First-person methods involve a disciplined practice that increases the subjects’ sensitivity to their experiences. This entails a systematic training of attention and the self-regulation of emotion. “This capacity enables tacit, pre-verbal and pre-reflective aspects of subjective experience—which otherwise would remain simply ‘lived through’—to become subjectively accessible and describable, and thus available for intersubjective and objective (biobehavioural) characterization” (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.37). Varela and Shear present two main dimensions which they consider necessary to the systematic study of conscious experience.
(1) Providing a clear procedure for accessing some phenomenal domain.
(2) Providing a clear means for an expression and validation within a community of observers who have familiarity with procedures as in (1). (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.6)
The distinction between the act of experiencing by following a procedure and providing validation through regulated intersubjective exchange is not absolute (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.7). This section focuses on the ‘basic attitude’ or ‘epoche’, as an example of a clear procedure for accessing phenomenality. According to Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003, p.25), “The use of the term ‘epoche’ in neurophenomenology is derived from the Greek term epokhè and is influenced by Husserl’s appropriation of the Greek term”. Epoche consists of three basic gestures: suspension of the ‘natural attitude’ that appearances are truly the state of the world, redirection of attention inwards, and letting go or accepting what comes (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.25). Expression and validation are explored in section 5.6.
To illustrate the above dimensions Varela and Shear (2000) discuss three existing first-person methods: introspection, phenomenology and meditation. For introspection, the act of paying attention to a defined task is the procedure, and validation is provided through mediated verbal account. For phenomenology, the act of reduction-suspension is the procedure and identifying descriptive invariants makes validation of accounts possible. For meditation, the suspension of mental activity and the use of sustained attention and awareness are the procedures and the participants’ accounts and scientific studies of meditation act as forms of validation. Each of these existing methods has a different emphasis. Varela and Shear (2003) consider that, of the three, meditation has the most highly developed procedures but tends to rely heavily on ‘inside’ accounts for verification whereas phenomenology and introspection are stronger with respect to verification (Depraz 1999b, p.7).
The procedural phase, within which an individual experiences something, Varela and Shear (1999b) label L1, the lived content of the experience. Next, the participant is required to examine or become aware of the content of L1. This experience of examining one’s own mentation is labelled L2. L2 will contain the content of L1 and content related to the manner in which the examination of L1 was achieved or accessed (Depraz 1999b, p.98). In order to become aware, to achieve L2, the participant must redirect their mentation; they must turn their thought back upon itself. This ‘conversion’ or ‘redirection’ requires an apperceptive act which moves attention away from the ‘exterior’ content of the world towards the ‘interior’ mental act of perception itself (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000, p.123-5). This requires the suspension or interruption of normal mentation (which does not stop to examine itself). Varela and Shear call the ability to suspend and redirect mental processes, to move from L1 to L2, the ‘basic attitude’ as opposed to the ‘natural attitude’ (Gallagher and Varela 2003). Suspension of the ‘natural attitude’ does not imply that the ‘natural attitude’ is denied or that the contents of the ‘natural attitude’ are automatically brought into doubt (Thompson 2007, forthcoming, p.24-25). Rather, suspension allows a redirection that focuses on the everyday things precisely as they are experienced and perceived. As such, redirection is a “procedure of working back from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of experience” (Thompson 2007, forthcoming, p.25). This redirection of mentation may be mediated by another but this is not always necessary (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.8). The ability to pursue this ‘basic attitude’ to a richer level, however, is often where the role of the second-person is required. Varela and Shear call this ‘phenomenal filling-in’. First-person methods may specify an appropriate means through which the participant can explicitly ‘express’ the content of their experience in a way that is open to ‘intersubjective validation’ (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.11). This verbalisation or expression “of phenomenal invariants provides the crucial step whereby this sort of first-person knowledge can be intersubjectively shared and calibrated, and related to objective data” (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.38).
