Phenomenology And Theory Of Mind

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

This text is based on the master's thesis by Sofie Boldsen

“A Phenomenology of the Autistic Body”

Translation, editing and editing Konopko A. S

Introduction

The term Theory of Mind has played a leading role in discussions about the nature of one person's ability to understand another since the 1980s. This idea occupies a special place in the psychology and philosophy of consciousness and rightfully received the title of a paradigm in cognitive psychology. The Theory of Mind's idea that cognitive activity is at the heart of the understanding of one person by another, operating with concepts of mental states, has had a significant impact on psychological research and psychotherapy. This article will analyze the main provisions of Theory of Mind and carry out a comparative analysis with the phenomenological tradition.

Criticism of the Theory of Mind

The theoretical and practical foundations of Theory of Mind have come under objections and criticism in recent years. The most often criticized is one of its main premises, which is the division of a person into mind and body. Thus, social problems are reduced to a lack of cognitive abilities, skills or knowledge, and the body's involvement in understanding other people is ignored by the theory of mind.

Phenomenology challenges various aspects of the fundamental assumptions made by Theory of Mind about the nature of social cognition. She argues that understanding other people is not a consequence of the explicit or implicit work of the mental apparatus, but, on the contrary, is immediate and intuitive.

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that emerged and then developed rapidly during the first half of the twentieth century and is known by such representatives as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A common thread running through the philosophy of all representatives of this trend is a radical insistence on studying the world, as experimentally given directly to the subject, from the first person. The basic concepts of phenomenology are such concepts as subjectivity, consciousness, intersubjectivity and corporeality. Theory of Mind, on the other hand, suggests that social understanding can be studied from the outside, from the perspective of a third person.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology differs in several respects from the rest of the phenomenological movement. Merleau-Ponty argues that the body can in no way be considered a physical object along with other objects in the world. On the contrary, the body plays a key role in how we experience the world, others and ourselves. The body that Merleau-Ponty speaks of is a living body; body, which is subjective life. Thus, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, at its very core, essentially opposes Theory of Mind. According to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, cognitive activity should be seen as a continuation of bodily activity, and the body should be understood as a subject of experiencing an experience.

Merging philosophy and psychology in phenomenology

Dan Zahavi and Joseph Parnas argue that phenomenology often refers to simple introspectionism, which provides simple descriptions of the experience. This is a simplified understanding that does not reveal the capabilities of a philosophical framework. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, phenomenology has carried out a comprehensive and detailed analysis of topics of deep interest to psychology, such as subjectivity, intersubjectivity, emotions and corporeality. Thus, both phenomenology and psychology explore subjective life, but often in very different ways. Phenomenology challenges the fundamental assumptions of the Theory of Mind, and offers a theoretical framework leading to research in new directions and new answers to problems in the field of psychology.

Throughout his career, Merleau-Ponty was in constant dialogue with empirical psychology and became one of the classical phenomenologists, by far the most involved in interaction with the empirical sciences.

His philosophy is a shining example of an open and mutually enriching dialogue between philosophy and psychology, which continues to this day.

Phenomenology and Theory of Mind

Fearing oversimplification, it can be said that the meeting point of Theory of Mind and phenomenology is attention to the fundamental structures of the mind. Consider briefly the historical development of these two fundamentally different approaches to the mind

Phenomenology is often contrasted with the analytical philosophy of mind, which developed in parallel with phenomenology, despite the fact that there was practically no discussion between them about mind. In fact, during the twentieth century, an atmosphere of rivalry developed between the two schools of thought. One way to characterize the difference between phenomenology and analytic philosophy is that the analytic approach traditionally prefers a naturalistic view of reason, whereas phenomenology insists on a non- or anti-naturalistic view. Gallagher and Zahavi note that science tends to support naturalism, and so when psychology began to lean towards computational theories of mind and the cognitive revolution began, the analytic Theory of Mind became the dominant philosophical approach to mind.

