Rethinking Nature: Phenomenology and a Non-reductionist Cognitive Science

Abstract

Resistance to the idea that phenomenology can be relevant to cognitive scientific explanation has faced two objections advanced, respectively, from both sides of the issue: from the scientific perspective it has been suggested that phenomenology, understood as an account of first-person experience, is ultimately reducible to cognitive neuroscientific explanation; and from a phenomenological perspective it has been argued that phenomenology cannot be naturalized. In this context it makes sense to consider that the notion of scientific reduction is linked to a classic scientific conception of nature. I argue that if properly understood, the proposal to rethink the concept of nature itself, in enactivist phenomenological approaches, undermines the reductionist program and redefines what it means for phenomenology to be naturalized.

KEYWORDS:

• naturalizing phenomenology
• nature
• quantum theory
• reductionism
• science
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jack Reynolds and Dan Zahavi for comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The equation expresses a version of quantum indeterminacy. Fjelland [2002: 55] explains this equation as follows:

the product of the uncertainties in two (noncommuting) entities must necessarily exceed a given constant . . . For example, x can denote the position of a particle, and p its linear momentum. ΔX is then the uncertainty in the determination of the position, and ΔP is the uncertainty in the determination of the momentum of the same particle. h is Planck's constant. The implications are radical. For example, if we know the position of a particle exactly, its momentum is totally unknown, and if we know the momentum exactly, its position is totally unknown.

2 According to a critique developed by Alexandre Koyré [1943: 34], Galileo was more of a theorist than an experimentalist; Galileo explained ‘real being by mathematical being … bodies moving in straight lines in infinite empty space are not real bodies moving in real space, but mathematical bodies moving in mathematical space’ (see also Koyré [1939: 3]).

3 Bohr [1984: 119] comes close to making physics an empirical phenomenology: ‘from our present standpoint, physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather a development for methods of ordering and surveying human experience.’

4 It also accords well with ‘subject naturalism’ [Price 2011: 187]—i.e., pragmatic, non-representationalist, expressivist view where valid claims about nature depend on the status of the subject making those claims.

5 Notwithstanding claims by some theory theorists concerning our use of folk psychology and theoretical inference.

6 Compare with Husserl’s [1965: 186] statement:

Mathematical science of nature is a technical marvel for the purpose of accomplishing inductrions whose fruitfulness, probability, exactitude, and calculability could previously not even be suspected. As an accomplishment it is a triumph of the human spirit. With regard to the rationality of its methods and theories, however, it is a thoroughly relative science. It presupposes as data principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.

Quentin Lauer comments in a translator’s footnote to this passage, ‘The work of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr has shown how quantum mechanics and nuclear physics have highlighted precisely the problem Husserl brings out here.’

7 ‘Comme le disait Niels Bohr, ce n'est pas un hasard s'il y a harmonie entre les descriptions de la psychologie (nous dirions: de la phemomenologie) et les conceptions de la physique contemporaine’ [Merleau-Ponty 1995: 373].

8 Pollard may have been misled by my report on the use of the plural term ‘body schemas’ as ‘a collection of motor programs’ (Gallagher 2005a: 24)—this, however, was intended as a report on the use of the plural term in the psychological literature.

9 But see Zahavi [2010: 16]: ‘a naturalization of phenomenology might not only entail a radical modification (rather than abandonment) of transcendental philosophy, but also a rethinking of the concept of nature—a rethinking that might ultimately lead to a transformation of natural science itself'.’

10 I’ve indicated elsewhere that this type of non-reductionistic cognitive science aligns with Sandra Mitchell’s [2002] concept of integrative pluralism. See also Gallagher et al. [2015]; and McGivern [2008].

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Award for supporting this research.