Matrix of cognitive meaning

I am going to continue to record long, important passages from Michael H. McCarthy’s The Crisis of Philosophy until I no longer need to do so.

So there.

Towards the beginning of his book, McCarthy introduces what he calls “The Matrix of Cognitive Meaning – An Orienting Map”. This is meant to provide a series of distinctions and definitions that he refers to throughout the book. This map maps several key concepts from across Lonergan’s Insight, but organizes them concisely.

My (still developing) argument is that Aristotle and Frege share a similar concept of science, namely the one embodied in classical consciousness. By extension, the logical positivists and James Ladyman share the classical concept of science, though to differing degrees. Since this argument relies upon McCarthy’s work heavily, specifically the part about both Aristotle and Frege seeking theoretical invariance in propositions, it’s worth explaining McCarthy’s matrix.

Animal knowing and fully human knowing

Lonergan notes the different levels of sophistication in animal knowing versus what he calls fully human knowing. McCarthy begins his discussion of cognitive meaning from that distinction.

Let me begin with a brief introductory note on meaning. Animals live in an environment with which they enjoy both causal and intentional relations. But the limits of an animal’s intentionality restrict the scope of its world. Animals clearly possess sensitive consciousness that they use effectively in adapting themselves to their immediate circumstances. They manage to survive both individually and collectively by orienting themselves within the world they experience directly. To the best of our knowledge the horizon of their consciousness is limited to this world of immediacy. The prelinguistic child is akin to the animals in the correlation between his or her consciousness and his or her world. The infant also lives in a world of immediacy. With the acquisition of linguistic and symbolic powers, the child transcends its restricted environment and enters a larger world mediated by meaning. As the human person develops intellectually and morally, his horizon of meaning and responsibility continually expands. There is no fixed limit to the world of the human being because there is no fixed limit to human intentionality in its intellectual and rational forms. Human perceptual consciousness, like that of the animals, is inherently limited, though it can be extended dramatically through the mediation of instruments devised by the mind and shaped by the hands. Intellectual and rational consciousness, however, are marked by an immanent tension. Although their actual achievement is always finite, their nature orientation and tendency are inherently unrestricted. There is a restless dynamism characteristic of human intentionality that regularly does beyond any finite achievement.

Because of intentionality, the human being’s relation to the world is essentially mediated by meaning. The scope of awareness and concern extends into the past and the future; the close-at-hand and the spatially remote; the possible, and obligatory as well as the actual. The many-dimensional world is open to us because of meaning. But human meaning is not a natural given like the sky above our heads or the earth beneath our feet. It has its source in intentional operations, both our own and that of the intersubjective communities to which we belong. This intentionality creates the meaning by which we understand the world and conduct ourselves within it. Purposive human transactions with the world are as complex as the patterns of intentional experience. We engage the world biologically, aesthetically, artistically, dramatically, practically, intellectually, and so forth. These difference types of transaction are mediated by different functions of meaning. Intentional meaning is effective when it guides our productive and artistic relations to the world; it is constitutive when it gives identity and significance to our responsible decisions and actions; it is communicative when it regulates our intersubjective transactions through speech and writing; and it is cognitive when it mediates our efforts of know the world as it really is.

Animal knowing appears to be essentially intuitive in nature; but properly human knowing, although it has an intuitive component, is deeply discursive. It advances through asking and answering questions. Human beings know the world not through their immediate experience of it but through the intelligent generation and reasonable affirmation of intentional signs. The world of our knowledge is a world mediated by true propositions, by the justified answers we give to the questions we ask one another. In this way, we know not only the past and the spatially remote but potentially the entire universe of being and value. Once the discursive nature of human knowledge is recognized, a basic question confronts the philosopher. Shall we start our analysis of cognitive intentionality with these mediating signs or can we go behind them to their originating source and ground in the intentional subject? This is the critical issue dividing conceptualists and intellectualists in the philosophy of mind and the theory of knowledge. The following account of cognitive meaning is openly intellectualist in its underlying commitments. (1)

The account of cognitive meaning*

The core of cognitive meaning is the unrestricted human desire to know: unlimited in scope, disinterested in nature, and detached in its normative operation, it is the permanent ground or principle (arche) of all human inquiry.

The sources of cognitive meaning are the conscious intentional operations that jointly constitute the process of human cognition. When not obstructed by alien desires, the desire to know unfolds in a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations, yielding progressive and cumulative results. Cognitive meaning is generated, refined, systematized, and eventually revised through this recurrent intentional process.

