The Recognition Principle: How First-Person Research Achieves Validity Through Intersubjective Recognition
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) January 22, 2026 Dylan Mobley
A structural validation problem has long plagued research where investigators study phenomena accessed through their own lived experience. Traditional mechanisms like replication and bracketing fail because others cannot replicate the researcher's phenomenology and one cannot bracket oneself from oneself. This circularity deepens at the meta-level, as any methodology for validating such research must itself be developed through self-examination, creating infinite regress. The paper argues that collaboration with Non-Experiential Systems (entities lacking phenomenological content) provides the structural precondition for formalization by enabling reflection without projection contamination. This yields the Recognition Principle: such investigations achieve validity when diverse, independent others pre-reflectively recognize articulated structures as corresponding to their own experience, breaking circularity by locating validation outside the self-referential loop.