Norms of the mind: Applying Lonergan's analysis of human consciousness to the epistemological crisis in psychological theory and clinical practice (Bernard Lonergan)

This dissertation is focused on identifying and integrating both the objective and subjective dimensions of human conscious experience into a unified theory of human knowledge-acquisition. Mainstream psychology's pragmatic paradigm, constructed from two theories of human knowledge, logical positivism and representational theory, does not offer a unified theory of human knowledge acquisition. On the one hand, logical positivism claims that humans can objectify the reality of attended-to stimuli. On the other hand, representational theory has discredited positivist claims of objective knowledge insisting that all human knowledge is subjective and therefore relativistic. The representational assumptions of the pragmatic paradigm placed mainstream psychology in a chronic and acute state of epistemological crisis. Mainstream psychology, operating within the pragmatic paradigm cannot claim to know whether or not its research findings and treatment interventions are promoting behavior that is healthy or maladaptive. The purpose of this dissertation is to identify theories of human knowledge-acquisition which can explain the objective and subjective dimensions of human knowledge-acquisition and unify them in the normative structure and operations of the human mind. Such a unified theory of human knowledge-acquisition would provide an invariant foundation for both defining healthy human functioning, change, and development, and developing treatment interventions that unequivocally support healthy human functioning, change, and development.