The acts of cognitive meaning are the basic intentional operations that formulate or posit answers to question that initiate and guide human inquiry. Questions for intelligence – what, why, how often, and so on – are met by formal acts of meaning in which tentative and hypothetical answers are submitted for critical verification. The question that guides critical reflection – is the tentative answer true – is met by a full act of meaning, an assertion (yes), denial (no), or suspension of judgment (I don’t know). Full acts of meaning affirm or deny the correctness and adequacy of the answers articulated in formal acts of meaning to the exploratory question of intelligence.

The terms of cognitive meaning are the successive answers fashioned by human inquiry to its own questions for intelligence and reflection. Formal terms of meaning are the propositions provisionally hypothesized in formal acts of meaning and subjected to truth appraisal in critical reflection. Full terms of meaning are truth-bearing propositions whose truth value has been determined and asserted in full acts of meaning. All the acts and terms of meaning have their proximate intentional source in direct and reflective insights, the pivotal acts in the complex structure of cognitional process.

The norms of cognitive meaning are the standards of appraisal by which the process of inquiry and its resultant acts and terms of meaning are reflectively evaluated. Canons of method articulate normative standards for the appropriate conduct of inquiry; the principles of logic express the standards of clarity, consistency, and rigor for formal terms of meaning; epistemology makes explicit the standards of objectivity and truth for full terms of meaning. The norms of cognitive meaning are the immanent critical exigencies regulative of the mind’s intentional activity in the pursuit of knowledge. Logic, epistemology, and cognitional theory articulate and thematize standards of correctness already operative implicitly in the prereflexive exercise of human intelligence and reason.

The human desire to know normatively unfolds in cognitional process and climaxes in the assertion or denial of full terms of meaning. The objects of cognitive meaning are the reality that is known through this self-correcting process of learning. Rationally affirmed propositional truth is the medium through which objective existence is humanly known. The core of cognitive meaning, the unrestricted desire to know, is fully united to the objects of cognitive, the reality that is to be known, through the sources , acts, terms, and norms of meaning in which it normatively unfolds. A philosophical theory of knowledge is required to give a full account of these interdependent dimensions of cognition and structure of being isomorphic with them.

The linguistic expressions of cognitive meaning: human beings conduct their inquiry and communicate and criticize its results in the medium of a common language. Questions for intelligence and reflection, formal and full terms of meaning, though they have their ground in intentional desires, operations, and norms, receive their full objectification in discourse. The complex network of theories, hypotheses, sentences, and sentence fragments in which partial, formal, and full terms of meaning are objectified and publicly communicated are the linguistic expressions of cognitive meaning.

Realms of cognitive meaning

Cognitive development occurs through the differentiation and specialization of cognitional process. Distinct exigencies of the human spirit are met by specializations of inquiry that generate original realms of cognitive meaning while creating new and continually evolving linguistic communities. The members of a realm of meaning share a common tradition and a common intentional life, that is, a common field of experience, a common method of understanding data, conceptualizing question and answers, and verifying results, a common estimate of importance and relevance. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, learning one of these languages is learning a new form of cognitive life.

The practical exigence of human beings unfolds in the specialization of intelligence known as common sense. What is common to the numberless varieties of common sense is their intentional standpoint rather than their explicit cognitive content. The common sense of one region, time, or specialized group will differ from that of others, but the intentional pattern of questioning, understanding, and judgment will be essentially the same. Common sense is a collaborative intellectual mastery of the concrete and particular insofar as it is relevant to the practical purposes, desires, and fears of specific historical communities. The transactions of common sense are conducted in ordinary discourse through a mode of linguistic expression exempt from the strict logical requirements of clarity, coherence, and rigor. Common sense has no theoretical inclinations.

The systematic theoretical exigence has gradually developed, over two millennia, into the specialization of intelligence known as empirical science. Theoretical science seeks to understand things not in their descriptive relations to human perceivers but in their explanatory relations to one another. The theoretical realm of meaning is the fruit of the collective human aspiration to universally valid explanatory knowledge. Technical canons of method and statement are devised to control its terms of meaning whose linguistic expressions are subject to the exacting norms of logic and epistemology. Communities of scientific meaning train new members in their methods and logic, operate within a shared technical language and paradigm unintelligible to outsiders, and conduct their inquiry within a highly complex network of interlocking beliefs. The community of theoretical science is a family of interdependent, hierarchically organized, normative practices based on tradition and authority, which historically put their own traditions and authorities into question.

