Heuristic structures in knowledge

My friend Thomas Ball, the filmmaker, has posted another fabulous reflection on his blog, at Telos productions;  which was previously called "The diary of a filmmaker".   I have loved his essays over the years, on art;  and what art means for us.  This month's reflection is about the Venice Biennale, and the show on the time between the world wars, as fascism intensified, and what that futuristic cultural context was, both in history and art, and how they interacted. 
One of the things Tom quoted was a discussion of the meaning of heuristics.  When I was in college, I majored in philosophy.  My metaphysics professor had us learn from the book "Insight" by Bernard Lonergan, SJ.  Lonergan was interested in the way we know, in the structure of knowledge and shared thinking in scientific endeavors.  He wrote a LOT about heuristic structures of knowing.  SO here is my posting to Tom's blog on this issue:
"I also have to say something about the word “Heuristic”. It warms the cockles of my heart, as it is a very important word in philosophy. You probably remember that I majored in philosophy! I was taught in metaphysics, that the stuff of knowledge fits into heuristic structures of thought, much as we fit things into boxes for mailing, or for packaging something. A heuristic structure in philosophy is something like a steel girder skeleton of a skyscraper– you are going to fill it with the rest of the building, with the details and the actual stuff, but you need this scaffold to begin with. The scaffold in thinking is the outline or the container of such information, and how it fits together with other information. For example, we could say that knowledge is sort of like a castle, with lots of turrets and rooms, and occasionally a whole wing gets redone, when it seems it is too narrow or too dark, or a whole new idea comes about. (for example, when physics was grappling with what Einstein said, which shifted us away from Newtonian physics. We acknowledge that we started with Newtonian physics, but we have this second or third floor, where a more sophisticated model exists, and where finer tuning for what is real can be done by scientists working at the edges of knowledge in this field. We have to use the materials we know, and we have to build on what has come before. Kant worked to try to explain categories of thought such as gravity, weight, space and time, sequence, coherence; ways we can describe scientific processes so that something can be checked for accuracy, or taught to someone else. How can we agree on what the scaffolding IS, for thinking and for exploring new theories or new data, finding new answers to our endless questions and with our ever-present curiosity? This is the issue of heuristics. Lonergan said that we are constantly expanding knowledge at the border of the known, with heuristic structures which are needing to be filled in. This also has to do with process, with evolution, with finding the boundaries of the known and then exploring something experimental beyond that. Thanks for sharing that word, which has so much philosophical nuance attached to it!"