The Lonergan Reader, Part 2, Chapter 2: Cognitional Structure

First, Lonergan talks about a dynamic structure: "A whole, then, has parts. The whole is related to each of the parts, and each of the parts is related to the other parts and to the whole" (381).

Not every whole is a structure.

He defines a dynamic structure: "The whole itself may be self-assembling, self-constituting; then it is formally dynamic. It is a dynamic structure" (381).

Human knowing is a dynamic structure. "Now human knowing involves many distinct and irreducible activities: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, inquiring, imagining, understanding, conceiving, reflecting, weighing the evidence, judging. No one of these activities, alone and by itself, may be named knowing" (381).

"As merely seeing is not human knowing, so for the same reason merely hearing, merely smelling, merely touching, merely tasting, may be parts, potential components of human knowing, but they are not human knowing itself. What is true of sense is no less true of understanding. Without the prior presentations of sense, there is nothing for a man to understand; and when there is nothing to be understood, there is no occurrence of understanding. Moreover, the combination of the operations of sense and of understanding does not suffice for human knowing. There must be added judging" (381-382).

So, knowing requires experience, understanding, and judging.

"But human knowing is also formally dynamic. It is self-assembling, self-constituting. It puts itself togethert, one part summoning forth the next, till the whole is reached. And this occurs, not with the blindness of a natural process, but consciously, intelligently, rationally. Experience stimulates inquiry, and inquiry is intelligence bringing itself to act; it leads from experience through imagination to insight, and from insight to the concepts that combine in single objects both what has been grasped by insight and what in experience or imagination is relevant to insight. In turn, concepts stimulate reflection, and reflection is the conscious exigence of rationality; it marshals the evidence and weighs it either to judge or else to doubt and so renew inquiry" (382).

Lonergan writes about consciousness and self-knowledge: "Where knowing is a structure, knowing must be a reduplication of the structure. ... But if knowing is a conjunction of experience, understanding, and judging, then knowing knowing has to be a conjunction of (1) experiencing experience, understanding, and judging, (2) understanding one's experience of experience, understanding, and judging, (3) judging one's understanding of experience, understanding, and judging to be correct" (383).

There is a difference between consciousness and knowing. "Self-knowledge is the reduplicated structure" (383). Consciousness is just the experience of it.