Bernard Lonergan's Critical Realism

Lonergan’s epistemology gives us the resources to understand the shifting horizons of late-modern culture. He gives an account of the history of philosophy that is based on his cognitional theory. Many of our present conflicts have roots in philosophical conflicts that many know little about. Joseph Kroger compares Lonergan and Michael Polanyi showing that both see a basic shift in the notion of reason between classical and modern models and both offer a third notion of reason. For Lonergan this is transcendental method and is based on cognitional theory. His task is reconstructive in light of current philosophical trends. He does not despair in the face of postmodernism, but offers a way forward. He understands the notions of reason at work in classical and modern thought and offers an explanatory account while positing a better notion of reason.

We see Lonergan's approach in his treatment of theories of knowing. Lonergan shows that idealism and empiricism, though they are never able to speak meaningfully to one another, share an underlying notion of reality: that knowing reality is analogous to seeing. This idea of knowledge claims that “objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is what is out there now to be looked at” (Method in Theology 238). In the case of idealism, what is contained in the mind is meaningful, it just in no way refers to the real. Lonergan claims that this overlooks the distinction between the world of immediate sense experience and the world as mediated by meaning (which is the real world). Lonergan's critical realism acknowledges this distinction and seeks to know the world mediated by meaning.