Abstract
Recent decades have seen a development of a variety of approaches for examining lived experience in the context of cognitive science. However, the field of first-person research has yet to develop a pragmatic epistemological framework that would enable researchers to compare and integrate – as well as understand the epistemic status of – different methods and their findings. In this article, we present the foundation of such a framework, grounded in an epistemological investigation of gestures involved in acquiring data on experience. We examine the acts of turning towards one’s experiential field and attending to experience within the process of reflection. We describe what we call the horizon of attending to experience by analogy to the “experimental arrangement” in quantum observation: this horizon, we argue, co-defines experiential phenomena that end up being observed and reported; at the same time, it itself forms an element of experience and is therefore amenable to phenomenological investigation. Drawing on the constructivist notion of enaction, we show that acknowledging the inherently constructive nature of attending to experience and accepting one’s lack of epistemic access to the “original”, observation-independent pre-reflective experience is not a dead end for first-person research when situated in a constructivist (but not relativist) understanding of the reflective act and its results. Expanding the notion of the horizon to encompass all epistemic acts involved in producing phenomenological data and final results of a first-person study (i.e., horizon of the method), we suggest some lines of inquiry that would allow researchers to identify and articulate horizons of particular methods, opening a way towards integrating past and future findings of different complementary first-person approaches into a comprehensive map of lived experience.
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Notes
Throughout the article, we will make use of terms that might have different meanings when used by other authors. We ask the reader to consult the Glossary (Appendix) for clarifying our use of the key terms necessary for developing our account: first-person method, empirical phenomenology, reflection, pre-reflective experience, experience-as-phenomenon, horizon of attending to experience, and horizon of the method.
The exercise described here is not intended to capture how the process of reflection is carried out in any particular first-person method. Indeed, both of the arguably most widely employed first-person methods – micro-phenomenology and DES – specifically warn against asking inducive questions such as “What does your left foot feel like?”; they also focus on an already transpired (rather than concurrent) experience and do not suggest adopting different attitudes in attending to it. (But see Schwitzgebel, 2007 for an experience sampling study that incidentally used a very similar question.)
A consistently phenomenological understanding of experience might render such dilemmas obsolete, stressing that any experience is, by (phenomenological) definition, necessarily experience for a subject, and that it therefore makes no sense to speak of “experience” independently of the subject’s relationship to it. However, this definition of experience is – as demonstrated by more than a century of aforementioned philosophical discussions – not accepted by all consciousness researchers and theorists. In this article, we refer to challenges such as the one posed by Blackmore not in order to resolve them, but to point to the current epistemological confusion of the field of first-person research.
Despite the impossibility of intersubjective and intersituational corroboration of acquired data on experience that could help us in dealing with the apparently constructive nature of the reflective act, different arguments have been put forward for why the reflected-upon experience must be identical to (or at least based on) the pre-reflective experience as it supposedly existed independently, prior to reflection; these arguments have been backed by common sense scientific aspirations (e.g. What would be the point of first-person research without such a promise?) as well as phenomenological accounts (e.g. Husserl, 1991; Sartre, 1956; Zahavi, 2015). In the present article, we are not interested in either accepting or challenging these arguments. Instead, we emphatically seek to avoid the in principle theoretical debates about the relationship between pre-reflective and reflective experience (for a discussion of the problematic distinction between reflective and pre-reflective awareness, see Kordeš & Demšar, 2021, “The notion of reflective observation”, pp. 5–7), about the issue of whether the findings of empirical phenomenological research really represent an original pre-reflective experience, as well as about the nature of such original experience.
Bohr’s observations of the non-coincidental congruence between phenomenological descriptions and measurements in quantum mechanics have also been tellingly echoed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 373).
In line with Bohr’s ideas and their later more systematic exploration by Michel Bitbol (2001, 2002), we have elsewhere suggested that a Bohrian non-representationalist epistemological framework could be applied in all those areas of scientific investigation that cannot regard their research objects as independent of the act of observation, which we describe as belonging to the non-trivial research domain (see Kordeš & Demšar, 2019).
