Chapter 3 outline on: The Canons of Empirical Methods

1.) The Canon of Selection Bernard Lonergan refers to two types of data: the data of sense, and the data of consciousness. He feels that the data of consciousness, or one's experience of the working of one's own mind be a part of one's research and be made available to the sense through reading and personal experience. The Canon of Selection is a set of general, testable principles that explains a range of observed phenomenon to …

…making explicit that which is implicit, (that which is 'naturally known'). Complete explanation will be in terms of conditioned series of schemes of recurrence, which combine classical law and statistical probabilities, one, which will grasp the intelligibility of a universe in, characterized by both systematic and non-systematic process. This complete explanation is what the sciences, taken together, are seeking; philosophy does not provide the explanation, but only describes the outlines of what is being sought.