Radical unintelligibility¶
Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment.
Core Idea¶
Radical unintelligibility is treated here as the recurring social sciences, humanities, and arts identity summarized by this source-grounded definition: Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment. Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment. We can refuse to choose what we know is worth choosing. It is the refusal to make a decision that one deems one ought to make.
Scope of Application¶
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Documented setting. Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment.
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Documented setting. It is the refusal to make a decision that one deems one ought to make.
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Documented setting. Mortal sin is radically unintelligible: when we commit a mortal sin, we fully consent to do something despite knowing that it is wrong to do it.
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Documented setting. We can refuse to choose what we know is worth choosing.
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Documented setting. Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment.
Clarity¶
A clear use of Radical unintelligibility names the carrier, the operative relation, and the conditions under which the source treats the identity as present. The minimal definition is Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment. The strongest recognition evidence in the frozen account is: We can refuse to choose what we know is worth choosing.
Manages Complexity¶
Radical unintelligibility compresses multiple social sciences, humanities, and arts details into a stable diagnostic relation. The source shows both the central mechanism—it is the refusal to make a decision that one deems one ought to make.—and the practical consequence—it is the refusal to make a decision that one deems one ought to make. This compression makes cases comparable while leaving parameters, conventions, exceptions, and evidential quality explicit.
Abstract Reasoning¶
- Type the carrier. Identify the social sciences, humanities, and arts entities to which the claim applies.
- State the relation. Use the source-grounded identity: Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment.
- Check operation and conditions. Mortal sin is radically unintelligible: when we commit a mortal sin, we fully consent to do something despite knowing that it is wrong to do it.
- Demand recognition evidence.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Within the home domain. Knowledge about Radical unintelligibility transfers literally when a new case preserves the same carrier type, relation, and recognition test. Radical Unintelligibility, a term coined by Bernard Lonergan, is the philosophical idea that we can act against our better judgment. It is the refusal to make a decision that one deems one ought to make. Beyond the home domain. No canonical parent is asserted for Radical unintelligibility. An outside case receives the specialist name only when the same typed roles and rejection conditions can be filled literally; otherwise the comparison remains an analogy pending later graph densification.
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Radical unintelligibility sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (68th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.
Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (2551 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Exploratory thought — 0.86
- Frankfurt cases — 0.84
- Cognitive liberty — 0.84
- Bayes Correlated Equilibrium — 0.84
- Both/and reasoning — 0.83
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08