The Phenomenological Mind : An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive

The Phenomenological Mind is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see the References section.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g., 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g., 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus explicitly uses it (e.g., 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional artificial intelligence, Gallagher and Zahavi indicate a positive and constructive place for it. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the traditional tenets of the phenomenological method and some potential surprises, namely, attempts to " naturalize " phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of " neurophenomenology. " Each of these is a surprise because Husserl was a critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing it. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. " Naturalizing " phenomenology means recognizing that " the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation " (p. 32) and that scientific investigation and phenomenology should mutually inform each other. They are corroborative, rather than competitive, though how this is best understood remains " contentious " (p. 30). " Formalizing " phenomenology is a matter of codifying " the formal structure of experience " (p. 30) in order to translate " data from phenomenological and naturalistic realms into a common language " (p. 32). The benefits of doing so are clear upon reflection, though the book does not offer detail. If we can find a way to code descriptions of experience in a language recognizable to science, we might go a long way toward finding scientific explanations for it—at least this seems to be the hope. Along similar lines, " neurophenomenology …