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Lonergan's Theory of Knowledge and the Social Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Hugo Meynell
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Extract

Bernard Lonergan’s theory of knowledge is not yet very well-known among social scientists. But it seems to me that it has implications of fundamental importance for the central problems with which they are concerned. In what follows, I shall try to explain why.

What is the nature of the explanation of human behaviour sought by the social scientist, and what relation does it have to the explanations which agents give of their own actions? It is characteristic of the sociological view which one might call ‘positivist’ that it eliminates as quite irrelevant to the scientific explanation of human behaviour the accounts given by the agents themselves. This is justified by the claim that the agent’s point of view is by its very nature individual and subjective; whereas science aspires to a form of explanation which is objective and publicly verifiable. Completely opposed to the positivist view is that which takes the agent’s explanation of his own behaviour as uniquely privileged. On this account, social science is pursuing a chimaera if it looks for any explanation of an action other than that which the agent gives or at least is capable of giving himself. This is a central contention, I think, of the ethnomethodologists; it has also been defended by Peter Winch.

A third view is the Marxist one, which differs from that just alluded to in that it insists that what human beings are up to on the one hand, and the justifications which they give of what they are doing, are two very different things ; but does not aspire to the kind of ‘reductionism’ which is practised by the positivist.

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Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 56 , Issue 664 , September 1975, pp. 388 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Cf. Garfinkel, H., Studies in Ethnomethodology (New Jersey, 1967)Google Scholar; Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1965)Google Scholar; and Understanding a Primitive Society (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1964; reprinted in D. Phillips, Z. (ed.), Religion and Understanding (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar).

2 Cf. MacLellan, D., The Thought of Karl Marx. An Introduction (London, 1971)Google Scholar, 45f; also Bottomore, T. B. and Rubel, M. (eds.), Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1963)Google Scholar; 28, 39, 68, 74, 90.

3 ‘For a conveniently brief account, cf. Lonergan, B., Collection (London, 1967), 225‐7Google Scholar. It is unfashionable, in that the use of introspection as a method in psychology is apt to be deplored both by behaviourist psychologists and by analytical philosophers. Patrick McGrath argues that Lonergan's whole account of knowledge is an example of language gone ‘on holiday’ (Knowledge, understanding and reality: some questions concerning Lonergan's philosophy; in Looking at Lonergan's Method, ed. Corcoran, Patrick SM (Dublin, 1975)Google Scholar, 34f.). By consistent application of the principles MoGrath derives, or purports to derive, from Wittgenstein, one could rule out a priori most advances in science and philosophy, and any original use of language in poetry. Whether this constitutes an abuse, or a legitimate application, of the views of the master, is a matter I would prefer to leave to the exegetes. In the same volume, Elizabeth Maclaren charges Lonergan with ‘staggering’ circularity (Theological Disagreement and the Functional Specialities, 80): apparently on the grounds that he uses his method to justify his results, and his results to justify his method. The latter claim is simply false. Lonergan justifies his method not by its results, but by reference to the elements constitutive of the process of coming to know, which each person is supposed to verify as occurring within himself.

4 Cf. Lonergan, , Insight. A Study of Human Understanding (London, 1957), 82-3Google Scholar: 248, etc.

5 Cf., e.g., Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic (London, 1918), 155ffGoogle Scholar.

6 It is to be noted that, if the above sketch of Lonergan's basic theory of knowledge is anything like correct, Mary Hesse's account, on the basis of which she sees fit to make a number of sarcastic comments, is a gross misrepresentation (Lonergan and method in the natural sciences, in Corcoran, op. cit.). In many ways, Lonergan's view of scientific method is remarkably similar to that of Karl Popper, with whom he shares (1) a conviction that science aspires to knowledge of what is really true about the world, (2) an emphasis on the importance of the creative role of the theorist for the advance of science, and (3) an insistence on the sharp distinction between the activity of concocting theories on the one hand, and that of finding out whether they are likely to be true or false on the other. However, Lonergan does not share with Popper that particular account of the validation and invalidation of theories which has rendered him so liable to attack by Thomas Kuhn.

7 Insight, 377.

8 R. Bierstedt provides a fine example of this manoeuvre, in his Introduction to Judith Willer's The Social Determination of Knowledge (New Jersey, 1971), 2–3Google Scholar.

9 Lonergan, , Method in Theology (London, 1972), 17Google Scholar.

10 Lonergan himself cites Galileo, not Locke, in this connection. Cf. Insight, 130–132.

11 Ibid., 413‐4.

12 This is sometimes held to be a misrepresentation of Kant's view. But cf. Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966), 236‐8Google Scholar.

13 Insight,372‐A, 422‐3.

14 For the more respectful recent attitude to Hegel, cf. Murray, David, Hegel: Force and Understanding, in Reason and Reality, ed. Vesey, G. N. A. (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

15 Insight, 533, 536–42. 394

16 Ibid., xi‐xii, xiv, 191, 199–203.

17 Ibid., 241.

18 lbid., chapter xviii.

19 Method in Theology, 238–40.

20 Insight, 619–624.

21 Ibid., 229‐32, 628‐9, 689–90.

22 Ibid., 37‐8, 41, 291‐6.

23 Ibid., 564‐8.

24 Nicholas Lash, in his serious and perceptive paper on Method and Cultural Discontinuity (Corcoran, op. cit., 127–143), suggests that Lonergan underestimates the discontinuity between different cultural epochs and contexts (129). But I think that he himself‐ overlooks the factors which appear to be constitutive of human thought and action as such–surely human action, whatever its social context, must be due to some kind of understanding of some range of experience; and that he has not sufficiently adverted to the paradoxical and indeed self‐destructive consequences of the relativism with which he flirts.

25 Method in Theology, 265, 292.