phenomenological tradition is a fascinating aspect of his thought as it unfolds over the next few decades. In the 1982 interviews, which I have chosen as the other historical bookend for my survey, the issue arises once again. We can note that while this narrative, beginning from the 1942 review, is characterized by a growing appreciation for the content, method and style of the movement that owed so much to Husserl’s Herculean philosophical labours, the dialectical note of warning still rings out: Lonergan remains convinced, citing William Ryan’s insightful contributions, that the Husserlian movement has not freed itself from the image of knowing as seeing, from a philosophical intuitionism that cannot do justice to the nature of knowledge as discursive, and therefore, suffers from an oversight of insight with all the attendant philosophical problems that, according to Lonergan, ensue.13

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 468–69. 13 Lonergan, Caring about Meaning, 108. 12

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The review acknowledges, in agreement with other enthusiastic reviews of von Hildebrand’s work on marriage, that the book offers enriching and profound insights into the phenomenology and theology of the Catholic vision of marriage. The principal objection, however, is the ambiguity arising over the meaning of meaning. To distinguish the ‘meaning’ of marriage, on the one hand, from the ‘end(s)’ of marriage, on the other, is to beg the question as to why an ‘end’ should not also be characterized as a meaning; for we are apt to inquire, regarding a human action, as to the meaning or the end intended, taking the terms as interchangeable. Lonergan’s own response was to attempt a disambiguation of terms, at once throwing light on the debate on the ends of marriage stimulated by the work of H. Doms, through his decidedly metaphysical essay ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’.14 Thus, to clarify ambiguity in meaning arising from an otherwise praiseworthy exercise in phenomenology, Lonergan turned to metaphysics. Yet, I think we can have the sense that this metaphysical exercise was not uninformed by Lonergan’s own ongoing appropriation of St. Thomas’s metaphysics, an appropriation bound up with the self-­appropriation Lonergan had already championed as the hermeneutical way forward to appreciate the genuine riches and resources of Thomist thought. In the late, markedly metaphysical, essay ‘Mission and the Spirit’, Lonergan returns to the terms ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal finality’, which appear in the early essay on the ends of marriage.15 The essay from the 1970s attests to the fact that, in his later period, Lonergan still pursues metaphysical analysis through the complementary paths of both grounding ontological elements in interiority and by turning to the findings of research such as occur in biological science. The question of the meaning of meaning that occurs in the review of von Hildebrand’s book and the dialectical engagement with phenomenology is still evident forty years later in the remarks on Husserl in the 1982 interviews. In both places, we also witness Lonergan’s engagement with the other dominant philosophical tradition of his and our times: analytical philosophy with its distinctive approach to the question of meaning. In the 1942 review, Lonergan draws into the discussion the 1923 work by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning.16 The work is referred to again in the 1982 interviews in the

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, Collection, CWL, Vol.  4, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) 17–52. 15 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, A Third Collection, F. E. Crowe, editor (London: Chapman, 1985), 23–34. 16 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language on Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (New York: Mariner Books: Reissue Edition, 1989). 14

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context of Lonergan’s comments on the concern with meaning of analytical philosophers.17 While intrigued by the questions the book poses, it is clear that in both 1942 and 1982, Lonergan registers a strong dissatisfaction with the work: it raises a question he will attempt to answer more successfully himself. Because of its connections with analytical philosophy, Lonergan is right to mention it in the context he does. While neither Ogden nor Richards were professional academic philosophers, the book is inspired to some degree by the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and had some influence on analytical philosophers such as A. J. Ayer. Ogden had intellectual liaisons with professional AngloAmerican philosophy, as can be witnessed from the role he played in persuading F. P. Ramsey to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from German into English. While Lonergan found the work disappointing, some outside analytical philosophy were enthusiastic: Umberto Eco finds its triadic semantic structures preferable to de Saussure’s dyadic alternative.18 What is clear is that in the forty-­ year period under review, Lonergan pursued his own investigations into the meaning of meaning with an eye on the parallel researches into the question underway in both the continental and analytical philosophical traditions.

Method as control of meaning The Ogden and Richards book raised a question that intrigued Lonergan and which his major work Insight would address. It was a question, however, already in some way current for him prior to the 1942 book review, as is evident from his doctoral researches on operative grace in St. Thomas Aquinas.19 In that research, Lonergan was already alert both to the questions in hand, on grace and divine ‘foreknowledge’, and to the methodological performance of St. Thomas’s developing thought. Aquinas’s meaning is not that characteristic of common sense; clearly, to use Lonergan’s later terminology, it is a manifestation of the theoretical differentiation of consciousness. Behind Aquinas’s labours stand

In 1972, Lonergan again refers to the book in his paper ‘World Mediated by Meaning’: see Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, CWL, Vol. 17, C. Croken and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 107. 18 Umberto Eco, ‘Introduction’, in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. 19 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, CWL, Vol.  1, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 17

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Scripture, Tradition and the Church’s magisterium, which in the first millennium, became affected by meaning of the theoretical differentiation as manifested in its dogmatic definitions. For according to Lonergan, a ‘tincture’ of the theoretical, or philosophical, emergent from the Greek discovery of mind, is detectable in these dogmatic formulae. Behind Aquinas’s labours also stand the genius of St. Augustine and the genius of Aristotle, mediated to Aquinas by lesser lights that nevertheless play a significant role, including the Arab commentators. If this Aristotelian corpus plays the role of a crucial Begrifflichkeit for St. Thomas, it does not, Lonergan is emphatic, play the role of a ‘system’. Lonergan’s close observation of Aquinas’s thought and its development in a given area convinced him that, while Aquinas provides his reader with a sufficiently uniform terminology at given periods so as to avoid contradiction and confusion, the shifting nuances in his terminology betray not an obsession with the creation of a meaning system, but rather the creative work of a genius coming up with insights relevant to the illumination of the truths of faith. Lonergan observes: ‘Though St Thomas does make sporadic efforts to stabilize a terminology, he seems to have been too occupied with real issues to be successful in fixing the meaning of all the words he uses.’20 And in a remark typical of his sardonic humour Lonergan points out that Aquinas’s variable terminological usage in his developing analysis of grace is offered almost deliberately, ‘. . . as if to insist upon meaning and to contemn terminological primness – the solitary achievement of lesser minds. . . ’.21 In the years leading up to the writing of Insight, years that he spent ‘reaching up to the mind of Aquinas’, Lonergan became convinced of the dire consequences for Western intellectual endeavours arising from the oversight of insight, which resulted from a failure to appreciate properly the creative achievements of St. Thomas. Nominalist conceptualism followed, and a fascination with the logical work of Aristotle tended to eclipse the aims of St. Thomas, which were to achieve some fruitful, albeit limited, insights into the truths and mysteries of Catholic faith. The conceptualist oversight of the conscious act of insight compounded, according to Lonergan, an attachment to an intellectual ideal for which certain proof is the sole concern; such an ideal ran counter, in fact, to the emerging scientific enterprise in Western culture, the objective for which is theory probably

Grace and Freedom, 271. Grace and Freedom, 146.

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verified in the data.22 Lonergan’s own philosophy, following Aquinas, does highlight the possibility, proven by fact, of de facto certain knowledge – as regards self-­affirmation and various metaphysical theorems arising from it – and also focuses on the meaning grasped by our intelligence in mathematical judgments and logical judgments as diverse forms of the virtually unconditioned.23 However, as the Verbum articles reveal, he learned from Aquinas the priority of method, generalized empirical (or transcendental) method, over logic.24 This entails that Lonergan’s thought is uniquely placed in twentieth-­century philosophical investigation of meaning to overcome the dichotomy as cause of conflict between those who, on the one hand, have seen the control of meaning as entailing a tight, rigorous deductive semantic structure as the beau idéal, and those, on the other, who have opposed this in the name of the variegated manifestations of meaningful communication in such areas as intersubjective, daily encounter or aesthetic appreciation. Such conflict, and ways to its resolution, was a central topic in the essay on Soames, and I return to the theme further below. The work on Aquinas, which resulted in Gratia Operans, Verbum and other ‘Latin’ theology, taught Lonergan lessons, not only as regards St. Thomas’s operative approach to meaning, but also as exercises in the hermeneutic of meaning discovery. From these exercises, Lonergan would derive his particular hermeneutic principle, that in order to appreciate the mind of Aquinas, we would need to self-­appropriate a non-conceptualist interiority. He would learn other lessons formulated in more general precepts on meaning and hermeneutics that

Lonergan’s treatment of the ‘scientific revolution’ does need nuancing now in light of the wealth of work that has appeared in the last few decades on the emergence of modern science. The discussion deserves a lengthier airing, but I think that we can, for instance, now better situate Herbert Butterfield’s work, to which Lonergan makes frequent reference in his later writing. Butterfield’s contribution, while still of value, was to some extent a popularization of the Koyré school, which itself had reacted to P. Duhem’s theses (see David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, editors, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Further, now widely accepted research such as that of A. C. Crombie allows us to appreciate a quite varied picture regarding the notion of the probable in medieval and early modern scientific controversies, and the use made of the Aristotelian corpus in such debates; Aristotle’s text on meteorology, for instance, played a role for those advocating a notion of scientific theory as ‘probable’ (see A. C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (London: Duckworth, 1995)). The literature on the significance of the Church condemnations of Aristotelian views on necessity, and thus, certainty also continues to grow apace (see William Wallace, ‘The Certitude of Science in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, July (1986): 281–91). Such research certainly does not, however, constitute a denial of the crucial contribution in this context of Lonergan’s highlighting of the theoretically probable in St. Thomas and the marginalization of this aspect of his thought in subsequent nominalist traditions. 23 Lonergan, Insight, 329–39. 24 Lonergan, Verbum, 53–54, 55–56. 22

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appear in the ongoing work in this domain evident in Insight and in Method in Theology. In the preface to Insight, written in 1954 after the completion of the main body of the work, Lonergan informs his readers that his intention is not only to invite them to discover the nature of the implications of conscious insight into insight, but also the meaning of meaning.25 It is not too audacious to claim, therefore, that another ‘door’ by way of entry into Lonergan’s Insight is found in the investigation of meaning. In this sense, Insight and the works to follow, travel along a similar path of investigation as those foundational works in both the worlds of analytical and continental philosophy in the twentieth century that have the question of human meaning as their central concern. Further, the preface to Insight focuses on an analytical heuristic to be explored in this investigation of meaning. Lonergan writes: ‘. . . inasmuch as it is the act of organizing intelligence, insight is an apprehension of relations. But among relations are meanings, for meaning seems to be a relation between sign and signified.’26 It may be that the insertion of the cautious word seems in this passage signals a certain tentativeness on Lonergan’s part – a caveat allowing for investigative modification of this initial schema in a perhaps radical direction. Indeed, it might be thought that this is what, in fact, happens as Lonergan’s thought expands and deepens over the years, and as his appreciation of diverse realms, carriers and historical stages of meaning encompasses his encounters with other profound philosophical and theological contributions to the question of human meaning. I argue below, however, that while there is discernible a shift beyond what is suggested by the heuristic, in a quite surprising manner this initial specification of a research programme in the early pages of Insight remains a constant through the later investigations, and is, indeed, highlighted and underlined in some perhaps unexpected ways as an analogously fertile analytical tool. Some of the distinctive features of Lonergan’s treatment of meaning in Insight were highlighted in my discussion of Soames’s writing on the philosophy of semantics. One of the striking features noted there was Lonergan’s ‘semantic turn’ in epistemology and metaphysics. The judgment of truth is an act of meaning, a

Insight, 5. Insight, 4–5.

25 26

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full act of meaning, which, if correct, corresponds to a meant.27 The ‘meant’, in a judgment claiming to be about reality, is being, and the protean notion of ‘being’ is further differentiated through metaphysical analysis (itself grounded in a fundamental way through cognitional analysis showing it to be isomorphic with our knowing). Such a metaphysics, as Lonergan later observes in his 1958 lectures on Insight, provides a ‘basic semantics’.28 The heuristic anticipation of being as what is to be known through intelligence and reason provides, for Lonergan, the ‘core of meaning’.29 That this aspect of his thought on meaning, his unfolding insights in response to the question on meaning of 1942, did not disappear in the later period in which Method in Theology was being written, is evident I believe from the 1967 response to David Burrell’s question on the complete intelligibility of being. Lonergan’s reply to Burrell involved pointing out that the notion of being as the intelligible is at the centre, core of our attempts to mean anything at all.30 This core notion of being, intended by us in our knowing, plays a central role in the universal viewpoint as sketched out in Lonergan’s hermeneutics in Insight.31 The polymorphism of human consciousness and the flow of our consciousness at any one period with its variety of conscious and ‘unconscious’ factors, emotional, cognitive, moral, animal, aesthetic, religious orientations and vectors, finds expression in the texts, aesthetic expressions, religious artifacts and edifices produced by human beings across times and cultures. Hermeneutics reflects on our encounters at our moment in history with the expressions of human consciousness from other times and places as we bring with us our current, operative vectors in consciousness into an interpretative dialogue. Lonergan’s investigations of human meaning as relevant to hermeneutics develop through the writing in Insight and in the works leading up to and following on from Method in Theology. He beautifully and succinctly expresses the notion of meaning as a hermeneutic variable in his response to another interlocutor in the late 1960s, Leslie Dewart. Lonergan points out that: ‘. . . the root of hermeneutics and the root of literary forms lie precisely in the fact that the correspondence between meaning and meant is itself part of the meaning and will vary with variations in the meaning.’32 Hermeneutics aims to enable us

29 30 31 32 27 28

Insight, 382. Understanding and Being, 365. Insight, 382–83. A Second Collection, 40–42. Insight, 600–601. A Second Collection, 14.

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to appreciate the diverse types of meaning that arise from the anthropological combination of patterns of human experience: the biological, intellectual, aesthetic, dramatic and mystical.33 To this taxonomy in Insight, Method in Theology will contribute the further, clear delineation of various differentiations of consciousness and historical stages of meaning. As such a variable, hermeneutics will facilitate an appreciation of the expressions of the intellectual pattern of experience in historical manifestations in the theoretical sphere. This is seen in, say, works on history of science and/or history of philosophy. Or an effective hermeneutic method will enable a retrieval of moments of human meaning expressive of the differentiation of consciousness, which is ‘interiority’ (to use Lonergan’s later expressions). But a primary locus for hermeneutical investigations will be the diverse types of common-­sense meaning found across times and cultures. Such meaning will manifest the blend of factors in the dramatic subject so that psychic/emotional, aesthetic, practical, intersubjective, intellectual, biological and religious elements will require identification as they emerge in the expressions of meaning of individuals and groups as historically situated. Already, in the lessons Lonergan began to derive from Aquinas on linguistic meaning, in his study Verbum, there are pointers towards the diversity of cultural linguistic expression. Such indications are picked out by Lonergan in Aquinas’s non-Scotist appreciation of the difference between inner words, ratio and the outer word(s) of our common languages.34 Maurice Merleau-Ponty was preoccupied with what he took to be a failure in Husserl’s phenomenology to provide an adequate appreciation of the primacy of the aesthetic in our encounter with the world.35 In Method in Theology, Lonergan would appear to endorse this phenomenological perspective as he sides with Vico on the ‘primacy of poetry’.36 However, I believe that we cannot fail to be struck by Lonergan’s earlier sensitivity to these issues and a rereading of the sections early in Insight on sensible data, on the aesthetic pattern of experience and on the dramatic pattern of experience37 is a valuable exercise in appreciating Lonergan’s own awareness of what Heidegger celebrates in his famous phrase

35 36 37 33 34

Insight, 204–12, 410–11. Verbum, 14–17. See E. F. Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). Lonergan, Method in Theology, 73. Insight, 96–97, 207–9, 210–12. In Lonergan’s non-empiricist analysis in the subsection ‘Data’, we witness already in Insight an awareness of what later will be expressed as ‘the world mediated by meaning and motivated by meaning’–the world we enter as we rapidly leave behind the world of immediacy of the small infant.

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‘man dwells poetically’. Such analyses on Lonergan’s part do not appear to be indebted to any lengthy perusal of contemporary phenomenological works. Similarly, while the chapter on meaning in Method in Theology most expeditiously differentiates various domains of meaning, among which is the ‘intersubjective’, a careful reading of such sections in Insight as ‘Common Sense as Intellectual’ brings home in a striking manner Lonergan’s understanding of the subtleties of the experience of meaning in the personal encounter and the role played by body language and gesture in the same.38 All these accounts of meaning are taken up and are subject to further refinement in later sections of the book, including those on genetic development, hermeneutics and the anthropological vision of a possible redemption suited to the human communal condition.39 In his later work, Lonergan will distinguish between meaning as cognitive, communicative, constitutive and effective. In Insight, the cognitive dimension of meaning is further differentiated in accord with Lonergan’s account of cognitional structure, with its dynamic three-­fold emergence. From the perspective of the linguistic expression of meaning, Lonergan distinguishes among: (a) partial terms of meaning, which coalesce via, (b) rules of meaning into, (c) formal terms of meaning, which if affirmed or denied are, (d) full terms of meaning.40 Concomitantly, from the perspective of ‘prelinguistic intentional consciousness’ there are differentiated: (i) sources of meaning, (ii) acts of meaning, (iii) terms of meaning, (iv) the core of meaning, as the intention of being, the intention of the intelligible.41 Sources of meaning may be ideas, concepts, judgments or the pure desire to know itself. Acts of meaning are: (1) formal, (2), full or (3) instrumental. Terms of meaning are what is meant: they are (A) formal or (B) full. This delineation of sources, elements, acts and terms of meaning is presented again, with some significant variation, in the chapter on meaning in Method in Theology. I examine that representation of the list and the significance of the variations below. The discussion also provides the opportunity of examining to what extent there are changes in the analysis or to what extent it is characterized by development, which is, in fact, a drawing together and underlining of aspects already in some fashion present in Insight. Lonergan’s focus on the history of meaning, so conspicuous in Method in Theology, which offers analyses of the

40 41 38 39

Insight, 196–204. Insight, 494–504, 585–93, 743–45. Insight, 329–30. Insight, 381–82.

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stages of meaning and differentiations of consciousness, is certainly not absent in Insight. The notion of the existential differentiations in consciousness emerges in the phenomenology of the stream of human consciousness. Lonergan writes: We speak of consciousness as a stream, but the stream involves not only the temporal succession of different contents but also direction, striving, effort. Thales was so intent upon the stars that he did not see the well into which he tumbled. The milkmaid was so indifferent to the stars that she could not overlook the well. Still, Thales could have seen the well, for he was not blind; and perhaps the Milkmaid could have been interested in the stars as she was human.42

And later in the book, we see the sketch Lonergan provides of the heuristically delineated ontological stages of meaning and expression. In a passage that brings together in an illuminating fashion a number of the aspects or elements of meaning, which I have identified in the semantic approach of Insight, Lonergan describes one of the principles of hermeneutics as taking account of: . . . the genetic sequence of the modes of expression and the recurrent gap between meaning and expression. For expression is an instrumental act of meaning; it results from principal acts of conception and judgment; the principal acts follow from the immanent sources of meaning; and so, once sources have been tapped, it is only a matter of normal ingenuity to develop appropriate modes of expression. It follows that, once any stage in the development of meaning has become propagated and established in a cultural milieu, there will result an appropriate mode of expression to bear witness to its existence. But it also follows that new meanings can be expressed only by transforming old modes of expression, that the greater the novelty the less prepared the audience, the less malleable the previous mode of expression, then the greater will be the initial gap between meaning and expression and the more prolonged will be the period of experimentation in which the new ideas are forging the tools for their own exteriorization.43

Lonergan was a dogmatic theologian, and his preoccupations in the years of writing Insight and in the period prior to its publication included questions pertaining to the continuity in meaning of Church doctrines across time, it affirmed by Vatican I; a preoccupation that is evident also in Method in Theology.44

Insight, 96. Insight, 611–12. 44 Method in Theology, 322–30. 42 43

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Such concern is implicit in the sections of Insight devoted to hermeneutics and also in the discussion of the perdurance of concepts across time in the epilogue to the book.45 It is explicit in Lonergan’s theology teaching at the Gregorian University at the time of the appearance of Insight, particularly in his lectures and publications for students on the development of doctrine on the Trinity.46 Finally, in this synoptic overview of meaning in Insight, we must include the book’s identification of meaninglessness, as the obvious corollary of the work’s aim to offer a method, a way for the control of meaning. In this endeavour, Insight can again be situated in the context of the aims of twentieth-­century philosophies, both analytical and continental, to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless. This may be conspicuous in the projects of analytical philosophy, in positivism, logical formalism and then ordinary language analysis, but it is no less the case in the world of continental philosophy: are not certain forms of atheistic existentialism or Marxism attempts to say that the religious worldview is absurd? And does not the deconstructive enterprise of some, towards the end of the twentieth century, aim to discredit as absurd previous forms of phenomenology and/or the pretentions and myths of modern, bourgeois, capitalist ideologies? One aspect of Insight’s approach to absence of meaning is found in the analysis of inverse insight. The surd in mathematics can be an example of the surprise encounter of intelligence with that which, while anticipated as yielding intelligible content, does not do so.47 However, it is important to grasp that the notion of ‘inverse insight’ is an analogous one. Such inverse insights, Lonergan avers, are operative in diverse domains: from the insight behind Newton’s first law to the Bois-Reymond/Cantor anti-diagonalization proof in mathematics, from Einsteinian relativity to proofs of undecidability of Gödel or Turing.48 The analogous nature of the notion of inverse insight is also attested to by the fact that, in the 1958 lectures on Insight, Lonergan accepts that some cases, at least of inverse insight, may have to do with the polymorphic nature of our consciousness, with our proneness, as in part higher animals, to a picture-­thinking, which may find itself startled by the ‘counterintuitive’ conclusions of our intelligence and

Insight, 759–61. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Triune God: Doctrines, CWL, Vol. 11, M. G. Shields, translator, R. M. Doran and H. D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 47 Insight, 43–50. 48 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, P. J. McShane, editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 59, 60–62, 150. 45 46

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reason.49 In the cases considered thus far, however, we might be excused for saying that inverse insight, occurring within a pattern of other insights and judgments, plays a part in the discovery of an absence of meaning, which is meaningful; we learn that intelligibility is not to be sought in quite the manner anticipated perhaps, but it is to be found elsewhere in the larger context in which the inverse insight is situated. True absurdity, however, is found in the totally meaningless surd of sin; in that instance, the analogy of inverse insight extends to cases where what ought to have been was, or is not. The latter point brings up the topic of how the development of Lonergan’s thinking on the good is to be understood in relation to the topic of meaning. In this context, the discussions and debates among Lonergan scholars in the years after his death on just how the approaches of Insight and Method in Theology to the ethical are to be related are relevant. Not wishing to enter into that debate in any detail here, it suffices to say, as I have argued elsewhere,50 that while we should acknowledge the significance of Lonergan’s later emphasis on the notion of the good as having a content not sufficiently expressed in Insight, where it is tied very much into the notion of the intelligible, nevertheless the interrelationship between the good and the intelligible is maintained throughout Lonergan’s writing. This can be seen in his references in later work, as in earlier writing, to evil as a surd – an absence of intelligibility.51 If, as we see below, meaning is to be understood on Lonergan’s view as the intelligibility that is intentional, then it follows that sin is the utterly meaningless. If evil, and the distinction between good and evil as sketched out philosophically in Insight, constitute a strand in distinguishing between the meaningful and meaningless, integral to the book’s programme for the control of meaning, then the anthropological theme of the polymorphism of human consciousness is arguably at the centre of its dialectical endeavours as relevant to semantics. It would be difficult to overestimate the radical nature of Lonergan’s challenging analysis of the effects of the polymorphism of human consciousness, as a hermeneutic of suspicion and recovery, for philosophy and culture.

