The Pragmatics, Embodiment, and Efficacy of Lived Experience Assessing the Core Tenets of Varela's Neurophenomenology

Summary

The enactive approach to cognitive science, originally expressed through neurophenomenology (NP), rests on three tenets: phenomenological pragmatics, embodied cognition, and conscious efficacy. Most NP research focuses on the first tenet, while the second receives less attention and the third is often avoided. Through a critical review of four case studies, the authors argue that NP falls short by not demonstrating that lived experience itself makes a difference to the living body's dynamics. They propose integrating research strands to reboot NP by centering conscious efficacy, using improved subjective reports and multi-scalar recordings of embodied action.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (NP) — continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multi-scalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form.