Employing phenomenological terms, this process of “becoming reflectively attentive to experience” is referred to as ‘epoche’ (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.37). “The ‘epoche’ mobilizes and intensifies the tacit self-awareness of experience by inducing an explicit attitude of attentive self-awareness” (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.37). This meta-awareness pays attention to “the manner in which something appears” and “implies flexibility of attention, in particular being able voluntarily to shift one’s attention and stabilize or sustain it on a given mode of presentation” (Thompson 2007, forthcoming, p.26).
Depraz considers three conceptions of the act of phenomenological reduction or epoche: the Cartesian way, the psychological way and the way of the life-world (Depraz 1999b, pp.102-106). Depraz argues that both the Cartesian and psychological forms of reduction are solipsist and, consequently, in their approach to intersubjectivity they are inadequate to the study of experience. The Cartesian and psychological forms of reduction reinforce the fallacy of the privacy of the first-person perspective. In contrast, the way of the life-world, true to its Husserlian heritage, is a perceptual act performed by an embodied subject located within the life-world. Similarly both Gendlin (1999) and Ginsburg (1999) take the body as their focal point in the development of first-person methods.
The corporeality of epoche of the life-world points towards affect as an open form of active perceptual attention and acts as the basis of intersubjectivity. It becomes immediately clear that the first-person is not purely private.
Only the way which passes by way of the life-world takes account of the communitarian dimension of the reductive experience. I am not the only one to apprehend myself at every instant as an operative subject and, in addition, others, co-actors in this experience, may equally work to develop this experience more correctly and more intensely in me. … the reductive path of the life-world proceeds towards an immersion in an embodied sensibility in which we all share as incarnate subjects. … The result is decisive. Sense and affect, far from being – as Descartes naïvely thought – enemies which lead us astray and deceive us, are rather to be regarded as our ‘allies’ that can help us. They are the privileged support of the transformation, of the alteration (Veränderung) of ourselves in which, in the end, the reductive experience consists. (Depraz 1999b, p.105)
This intersubjective, embodied, living act of reduction provides a continual renewal of a dual sense of self, simultaneously theoretical and existential. What is at stake, Depraz (1999b, p.97) argues, is the ‘phenomenological scientificity’ of the praxis of reduction, a praxis which needs to be simultaneously practical and theoretical. This requires of the theoretical that it not render invisible the practical. From an enactive perspective, this same need not to divorce the theoretical from the pragmatic, was discussed in sections 4.4 and 4.5.
Suspension and redirection are two components of the core process of becoming aware, or epoche, of moving from L1 to L2. In his conversation with Scharmer, Varela outlines a third component: letting go. Initially, when one suspends one’s habitual stream of thought, nothing happens. If one tolerates this ‘nothing happening’ for long enough “suspension will lead to very early emerging events, contents, patterns, gestures, whatever” (Scharmer 2000, p.5). It is then possible, within the space that the gesture of suspension has created, to perform the gesture of redirecting one’s attention to the new, the emerging events, contents and gestures that arose from the act of suspension. In order to return to the state of suspension from redirection, however, it is necessary to make the gesture of letting go.
Unlike our habitual paying attention, exploring experience requires what we call here letting go. It has to be a light touch. If you redirect to the phenomenon of examining experience in a heavy-handed way, you get what you ask for. In other words, you’re embarked in your associations and thoughts, and again, you’re overcome by your habitual mindstream. But the letting go here is crucial, because it’s only when you don’t hold on to the redirection that you can again go back to suspension. And this process, this core process, goes through and through. It doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, you just keep doing it. (Scharmer 2000, p.5)
Letting go is also referred to as ‘receptivity’ (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000). This ‘receptivity’ is necessary to broaden the field of attention, it is a reception “to a letting-come, about which there is nothing passive other than the name. In fact, it eminently involves action” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000, p.129).