The reflexive methodological exigence becomes prominent when common sense and theoretical science have become historically distinct and relatively autonomous realms of meaning. The increasing heterogeneity of consciousness and discourse prompts human beings to become reflexive about their cognition activity, to seek understanding of what they are doing and achieving in the practice of mathematics, empirical science, historical inquiry, common sense, philosophy, theology, and so on. This exigence promotes a specifically philosophical realm of meaning distinct from the practical and scientific realms it investigates. Its purpose is to distinguish, intentionally ground, critically analyze, and finally integrate the successive historical achievements of the sciences and common sense. Although the aspirations of reflexive philosophy remain theoretical, in the present context of philosophical crisis, it lacks the agreement on method, language, and inherited belief characteristic of empirical science. Philosophers today are implicitly united by a common synoptic goal, but they clearly do not possess a common program for achieving it.

The transcendent exigence drives the human spirit to raise questions about the ultimate foundations of existence and value. Is there an absolute, intelligent, unconditional ground of contingent reality? Is this ground a personal center of moral responsibility and a proper subject for moral evaluation? These ancient questions about God and the answers and aspirations they evoke receive diverse linguistic expression in the different realms of cognitive meaning; for example, ordinary religious discourse of common sense, theological doctrines modeled on the classical ideal of science as well as historically sensitive theologies, aware of the difference between transcendent and contingent being and sensitive to the need for functional specialization in theological inquiry. Human discourse about God may be phrased in ordinary language as in the prayers, symbols, and homilies of pastoral common sense, or it may be technical and theoretical as in the formulations of systematic theology.

Stages of cognitive meaning

The pretheoretical stage of practical common sense dominated the West until the advent of pre-Socratic philosophy and ended when Aristotle’s logic systematized the classical ideal of scientific theory.

In the second stage of meaning, common sense and systematic theory became distinct forms of cognition but empirical science had not yet become independent of philosophy. Either metaphysics or epistemology functioned as the foundational discipline on which theoretical science rested. This stage of classical consciousness in the realm of theory extended roughly from Aristotle to Kant. The historical sensitivity of Hegel, the evolutionary interests of Lyell and Darwin, the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries and non-Aristotelian logics, the liberation of empirical science from philosophy all propelled cognitive meaning into the third stage.

In the third stage of historical consciousness, common sense, empirical science, and philosophy have become distinct, complementary, and independent realms of cognitive meaning; the classical ideal of scientific theory and the quest for certainty have been abandoned, but the undefined character of foundational analysis and the uncertain prospects for theoretical integration face philosophy with a serious crisis of identity and self-definition.

The architecture of philosophy in the third stage of meaning

The different dimensions of human knowledge that I have outlined in the matrix of meaning offer a specialized subject matter for distinct though related philosophical disciplines.

Cognitional theory distinguishes the core, sources, and acts of cognitive meaning and explores their intentional relations; through intentional analyses of the origin and process of human cognition, it proposes an explanatory account of what human beings are doing when engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.

Formal logic studies the relations of presuppositions, implication, and deducibility among formal terms of meaning (actual or potential); it articulates the normative standards of intelligibility that a truth-vehicle or deductively ordered system of truth-vehicles must satisfy.

Epistemology studies the necessary conditions under which the assertion or denial of full terms of meaning is rationally justified; it articulates the normative requirements and implications of objective knowledge and truth.

Metaphysics studies the basic intelligible structure of the objects of cognitive meaning (actually existing things and their properties); it also seeks to integrate the multiple realms of cognitive meaning without conflating their essential differences. Competing metaphysical strategies of integration are based on opposing estimates of the locus of theoretical invariance within the comprehensive matrix of cognition.

Semiotic analysis investigates the linguistic expressions of cognitive meaning in terms of their correlated sense and reference. Its task is to explicate the concepts (Begriffe) or thoughts (Gedanke) expressed by linguistic signs and to fix the objects, if any, to which those signs refer. Cognitive semiotic analysis broadly divides philosophers into those who explicate formal terms of meaning through the assignment of truth conditions and those who do it by specifying their conditions of knowledge and verification.

The different realms of cognitive meaning, common sense, empirical science, philosophy, and theology, admit of analysis by each of these distinct philosophical disciplines. In successive historical periods, the leading philosophers have given priority to different disciplines, treating their basic questions and answers as foundational to the philosophic examination of knowledge as a whole. The central issue in this dispute over foundations is the most effective order of philosophical inquiry. Classical consciousness, with its anticipation of permanent theoretical meaning, emphasized the order of logical systematization. One discipline is systematically prior to another if its explanatory categories and principles are logically presupposed in the statement and solution of the other’s problems.

Notes:

1. Michael H. McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy, p. 11 – 12.

• * The entirety of the following text has been taken from The Crisis of Philosophy, but has been broken up differently in order to facilitate ease of reading.