Understanding and Being, 287–89. Andrew Beards, Insight and Analysis: Essays in Applying Lonergan’s Thought (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2010), chapter 7. 51 A number of relevant passages in Lonergan’s writing are given in the discussion in Insight and Analysis. In addition, I refer to Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 193. 49 50

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Celebrated among the cultured are perhaps Heidegger’s destruktion of the Platonism inherent in the Western tradition, subsequent to our lapse from the ‘original grace’ of parmenidean intuition; Nietzsche’s vision of the abiding selfish and egotistical ‘gene’ at work in the philosophers; the deconstructive narratives these have spawned; or Wittgenstein’s attack on the linguistic pictures that hold us captive. Yet, Lonergan’s hermeneutic of suspicion concerning our inveterate tendency towards conflating animal extroversion with objective knowledge, and the philosophical hubris that results, is at once more far-­reaching, devastating as critique, and in addition, optimistic in outcome. Given our nature as in part higher animals, the anthropological tendency we have to confuse objective knowledge with seeing is at the root, Lonergan argues, of perennial philosophical confusion. The self-­affirmation he outlines can help us to move beyond this confusion in an intellectual conversion that shifts the criterion of knowing from sensible satisfaction to intelligent and reasonable grasp of what is real. And such self-­affirmation can be critically validated in a manner that deconstructs as self-­referentially vitiated the very denial of the success of the experiment. We can proceed, accordingly, to a deconstruction of the notable campaigns waged for a hermeneutics of suspicion over the last one hundred or so years listed above. But the outcome is positive: both in the sense that a philosophical position can be adumbrated in epistemology and metaphysics grounded in a critically validated fashion as stated, and in an anthropology that recognizes the genuine psychological needs we have for the potent image and psychically charged affect-­laden symbol. The critique does not seek to change our nature, but to point towards a harmonious integration of the aspects of that nature. Thus, in his analysis of myth and mystery, lonergan argues that mystery, as a symbolic orientation into further intelligibility, may increase, as myth decreases.52 The mythic that our animal psychic orientations generate, is truly endemic: linguistically, the all-­ pervading presence of the metaphorical attests to it since metaphor is contracted myth.53 Nor is this picture-­thinking in our consciousness something jettisoned as culture comes of age: for philosophical endeavours of a most sophisticated kind in our own time may be vitiated by the psychically charged imagery that is appealed to in debate as considered to be the ‘intuitively evident’.54

Insight, 569–72. Insight, 567–69. 54 Cf. Philip McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), 213–14. 52 53

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The outcome of the critique, which reverses counter-positions and advances positions, is, as I have mentioned, philosophically optimistic: positive results can be obtained in core areas in philosophy. But de facto, the message of Insight is, humanly speaking, pessimistic, as regards the capability of individuals and groups to attain to positive results and to live according to a genuine ethics. Thus, the moving viewpoint of Insight points beyond the philosophically tragic, which it identifies with relentless consistency, to the need for redemption and the divine solution to historic anthropological moral impotence. Accordingly, there is need for a divine vector in the control of human meaning. This is signalled already in the section on cosmopolis earlier in the book, as the moral danger of the mythic in social meaning is identified.55 And the heuristic outline of such a possible divine solution takes up the theme again in chapter 20. In that chapter, we again witness Lonergan writing that such a solution is not the mutilation of Anthropos, but on the contrary, a reorientation through divine gift, grace, such as to bring about an authentic integration of the schemes of recurrence on the various levels that constitute our being. . . . since mystery is a permanent need of man’s sensitivity and intersubjectivity, while myth is an aberration not only of mystery but also of intellect and will, the mystery that is the solution as sensible must not be fiction but fact, not a story but history . . . the emergent trend and the full realization of the solution must include the sensible data that are demanded by man’s sensitive nature and that will command his attention, nourish his imagination, stimulate his intelligence and will, release his affectivity, control his aggressivity and, as central features of the world of sense, intimate its finality, its yearning for God.56

The presence of the divine vector in the control of meaning is also evident in the theme of the origins of Christian realism, elaborated in Lonergan’s theological treatises of the 1950s and early 1960s. The personal and intersubjective ‘way down’ of Catholic Christian faith already orients the believer to a notion of the real as that assented to in judgment, the judgments that are the saving doctrines of the faith. The ‘way up’ of a philosophical critical realism corroborates and expounds this implicit commitment to the real, to the intelligible and reasonable.57 I also

Insight, 265, see also 556–58. Insight, 745. We should, perhaps, understand this as the context in which we should place Lonergan’s remarks on theological understanding of the truths of faith and the becoming of persons, alluding to Nédoncelle’s work in the Gonzaga University lectures: see Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 210–11.

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consider it important that in thinking through further the interconnections between intellectual and moral conversions, as these are spelled out in Method in Theology, we reflect on ways in which problematic philosophical positions have an impact on the ethical and the anthropological. While the argument for the distinct notion of the good, and for values apprehended in feelings are all well taken, the theme of Insight regarding the prolongation of the errors of counterpositions from epistemology into ethics remains important. Method itself reminds us that our feelings are not above refinement and outright critique.58 Perhaps implicit in the discussions of the notion of the refinement of feelings is the admission that feelings, at a given prior stage of development perhaps, may also be the locus for the apprehension of disvalues! As we know all too well from current philosophical, cultural-­political debate, a confused anthropology can support or generate social myths that have disastrous ethical consequences for some of the most vulnerable members of society.

The meaning debate: The expansion of Lonergan’s engagement with contemporary philosophy A dialectical encounter with the discussions underway in both analytical and continental philosophy on the topic of meaning witnessed in the 1942 book surfaces explicitly once again in the Boston College lectures of 1957. The first set of lectures concern mid-­twentieth-century analytical philosophy. A reading of these lectures in the context of our present concern may highlight Lonergan’s interest in, indeed fascination for, the achievements in meaning control effected by the development of formal, symbolic techniques in logic.59 In the discussions, he is attentive to ways in which formal systems of logic may be characterized in terms of his analyses of the meaning had through insights that formulate analytical propositions. In the Halifax lectures of the following year, Lonergan will emphasize further how philosophers in the analytical tradition shifted to formal controls of meaning under the impetus of developments in geometry and

Method in Theology, 38. I think it of great interest that already in 1958 we find remarks Lonergan made on the question of ‘feelings’, which are highly relevant to the debate on this area of his thought that developed after his death. He quite readily accepts that such an intellectual, conscious experience as the pure desire to know might, if we wished, be deemed a type of ‘affectivity’: see Understanding and Being, 265. 59 Phenomenology and Logic, Part One. 58

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mathematics, and how, in turn, the debates had implications for the philosophy of mathematical meaning. Thus, in avoiding the ‘casual insights’ of earlier Euclidean geometries symbolic expressions were formulated to control possibly wayward meaning.60 In fact, as the attentive reader of Insight may well detect, these themes in the lectures of the late 1950s expand on interests already evident in the lengthy book.61 The argument of the 1957 lectures is that the symbolic techniques offer a genuine advance in meaning explication and control,62 but at the same time the results are ambiguous. First, there is often an underlying positivism or empiricism operative in the philosophical analyses that run alongside the technical formulations.63 Second, the philosophies of logic arising from the work on the symbolic systems may be in conflict and even tend towards a false philosophy of technical reductionism.64 Third, as the Gödelian achievement famously highlights, the hopes of this technical control of meaning have been disappointed precisely thanks to the technical developments themselves. This disappointment had not only led to what Lonergan calls the ‘English experiment’, a turn away from formalism to ordinary language analysis,65 but also it had meant that the deductive ideal in mathematics had been undermined, a hypothetical-­deductive model of mathematical foundations taking its place.66 In an illuminating observation in the 1963 ‘The Analogy of Meaning’ paper, Lonergan insists that, given the Thomist view of knowing as discursive, as opposed to the Scotist naïve realist option, knowing is a matter of meaning throughout.67 This accords with Lonergan’s analysis of judgment as a ‘full term’ of meaning in Insight and his later identification of the cognitive as one, clearly central, function of meaning. This discursive, as opposed to intuitive notion of knowing, sets Lonergan apart from the influence of Frege’s philosophy, one dominant current running through the analytical tradition. If this cognitive

Understanding and Being, 31. This is evident in analyses referencing Gödel’s proof of deductive limitations, of ‘mathesis’, and footnotes – not a conspicuous feature of the great book – directing the reader to works by A. Pap and A. Fraenkel; Insight, 18, 19, 596, 339, 334 n. 3, 46 n. 4. 62 Phenomenology and Logic, 89. 63 Phenomenology and Logic, 116–17. 64 Phenomenology and Logic, 96–97. 65 Phenomenology and Logic, 94, 158. 66 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 2, CWL, Vol. 23, M. G. Shields, translator, R. M. Doran and H. D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 241. 67 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, CWL, Vol. 6, R. C. Croken, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 199. 60 61

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meaning unfolds on the three levels of cognitional structure, then the differences between Lonergan’s cognitive meaning and the cognitional accounts of Frege and Scotus are two-­fold. The emphasis on meaning as the meaning of concepts in the latter two philosophies implies a denial of preconceptual conscious insight; it is a denial, then, of the whole realm Lonergan speaks of as elemental meaning, to be found, he believes in Aristotelian thought. That denial leads to, among other consequences, a dead-­end for analytical philosophy when, in the writing of some otherwise very able exponents, it attempts to understand the domain of aesthetics.68 Further, the famous Fregean distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung expresses an oversight of what constitutes the full act of meaning, the reasonable judgment as an intentional reference to reality as known. I have treated at some length the problems and confusions arising in philosophy of language and metaphysics that this oversight has caused in analytical thought.69 As Lonergan emphasizes in the 1957 lectures, a false set of expectations regarding linguistic meaning have led to problems with the formalist ideal of the control of meaning. For one thing: ‘ordinary concepts are not the simple smooth regular homogeneous nuggets needed to conform to a [formal deductive system], but they are open heuristic structures subject to enormous differentiation and variation.’70 Pointing to his analysis of the term ‘person,’ in his Christology course underway at the time, Lonergan argues that, on the contrary, ordinary terms may embed meaning as articulate or less articulate insights into what a thing is, that also set up a heuristic path for future exploration and discovery of meaning; there is an analogy here with the example he often gives in the history of science regarding the ‘nature of . . .’ fire, for example.71 The example of the notion of ‘person,’ in Christology, is offered against what is perceived already as an ahistorical ideal, but Lonergan will further refine the nature of the historical development involved as he brings into the picture the delineated historical phases of meaning that are differentiations of consciousness. In the 1957 Boston College lectures, Lonergan embraces the move into ordinary language philosophy within the analytical tradition as making common cause with what he understands himself to be doing in his analysis of common

See ‘Aesthetics: Insights from Eldridge, Aquinas and Lonergan’. See Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Press, 2008). 70 Phenomenology and Logic, 158. 71 Understanding and Being, 198. 68 69

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sense in Insight.72 It is a healthy shift away from the positivist or logicist ideal of meaning as to be found only among the ‘smooth nuggets’ of concepts as specified in the formal system. He, therefore, welcomes the emphasis placed on ‘meaning as use’. However, already in the Boston College lectures, the specificities of Lonergan’s approach that distinguish it from the current analyses of ordinary linguistic meaning can be noted. First, Lonergan gives the ‘meaning as use’ an historical inflection. This places it within the context of what he had already written on hermeneutics in Insight, within his ongoing work in that area and as related to the historical dimensions of doctrinal development. Second, Lonergan’s writing on ordinary meaning as use places it within the context of intersubjectivity; the context within which, ‘incarnate intelligences’ communicate and interact.73 Third, the account of meaning as occurring in the linguistic field within the domain of intersubjectivity unfolds in terms of understanding how meaningful conscious acts of intelligence and reason occur in the communicative context embedded in interpersonal communication that is also at once emotional and involves other diverse psychological aspects.74 Fourth, this approach implies that intelligence and reason as operative in common-­sense understanding, judgment and communication, is just that: the intelligence and reason operative in our common-­ sense dealings with each other and the world have meaning that is in common with the specialized deployment of intelligence and reason in science, scholarship, art, economics and other social domains of specialization. Fifth, while ‘meaning as use’, and meaning as ordinary, characterizes common-­sense communication and thinking, this does not imply that there is no room or need for specialized, formalized or more systematic areas of meaning.75

See the remarks on J. O. Urmson’s book, Phenomenology and Logic, 94–95. Insight, 200–201. Insight, 495–96. We can contrast the analysis of the intersubjective exchange, as described in various passages in Insight, with the rather stilted image offered in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (see, for example, PI, 19–21). A student of mine once tellingly observed that these Wittgensteinian accounts of ordinary language exchange appeared more akin to the interaction of automata. Just as analysis of aesthetic experience is stymied without the notions of insight and apprehensions of value, so is that of interpersonal linguistic encounter. 75 Perhaps lying behind his healthy reservations as to the overconfidence of the analytical endeavour for the formal control of meaning are passages Lonergan had assimilated in his youth as he read Joseph’s Introduction to Logic; a book inspired by Cook Wilson’s sceptical attitude to the achievements of Boole and other formalists. For example, Joseph writes: ‘In particular cases a syllogism may not belong to the figure into which it has been verbally compelled. . . . The theory of syllogism ought not to be regarded as a lesson in the manipulation of symbols and the application of formulae. What we have to look to is the character of the thinking involved in it . . . ’. (H. W. B. Joseph, Introduction to Logic [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, 330–31]). For J. Cook Wilson’s philosophy of logic, see John Cook Wilson, Statement and Inference, A. S. C. Farquharson, editor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926). 72 73 74

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The second set of lectures given at Boston College in 1957 amount to a dialectical encounter with continental philosophy, and so continue a strand in Lonergan’s thought that we noted in the von Hildebrand book review; a trend that will continue to develop in such later writing as the article-­length review of Leslie Dewart’s book,76 the section on dialectic in Method in Theology,77 and the late remarks on Jaspers and Husserl in Caring about Meaning.78 On the topic of meaning, we can observe that Lonergan’s reading of Merleau-Ponty would seem to be the place, or one of the places, where he learned the notion of incarnate meaning. Lonergan writes: ‘What is the human body? It is the incarnation of meaning, of a principle of meaning. And of course this ties in with the old-­time axiom that a person by the age of thirty is responsible for his own face.’79 Given the interest evident in the 1957 and 1958 North American lectures in the possibilities and limits of formal deductive systems for meaning exemplification and control, it is not surprising that Lonergan also returns to the theme, evident in his earlier work, of the scope and limits of ‘systematic meaning’. Lonergan’s position entails avoiding both the Scylla, represented by Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy, which would squeeze meaning into the narrow shoe of formal propositions (of an atomist kind), and the Charybdis of the later reaction to his own work of the same philosopher, which seems to have resulted in a rejection of anything systematic or formal in the domain of meaning. As his doctoral work on grace had taught him, Lonergan does not see in St. Thomas Aquinas the attempt to set up systematic expansions of meaning, as might be desired by a Scotist deductivism. The formal systems of meaning considered in the 1957 lectures, have their ‘truth’ – full meaning – from the analytical propositions involved and from the elements of cognitional intelligence and reasonableness they capture and formalize. This brings up a further point that I think important when considering ways in which Lonergan’s thought steers us away from some of the pitfalls in analytical philosophy regarding meaning: namely, the tendency to distinguish in an inadequate fashion logic from semantics. Lonergan’s analysis reminds us that logical forms are already the result of acts of meaning; it is not a matter of us bolting on some semantics to a ‘non-­human’ system of calculation. Thus, analytical propositions, be they ever so trivial, are still the expressions of

78 79 76 77

Lonergan, ‘The Dehellenization of Dogma’, A Second Collection, 11–32. Method in Theology, 253–65. Caring about Meaning, 68, 108. Phenomenology and Logic, 272.

