The 'pre-reflective' and Implicit Character of Lived Experience

This special issue commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within (Varela & Shear, 1999), where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experienced. In the Editors’ Introduction: ‘First-person methodologies: What, Why, How?’ (Varela & Shear, 1999a), they demonstrated that it was essential to lift the ban which had until then excluded lived experience from the field of scientific research, and to design rigorous methods enabling researchers to collect ‘first person’ descriptions of the ‘lived experience associated with cognitive and mental events’ (p. 1), that is descriptions provided by the subject living them. They also introduced the idea that the process which enables us to become reflectively conscious of one’s experience and to describe it has a specific structure, and that it is possible and important to study it. The objective of this commemorative issue is to examine and refine this research program on first person methods, through contributions based on empirical research. We have tried to keep close to the spirit of the original by gathering contributions of researchers who do not only propose first person descriptions, but who also try to describe the very process of description, in order to make this process reproducible — a necessary condition for any scientific understanding.