In varying degrees, the reflectable is not immediately available. It doesn’t exist other than as a potential and will not come as revelation other than through a cognitive act borne by a particular intention. And so the gesture of letting-go presupposes a waiting, but is focused and open and so eventually void of content for a time, without any immediate discrimination other than “there is nothing”, “its foggy”, “it’s blurred”, “it’s confused”, “nothing’s happening”. (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000, p.130)
What accompanies the three components of epoche, what steps into this void, is an intuitive evidence which has its own internal obviousness: “In other words, epoche and intuitive evidence call to each other, so to speak” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2000, p.123). Intuition lies between the suspension of epoche and expression and validation and requires epoche as the condition under which it may emerge with a ‘lightning bolt’ temporality (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.53). Intuition cannot be actively induced, rather it requires a waiting for and an acceptance.
Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003) trace the history of the concepts of intuition through the work of Descartes, Kant and a number of later German idealists (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, pp.44-46). These authors outline a tension between the concepts of intuition that describe intuition as an elementary, singular, individual experience and an intersubjective intuition that is universal and provides a unique form of access to knowledge (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.44). These authors draw upon Husserl’s understanding of intuition as an intersubjectively available grounding principle of knowledge. For Husserl, intuition refers to that which is directly given in plenitude (Fülle) and fullfilment. Principally, intuition is either given through perception (Gegenwärtigung) or imagination/memory (Vergegenwärtigung) (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.45).
The objects of intuition often show up as novel and surprising. In this sense the intuitive appears to be discontinuous, it emerges in a manner that ruptures the normal train of experience. Intuition is creative: “What is at stake here is the creativity of thought, which we have to sharply distinguish from the “mediate” activity which presents itself as a reflexive activity and whose every step follows the preceding one according to the laws governing the coherence of contents in our experience” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.48). Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003) propose ‘three ensembles of criteria’ by which intuition from the first-person perspective may be recognised: the cognitive, emotional and properly intersubjective points of view.
1. First, from the cognitive point of view: on the one hand, confusion, incompletion, absence, whiteout, emptiness, nothingness, unreadiness, that which still moves within, and on the other hand, clarity, distinctness, evidence, completion, stability, coherence, being finished, “at peace”.
2. Next, from the emotional point of view: the feeling of adequation, of justice, or aesthetic success, of joy, of a profound satisfaction, of global congruence when the criterion is fully satisfied, or of surprise and frustration or disappointment if it is not.
3. Finally, from the properly intersubjective point of view, participating at the same time in the cognitive (the constitution of objectivity) and the affective (conviction by means of empathy): the experience of an inner conflict or the force of assent, of being carried along by a convincing argument which makes you approve of it as soon as you agree to recognize its truth. (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.63)
This understanding of intuition, although eidetic, is not apodictic in the Husserlian sense although it endeavours to preserve “Husserl’s demand for intuitive evidence as an ‘infinite horizon of approximations tending towards the idea’, that is, a process of growth wherein different forms of evidence participate in establishing new knowledge in a corpus proper to a community” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.62).
Suspension, redirection and letting go, as the components of epoche and accompanied by intuitive evidence, are the principal aspects of the first-person study of experience. These provide a clear procedure for accessing the phenomenal domain. In this research suspension, redirection and letting go provide the initial components of a ‘model’ for the actions that are necessary for the participants to undertake in the process of expressing their experience of CFS. What these discriminations imply for all first-person methods is the need to make a distinction between experiential content and the process(es) involved in ‘coming up with’ that content. Different methods place a different emphasis on each of these. Introspection and phenomenology place more emphasis on content and thus require the participant to be able to move from L1 to L2 with ease. Meditation, on the other hand, places more emphasis on identifying the processes through which content arises with the goal of ceasing these processes and thus achieving a state of pure consciousness by eradicating content completely (Scharmer 2000, p.8). For the purposes of gathering phenomenal data, regardless of what method is considered, it is the ability to suspend mentation and reflect on this mentation, to move from L1 to L2 that provides phenomenal accounts with their richness. Without this ability, such accounts remain flat and poor (Scharmer 2000, p.8).
Although cognitive science has taken the use of first-person accounts in the laboratory for granted since the beginning of the twentieth century, Varela argues that this is only a spontaneous beginning.
