Grammar of Assent Chapter 8 - lonergan.org

Grammar of Assent Chapter VIII
Part 1: Formal Inference

by Peter Trahan

Inference
• The conditional acceptance of a proposition. (this by virtue of that)
• The object of inference is the truth-like, or a verisimilitude

Assent
• The unconditional acceptance of a proposition.
• The object of assent is a truth.

Newman asks, “how does a conditional act lead to an unconditional?” He argues that because
inferences start with unproven premises and because the conclusions of inferences are abstract and not
concrete, inferences can only conclude probabilities.

He describes the act of deductive reasoning as part of the “state of nature.” It is an “instinctive
perception” and as a “spontaneous impulse” and as “inevitable as the exercise of sense and memory”
and that we perform this act “without knowing how we do so.” Like the sense and memory this
reasoning act also open to error.

Newman therefore wishes to “invent a method which may act as a common measure between mind
and mind, as a means of joint investigation, and as a recognized intellectual standard … to secure us
against hopeless mistakes, and to emancipate us from the capricious ipse dixit of authority.”

He cites mathematics again (geometry and algebra) as an example of the kind of certainty he wishes
for: “a true record of the system of objective truth.”

He wishes to use a sort of symbolic logic as a method for discovering a way that all men can come
consensus about objective truth. He calls this the “inferential method”as a test and common measure
of reasoning.

“Without external symbols to mark out and to steady its course, the intellect runs wild; but with
the aid of symbols, as in algebra, it advances with precision and effect. Let then our symbols be
words: let all thought be arrested and embodied in words... and thought go for only so much as
it can show itself to be worth in language. Let every prompting of the intellect be ignored, every
momentum of argument be disowned, which is unprovided with an equivalent wording … what
I have called Inference, and the science, which is its regulating principle is Logic.

“The first step in the inferential method is to throw the question to be decided into the form of a
proposition; then to throw the proof itself into propositions, the force of the proof lying in the
comparison of these propositions with each other.”

He notes that this method will partly succeed and partly fail, depending on the adequacy of words to
express what can be thought as well as the ambiguity of and multiple senses of words themselves.

Inferences are more suitable to notional apprehensions, and the relations of notional apprehensions can
be made into a relation of symbols and “scientific management.”

The problem of first principles

Newman admits that logic and syllogism, while useful, cannot complete the proof because they cannot
prove the premises, or first principles from which the logical system reveals the inevitable conclusions
present in those premises which were not proven. If the premises are not proven, in what sense is the
conclusion proven? Only relative to the premises, which are as yet still uncertain with the system.

Newman seems to be pointing to a limitation of pure rationality to secure that which it seeks:

“Logic does not really prove. For genuine proof we require an organon more delicate,
versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation.”

New man says at the end of section 1 on formal inferences that:

“Thought is too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal,
delicate, and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate, to admit of the trammels of
any language.

“Nor is it any disparagement of the proper value of formal reasoning thus to speak of them.
That they cannot proceed beyond probabilities is most readily allowed by those who use them
most. Philosophers, experimentalists, lawyers, in their several ways, have commonly the
reputaiont of being, at least on moral and religious subjects, hard of belief; because, proceeding
in the necessary investigation by the analytical method of verbal inference, they find within its
limits no sufficient resources for attaining a conclusion.”

In this last paragraph, he speaks of “those who use [formal reasoning] most.” Philosophers, for
example. He says “they” find within the limits of formal reasoning no sufficient resources for attaining
a conclusion.

Is Newman one of “they”? Does he agree that a conclusion cannot be reached from within the limits of
formal reasoning?

Yes.

His conclusion of the first section of chapter 8, formal inference, is that it

determines neither our principles, nor our ultimate judgments, - that it is neither the test
of truth, nor the adequate basis of assent.

Thus the question, which he asked at the beginning:

“how does a conditional act lead to an unconditional?”

How do we free ourselves from the limits of formal reasoning into the liberation of certitude? Where
do we find “an organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation”?



Grammar of Assent Chapter VIII
Part 2: Informal Inference

This organon, Newman suggests, is like our eyesight, by which “we recognize two brothers, yet
without being able to express what it is by which we distinguish them.”

I do not possess a proof that Britain is an island, or that I must die, or that I was born, yet I possess a
“most precise, absolute, masterful, certitude” of these facts.

Many of our most obstinate and most reasonable certitudes depend on proofs which are
informal and personal, which baffle our powers of analysis, and cannot be brought under
logical rule, because they cannot be submitted to logical statistics.

If we must speak of Law, this recognition of a correlation between certitude and implicit proof
seems to me a law of our minds.

Newman states that the criterion of our judgments is deeply personal and our judgment depends more
upon the character of the arguer than upon the argument:

We judge for ourselves, by our own lights, and on our own principles; and our criterion of
truth is not so much the manipulation of propositions, as the intellectual and moral character of
the person maintaining them, and the ultimate silent effect of his arguments or conclusions upon
our minds.

Newman can now explain the source of maxims such as, “Formulas make a pedant and a
doctrinaire but it never makes converts.”

Such maxims mean that the process of reasoning which legitimately lead to assent, to action, to
certitude, are in fact too multiform, subtle, omnigenous, to implicit, to allow of being measured
by rule, that they are after all personal, - verbal argumentation being useful only in
subordination to a higher logic.

---

Every inquirer has a right to determine the question according to the best exercise of his
judgment, still whether he so determine it for himself, or trust in part or altogether to the
judgment of those who have the best claim to judge, in either case he is guided by the implicit
processes of the reasoning faculty, not by any manufacture of arguments forcing their way to an
irrefragable conclusion.