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meaning, the expressions of the virtually unconditioned, ‘if a then b, but a therefore b’. They may, of course, receive further meaning content as Lonergan’s metalogical reflections in the 1957 lectures allow, from, say, elements identified in our cognitional structure.80 In the 1958 Halifax lectures, however, the examples Lonergan provides of the quite rare phenomenon of systematic meaning are empirical of the restricted mathematical kind or of the scientific type. He writes: ‘There are Euclid’s geometry and subsequent developments in geometry, Newton’s mechanics and dynamics and the building upon Newton, and the Mendeleev table in Chemistry.’81 As we progress through the lectures and writings of the late 1950s and 1960s, we naturally witness the development of themes that will come to fruition in the chapter on meaning of Method in Theology. However, we can also note that there are nuances and insights in these works that will not find their way into that book on theological method. This does not appear, from the thematic perspective at least, to have resulted from a rejection of earlier ideas by the author. It may be that Lonergan’s diminished powers when writing Method in Theology, subsequent to serious surgery he underwent in the mid-1960s are a contributory reason. But the more obvious and natural explanation, I would suggest, has to do, first, with the way authors, who address various audiences in a busy and productive period, work: not slavishly keeping tally of each and every insight that occurs in their presentation of substantially similar material on different occasions. Second, the reason might well be the compositional economy that has to be exercised in writing a lengthy book, if individual chapters are not to expand beyond due limits, thereby creating an imbalance in the argument of the whole. Nevertheless, for the illumination of his readers, this means that Lonergan’s work can, from a thematic perspective, be profitably ‘expanded’ in a reverse direction, deepening our appreciation of certain analyses through a reading of earlier forays into allied areas. One example, among a number, is the phenomenon of the meaning of the smile, which is explored in Method in Theology and which also appears in earlier works such as the 1959 lectures Topics in Education. While there are clearly refinements in the version to be found in the later book, there are also nuances regarding the phenomenon itself and allied areas of human meaning that are peculiar to the

This perspective is evident in the lecture from the 1970s ‘Is it Real?’ in which Lonergan, while distinguishing between ‘formal, empirical and referential systems’ underlines that all have meaning: Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 121. 81 Understanding and Being, 52. 80

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earlier account. So in 1959, we find Lonergan contrasting the smile with linguistic meaning, ‘Words tend towards, though they never achieve, a univocity of meaning, a single meaning.’82 Words head towards this while the same type of smile may express different emotions and intentions in different circumstances; the smile is a basic expression of undifferentiated consciousness. Unlike a proposition in a smile ‘we are not talking about something’ [emphasis added].83 This would imply, I believe, that, although Lonergan makes the point neither in these lectures nor in Method the smile, when of the kind that is a spontaneous manifestation of the person, is to be included in the category of the conscious non-intentional, which Lonergan recognizes in Method, in the case of some feelings, thanks to the contributions of von Hildebrand.84 A further development in analysis that emerges in these lectures has to do with meaning in the aesthetic domain and the notion of Aristotelian ‘elemental meaning’ that Lonergan introduces to highlight further the significance of the distinction for aesthetics between conscious insight, on the one hand, and conscious elaborated, verbalized concept(s), on the other.85 This inchoate, conscious meaning is seen in appreciation of the art work. Lonergan remarks that the meaning, ‘. . . is intentional, but it has not reached the full stage of intending’.86 As we see from the discussion of Method in Theology below, Lonergan is filling in further, what I argue, is presented as a heuristic and analogically filled out notion first presented in Insight when, as mentioned above, he suggests that meaning is most fundamentally a relation: a relation between sign and signified. We can note, then, that although this is not spelled out completely by Lonergan at this point, we may distinguish between (1) the conscious but non-intentional meaning of the type of smile that is spontaneous and self-­revelatory, (2) the ‘intentional but not fully so’ meaning of the conscious act of aesthetic appreciation and (3) the ‘fully intentional’ expression of meaning in the linguistic articulated act.87

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Topics in Education, CWL, Vol. 10, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 166. 83 Topics in Education, 167. 84 Topics in Education, 167. 85 Topics in Education, 215–17. 86 Topics in Education, 217. 87 A further example of a subtle and illuminating point concerning meaning from the period we are discussing comes from Lonergan’s Gregorian University lectures on the Trinity. There, he distinguishes between the ratio of the potential act of meaning, which is the direct or reflexive insight, the grasp of formal or full meaning, on the one hand, and on the other, communicative meaning in which intellect is not brought into act by species. The Trinitarian dimension will be highlighted in the important lecture of the early 1960s, Time and Meaning. 82

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The 1959 Education lectures also manifest a concern for the existential question of meaning in its personal and cultural dimensions. It is fascinating to observe Lonergan’s awareness in this period that a new approach to faith formation and apologetics is called for in terms of ‘what the Catholic faith means to me’.88 Such an approach meshes well with Lonergan’s own reading of Aquinas’s view on systematic theology, as that which may serve to offer a dim, distant, yet fruitful insight into the meanings of the saving truths of faith. To feed faith and prayer with such meaning, such intelligibility, such beauty is already to meet something of that contemporary need; the more a life is filled with intelligibility, truth and beauty the more meaningful that life becomes. Lonergan rightly recognizes the need for a current modality, a current way of evangelizing, as we would call it over half a century later. Lonergan’s writings from the 1940s and 1950s demonstrate how a failure in meaning may result from an oversight of insight, direct or reflective, from a failure to recognize casual insights or from a mistake that does not identify a context in which an inverse insight is appropriate. The foundational writings of this period have as a central concern, the control of meaning that is arrived at through intellectual conversion. According to Lonergan, the development of mathematics and science, if rightly understood, and that, of course, is no easy matter, have promoted, acted as a quasi-­operator to shift us out of the horizon in which we attempt to assimilate the results of human cognitive endeavours into perspectives formed from our kinaesthetic-­tactile orientation to reality.89 Special and general relativity have served this function as has the rise of non-Euclidean geometries. While Lonergan is critical, on philosophical and theological grounds, of Bultmann’s programme of demythologization,90 his own dialectical method for demythologization entails that the meaning of Freud’s account of ‘libido’ or the sponge-­vortex pictures conjured up by nineteenth-­century physicists, beyond the warrant of the verified mathematical constructs, are shown to be chimerical.91

The decade of Aggiornamento Meaning becomes a prominent area for further investigation in the early 1960s and in the work that leads up to and is integral to the writing of Method in 90 91 88 89

Topics in Education, 21. Topics in Education, 161–86. Insight, 607; Phenomenology and Logic, 274. Insight, 229.

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Theology. This is evident from the three important short pieces dedicated to meaning: ‘Time and Meaning’,92 ‘Dimensions of Meaning’93 and ‘The Analogy of Meaning’.94 In the latter piece, Lonergan, ever with one eye on issues of method, is evidently labouring towards an understanding of the way to integrate the treatment of the core of meaning, as the intention of being in our questioning and knowing, with other areas of human meaning; a number of those areas already having been recognized in some fashion in Insight, particularly in the sections on hermeneutics. Thus, he identifies an analytic way, focusing on meaning as cognitional, and a descriptive way, which embraces the investigations into the other areas of meaning.95 He had certainly learned much from his ongoing dialogue with phenomenology as regards various dimensions of meaning, and perhaps, behind these opening reflections lie questions having to do with how we are to bring together the descriptive and the explanatory; questions made all the more acute given his characterization of phenomenology as a method focused in some fashion on certain ‘parts of the form’ of a subject.96 The issue also arises in a tantalizing manner in his brief references to the contributions of ‘existentialism’ and their integration into a genetic, developmental account of metaphysical import, in Insight.97 The essay then proceeds to offer us some further insights into linguistic meaning. Lonergan notes that everyday language involves different moods: the imperative, the optative and so on. It speaks in the first person. This one may contrast with technical language, which speaks in the third person. Abstracting from a given intersubjective context, literary language, poesies, is addressed to an absent audience; it is written for someone who is not there but intended. Everyday language is immediate and not mediated in this way. It can involve context relative ‘avowals’ – as Wittgenstein scholars call them. Lonergan then introduces the topics that preoccupied C. S. Lewis in his little book An Essay in Criticism, and Lewis’s idea that a good book is one written for a good reader. Besides Lewis, Cassirer is also invoked, as is his work on the concreteness of a primitive language: such a language, Cassirer avers, does not have an abstract term for two, but speaks rather of a ‘pair of these’

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, CWL, Vol. 6, R. C. Croken, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 94–121. 93 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Collection, CWL, Vol.  4, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 232–45. 94 Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 183–213. 95 Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 184. 96 Understanding and Being, 43–45. 97 Insight, 494–95. 92

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and ‘those’. Finally, the evocative account of Helen Keller’s discovery of the power of the word makes its appearance in the essay; it is a story that will have a prominent place in the account of linguistic meaning in Method in Theology.98 In the ‘Time and Meaning’ lecture, Lonergan makes the ontological distinction – which will feature in Method in Theology – between two types of reality: the natural and the intentional. Meaning, he claims, pertains to the intentional.99 The implication of this is that intelligibility, as intrinsic to being, is not coextensive with meaning. Rather, meaning is of the intelligible that is also intelligent – to express the matter in the language of Insight. Another pithy definition from the early 1960s is found in seminar presentations in which Lonergan is preoccupied with theological method. He remarks that meaning includes those who intend, the intending and what is intended.100 In this compact definition, we can perhaps discern more or less overt references to what he will clearly delineate in Method in Theology, as incarnate meaning, ‘those who intend’, the cluster of types of intentional meaning, including cognitive and effective meaning, and, third, the meant referred to as the intelligible as known. To be consistent with what we have said so far, we would have to understand the third category in this way. The meant intended in a full act of meaning, a judgment of fact, can be any aspect of intelligible reality. Given the restriction of meaning to the intentional, it would need to be stipulated that the meant here is intelligible reality insofar as it becomes content of acts of human knowing. A further question of precision regards the characterization of the domain of meaning as that of the intentional. If it can be argued, as suggested above, that certain types of self-­revelatory smile are to be placed in the same category as our conscious but non-intentional feeling states, then some refinement is called for regarding the claim that meaning is co-extensive with the intentional. Indeed, Lonergan himself hints at something akin to this when he remarks, in his 1962 Regis College lecture, that body language ‘betrays’ the human subject rather than describes the human subject;101 although we should add that such ‘showing’

In his notes for the Phenomenology and Logic lectures, Lonergan points out that in the development of mathematics, the mathematician may develop symbolism that is at once symbol and technique. In doing so, he is both ‘writer and reader’, ‘hearer and speaker’ (Phenomenology and Logic, 146). This point is relevant perhaps to Lonergan’s critique of a Wittgensteinian view that is an oversight of original meaning (see Method in Theology, 10.7). 99 Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 105. 100 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 3, 13. 101 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Early Works on Theological Method 1, 201. 98

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rather than ‘saying’ may still be intentional in nature, while sometimes it is not. In light of this, perhaps we should say that meaning pertains to self-­conscious reality, understanding that the designation has an analogous openness to it. This would be in line, I would suggest, with Lonergan’s own desire to distinguish between inchoate while intentional meaning (elemental meaning), on the one hand, and more explicit formal and full acts of meaning, on the other – properly articulate meaning, as in the linguistic domain. The notion of meaning as extended to cover self-­consciousness in this manner could also embrace the embryonic intentionality that Lonergan draws attention to when writing in 1964 of human sensitivity, and how already in the psyche there is the anticipation of properly human meaning – that which is also expressed in body language, for example. It is perhaps significant that in this passage, in which Jung is referred to, Lonergan is also discussing the meaning of the smile.102 We could then, perhaps, include the self-­conscious expressions, sounds, body language, of higher animals in this analogous category of meaning. I think we do, reasonably, in ordinary discourse sometimes ask questions regarding a dog’s behaviour, ‘what does that mean’? Whereas it would seem a little strange, an exercise in anthropomorphism motivated by poesia or by a new-­age philosophy, to ask for the meaning of a plant’s behaviour or that of the weather. The restriction of meaning to the intentional, or at least to the self-­conscious, might also occasion the objection that surely we can and do ask questions about the meaning of reality, of the universe. Indeed, in Method in Theology, Lonergan highlights the importance of such questions.103 In that case, cannot we say that intelligibility and meaning are synonymous? That the meant, reality is also meaning? The answer to this question is ‘yes and no’. Lonergan’s restriction of meaning to the intentional, or self-­conscious – as I have suggested – is still an important and illuminating philosophical demarcation. However, the objection or question itself does point towards the truth that reality, being is only intelligible if the intentional is at its root. In other words, it is intelligible only if God exists, of whom we can predicate analogously but truly an intentional existence. Lectures and writing that Lonergan produced in the years leading up to the composition of Method in Theology, now thankfully published in the Collected Works series, provide fascinating clues to the path or paths along which his

Early Works on Theological Method 3, 210–11. Method in Theology, 102.

102 103

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thought was developing, and at the same time, offers fertile and stimulating indications for further research into such areas as human meaning. As indicators of the unfolding of Lonergan’s thinking, some of these works bring to our attention the thematic links between Insight and Method. For instance, the 1962 piece ‘The Human Good, Meaning, Differentiations of Consciousness’ helps to alert us to the way the category of ‘constitutive meaning’, elaborated in Method, is present albeit not highlighted explicitly throughout Insight as any instance of ‘formal cause’ resulting from intentional activity. In 1962, Lonergan writes: . . . meaning in its full extent is what is understood in the concrete situation and actions of the person, from frowns to long speeches, and as such is the formal element in this process of the human good. All the institutions involve meaning.104

Meaning as constitutive, then, we might say is, from a metaphysical perspective, formal causality in the intentional order. The example, given in Insight, of a bridge illustrating causality as formal is therefore also at once an example of a human artifact the blueprint for which, the formal cause, results from intentionality.105 The chapter on ethics in Insight, which appropriates Aquinas’s notion of the good of order, also refers to this order as the formal constitutive element in human situations.106 In the same 1962 work, Lonergan extends his reflections on meaning into the theological sphere and again draws attention to the concept of meaning as ‘formally constitutive’. He writes: What is revelation? It is a new meaning added into human life. By bringing a new meaning into this process of the human good, you transform something that is formally constitutive of that human good. What is the Body of Christ? It is an order. Just as the family, the state, the economy and the law express an order, so too is the body of Christ an order, and it is a redemptive order that counteracts the evil of sin in that mediation of the social order.107

In 1964, Lonergan observes that there is a ‘creative, effective order of meaning’; such intentional ordering of reality is an expression of ‘Human meaning’ as a

Early Works on Theological Method 1, 41. Insight, 674–75. 106 Insight, 628–29. We can also point in this regard to the discussion in Insight, in chapter 20, of cultural ‘ways’, or orders as emergent from human thought and choice, and to the analysis of the way the forms of faith, hope and charity constitute a renewed humanity. 107 Early Works on Theological Method 1, 41. 104 105

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‘determination of transcendental determination towards being’.108 Thus there is a created analogy for divine creativity. Lonergan’s writing between 1957 and the emergence of Method in Theology also manifests the continuity and development that occurs in his thought on symbolic meaning. In the existential anthropology of Insight, the symbolic is seen as an integral constituent of human being. ‘Symbol’ can be understood to refer both to the configured data (phantasm) expressive of insight and/or the quasi-­operator eliciting insights that we find in mathematics pure and applied, and to the affect-­laden image of religion or secular cultural life. As in the case of metaphor and myth, the symbol as affect-­laden image is all-­pervasive in human expression and culture. Insight emphasizes the dialectical challenge that this poses for an authentic control of meaning and value as regards the symbolic dimension of human life. This basic perspective does not change as Lonergan’s thought develops. However, various other aspects of symbolic meaning are identified and highlighted. In the 1958 Halifax lectures, we find this basic position on symbolic meaning summarized, including the idea of the symbol as mediating between the conscious and unconscious aspects of our lives. At the same time, some of the themes to be found in Method appear, such as the manner in which the symbol can bring together the logical coincidentia oppositorum.109 Mention is made of the way the symbolic – in the general sense of the image – is not transcended save in mystical experience.110 The 1962 Regis College lecture draws attention to the way symbolic meaning is found universally in literary linguistic expressions of meaning: ‘. . .one has the

Lonergan’s notes for ‘The Contemporary Problem’, in Early Works on Theological Method 1, 387. Again, in Insight, our attention is drawn to the analogy human creativity supplies for God’s creative act, Insight, 680. 109 Understanding and Being, 218–19. 110 Understanding and Being, 219. The issues raised by this statement are worthy of further investigation. As mentioned above, the ‘mystical pattern of experience’ appears in Insight, and it would be valuable to research ways in which Lonergan’s thought on that idea develops and connects with later writing on religious experience and the phenomenology of ‘consolation without a cause’. Already in Grace and Freedom there is mention of mystical union described in a context in which, clearly, the intention is to identify it as an experiential phenomenon (Grace and Freedom, 432). For our topic of meaning, we can raise the intriguing question, is there also, therefore (if we will pardon the overtones of crystal ball gazing), ‘mystical meaning’? It would seem that the answer is affirmative. In exploring this theme, we should take into consideration what Lonergan says on the shift a writer such as St. John of the Cross makes between mystical experience, on the one hand, and the struggle to formulate the ‘meanings’ of this experience in words, on the other (see Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 194). Lonergan’s work on Christ’s knowledge would also be relevant to this topic. In light of the analysis of Method in Theology, the shift involved would be from a form of ‘potential meaning’ to ‘formal’ and ‘full’ expressed meanings. Such ‘mystical meaning’ would be a subset of the wider realm of transcendent meaning outlined in Method in Theology. 108

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influence of the laws of affectivity and imagination in linguistic discourse’.111 Lonergan observes that in (literary) linguistic meaning symbols appear in a way that replaces class names or universals: a Dickens character – Scrooge or Mr Pickwick – represents a set of universally recognized human traits (at least in a given culture). It is worth noting at this juncture that Lonergan’s writing shows an awareness of the interpenetration and interweaving of various types and domains of meaning. So in this instance, the discussion touches on what in Method in Theology will be identified as a type of linguistic meaning, the literary, in which symbolic meaning is pervasive. Furthermore, since the brief section on incarnate meaning in Method refers to both fictional and real characters as instances,112 the 1962 lecture can be taken as perhaps making an implicit reference to incarnate meaning as seen in characters in literary works such as the novel. Method in Theology indeed highlights ways in which diverse types and areas of meaning interpenetrate;113 however, this area of meaning overlap is certainly worth further investigation beyond what is said in that work, given the overall resources for an account of meaning to be found across the whole that is Lonergan’s literary output. Writing from 1963 to 1964 shows Lonergan edging further towards the historical understanding of differentiations of consciousness and stages of meaning to be found fully expounded in Method in Theology.114 He distinguishes between a global, over-­determined meaning, on the one hand, and culturally differentiated strands or domains of meaning, on the other; such as we witness in the fields of politics, art, literature, philosophy and so on.115 In this period, the dialectic engagement with the philosophical traditions, a theme which I am highlighting here, continues as Lonergan examines from various angles the methodological issues at stake. The human sciences approach in a descriptive fashion data that is constituted by meaning, by intentionality. If, on the other hand, we are to approach the same data in an explanatory way, in light of the universal viewpoint of Insight, then the aim is to discover genetic, developmental stages in a comparative manner.116 The editors of Early Works on Theological

Early Works on Theological Method I,105. Method in Theology, 73. Method in Theology, 73. In the late 1950s, Lonergan was clearly toying with ideas from Sorokin that might prove fruitful for a genetic account of stages of cultural historical development in consciousness and meaning. See Understanding and Being, 221. 115 Early Works on Theological Method 3, 12. 116 Early Works on Theological Method 3, CWL, Vol.  24, M. G. Shields, translator, R. M. Doran and H. D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 23–24. 114 111 112 113

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Method 3, remark on a discernible fluidity in the way Lonergan deploys the analytic or explanatory vis-à-­vis the descriptive approach in these reflections. However, what is of significance for my investigation, an investigation that stresses the way that over a forty-­year span we see Lonergan engage with other philosophical perspectives on meaning, is the record of one of the students at these sessions in the early 1960s; that participant’s notes record Lonergan’s explicit concern with the question of how the undoubtedly invaluable contributions of phenomenology on meaning, may be transposed into an analytic or explanatory context.117 Lonergan’s teaching and writing in this period also attests to the wealth of insight he was offering his students regarding not only distinct modes of human meaning, but also their interrelation and interpenetration. Of meaning as constitutive, Lonergan observes that it constitutes (a) communication; (b) the individual, that is, human potentiality, human life, and human knowledge; and (c) human community.118 He then proceeds to differentiate the constitutive meaning of communication; in terms of the analysis of Method in Theology, this is therefore the identification of the constitutive meaning of diverse types of communicative meaning.119 Accordingly, communicative meaning is constituted as: (i) ordinary language meaning, (ii) intersubjective meaning, (iii) affective meaning, (iv) artistic meaning, (v) literary meaning and (vi) technical meaning. Affective meaning evokes and is evoked by symbols that play a role in both waking and sleeping consciousness.120 The notion of incarnate meaning also becomes a focus for reflection. It was noted above that there are indications of Lonergan’s developing appreciation of this domain of meaning in his references to Merleau-Ponty in 1957, and that there are indeed phrases in Insight, such as ‘incarnate intelligences’, which seem

Editor’s note 62, Early Works on Theological Method 3, 13–15; see the reference to the notes taken by Daley, p. 149, n. 65. In January 1964, we see Lonergan making a further methodological suggestion in this vein when he writes of a ‘synthetic way’ of approaching meaning from its elements in cognitional structure, to be contrasted with an ‘analytic way’ that he is following in gathering and examining various features and factors in the diverse modes of human meaning: Early Works on Theological Method 3, 147–48. There is indeed a fluidity in the terminology Lonergan employs in this period, indicative of repeated forays into possible ways of understanding in greater depth meaning in an explanatory fashion – as Lonergan himself would understand the explanatory. 118 Early Works on Theological Method 3, 148. 119 In a footnote in Method in Theology (75 n. 19), Lonergan, acknowledging the contribution of certain contemporary linguistic analysts draws attention to the manner in which their work highlights performative linguistic meaning as a form of constitutive or effective meaning. 120 Early Works on Theological Method 3, 149–50. 117

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to point in the direction of such an analysis. It is in his work from the early 1960s that Lonergan reveals that a significant influence on his developing thought is the Heidegger-­inspired work of George Morel on the person of St. John of the Cross.121 In the piece ‘Analogy of Meaning’, Lonergan informs us that incarnate meaning is intersubjective meaning raised to a pitch of intensity, as may be witnessed in social response to the hero, to the crucified one. Other theological examples are invoked, such as the image of Our Lady at the foot of the cross and the crucifix itself.122 Insofar as the interrelation of the diverse aspects of types of human meaning offers further insight into each of the individual types or modes, we can observe that in an earlier text, mentioned above, Lonergan avers that an instance of constitutive meaning is seen in the case of the individual, of the potentiality of a given person. While he does not make the point explicitly this would seem to be yet a further case of interpenetration: incarnate meaning is a type of meaning as constitutive.