For the past 30 years, Theory of Mind has been one of the fastest growing areas of research in psychology. The term “Theory of Mind” or its equivalent “mentalization” has become a natural part of the psychology of cognition and development, in terms of understanding the behavior of other people. The Theory of Mind's assumption that the mental capacity of the individual is at the heart of social interaction leads to the fact that intersubjectivity becomes the domain of cognitive rather than social psychology, thus individualizing the concept of sociality. As cognitive psychology flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, phenomenology, which was considered purely introspectionism, was largely ignored as irrelevant. However, since the late 1980s, interest in phenomenology from within the cognitive sciences began to increase. In some circles of cognitive science, the content of consciousness has become a subject of interest, and a methodological discussion has begun on how to scientifically investigate the mind of an experiencing subject. Another development that sparked interest in phenomenology was advances in neuroscience. The science of the brain has made many experiments possible, relying, among other things, on the self-reports of the participants in the experiments. This required a methodology that provided the necessary framework for describing and understanding the experience as given in the first person.

It should be noted that interest in philosophical phenomenology in the field of cognitive sciences is by no means widely represented. Many do not consider philosophy to be relevant to scientific research, and some are skeptical as to whether phenomenology can represent a scientific approach to the study of the mind. This point of view is shared by renowned physicist, biologist and neuroscientist Francis Crick:

“[…] It is hopeless to try to solve problems of consciousness with general philosophical arguments; proposals are needed for new experiments that can shed light on these problems.”,“[…] the study of consciousness is a scientific problem. […] There is no reason to believe that only philosophers can deal with this. " Moreover, since philosophers "[…] have had such a bad reputation over the past 2,000 years that they should rather display a certain modesty than the arrogance they usually display."

According to this view, phenomenology and its contributions to cognitive science seem unnecessary and unnecessary. However, in circles that consider phenomenology to be an appropriate approach, there is a lively debate about how exactly to connect phenomenology with cognitive science, given that the basic assumptions of the two schools seem somewhat incompatible. Despite the growing recognition of phenomenology in the field of cognitive science, scientific research is dominated by the proponents of Theory of Mind, who explain the psyche in a simplified way, in the form of a combination of certain cognitive mechanisms. The idea of correlating the functions of the mind with specific elements of cognitive architecture is an idea that has a strong influence on psychology as a science and entails a very specific understanding of it.

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind is difficult to describe as a single scientific school, since different branches often disagree on very fundamental issues. However, the center of interest in any case is the question of how we understand other people. One feature common to different parts of Theory of Mind is that one person's understanding of another is treated as a result of cognitive work. The capacity for social understanding allows us to attribute mental states to other people and thus interpret observed behavior in terms of mental state concepts. The main discrepancy between the various branches of the Theory of Mind concerns whether we attribute mental states to another through explicit or implicit mental activity, is this process conscious, or subconscious

Theory of Mind can be seen as a field that brings together ideas from various sciences and research traditions. Thus, we can trace the development of this thought and its predecessors. The philosophical concept of folk psychology, which became widespread in the 1980s, was of great importance for the philosophy of mind and for cognitive science. The idea of folk psychology that understanding other people implies some kind of internal theoretical justification was continued in the first version of Theory of Mind, which was later called Theory of “Theory of Mind” or theory-theory. Researchers in the 1980s pinned their hopes on Theory of Mind to provide empirical support for this idea.

Another important source of inspiration in the early years of Theory of Mind was the development of computational models in cognitive psychology. The perception of the mind and its processes, by analogy with a computer and computational processes, opened up a new way of conceptualizing the mind, which gave impetus to the development of Theory of Mind as a branch of cognitive psychology. The development of computing technology provided a conceptual framework according to which the mind functioned as a kind of processor, operating with ideas about the world, representations, in accordance with a set of rules.

The concept of mental representation has become critically important for the development of the research tradition of Theory of Mind, whose main task was to study the work of cognitive mechanisms responsible for the formation of representations in the minds of other people. Advances in cognitive psychology have been combined with developments in developmental psychology, in particular from the Piaget tradition. Thus, a field of research has been formed that investigates the nature and development of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for our understanding of the mental states of other people.

Although it is now customary to combine different views in the field of Theory of Mind, two positions can be distinguished; modeling theory and theory-theory. Proponents of the modeling theory argue that understanding other people's intentions, beliefs, emotions is achieved through mental modeling of the situation of another person and the subsequent assignment of their own mental state in the simulated situation to another. In other words, one's own mind is used as a model for another person's mind. Proponents of theory-theory argue that a child's gradually developing ability to understand others is based on the development of common sense, some kind of internal theory of psychology, which offers explanations for why people act this way and not otherwise. In any case, all supporters of Theory of Mind argue that mental states of other people are not directly accessible to us, so we must use cognitive abilities to deduce mental states from behavioral data, and thus social cognition becomes quasi-scientific.