The obvious difficulty for attempting a phenomenological examination of the horizon lies in the apparent vicious circle involved in any attempt at examining the horizon: if we want to notice the horizon of attending to experience, we must modify our way of relating to our experiential field by adopting another horizon of attending to experience – in other words, we must turn towards the very act of turning-towards. While systematically addressing the issue of self-referentiality in scientific inquiry exceeds the scope of this article (but see Kordeš & Demšar, 2018, 2019), we want to emphasize that self-referentiality does not automatically prevent empirical examination of experience. Unlike objectivist frameworks, the constructivist view can welcome self-referentiality as not only a possible complication, but indeed as an essential element of the scientific investigation of experience and mental processes more broadly (cf. Stewart, 2001; Riegler, 2001).
Our use of the notion of horizons in the present article primarily resonates with the understanding of horizons as it was postulated by Edmund Husserl in relation to his analysis of the protentional-retentional structure of consciousness. In this context, and in line with the account presented here, Husserl’s horizons are tied to the anticipatory dynamics involved in the constitution of perceptual objects and of the temporality of experience, and can be said to themselves present an implicit feature of experience. (Recently, the notion of horizon has been expanded beyond the paradigmatic case of perceptual acts to describe analogous reference to the possibilities of experience involved in more typically cognitive activities such as thinking, with the notion of “cognitive horizons” related to the concept of cognitive affordances; Jorba, 2020). Despite this resonance, we want to point out that our use of the notion of horizon is only a methodological operationalization. The preliminary identification of the similarity between our use of the term and the way that the notion is used in Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy would require a more thorough analysis (an analysis that could also include the way Husserl’s original use was adopted and adapted by other phenomenological thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, cf. Moran, 2011; we thank the anonymous reviewer for making this point). Due to the pragmatic, empirically oriented intention of our proposal, such an analysis exceeds the scope of the present article.
Surprisingly, this seemingly important distinction is rarely explicitly mentioned in phenomenological literature and first-person studies. In approaches such as micro-phenomenology and DES, the phenomenological attitude is adopted retrospectively, directed to a past (even if just-elapsed) experience that was itself often lived through in absence of phenomenological or reflective focus. It might occur that a particular examined experience happens to be one in which the participant was reflectively or phenomenologically aware already while living through it (e.g. listening to a sound with a specific attentional disposition or maintaining meditative presence with one’s ongoing experience; Petitmengin et al., 2009, 2017). Yet, the field of first-person research currently lacks a method for which maintaining real-time reflective (or phenomenological) awareness would constitute a methodological premise. Based on this observation, we have recently developed a novel approach for meditation-based phenomenological examination of ongoing lived experience, called sampling reflectively observed experience (SROE for short; see Kordeš & Demšar, 2021), which we in the next subsection suggest as a suitable approach for phenomenologically examining the horizons of attending to experience.
While DES emphasizes that it focuses on examining specifically “directly apprehended ongoing experience, that which directly presents itself ‘before the footlights of consciousness’ […] at some particular moment” (Hurlburt, 2011, p. 2), our definition of reflective awareness is stricter than this. In DES, what we understand as the reflective act (see Glossary) is carried out not during the examined moment of experience (i.e., the last undisturbed moment before the beep), but while describing this moment in the subsequent note-taking and expositional interview. We do not think that real-time reflective awareness of experience is present throughout most of people’s everyday lives, and while one might sometimes be thrown into reflection incidentally and/or without intent, we think that reflective attending more frequently requires deliberate attentional effort and skill.
Meditation practitioners often report that they do not succeed in attending to their experience with complete absence of judgment. This does not preclude using meditation-based observation of experience as a tool for exploring horizons. Often, already attempting to adopt a nonjudgmental attitude towards experience allows the meditator to recognize the “distance” between her current way of attending to experience and the horizon (or attentional disposition) that she is striving to adopt. She can, for instance, observe how her attention is shifting between different areas of her experiential field, or how she is trying to relax a specific part of her bodily experience. The feeling of trying to relax, in this case, is a part of the horizon, and so is the feeling preceding the shift of attention towards yet another area of the experiential field.
Importantly, these epistemic acts are typically not carried out in a diachronic succession, but are most frequently intertwined and may all simultaneously contribute to every step of the research process. For instance, linguistic and conceptual factors may co-determine what can be grasped at the very first moment of turning towards the pre-reflective flow experience, enabling and constraining the reflective act from its very onset (cf. Kordeš et al., 2019).
