Artfulhousing,
I am sorry that the subject you started on "functional collaboration" never elicited more responses, because you wrote some things in your initial post that I believe to be important. So I am taking the liberty of quoting your points, omitting some of your elaboration of those points:
"(i) While Chapter 5 of MiT articulates the relevance of FC for the development of theology, it has relevance beyond this. ...
"(ii) While MiT articulates the relevance of FC for the development of one research field, viz. theology, its wider context is within a practical theory of history, ...
"(iii) I began to understand the eight functional specialties in terms of eight questions and the eight methods we use to answer those questions. ...
"(iv) In a common sense mode I describe these eight questions and relate them to the functional specialties as follows: Research as answering as an empirical question, Interpretation a theoretical question, History a historical question, Dialectic a critical/evaluative question, Foundations a transformative question, Doctrines/Policies a policy question, Systematics a strategic question and Communications a practical question. Though Lonergan clearly makes a stand on the importance of theory, MiT seems to unfold functional collaboration within a common sense framework. ...
"(v) ... As I began to appropriate the orientations of the eight questions and the differing way in which I answer them, I came to the view that these eight questions are a complete ordered set of questions. In other words, they are all the questions we can ask about something. They are ordered in that they regard the ‘stages’ in process from the current situation to creating a new situation.
"(vi) As a complete ordered set of inter-related questions, I came to the conclusion that FC is a theory of science. Rather than describing science as knowledge, or in terms of precision or its empirical base, FC outlines the significant, relevant and essential questions that constitute or bring about science (just as experience, understanding and judging constitute knowing and are the elements in a theory of knowledge). This is an explanatory definition of science, one that incorporates not only knowledge but also incorporates implementation and the creation of something worthwhile.
"(vii) Finally, as a completed ordered set of inter-related questions, I also came to the conclusion that FC is a theory of progress, it is what constitutes or brings about progress in any field of human endeavour. We cannot move forward in any area unless we answer each of these eight questions. ...
"viii) We can work as individuals and seek to answer each of these questions in turn. We can, however, be more effective if we collaborate, if we develop expertise in the different methods for answering different questions. These questions are often complex and difficult."
I returned to your post in the other subject line because in your post of October 19, responding to my post on the first functional specialization, you wrote: "I have come to understand Research as answering the empirical question: what events have occurred or are occurring?" That reminded me of your exposition of the ordered set of question that you say constitute both a theory of science and a theory of progress. I agree that we can be more effective if we collaborate, and collaboration requires us to try to interpret what the others mean when they speak or write.
The empirical question you pose seems to me to be the question behind general research. I stated what I mean by this term: "All data construction that is not guided by efforts to verify or falsify hypotheses can be characterized as 'general research.' Those who emphasize description can be said to be doing 'general research.' Maps, archaeological digs, ethnographies, surveys and critical editions of texts are examples of this." How might a map be considered a documentation of "events that have occurred or are occuring?" It seems to me that a map is a record of some of the things that are or were present within a defined territory. It differs from a simple list of those things, because it also documents the spatial relationship between and among the things that are included. It can specify the location of the occurrence of one or more events, but abstracts from the temporal sequences of events that had occurred at the various locations.
So your phrasing of the question behind general research leaves out the documentation of things that I do not call "events." I agree that the map-maker's experience of the confluence of two rivers was an event, but argue that his intention in drawing this confluence, and indicating its location with reference to other significant features of the territory he is mapping, is not to document his experience upon first seeing the rivers merge, which was the event, but to map the content of what he experienced, which is not an event.
I did not elaborate upon my understanding of "special research," other than in saying that it is data construction that is guided by efforts at verifying or falsifying hypotheses.
Your qualification of my discussion of data construction seems to me to bear upon "general research" rather than "special research." When a researcher constructs data in order to verify or falsify a hypothesis, she is not operating within what I understand to be a common sense framework. A person who is operating in a common sense framework does not formulate and test hypotheses, and does not try to formulate explicit definitions of terms.
You seem to have rejected my characterization of research as "data construction" by saying "much of the data gathered has its relevance within a framework which takes the perspective of one or other economic, social, political, cultural or religious group (or shifts between them depending upon the circumstances)." Perhaps by putting it this way you do not mean to disagree with my denial that we ever "gather" data, but that we must always construct it. I say this, because by adding that a "framework" or "perspective" is always the context for the "gathering" of data, you seem to be making a point that is similar to mine. That is, a researcher always constructs her data FROM a framework or perspective. Where we seem to differ is that I believe that in data construction to verify or falsify a hypothesis, the definitions of the key terms that go into the formulation of the hypothesis, provide the framework or perspective from which the data are constructed. To the extent that the key terms in a scientific hypothesis are defined by how they are used in theoretical explanations, the data that are constructed to verify or falsify that hypothesis are not constructed from a common sense perspective. To the extent that the key terms in a hypothesis are drawn from common sense discourse, without having been theoretically clarified and criticized, I agree that the data will be constructed from the common sense perspective of some non-scientific social group.
Scientific research, and the data construction that is a key element in scientific research, occurs within scientific communities. Genuinely scientific communities may include theoretical disagreements, but their disagreements are those that ought to be settled by empirical data. For these disagreements to "engage," rather than be no more than instances of people talking past one another, there has to be a frame of reference within which there are enough similarly defined theoretical terms for opposing hypothesis to be verified/falsified on the basis of data that have been constructed from within that common frame of reference.
The guiding value for scientific research must be truth, and genuine scientists must subordinate all other desires to the pure desire to know. To the extent that data are constructed for other purposes, they are likely to be biased in the very process of how they were constructed.