The modular approach to theory-theory implies that the ability to ascribe mental states to other people follows directly from the architecture of our brain. Modularists explore the nature and function of cognitive systems that enable us to shape the mental state concepts needed to understand the behavior of others. The biologically mediated cognitive modules of the brain responsible for this specific comprehension allow us to post-perceptually interpret behavior in terms of mental states. Thus, supporters of the modular approach differ from traditional theory-theory, since the gradual development of the ability to understand others is based not on the formation of an internal psychological theory, but on complex patterns of the biological cognitive system.

The theoretical differences between the theory of mind and phenomenology are enormous. In particular, the claim that conceptual knowledge is that which mediates our understanding of others would be viewed by any phenomenologist as a flagrant misunderstanding. Phenomenology is based on the assertion that the basic knowledge of the world or other subjects by the subject is a direct experience that cannot be deduced from the constituent parts, in which the world reveals itself directly. Thus, from the point of view of phenomenology, conceptual knowledge and logical cognitive abilities have only an auxiliary function, clarifying and explaining what is already known intuitively.

Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed the idea of phenomenology in Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and Ideas I (1913) as the science of the “essence of consciousness” and intentionality (object-directed activity of the mind). He realized that if someone wants to investigate anything in the world, he must first investigate consciousness, because the world always reveals itself from the point of view of the first person. Husserl argued that in order to study the basic structures of consciousness in which the world appears, it is necessary to conduct a special exercise called the era. This exercise is to suspend all questions regarding the nature of the world around us. In the course of his research, Husserl discovered that consciousness has a constitutive nature; that it is always a subject directed at the outside world that allows the world to manifest and express itself

The subsequent development of phenomenology can be largely understood as a reaction to the aforementioned concept of constitutive (or transcendental) consciousness and to the method of the epoch. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) wanted to develop a fundamental ontology that explores Being and its meaning. But, unlike Husserl, he argued that this could not be done if, due to the era, the world was to a certain extent inaccessible, after the questions concerning our closest environment were bracketed. Our being ultimately can only be understood as being in the world, and therefore the study of the meaning of being must take into account our relationship with things in the world. Things are manifested primarily not through consciousness and perception, but through our practical interaction with them. Therefore, Heidegger strongly rejects Husserl's emphasis on subjectivity and consciousness and insists on the primary and necessary connection of man with the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) expanded Husserl's concept of corporeality by deepening the concept of a living body, but, unlike Husserl and Heidegger, he went even further and made the body the main concept of his phenomenology, and throughout his works emphasized its defining role in perception. Heidegger's primary idea of being in the world became, in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, the study of the bodily experience of the world through perception. The paramount moment in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is the realization that the body is neither a subject nor an object. This classical philosophical distinction as a whole must be rejected in favor of a new concept of consciousness embodied and embedded in the world. We interact with the world and understand it as embodied subjects; we explore the world perceptually and practically, and thus mind and body are inseparable parts of one whole

Although the focus of the aforementioned phenomenologists is significantly different, on the main point they converge. Phenomenology takes as its starting point that which is given empirically at once and directly. Husserl's programmatic assertion of "returning to things themselves," which implies that phenomenology must deal with how objects in the world represent themselves in direct experience, is a requirement that remains valid throughout the phenomenological tradition of the twentieth century.

Thus, the differences between the fields of theory of mind and phenomenology are clarified. Next, we will consider the main provisions of Theory of Mind, which will be opposed to the phenomenological movement in general and, in particular, to the fundamental assumptions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Basic premises of Theory of Mind

As discussed earlier, the original notion that understanding others implies some kind of internal theory of the psyche has largely been replaced by the idea of a theory of consciousness based on a complex cognitive system of modules and functions that are biological in nature and evolved through natural selection. Thus, the term Theory of Mind usually means not a real-life theory, but the cognitive ability to understand the behavior of another person in terms of hidden invisible mental states. Despite the fact that the term Theory of Mind has become a rather vague concept, there are two fundamental assumptions underlying the cognitive way of approaching social understanding:

Indirectness:

Mental states are unobservable entities that are inaccessible to us in perception. This assumption is of paramount importance for all branches of Theory of Mind. If we had direct direct access to the mental states of others, there simply would be no need for simulation, theorizing, or inference.

