left cognitive psychologists with their counterparts in behavior, while at the same time creating a new subdiscipline called cognitive neuroscience, an endeavor still not fully understood by the cognitivists who remained.
So we have three levels of science to remember, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroscience proper. The neurophenomenologists are clearly speaking from the cognitive neurosciences to the larger fi eld of neuroscience.
However, neurophenomenology has yet to reach the radar screen of cognitive psychologists and psychology in general. It is also my contention that the neurophe- nomenologists have captured recent trends in the neurosciences in neurophilosophy, the philosophy of mind, and what d’Aquili and Newberg have called neurotheology, by taking a fi rst step engaging the neuroscientists proper, not with more analytic philosophy, but with phenomenology as a formal discipline.
Phenomenology had entered psychology through the existential- phenomenological movement in the 1950s, spearheaded by psychotherapists in psychology and psy- chiatry around such authors as Rollo May (May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958 ), Victor Frankl in From Death Camp to Existentialism ( 1959 ), and Humanistic psychologists in league with May, such as Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow (May, 1961 ), and others around Clark Moustakas ( 1961 ) and Amedeo Giorgi ( 1970 ).
Giorgi, however, is not a clinician, but a trained experimental scientist who sees himself clearly as a phenomenological psychologist. He has been most pro- foundly infl uenced by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in the tradition of the Continental phenomenologists, but has also written on William James, and at one point trans- lated Linschoten on radical empiricism and phenomenology. Giorgi’s position is that phenomenology is, in fact, the unifying element in psychology regarding the war between the experimentalists and the clinicians. A phenomenologically ori- ented psychology would be able to explore the commonalities between patient and therapist as well as experimenter and subject and would also move psychology more toward becoming a descriptive science rather than the current approach, which is one devoted to the manipulation, prediction, and control of the subject while the experimenter adopts an essentially false position of neutrality in the conduct of the study.
James’s radical empiricism is in complete agreement with Giorgi, but only up to a point, which involves the differentiation of phenomenology in science from its role in psychology. Such an important distinction James himself dealt with in 1904 in corre- spondence with the logician and philosopher of science, Charles Sanders Peirce [pro- nounced “purse”]. James had sent his article on “Does Consciousness Exist?” to Peirce and the response he got was largely unintelligible, though one thing was clear.
Peirce maintained that phenomenology was absolutely fundamental to science, but James was in error calling it psychology. The issue appeared to be where Peirce saw psychology in the hierarchy of the sciences. It was a formal discipline, but a branch of what would become the social sciences, as most psychologists interpret it today.
James, on the other hand, argued for a new kind of psychological science, based on an intuitively oriented, phenomenological psychology in the immediate moment (Taylor, 2010a , b , c ). In this, he rejected the artifi cial boundaries between the disci- plines as man-made and thus subject to the same vagaries as all rational thought
based on an analysis of the senses alone. The distinctions were certainly rational, but rationality is a sentiment whose reign continues by consensus alone, precluding other ways of knowing. The importation of the Western scientifi c model globally would be a case in point (see, for instance, The Oxford Handbook in the History of Psychology , Baker, 2012 ). It can only be considered the New Colonialism to pre- sume that reductionistic empiricism fi elds the only defi nition of reality possible.
The consequence is that the globalization of reductionistic materialism in psycho- logical science precludes research psychologists from ever really listening to the indigenous psychologies of non-Western cultures, which have their own cultural mythologies, standards of mental health, and unique models for the actualization of human potential for persons within their own cultures.
Giorgi maintains a more traditional view of psychology, while James maintained that there is no science anywhere without persons—that psychology is epistemol- ogy. The implication is that a phenomenologically oriented psychology of persons is foundational to all the basic sciences, not physics. Giorgi, while adhering to the tra- ditional distinction between the Natural and Human Sciences, believes that James’s position traditional phenomenologists would label psychologism (personal commu- nication, March 25, 2010). This is tantamount to taking a branch of science and calling it the trunk and roots, at least according to the traditional and current view of psychology. But phenomenology now exists in a new world, where it implicates the experimenter in the conduct of science, which was James’s point to begin with.
We may count James’s functionalism as the fi rst order expression of his radical empiricism. The lineage was carried on not by the New Realists, but by the macrop- ersonality theorists of the 1930s and 1940s in the work of Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, and the Murphys, who, through the writings of Allport, represented a sci- ence of the whole person (Taylor, 1992 ). While their students endeavored to inte- grate themselves into psychology as a social science of the times, instead, these pioneer theorists themselves became godfathers and godmothers of the Humanistic Movement in psychology that sprouted in the 1940s and 1950s (Taylor, 2000 ; Taylor, Martinez, & Martin, 2000 ). The Humanistic Movement, in turn, argued for psychology as a person-centered science, which was not Humanism and advocated not just a psychology of persons, but a much more sophisticated and nuanced epis- temological critique of existing psychological systems. Humanistic psychology as a global movement was absorbed almost completely into the Human Potential Movement after 1969, however, and attempts to focus on a psychology of the person were displaced by the cognitive revolution as behaviorists bought themselves com- puters in droves and developed a more mentalist language of behavioristic princi- ples. Cognitive information processing models, computational analysis, and artifi cial intelligence on the computer screens soon replaced kibbles in the dish of the white rat, while any vision of the whole person faded before the ascendency of the Five Factor Model. The person seemed to have disappeared as a focus in psychology.
The humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution, however, namely, the return of the philosophical questions once banned from discussion during the cognitive-behavioral era, implicate the very personality of the experimenter in the conduct of psychological science now that the revolution in consciousness is
forcing science to study its own methods and points of view. I refer to this as the
“phenomenology of the science making process itself” and see it refl ected in the work of such investigators as Max Velmans, University of London, who maintains that the experimenter represents the new variable that must be accounted for in the puzzle to understand the relation between the brain and the mind.
Neurophenomenologists carry this argument one step forward by challenging neuroscience to train the next generation of scientists in the methods of phenome- nology. This alone is destined to alter the way the scientifi c method is taught in experimental psychology. However, in all likelihood, it must play itself out in psy- chology as science generally before experimental psychologists are prepared to handle the shift from a nineteenth-century defi nition of the physical sciences in which their kind of science, based on a Newtonian, Kantian, and Aristotelian model, has prevailed for the past 100 years to a more experiential, phenomenological, and Jamesean view of psychology as a person-centered science.
Notes
1. Five core ideas that defi ne the enactive paradigm are the mutually supporting concepts of autonomy , sense-making , embodiment , emergence , and experience (Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2007 ; Thompson, 2005 , 2007 ; Varela et al., 1991 ). A key principle of the enactive approach is that the organism is a center of activity in the world. See also Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences , Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007 ).
2. The lectures on “Exceptional Mental States” James never published (Taylor, 1982/ 2010a ), but their content was bequeathed to the next generation of James’s graduate students, such as Boris Sidis ( 1898 ). The content of the 1896 lectures also found theirway into several major chapters in James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James made the case there that the road to ultimately transforming states of mystical consciousness lay through an explora- tion of dynamic subconscious or subliminal states within the individual.
3. Francis J. Child, who had been in attendance, had written to James Russell Lowell that the subject of the lectures was the brain as the organ of the mind, though I do not think James would completely agree (James, 1988 , p. 449). James’s later radical empiricism suggests that the brain as the organ of the mind would be just as appropriate. Each point of view is true with regard to a different level of experience.
Biological reductionists would claim superiority. Radical empiricists would accept both as true because both are based on belief—that is, both are based on unproven assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality.
4. The origin myth that Wundt founded the fi rst laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, I have dealt with in Taylor ( 2003a ). The Hypothesis of the Three Streams: Or, Why Wundt’s Laboratory was not founded until 1950.
5. See, for instance, James ( 1874 ).
6. This, of course, was 15 years before Ramon y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for identifying the neuron.
7. Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (13 April 1794–6 December 1867), father of Gustave Flourens, was a French physiologist, a founder of experimental brain science, and a pioneer in anesthe- sia. Eduard Hitzig (February 6, 1839–August 20, 1907) was a German neurologist and neu- ropsychiatrist. Sir David Ferrier, FRS (13 January 1843–19 March 1928) was a Scottish neurologist and psychologist.
8. See, for instance, James ( 1875 ). While phrenology might not seem an apt scientifi c compari- son, its early pioneer, Franz Joseph Gall, sparked a vigorous discussion among the early brain neurophysiologists abroad in the controversy over localization of function in brain neuroanatomy.
9. James ( 1879b ), a year after the Lowell Lectures, wrote on the Sentiment of Rationality, more fully developed in 1897 in The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy . 10. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, his tripartite metaphysics was a retailing of Peirce’s
Three Categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, but in a more typical Jamesean vein. See Taylor ( 2012b ).
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Is there an embodied, growth-oriented dimension of the person 1 or neurophenomeno- logical self that is biochemically and energetically rooted in the hypothalamic- pituitary- gonadal (HPG) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axes of the body? Neurophenomenology encourages a vision of the integrated self through a reexamination of the relationship between the subjectively experienced mind and the objectively known material substratum of the mind, the brain. Enactive cognition 2 points out that while it is impossible to infer such engagement through the brain, it is possible through the lived experience of the body. 3 Psychoneurointracrinology explores this explanatory gap between the mind and the brain. This construct repre- sents the interrelationship between psychological, neurological, and intracrinological processes forming a mind-brain continuum within the person (Gordon , 2001 , 2007 , in press a , b ). Psycho (psychological) refers to constructs variously referred to as psyche, self, soul, mind, and consciousness. Neuro (neurological) refers to the com- position and reactions within the nervous system. Intracrine (intracrinological) refers to the intracellular biosynthesis of steroids: the binding of receptors and the forma- tion of enzymes that catalyze the creation of hormones within the cell.