Phenomenology and Artificial Intelligence

Phenomenology is often thought to be irrelevant to artificial intelligence and cognitive science research because first-person descriptions do not reach to the level of genuine causal explanations. Though phenomenology taken in this weak sense may not be useful, the method of phenomenology taken more formally may well produce fruitful results. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, or epoché, sets the right frame of reference for a science of cognition because it makes explicit the difference between what belongs to cognition and what belongs to the natural world. Isolating this critical difference helps us assign the correct procedures to cognition and describe their functions. A formalized phenomenology of cognition can therefore aid initiatives in cognitive computing.