Bridging the Gap:

There is a chasm between what is directly perceptually accessible, that is, behavior, and the mental states that are supposed to underlie behavior. Thus, a way to overcome this chasm is needed, and this is what mental modeling, internal theories of the psyche and cognitive modules are supposed to serve. It is clear from these basic assumptions that Theory of Mind implies that understanding others is a two-step process; (1) observation of behavioral data, and (2) subsequent interpretation through conceptual knowledge of mental states. In other words, we need abilities that will allow us to go beyond what we can observe. We must penetrate the behavior, decipher this simple physical movement, in order to thus be able to understand the mental states behind the behavior.

External behavior and the reality of the mind

Leudar and Costall emphasize that the Theory of Mind study makes a distinction between external behavior and the reality behind the behavior. This difference stems from the idea of what psychology should be like as a science:

"According to the model, the goal of scientific research is to penetrate deep into things, passing through their appearance, to discover hidden reality: for example, the structure of the atom, genes or cognitive mechanisms."

In the framework of Theory of Mind, the study of social interaction in real life would not make sense, since this everyday interaction is only the surface or appearance of social reality. According to Theory of Mind, social understanding doesn't happen the way we think it does. Our daily experience of immediately and intuitively understanding people's intentions does not mean anything, so it only seems to us so. This is because we have become virtuosos in performing the logical thinking processes that underlie social understanding. The processes that make up the reality and essence of intersubjectivity

Since the ability to understand the thinking of another relies on conceptual knowledge that deduces mental states from observed behavior, it makes sense to explore understanding of others in an experimental setting where these conceptual abilities will show themselves. Thus, the experiment is designed to discover and isolate the precise cognitive abilities required for social understanding. Such cognitive abilities should be deducing the meaning of behavior from observation, understanding the concepts of mental states and the ability to meta-representations.

Although Donald Hebb's work predates the Theory of Mind tradition, he was instrumental in transforming psychology into a cognitive and neurological science. He said the following, which would serve as a fine illustration of how early cognitive psychologists perceived their task:

“To say that our knowledge of other minds follows from theory and not from observation means that we study the mind in the same way that a chemist studies the atom. Atoms are not directly observed, but their properties can be inferred from observed events”

These observable events, which in a psychological context are behavior and language, are in themselves meaningless data. However, at the same time, this is the only one directly available to the psychologist as evidence of the work of the cognitive system. Thus, the split between appearance and reality manifests itself in essence as a split between visible behavior and latent mental states. When behavior is presented as something public and observable, as opposed to a private unobservable subjectivity, the problem inevitably arises of how we can know the unobservable. Behavior becomes simply empirical data, evidence left behind by the mind hidden from the observer.

Behaviorism and the outside perspective

Leudar and Costall describe how the above distinction between observed behavior and the latent reality of the mind embodies the fundamental premises of behaviorism that the cognitive revolution originally sought to end. Psychological behaviorism can be seen as a continuation of the objective experimental methodology developed by animal experimenters in the early 20th century. The experimental study of animal behavior implied the distance of the researcher from the object of research, which was supposed to allow an objective and unbiased look at the research participant, whether human or non-human.

Psychological behaviorism believed that psychology should be the science of behavior, and therefore the goal was to eliminate subjectivity in experimental research, which was necessary during the heyday of behaviorism. The elimination of subjectivity was important in order to give an objective, non-perspective position and to ensure that the results and methods of psychological experiments were comparable, reproducible, and fully standardized. In addition, it was important to present behavior devoid of any subjective dimension, as this would add a situational and interpretive dimension to psychological research. Thus, the body and its movements were perceived as meaningless mechanical movements - a concept that was implicitly preserved in the cognitive revolution:

For, despite all the talk of a cognitive revolution, the "official" concept of behavior that they unwittingly express is the inherited from neo-behaviorism, the concept of behavior as a meaningless movement, measurable physically and is the antithesis of the mind.

Leudar and Costall argue that the aforementioned scientific ideals of behaviorism are present in contemporary research on Theory of Mind:

“In conclusion, the ToMism paradigm [Theory of Mind-ism, ed.] Is one of the most recent and by far the most influential outbreaks of scientism in psychology. […] He views psychology as a natural science and explores intentional agents using the methods of natural science […]”

Since the essence of social understanding is understood as conceptual and meta-representational abilities arising from the work of cognitive systems, and because of the scientific ideal of objectivity mentioned above, the most preferred research methods are experiments. In addition, the elimination of interactive and subjective elements frees the researcher from situational and contextual aspects that require interpretation. The experimental setup used by the researchers of Theory of Mind embodies the scientific ideals mentioned in the context of behaviorism, which, it is argued, allows the researcher to accept an objective third-person perspective on the events unfolding during the experiment. The experimental method provides clear observational data, devoid of any situational or subjective elements, which allows the researcher to focus his attention only on the studied cognitive structures that are considered necessary for social understanding.