Meaning and theological method Finally, our tale of thematic development arrives at Method in Theology. I have referred to the book throughout the short historical sketch of Lonergan’s thinking on meaning. My intention here, then, is not to enter on a detailed exploration of its rich and fertile analyses, but rather to focus on several points I wish to highlight that connect with the themes of my discussion so far. First, notwithstanding the wealth of material to be found in the chapter dedicated to meaning, we should be alert to other instances outside the chapter in which Method in Theology makes a contribution to our understanding of meaning. An obvious instance is the section on ontology of meaning, which takes and develops Lonergan’s earlier insight, discussed above, on meaning as pertaining to the intentional order of reality.123 Other parts of the book in which the topic of meaning is treated may be more or less easy to identify. In these sections, Lonergan often enough draws on what he has said in chapter 3, but the context also adds further insights and perspectives on the nature of meaning to

The work Lonergan refers to is, George Morel, Le Sens De L’Existence Selon S. Jean De La Croix (Paris: Aubier, 1960). 122 Early Works on Theological Method 3, 188. 123 Method in Theology, 356–58. 121

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which we should attend. Thus, the book gathers together and builds on Lonergan’s long years of concern with the notion of meaning in interpretation and hermeneutics as relevant to a proper appreciation of Catholic teaching on the development of dogma.124 Lonergan distinguishes among four realms of meaning: common sense, theory, interiority and transcendence, and we find further reflections on the latter in the note at the end of the dialectic section.125 Illustrating the fashion in which these realms may interrelate historically and intelligibly, Lonergan, in the chapter on religion, takes us back to his work on operative grace. The metaphysical contributions of medieval theory, moving beyond a common-­sense appreciation of grace, can be distinguished from but at once ‘grounded in the world of interiority’.126 It is important to recall again here that we see Lonergan’s approach or method in his later thought as involving a movement between the phenomenologically descriptive and the metaphysically explanatory in contexts in which he may claim that distinctions are notional. A sensitivity to Lonergan’s awareness of the interrelation of diverse types of meaning in a given context is also worth cultivating. This may assist us to draw out some of the riches of quite compact passages. For example, in the chapter on history we read: Now meaning may regard the general or universal, but most human thought and speech and action are concerned with the particular and the concrete. Again, there are structural and material invariants to meaning, but there are also changes that affect the manner in which the carriers of meaning are employed, the elements of meaning are combined, the functions of meaning are distinguished and developed, the realms of meaning are extended, the stages of meaning blossom forth, meet resistance, compromise, collapse. Finally, there are the further vicissitudes of meaning as common meaning . . . people can get out of touch, misunderstand one another, hold radically opposed views. . . . Then common meaning contracts, becomes confined to banalities, moves towards ideological warfare.127

Such a passage calls to mind one of my principal themes: Lonergan’s awareness of the twentieth-­century concern for meaning and the avenues of investigation explored by the two dominant traditions of analytical and continental philosophy.

126 127 124 125

Method in Theology, 167–74; 320–26. Method in Theology, 265–66. Method in Theology, 107. Method in Theology, 178.

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The passage begins with allusions to Lonergan’s fine-­grained analytical analyses of meaning, which in his view are to be grounded in the intentionality analysis of interiority, but which are of direct relevance to the concerns and debates of analytical philosophy in its various phases of research into meaning. The passage ends signalling the wider, existential and social dimensions of the crisis in meaning recalling the anxieties of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Husserl. The chapter on Scott Soames and meaning engaged with current analytical debates on meaning, and while these are deeply rooted in the tradition about which Lonergan knew a great deal, trends were gathering momentum in analytical philosophy during Lonergan’s last period of writing with which he was unfamiliar. Timothy Williamson, another luminary of current analytical thought, has recently provided a helpful, if not wholly neutral, account of the ‘third phase’ of analytical philosophy, underway even as Lonergan saw the publication of Method in Theology.128 This third phase, beginning in the 1970s, following on the logicist and positivist and then ordinary language phases, is characterized, according to Williamson by the influence of Donald Davidson and David Lewis. In Davidson’s work, we see launched the research programme into recursive semantic structures, while in Lewis’s work, we witness the beginnings of the major renaissance of metaphysics in analytical philosophy, as analysts probe into this basic form of semantics. In light of this, we should also be alert, in the context of meaning, to the treatment of metaphysics in Method in Theology.129 That the discussion is brief in no way indicates a slighting of the topic; some of Lonergan’s most thought-­provoking post-Method writings clearly indicate otherwise. Present in the book, but also beyond the confines of chapter 3, are references to developmental categories of an explanatory nature regarding meaning. In the section ‘Dialectic of Method Part 2’, Lonergan writes of ‘genetically distinct horizons’ of meaning.130 These may be complementary or genetically or dialectically related. These are seen in the realms and stages of meaning already delineated in chapter 3. The introduction of these terms surely ties the discussion at this point into Lonergan’s earlier explanatory and metaphysical analysis of development in Insight. The matter is identified, then, in Method, but it is not Lonergan’s concern to follow it up there. It is a significant and intriguing Timothy Williamson, ‘How Did We Get Here from There? The Transformation of Analytical Philosophy’, available at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/35835/How_ did_we_get_here_from_there.pdf. 129 Method in Theology, 343. 130 Method in Theology, 236, 257. 128

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connection, however, in light of the thematic issues that have preoccupied us in this essay. As we have observed, for many years, Lonergan shows an interest in how the descriptive and the explanatory are to be related; the interest is manifest in the 1942 von Hildebrand review, the leitmotiv of our investigation. Here, we have an intimation of one way to proceed in understanding how descriptive accounts of meaning, so richly enhanced by the contributions of the phenomenological tradition, may be taken up into an area of explanatory and metaphysical analysis. A metaphysical and explanatory background is further brought into focus in Method in Theology in the section on elements of meaning in chapter 3.131 This has been touched on briefly above. However, since a further important strand of my investigation concerns to what extent the heuristic for the investigation of meaning Lonergan offers in the preface to Insight is utilized or superseded as his thought matures, a further examination of passages in this section in the light of these questions is required. To begin with, the intimations of metaphysical background are striking in the section since a change from the similar discussion in Insight occurs with the introduction of the category of ‘potential meaning’: now we have the delineated triad of potential, formal and full acts of meaning in consciousness. How, then, does this leave the notion expressed at the beginning of Insight that meaning is a type of intelligible relation, to wit, the relation between sign and signified? In one way, it definitely modifies or goes beyond this, while at the same time, the approach of Method, I believe, surprisingly underlines and emphasizes aspects of the position taken in the earlier work. It is as well to remind ourselves at this point that, first, Lonergan’s avowed intention in Insight is not to have said the last word on all manner of philosophical and theological issues. Second, as I pointed out above, the insertion of the word seems in the passage under discussion from the preface to Insight, indicates that what we have in this case is what might be termed a ‘tentative heuristic’ as regards the nature of meaning. Given Lonergan’s developing thought on human meaning and its various manifestations and expressions, we might have anticipated that he would simply drop the insistence on the primacy of meaning as a relation between sign and signified; as a relation between conscious intention and its expression or representation in some material element of word, sign or symbol. However,

Method in Theology, 236, 257.

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while the introduction of the category of ‘acts of potential meaning’ does expand the meaning of meaning beyond the specification of this idea it also stresses a certain primacy of meaning as formal or full acts of meaning; the meaning in which there is a relation between intention and material expression. In fact, the use of the term ‘potential’ in this context is, when we consider it, potentially misleading; it is a risky word hermeneutically speaking. We might think of a piece of wood as potentially a wooden spoon, if someone skilled in woodcraft should turn his hand to fashion such a utensil from this material. But to apply the word potential to a musical composition in the sense that it embodies potential acts of meaning might, without further insight and explanation, lead to confusion on the part of the reader. What those familiar with Lonergan’s oeuvre will identify in this instance is a use of the term ‘potential’, which has a context in his years of exploring Aquinas’s thought. In short, to illuminate these passages in Method in Theology, we can recall the analysis of subtle Thomist distinctions among types of potentiality, between active and passive potency, as found in, for instance, the Verbum studies.132 The emerging importance in writing prior to Method and in the book itself, of the Aristotelian notion of ‘elemental meaning’ reinforces this sense of what is meant by the use of ‘potential’ in this context. It also reinforces the continuity between Lonergan’s many years of investigation into the conscious realities of apprehensive as distinct from formative abstraction, the pivotal distinction between conscious insight and its expression in word, and what is being presented to us in these passages on meaning in Method. Thinking of a possible reader from one of the contemporary philosophical traditions, we might imagine that an analytical philosopher would find common ground with Lonergan in his apparent stress on the primacy of meaning as formal and full; meaning, that is as articulated in expressions and language. But such a reader might be baffled by the suggestion of this other domain of potential meaning; of course, such bewilderment would manifest precisely what is lacking in so much analytical work on meaning, an absence that is at the root of so many confusions and self-­ created conundrums in that world of philosophy. In his 1963 lecture ‘The Analogy of Meaning’, Lonergan drew attention to the Trinitarian dimensions of meaning theory.133 It is clear from what Lonergan says

Verbum, 110–19, 121–22. Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 206.

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there that Christ is the princeps analogatum for both incarnate meaning, and for meaning understood as the emanation of sign from signifier. The active potency of our meaningful, non-objectified intentional acts and states approximates a little more closely than other created realities to the intelligible procession that is the divine word. For in our case, at least, it can be said that, in insights in the domain of elemental meaning there is instanced active potency and not the passive potency that underlies form and the intelligibility of act. In the case of the Trinity, of course, there is no potency at all – which is the deepest mystery. In Verbum, Lonergan examines how differentiations in the notions of potency constitute a complex issue in Aquinas’s use and development of Aristotelian thought.134 Lonergan succinctly expresses a determinate characteristic of active potency when he writes: . . . such operation or action may involve an ulterior effect, as in the case when action goes forth into external matter; on the other hand, it may not involve anything over and above itself, as is the case when actions remain in the agent.135

Introducing this analysis into the context of page 74 of Method in Theology, we can say that the active potency of the intentional, constitutive formal cause of a cadenza in a Rachmaninov piano concerto is always a conscious embodiment of meaning, meaning evoking feeling. But we may not be able to pivot on that conscious act of insight in the music to bring about the conscious activities of successfully expressing in words just what the composer, and in the performance, pianist and conductor, wanted to express at a given moment. This is quite different from the type of potency of wood for the production of spoons.136 The introduction of the notion of potential acts of meaning in Method, then, reinforces the Lonerganian theme of cognitional process from conscious insight

Verbum, 125–29. Verbum, 117. 136 In fact, in the passage in Method under discussion, Lonergan mentions both types of potency in quick succession, illustrating what I think we may fruitfully distinguish in terms of his analyses of active and passive potency, respectively. He writes of the potential meaning of the art work and then goes on to mention the potential meaning of the acts of sensation. When considering acts of potential meaning in the work of art, we may also notice that in some situations there is shift, not so much from conscious potential meaning in insight into phantasm to conscious verbalized, formal or full acts of meaning, as from potential meaning to further potential meaning. Thus, often musical compositions are inspired by poems that they may also set to music. While the creative process may involve aspects of articulation and verbalization of hitherto experienced potential meaning embedded in the work that inspires the new creation, it may often be the case that the insights and apprehensions of value experienced in the one work will be re-­expressed in the subsequent aesthetic meaning, the music of the song-­cycle inspired by poetry, in a way that avoids verbalized articulation. 134 135

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into phantasm that may or may not result in further conscious articulation in word. At the same time, it does go beyond what is, strictly speaking, entailed in thinking of meaning solely in terms of the relation of sign to signified. There are intentional acts of meaning, which differ from the acts that create a material sign, a word or symbol, the formal meaning of which is had from intentional, conscious (or even subconscious) human agency. Nevertheless, the other element in the ‘tentative heuristic’ found in the preface to Insight remains true as a generality: meaning involves types of intelligible relation. This aspect of the heuristic notion of meaning will play out analogically in different cases. So while there is a relation that can be understood as such between the meaning act, which is an insight that, say, ‘gets’ the humour in a cartoon and the datum, the drawing, into which the insight is had, this is not, however, the same as a relation between sign and signified, as is witnessed in the case of conceptual or symbolic images that are material elements endowed with the human meaning they manifest; such as those employed in my subsequent, perhaps lame, attempt to explain the joke to a third party. If we examine the intriguing phenomena on the smile, the cases will vary again. Smiles that welcome or deceive or that are expressive of some more determinate intention, however fleeting, can be understood in terms of a relation that is nearer to that of sign to signified. When we approach further in the direction of incarnate or constitutive meaning, then we may consider smiles that reveal the whole person perhaps in intersubjective situations in which that self-­revelation is virtually malgré lui. Then the relation approximates more to that of the relation of form to the matter it informs. Analogous to this would be the relation of the insight into phantasm, data of the potential act of meaning, the insight, grasping some intelligible form. Akin to the relation between the self-­revealing smile informing the presence of the incarnate subject to another, and that subject who smiles, is the potential act of meaning of insight into data. However, the difference is between an intentional informing in the latter case as opposed to an ontological informing in the former one. In the examination of elements of meaning in Method in Theology, therefore, there is continuity and change vis-à-­vis the position of meaning in Insight. I have suggested that the aspects of continuity are preponderant. A central theme of Insight, Lonergan’s retrieval and application of Aquinas’s overlooked distinction between conscious insight into data, on the one hand, and the verbal, conceptual expression of it, on the other, finds full recognition in the account of meaning with the introduction of the idea of acts of potential meaning. While the intentionality of human meaning cannot be strictly confined within the

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boundaries of the signified/signifier schema that in Insight Lonergan states ‘seems’ to characterize meaning, a certain primacy, we might say, is still accorded that schema. Intentional acts of meaning that do not fit within that original schema are now distinguished as ‘potential’. Not wishing to extend an already lengthy survey too far, I end this developmental overview with examples from Lonergan’s last published works that touch on the theme of meaning. At the end of the forty-­year period we have been considering, Lonergan offered the paper ‘Unity and Plurality’ as his contribution to the 1982 Boston College Lonergan Workshop.137 In this post Method in Theology paper, we see Lonergan, in an analysis of doctrinal meaning, moving effortlessly between the differentiations of conscious­ ness involved in the history of the Church’s affirmation of one divine person and two natures in Christ: it is a confident assembling of perspectives on the meaning of the doctrine found throughout Lonergan’s work, now integrated into a paper that clearly formulates categories of thought adumbrated during Lonergan’s long quest for cohesion in discourse on human meaning. Thus, we see how, according to Lonergan, the inevitable further questions that arise concerning the meaning of the Christological doctrines, as history moves forward, effect a shift from a logical interpretation of the doctrine to a medieval metaphysical analysis of person and nature, to a modern reflection on the doctrine’s coherence in terms of a distinction between subject and subjectivity grounded in interiority.138 The implication, spelled out further in the remainder of the article, is that Lonergan’s generalized empirical method will be the way of integrating these semantic perspectives harmoniously. Unstated, but implicit, is, then, Lonergan’s method in meaning that will involve a critical hermeneutic of the metaphysical analyses to be validated, at least in part, through the phenomenology of interiority. We also see in these passages what is also evident on page 107 of Method in Theology: an illuminating shift between the classical language of grace, on the one hand, and the domain of interiority as that in which the meaning of the former may be fruitfully unfolded and validated. So after a recapitulation of themes familiar from Method regarding the differentiation of consciousness that is transcendence, the experience of conscious love orientated to the unrestrictedly lovable,139 in the next breath, Lonergan refers to this as grace: ‘The

Lonergan, ‘Unity and Plurality: The Coherence of Christian Truth’, A Third Collection (London: Chapman, 1985), 239–50. 138 A Third Collection, 244. 139 A Third Collection, 244. 137

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Christian however knows God not only through the grace of God in his heart but also through the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus and the witness to that revelation down the ages through the church.’140 In his final period, Lonergan shows himself to be as adept as ever at crafting passages that encapsulate and draw together themes elaborated across his prior academic corpus, giving them at the same time a final nuance and adding intimations of further depth. And so in the lecture ‘Religious Knowledge’ from 1976, he is able to harness previous analyses of the various levels of cognition and evaluation, placing them in the whole of the existential orientation of the human person, as he states that the fundamental meaning of each level is that of self-­transcendence: self-­transcendence to the truly good, truly moral and truly lovable. The fundamental meaning of the whole of the human person is, accordingly, in the concrete, love; love as the orientation to the other of the human beloved and above all to God.141 To render this existential perspective the more concrete, in the light of Lonergan’s theology as a whole, we should complement these remarks on the meaning of individual life with those found in the lectures of 1958: the meaning of concrete human life is found most fully in relationship to Christ, the redeemer who makes all our loves effectively possible and authentic.142 Finally, in the 1982 interviews, Lonergan rounds out this concrete perspective on meaning by commenting, ‘Meaning is on several levels but value is the top level in meaning, the existential level.’143 A Third Collection, 245. This late piece also returns to a familiar theme regarding the shift Socrates effected from common-­sense terms in his quest for moral definition; a shift continued as Aristotle constructed a set of meanings, developed from common-­sense terms, moving into the world of theory (40–41). 141 A Third Collection, 133. See also 217. In these passages, Lonergan is clearly referring to the fundamental meaning of human nature, to what we might call ‘transcultural nature’ apart from historically nurtured-­nature. As such, reference is made to the intelligibility of human being, and the question is then, does this not indicate that meaning and intelligibility are simply synonymous? How, then, does that comport with the ontological distinction between reality/intelligibility in general, and on the other hand, meaning as reality that is intentional? Answering this helps us to understand further that intelligibility qua meaning is predicated in the case of the human person precisely because human being pertains to the domain of spiritual (as distinct from animal) intentionality. 142 See Understanding and Being, 376: ‘That understanding of the meaning of human life that is mediated to us through the death and resurrection of Christ. . . ’. 143 Lonergan, Caring about Meaning, 202. The point reconnects us with the brief discussion of the relation between meaning and value above. We readily say of evil and destructive acts or ways of life that they are ‘senseless, devoid of meaning’. We comment on the tragedy of the young or others striving to live without a meaning or purpose in life. My own approach to the question of how the good, and the intelligible, being relate in Lonergan’s developing thought is increasingly in the direction of seeing these in the light of the transcendentals and ways in which these are interrelated. I believe the references to the different meanings of ‘transcendental’ in Lonergan’s later thought are hints pointing us in the direction of this reappropriation of the scholastic transcendentals and their interchangeable nature, now recast in cognitional, heuristic terms. 140

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I wish to turn now to the two areas of meaning analysis discussed in Method in Theology, mentioned above: linguistic meaning and incarnate meaning. These two areas are, in some way, emblematic of the manner in which Lonergan’s developing thought on meaning has in its sights the contemporary work on meaning going on in the analytical and continental traditions in twentieth-­ century philosophy. My discussion also aims to illustrate how we can benefit from the enlargement of perspectives on various dimensions of meaning that are to be found by surveying the entirety of Lonergan’s output. The analyses in Method are in some cases brief, in others, less so, and I have suggested above that, prima facie, at least, we need look no further than compositional husbandry as a motive for this. These brief treatments are compact and extremely rich in content; for the student of Lonergan’s thought, they are also clear allusions to other parts of Lonergan’s oeuvre relevant to the topics in hand. Examining the manner in which different writings from different periods of Lonergan’s work may contribute to an understanding of some aspect of meaning also, I believe, draws our attention to ways in which moments in which a phenomenological approach is salient may be complemented and enriched by writing in which the metaphysical and explanatory approach is more to the fore – and vice versa.

Linguistic meaning By its embodiment in language, in a set of conventional signs, meaning finds its greatest liberation. For conventional signs can be multiplied almost indefinitely. They can be differentiated and specialised to the utmost refinement. They can be used reflexively in the analysis and control of linguistic meaning itself.144

In this passage, Lonergan illustrates the meaning of his own distinction between potential acts of meaning – insight in the elemental sphere – and formal and full acts of meaning, expressed in words. It is the domain of the distinction between sign and signified identified in Insight. Such articulation of meaning, however, is by no means a done deal simply by turning to words. For, as Lonergan avers, Vico is right to hold the primacy of poetry. And so with a nod in the direction of the analytical philosophers of the 1970s, the section on linguistic meaning concludes with the assertion that literal meaning literally expressed is only achieved, ‘. . .

Method in Theology, 70.

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with enormous effort and care . . . as the tireless labours of linguistic analysts seem to show’.145 In the section on linguistic meaning, key elements include the distinctions among common sense, technical and literary meaning. A further subdivision of technical meaning highlights the fact that among such technical languages are those languages emerging from the theoretical differentiation of consciousness, and by implication, we might add, that of interiority. Accordingly, what Lonergan has to say further on in chapter 3, on the stages of meaning, the Greek discovery of mind and the process of feedback among advancing literary language, common-­sense language and theoretical language is evidently relevant to the analysis of linguistic meaning. In addition, as remarked above, Lonergan is sensitive in Method in Theology, as he had been in writing prior to the book, to ways in which the diverse forms of meaning interpenetrate. Common-­sense and even types of literary meaning – in analogous ways – occur as integrated into forms of intersubjective encounter and discourse. The celebration of Vico’s proclamation of the primacy of poetry entails that language also occurs as an aesthetic and symbolic phenomenon, and in the short section on incarnate meaning, Lonergan indicates that such incarnate meaning can also be witnessed in examples of characters in literature. In light of our interest in ways in which analyses from diverse periods of Lonergan’s writing offer possibilities for mutual enrichment, we can note here that this is the case with regard to the account of stages in meaning in Method in Theology. Such stages, in their linguistic embodiment, invite further analysis in light of the position on emergent probability and schemes of recurrence adumbrated in Insight. As Method in Theology saw the light of day, analytical philosophy was already moving slowly into the third phase of its twentieth-­century history. Above I noted the recent historical overview offered by Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, describing how the ordinary language phase of analytical philosophy gradually gave way in the last decades of the century to a new era. In a new phase, philosophers sought insights into semantic structures in language and became engaged in a renewed metaphysics that analysts now viewed in a way similar to Lonergan’s prescient designation of metaphysics in the late 1950s as a form of ‘fundamental semantics’.146 In these new developments,

Method in Theology, 73. Understanding and Being, 365; Topics in Education, 180.

