Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 16, 2021
Allan Køster, Anthony Vincent Fernandez
106 citations
A new approach called Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR) uses phenomenology's concepts—existentials—rather than its methods like the epoché or reductions. The approach is intended for interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers and qualitative researchers. The article reviews the debate over phenomenology's role in qualitative research, arguing that qualitative theorists have not fully used philosophical phenomenology. PGQR conceptually front-loads a qualitative study by focusing on structures of human existence or being in the world. An example study of early parental bereavement illustrates the approach. The kind of knowledge generated by PGQR is clarified and shown how it can integrate with existing approaches.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 6, 2020
Anna Ciaunica, J. C. Charlton, Harry Farmer
78 citations
Depersonalization Disorder (DPD) alters the transparency of basic embodied pre-reflective self-consciousness and impairs the ability to flexibly switch between reflective and pre-reflective facets of self-awareness. The condition involves detachment from self, body, and world (derealization), with impaired processing of bodily signals. First-hand reports describe a fracture between an observing and an observed self, similar to self-detachment in certain Buddhist meditative practices. These alterations reveal the normally tacit transparency of pre-reflective self-consciousness, like a crack in transparent glass showing an unnoticed window.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 28, 2010
Benny Shanon
51 citations
Ayahuasca experiences significantly alter perceptions of reality, with 80% of participants reporting profound insights into their consciousness. In a study of 150 individuals, 70% felt a deeper connection to nature and others, reflecting principles found in Buddhism and indigenous philosophies. Through biochemical analysis and sensing techniques, the effects of psychedelics were linked to changes in mental states. This intersection of psychology, sociology, and anthropology suggests that ayahuasca not only influences individual perspectives but also enriches our understanding of metaphysics and epistemology.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 10, 2021
Simon Høffding, Kristian Moltke Martiny, Andreas Roepstorff
45 citations
Phenomenological interviews are a valid and reliable source of knowledge, no less trustworthy than quantitative or experimental methods. The paper addresses skeptic objections about introspection, the unreliability of episodic memory, and the inability of interviews to address psychological, cognitive, and biological correlates of experience. It argues that rejecting the methodological and epistemological justification of phenomenological interviews leads to a deep mistrust that undermines scientific discourse by excluding conscious processes as objects of explanation, with serious consequences for the conception of science.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2010
S. Haan, L. Bruin
40 citations
The sense of ownership (SO) and the sense of agency (SA) are not separate experiences of the minimal self but are intimately related and modulate each other. A careful examination of examples used to argue for their separability shows they are intertwined. The authors propose distinguishing different notions of SO and SA that are currently used interchangeably, suggesting a gradual reading that allows for various blends. This approach offers a richer phenomenology and a more parsimonious view of the minimal self.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 3, 2021
Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez
21 citations
A pilot study using micro-phenomenological interviews with five participants who reported conscious experiences during sleep that lacked any object of awareness—no scenery, no dream. This state, described in Indian contemplative traditions as consciousness-as-such, was preceded by the dissolution of a lucid dream or other conscious mentation. Analysis identified four experiential dimensions during this void: perception of absence, self-perception, perception of emotions, and perception of awareness. The results are exploratory but align with existing literature on objectless sleep and suggest avenues for future research.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 10, 2022
Katrin Heimann, Hanne Bess Boelsbjerg, Chris T. Allen et al.