While a more detailed examination of the interpretative nature of qualitative analysis exceeds the scope of this article, see Kordeš et al. (2019) for an account of the “horizons of analysis”.
Not all first-person methods are non-commutative. Many of them aim towards similar aspects of experience, but at different levels of granularity. For instance: one could imagine carrying out a study exploring a diachronic unfolding of experience with the micro-phenomenological approach or an adaptation of a think-aloud protocol, where particular experiential moments of the unfolding of experience would be further – and in more detail – examined with DES.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Natalie Depraz, Russ Hurlburt, Aleš Oblak, Donata Schoeller, and Terje Sparby for their valuable comments on early drafts of this text. We would also like to thank the audiences at the conference First-Person Science of Consciousness (Witten, 2019) and at the workshop Micro-Phenomenology Lab (online, 2020), where we presented some key ideas of this paper.
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Both authors were employed at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia at the time of conceiving this work and writing the manuscript. No additional funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
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Appendix: Glossary
Appendix: Glossary
- First-person method refers to any research method aimed at acquiring first-person or phenomenological data (i.e., data on lived experience, cf. Varela & Shear, 1999), usually taking the form of verbal descriptions of a particular experiential episode, or certain aspects thereof. (This includes interview-based approaches sometimes called “second-person methods”). | |
- Empirical phenomenology refers to any type of empirical research on lived experience (also called first-person research) carried out within the phenomenological attitude (see Section 3.2). The term empirical is here used in a broad sense to denote any kind of research based in acquiring data (in this case, phenomenological data) by means of observation, distinguishing this approach from the largely theoretical endeavors of phenomenological philosophy. Empirical phenomenology thus stands for empirical, but not naturalized research on experience; this type of inquiry needs not be tied to any particular technique but encompasses all approaches to investigating experience that attempt to bracket the preconceptions, beliefs, and judgments about the experience in order to explore the way in which experience is actually given in consciousness. | |
- Reflection (or reflective act) denotes the process of becoming reflectively aware of one’s ongoing or past experience, most crucially consisting of attending to (or observing) experience (what Depraz et al., 2003 refer to as the gesture of becoming aware), but potentially also involving verbal or non-verbal articulation of experience. We are primarily interested in phenomenological reflection (i.e., reflection broadly carried out in line with the general methodological guidelines of the phenomenological approach; see Section 3.2) aimed at yielding phenomenological data. | |
- Pre-reflective (flow of) experience refers to one’s lived experience as it flows in absence of (or prior to) observation or examination. Since our epistemological framework is emphatically limited to what is epistemically accessible (see Section 2), our analysis does not make any claims about the nature or existence of the unexamined pre-reflective flow of experience. The expression is therefore used exclusively as a placeholder. (Synonyms used in other literature: undisturbed experience, preconscious experience.) | |
- Experience-as-phenomenon refers to experience as it is manifested in the act of examination, i.e., as it appears to the experiential subject as she is attending to experience. By analogy to perception, experience-as-phenomenon refers to what is “seen” when “looking at” experience. (Synonyms used: experiential percept; to be distinguished from “apprehended experience” in broader sense, see Hurlburt, 2011 and Footnote 10.) | |
- Horizon of attending to experience refers to the totality of characteristics involved in relating to one’s experience within the reflective act. We argue that horizons are present in attending either to concurrent experience from the present or already transpired experience from the past. Horizons necessarily co-determine how experience is made manifest in the reflective act, and at the same time themselves amount to an element of the experience (see Section 3). | |
- Horizon of the method refers to the inherent perspectivity of the entire process of first-person inquiry: the sum of “horizons” adopted not only in attending to experience, but also in further processes involved in generating phenomenological data and final results of first-person studies – acts of (verbal) articulation, intersubjective co-construction, analysis, and assessment (see Section 4). |
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Kordeš, U., Demšar, E. Horizons of becoming aware: Constructing a pragmatic-epistemological framework for empirical first-person research. Phenom Cogn Sci 22, 339–367 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09767-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09767-6