(14) Examples of Conflicts Within Fields

Example of Conflict Within the Fields

We find an example of the ongoing conflict in knowledge fields in the education textbook Curriculum: Foundations, Principles and Issues. Here, the authors Ornstein and Hunkins address an audience of educators and curriculum theorists about the divisive state of the argument regarding theory and curriculum design:


Much of what is stated about thinking processes comes from knowledge of cognitive psychology. What is advocated in terms of problem-solving procedures is derived from our understanding of science and other organizations of knowledge, such as psychology. Some educators would have these ideas regarding procedural knowledge and thinking strategies stand alone as a prime source of the curriculum. Given the times, when the knowledge realm is exploding so rapidly, the only constant seems to be the procedures by which we process knowledge.

To be sure, this view of curriculum design coincides with the scientific and rational world of Western culture. But we also live in a pluralistic world with many different cultures. This latter view accepts the universe not as static, but as self-generating, complex, and evolving. It is a universe that is becoming rather than just existing for our detached scientific viewing. This new view of the reality goes by many different names, post-modernism, postpositivism, and third-wave thinking, in contrast to the mainstream view, called positivism or modernism that we have been operating under for several centuries. (1998, pp. 234-35; 2004, p. 237)


A full understanding of transcendental method’s cognitional theory affords a clear and continually verifiable explanation of the “constant . . . procedures by which we process knowledge.” But as the above quote implies, a cognitional theory is essential, but still is merely psychological. It does not explain what knowledge is with any thoroughness; a definition and explanation of knowledge and its relationship to the true-real complex is by definition not only psychological but also philosophical; and the fields are still in various divisive attitudes about it. Psychology alone cannot help where knowledge of knowledge is concerned and commonly adapts to whatever assumptions were around when the psychologist went through their education and training.

On the other hand, an application of a full understanding of transcendental method, which will include its theory of knowledge and a personal, empirical application of the theory to the self, opens the door to our conscious and reasonable embrace of the self-corrective process that already thrusts us towards our own real self-transcendence on many fronts. It does so by acquainting us with our own personal interior functions, or what Lonergan calls the mind’s infrastructure, by addressing fully the philosophical questions that take us beyond psychological disclosure; and by explaining and inviting us to understand and know the true-reality of ourselves, and ourselves in true-reality, including what it means to know.

That acquaintance sets up the conditions to further address, and to possibly remove, the conflict between our two dismaying notions—now manifest in the language of those in the various fields of study. The first notion relates to classicist, positivist, and post-positivist views of natural and statistical science, their data, their methods, and their application to and hegemony over the social sciences, the arts, and other human studies, and including commonsense wisdom. Hence, their implied hegemony is also over any critical view of reality that might be intrinsically related to human beings and our affairs, and all the complex meaning that surrounds that being and those affairs. These folks who think from this lens at least will make a judgment; however, they admit little or no nuance of meaning, and especially any meaning that might include their own personal judgments. Here, the reader might recognize the irony (or hypocrisy) implied in such a view.

The second dismaying notion shows up and relates to the more emergent and nuanced views that have taken hold in the human sciences, in the humanities, and in the integrative field of education. These views identify with dialogue and with “becoming rather than just existing for our detached scientific viewing” (1998).

The polemic, of course, is with the first view above. These folks at least admit nuance and depth of meaning, to ongoing change, as well as to the mystery of the unknown, which they are open to in principle. However, they still stand on unresolved and un-thought out notions of the good, knowledge, and truth. The frightening inference evident in the extreme versions of such a lens, again, is that “anything goes.” This later lens, though rightly exploratory, still has not embraced a worked-out or verified ground on which to stake a claim to the good, to knowledge or to truth-reality of either. Again, the reader might realize here the irony (and hypocrisy) of such thought when applied to the fields of “knowledge,” and to “education” which is nothing without knowledge.

If philosophy can provide an avenue for a unity of thought drawn from an empirically verified base for either of these lenses, then, we at least can have hope that intelligent people in all of these fields can and will understand it, and set about to bring that unity to their own various fields. We turn, then, to theoretical philosophy--to transcendental method--to suggest that the project will be difficult, and take a long time, but that it can and should be done.