Lonergan's Cognitional Theory and Historical Method

Lonergan’s theory of history depends on an important distinction between the world of immediacy (the available sense world) and the world of meaning. The world of meaning is made up of the cultural matrix, the common held meanings of a group of people, and within that the meaning of individual speech and action. Lonergan says,

“Meaning, then, is a constitutive element in the conscious flow that is the normally controlling side of human action. It is this constitutive role of meaning in the controlling side of human action that grounds the peculiarity of the historical field of investigation” (178).

Lonergan shows that naive realism, empiricism and idealism share a basic supposition about knowledge: that knowing is like seeing. This myth of knowledge as seeing overlooks the distinction between the world of immediacy and that of meaning. The naive realist believes he knows the world of meaning in a way analogous to seeing (reading the meaning of a text straight off the page), while the empiricist limits knowledge to that which can be experienced by the senses. The idealist understands that knowledge is meaningful, but denies that it refers to reality (it is only ideal). Lonergan, over and against all, reveals the source of their disagreement: their shared myth of knowledge as seeing, and posits critical realism. The critical realist understands that the real world is that which is mediated by meaning. He says, “the reality known is not just looked at; it is given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding, posited by judgment and belief” [Please note the four levels of consciousness at work. Method 238.]

It is from this point that historical inquiry can begin, concerned with understanding human acts of meaning through a process in line with the operations of human knowing and proceeding through a process of hypothesis verification. Lonergan refers to British philosopher R.G. Collingwood’s well known work, The Idea of History. According to Collingwood the goal of historical inquiry was to come to understand the “inside of the event” in terms of the human intentionality of the actors involved. This accords with Lonergan’s epistemological breakthrough.