Spontaneous capacity, which is already part of science, needs to be developed further. Something that is spontaneous and natural is the beginning of the whole process of learning, where you become truly a black belt or a very competent observer of your experience, a describer of your experience. By means of what? One key thing: disciplined regular training. Without specific regular training, like everything else in human affairs, you stay a beginner. … We are pushing beyond just verbal reports to all forms of other techniques of explorations and expressions, which requires a whole new methodology. (Scharmer 2000, p.2)
Varela stresses the need to patiently cultivate the ability to observe and describe one’s own experience. Cultivation is required to “sensitize individuals to their own mental lives through the systematic training of attention, emotion regulation, and metacognitive awareness” (Thompson forthcoming, p.3). Without such cultivation the use of the first-person within cognitive science will remain problematic for numerous reasons (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.32). Each of the gestures of suspension, redirection and letting go need to be cultivated. Just as a beginner must practice in order to learn to play a musical instrument, participants in phenomenal studies will need practice at phenomenal methods. Discovering how to suspend and examine mentation requires sustained discipline and learning and this process has its own developmental time frame for each practitioner (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.8).
Phenomenological training modifies experience; it demonstrates that experience is dynamic and ‘plastic’. These procedures “help to stabilize phenomenal aspects of this plasticity so that they can be translated into descriptive first-person reports” which allow for rigorous intersubjective corroboration (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.39). Studies of the specific experiential affective state of loving-kindness or compassion strongly suggest that, with practice, plasticity can be stabilised and experiential states can be induced (Lutz et al. 2004). The physiological correlates of such approaches are under investigation and they are being used in clinical and health programmes (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.37). Such studies have shown, for instance, that the cultivation and use of mindfulness can be used in the treatment of chronic pain, anxiety disorders, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, psoriasis, hypertension, depression, HIV-positive men, breast, prostate and other forms of cancer (Carlson et al. 2003). Cultivating and inducing mindfulness has been shown to consistently enhance immune function, reduce negative affect, increase positive affect, reduce perceived stress and enhance perceived quality of life (Carlson et al. 2003; Davidson et al. 2003; Kabat-Zinn, Lipworth, and Burney 1985).
Developmental processes imply change. Consequently an allowance must be made for changes within participants in studies of conscious experience. This extension of participant capacity is a significant part of what Varela is referring to when he asserts the need for science to develop new methods and methodologies for the study of conscious experience. Concomitant to these processes of change is the need to distinguish different levels of competence.
It’s like karate science. You’ve got to distinguish between the kid who just came for the weekend and the eminent master… In experiments you need to distinguish the strategies that different people have to do, and determine the level of competence that people need. (Scharmer 2000, p.2).
What these different levels of competence represent is the participants’ ‘know-how’. “It is the know-how that counts, not the know-what. When you get to this point, the know-what is only used to get started, but it is the know-how that counts and that is going to be transformative” (Scharmer 2000, p.9). Just as common sense experience involves ‘know-how’ it is through learning and practising that the experiencers of each of an individual’s senses develop the ‘know-how’ required to become competent at assessing and transforming their experience.
A method based on these principles may attract what Varela and Shear (1996) label the ‘excavation fallacy’ or ‘hermeneutical objection’.
How do you know that by exploring experience with a method you are not, in fact, deforming or even creating what you experience? Experience being what it is, what is the possible meaning of examination? (Varela and Shear 1999b, p.13)
To this objection Varela and Shear (1996) reply that first-person data does not need to be free from the influences created by its method of observation in order to be valid: “every examination is an interpretation, and all interpretation reveals and hides away at the same time” (Varela 1996, p.14). Likewise such a method will not be entirely free of the entities that it examines. This lack of methodological neutrality does not imply that any disciplined examination of experience creates nothing but artefacts or distorted versions of experience.
To be sure, the exploration of experience will suffer along with all other methodological investigations from cultural expectations and instrumental bias, but there is no evidence that the phenomenal data gathered are not equally constrained by the proper reality of conscious contents. (Varela 1996, p.14)
This problem is not unique to first-person methods, however the study of experience does involve an important difference. This objection hinges on the assumption that what is being observed has some static, neutral or natural state that must be captured in order to appreciate it accurately. Experience is not one dimensional in this manner.
