A More Adequate Epistemology

One thing that has prevented me from wholly embracing Ken Wilber’s ideas is the epistemology implicit in his work. While I understand the importance of rejecting speculative metaphysics, I don’t think the “Integral post-metaphysics,” particularly as Wilber has outlined it in Appendix II of Integral Spirituality, is ultimately the best alternative. What follows is an explanation of what I think is a more adequate epistemology, and is drawn largely from the work of Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan. And, like Wilber, but unlike most contemporary philosophy, it explicitly acknowledges the reality of spirituality. It also has the advantage of being verifiable in your own experience.

Three Basic Questions

What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it?

Lonergan held that a person’s answers to these questions will be, respectively, their cognitional theory, their epistemology, and their metaphysics (Method 25). When he says “metaphysics” he does not mean it in the narrow sense used by Wilber.

Cognitional Theory: What am I doing when I am knowing?

By “knowing” Lonergan means “coming to know” something. And to answer this question we have to pay attention to the structure of our own cognitional processes.

The first thing is experience. No one has ever come to know anything while in a deep coma. What is given in experience is mere data: data of sense, and data of consciousness. It is mere scraps of potential information. Obviously we do not come to know anything about much of it, as there is, for example, a great deal of sense data that we don’t even pay attention to.

From the raw data that we do attend to, we may have an insight. So that little black furry thing moving into my field of vision is recognised as a dog. I haven’t seen this dog before, but I’ve grasped in this experience the presence of certain characteristics that I’ve learned, in previous insights, to be characteristic of dogs. In other words, I have a concept of what a dog is, so that whenever I see one, I can recognise it as such. And this recognition is itself an insight.

But recognising something as a dog is not actually knowing that it is a dog. The dog might be far enough away that I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a dog, maybe it’s something else. So it isn’t until I can judge reasonably that it is a dog that I actually know it’s a dog. Reasonable judgment, not mere understanding, is the constitutive element of knowing.

So this is my cognitional process: attentive experience, intelligent understanding, and reasonable judgment. This, Lonergan says, is what one does when one comes to know something successfully.

Epistemology: Why is doing that knowing?

Some people think of objectivity as opposed to subjectivity. This would seem to negate the possibility of objective knowledge, since whenever we know anything we cannot help but do so as subjects. But Lonergan argues that objectivity is not the absence of subjectivity, but is rather the exercise of authentic subjectivity. And it is authentic when my experiencing is attentive, my understanding is intelligent, and my judgment is reasonable.

Of course, people think they are being reasonable all the time, and they nevertheless believe things that are not true. But believing oneself to be reasonable is one thing, actually being reasonable is another.

Truly reasonable judgment that something is so occurs when I grasp a) under what conditions a particular state of affairs will be so, and b) that those conditions are fulfilled. Lonergan called this the virtually unconditioned (Insight 305).

Metaphysics: What do I know when I do it?

If “knowing” is the result of experiencing, understanding, and judgment, it follows that what can be known is everything that is, through experience, both intelligible and affirmable. And this is reality, or “being.”

Now, one might argue that there might well be a great deal that is beyond the reach of our experience, understanding, and judgment. And indeed there is. Clearly our questions far outnumber our answers, and there is a great deal we know we don’t know, and can’t know. So Lonergan distinguishes between “proportionate being,” which is whatever can be known through our attentive experience, intelligent understanding, and reasonable judgment, and “transcendent being,” which is whatever else might exist.

A Concrete Example

A concrete example might be helpful. I have never been to California, and yet I am quite confident in saying that California is a real place. In my life, I have had a number of experiences that have led me to understand that there is a real place, in the southwest of the United States, called California. And I have judged that this is so. Was that judgment reasonable?