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Kripke’s work on modal logic and Dummett’s searching questions regarding philosophical assumptions based on the classical logic of Frege/Russell also played a significant role. The period has witnessed the waning influence of the later Wittgenstein; even the antiprivate language argument, once seen as an enduring legacy of the celebrated philosopher, has in recent years been subject to a barrage of criticism from leading Anglo-American philosophers.147 In a recent book review, the University of Cambridge philosopher Tim Crane has reflected on the fascinating topic of nontranslatability between natural languages.148 Both Crane, an analytical philosopher, and the contributors to the book, who are mostly from the French continental tradition, are agreed at least on the reality of this phenomenon readily experienced by anyone who gains familiarity with a second language and a facility to use it in situ. So, many words and phrases, both in current idiomatic use and in established sources of vocabulary and grammar of a given language are found to be difficult if not impossible to translate directly and succinctly into another language. Of course, as Crane points out, it is in principle possible to express or explain in one language what is found in another, albeit such summarizing and exposition is too long-­winded as to disqualify itself from what we would consider a ready and usable straight translation. From anecdotal sources we know that Lonergan’s early training as a student and then as a teacher of classical languages familiarized him with just such an experience, and that this was a contributory factor in his own rediscovery of the importance of the nature and distinction between conscious insight, on the one hand, and conscious conceptual formulation, on the other, in Aquinas.149 For what Professor Crane and the contributors to the book witness to, but do not advert to in a philosophically illuminating fashion, is just this phenomenon. If I understand well a word or phrase in Italian and its usage, then I may also understand that I cannot easily translate it into English, and that even a paraphrase or a descriptive account is tricky and difficult. But this is precisely because I have the relevant conscious insights and apprehensions of value, in the

See Timothy Williamson, ‘How Did We Get Here from There? The Transformation of Analytical Philosophy’; Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth-Century, Volume 2, The Age of Meaning (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 33–59. 148 Tim Crane, ‘The Philosophy of Translation’, review of Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), in The Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 2015. 149 Lonergan made remarks to this effect to his friend, the Lonergan scholar Fr. Joseph Flanagan, S.J. 147

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one language and its current usage in intersubjective contexts. And in the other, I have familiarity with the relevant insights that allow me to understand that the task of a ‘strict’ translation cannot be performed. I, the conscious subject, bridge the translation gap in the very knowledge that no easy translation can. Lonergan’s contribution to philosophy of language, then, starts at the very origins of his own original philosophical thinking. A natural language as an expression of persons in community has to be understood and investigated in the context of an anthropological perspective that is as complete as possible. And this is how Lonergan’s philosophy of language, developed throughout his writing, offers resources for understanding linguistic meaning. Language is a crucial factor in the constitutive communication that is the mutual self-­mediation of persons. As such, it has to be understood as participating in the various domains of meaning Lonergan gradually differentiates and clarifies as his thought progresses. For the nontranslatability between natural languages, will often enough have as much to do with the aesthetic, symbolic nuances in the given intersubjective context as with more conceptually perspicacious factors. Nontranslatability regards, then, potential acts of meaning in the elemental domain as well as formal and full acts of meaning, in which are differentiated sign and signified. In Verbum, Lonergan explored St. Thomas Aquinas’s subtle analysis differentiating inner and outer word, with the ulterior aim of reclaiming the authentic profundity of Thomist Trinitarian theology. Aquinas, Lonergan notes with surprise, holds that outer words, linguistic signs mean inner words, inner words being our conscious intentions informing use.150 But before an analytical philosopher, of a certain type, should become too excited by this apparent medieval endorsement of her views, we should point out that St. Thomas, according to Lonergan, in no way denies that the conscious intention is what gives meaning to the outward sign. He is explicit on this being the case. Rather, his point is made as an antiplatonic one: words, initially anyway, refer to objects of thought, not to realities known to exist simply because the words with reference to them are given. For our purposes, it is also significant to observe, that in the opening passages of Verbum, Lonergan points to Aquinas’s sensitivity, and thus, also flags up his own, to ‘the whole mnemic mass and sensitive mechanism of motor, auditory, and visual images connected with language’.151

Verbum, 2. This is expressed in St. Thomas’s notion of ‘imaginatio vocis’, Verbum, 1.

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Lonergan would later fill out further this basic heuristic perspective with insights into the ‘psychology of words’, which would include the symbolic dimensions of language, drawing on contributions of structuralists such as Gilbert Durand.152 Also to be found in Verbum is the intimation of later developments regarding Lonergan’s writing on religious experience, the inner word of judgment on that experience and the affective core of such consciousness.153 Insight’s dialectical philosophy, inviting personal, existential self-­appropriation, continues to enlarge our vision of the way language is situated within the variegated landscape of an anthropology that takes into account the perspectives of psychology and social history. The insights and avenues of investigation relevant to a philosophy of language that the book offers are too numerous to itemize here. But among them, we can mention the following. First, Lonergan’s differentiations, arising from his analysis of insight, of various types of definition, nominal, explanatory and implicit, directly contribute to an illuminating account of the languages of common sense, mathematics and science.154 Second, the whole analysis of the emergence of higher viewpoints has its linguistic dimensions and further clarifies what Lonergan means, when writing later in Method in Theology, of the struggle involved in the articulation of literal meaning.155 That latter theme is, of course, central in a way to the whole book. For it is the theme of the dialectic that would allow us to move beyond the anthropologically inevitable confusions attendant on our polymorphic consciousness, ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem. Insight, then, fully acknowledges, and let it be said accords due value to, the fact that language is, de facto, suffused with metaphor, metaphor being contracted myth.156 The control of meaning, through a self-­appropriation that allows a clear distinction between the truly explanatory and the in-­part or wholly descriptive (in no way denigrated as the ‘illusory’) has immediate implications for a philosophy of language. Such a philosophy of language, in turn, has consequences for hermeneutics both as interpretative and as controlling what is meaningful and meaningless.157 This also entails a hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval with regard even to the massive achievement that is Aristotelianism. That philosophy, too, needs freeing

154 155 156 157 152 153

Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 99–100. Verbum, 93; cf. Grace and Freedom, 432. Insight, 35–37. Insight, 37–43. Insight, 567–69. Insight, 608–17.

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from a certain bewitchment by language and a certain tendency to ‘verbalism,’ which eludes the precision it otherwise fosters.158 The analyses of linguistic meaning in Insight also throw light on its nature as an expression of the human animal, and as manifesting conscious ‘intentions’ not those directly of the intentional agent; that is, it is an analysis that embraces the positive contributions of depth psychology.159 The book’s linguistic philosophy offers insight into facets of the ‘psychology of words’ and how the interpreter of texts needs to appreciate this phenomenon;160 it also draws our attention to features peculiar to literary meaning as found in the medium of the novel.161 The psychology of words not only pertains to emotional, aesthetic and preconscious elements, but also to the role of language as image for insight; apt linguistic symbolism can function as a ‘quasi-­operator’ eliciting appropriate insights into the matter in hand.162 Discussions of common-­sense language touch on such matters as common-­sense generalizations and definitions in a way that is of direct relevance to debates in analytical philosophy past and present on these topics.163 Further, as indicated from the quotation given earlier, the book analyses how a major factor in semantic change is the growth of knowledge.164 The student of current work in semantics and philosophy of language in analytical circles will find moments throughout Insight that prove surprisingly illuminating for debates in this somewhat different philosophical world. Among these, we can count Lonergan’s examination of the relation between the cognitive appropriation of truth and linguistic expressions of truth.165 In his Boston College lectures of 1957, Lonergan had greeted, what he termed, the ‘English experiment’ as a welcome break from the logical positivist ideas on the reform of ordinary language; in its positive aspects, it was, he thought, cognate with his own analyses of common sense.166 This ‘experiment’, which was

A Third Collection, 246. And so Lonergan, in an instance of his droll, Canadian humour in Insight gives us his own example of a ‘Freudian slip’: Insight, 217–18. Later in the book, he draws attention to what Wittgensteinians call ‘avowals’: that is, linguistic expressions that are, or approximate to, a mere voicing of physical and emotional reaction: Insight, 592. 160 Insight, 615. 161 Insight, 593. 162 Insight, 42–43, 592–93. 163 Insight, 196–204, 322–24. 164 Insight, 577–78. The inability of much analytical philosophy over the last decades properly to account for semantic change, in a manner in which Lonergan can, is a major theme in Michael McCarthy’s book The Crisis of Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1990). 165 Insight, 580–81. 166 Phenomenology and Logic, 94. 158 159

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the ordinary language phase in the history of analytical philosophy was in full swing when Method in Theology appeared. As we have noted above, however, change was in the air in the 1970s for the Anglo-American philosophical world. Above, I also drew attention to the chapter on Scott Soames and recent work on meaning in analytical philosophy. As I pointed out, turning to Lonergan’s thought to throw light on these recent debates involves deploying some of the central analyses in Insight concerning the interrelationships between and differentiation of logic, metaphysics and grammar; and it requires us to show how Lonergan’s generalized empirical method grounds such differentiation and integration. Other resources of direct relevance to current analytical debates on meaning are found by mining the 1957 lectures on logic. For, essentially, these provide a meta-­logic or philosophy of logic adequate to the task of understanding the possible applications and limitations of various logics to more general philosophical questions, including those of language semantics. Lonergan’s method is dialectical: The positive aspect in modern symbolic techniques is identified in the attempt to avoid ‘casual insights’ in geometry and logical structures. The turn to symbolic systems is understood by Lonergan as a research project in the control of meaning that in part has proved successful.167 But, perhaps easy to miss, is Lonergan’s negative critique of a tendency that fosters a fetish for technique; one that involves oversight of insight into the proper foundation of various key logical principles and operations in cognitional structure.168 A further critical aspect to the lectures is evident in Lonergan’s cavils against a simplistic notion of words as conceptual basic building blocks. Ordinary language concepts involve, hopefully, genuine insights into the data, but these, at best, do not comprise a complete account, rather, a genuine heuristic open to further completion. This is the upshot of Lonergan’s importing into the discussion his own theological work on the development of the notion of ‘person’ in the

Phenomenology and Logic, 12, 14–15. We may observe that some instances of ‘casual insight’ seem relatively innocuous, while others may skew or undermine in a more serious fashion a position in logic, mathematics or philosophy. Thus, Euclid’s failure to express in his axioms some of the insights clearly enjoyed in the diagrammatic images is sometimes a failure in completeness, to be remedied by later geometers. On the other hand, other modal claims made for elements in Euclid’s geometry as being of absolute, not relative, necessity are seen to be based on casual insights as unwarranted assumptions. More serious cases of ambiguity in meaning arising from casual insights – perhaps combined with ‘casual oversights’ – can be seen in cases of philosophy of logic and other areas of philosophy (see Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 31). One such is, I believe, evident in the Kripke-­inspired modal logics, which fail to appreciate potency; other examples of this kind are pinpointed by McShane in probability theory: see Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, 103, 158 n. 35. 168 Phenomenology and Logic, 96–98. 167

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history of Catholic theology.169 Lest we be tempted to think that in the later Lonergan the role feelings play in the psychology of language, as expressing the intellectual pattern, is always benign, we can point to his comments from 1977 on Marx’s thought: Lonergan avers that Marx’s writing on capital as surplus is ‘emotional’ and skewed. From the viewpoint of the 1970s, it might seem highly surprising that analytical philosophy would develop in the way it did over the next few decades in its researches into linguistic meaning. It is the case, however, that if we are considering key contributions of Lonergan’s thought to current debates regarding linguistic meaning in Anglo-American philosophy, then it is to the resources offered by Insight and the 1957 lectures on logic that we must primarily turn. This is ample testimony to one of the principal points I wish to make in this essay: To learn what Lonergan has to teach us on the nature of meaning, we have to take in the whole compass of his work.

Incarnate meaning The brevity of the discussion of incarnate meaning, to which less than a page is devoted in Method in Theology, is itself an invitation to further enlarge our understanding of this potent source of insight into meaning. One way in which this may be done, I suggest, is by surveying the entirety of Lonergan’s output to find other analyses that are relevant. As I have noted already, earlier traces of this notion are to be found in Lonergan’s writing in which expressions occur such as ‘incarnate intelligence’ and ‘incarnate spirit’,170 and in his positive appreciation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the bodily presence of persons. The reading of Morel’s book served to crystallize the notion of incarnate meaning as a distinct carrier of meaning.

Phenomenology and Logic, 158. In the section on linguistic meaning in his 1968 Boston College lectures (Early Works on Theological Method I, 529–33), Lonergan brings together various strands in his writing on linguistic meaning, and in short compass, refers both to the function of language as orienting the subject in his environment and to the technical language of logic, both Aristotelian and symbolic. This connects the discussion with the 1957 lectures in a way we do not see in Method in Theology. Nor do we find in the book explicit mention of rhetoric, which is referred to in the 1968 lectures. The subject of rhetoric in Lonergan’s work, and its role in theology, is, I believe, one well worth following up. 170 Insight, 200; Collection, 269. 169

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In Method in Theology, Lonergan writes: ‘Incarnate meaning combines all or at least many of the other carriers of meaning.’171 Such an assertion permits us to think of incarnate meaning as implying that human persons may themselves be living symbols, as embodying an affect-­laden image or a combination of such images. Such a living symbol would, therefore, occasion potential acts of meaning on the part of those in intersubjective engagement with them, or in reference to them at further remove. Such potential acts could further unfold in articulated meaning as literary critics help us to understand the significance of a figure in literature, such as Don Quixote, or as we reflect on what someone in a more proximate sphere of acquaintance means to us as a representative symbol of given qualities. Further, as Lonergan’s mention, at the end of the section on incarnate meaning, of incarnate meaninglessness implies, we should not only think here of insights into such living, personal symbols, but also of apprehensions of value. In this manner, we should bear in mind how analysis of incarnate meaning would connect with Lonergan’s references in Method in Theology to the ontic value of persons.172 We are, of course, very familiar with this phenomenon from the world of media, politics and entertainment as the somewhat irritatingly overused expression ‘iconic’ is applied with regularity to rising stars in sport or television and film. Lonergan’s writing indicates that all of us are incarnate spirits, incarnate intelligences, but not all may be instances of incarnate meaning in quite the way we intend the phrase; or at least, not all of us all of the time. Such human symbols, individual or collective, in fiction or in real life, may be representative samples of certain qualities typical of some group. But being picked out as a representative sample in this way is not simply a matter of selection to represent some scheme of social recurrence in the investigations of a social scientist. Such representation must also be invested in symbolic and aesthetic characterization; thus, T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock represents a certain social type subjected to a humdrum, middle-­class existence. On the other hand, the human symbol can be one who represents novelty and originality. As such a type, he or she may be invoked as a reference term, as a descriptive epithet applied to others: ‘she is a real Martinet’, ‘he is a Scrooge!’ While all of us may not be such symbolic figures, we are potentially so, and to a greater or lesser extent, we may pass in and out of this category as we

Method in Theology, 73. Method in Theology, 31.

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play roles within diverse social settings. When visiting the United States, I may be pointed out as a ‘typical Englishman’. In the domain of hermeneutics, the biography of a figure in history, either famous or less so, will serve to identify a given individual as a representative sample, a symbol, of a certain period and social place, its values, customs and mores. Thinking of incarnate meaning as the identification of the person as symbol, as Lonergan’s remarks imply that we may, provides the clue for an insight into the fascinating possibility of bringing into an enriching dialogue these later thoughts on meaning with work from the earliest stage in the forty years of Lonergan’s development on which we are focusing. The Council of Trent affirmed the doctrine of the Mass as a sacrifice, rejecting the position that it is merely a memorial of Calvary. Precise understanding of how the aspects of identity and difference between each Mass and Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary may cohere was left to theological discussion. Early in the twentieth century, Maurice de la Taille’s contribution to the debate stirred controversy. Among those who responded was Anscar Vonier, Abbot of Buckfast, whose 1925 work A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist was an implicit rejection of de la Taille’s solution.173 As other Thomists in the debate, Vonier sought to bring to bear on the question Aquinas’s subtle analysis of ways in which instrumental causality may have a symbolic signification.174 This theological debate is the context of Lonergan’s work De Notione Sacrificii, a piece written from 1943 to 1944 during his time teaching in Montreal.175 As we might expect, Lonergan’s contribution is an ingenious resolution of various problems arising from the debate. Central to the piece is the notion of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary as a ‘perfect symbol of his sacrificial attitude’.176 In other words, what those present at Christ’s death witnessed, and what multitudes of others down the centuries have heard about, read and prayed about and have seen depicted in sacred art, was the agonized bodily expression of Christ’s intentional willing to

Anscar Vonier, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist (Buckfast: Assumption Press, 2013). Cf. Vonier, 23–28. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ‘De Notione Sacrificii’, Early Latin Theology, CWL, Vol. 19, M. G. Shields, translator, R. M. Doran and H. D. Monsour, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 3–51. For a very enlightening essay on Lonergan’s continued relevance to this area of theological discussion, which also highlights how his work enables us to retrieve the central positive insight of Vonier, see Raymond Moloney, S.J., ‘Lonergan on Eucharistic Sacrifice’, Theological Studies, 62 (2001): 53–70. 176 Early Latin Theology, 5–13. 173 174 175

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suffer for the redemption of humankind, in loving obedience to the Father in the Holy Spirit. The analyses offered in the essay are, then, directly relevant to a further investigation of the notion of incarnate meaning. Indeed, in the early 1960s, while not referencing this earlier work, Lonergan illustrated the idea of incarnate meaning by drawing attention to the images of the suffering Christ and His suffering Mother.177 A conclusion of Lonergan’s argument is that, while the intentional, formal aspect of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary and the sacrifice of each Mass are identical, there is a difference to be found in the symbolic manifestation: this was immediate in the bodily expression of Christ’s agony on the Cross; it is mediate in the symbolic manifestation that is the unbloody sacrifice of each Mass.178 The distinction here between immediate and mediate is one that has more general relevance for reflection on incarnate meaning as signifying the person as symbol, and the whole piece is replete with indications of other possible resources for similar avenues of further reflection. It is interesting to note that, while the idea of symbol as affect laden-­image is absent from his work at this stage, there are two aspects to symbol that Lonergan highlights: first, it is a more or less adequate, perceptible sign of the signified; second, it is an image that plays a public, social role.179 With regard to the second point, we can see that Lonergan is already, in this early period, referencing the social sciences, in the person of Sorokin. And in addition, I would point out that it is precisely this social aspect to the sign as symbol that was identified above as a characteristic of Lonergan’s later notion of incarnate meaning, the notion of the person-­symbol.180 While the analysis of incarnate meaning highlights the reality of the person-­ symbol, it also implies or suggests a notion of wider scope, which I have referred to elsewhere.181 The meaning that is, in part, constitutive of the reality of a given individual is that of the time and place of the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value into which the individual is born and is nurtured. This is the ontological referent of historical consciousness, so that we anticipate a

Early Works on Theological Method 3, 188. Early Latin Theology, 45–47. Early Latin Theology, 5–9. Along with Christopher Dawson, Pitirim Sorokin was a favourite sociologist, at least, during the first two decades of the forty-­year period of Lonergan’s work that we have been examining. 181 See Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy, chapter 10. 179 180 177 178

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nineteenth-­century Javanese boat builder will be a rather different character from a Roman carpenter from the time of St. Philip Neri. This wider category provides the background potential for the emergence of the social person-­symbol.

Conclusion The 1942 review of von Hildebrand’s book demonstrates how the question of meaning arose for Lonergan as an explicitly reflexive problem: How might we attain to an effective, and at least, core method for the control of meaning, and by implication, control of the meaning of talk about meaning itself? This question was a vector, a contributory operator throughout Lonergan’s subsequent development. I have endeavoured to show in this chapter that the successive expansions in Lonergan’s perspectives on the meaning of meaning over the years have, for the most part, the character of a genetic development; as relevant themes and hints of insight into meaning in earlier works are differentiated and crystallized into explicit areas of focus in later work. I have also offered reflections on intriguing areas in which a shift seems to have occurred in later writing vis-à-­vis earlier discussions. In the ongoing enlargement of his reflections on and analyses of meaning, Lonergan was undoubtedly assisted and stimulated by his engagement with the phenomenological tradition; this is evident from the incipient encounter with that tradition in the 1942 review of the book on marriage. But, as the reference to the Ogden and Richards book in the same review indicates, the development of Lonergan’s thinking in this area also encompassed an interest in and dialectical encounter with the analytical tradition’s wrestling with the question of meaning.182 The encounter with both these twentieth-­century philosophical movements was dialectical, in accord with Lonergan’s hermeneutic of reversing counterpositions and developing positions. The presence in Method in Theology of the section on the ontology of meaning is alone sufficient to apprise us of the way Lonergan did not cease, in his later thought, to be preoccupied with the manner in which a descriptive, phenomenological account of meaning in its

One of the earliest references to philosophical issues pertaining to meaning in Lonergan’s writing is a critical comment on logical positivism in Verbum (2–3). There, Lonergan counters the positivist idea that a false statement or judgment is a meaningless one; the argument is expanded in Insight (383).