Basic assumptions of phenomenology

First-person perspective primacy

A striking contrast between Theory of Mind and phenomenology, which is important to focus on from the very beginning, is that phenomenology was originally created as a descriptive activity. Husserl was interested in clarifying the essence of phenomena. He argued that this undertaking must be completed before any scientific theory is created. Before any attempt at a scientific explanation, it is extremely important to clarify the essence of the phenomena that we want to explain. Phenomenology is thus an enterprise that aims at the very foundation of any scientific inquiry by insisting on a primary sense existing in the phenomenal world that precedes any scientific or reflective knowledge of that sense.

The way in which the phenomenologist explores this primordial meaning is by examining how phenomena manifest themselves in experience. Phenomenologists are not interested in studying the essences of the world as divorced from subjective experience, since the world is inseparable from how it presents itself to the experiencing subject. Phenomenology does not encroach on the same ideal of objectivity inherent in Theory of Mind. On the contrary, the scientific objectivity inherent in Theory of Mind will be viewed by the phenomenologist as a senseless and harmful attempt to separate the given object from the researcher's experience. Indeed, it is impossible to take a purely objective position, since the object itself is inseparable from the first-person perspective in which it is given to the researcher.

Some argue that in the above statements, a silhouetted subjectivism can be seen, but this statement is not entirely true. Objects in the world are presented to the embodied subject in the first-person perspective, and thus the first-person experience is not only subjective, but also the experience of the object itself. The most basic feature of consciousness for Husserl was this focus on objects, which he called intentionality. Intentionality is not just a feature of consciousness, but the way the world reveals itself to us. Merleau-Ponty expanded the concept of intentionality by making it bodily and motor intentionality. How the body is directed towards the world in its practical and perceptual activities is how we pre-cognitively, pre-reflectively understand the world. In this essential world-orientation, the distinction between the perceiving subject and the perceived object of perception dissolves into the concept of intentionality.

To fully understand the nature and function of intentionality, it is necessary to clearly discover the connection between consciousness and the world. Husserl insisted that this could only be done by pausing our everyday ideas about the world, thus highlighting the pure relationships that precede and constitute our ordinary experience. The epoch is the most important part of the phenomenological reduction by which the phenomenologist can distance himself from the world in order to explore its phenomenal being. Thus, Husserl believed that he had discovered the conditions that make it possible for the consciousness of objects as objects with different meanings and meanings and accessible from different points of view.

Phenomenological reduction is indeed a point of contention between Husserl's and existential phenomenology. In the preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that reduction is an interruption of our being in the world, which deprives the world of its original meaning, as a bodily world. His statement is known that “the most important lesson of reduction is the impossibility of complete reduction”. Reduction for Merleau-Ponty is an abstract philosophical reflection on the world, and Merleau-Ponty's point of view is that consciousness is inseparable from bodily being in the world. The reflexive subject always reveals himself as a living body involved in the world

Body and Perceptual Experience in Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology

Unlike his phenomenological predecessors, Merleau-Ponty made the concept of a living body the starting point of his phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, the main task of phenomenology is to reveal the world of experience that existed before scientific reflection and thematic attention. The world of objects - the world of science - is simply an abstraction from the living world, which opens itself up in perception. The fact that in my experience the world is open as a meaningful system of objects is not a consequence of reasoning about the world and judging about it. Also, my body is not only a set of physical processes that provide the perception of the world. What makes the world meaningful and meaningful for me is how my body, through perception, makes up a single system with the world.

The involvement of the body in the world is perceived by Merleau-Ponty as a way of being in the world and a way of knowing it. Thus, it becomes clear that the experience of perception cannot be reduced to the objective processes of the body as a physical object, or the actions of a purely subjective consciousness. Merleau-Ponty believes that perception, understood as our bodily existence in the world, is neither objective nor subjective, but rather is the basis for such a distinction.

