Understanding and Being lecture 5:2

CD/mp3 146, second part of fifth Halifax lecture on Insight. Corresponds to CWL 5: 123-32. Sponsored by Mary Kierans, in the name of Hugh Kierans. Good judgment can be eclipsed by psychic disturbance. Sound judgment means control of all the factors relevant to the prospective judgment. And there are indefinite qualifying alternatives that can be introduced. The condition of the invulnerable insight is stated objectively: not that no further relevant questions occur to me, but that there are no further relevant questions. By combining what has been said about concrete judgments of fact and about judgments on the correctness of concrete insights, one can account for all of the judgments of common sense. But the scientist's judgments are only probable. The scientist cannot establish that there is no other theory that would cover all the data we have at present and account for further data now not accounted for. A third class of judgments that illustrate the virtually unconditioned are analytic propositions and principles. Analytic propositions are an indefinitely large group. As such they do not give any significant knowledge. But analytic principles arise when the defined terms in their defined sense occur in concrete judgments of fact. Analytic principles are divided into three classes: those in which the verifying judgments are affirmed simply (the philosophic case), or provisionally (the scientific), or serially (the mathematical).

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