Forms of social construction of meaning are essential to the line of argument that Salzman and Lawler use. But their account of the social construction of meaning troubles the nine bishops, who seem to believe that conceptual constructs are not socially constructed, even though they themselves do not explain exactly how conceptual constructs come into use. Thus the nine bishops criticize the alleged inadequacies of Salzman and Lawler's epistemology, but the nine bishops themselves do not carefully set forth a proposed more adequate epistemology.
From what the nine bishops do say, it is obvious that they would prefer a nonskeptical and nonrelativist epistemology. But I suspect that the nine bishops subscribe to the kind of unreflective epistemology that the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J., mocks as "taking a good look" in INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957; 5th ed. University of Toronto Press, 1992). But Salzman and Lawler are trying to work out a more reflective epistemology that is nonskeptical and nonrelativist.
In the introduction to the recent reprinting of his 1965 book Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge (Transaction Publishers, 1994, page xv), the conservative Catholic writer Michael Novak has succinctly explained Lonergan's critique of "taking a good look" in the following paragraph regarding Richard Rorty's thought: "Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature' he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye. We do not know simply through "looking at' reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!' But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!' Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction."
In METHOD IN THEOLOGY (Herder and Herder, 1972, page 214), Lonergan claims that the tendency to equate knowing with "taking a good look" has "provided the unshakable foundation of materialism, empiricism, positivism, sensism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, pragmatism."
Walter J. Ong, S.J., the American cultural historian and philosopher, agrees with Novak's claim that "[o]ne needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with operation of any (or all) bodily senses." Ong's major work in the history of dialectic and rhetoric is about the sixteenth-century logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus (1515-1572), whose work was very popular among Protestants, especially Puritans. In THE NEW ENGLAND MIND: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (Harvard University Press, 1939), Perry Miller of Harvard University, who directed Ong's dissertation about Ramus, reports that he found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England most educated people there were self-described Ramists, followers of Ramus. In RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON (Harvard University Press, 1958), Ong has in effect also set forth a critique of "confusing the activities of the mind with any (or all) the bodily senses." Ong refers to this kind of confusion in various terms: the corpuscular view of reality, the corpuscular epistemology, and the corpuscular psychology in short, the corpuscular sense of life (pages 65-66, 72, 146, 171, 203, 210). But in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophic thought that Lonergan and Ong and Novak draw on, the human mind is not corpuscular. This is the import of the body/soul distinction with which Ong and others in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophic thought work.
Related Reading: To see what Ramist logic looks like, the interested reader might want to look over John Milton's treatise in Latin titled in English translation A FULLER COURSE IN THE ART OF LOGIC CONFORMED TO THE METHOD OF PETER RAMUS, translated by Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger, in the COMPLETE PROSE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON: VOLUME VIII: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (Yale University Press, 1982, pages 206-407). Ong's historical introduction (pages 139-205) is well worth reading.
In any event, it seems to me that the nine bishops have not moved to a more reflective epistemology than the kind of epistemology that Lonergan mocks as "taking a good look."
But drawing on Lonergan'smore reflective epistemology, the Canadian philosopher and theologian Frederick E. Crowe, S.J., has published an excellent article about a certain seminal aspect of Paul the Apostle's thought that is relevant to working out an adequate epistemology: "Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All" in COMMUNICATION AND LONERGAN: COMMON GROUND FOR FORGING THE NEW AGE, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Sheed & Ward, 1993, pages 89-107). Crowe draws on Lonergan's INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
