Using Lonergan and Logic to Avoid the Hermeneutic Circle

Philosopher, Hans Georg Gadamer has pointed out that a person can only know reality through the use of sense experience, mediated by meaning. Thus, what we know is both limited, and made possible through the cognitive use of meaning categories. Gadamer points out, however, that if it were not for certain, "forestructures of knowing," that we would be caught in a type of "analytic spin" (Spann), were we can not really know anything objectively because there is no objective way of grounding our meaning categories, other than other meaning categories, which of course would involve an invalid, logically circular way of knowing.
I have found two diferrent ways of using "forestructures of knowing" which provide a way out of the analytic spin of the hermeneutic circle of logic circularity. First, you can use sense experience and concrete logic to ground logic itself, and then use logic as a way of critiquing meaning categories. Thus, any meaning framework that is used must not involve a logical contradiction. Additionally, a modified form of the Lonerganian Cogntional Structure can be used as well. Thus, the following cognitive approach can be used: Experience, Analytical Logic Understanding, and then Analogical Logic Understanding or Reflection. Ordinarily, a person might find that analytic logic at Level 2 of Understanding might involve some logical circularity or analytic spin. However, since a person can take the ideas of analytic logic and then use them with analogical logic (intuition), analytic spin is avoided, and a form of authentic subjectivity or objectivity is achieved. With analytic logic, one might assert that A is not B, or that the Apple is not a Banana, however, with analogical logic, one might assert that A is not like B, or that an Apple is not like a Banana. However, one migh also say that an Apple is like a Banana, since they are both pieces or fruit. In any event, the foregoing meets the requirements of Logical Positivism, since analytic logic and analogical logic, while different, are analogous, and are equally valid.

(C)Copyright 2011 by Anthony J. Fejfar

Kant and Hermeneutics

The idea that there is a Neumenal World and a Phenomenal World is attributed to the Philospher, Emmanuel Kant. Kant wrote that the phenomenal world is the world of sense experience, while the neumenal world is the world of ideas. Kant tells us that we can only really know the neumenal world of ideas, because, starting very early in childhood, human beings only really have sense experience which is interprested and constructed in light of ideas, or, meaning categories. Thus, Kant says that we never really know the phenomenal world of sense experience, as such. Philosopher, Bernard Lonergan says the same thing when he asserts that at Level 2 Consciousness, we only know the World Mediated by Meaning. Do we have any connection at all, then, with the material world of sense experience, which the empiricists claim that exists. Well, the Philosopher, Han Georg Gadamer tells us that us that there are "forestructures on knowing" which are in the human mind, prior to cogntition. Gadamer's position is a type of Neo-platonism, where he asserts that there are essentially, "Interpretive Forms" front loaded into the mind, just as Neo-platonists assert that there are "Immutable Platonic Forms" which are front loaded into the human mind, prior to cognition. However, there is yet another approach which asserts that we can know the real of the "world out there," which is Lonergan, stating that we know the world, or the real, through the cognitive process, of, experience, understanding, and then, judgment and reflection. Now, it is apparent that the cognitive level and operation of judgement and reflection involves a cognitive, intuitive function, not just ideal, analytic understanding. This is consistent with cogntive and epistemological, phenomenological reasearch which states the intuition involves high speed, preconscious or unconscious analogical thought processes in the mind, which can go quantum, and thus non-local at a distance, so that the person can have an immediate intuitive sympathy (Bergson) with an object or an idea which is out there is the physical world, and or, the historical world of the past.