Froese, Tom and Sykes, John (2023) The pragmatics, embodiment, and efficacy of lived experience: Assessing the core tenets of Varela’s neurophenomenology. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Varela’s enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a sophisticated theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality. At the same time, Varela’s methodological innovation – neurophenomenology (NP) – continues to inspire noteworthy empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets, i.e., (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy, yet these two research fields have become largely disconnected. We argue that this disconnect largely hinges on an unresolved tension regarding how to conceptualize the mind-body relationship. Although advances have been made regarding the overarching motivation of bringing cognitive (neuro)science closer to lived experience, Varela may have overestimated the impact of introducing first- and second-person methods on dissolving the traditional mind-body problem. Most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even some explicit distancing from tenet 3. We illustrate this situation by way of a critical review of several case studies. We find that NP falls short of its revolutionary ambition to combine all three tenets; it still needs to demonstrate that first-person perspective matters, not only as another source of correlational data, but because a person’s lived experience, as such, makes an efficacious difference to their embodied cognition. We conclude that, given tenet 1 is now an accepted tool of human neuroscience, and tenet 2 is slowly receiving more attention, it is time to revisit tenet 3. The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of embodied brain activity would go hand in hand with a rebooting of neurophenomenology in stronger form.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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| Subjects: | General Issues > Causation Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Psychology |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. Tom Froese | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 05 Apr 2023 13:07 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 05 Apr 2023 13:07 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 21970 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Causation Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Psychology |
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| Date: | 5 April 2023 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/21970 |
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