Context: Seventeen years ago Francisco Varela introduced neurophenomenology. He proposed the integration of phenomenological approaches to first-person experience – in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – with a neuro-dynamical, scientific approach to the study of the situated brain and body. Problem: It is time for a re-appraisal of this field. Has neurophenomenology already contributed to the sciences of the mind? If so, how? How should it best do so in future? Additionally, can neurophenomenology really help to resolve or dissolve the “hard problem” of the relation between mind and body, as Varela claimed? Method: The papers in this special issue arose out of a conference organised by the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society in Bristol, UK, in September 2012. We have invited a representative sample of the speakers at that conference to present their work here. Results: Various papers argue that the first-person methods of phenomenology are distinct from, and more robust than, the failed “introspectionist” methods of early modern psychology. The “elicitation interview” emerges as a successful and widely adopted method to have emerged from this field. Phenomenological techniques are already being successfully applied to neuroscientific problems. Various specific proposals for new techniques and applications are made. Implications: It is time to take neurophenomenology seriously. It has proven its worth, and it is ripe with the potential for further immediate, successful applications. Constructivist content: Varela’s key aim was to develop a non-dualising approach to the science of consciousness. The papers in this special issue look at the philosophical and practical details of successfully putting such an approach into practice.

Key words: Phenomenology, neuroscience, dynamical systems, first-person methods, second-person methods, the elicitation interview, introspection, consciousness

Context: We are presently witnessing a revival of introspective methods, which implicitly challenges an impressive list of in-principle objections that were addressed to introspection by various philosophers and by behaviorists. Problem: How can one overcome those objections and provide introspection with a secure basis? Results: A renewed definition of introspection as “enlargement of the field of attention and contact with re-enacted experience,” rather than “looking-within,” is formulated. This entails (i) an alternative status of introspective phenomena, which are no longer taken as revelations of some an sich slice of experience, but as full-fledged experiences; and (ii) an alternative view of the validity of first-person reports as “performative coherence” rather than correspondence. A preliminary empirical study of the self-assessed reliability of introspective data using the elicitation interview method is then carried out. It turns out that subjects make use of reproducible processual criteria in order to probe into the authenticity and completeness of their own introspective reports. Implications: Introspective inquiry is likely to have enough resources to “take care of itself.” Constructivist content: It is argued that the failure of the introspectionist wave of the turn of the 19th/20th centuries is mostly due to its unconditional acceptance of the representationalist theory of knowledge, and that alternative non-representationalist criteria of validity give new credibility to introspective knowledge.

Key words: Introspection, first-person, phenomenology, consciousness, awareness, epistemology, non-representationalism, experience, subjectivity

From the Introduction: Our aim is to show that, irrespective of its alleged theoretical “impossibility”, introspection is a living reality. We will focus on one of the currently available methods that we ourselves practice: the elicitation interview method.

Conflicting claims have been made about whether introspection can be reliable at all. Lots of objections have been formulated against it in classical and modern literature. We thus list these objections and outline some replies, in addition to some theoretical rebuttals based on contemporary philosophy of science. We further point out that these objections target an abstract image of introspection rather than introspection per se. Accordingly, we describe one of the currently available methods that we ourselves practice: the elicitation (or micro-phenomenological) interview method. Our aim is to show that, irrespective of its alleged theoretical impossibility”, introspection is made real by this kind of method which incorporates replies to most standard objections.

Summary: In its most radical version, Neurophenomenology asks researchers to suspend the quest of an objective solution to the problem of the origin of subjectivity, and clarify instead how objectification can be obtained out of the coordination of subjective experiences. It therefore invites researchers to develop their inquiry about subjective experience with the same determination as their objective inquiry. However, accessing lived experience raises the question of the investigation method, and of the reliability of its results. Here, we present an accurate method of exploration of lived experience: the elicitation (or microphenomenological) interview. In the course of this interview, one first triggers a form of “phenomenological reduction,” then assists the subject in retrieving or “evoking” past experiences, and finally helps the subject to perform acts of attention about this evoked experience, to describe it faithfully. It is shown that this method addresses a set of traditional objections against introspection Relevance: Elicitation interview, first-person, introspection, lived experience, microdynamics, micro-phenomenological interview, neurophenomenology, pre-reflective experience.

Key words: Elicitation interview, first-person, introspection, lived experience, microdynamics, micro-phenomenological interview, neurophenomenology, pre-reflective experience.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of judicial reasoning that satisfactorily integrates partially provided explanations by three different theoretical research paradigms: philosophy of law, legal epistemology, and artificial intelligence and law. The model emerges from the application of knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation methods, and uses the theory of neural networks as a theoretical metaphor to generate explanations and visual representations. The epistemological status of the model is of constructivist stripe: it is in line with the contemporary research tendencies within cognitive psychology that propose that judicial reasoning may be better understood if a coherentist and a connectionist approach is taken.

Key words: judicial reasoning, philosophy of law, legal epistemology, artificial intelligence, neural networks

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood. Relevance: It proposes an enactive conceptualization of the phenomenon of appraisal.

The most fundamental step in the knowledge acquisition phase of the development of an expert system is the elicitation of knowledge from a skilled individual. The knowledge acquisition phase has typically involved the knowledge engineer’s working closely with a specialist to elicit relevant knowledge from the latter’s domain. This is typically a tedious and ad hoc cycle that consists of extensive verbal interviews followed by the construction of prototypes, testing, and more interviews. This approach has two significant drawbacks – it has been extremely laborious, and domain experts often have difficulty articulating their knowledge in forms useful to the knowledge engineer. Indeed, it has been suggested (Feigenbaum & McCorduck, 1983) that “the problem of knowledge acquisition is the critical bottleneck in artificial intelligence” (p. 80).

Key words: expert system, knowledge acquisition, domain expert, knowledge engineer, personal construct

A research effort aimed at the development and unification of the prerequisite underlying theoretical foundations for an adequate approach to knowledge elicitation from repertory grid data is described. A theory of confirmation that incorporates the basic tenets of personal construct psychology directly into the logic as a basis for the determination of relevance is offered, thus strengthening the logic and extending personal construct psychology. These largely theoretical developments are applied to the representation and analysis of repertory grid data. The concept of an alpha -plane is introduced as a binary decomposition of repertory grid data that furnishes the realization of construct extensions (or ranges of convenience) needed to determine the range of relevance of a particular generalization or hypothesis. In addition, they provide the uniquely determined string of incidences required by any application of Bundy’s truth functional incidence calculus. The theories are applied to the design and construction of NICOD-a semiautomated medical knowledge acquisition system. The system has been successfully employed in the elicitation of valuable heuristic radiological knowledge (mammography) that the domain experts (radiologists) were otherwise unable to articulate.

The present article concentrates on second-person in- depth phenomenological inquiry (SIPI) into human experience. In order to delineate important characteristics of SIPI we use an example of a phenomenological case study. The study comprised of descriptive experience sampling, writing of diary, and a series of elicitation interviews.