Also, methodologically for our experiment, we are relying heavily on your own latent assumptions about knowing, objectivity, and the real—that once you understand and have gone through the experiment, you will have enough repeatable evidence to pronounce that, indeed, you have found the method of mind in your own experience of it and that, indeed, the theory is verified factually in the process of experimentation. In such pronouncements, your assumptions will be that you know, and that what you know is true-real. The operative word here is: IS.
However, a philosophical problem may arise when we realize that what we are finding in the experiment is (1) only available to our senses remotely, i.e., through hearing language or seeing marks on a page, and (2) falls within the arena of the subjective and, as such on both counts, comes with some residual philosophical "baggage" with regard to its potential for being knowable truth-reality--objective as distinct from subjective.
We are called to approach and remedy such issues (where our latent philosophical assumptions crawl out from under their pre-conscious rock and become problematic philosophical assumptions) in what we are referring to here as the longer philosophical journey.
As an aspect of that journey (including the fuller philosophical project of self-appropriation-affirmation), we also want to understand the data of our experiment in terms of what it means to know objective reality. And we want to include, explicitly, knowing of our own conscious activities as real, including knowing itself as a part of those activities, in that reflective light--or we want to come to know knowing in a critical fashion.
In our more comprehensive text on Foundational Review, then, and in other appendixes here, we give some treatment to the distinction between the subjective and the objective and briefly related both to our notions of reality. Since these appendixes are written as an interim between the shorter and longer journeys, I will give a very brief treatment at the end of this appendix, drawing together some of the meaning that relates to the subject/object distinction in our narratives from appendix 1 (Language and Self-Presence) and appendix 7 (Deriving Ought from Is). (Note: Finding the Mind: Foundational Review text is unpublished at this time.)
However, for the experiment, we merely want to analyze our crises, understand and test the theory by locating our four shadow-questions in the expressions you use in your own crisis narrative, and then hopefully locate the desire-quests in your own mind’s activities, again, depending on your latent assumptions to carry the day for you philosophically, namely, that what you come to know is true-real.
Thus, in the experiment, we want to locate the general order of the questions in your own expressions and conscious activities:
1. As laboratory data for critical verification of a cognitional theory, namely, general empirical method (Lonergan, 1958/2000 & 1972);
2. As objects-X we can know objectively, beyond a mere psychological or mental novelty, and beyond merely a fuzzy combination of belief-knowledge imagination, etc.; and
3. At some point in your further study, should you set out on the longer journey, as the more comprehensive meaning of self-appropriation-affirmation. (See also our introduction to the main text.)
If so, then here at least, we must take into account:
1. Your experience--of the vast difference between (a) your merely seeing or otherwise sensing, and (b) the fullness of your desire-questing-insighting-understanding-knowing of anything you experience, whether it be brains or minds or questions that are the objects of our study;
2. Your personal and cultural history of schematic development and content accrual—a complex of under-meaning from which all your specific questions arise, and from which your questions can be suppressed or their content deformed;
3. your present judgments about the above—as (a) the growth and informing of wisdom or as (b) merely the bias that infects your notion of objectivity (as the true-real or not); for instance, that knowing equates to looking and the concomitant notion of starting with a blank slate every time we think about or do anything at all;
4. The unified relationship of our So-type questions to both What-type and Good-worth-value-type questions. Thus, our judgments Yes-No spontaneously anticipate a grasp of the same true-knowledge-real of both What Is Really So and What Is So as Really Good-Bad. Questions of good-bad (quali-meaning questions) do not diminish our spontaneous hold on true-reality. Our activities of understanding and knowing, and not merely our seeing or failing to see, underpin both.
NOTE: The term IS commonly signals a literary or logical and conceptual meaning. However, IS also signals our spontaneous regard for real being; and our common use of IS-language signals our equally-spontaneous and latent commitment to knowing true-real being, or IS and IS GOOD-BAD as true-objective-real.
5. The resonant-informing nature of intelligence: Your What-type intelligent and qualitative questions and their issued insights as informing your common anticipations in your concrete human living.
6. The differences between (and similarities of) our yes-no judgments about concrete facts and our yes-no judgments about what is or is not worthwhile to say or do;
7. The catalytic relationship of both kinds of judgments towards our creating ourselves in our history of speech and act;
8. The complexity and streamlined condensation of our own and others’ language. In that language and through our analysis, the structure of our questions can emerge in our various specified expressions, and to one degree of differentiation or another. (See our chapter on the difference between fundaments and foundations in Finding the Mind: Foundational Review.)
In other words, our present narrative can only hint at the full philosophical import of our experiment on our notions of subjectivity-objectivity and reality. However, we still want to raise the question here about the knowable-objective true-reality of what you will discover and can come to know in your experiment herein. However, while laboring under merely latent assumptions, you cannot hold up to a critical light those assumptions, as you would hold a prism up to catch the light in full critical philosophical understanding. In order to do that, you will need to do a considerable amount of open-minded and critically-guided self-reflection.
Also, in the light of our interim reflections about the Pervasiveness of the Good (appendix 5) and about our question about the suggested objective reality of discovered mental structures, ala the experiment, let us move on to our desire-quest-3: Is it Really Worthwhile?, and to our identifying this desire-quest as it emerges in our crises.
Exploring The Notion of Objectivity
Drawing from two other appendixes (1 and 7), we briefly can develop our notions of subjectivity and objectivity, and their relationship, from having understood (a) our tri-part structure and the way we language within it (Piscitelli 1977), and (b) our notion of the paradigmatic difference between fostering an insider's, over an outsider's, view of history.
That is, we find the objective pole as mid-way between the subject-as-subject self-present person, and where our experience of this structure is our ability to think-about-any-object-X, and where we experience that thinking as a "talking-to-myself" in the privacy of my own mental sphere.
Subject.......Object X........Subject
Listener......Object X........Speaker
As self-reflective:
Subject.......Subject/Self-as-Object-X.......Subject
The object, then, is related to the subject as that intelligibilty-meaning that we are questioning or conversing, or that is being conversed.
Whereas, when we speak-with/listen-to another person-subject, the self-presence that I am becomes also present to the other person who is also self-present(and vice versa). Here, the what-object-X that the other person is saying, I am also "saying-to-myself" as I listen to that meaning in my own interior life. And, as self-reflective, that what-object-X also can be either me, or her, or both of us.
Further, from an empirically-established metaphysics based in B. Lonergan's theoretical work and its call for personal application, the above is not a suggestion of some sort of "pure subjectivity." Rather, it calls forth an insider's view of history (as philosophical paradigm). That view places the subject not outside, but inside of being--as an intelligent, but also intelligible being whose awareness anticipates (through the desire-questioning process) further knowledge of being including, in self-reflective feats, knowledge of the subject-self in that one-being who has some say in how and what I might be (1958/2000).
For an exploration of three aspects of objectivity (absolute, normative, and experiential) and for a full development of a suitable (and verifiable) epistemological theory, see Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, specifically, "The Notion of Objectivity," "The Notion of Judgment," and "Reflective Understanding" (1958 & 2000).
A note on the imagination and feelings: In other narratives, I also include reference to the imagination and feelings as intimate, even inseparable aspects of the thinking process. These aspects of thinking are not our focus here; however, let us not discount these, or forget how substantial and integral these are to the structure of the mind and its development--especially its early development.
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