Lonergan's philosophy as grounding for cross‐disciplinary research

Abstract

Increasingly, nurses conduct scientific inquiry into complex health-care problems by collaborating on teams with researchers from other highly specialized fields. As cross-disciplinary research proliferates and becomes institutionalized globally, researchers will increasingly encounter the need to integrate their particular research perspectives within inquiries without sacrificing the potential contributions of their discipline-specific expertise. The work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) offers the necessary philosophical grounding. Here, I defend a role for philosophy in cross-disciplinary research and present selected ideas in Lonergan's work. These include: (1) a dynamic, normative pattern that each inquirer operates uniquely also forms the common core, or unity, in knowing; (2) the possibility of cross-disciplinary knowledge development is dependent on each researcher's consciousness of her or his attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibleness; and (3) shifts in researchers' viewpoints, or horizons, facilitate their collaborative inquiry and their grasp of the unity in knowing. The desire to know, shared by team members, drives their inquiry. Lonergan's stance is consistent with nursing values because it respects, but does not unconditionally privilege, any researcher or discipline. Arguments support a claim that Lonergan's perspective is well suited to guide nurse researchers participating on cross-disciplinary health research teams.

Self‐appropriation in nurse engagement: Facilitating the development of expert nurses using Benner and Lonergan

“…Bernard Lonergan presents a perspective on self‐understanding that lends itself to use within the field of nursing. Lonergan's philosophical work, while not specific to the profession of nursing, has been used to describe knowledge generation in nursing as well as in interdisciplinary teams (Kane, 2014; Perry, 2004). While the full breadth of Lonergan's work is beyond the scope of this paper, his philosophy views the person as a unity, and notes that ‘organic, psychic, and intellectual development are not three independent processes.…”

Contemplating the spirituality of scholarship

“…The recognisable structure of human knowing is well described by the philosopher theologian, Bernard Lonergan whose framing of the activities of human knowing have been brought to many fields: nursing theory, practice, and research (Perry, 2004), interdisciplinarity (Kane, 2013;Kane & Perry, 2016;Sawa, 2005), and health science (Daly, 2009). He describes the human knower as a subject engaging in three activities-experiencing, understanding, and judging (Lonergan, 1992) The pattern of the three activities: experience understanding and judgement is invariant in that all knowing involves experience, understanding, and judgement and applies to all settings.…”

What we're trying to solve: the back and forth of engaged interdisciplinary inquiry

“…Both authors' works utilize Lonergan's cognitive philosophy. Kane (2014) proposed Lonergan's philosophical perspective (1957Lonergan's philosophical perspective ( /2000Lonergan's philosophical perspective ( , 1964Lonergan's philosophical perspective ( /1988Lonergan's philosophical perspective ( , 1972Lonergan's philosophical perspective ( /2003 as a means to understand and promote interdisciplinary knowledge development because his theory of human understanding identifies a cognitional process with a dynamic, normative structure operative in all forms of human inquiry. Lonergan (1972Lonergan ( /2003 differentiates human cognition into a heuristic structure comprised of four cognitive operations: experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding.…”