Thus, Merleau-Ponty argues that any understanding of a world or an object must begin with an understanding of perception. Phenomenological analysis of perception should start from a first-person perspective. When asking a question about the existence and significance of any phenomenon in the world, we must first pay attention to how we recognize this phenomenon; that is, as it is given to us in experience. Thus, if we want to know what perception means and denotes, we must clearly identify our preliminary pre-reflective experience of perception as a fundamental way of knowing the world and ourselves.

It is important to note that Merleau-Ponty does not in any way perceive perception as a passive process, when the world is simply seen through my sensory system. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of perception as a bodily participation in the world, it is understood that perception is an active process where the subject is fully involved in the world. Perception is formed both by subtle body movements that regulate the field of perception, for example, slightly turning the head to the right or left, towards the source of the sound, and by detecting the world as a field of possible actions. For Merleau-Ponty, body movements are not just a change in the position of an object in space, but an opening of the view of the world through a change in perspective. It is through the prism of the body that I perceive the world and, according to Merleau-Ponty, become its inhabitant

Phenomenological criticism of the main provisions of the Theory of Mind

As we have seen, the basic premise of Theory of Mind is that a person can be adequately understood objectively, from the perspective of a detached, non-interacting, third person perspective. In phenomenology, by contrast, understanding subjective experience from a first-person perspective is invaluable for understanding any phenomenon. When researchers of Theory of Mind do not show much interest in the experience as given in the first person, it entails ignoring the subtle and implicit modes of subjective experience. Although a significant part of the Theory of Mind researchers argue that the understanding of the mental states of other people is formed at the pre-personal level, the corresponding knowledge is still a product of thinking and conceptual in nature.

Instead, phenomenology asserts that all consciousness and knowledge presupposes prior awareness of what is experienced and understood. This awareness is tacit, direct, non-conceptual, pre-reflective, and can be described as minimal self-awareness. Thus, our explicit and thematic attention to another person is based on a primary and fundamental awareness of ourselves as the subject of an experience that is in no way mediated by conceptual knowledge of any kind.

Accordingly, the interest of phenomenologists will be directed towards the nature of this pre-reflective awareness. This interest is in no way shown by the followers of Theory of Mind. In Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, the empirical subject is essentially a living body. Our attention to the world is always accompanied and shaped by fundamental bodily self-awareness, which is of primary interest for phenomenological analysis within the framework of Merleau-Ponty.

Another important difference between Theory of Mind and phenomenology is that, in the former case, understanding other people has a striking similarity to how we understand objects in the world. Our understanding of others is within the framework of the theory of thinking, explanatory schemes and predictions of behavior, as if people were just complex objects, robots, the behavior of which is not available to us. As we have seen, primary awareness in phenomenology is recognized as a pre-reflective, direct understanding of meaning in the living world. In Merleau-Ponty phenomenology, we do not need to draw conclusions or think in order to understand others. The way we are physically present in a shared world with other people is a direct, pre-reflective and intersubjective understanding that precedes any reflective and cognitive activity recognized in Theory of Mind as the basis of social understanding. Thus, in the phenomenological approach, there is no need for observation of behavioral data and subsequent conclusions regarding latent mental states.

Phenomenology as a Philosophical Enterprise in Psychology

Despite Merleau-Ponty's departure from Husserl's phenomenology, the phenomenology of perception and body that Merleau-Ponty represents would have been unthinkable were it not for the general phenomenological movement initiated by Husserl. Merleau-Ponty himself sought to emphasize how he owed the general phenomenological movement and, in particular, the work of Husserl. Thus, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of the philosophical movement within which the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty exists and which permeates his way of philosophizing

The concept of phenomenology is difficult to characterize in specific terms, since phenomenology was not developed as a single coherent system, but remained a movement in which individual proponents do not necessarily agree on the fundamental assumptions and methods of implementing phenomenological thought. However, phenomenology tends to focus on describing the phenomena presented in experience. The initial, albeit very fundamental, difference between the phenomenology approach and the empirical science approach is that phenomenology aims at describing experience, while empirical science will most often focus on explaining its subject.