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various manifestations, requires integration with and clarification through an explanatory and metaphysical approach; that is, precisely the direction in which we may effect a control of meaning. After returning from a particularly satisfying walk, Tina and I have often commented that our Labrador Bella is smiling at us; this might be dismissed as mere panting by some, but we are not convinced. There are other occasions on which Bella, content and in comfortable company, appears to be expressing something like a smile on her face. In fact, to support such anecdotally acquired conviction we can invoke some recent serious research into the psychology of higher animals.183 But if it is the case that higher animals such as Bella do express happy emotional states by smiling, and if such smiling is analogous to types of human smile, then further philosophical questions arise, namely: Is the relationship between the two analogous, and if so, where are the similarities and differences to be located? Of course, some will deny there is analogy at any point: There is rather univocity as evincing our nature to be simply that of a higher animal. The rejection of that option will involve raising further questions as to the nature of the self who is revealed in the self-­manifestation of my dog’s smile, as opposed to the selves, manifest in the interpersonal encounter between the two of us as my wife smiles at me. These further questions will necessarily take us beyond the subtly garnered evidences of the phenomenological tradition to analyses with an explanatory, and indeed, metaphysical import. What remains for investigation are, I believe, intriguing further questions concerning how the descriptive and explanatory/metaphysical relate to phenomenology, and more generally, to the dialectic of position and counterposition in the history of philosophy. It is worth exploring in greater depth how Lonergan’s insight that the Aristotelian notion of parts of the form illuminates a critical reception of the method or methods of phenomenology, notwithstanding the manifold positive results that flow from such methods. And allied to this analysis would be further reflection on description and explanation, their distinction and interrelation.184

For instance, we can reference the research of Professor Nicholas H. Dodman. See his Psychopharmacology of Animal Behaviour Disorders (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998). I would not wish to give the impression that, for Lonergan, explanation immediately implies metaphysics; that would be a serious error. Metaphysics is established, in its core elements, as that which is heuristically anticipated in all inquiry and that which may be, in part, critically validated in self-­affirmation. However, metaphysics does not replace the particular explanations that science and the other human cognitive disciplines (including cognitional theory) provide or seek to attain; it rather underpins these as providing their ultimate semantic and ontological characterization.

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Undoubtedly, a natural language such as Italian or German involves recurrent schemes of semantic structures, in terms of grammar and such aspects as idiomatic expression.185 As we learn a language, we become aware that, as with stepping onto the moving pavement at the airport, there is sufficient stability in the situation for us to learn a language while also recognizing that it is historically on the move. A conspicuous feature of the history of analytical philosophy in the last one hundred years has been a debate over the control of meaning that has focused on arguments over the nature, scope and comprehensiveness of purported recurrent semantic structures in human discourse. In some fashion, the dialectic oscillation between structuralism and deconstruction in the continental tradition has mirrored this parallel debate. De facto the operational condition of possibility of all such debates is the basic, flexible yet pervasive cognitional and evaluative structure that Lonergan outlines, identifying recurrent semantic structures, with metaphysical reference. These structures are further situated in structural anthropological patterns of preconscious and conscious kinds that have their place in the genetic and dialectical unfolding of communal meaning and meaninglessness, communal expression of value and disvalue in each successive generation. Such historical development is further specified in terms of differentiations of consciousness. Lonergan’s thought, therefore, identifies a cluster of variables that concretely determine something of the complexity of given human semantic expression. Precisely because of the explanatory richness of this intentionality analysis, and although we do not normally think of his work in such terms, we can also say that what Lonergan offers is an extraordinarily powerful form of linguistic analysis.

Thus, the truth in Michael Dummett’s observations on what remains valid in a research programme like that of Davidson, even if the latter towards the end of his life had doubts about his earlier more ambitious aims; Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig’, in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 31, R. Auxier and E. Hahn, editors (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007), 215–27.

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Epilogue Following the pattern of my earlier collection of essays, Insight and Analysis, the present Epilogue is offered as a concluding section to this work, allowing the opportunity to draw together some key themes and threads of analysis evident in the preceding chapters in a way that points in the direction of further applications and investigations. The Epilogue in the previous book began with a brief discussion of ways in which Lonergan’s account of our cognitional and evaluative operations may throw light on the examination of paradoxes of self-­reference, which played a significant role in the development of twentieth-­century analytical philosophy. Since we touched on this area again in the essay on Scott Soames, I may be allowed to return to it here and make a few further observations. Lonergan’s generalized empirical method exploits the point made by both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas that we are capable of a conscious reflexivity in understanding our understanding, knowing our knowing.1 This basic anthropological capacity is attested to by the reality of the rise and subsequent history of philosophy in both East and West. The history of the particular philosophical discipline of logic is again testimony to this reflexive ability. Discussions of logical paradox and contradiction inevitably make implicit, or explicit, reference to conscious intentionality as investing the signs or symbols deployed with the requisite meaning. To notice, advert to, the fact that a Russell-­ inspired judgment (proposition) that, say, no judgment (proposition) can meaningfully refer to itself, in fact, violates its own stipulation, we need to refer to the conscious intentionality operative in the given assertion. The conscious

Aristotle, Ethics, IX, 9 (1170a 29–34); De Veritate, q. 10, a. 8. The scandal of the great disputes in philosophy over everything save the most anodyne of generalizations concerning consciousness and human knowing attests to the fact that this reflexive turn is not intuitive self-­presence, but is rather, as Aquinas and Lonergan hold, an instance of discursive knowledge just as is all our knowledge; as such, it encounters the many obstacles to genuine knowledge to which we are constitutionally prone.

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intentionality of just musing on a given proposition–or prospective judgment–is not the intentional act of asserting it as true. And so the condition of possibility of knowledge of paradoxes and contradictions is such knowledge of conscious intentionality in oneself or in others: in some such cases, we claim to know that the asserted judgment has occurred and is at odds with itself. Or if there is mere consideration, we know that the conscious intentionality is such that were the judgment to be made, there would be contradiction, but in fact, in these intentional activities, there is no such contradiction. One case in which Lonergan’s metalogical analysis of intentionality proves illuminating concerns a brief airing of a possible paradox of thought-­referringto-­thought that Michael Dummett identifies on the basis of an argument put forward by John Myhill.2 Dummett argues that surely we can make general claims about thoughts in general, yet sees a problem in Myhill’s contention that this would lead to a self-­referential class paradox: It would be to posit a ‘thought of all thoughts,’ which like Russell’s hyper-­class, would entail a thought that was at once both whole and part of the whole. The only alternative Dummett sees is a reluctant acceptance of some kind of hierarchy of reference to thoughts akin to Russell’s solution to some of his own problems. But, in fact, this would not allow Dummett to make the references to ‘thoughts’ in generalities as he would wish since this, as he says, very natural activity would through such a hierarchization be postponed into an indefinite future. The oversight involved, however, is embedded in Myhill’s argument. A judgment that refers to all judgments, including itself, is not constituted from all the judgments to which it refers. I could make a judgment about ‘all of my favourite things’. These things could include my collection of packs of playing cards, my collection of old matchboxes and my collection of stamps. And it could include – rather oddly – my judgments about my favourite things. But in that self-­ reference of the judgment, there is no intention of making that judgment itself something constituted from the totality of the parts that are my different favourite things in terms of the diverse collections. The judgment refers to all,

Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to Jan Dejnožka’, in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers Vol. 31, R. Auxier and E. Hahn, editors (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007), 124–25. Students of Lonergan will recall his brief examination of John Myhill’s response to the Gödelian theorem in Phenomenology and Logic, 63. In the fascinating autobiography with which the aforementioned volume on Dummett opens, Dummett recalls that Myhill was one of the foremost exponents of the new approaches in symbolic logic with whom he wished to work during his period as a Harkness Fellow in the United States during the mid-1950s: see The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, 12.

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but it includes itself in the all as only one part. It does not claim at one and the same time to be made up from all these parts.3 Negative views on Lonergan’s hermeneutic retrieval of Aquinas, including some of those mentioned above, are often tied up with generalizations that count him among the ‘transcendental Thomist’ camp. The first essay in this book was, in part, aimed at dispelling the misconceptions inherent in sweeping judgments of this kind.4 It is unfortunate that in recent years we have witnessed all too often the contributions of theologians of a certain type who seem to be overly concerned with keeping in line with what is currently in vogue among philosophers, and more often than not, philosophers of the continental stripe. This disturbing ‘philosophers’ cat-­walk watching’ phenomenon leads some to eschew any attempt at adumbrating philosophical preambles to theology as hopelessly bound up with, what they take to be, out-­of-date ‘foundationalism.’ It is seldom easy to identify with any precision just what theologians of this type mean when they refer disparagingly to ‘foundationalism,’ albeit a ready selection of writers from both Anglophone and continental philosophy of the twentieth century may be implicitly or explicitly referenced. The point may be made, however, that in both those traditions the cat-­walk show has changed its style quite rapidly over the last few decades; only a few decades have served to verify Hegel’s dictum that the man who marries the spirit of the age is soon widowed. We can point here to the closing sections of Timothy Williamson’s survey essay on developments in analytical philosophy leading up to the present state of the art, to which I made reference in the essay on ‘Lonergan on Meaning’. There, Williamson observes that the repetition of a proclaimed ‘end of philosophy’ made by Rorty in the early 1980s did little or nothing to stop analytical philosophy in its tracks, presumably because analytical philosophers found the reasoning in favour of the signing of the death warrant unconvincing. Only Robert Brandom carried forward an attenuated version of the Rorty legacy in a manner recognized by other analytical philosophers to be an exercise in serious philosophy. And

Dummett is not alone in succumbing to the ‘All-­in-One’ confusion pertaining to the logic of class reference that Richard Cartwright has identified and very ably disambiguates in an article that has now proved influential among analytical philosophers; see Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 76–77. 4 In this regard, it is instructive to examine such works as John F. X. Knasas’ Being and Some 20th Century Thomists (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); for a critical evaluation of Knasas’ position on Lonergan, see Jeremy D. Wilkins, ‘A Dialectic of “Thomist” Realisms: John Knasas and Bernard Lonergan’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 78, 1, 2004: 107–30. 3

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Williamson comments that critiques of Brandom indicated with some irony that his inferentialism was, in fact, at odds with his pragmatism.5 Williamson is clear that with the dominant trend in analytical philosophy being oriented to realist metaphysics the Rorty experiment is regarded as an item in the philosophers’ museum. Continental philosophy too has witnessed the emergence on the scene of ‘post-­continentals’ such as Badiou who espouse a form of realist metaphysics, albeit of a rather bizarre character.6 If an antifoundationlist or deconstructive critique is to involve anything like the claim, ‘position x is incorrect or not wholly correct because of . . .’ , then the critique itself will deploy the operations of conscious reasoning as foundational; it will operate with the spontaneities and inevitabilities that are the ‘intelligible emanations’ of human consciousness. Serious concern with philosophy, on the part of theologians or anyone else, should, I believe, lead us to adopt a stance that we might characterize by adapting to our purposes a famous phrase from Francis Bacon in the following manner: ‘little philosophy inclineth a man to a care for philosophical fashion; much philosophy inclineth him to scepticism about the same!’ While not of itself enough to supply the philosophical arguments that are required for a satisfactory dialectic in the situation we are discussing, the history of Western philosophy does give us pause for some thoughts relevant to our theme. The oscillations between despair regarding what philosophy can achieve and a more or less cautious optimism concerning the same seem to be recurrent aspects of that narrative. And so, philosophy has seen the comings and goings of the Sophists, of the ‘Academics’ engaged by St. Augustine in his anti-sceptical treatise, the medieval Nicholas of Autrecourt and the renaissance Leo Valla, whose ‘end of philosophy’ prognostications seem to anticipate the disillusionment

Timothy Williamson, ‘How Did We Get Here from There? The Transformation of Analytical Philosophy’: available at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/35835/ How_did_we_get_here_from_there.pdf, 39. For a perspicacious evaluation of Brandom’s thought from the position of critical realism, see Francisco V. Galán Vélez, ‘Rendering It Explicitly Accountable: Shedding Light on Lonergan’s “Pragmatism” Through Robert Brandom’s Normative Pragmatics’, Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, Fall (2012): 45–72. Critical discussion of Richard Rorty’s thought was carried forward by a number of Lonergan scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. For an overview and contribution to the debate, see R. J. Snell, Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty On Knowing Without A God’s-Eye View (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006). 6 It looks as though that ‘foundationalist’ discipline metaphysics is not going to go away – its demise has been predicted before in the history of philosophy. For a good, critical overview of developments in metaphysics in both analytical and continental philosophy, see the recent work of the Oxford philosopher A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5

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of the later Wittgenstein. My point here is rather that if we are to favour in the name simply of current fashion the ‘winners’, then we had better not pretend that we are really interested in doing philosophy. Nor will gestures in the direction of the vast sweep of history help if by that we are advocating an apocalyptic historical relativism. To begin with, if we suggest, with an implicit Whiggish idea of history, that the positions taken in a thousand years will show those advanced today to be so much ignorance, then why not suggest that those taken in two thousand years will show up as gibberish those of a thousand years hence, and so on into the indefinite future. Of course, the claims to know that there is a reality named ‘human history’ and that this phenomenon of ‘history’ affects human thought in such and such profound ways, are themselves claims to have achieved objective knowledge on the basis of exercising our intelligence and reason. The plausible option, then, is something like Lonergan’s notion of developing consistent positions and reversing erroneous counterpositions across the time of philosophical history: There are truths, or at least, soundly justified knowledge claims, to be found even in the most unpromising philosophical efforts. Nor should we underestimate in this context Lonergan’s positive evaluation – how could it be otherwise? – of the truth and sound judgments human beings reach in day-­to-day living through the exercise of intelligence, reason and responsibility in the domain of common sense. In this, Lonergan is in agreement with many philosophers, including some we have examined in this volume such as Nancy Cartwright and Scott Soames. This common sense ‘as intellectual’, as Lonergan puts it, is something beyond that which we share with higher animals, and accordingly, is not the fundamentally irrational ‘natural attitude’ of Hume: It is the crucible from which all further differentiations of human intelligence, reason and responsibly pursued projects, in science, scholarship, literature, religion, emerge in ways that are fundamentally continuous along the spectrum of further questions, the unfolding of natural human wonder. As Lonergan remarks apropos of the Thales and the milkmaid tale, ‘. . . Thales could have seen the well, for he was not blind; and perhaps the milkmaid could have been interested in the stars, for she was human.’7 Philosophers such as Nietzsche invite us to entertain notions of ‘useful error,’ and naturally in a limited context, this can obtain; perhaps, in the scenarios of science fiction worlds, it could obtain to a greater extent. But with the evidence Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL, Vol.  3, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 205.

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available to us from responsible and intelligent inquiries into the contexts in which we actually pass our days such ‘clever’ thought experiments have very limited value as the process of preparing for, say, a driving test will readily confirm. St. John Paul II’s encyclical reminds us that poor philosophical reasoning on the part of theologians is not somehow rendered effective simply by the fact that it is carried on in the name of faith seeking understanding (Fides et Ratio, 48). Thus, if it is the case that the philosophical positions of, say, St. Thomas Aquinas or Karl Rahner are now thought to be broken-­backed qua philosophical projects, a reading that places their contributions solely within the confines of reflection on Catholic faith does nothing to improve their cogency or worth. As Lonergan, perhaps with a hint of irony, points out in Method in Theology, theologians still have to make use of the human mind.8 While their aim of expounding a Christian theology both radical and orthodox is, in many respects, laudable, the work of theologians such as John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock cannot, in reality, be thought congruent with Catholic orthodoxy. In the last analysis, the endorsement of a tradition-­based fideism in these programmes is redolent of the ‘traditionalism’ of de Lamennais and others censured at the First Vatican Council. Nor does the approach comport well with the teaching of Fides et Ratio. Milbank and Pickstock often make derogatory remarks in passing on Lonergan’s thought, while a serious critical engagement beyond such elliptical comment is not offered. In their short book Truth in Aquinas, they advance a form of ‘post-­foundationalist’ interpretation of St. Thomas on truth, which at once espouses a reading in the spirit of the theological options we have been considering, while championing the idea that Aquinas advanced a notion of truth understood, most fundamentally, in terms of ocular contact. In a couple of passages, critical reference is made to Lonergan’s reading, which is, naturally, diametrically opposed to the ocular paradigm.9 Lonergan’s contribution, of course, does not stand or fall in terms of how well he interpreted St. Thomas Aquinas. The Lonergan, Method in Theology, 23. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 22, 45–46, 52. As is to be expected from such quarters, the critical comments insinuate a charge of Kantianism against Lonergan. While the absurdity of this suggestion should be evident to anyone acquainted with Lonergan’s thought, for further study of the relevant issues, it is always worth consulting some of the writing of the Lonergan scholar who was also a recognized Kant specialist, Fr. Giovanni Sala, S.J. From among his works – many of which remain untranslated from German – we can recommend Giovanni Sala, S.J., Lonergan and Kant: Five Essays on Human Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). From Lonergan’s perspective, Kant has to be seen as a deeply disillusioned empiricist.

8 9

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same is true of, say, the philosophy of Michael Dummett vis-à-­vis his relationship to Frege’s work. Indeed, we should not forget that Lonergan’s endeavour, appealing to what each of us may or may not verify in an existentially engaged process of self-­ appropriation, is at root a critical hermeneutic as regards St. Thomas’s thought. That being said, it is hard to find, even in Lonergan’s last writings, a decidedly negative appraisal of anything truly significant in St. Thomas’s writing, and we have the impression that this is not simply a matter of strategic circumspection. Against Lonergan’s ground-­breaking interpretative work on St. Thomas’s philosophy of mind in Verbum, Milbank and Pickstock invoke studies by John Jenkins and Mark Jordan. These studies, it may be noted, do not themselves converge in their approaches to St. Thomas on knowing. Jenkins’s book has a short section devoted solely to discussing Lonergan’s position on Aquinas on knowledge in which he mistakenly claims that Lonergan overlooks Aquinas’s comments on the per se infallibility of the intellect, with reference to Aquinas’s position on De anima.10 In fact, Lonergan discusses the notion of the infallibility of the intellect on several occasions and offers an interpretation of this that he suggests might mesh with other aspects of Aquinas’s thought on cognition.11 Jenkins’s overall thesis offers an interpretation of Aquinas on knowledge, which prescinding from issues to do with Lonergan’s interpretation, we hope is not correct for St. Thomas’s sake. The thesis is that we have immediate certainty regarding some aspects of reality simply in virtue of the encounter of the intellect with phantasms – what Lonergan would describe as the moment of insight in the data – and that the process of taking ideas to the reflective process of judgment only occurs in the cases of some confused and obscure elements in this cognitive process. If this is what St. Thomas holds, then we would have to say that his epistemology is hopelessly flawed and has little or nothing to offer us. The briefest reflection on the history and philosophy of science would convince us this is the case. For the theory would imply that parts of science are established with certainty solely by the bright ideas scientists have when considering the data, while other aspects need to be subjected to the more laborious process of reflecting and weighing of evidence for judgment; how the triage of the certain ideas as opposed to the more obscure elements sent on for judgment is effected remains itself obscure.