In order to test this, I need only consider the alternative: that the experiences that attest to the reality of a place called California should actually be understood in a different way. For example, the images I’ve seen in movies and TV, the pictures I’ve seen in newspapers and magazines, the stuff I’ve read, the sporting events I’ve attended featuring teams purporting to be from there, the many people I know who claim to have lived there, it could all be part of a large conspiracy to trick me, and possibly others, into thinking that California is a real place. My own family members may have been co-opted into the conspiracy when they’ve visited there, or maybe they were tricked into thinking they were there, but they were actually somewhere else. It becomes clear very quickly that this is ridiculous. There is no alternative explanation for what I’ve experienced that any reasonable person could possibly accept. California must be a real place. And I can claim to know that objectively.

Cognitional Structure as Self-Justifying

The nice thing about Lonergan’s method is that it is self-justifying. Anyone who wants to deny the process has to go through the process to do so.

I can’t deny the process if I don’t know about it, so I have to read or hear about it first. And it isn’t enough to simply look at the words on a page, or have someone read it to me when I’m not paying attention. Clearly attentive experience is necessary.

While I’m attentively reading or hearing about it, two things can happen: I can understand it, or I can fail to understand it. If I fail to understand it, and I know I haven’t understood it, I cannot reasonably deny it. If I think I’ve understood it, but haven’t, what I’ll be denying is not the real understanding, but my own misunderstanding. So intelligent understanding is necessary.

And all that is left is judgment. But whether you affirm or deny the process, you are making a judgment. There is nothing reasonable about judging that you don’t make judgments. The only reasonable judgment is that it is true.

Isn’t that exciting? I sure think so. It’s very important to recognise, though, that we’re not often, or even usually, aware of this process when it’s occurring. When I read the sports scores in the morning, I don’t think about whether or not it is reasonable to accept them as true. Looking back on it now, though, I can see that it is. If, on the other hand, I read a story about something going on in the Middle East, the reasonableness of affirming what I understand the newspaper to be saying is a little more questionable, as bias in that kind of reporting is more common. So reflecting on it now, I can see that a much better approach is to say, “this newspaper is reporting this, and I’ll tentatively accept it until I hear otherwise,” or something to that effect. So I don’t know that the events in question happened, but I might decide that they probably did (depending on how much I trust the news source).

Some further considerations

Idealism: For our present purposes, it is necessary to consider how this philosophy compares with any kind of idealism. Idealism locates “reality” on the level of understanding. I have concepts, and when I talk about what is real, I’m only talking about my concepts of what is real. In critical realism, the real is not what is conceptualised, but what is reasonably affirmed as real. Idealism fails to understand the importance of reasonable judgment as the constitutive element in knowing.

Spirituality: Lonergan was a Jesuit priest, so of course he made room in his philosophy for religion (or, more accurately, made religion a part of his philosophy). Actually, I suspect (and I’m not alone in thinking this) that the reason his writings are so difficult to understand is because it has very radical implications for theology, given that they exclude speculative metaphysics, and obviously the Vatican might have had a problem with this. One of my professors in university, who knew Lonergan quite well, says the Vatican didn’t know what to make of him, so I suppose he succeeded in that regard.

But it is not hard to see how spiritual experience fits in. After all, when someone has a spiritual experience, they have to understand it in some way, and then make a judgment regarding that understanding. The problem, though, is that such experiences can be quite compelling, so people might uncritically accept whatever they first understand. This, I suspect, is why people who have enlightenment experiences at a particular altitude might become stuck at that stage as a result. (Wilber mentioned somewhere that this often happens.)

So someone who has a vision of some deity might be so overwhelmed that they judge, quite unreasonably, that the object in the vision is actually real. In the past, when cultures were more homogeneous than they are today, and when one might never come into contact with someone from another religious tradition, it might have seemed quite natural to simply accept what one experienced as real. Today, however, it is quite apparent that such experiences occur in every religious tradition, and accepting a specifically Christian (or Hindu, or whatever) vision experience as “real” is easily recognised as quite unreasonable. Unless, of course, one “understands” that the imagery is drawn from their own imagination, in which case it could be affirmed as real. For more profound mystical experiences, the same pattern of experiencing, understanding, and judging applies, although that’s a much too complicated subject to get into at present.

There is so much more to say, but this is getting kind of long, so I’ll leave it at that. If anyone has any questions or comments, please share.