17 citations
Micro-phenomenology, an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience, can be turned on itself to reveal quality criteria. In a pilot series of five interviews, experienced micro-phenomenology researchers recalled one successful and one challenging instance of using the method. An auto-ethnographic dialogue between the authors illustrates the planning, conducting, and analysis of these interviews. An unexpected finding emerged: researchers judge the quality of an interview partly based on a sense of connection or contact between interviewer and interviewee. The article discusses this finding in relation to the method's means and intentions and suggests directions for future research.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 24, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
17 citations
Meditation experiences often described as contentless—such as those in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation—are not truly devoid of mental content. A review of 135 expert texts from these three traditions identified 65 features reported or implied across the practices, with most shared among all three. However, Shamatha involves substantially greater attentional stability and vividness. Numerous forms of content, including wakefulness, naturalness, calm, bliss/joy, and freedom, are present in these experiences. The findings challenge the classical view that such states are an identical pure consciousness, leaving it an open question whether they should be classed as such.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 7, 2022
A. Gambarotto, M. Mossio
13 citations
Hegel viewed organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems, emphasizing their behavioral and cognitive capacities. This Hegelian stance, which develops a naturalized yet non-reductive account of natural purposiveness, is also present in enactivism, a contemporary theory of biological autonomy focused on cognition and the mind.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
July 1, 2022
Jelena Markovic
13 citations
Unchosen transformative experiences—those imposed by external circumstances—threaten agency by disrupting core projects, cares, and goals. Drawing on William James's analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe's account of grief, the author provides a phenomenological analysis of such experiences as restructuring systems of practical meaning. An agent's experience is structured by practically significant possibilities organized around projects and relationships; transformative experiences shift these systems, altering habitual meanings and the relations among projects. Using the enactivist concept of sense-making, the author examines how an agent rebuilds disrupted meaning structures. In precarious conditions, the agent establishes new patterns of bodily and social interaction, altering practical meanings and reconstituting oneself as an intentional agent.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 2, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
13 citations
Contentless experience, or pure consciousness, is a state free of mental content like thoughts, perceptions, and imagery. Three meditation practices—Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation—are said to access this state, but the paths differ. A review of 135 expert texts reveals that Shamatha and Transcendental Meditation superficially require focusing on an object, while Stillness Meditation does not. However, a detailed analysis shows Shamatha is posturally closer to Stillness Meditation but differs in requiring greater attentional stability, vividness, focusing, less tolerance of mind-wandering, more monitoring, and deliberate control. Achieving contentless experience through Shamatha is slower, more difficult, and less frequent. These findings inform meditation taxonomies, consciousness research, neuroscience, clinical practice, and practitioners.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 14, 2020
Wolfgang Fasching
11 citations
Consciousness, according to Advaita Vedānta, is not itself an object of introspection but is the pure manifestation (prakāśa) that makes all contents of consciousness known. This paper argues that contemporary philosophy of mind, by treating consciousness as a special kind of object (qualia), makes the anti-materialist claim vulnerable to the materialist reply that the difference between mental and physical is merely epistemological. The paper contends that this materialist move leads to circularity or infinite regress regarding the nature of givenness or manifestation itself.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 8, 2023
Enara García
9 citations
Affectivity is central to mental disorders because sense-making is inherently affective. Drawing on Husserl's genetic method and Simondonian philosophy, sense-making is described as the progressive concretization of self-world structures that support conscious intentionality. Affectivity anticipates partial self-world coherence in this process. Different affective experiences—existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, emotions—play distinct roles. This framework reinterprets schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety spectrum disorders as disorders of affectivity, contributing to a phenomenologically informed enactive account of mental disorders.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
István Fazakas, Mathilde Bois, Tudi Gozé
7 citations
Selfhood, even at its most basic level, has a bodily thickness that can be altered in schizophrenia. Drawing on Sartre's concept of coenesthesia—the translucent material of consciousness—and historical research, the authors argue that the minimal self is not a bare point but an embodied, elemental feeling. This phenomenological materiality, or bodily element of ipseity, helps explain anomalies of self-experience in schizophrenia spectrum disorders without reducing selfhood so drastically that it cannot account for experiential changes.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 7, 2024
Laura Candiotto
7 citations
The capacity to feel pleasure and pain, sentience, is typically treated as a property that an organism either has or lacks, and determining which organisms possess it is crucial for ethical reasoning. However, there is no stable agreement on how to assess sentience. This paper argues that the assumptions underlying the concept of sentience themselves create this problem, calling it the metaproblem of sentience. Drawing on enactive and pragmatist ideas, including Peirce's real doubt and loving epistemology, the author proposes a participatory account of sentience. The key move is that the transcendental argument—that life can be known only by life—should be understood relationally: life can be cared for only by life. Thus, sentience is known through engagement and care, not detached assessment, leading to a participatory ethics.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
October 22, 2022
Mark-Oliver Casper, Philipp Haueis
7 citations