John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 107–14. 11 Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL, Vol. 2, F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 75, 185–86, 188; Insight, 432. 10

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It is no mere sentimental attachment that induces me to be loath to accept that St. Thomas Aquinas’s apparently so ingenious and subtle theorizing on cognition really results in such a hopeless and outrageously flawed theory. The work of Mark Jordan, however, invites a good deal more reflection and evaluative dialogue. There is no doubt that his book Ordering Wisdom, as his other works on St. Thomas, is a significant contribution to Thomist study.12 However, the specific discussion of Lonergan’s analyses does, I think, lead us to wonder about certain critical points Jordan makes. The debate needs more detailed examination and space given to it than I can provide here, and my hope is that other Lonergan scholars will devote their energies to this exegetical and hermeneutical discussion. Suffice it to note that Jordan’s attempt to deflect Lonergan’s interpretative aims in his work on Aquinas on mind – an attempt that explicitly occupies Jordan in only a few pages of the work – seems oddly pitched in adverting to what Aquinas writes on the ‘inner discourse’ that occurs in the consciousness of angels. The objective is to call into question Lonergan’s identification, in quite the way it unfolds, of the conscious processes of objective, apprehensive and formative abstraction in Aquinas’s work. But surely an important point to bear in mind here is that, as St. Thomas makes clear, the knowledge of angels has nothing to do with phantasms, nothing to do with some kind of abstraction concerning mental imagery as happens in human consciousness.13 Jordan’s emphasis on the theme of ‘inner discourse’ in the texts he adverts to in St. Thomas need not, as far as I can discern, negate Lonergan’s exegetical emphasis on the characteristics he believes identifiable in St. Thomas’s texts pertaining to apprehensive abstraction, as preconceptual conscious insight, on the one hand, and on the other, formative abstraction, as further insightful articulation of the said insight in conceptual, linguistic/symbolic expression. Neither in Lonergan’s own philosophy, nor in his exegetical offerings on Aquinas, does he think the idea cogent that there is a kind of preconceptual ‘discourse’ going on in our thinking that is then subsequently ‘translated’ into conceptual/ linguistic articulation. Rather, in our mutterings and musings on questions in, say, geometry, where we might come up with a definition, or more frequently, be trying to make sense of one, there is an interplay between the already verbalized and symbolized insights, on the one hand, and new moments of preconceptual

Mark D. Jordan, Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Discourses in Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 31–39. 13 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, Q. 54, art. 5. 12

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insight, on the other. Thus, in the process of the questioning and musing over Euclidean definitions, as in the thought-­experiment described in the opening phenomenology of Insight, this interplay is operative.14 To reiterate the point made above, ultimately, it is not his Thomistic exegesis that is the crucial issue as regards Lonergan’s thought, but rather its fundamental validity as regards the evidence of our conscious experience. From that perspective, the phenomenology of the shift from preconceptual conscious insight to articulation in some conceptual/verbalized form of insights, which is one aspect of Lonergan’s phenomenology of Verstehen is, I believe, astoundingly illuminating, and its absence from vast swathes of philosophical research in other traditions creates a major obstacle to fruitful further investigation. As I have emphasized in the essay on aesthetics, the absence of these details in the phenomenology of consciousness in that domain weakens considerably many otherwise laudable analyses of human aesthetic experience.15 Lonergan’s achievement cannot be understood apart from the scholastic revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This revival gained momentum, for various cultural and intellectual reasons, both inside and outside Catholicism in those centuries. Outside the Church, enthusiasm of varying degrees was shown for the movement from some quite unexpected quarters: We can think of John Stuart Mill’s admiration for the contributions of the Schoolmen to the development of logic, expressed in his System of Logic, or C. S. Peirce’s professed indebtedness to the Scholastics as well as to Schelling. When the movement was explicitly endorsed and further promoted by the magisterium of the Catholic Church, this occurred in a manner that already signalled the need for a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval,’ perhaps all too easily overlooked, but evident in Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris and St. Pius X’s Pascendi. The way of critical self-­appropriation Lonergan is led to by, he informs us, his reading of Bl. John Henry Newman, St. Augustine and Plato, and then of Aristotle and St. Thomas Insight, chapter 1; see also Lonergan’s attentiveness to this subtle interplay between the articulated and the preconceptual moments in his discussion with his audience in the 1958 Halifax lectures: Understanding and Being, 282–85. 15 Later in the book, Jordan chides writers such as P. Hoenen and Lonergan for taking Aquinas’s discussion in De Veritate, q. 10, as a contribution to modern debates on the critical problem when, according to Jordan, the primary aim of the text is to assemble the contributions of Aristotle, St. Augustine and other authorities on the nature of truth. The objection must seem oddly disingenuous to anyone inspecting the text in question since St. Thomas is quite evidently assembling such authorities in the process of giving his own judgment on the issues at hand, as is his normal manner in disputation. There is no evidence that he has forgotten in the said text his own illuminating rule that in investigation what is ultimately important is not what people (even authorities) think, but what the truth is: St. Thomas Aquinas, De Caelo, 1. 22. 14

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Aquinas is the unique way he followed in advancing the movement and bringing it into a more effective dialogue and debate with modern philosophy, science and scholarship. Intrinsic to this effectiveness is the existential invitation, indeed challenge, Lonergan offers his readers of a journey of self-­discovery that is also a critical appropriation of what is referred to by some as the philosophia perennis. This journey of self-­discovery enhances in a decisive manner the identification of the contours and lineaments of what Heideggerian thought names our Geworfenheit, but which Lonergan characterizes more adequately as our ‘confinement in openness’;16 a characterization that focuses our attention more keenly on the realities in our lives of gift and grace.

The expression is that of Bernard Tyrrell, who employs it in a felicitous manner in describing Lonergan’s approach to knowing, and consequently, metaphysics: Bernard Tyrell, Bernard Lonergan’s Philosophy of God (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1974), chapter 4.

16

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Index abstraction 30, 121, 122, 130–2, 134–5, 151–2, 154, 177, 178, 179, 240, 266 accidents (conjugates) 71, 158, 196 act/potency distinction 175–6 Adorno, T. W. 78, 84 aesthetics x, 25, 77–118, 190 n.59, 223 n.68, 227, 267 ‘aesthetic innocence’ 85, 110 criteria for evaluation 82, 83 n.14, 84, 89, 97, 98 n.48, 109–10 n.58, 118 and en-joyment 87 n.25, 88, 90–1, 93, 104, 106 Albertson, J. 39 n.92, 127 n.22 An Old Woman (Quentin Massys) 93 analytical philosophy x–xi n.2, 17, 18 n.45, 18 n.46, 24 n.63, 27, 34 n.83, 39, 48, 49 n.2, 49–62 n.30, 65, 67, 70, 72–5, 100, 119–20 n.4, 123 n.9, 126, 132, 136 n.45, 142 n.59, 146, 147, 162, 163–73 n.20, 178–9, 183–5, 187, 188 n.55, 190, 195, 196–8, 200–1, 203–4, 208–9, 212, 217, 221–3, 225, 237–8, 240, 245, 246–52, 256, 258, 259, 261–2 externalists and internalists 57–8 and ‘folk psychological’ descriptions 52n.12, 55, 189 angels 47, 266 Anglo-American philosophy (see analytical philosophy) animal meaning 231 Anscombe, Elisabeth 123 n.9, 128 anthropology 8, 23, 25, 42, 47, 55, 75, 78, 87 n.24, 96, 103 n.52, 111, 115 n.69, 121, 163, 214–15, 218–21, 233, 248–9, 259 anthropomorphism, limitations of 164, 231 anti-foundationalism 122, 261, anti-reductionism 69–70, 132–3, 139 apologetics 48, 228

Aquinas, St. Thomas 2–4, 22, 29, 34–8, 45 n.106, 64, 70, 71, 86–98, 104, 116–7, 120, 137, 144, 151–2, 156 n.89, 173 n.20, 186, 187 n.51, 204–7, 209–11, 214, 225, 228, 232, 241, 242, 248, 254, 259 n.1, 261, 264–7 n.15 on beauty 87 n.25, 88–93 integrity, proportion and clarity 93–4 Aristotelian-Thomist tradition xi 15, 22, 71, 120, 141, 144, 152, 205, 241, 259 Aristotle, Aristotelian 4, 10, 27, 29, 33, 36, 38 n.91, 51, 62 n.30, 78, 79, 80, 101, 123, 130–2, 136 n.45, 137, 146 n.68, 150, 154, 156–7, 161–2, 165, 186, 194, 207, 210–11 n.22, 223, 227, 240, 241 n.140, 249–50, 257, 259 n.1, 267 n.15 Arndt, Markus 36 n.88 Arnold, Matthew 162 art and the analogy of language 104–5 and beauty 77, 79, 83 n.14, 87–93, 95, 97–9, 105–6, 110 n.58, 111, 112 n.61, 114, 115, 117, 228 and the cognitive 81, 100–5 criticism of 83, 101, 190 and freedom 80, 84, 106–8, 113 n.64 and insight 93, 94, 97, 98, 99–105, 108, 109, 117, 190, 214–15, 223, 241 n.136, 242 as insight and objectification (Lonergan) 99–105, 117 and morality 77, 84, 106–13 and originality 77, 80, 84 n.16, 88, 94, 95 n.41, 96, 97–8, 105, 109, 110, 117 polyvalence of works of art 98, 116 Augustine, St. 2, 3, 19, 22, 31, 163, 205, 210, 262, 267 n.15 Confessions 98

278

Index

Austin, J. L. 73 n.46, 199, 200 Ayer, A. J. 49, 53, 209

Butler, Joseph 35 n.86, 37 n.99, 38, 269 Byrne, Patrick 32 n.76, 33, 269

Babbage, Charles 52 Bach, Johann Sebastian 104 Bacon’s method 137 Badiou, Alain x, 262 Barthes, Roland 78 Bartók, Béla 104 Baudrillard, J. 47 Bayes, Thomas 37 n.90 Beards, Andrew 11 n.31, 21 n.53, 24 n.63, 27 n.66, 52 n.12, 58 n.19, 60 n.27, 74 n.50, 94 n.38, 96 n.43, 112 n.62, 120 n.5, 130 n.30, 182 n.45, 183 n.46, 186 n.50, 218 n.50, 223 n.68, 223 n.69, 255 n.181, 261 n.3, 269 Beardsley, Monroe 79 beauty and intelligibility 88, 91–3, 95 n.40, 96, 98, 106, 110 n.58, 112, 115 as a transcendental 88–92, 95, 97–9, 104–8, 112, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig van 90, 105, 106 Benjamin, W. 78 Berlioz, Hector 104 Bernoulli, Daniel 37, 39 n.92, 127 n.22 Bhaskar, Roy 120 n.4 biology, philosophy of 33, 36 n.88, 126 n.19, 132–3 n.37 ‘black box’ of cognition 188, 189 Bocheński, J. M. 169 body language 190, 197, 215, 230, 231 Bois-Reymond, Paul du 217 Bolt, Robert 97 n.44 Boole, G. 224 n.75 Borden, Sarah 24 n.63, 269 Boscovich, Ruggiero 27 Boston College lectures (1957), of Lonergan 27, 51 n.6, 171, 221, 223, 224, 225, 243, 250, 252 n.169 Bourdieu, Pierre 82 Brentano, Franz 22 Bromberger, S. 128 Bronowski, J. 40, 41, 42, 269 Budenholzer, Frank 32 n.76 Burke, Edmund 79 Butler, B. C. 53 n.13

Cantor, Georg 217 Cappelen, Herman 75 n.53 Carnap, Rudolf 66, 123, 129, 142 n.59, 176 Carroll, Noël 78, 85, 106 Cartesianism 17 Cartwright, Nancy x, 33, 119–20, 122–43, 145–62, 263, 269 abstraction in science 122, 130–1, 134, 135, 150, 151, 152, 154 capacities 127–31, 133–8, 146, 157–9 causal explanation 126–30, 134, 136, 138, 145, 153, 158–61 ceteris paribus conditions 129, 133–5, 159–60 chance set-ups 127, 138, 160 Coulomb’s law 135, 138 covering-law view 33, 131 fundamentalism 147, 155 genus/species hierarchy 131, 153 idealization 122, 130–1, 138 Kepler’s law 134 nature 128, 133, 135, 137–8, 146, 156–8 nomological machines 134, 136 138, 158, 160, 161 ‘why questions’ 128 Cartwright, Richard 182 n.45, 261 n.3 Cassin, Barbara 247 n.148, 269 Cassirer, E. 18 n.49, 157, 229 causes, causation 17, 24 n.63, 36–8, 126, 128–9, 132, 137, 145, 155, 158, 199 Cavell, Stanley 78, 83 Chesterton, G. K. 111 children’s behaviour 100, 127, 197 Christian realism (Lonergan) 220 circulation analysis (Lonergan) 14 n.37, 26, 126 n.19 classical laws, in science 8, 121, 133–4, 143, 148–9, 158–61 cogito 21, 62 Colapietro, Vincent 32 n.76 Collingwood, R. G. 11, 49 n.2, 53, 54, 74 n.49, 78, 81, 83 n.14, 95 n.40, 113 conceptual formulation 69–70, 83, 99, 100–2, 152, 189–90, 242, 247, 266, 267

Index conditional necessity 70–1 consciousness, differentiations of 204, 209–10, 214, 216, 223, 232, 234, 243, 246, 258 historical consciousness (Lonergan) 29, 255 continental philosophy x–xi, 61, 67, 73–4, 78, 163–4, 168, 187, 203, 207, 209, 212, 217, 221, 225, 237, 245, 247, 258, 261, 262 contingency 28, 70–1 Cook Wilson, John 53 n.13, 72–4, 224 n.75, 269 Copenhaver, Brian 38 n.91, 269 Coreth, Emerich 9–12, 23 counter positions 11, 28, 30, 75, 111, 150 n.77, 190, 220, 221, 256, 257, 263 Critchley, Simon 1 critical realism 3, 49, 61, 69, 72, 74 n.49, 111, 119, 120 n.4, 146, 147, 148, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 170, 174, 200, 220, 262 n.5 Croce, Benedetto 78, 81 Crombie, A. C. 38 n.91, 211 n.22, 269 Cross, Richard 64 n.33, 269 Dadosky, John 87 n.25, 92 n.35, 270 Dante 89 Danto, Arthur 78, 79, 80–1 Daston, Lorraine 37 n.90, 270 Davidson, Donald 170, 176–8, 195, 197, 199, 201, 238, 258 n.185 Dawkins, Richard 21 Dawson, Christopher 255 n.180 de la Taille, Maurice 254 de Lamennais, H. F. R. 264 de Morgan, Augustus 52 de Saussure, Ferdinand 164, 209 deconstructionist 2, 17, 163, 164, 219, 258 deductive-nomological account 126 deductivism 28, 145 n.63, 225 deflationary analysis 33, 53 n.14, 80, 96, 126, 129, 136, 168, 171–3 n.20 Degas, Edgar 92 demythologization 228 depth grammar 172, 178, 196, 201 Derrida, Jacques xi, 10, 17, 21–2, 57, 78, 172, 196–7, 270

279

Descartes, René 22 Devitt, Michael 171 n.17, 270 Dewart, Leslie 20, 213, 225 Dewey, John 77, 79, 81, 83, 86, 87 Dodgson, Charles 52 Dodman, Nicholas H. 257 n.183, 270 Doms, H. 208 Doorley, Mark J. 99 n.46, 270 Doran, Robert 270 and psychic conversion 114 n.67 Dufrenne, Mikel 92 n.35, 107 n.56, 115 n.69 Duhem, P. 130 Dummett, Michael 12, 49, 73 n.48, 74 n.51, 166 n.5, 172 n.19, 186, 187, 247, 258 n.185, 260 n.2, 261 n.3, 265, 270 Dumsday, Travis S. 136 n.45, 270 Durand, Gilbert 92, 249 Eco, Umberto 87 n.25, 209 n.18, 270 economics, econometrics ix, 6, 13, 14 n.14, 25, 26, 115 n.69, 126 n.19, 135, 142, 161 Einstein, Albert 44, 124, 148 n.69, 149, 154 Eldridge, Richard 77 n.1, 78, 79 nn.2–4, 80 nn.5–6, 81–7 n.24, 89, 96, 99, 101, 103 n.52, 104, 106–10, 113, 116–18, 270 on aesthetic attraction 79 on Danto’s minimalist theory of aesthetics 80–1 on evaluating art 82–4 on formalist theories of aesthetic experience 79 on freedom and art 80, 84, 113 on Hegel’s vision of the aesthetic 80–1, 87, 113 on ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 85, 107, 110–12, 117 on the ‘innocence of the aesthete’ 85, 110 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art 77–8 on morality and art 77, 84, 106–9 on originality in art 77, 80, 84 n.16 on reason and emotion in art 77, 80, 81, 99 Eliot, T. S. 253

280

Index

Ellul, J. 47 empiricism, problems of 8, 15, 17–21, 74 n.51, 122–3, 128, 146–7, 154–5, 162, 222 ‘end of philosophy’ 261–2 Engel, Pascal xi ‘English experiment’ (Lonergan) 222, 250 ethics 23 n.61, 25, 95, 111, 220–1, 232 Euclidean geometry 39 n.92, 100, 155, 222, 267 fallibilism 121 feelings as apprehensions of value 79, 99 n.46, 105, 204, 221 n.58, 227 refinement of 80, 83, 110 Ferreira, M. Jamie 51 n.7, 270 Feyerabend, Paul 1, 32, 121 Fideism 169, 264 Fides et Ratio, encyclical 264 Fine, Arthur 136 Flew, A. G. n. 169 formal cause 33, 43, 108, 132, 145–7, 151, 154, 155, 175, 193–5, 232, 241 Foster, Hal 85 Foster, John 177 Foucault, Michel 78, 107, 112 n.62 Frankl, Victor 168 Franklin, James 37 n.90, 40 n.97, 270 Frege, Gottlob 27, 52, 165, 169, 170, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 201, 222–3, 247, 265 Freud, Sigmund 85, 228, 250 n.159 Friel, Chris 120 n.4, 270 future contingent 186 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 11, 27 n.66, 79 Galán Vélez, Francisco V. 262 n.5, 270 Galison, Peter 140, 145 Gassendi, P. 137 genetic development 28, 29, 30, 199, 204, 215–16, 229, 234, 238, 256, 258 Gettier, Edmund 57, 60, 61, 62, 63 Gilson, Étienne 78, 89 n.28 Gödel, Kurt 31, 47, 88, 97, 98, 186, 217, 222 n.61, 260 n.2 Goodman, Nelson 78, 81, 84 n.16, 108 Greenough, Patrick 49 n.4, 270

Grotius, Hugo 37 Guernica (Picasso) 79 Gutting, Gary xi n.2, 271 Harman, Gilbert 170 Hartmann, Stephan 119 n.2, 271 Hawthorne, John 49 n.2, 165 n.4 Heelan, Patrick 32 n.76, 36 n.88, 119 n.1, 125 n.15, 271 Hegel, Georg W. F. 28, 78, 80, 81, 87, 113, 261 Heidegger, Martin x, 10, 13, 20, 22–3 n.61, 57, 78, 87 n.24, 168, 203 n.2, 214, 219, 236, 238, 268, 271 Hempel, Carl 33, 123, 126, 135 Herman, Louis M. 75 n.53 hermeneutics, hermeneutical circle xi, 2–4, 6, 20, 25, 26, 27 n.66, 28, 29, 41, 75, 85 n.24, 114 n.67, 154, 163, 167, 197–9, 204–8, 211, 213–19, 224, 229, 237, 243, 249, 254, 256, 261, 265, 266, 267 ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 85, 107, 110, 112, 117, 137, 156, 218, 219, 267 hierarchy in levels of discourse 182–3, 260 Hilbert, David 30, 177 Hintikka, Jaakko 17 n.43, 167, 271 Hintikka, Merrill B. 17 n.43, 271 Hoffmann, Michael H. G. 34 n.80, 271 Hooke 134 Hughes, Glen 113 n.63, 271 Hume, Humean 15, 17, 31, 35 n.85, 37 n.90, 51 n.7, 57, 78, 82, 123–4, 126, 129, 131, 133, 136–8, 141, 146, 155, 162, 169, 186, 263 Husserl, Edmund x, xi, 9–10, 17, 19–22, 47, 57, 62, 103, 168, 207, 208, 214, 225, 238 idealism, and idealists 9, 16, 17, 18, 52–3, 63, 74 n.49, 78, 111, 165 incoherent arguments 56, 62, 65 n.36, 165 induction 33–7, 52, 141 Ingarden, Roman 23 intentionality 2, 22, 62, 84 n.16, 108, 188, 194, 231, 232, 234, 242, 244 n.141, 259–60 intentionality analysis 204, 238, 258

Index interiority xi, 29–31, 204–8, 211, 214, 237, 238, 243, 246 Jaegowan, Kim 58 Jaspers, Karl 19, 20, 225 Jeffrey, Richard 51 Jenkins, John I. 265 n.10, 271 Joachim, H. 53 Johnson, Samuel 152 Jordan, Mark D. 87 n.25, 265–7 n.15, 271 Joseph, H. W. B. 15, 34, 35, 50–4, 72–3, 224 n.75, 271 Juffmann, Thomas 36 n.88 Jung, Carl 231 Kaelin, E. F. 214 n.35, 271 Kant and Kantianism 9, 10, 11, 18 n.46, 23 n.61, 31, 57, 78, 79, 82–3, 115 n.69, 186, 264 n.9 Keller, Helen 192, 230 Kenny, Anthony 169 n.13, 271 Keupink, Alfons 142 n.59, 271 Kivy, Peter 78, 81 Kovach, F. J. 87 n.25, 271 Kripke, Saul 72, 142 n.59, 164, 184, 200, 247, 251 n.167 Kuhn, Thomas 32, 39, 40 n.96, 43 La Donna Velata (Raphael) 93 Lakatos, Imre 32 Lamb, Matthew 6 Lamb, Willis 124 n.13, 125 Langer, Suzanne K. 78, 102 n.51 Lattis, James 38 n.91, 271 Laudan, Larry 32 n.76, 125–6 n.17, 271 Lawrence, Frederick 113 n.64, 271 Levinas, Emmanuel xi, 97 Lewis, C. S. 111, 229 Lewis, David 238 Liddy, Richard M. 50 n.3, 51, 271 Lindberg, David C. 211 n.22, 271 linguistic analysis 258 Locke, John An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 15 Lonergan, Bernard on aesthetic differentiation of consciousness 87 n.24, 106

281 on aesthetics x, 25, 86–7, 91–2, 95 n.40, 99–118, 190, 211, 213–14, 223–4, 227, 241 n.136, 246, 250, 253, 267 on analytical philosophy x–xi, 18, 27–8, 50–1, 53, 61, 62 n.30, 73–5, 142–3, 171, 185–6, 195–7, 203, 208–9, 217, 221–5, 237–8, 245–6, 250–1, 256 on analytical propositions and analytical principles 18, 142–3, 178–9, 221, 225–6 on ‘biological pattern’ of consciousness 92, 214 on canons of empirical enquiry 3, 7–9, 33, 39, 40, 42, 43, 72, 145, 148 n.69 Caring about Meaning 6, 12, 14 n.37, 19, 46 n.107, 50 n.5, 163 n.1, 203, 207 n.13, 225, 244 n.143 on casual insights 98, 100, 222, 228, 251 n.167 Collection 20 n.51, 36 n.89, 50 n.5, 63 n.32, 203 n.14, 229 n.93, 252 n.170 on common sense 4, 7, 12, 14, 16, 30, 37, 42, 68, 95, 147, 153, 157, 168, 175, 178, 198, 207, 209, 214, 215, 223–4, 237, 244 n.140, 246, 249, 250, 263 on communications 48 compared with Dummett 12, 74, 172, 186, 187, 260, 265 contrast with Derrida 10, 17, 21–2, 57, 172, 196 on conversion 92 n.35, 110–15, 117, 219, 221, 228 on critical realism 3, 61, 69, 72, 74, 111, 119–20, 146–7, 148–9, 156–7, 148–9, 156–7, 158, 162, 164, 170, 183, 200, 220 on data of consciousness 7, 10, 14–15, 17, 18–9, 21, 55, 65, 66–9, 122, 189 on degrees of certainty 63–4 on depth psychology 13, 14, 25, 249, 250 on Descartes 22 dialectic 7–10, 12, 19, 20, 26, 28, 30–1, 62, 74, 75, 92 n.35, 110–15, 117, 190, 199, 201, 207–8, 218, 221, 225, 228, 233, 234, 237, 238–9, 251, 256–7, 258, 262 on the dramatic pattern of experience 87, 214

