Lonergan summarizes the cognitional process: "Human knowing is cyclic and cumulative. It is cyclic inasmuch as cognitional process advances from experience through inquiry and reflection to judgment, only to revert to experience and recommence its ascent to another judgment. It is cumulative, not only in memory's store of experiences and understanding's clustering of insights, but also in the coalescence of judgments into the context named knowledge or mentality" (212).
Lonergan asserts, "the notion of objectivity is contained in a patterned context of judgments" (212).
Lonergan lists the different properties of the principal notion of objectivity: First, "the notion resides in a context of judgments; without a plurality of judgments that satisfy a definite pattern, the notion does not emerge. Secondly, there follows an immediate corollary: the principal notion of objectivity, as defined, is not contained in any single judgment, and still less in any experiential or normative factor that occurs in cognitional process prior to judgment. Thirdly, the validity of the principal notion of objectivity is the same as the validity of the set of judgments that contain it; if the judgments are correct, then it is correct that there are objects and subjects in the sense defined, for the sense defined is simply the correctness of the appropriate pattern of judgments" (213).
Lonergan states that the notion of objectivity is "closely related to the notion of being. Being is what is known through the totality of correct judgments. Objectivity in its principal sense is what is known through any acts of judgments satisfying a determinate pattern. In brief, there is objectivity if there are distinct beings, some of which both know themselves and know others as others" (213). For example, I am a knower. "This is a typewriter-the further judgment that I am not this typewriter. An indefinite number of further objects may be added by making the additional appropriate positive and negative judgments. Finally, insofar as one can intelligently grasp and reasonably affirm the existence of other knowers besides oneself, one can add to the list the objects that also are subjects" (212).
Besides the notion of objectivity, there are also the "partial aspects of experiential, normative, and absolute objectivity" (214).
"The ground of absolute objectivity is the virtually unconditioned that is grasped by reflective understanding and posited in judgment" (214). The advantage of absolute objectivity is its publicity. It is "accessible not only to the knower that utters it but also to any other knower" (215).
The notion of normative objectivity is "opposed to the subjectivity of wishful thinking, of rash or excessively cautious judgments, of allowing joy or sadness, hope or fear, love or detestation, to interfere with the proper march of cognitional process."
"The ground of normative objectivity lies in the unfolding of the unrestricted, detached, disinterested desire to know. Because it is unrestricted, it opposes the obscurantism that hides truth or blocks access to it in whole or part. Because it is detached, it is opposed to the inhibitions of cognitional process that arise from other human desires and drives. Because it is disinterested, it is opposed to the well-meaning but disastrous reinforcement that other desires lend cognitional process only to twist its orientation into the narrow confines of their limited range" (217).
Lonergan states that the pure desire not only desires, it desires intelligently and reasonably. It is intelligent because it wants to understand, and it desires reasonably because it wants to "grasp the unconditioned" (217).
The third aspect is experiential objectivity. It is the "field of materials about which one inquires, in which one finds the fulfillment of conditions for the unconditioned, to which cognitional process repeatedly returns to generate the series of inquiries and reflections that yield the contextual manifold of judgments" (218).
It is the "given of the given" (218). The given precedes any questioning and "independent of any answers" (218). The given is quite broad. It includes what is given through the senses but also "images, dreams, illusions, hallucinations, personal equations, subjective bias, and so forth" (219).
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