The received idea of scientific rationality, in positing the disengaged subject over against the object (whether nature or culture) is bound to lead to the destruction of the traditional or primal society with which it comes into contact.

The explanation, characteristic of societies in which the scientific differentiation of consciousness has not been institutionalized, of unwelcome chance occurrences in terms of personal intentions, could be misunderstood as bad science, as a confusion of subjective intentions with objective causal factors. In this way the urge to meaning and truth in the mythic consciousness is overlooked, and the insights of the culture are simply dismissed.

Alternatively, the accounts given by the traditional society of the events in question could be appreciated as a way of making sense of the world, and expressing a certain kind of logic. This more sympathetic approach runs aground, however, on the inability of western scientific rationality to give any foundation for its own project, and the result is a tendency to cultural relativism, not to say scepticism about the claims of reason, both theoretical and practical, in general.

But science in the dominant modern conception thereof, has generated its own mythic dimension, to do with the unquestionableness of the fully autonomous subject being placed outside of the legitimate domain of rational inquiry. The person/nature divide, alien to the more integrated culture, exempts the member of the scientific culture of modernity from the overarching norms governing our capacity to be reasonable in our judgments and responsible in our decisions. In re-rooting scientific practice in these very norms, Lonergan’s method creates the possibility of a fruitful dialogue with those in the traditional culture dominated by common sense and symbolic frameworks for knowledge, similarly subject to the norms to do with our capacities for knowing and for responsible action.

The unreasonableness of this kind of scientific "reason" has been pointed to by various writers. Lonergan supplies a constructive account of how we could understand scientific rationality in a way that is consonant with the urge to meaning and truth in a variety of interest-driven dimensions of life – those of common sense and religion for example, and also through cultures characterized by less or more differentiated areas of inquiry or controls on meaning, for example either the integrated vision of a culture dominated by symbolic and common sense ideals of knowledge, or else with some more institutionalized theoretical differentiation.

Lonergan shows that the dichotomy between "subject" as defined by what is (privately) experienced, and "object" as what is scientifically shown to be the case, breaks down when one considers the various patternings of experience that are operative, for example the biological pattern on the one hand, and the intellectual on the other.

The notion of knowing through self-appropriation of one’s various patternings of experience allows one to see that the primitive culture and the scientific culture can dialogue in accordance with overarching norms of knowing and acting. In the mythic consciousness, as in the scientific, there is an intention of truth.

Furthermore, the value put on participation by African traditional culture, can furnish the necessary impetus to absorbing the normative self-appropriation of human agency and the intersubjective conditions for this to occur. What science can do, when sufficiently philosophically enlightened, is to help objectify and detail these conditions for human and personal development. A social unity can be envisaged on the basis of more than "mere custom".

In order for this cross-cultural learning to take place, a good starting point is the acknowledgement of the life world, not the logically coherent world of science, but the common world within which the scientist practices science and the person of common sense practices common sense. For both the member of the traditional society, and the member of the culture characterized by scientific procedures, this life-world has a horizon of uncertainty and indeterminateness. There is scope for dialogue here, and intercultural learning, in terms of the need to come to terms with this horizon.