282

Index

on economics ix, 6, 13–14, 25, 26, 115 n.69, 126 on ethics 25, 111, 220–1, 232 on explanatory genus and species 33, 42, 47, 153, 158 on ‘extroversion’, characteristic of ‘biological pattern’ 71, 219 on feelings 83, 99, 105, 110, 190, 204, 221, 227, 230, 252 Grace and Freedom 31 n.73, 92 n.35, 209 n.19, 210, 233 n.110, 249 n.153 on Heidegger 10, 20, 22–3 n.61, 87 n.24, 203 n.2, 214, 219 on higher viewpoints 28–30, 105 n.54, 198, 249 Insight 2–3, 5–8, 10, 12, 13–16, 18–19, 21–3, 25–6, 28–9, 31–2, 34–5, 37 n.90, 39 n.93, 40, 42 n.102, 43 n.103, 44, 45 n.106, 47, 48 n.111, 52n, 11, 63–4, 67, 68, 75, 86, 87, 91, 99–102, 105 n.54, 113, 114–15, 121, 142–3, 145–6, 148–50, 152, 153 n.80, 160–1, 162 n.94, 167 n.7, 175 n.25, 176 n.26, 177 n.29, 179 n.32, 195, 197–8, 201, 204–5, 207, 209, 210–22, 224, 227, 228–30, 232–5, 238–9, 242–3, 245–6, 249–52, 256 n.182, 263 n.7, 265 n.11, 267 on insight, difference from conception 99–103, 105 n.53, 143, 171, 190, 192, 201, 216, 227, 241 n.136, 242, 266–7 on known/unknown 99 n.46, 103, 114 Language, Truth and Meaning 11 n.30, 23 n.61 on macroeconomic theory 26, 126 n.19 on meaning (see meaning) on metaphysics ix, 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 23–4, 25, 42, 71, 72, 111, 120, 185, 195–6, 199, 201, 206–7, 208, 212–13, 219, 238, 246, 251, 257 n.184, 268 n.16 Method in Theology 5, 7, 9–10, 12 n.35, 14, 19, 20, 26, 27 n.66, 71 n.45, 110 n.59, 111 n.60, 115 n.68, 171 n.16, 198 n.68, 209, 212–16, 218, 221, 225–7, 230–1, 233–43, 245–6, 249, 251–3, 256, 264 on mythic consciousness 10–12, 155, 219–20

‘Ongoing Genesis of Methods, The’ 5, 24–31 ‘Origins of Christian Realism, The’ 220 Phenomenology and Logic 4 n.6, 21 n.54, 23 n.60, 28 n.69, 30 n.71, 47 n.109, 51 n.8, 52 n.12, 53 n.14, 61 n.29, 62 n.30, 115 n.69, 142 n.59, 144 n.62, 156 n.87, 171 n.17, 177 n.30, 179 n.33, 217 n.48, 221 n.59, 222, 223 n.70, 224 n.72, 225 n.79, 228 n.90, 230 n.98, 250 n.166, 251, 252 n.169, 260 n.2 Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 222 n.67, 229, 230 n.99, 240 n.133, 249 n.152 Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 6 n.15, 24 n.64, 52 n.11, 71 n.44, 145 n.64, 209 n.17, 218 n.51, 220 n.57, 226 n.80, 233 n.110 Philosophy of God and Theology 6 n.12 on polymorphism of human consciousness 10, 55, 71, 75, 199, 206, 213, 217, 218, 249 on Rahner 11–13 on schemes of recurrence 38, 46, 159–61, 195 n.60, 220, 246 on scientific method 5, 7, 31–45 the ‘scissors analogy’ 8, 207 Second Collection, A 4 n.6, 5–6, 11 n.32, 20 n.52, 50 n.5, 170 n.15, 187 n.52, 198 n.70, 206 n.11, 213, 225 n.76 on self-appropriation ix, xi, 2–4, 12, 19–20, 22, 30 39, 45 n.106, 120, 121, 156, 205, 208, 249, 265, 267–8 on theology ix, 1–5, 12, 13, 20, 24–6, 31, 35, 38, 46, 48, 75, 110–11, 115 n.69, 205–8, 211, 216–18, 228, 244, 248, 251–2, 254–5, 261–8 Third Collection, A 3 n.4, 5 n.8, 9 n.28, 20 n.52, 27 n.67, 39 n.94, 95 n.40, 146 n.68, 188 n.58, 208 n.15, 243–4, 250 n.158 Topics in Education 8, 92 n.35, 101, 102 n.51, 108 n.57, 114 n.66, 226–8, 246 n.146 and Transcendental Thomism 6, 9–14, 261 on truth, different types of 34, 35, 45 n.106, 48, 62 n.39, 63–4, 67–9,

Index 88, 97 n.44, 122, 172, 185 n.48, 195, 210, 212–13, 225, 228, 231, 250, 263, 264–5, 267 n.15 Understanding and Being 16 n.39, 30 n.72, 34, 39 n.92, 64 n.34, 127 n.22, 145 n.64, 163 n.1, 178 n.31, 183 n.46, 185 n.49, 198 n.67, 203 n.2, 205 n.9, 206 n.11, 213 n.28, 218 n.49, 221 n.58, 222 n.60, 223 n.71, 226 n.81, 229 n.96, 233, 234 n.114, 244 n.142, 246 n.146, 251 n.167, 267 n.14 use of self-knowledge 45 n.106, 55–6, 58, 64, 69, 120, 189, 195 use of self-refutation 17, 22, 62, 64, 165, 195 Verbum 2, 4, 6, 27, 29, 144 n.61, 151, 152, 154 n.82, 156 n.89, 157 n.90, 162 n.94, 170 n.20, 187 n.51, 196 n.62, 205 n.8, 206 n.11, 211, 214, 240, 241, 248–9, 256 n.182, 265 Wittgenstein, discussion of 230 n.98 Lyotard, J.-F. 47 MacIntyre, Alasdair 22 n.57, 110, 169, 273 Mackie, J. L. 58 n.19 Macquarrie, John 18 n.44 Magee, Bryan (his interviews) 155 n.85 Mansini, Guy 31 n.73, 273 Marcel, Gabriel 13, 21, 98 Maréchal, Joseph 11, 12 Marion, J. L. x n.1, 57, 79 Marion, Mathieu 73 n.46 Maritain, Jacques 78, 89 n.28, 105–6, 117 Art and Scholasticism 87 Markov condition 138 Marrou, Henri 9 Martinů, Bohuslav 101 Marx, Karl, Marxist 85, 107, 131, 217, 252 materialism 3 Mathews, William A. 50–1, 54, 273 McCarthy, Michael 250 n.164, 273 McDonnell, Cyril 22, 273 McDowell, John 49, 68, 72, 73 74 n.51, 273 McMullin, Ernan 32, 40, 123, 130, 132, 273 McPartland, Thomas 27 n.66, 273

283

McShane, Philip 8, 31–2, 34 n.83, 39 n.92, 119 n.1, 125, 219 n.54, 251 n.167, 273 v-probabilities and f-probabilities 36, 141 n.57 meaning carriers of 212, 237, 253 cognitive 45 n.106, 48, 191, 215, 222–3, 230 communicative 194, 215, 224, 227 n.87, 235 constitutive 48, 115 n.69, 193–4, 215, 232, 235–6, 241–2, 248, 255 control of 164, 165, 177, 195, 198, 204, 211, 217–18, 220–3, 224 n.75, 225, 228, 233, 245, 249, 251, 256–8 core of 198, 213, 215, 229 dimensions of 163, 187, 229, 245 effective 48, 215, 230, 232, 235 n.119 elemental 101, 223, 227, 231, 240, 241, 245, 248 formal acts of 179, 188, 191, 193, 194, 195, 215, 227 n.87, 231, 233 n.110, 239, 240, 241 n.136, 245, 248 formal terms of 181, 191, 192, 215 full acts of 164, 171, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195, 231, 239, 240, 241 n.136, 245, 248 full terms of 191, 192, 215 incarnate 225, 230, 234, 235–6, 241, 242, 245, 246, 252–6 instrumental 191, 195, 215, 216 intersubjective 187, 190, 192, 211, 214, 215, 220, 224 n.74, 229, 235, 236, 242, 246, 248, 253 linguistic 98, 102–3, 146–7, 163, 166–201, 203–4, 214–15, 219, 223–4, 227, 229–30, 231, 233–5, 245–52, 258, 266 mystical 214, 233 n.110 partial terms of 175, 191–2, 194–5, 215 potential acts of 240–1, 245, 248, 253 realms 187, 212, 237–8 religious 187, 213–14 rules of 215 sources of 194, 215, 216 stages of 198, 199, 212, 214, 216, 234, 237, 238, 246 symbolic 163, 187, 192, 199, 219, 233–4, 246, 248–9, 253–5

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systematic 224–5, 226 theory of 123, 176, 180, 185, 187 transcendent 233 n.110 use, meaning as 167–8, 224 world mediated by 48, 67, 191, 192, 197, 207, 214 n.37, 255 Melchin, Kenneth 195 n.60, 204 n.5, 273 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 13, 21, 214, 225, 235, 252 metaethics 25 Metz, J. B. 13 Meynell, Hugo 2, 17, 32, 98 n.45, 119 n.1, 273 Milbank, John 264–5, 273 Mill, J. S. 34, 39, 41, 42, 51–2, 130, 267 Mitchell, Sandra 133 n.37 modal language 45, 65, 100, 129, 136, 138, 140–1, 151, 159, 171, 228, 247, 251 n.167 modal metaphysics 71–2 Moloney, Raymond 254 n.175, 273 Mooney, Hilary 92 n.35, 273 Moore, A. W. 262 n.6, 274 Moore, G. E. 45 n.106, 53, 63, 164, 165 More, St. Thomas 97 n.44 Morel, George 236 n.121, 252 Morelli, Mark D. 51 n.6 Mother Teresa of Calcutta 109 Muck, Otto 10, 12 Murnion, William 205–6, 274 Murphy, Francesca 89 n.28, 274 mutual self-mediation 248 myth 10, 12, 25, 164, 198, 219–21, 233, 249 naïve realism 16, 74, 156, 162, 188 natural language 176–7, 191–8, 201, 258 naturalism 49 n.2, 69–70 necessity 28, 36, 38 n.91, 70–2, 100, 133–4, 138, 141, 142 n.59, 151, 159, 211 n.22, 251 n.167 Nédoncelle, Maurice 220 n.57 neo-scholasticism 13, 24, Neurath, Otto 133, 142 n.59 Newman, John Henry 2, 4, 15, 20, 22, 35 n.86, 37, 50, 51, 205, 267 Newton, Isaac 40, 133, 134, 217, 226 Nicholas of Autrecourt 23 n.61, 262 Nietzsche and Nietzscheans 85, 111, 163, 219, 238, 263

Novak, Lesek 130–1 Nussbaum, Martha 85, 106 Ockham, William, ‘Ockham’s razor’ 23 n.61, 42–4, 72, 136 Ogden, C. K. 208–9, 256, 274 O’Hara, Charles 46 n.107 ontology of meaning 236, 256 oversight of insight 8, 23, 31 n.73, 39 n.92, 106, 130, 142, 148, 161, 207, 210, 223, 228, 251 n.167, 260 Oxford philosophy 15, 49–54, 72–5 Oyler, David 32 n.76 Pamburn, James 92 n.35, 274 Pap, Arthur 18 n.46, 142 n.59, 222 n.61 Parmenides 23 n.61, 219 Parsons, Talcott 8–9 Pascal, Blaise 37 Pasch, Moritz 100 Pavlov, Ivan 37 Peano, Guiseppe 52, 165 perceptualism 19 phenomenology, and descriptive knowledge (Lonergan) 20–1, 229, 234–5, 237, 239, 256–7 Philip the Chancellor 31 Phillippe, M. D. 150 n.76 philosophy of mind 54, 61, 72, 122, 139, 170, 173, 265 philosophy of science ix, 3, 25, 31–45, 119–62, 265 ‘picture thinking’ 199, 217, 219 Pierce, C. S. 34 n.80, 52, 66, 121, 209, 267 Pietà (Michelangelo) 111, 112 n.61 Plantinga, Alvin 169 Plato, Platonism xi, 22, 41, 51, 87 n.25, 89, 124, 125, 142, 170, 181, 182, 186, 191, 194, 219, 248, 267 Pope John Paul II, Wojtyła 98, 264 Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris 267 Pope Pius X, Pascendi 267 Popper, Karl 9, 32, 39, 40–4, 119, 121 positivism 16, 18–19, 33, 66, 123, 126–7, 129, 134–5, 140, 143, 149, 159, 161–2, 166, 169, 224, 238, 250, 256 n.182 potency 45, 157, 175–6, 186, 240–1 n.136, 251 n.167

Index predication 91, 157, 173–4, 187–8 Priest, Graham 52 n.12 probable judgments 35–7, 44–5, 55, 65 n.36, 141–3, 147, 150, 196 Proust, Marcel 103 Pryor, James 181 Pseudo-Dionysius 92 Ptolemy, Claudius 44 Putnam, Hilary 57, 60 n.27 quantum mechanics 25, 32, 36 n.88, 124–5, 133–4, 138, 148–9, 155 n.83, 161 quasi-operator 26, 228, 233, 250 Quine, W. V. O. 16–17, 18, 32 n.76, 52 n.12, 142 n.59, 155, 165, 199 radical orthodoxy 264–5 Rahner, Karl 11–13, 264 Ramsey, F. P. 46, 209 Ramsey, Ian 169 Rancière, Jacques 107, 115 n.69, 274 ‘raw data’ 67 Ray, G. 18 n.45, 274 recursive semantic structures 238 ‘refinement of feelings’, aesthetic sensibilities 80, 83, 110, 116, 221 relational patterns 156 relativity 25, 31, 121, 125, 217, 228 Renić, S.J., Dalibor 188 n.55, 274 Reynolds, Joshua 112 rhetoric 252 n.169 Richards, I. A. 208–9, 256 Richardson, William 23 Ricoeur, Paul 156 Rorty, Richard 261–2 Russell, Bertrand 27, 28, 46, 52, 53, 73–4, 142 n.59, 164, 165, 166, 169–70, 173–5, 179–83, 186, 201, 247, 259–60 Ryan, William 19, 207 Ryle, Gilbert 49 n.2, 53 n.14, 73 n.46, 135, 171, 199 Saison, Maryvonne 107 n.56 Sala, Giovanni 264 n.9, 274 Sartre, Jean-Paul 98, 112 Satie, Erik 96 n.42

285

Savile, A. 82 Scheler, Max 13, 99 n.46 Schelling, F. W. J. 78, 267 scholastic philosophy 9–10, 24, 71, 75, 87, 136 n.45, 152, 206, 244 n.143, 267 Schopenhauer, Arthur 111 scientific revolution 211 n.22 scientific verification 36, 39, 123–4, 133, 141 n.57, 142, 149, 161 Scotus, Duns Scotism, 23 n.61, 24, 64, 72, 132, 162, 214, 222, 223, 225 Scruton, Roger 78, 81, 83, 88–9, 91, 100–1, 190 n.59, 274 self-reference 10, 21, 76 n.32, 45 n.106, 47, 65, 97, 111, 121, 144, 183, 205, 219, 259, 260 Sellars, Wilfred 16, 129 set-theory 166, 182 Signorelli, Luca 90 ‘Sinn und Bedeutung’ 223 Skyrms, Brian 123–4, 127 Smith, Barbara 82 Smith, Barry 15 n.38, 274 Snell, Bruno 192, 197 Snell, R. J. 262 n.5, 274 Soames, Scott x, 17 n.41, 163–201, 203–4, 211, 212, 238, 247 n.147, 251, 259, 263, 274 act-types 181 antiprivate language argument 167, 247 n.147 beliefs 181, 188 event-types 182 formal language 180–3 Frege-Russell account of meaning 169, 170, 174–5, 179–81, 182, 201 indeterminacy of translation 17 n.41, 165 Platonism 170, 181–2, 186, 191, 194 properties 180, 184–5 psycholinguistic theories 176–7 Russell’s Principles of Mathematics 174, 179, 180 n.35 Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy 179–80 syntactic structures 180–1, 192

286

Index

‘systematicity’ in semantics 195, 200 truth conditions 176–7, 179, 182 type-token semantics 181–3, 191 social relativism 82 Socrates 22, 198, 244 n.140 Sokolowski, Robert 23, 274 Sorge 203 Sorokin, Pitirim 234 n.114, 255 n.180 Spirtes, Peter 138 Spitzer, Anais n.10 n.29, 275 Stalnaker, R. 170 Stanford school, philosophy of science 123, 127 Stanley, Jason 49 n.1, 275 Stein, Edith 23, 24 n.63 Stewart, J. A. 51, 54 Strawson, Peter 49 n.2, 199, 200 structuralism 163, 258 suarezian 15, 50 substance 137, 156–8, 196 Suppes, Patrick 123, 127 surd 8, 31, 217–18 ‘surface grammar’ 172, 196 symbolic logic 1, 30, 31, 51, 53, 73, 98, 100, 177–9, 260 n.2 symbolic techniques 73–4, 166, 169, 221–2, 251 Tarski, A. 170–1, 176 Thagard, Paul 41, 275 The Choir 8 Thijssen, T. M. 38 n.91 time-travel 186 Tolstoy, Leo 78, 80 transcendental method, and General Empirical Method 5–6, 9–14, 48, 211 translation 16–17, 103, 165, 177, 194, 247–8 Trawny, Peter 23 n.61, 275 Trethowen, Illtyd 53 n.13 Trinitarian theology (Lonergan) 12, 25, 26, 34, 35, 90, 93, 94, 217, 227 n.87, 240–1, 248 Trollope, Anthony 2 Turing, Alan 31, 46, 217 Tyrell, Bernard 268 n.16, 275

universal viewpoint (Lonergan) 47, 198–9, 213, 234 universalisation, in science 149 vagueness 49, 56, 96–7, 146–8 value 16, 20, 48, 67, 83–5, 88, 91 n.30, 92 n.35, 93, 95–9, 101–3, 105–9, 112–18, 120, 169, 188, 190, 191–2, 204, 207, 221, 224 n.74, 233, 241 n.136, 244, 247, 253, 254, 255, 258 Vatican Council, First 216, 264 Vatican Council, Second 13 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 116 n.70 Vedral, Vlatko 36 n.88 Venn, John 52 Verstehen, phenomenology of (Lonergan) 10, 12, 16, 21–2, 24, 61, 267 vertical/horizontal finality 115 n.69, 208 Vertin, Michael 32 n.76, 125 n.15 Vianney, St. John 109 Vico, G. 3, 214, 245, 246 ‘view from nowhere’ 63 Voegelin, Eric 11 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 92 n.35 von Hildebrand, Alice 105–6 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 20, 23, 78, 99 n.46, 105–6, 117, 203–4, 207–8, 225, 227, 239, 256 von Mises, R. 39 n.92 Vonier, Anscar 254, 275 Wagner, Richard 103 n.52 Walker, Timothy 120 n.4, 275 Wallace, William A. 38 n.91, 211 n.22, 275 Wang, Hao 47 Welte, Bernhard 20 Whately, Richard 51 Whewell, William 34 n.81, 39, 41, 52, 144, 275 Whitehead, Alfred North 74, 157, 165, 179 Wilkins, B. T. 41, 275 Wilkins, Jeremy D. 261 n.4, 275 Williamson, Timothy ix, x–xi, 49, 54–75, 189, 238, 246, 247 n.147, 261–2, 275 on ‘anti-luminosity’ 54–5, 57–8, 66, 69 on ‘factive’ states 60–1, 72–3 on ‘intuition’ 75

Index on ‘metaphilosophy’ 75 on modal metaphysics 69–72 on ‘psychological pragmatism’ 58–9, 60 Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Wittgensteinian 17, 46, 65–6, 77, 143, 165, 166–9, 172, 196, 197, 199, 209, 219, 224 n.74, 225, 229, 230 n.98, 247, 250 n.159, 263, 275

Wordsworth, William 78, 79–80, 84, 95 n.40 ‘world of immediacy’ 16, 67, 214 n.37 Wright, Andrew 120 n.4, 275 Wright, Crispin 49, 74 Wright, n. T. 26 Žižek, Slavoj 1–2

287