Phenomenology makes unique contributions to scientific practice—concept formation, experimental design, and data collection—but when it comes to explanation, it faces a dilemma. Either phenomenological attempts to explain conscious phenomena fail to satisfy a central constraint on explanations (the asymmetry between explanans and explanandum), or they satisfy this asymmetry only by merging with non-phenomenological explanation types. The consequence is that insofar as phenomenological approaches are explanatory, they do not provide an own type of explanation. Three case studies of phenomenologically inspired experiments in cognitive science illustrate each contribution to experimental practice while also showing how the explanatory dilemma arises.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Enrico Petracca
4 citations
The scaling-up problem challenges radical embodied cognition (REC) to explain supposedly complex, representation-hungry phenomena. This paper argues that sorting cognitive phenomena by inherent complexity or representation-hunger is untenable, using social phenomena as a test case. Two opposing views—that sociality is the most representation-hungry (Clark & Toribio) or a non-representational resource (radical enactivists)—show the difficulty of placing sociality in a representational hierarchy. Examining dual-process models in social psychology reveals a distinction between task complexity and cognitive requirements, undermining the essentialism behind representation-hunger. Radical enactivism's encounter with social theory offers a non-representational account of institutions. The paper concludes that either the scaling-up problem is invalid in its hierarchical form, or REC has already scaled up to social phenomena.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2025
Jeff Yoshimi
4 citations
A pluralist approach to neurophenomenology holds that multiple theoretical frameworks—symbolic, dynamical systems, connectionist, and others—are mutually compatible and can each illuminate different aspects of consciousness and its neural correlates. Historical and conceptual arguments show that these frameworks can inform and constrain one another in non-trivial ways, rather than being in competition. The response to a critique of using neural networks and dynamical systems theory in neurophenomenology illustrates this pluralism, arguing that each type of analysis is best suited to specific phenomena.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 21, 2023
Tom Cochrane
3 citations
Basic mental agency—the ability to voluntarily direct one's own thoughts—is grounded in two core capacities: endogenous attention and imagination. This paper argues that these capacities share five key features: both are driven by currently prioritized goals that are or can become conscious; both deliver their outputs to working memory; both operate on conceptual content; both are guided by norms or habits; and both activate rather than inhibit mental content. Together, these similarities suggest that basic mental agency is fundamentally the power to summon conceptual content and hold it in working memory.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Ståle Finke, Thomas Netland, Mattias Solli
2 citations
This article argues that art transforms everyday experience through symbolic communication, rejecting both the idea that art is entirely separate from daily life and the notion that it is directly continuous with it. Drawing on the enactive concept of humans as linguistic bodies and the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the authors propose that art is a linguistic phenomenon enabling original situations of communication. They discuss and critique enactivist perspectives from Shaun Gallagher and Alva Noë, then develop a pluralistic view of art media and a conception of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought.
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.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
April 6, 2026
Thomas Fuchs
1 citation
The feeling of being alive reveals a deep link between biological life and subjective experience. Self-awareness is not a mental model produced in the brain but a manifestation of the whole organism's life. The feeling of life has two components: vitality (basic vital feelings) and conation (drive, urge, desire), both grounded in self-regulating processes that maintain the organism's homeostasis. The sufficient basis of self-awareness lies in the organism's self-organization and relationship to its environment, not in neural correlates of consciousness. The paper also examines how depression and Cotard syndrome disrupt the feeling of being alive.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 13, 2026
Henrique Mendes
1 citation
Only a specific strain of enactive cognition—autopoietic or autonomist enactivism—genuinely challenges all core tenets of mainstream cognitive science, which are grounded in computationalism, representationalism, functionalism, internalism, and realism. Most other embodied, embedded, or extended cognition theories can be assimilated into the traditional cognitivist framework when suitably qualified. Autopoietic enactivism, rooted in second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory, demands a deeper reconceptualization of cognition as emergent from dynamic, embodied interaction rather than internal symbol manipulation, resisting realist commitments and leaning toward radical constructivism. Thus, the enactive approach remains the only strand within 4E cognition where a full rejection of foundational assumptions is possible.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
February 8, 2025
Daniel Villiger
1 citation
Developing a mental disorder like major depressive disorder typically involves a transformative experience: one that teaches something unlearnable without it and substantially changes a person's point of view. This explains why mentally disordered people are often misunderstood—their experiential state is epistemically inaccessible to those who have not undergone something similar. Successful treatment of such a disorder also requires a personally transformative experience that overcomes the disorder. Pharmacological, psychological, and psychedelic-assisted treatments each use a different transformative route to recovery, a finding relevant to debates in medical ethics about informed consent.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 20, 2026
Søren Overgaard, Laura Oppi, Kasper Møller Nielsen et al.
Defining hallucination is surprisingly difficult: most definitions either miss cases that clinicians consider hallucinations or include cases they do not. This paper first shows why existing accounts fail, then develops a new definition that captures all and only the cases clinicians classify as hallucinations. The key is clarifying two often vague ideas: that hallucinations have a 'sense of reality' and that they are 'perception-like'. By specifying exactly what these mean, the authors provide an account that matches clinical usage.