Monday, January 15, 2007

Introduction to TRANSCENDENTAL/General Empirical METHOD

TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD

Another name for transcendental method (TM) is general empirical method (GEM). Transcendental method as a theoretical development is the contribution of the philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, and is drawn from several texts including Insight, a Study of Human Understanding (1958 & 2000), Method in Theology (1972), several Collections of papers, and other writings and dialogue.

A method is "not a set of rules to be followed meticulously by a dolt. It is a framework for collaborative creativity." Further, method is "a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results" (Lonergan, 1972).

Transcendental method as a theory points to transcendental method as the actual operating method of the human mind. Before we have a theory of the mind's method, we have a mind with a creative and self-corrective method to refer to.

Thus, transcendental method-the-theory refers to transcendental method-the-reality; or to the shared structure, developmental patterns, and activities of our thinking experience as human beings in history.

Aspects of a mind already in operation are "not a product of any culture but, on the contrary, are the principles that produce cultures, preserve them, development them" (p. 282).

Similarly, transcendental method-the-theory is a conceptual construct that we can change and develop according to discoveries about the relevant data. However, transcendental method-the-reality is not a conceptual construct, but the functioning consciousness that constructs and reconstructs concepts according to movements in human understanding. Getting a cognitional theory to adequately match the actual method, then, and providing a method for explicit access-- without vulgarizing the philosopher's work or the philosophical journey itself-- is the philosophical challenge of the day.

The following is a rather long quote; however, it is relevant to our explanation of TM and is quoted from Lonergan’s Insight, A Study of Human Understanding. (I have added non-philosophical meaning in parentheses for those who are not familiar with the technical terms used.)

If Descartes has imposed upon subsequent philosophers a requirement of rigorous method, Hegel has obliged them not only to account for their own views but also to explain the existence of contrary convictions and opinions. Accordingly, our appeal has been not only to the isomorphism (the “match”) between the structure of cognitional activity and the structure of proportionate being (all that is), but also to the polymorphism (many forms, including biases) of human consciousness. From the isomorphism there has followed (in his book Insight) a series of brief but highly effective refutations of contrary views. However our method possesses still further significance. Not only is it possible to deal piecemeal with opposed opinions but also there is available a general theorem to the effect that any philosophy, whether actual or possible, will rest upon the dynamic structure of cognitional activity either as correctly conceived or as distorted by oversights and by mistaken orientations.”

“Such a theorem in itself is simple enough but it labors under one considerable difficulty. No one would deny that conclusions follow from premises or that, as our metaphysics has followed from our conception of cognitional activity, other metaphysics or negations of metaphysics would follow from other conceptions. But obviously considerable resistance would meet the claim that the procedure yielded results that were strictly coincident with the views of other philosophers. The most that could be established would be a general similarity of structure and tendencies, while, commonly enough, philosophers living and dead are not just structures and tendencies but also less general responses to problems peculiar to particular places and times.”

“To meet this difficult, it is necessary to transpose the issue from the field of abstract deduction to the field of concrete historical process. Accordingly, instead of asking whether the views of any given philosopher follow from assumptions of a specific type, we propose to ask whether there exists a single base of operations from which any philosophy can be interpreted correctly, and we propose to show that our cognitional analysis provides such a base. In this fashion, the a priori element of cognitional analysis joins hands with the a posteriori element of historical data . . .” (Insight, a Study of Human Understanding, Chapter on Metaphysics as Dialectic; 1956, pp. 530-31; & Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3; 2000, pp. 553-54
).
(content parentheses added)

That theorem is transcendental or general empirical method (TM/GEM). Bernard Lonergan developed transcendental methodinto a formulated theory to adequately match and express actual cognitional activities. However, the theoretician himself maintained the distinction between, first, the broad outlines of commonly shared human mindedness ("infrastructure") and, second, formulated theory as a “superstructure,” as an intentional-critical, but variable affair, and as a product of the intellectual pattern of experience, aimed at better and better explanation of data--in this case, the data of the human mind.

In this way, TM--as our commonly shared human mindedness--also became referred to as a transcultural base. “Clearly it is not transcultural inasmuch as it is explicitly formulated; but it is trans-cultural in the realities to which the formulation refers. . .” (p. 282).

Further, through employment of an adequate theory, we use the mind's own method of discovery and verification and of knowing-the-real as a critical venture (as we do with any discovery and verification), to discover and verify the mind’s own method of discovery, and to know it too in critical fashion.

At its core, then, the body of work surrounding a study of transcendental method is about this discovery and how we go about knowing the real of anything. Getting the right constructs and concepts, and setting up the critical conditions for verifying those theories in the data of concern, then, become the fundamental work of the field of philosophy—a field that has always sought to discover the fount of human creativity and the source of unification for all knowledge fields.

Finally, neither the human mind, nor transcendental method as a theory of it, nor its critical verification, suggests a conflict with or divorce from anyone's faith journey. Rather, and though we can identify the general question for ultimate meaning as mystery in the structure of the mind, transcendental method (as both reality and theory) stands at the critical empirical basis of, but is not itself an answer to, that journey. Thus, no specific religious view is required or necessary to develop, to understand, or to verify the empirical work of transcendental method as general theory.

On the other hand, we invite the discussion of theological, religious, and faith issues on this site (see site section on religious and theological studies).

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