The Lonergan Reader, Part 2, Chapter 4: Dimensions of Meaning

"Human reality ... is not merely meant but in large measure constituted through acts of meaning" (388). Lonergan says he will explain what this means.

In dreamless sleep, there is no meaning present. When one is an infant before language develops, meaning is immediate. Lonergan writes, "When first hearing and speech develop, they are directed to present objects, and so meaning initially is confined to a world of immediacy, to a world no bigger than the nursery, and seemingly no better known because it is not merely experienced but also meant. Then, to all appearances, it is quite correct to say that reality comes first and meaning is quite secondary" (388). Immediate meaning will be contrasted with mediated meaning. Immediate experience is narrower than mediated meaning because it is limited to our own experience.

When we develop language, we begin to enter a broader world. Lonergan describes mediated meaning: "For words denote not only what is present but also what is absent, not only what is near but also what is far, not only the past but also the future, not only the factual but also the possible, the ideal, the ought-to-be for which we keep striving though we never attain. So we come to live, not as the infant in the world of experience, but in a far vaster world that is brought to us through memories of other men, through the common sense of the community, through the pages of literature, through the labors of scholars, through the investigations of scientists, through the experience of saints, through the meditations of philosophers and theologians" (388).

Lonergan continues his explanation of mediated meaning: "This larger world, mediated through meaning, does not lie within anyone's immediate experience. It is not even the sum, the integral, of the totality of all worlds of immediate experience. For meaning is an act that does not merely repeat but goes beyond experiencing. What is meant is not only experienced but also somehow understood and, commonly, also affirmed. It is this addition of understanding and judgment that makes possible the larger world mediated by meaning ..." (388).

Beyond the world we know about, there is the world we create. This world we make we first intend. Man's making is not limited to the world. He also makes himself. The existential subject has to decide what he is to become. Lonergan thinks that social and cultural changes are changes in meaning.

Lonergan distinguishes between common sense and theory: two levels of meaning. Later he will add interior and transcendence. Myth and magic are also examples of meaning.

A clear example of the breakdown of classical culture exists in the sciences. "But modern science is not true; it is only on the way towards truth. It is not certain; for its positive affirmations it claims no more than probability. It is not knowledge but hypothesis, theory, system, the best scientific opinion of the day" (394). Modern science works in a contingent universe. In the classical world, knowledge was a result of the universe being necessary. "Insofar as the universe was necessary, it could be known scientifically; but insofar as it was contingent, it could only be known by opinion" (395).