Jean-Michel Roy collaborated with Francisco Varela at the time Varela laid the grounds of his neurophenomenological project. A co-founder of the Paris research group Phenomenology and Cognition, he organized the 1995 Bordeaux conference that gave birth to the collective volume Naturalizing Phenomenology, of which he is a co-editor (Stanford University Press, 1999). In a series of subsequent papers he developed his own view of the possible relevance of a phenomenological investigation to contemporary cognitive science, and of Husserlian phenomenology in particular.
Roy J.-M. (2009) Subjectivity: First- and third-person methodologies. In: Banks W. P. (ed.) Encyclopedia of consciousness. Volume 2. Academic Press, New York: 389–400. https://cepa.info/5861
It is only in the mid-1980s that the contemporary cognitive movement born out of the Cognitive Revolution rehabilitated consciousness as a major theme of investigation. Given the subjective character of conscious properties, this important evolution revived a time honored question of philosophy: is a scientific theory of subjective properties possible, and if so how? The article reviews the main elements of the current debate elicited by this twofold issue, focusing on the proposal that a science of subjective properties requires a new methodology granting a crucial role to the self-description by the investigated subjects of the content of their conscious experience.
Roy J.-M. (2013) Pragmatisme cognitif et énactivisme. Intellectica 60: 69–89. https://cepa.info/7336
The increasing references to the pragmatist movement within contemporary cognitive science is a sign that it has finally started to address an issue it long neglected, and that might be appropriately labeled the problem of cognitive pragmatism. The article first attempts to sketch out a general definition of this problem, and then provides a detailed examination of one of the specific issues involved in it. This issue, which is of a critical nature, consists in determining whether the enactivism of A. Noë, taken as particularly representative of the form currently assumed by the enactivist current, can be interpreted as a vindication of cognitive pragmatism, and if so, as a receivable one. After defending a positive answer to the first question, on the basis of the idea that cognitive pragmatism should be fundamentally understood as the hypothesis that action is essential to cognition, it answers the second one negatively. A negative answer essentially motivated by the claim that the pragmatist dimension of Noë’s enactivism is insufficiently grounded, because it rests on a key distinction between constitutive and non-constitutive dependency that Noë leaves wholly unanalyzed and that is far from being unquestionable.
Roy J.-M. (2015) Anti-Cartesianism and Anti-Brentanism: The problem of anti-representationalist intentionalism. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 53(S1): 90–125.
Despite its internal divisions and the uncertainty surrounding many of its foundations, there is a growing consensus that the on-going search for an alternative model of the mind finds a minimal theoretical identity in the pursuit of an anti-Cartesian conception of mental phenomena. Nevertheless, this anti-Cartesianism remains more or less explicitly committed to the neo-Brentanian idea that intentionality is an essential feature of the mental – an idea that has prevailed since the advent of modern cognitive science in the 1950s. An issue of compatibility is thereby raised, as neo-Brentanism arguably sides with cognitive Cartesianism. The main goal of the paper is to put into full light one specific aspect of this largely unperceived problem of compatibility by arguing that the neo-Brentanian property of intentionality is an essentially representational one that runs counter to the salient anti-representationalism of anti-Cartesianism. And, that this representational essence confronts the search for alternative models of the mind of an anti-Cartesian kind with the following theoretical issue: To what extent is it possible to devise a non-Brentanian property of intentionality, particularly one that is fully dissociated from the property of representation? This issue is shown to be much deeper and more difficult than it looks once the nature of representation is properly apprehended; it seems to be still waiting for an answer in the current search for an alternative model of the mind, if only because it has not yet be set in fully adequate terms.
Roy J.-M. (2017) A Newcomer to the Neurophenomenological Family? Constructivist Foundations 12(2): 180–182. https://cepa.info/4071
Open peer commentary on the article “Modeling Subjects’ Experience While Modeling the Experimental Design: A Mild-Neurophenomenology-Inspired Approach in the Piloting Phase” by Constanza Baquedano & Catalina Fabar. Upshot: Demonstrating the relevance of collecting first-person data and of establishing reciprocal constraints between this these data and behavioral data to overcome the issue of behavioral data replication is an interesting result. However, this result, as such, falls short of offering any theoretical reorientation of the neurophenomenological project, strictly understood.
Roy J.-M. (2017) Time As the “Acid Test” of Neurophenomenology. Constructivist Foundations 13(1): 101–103. https://cepa.info/4407
Open peer commentary on the article “The Past, Present and Future of Time-Consciousness: From Husserl to Varela and Beyond” by Shaun Gallagher. Upshot: Gallagher provides a suggestive solution to the problem of articulating the neurophenomenological and the enactivist components of Varela’s approach to cognition, although one that perpetuates a problematic understanding of the naturalist dimension of the idea of neurophenomenology.