From pure experience to cognitive models: constitutive explanations and modalization in phenomenological cognitivism
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences August 12, 2025 Jacopo Colelli 2 citations
Phenomenological Cognitivism is a methodological framework that grounds psychological explanations in pure experience to clarify their intentional properties and how they are embedded within the layered structure of first-person experience. Unlike practical phenomenological approaches that use phenomenology only as a heuristic for data collection or experimental design, this framework uses phenomenological functional analyses to align sensitivity to intentional properties with the explanatory goals of cognitive neuroscience. Central to it are constitutive explanations, which identify minimal phenomenological structures necessary for cognitive capacities to function correctly, and modalization, which describes how these capacities must adapt functionally within different architectures and representational dependencies across experiential domains. The framework supports epistemological model structuring, using phenomenological descriptions to inform and constrain computational models and the identification of neurobiological mechanisms.