Some Technical Terms

Some Technical Terms

If looking at something means that you understand it, then everyone only need look to understand. It follows that everyone with good vision starts with the same view. But everyone does not understand in the same way. So our “views” must be influenced by something other than from merely looking (or otherwise sensing). Those views are, in part, your philosophical inheritance.

Looking = Understanding and Knowledge of Sense

VERSUS

Thinking Processes = Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning

Further, in technical terms, I refer to your philosophical inheritance as some basic assumptions you hold (your philosophical foundations) and how, in reflection, you view your own fundaments, i.e., your understanding (cognition), epistemology (knowledge), metaphysics (being), ontology (reality), the ethical and political dimensions of being (the good writ-small and writ-large), ultimate being and good, and the ultimate good of being. And yes, you have inherited views on all these things; these views are named philosophical foundations; and they tend to float around in most of our thought like smog in a busy city. (Though we are exploring briefly here, we devote some chapters to these issues and meanings.)

Fundaments: Aspects and functions you are born with and develop over time. Fundaments develop, but their presence as a part of our conscious order does not change according to new learning.

Foundations: Philosophical and other assumptions that you learn with regard to your fundaments and that underpin your more topical thought, e.g., you have philosophical views (fundaments), but those views are developed and shaped differently (philosophical foundations); and you have social relationships that develop (or not) (social fundament), but those relationships vary according to many different factors (social foundations). So it is with several aspects of your human being, e.g., intellectual, ethical, political, spiritual, etc.

Moreover, our views drawn from our philosophical inheritance (foundations) may or may not be “in tune” with the fundaments that you have been born with and that have been developing in you all along, or how you actually go around questioning and knowing things—a statement that assumes there is such a reality, such questioning, and such knowing. However, on these very assumptions, you may discover (question and come to know) a difference between what you actually are and do on a quite regular basis, on the one hand, and what you think you are and do, on the other.

Hence, I distinguish here and in a later chapter your philosophical fundaments--what are the facts of the case and how you think and act in terms of them--from your philosophical foundations as inherited—what you assume and think are the facts of the case. Foggy, distorted, or attuned, in this writing your foundations are both what are attuned with your fundaments and-or what you have received from, or what has come “down” to you in, your philosophical tradition, as the philosophical facts of the case. If our inheritance is not attuned with our fundaments, then we can be in possession of confused and bifurcated foundations. Whether or not they actually are attuned remains to be seen. Regardless, your being in or out-of-tune philosophically has vast and entirely concrete implications for all of your thought, speech, and act.

In fact, one of your actual fundaments is your ability to spontaneously self-correct; and we will refer to your self-corrective process many times in the present work. However, we make a distinction between your philosophical fundaments and your philosophical foundational inheritance. An exploration of these, and your re-attunement of one with the other, if that is called for, can only help you in your self-understanding, and perhaps also in your future self-corrective movements. Again, the philosophical maxims are “know thyself” and “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Indeed, your interior activities can only be enhanced by your self-reflective knowledge of them and of some of the technical terms that embody them.

The present work will provide a beginning place of self-awareness of your own fundaments and how they operate, of a self-critique of your own inherited philosophical foundations, and a roadmap for a new attunement between yourself and what you think about yourself.

Of course, there is much more to it; and many more technical terms to learn and relate to your own experience; and your inherited foundations may already include some variously named pitfalls, e.g., subjectivism, positivism, relativism, or many other distorting notions that, as your in-place assumptions, may already affect your views of things, including the work you are reading right now. Thus, the work provides an adequate set of theories, a technical-conceptual language, and pedagogy to guide you and to keep you both personally engaged and in a methodical and critical frame of mind.

However, we are exploring the very assumptions that you already bring to this reading. As such, we must first briefly explain, expose-to-the-light, and attempt to avoid potential pitfalls that may be a part of those assumptions. We do so while, first, taking full advantage of science, critical method, and the critical habits of the scientist; and second, while taking full advantage of the insights that accompany the post-modern movement into ad infinitum interpretive meaning and conceptual expressions, and the various notions of uncertainty that accompany those interpretations. We also avoid the pitfalls of empiricism while, at the same time, drawing on meaningful and critical evidence to make our discernments, and ultimately our judgments, about what is, in fact, true—in this case, about our own minds (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000; 1972).

Our exercises, then, are experiential, exploratory, empirical, participatory, interpretive, and language-based; the self-appropriation aspect of the theory is unique as an implied dimension of the data itself; and for its fruition the project depends entirely on your ability and willingness to experiment and to self-reflect for the theory’s concrete verification and confirmation procedures.

Finally, though our exercises require that we incorporate in them a specified theory and its technical language, we claim no specific or calcified theoretical conception or doctrine as the only appropriate theory. Rather, the point of the reflection and discussion points embedded in each chapter, and the exercises in their own chapter, is to go “under” or beyond our specified theory, logical order, and conceptual expression, and to return to your original and recurring experience of your own consciousness, otherwise known in poetic language as your heart, spirit, mind, and soul, regardless of what technical language we give it.

You will of course be interpreting yourself. However, with an adequate set of theories and verification procedures, the interpretation can be adequate to the data and to your recurring experience of it and thus, a right and good one.