In his attempt to explain what characterizes phenomenology as a method, Daniel Schmicking stresses that although phenomenology describes phenomena as they appear in experience, this point is not as simple as it might seem. Phenomenologists are interested in the ways in which phenomena manifest themselves, and this is exactly what is the real problem, because the ways of experiencing experience are not the content of experience. The study of the fundamental structures of experience is the study of what serves to form this experience, and what precedes the experience, what is its basis. Thus, phenomenology presupposes that which goes beyond mere description. Phenomenology is an attempt to reveal the meaning of the world, prior to conscious reflection or scientific analysis; reveal how the world reveals itself to us

What phenomenology does offer in this way is a deep, comprehensive analysis of the underlying structures of first-person experience. In the theoretical discussion of Theory of Mind, we have seen how the concepts of subjectivity and corporeality are ignored in the pursuit of scientific objectivity. Dan Zahavi argues that this tendency in cognitive psychology to examine its subject from a distant, third-person perspective presents a significant problem. This problem can be described as an “explanatory gap” in the context of Theory of Mind, that is, the problem of bridging the gap between possibly existing cognitive systems, described in the third person, and the empirical dimension available to us directly, in the first person.

In the context of psychological research, the consequence of this problem is the neglect of any research into the empirical dimension of the phenomenon under study. There is practically no interest in the first person experience. In this context, phenomenology offers a theoretical framework encompassing the concepts of subjectivity, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and perception, and many others in a systematic and complex manner.

Philosophical thinking in empirical sciences

The difference between the descriptive activity of phenomenology and the explanatory enterprise of the empirical sciences can be seen as the difference between understanding and explanation. Understanding and explanation have historically been associated with the humanities and natural sciences, respectively. The Theory of Mind described above follows the scientific ideals of natural sciences, which are characterized by causal thinking.

While the phenomenological approach cannot completely deny the value of scientific explanation, the key will be to reformulate the question from "How can we explain a person?" to “How can we understand a person?”. In the understanding of a psychological phenomenon, physical causation is by no means exhaustive. It is not that philosophers are not interested in the notion of causal explanation. In contrast, the concept of causation has been a topic of discussion in philosophy for centuries. However, the point is rather that the philosophical approach to this subject is fundamentally different from the empirical scientific approach. Rather, a philosophical study of causality would take the form of an epistemological and ontological discussion of the foundations of a scientific understanding of causality.

Philosophical thinking, therefore, is a critical study of the fundamental foundations of empirical science as basic assumptions, concepts, methods and philosophical premises. Amy Fisher Smith argues that philosophy has a huge impact on psychological theories through sets of tacit and implicit fundamental assumptions that nevertheless animate and shape a particular approach to the psychological subject. On this basis, Smith argues the importance of critical philosophical thinking in the field of psychology in order to uncover and explain this ontological and epistemological basis. The philosophical ideas underlying psychological theory and practice quickly become self-evident; their philosophical origins are forgotten as they take on the character of unchanging facts

For example, we have seen how Theory of Mind suggests a gap between the internal structures of the mind and the external physical body in which they are realized, and therefore that the mind can be studied without regard to the body in which it resides. This philosophical assumption highlights the object of research, and it is believed that a person can be understood through analysis. Leudar & Costall emphasize that Theory of Mind […] continues to present its original assumptions not as assumptions, but as established, proven facts. " Repeating somewhat the description of Amy Fisher Smith, how tacit and, as it were, taken for granted philosophical assumptions of the implicit influence the formation of various theories and, in particular, psychology

This sheds light on the importance of articulated philosophical thinking in explaining these assumptions and critically evaluating them. In the writings of both Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, fundamental scientific criticism is aimed at making the scientist assume that he cannot study the world from a neutral, independent "view from nowhere." In this context, the scientist ignores his own subjectivity and the fact that he perceives the world from a first-person perspective. In other words, phenomenology offers a truly scientific view of the world as experienced by the subject; a living world in which the original meaning is laid, forming a supposed objective scientific perspective

In some areas of cognitive psychology, it is hotly debated how, if at all, it is possible to integrate phenomenological ideas with the empirical sciences, namely how to reconcile often widely diverging sets of ontological and epistemological viewpoints.

Merleau-Ponty can be safely portrayed as a classical phenomenologist who, throughout his career, engaged in continuous dialogue with various forms of empirical science, talking about his own phenomenology in disputes with representatives of the mainstream psychology of his day. Thus, Merleau-Ponty is a prime example of how phenomenology can enter into discussions with the empirical sciences, and how phenomenological analysis can provide a philosophical basis for understanding the subject of psychology. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty calls for reconciliation and mutual enlightenment between philosophical phenomenology and empirical science.

“The ultimate task of phenomenology as a philosophy of consciousness is to understand its connection with non-phenomenology. That which opposes phenomenology within us - natural being, the "barbaric" source of which Schelling spoke, cannot remain outside phenomenology and must find its place in it”