ADR-016: phenomenology joins the topics

Context

Filing the self literature (ADR-015) brought in Zahavi’s Subjectivity and Selfhood and Gallagher’s “Philosophical conceptions of the self”. Their subject, the self, has a word. Their method has none. The vocabulary had words for subjects (consciousness, the self, cognition) but none for the phenomenological way of studying them. Zahavi’s reply to the no-self views the record holds, Dennett’s and Metzinger’s, is a phenomenologist’s reply, and the record could not say so.

The record already held other works of this kind with nowhere to put them:

• a reading of Kaepernick through Merleau-Pontian phenomenology;
• a mixed-methods study coding the phenomenology of meditation experience;
• Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, whose “method for phenomenology” is heterophenomenology;
• IIT 3.0, which derives its postulates from axioms about experience.

The filing agent proposed the word, and the owner accepted it.

Decision

Add phenomenology to topics, in the philosophy group, after self-and-personhood. Its blurb: “the first-person description of experience as a method — the philosophical tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), its use in the sciences of mind, and the theories that take their data from it”.

The word names a method, not a subject, so it is never expected to lead. A work carries it when a reader browsing phenomenology would be right to expect it there: because the work practises the method, or argues about it, or builds a theory on its data.

Tagged. No tag was removed, and no first tag changed.

• Second tag: LIT-463 (Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood).
• Last tag:
  • LIT-453 (Gallagher 2000, the minimal self);
  • LIT-209 (Kaepernick, read through Merleau-Ponty);
  • LIT-066 (the varieties of contemplative experience);
  • LIT-443 (Consciousness Explained, heterophenomenology);
  • LIT-445 (IIT 3.0, from the phenomenology to the mechanisms).

Alternatives considered

• Leave method unsaid. Each of these works already has its subject tagged. But a reader who wants the phenomenological literature has no page to find it on, and a reply such as Zahavi’s to Dennett is a reply from a method.
• Stretch consciousness or self-and-personhood. That is the nearest-wrong-word move the vocabulary rule forbids. Kaepernick and the meditation study are not about either subject in the sense those words hold.
• A narrower word, minimal-self. It names only Zahavi’s and Gallagher’s thesis, which self-and-personhood already holds.

Consequences

Metzinger’s self-model theory engages phenomenology closely but is not a work of the method, and was left untagged; a reading of Being No One may change that. Future filings of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Varela’s neurophenomenology or Thompson’s Mind in Life have a word waiting.