MUTUAL ENLIGHTENMENT: RECENT PHENOMENOLOGY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Abstract

This article provides a critical review of recent work at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science. What is and what ought to be the relationship between these two approaches to the study of consciousness? This review explores problems involved with expressing subjective experience in an objective fashion, and issues involved in the use of principles of isomorphism to explain how brain and consciousness are interrelated. It suggests that strict lines cannot be drawn between third-person theory and phenomenological description, that the division of labour between phenomenology and cognitive science is not very strict, and that the best model for understanding the relation between these two approaches is one that emphasizes an externalist viewpoint. The term phenomenology can be used in a generic sense to cover a variety of areas related to the problem of consciousness. In this sense it is a title that ranges over issues pertaining to first-person or subjective experience, qualia, and what has become known as 'the hard problem' (Chalmers, 1995). The term is sometimes used even more generally to signify a variety of approaches to studying such issues, including contemplative, meditative and mystical studies, and transpersonal psychol- ogy. 1 Within the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, however, phenomenology also has a more specialized meaning. In this case it refers to the methodology and philosophy initiated by the philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and developed in various ways by theorists such as Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz. I restrict the scope of this review to phenomenol- ogy in this more specialized sense. In the light of several recent publications, the general questions I address are: What is and what ought to be the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive science? and what, if any, recent contributions has phenomenology made to the science of consciousness? 2

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