From Integral Experience to Scientific Knowledge

Drawing on Karol Wojtyla, Juan Manuel Burgos proposes a unified model in which knowledge begins with lived experience, develops into structured understanding, and culminates in critically validated scientific insight.

Two opposing epistemological views have been competing for supremacy for centuries: subjective positions with relativist tendencies and objective positions that tend to ignore human beings as subjects of knowledge. In this book, Burgos offers an original resolution to this long-standing problem.

Burgos suggests that knowledge begins through an experiential process that is activated when a person interacts with the world, filling the subject with meaningful experiences that integrate objectivity and subjectivity, intelligence and sensitivity. This is the main source from which everything we know comes. Only in a second stage does comprehension arise. A stable and much more objectified knowledge generated through a particular type of induction that produces notions and notional connections; comprehensive truth; patterns and laws; structured common knowledge, etc. Finally, in a third stage, comprehension can be critically validated and expanded, giving rise to an analogous and powerful knowledge with a unique capacity to grasp the truth, which has been decisive in our civilization: science.

This book carefully and thoroughly describes each of these processes and also offers some practical implications for education, sociology, and literary interpretation.