This is fine if we reject the assumption (as I do) that there is some kind of well-defined standard for what should count as real or normal experience: experience appears to be inherently open-ended and pliable, and hence there is no contradiction in saying that sustained training in a method can make available aspects of experience that were not available before. (Varela 1996, p.346)
It makes no sense to talk of experience as if it was pure or raw. It is always fluid and changing and the act of exploring it is already, to whatever end, a part of human activity. The realm that first-person methods allow us to explore is the realm of “potentially valid intersubjective items of knowledge, quasi-objects of a mental sort. No more, no less” (Varela and Shear 1999b, p.14). First-person methods will not be method-free but this does not preclude the possibility of mindfully employing such methods to constructive ends. It is a question of finding a middle ground (Varela and Shear 1999b, p.14). There is growing evidence that first-person experience can be explored, examined and transformed systematically (Varela and Shear 1999b).
Varela emphasises that third and first-person accounts are most powerful when they are mutually informing.
It is quite easy to see how scientific accounts illuminate mental experience, but the reciprocal direction, from experience towards science, is what is typically ignored. … The study of experience is not a convenient stop on our way to a real explanation, but an active participant in its own right. (Varela 1996, pp.343-44)
To this end Varela and Shear (2003) argue that third and first-person accounts need to be harmonised and mutually constraining and to do so first-person accounts must be appropriately linked to objective empirical research. What this allows in the present research is the ability to move from first to third person seamlessly. This opens two possibilities: the possibility of investigating first-person accounts of the experience of CFS and extrapolating from these potential third-person investigations and the possibility of relating this first-person data to the third-person evidence available in the existing experimental literature on CFS. In establishing such a relationship of “reciprocal influence and determination”, Varela and Shear propose the second-person position (Scharmer 2000, p.2).
Varela and Shear (2000) observe that existing methods that examine experience often initially require a mediator or second-person. This second-person is often already adept at the task under examination. Although not directly familiar with the participants’ lived experience (L1), the mediator assumes the position of having ‘been there’ to some extent and, using this empathy as their basis, coaches the subjects’ learning process. The second-person locates the first-person as the expert. Both then engage in a process of making the implicit explicit. Varela claims that, like the first-person, the second-person already exists within cognitive science but only in a mode that is much closer to the third-person position than is required by a science of consciousness.
This partner can have two modes. One is a mode which is slightly closer to the third-person position. That is verbal reports. It is what many cognitive scientists do. They place themselves in the position of admitting that you have the mind, that you can have access from the first person to what I just showed you. So they admit the position of first person, but at the same time they remain a little bit removed. They are content with taking notes and noticing whatever it is that you say. In contrast, a more interesting second person is really empathetic. He (sic) admits that you have in your mind an access to your experience, but this person himself knows the kind of experience you’re talking about and therefore acts as a coach. The good sports coach cannot be somebody who hasn’t done the sport. The coach must have first-person access to his own experience that perfectly resonates with yours. For example, in Buddhism, you have to advance and progress in this cycle with a qualified teacher. A qualified teacher is who? A second person. Because he can then make the process work through mutual resonance and correct it. (Scharmer 2000, p.7)
Extending phenomenal methodologies that enlist the first-person requires the construction of methodologies that allow for the second-person position and for such second-persons to fully develop into empathic resonators. This conception of first, second and third-person highlights the fact that each position is “structured not so much in regards to what content they address, but in the manner in which they appear – inserted in the network of social exchanges” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.9). The necessary distinction is not between the public and the private or the purely objective and subjective but rather the way in which these positions function within the social practices of knowledge construction. How these positions intersect and relate is crucial to the ability of the researcher to harmonise first and third persons and promote their mutual constraint. The three positions are not concretely given categories, rather they reflect the requirements of the complex social networks they are situated within (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.82).
The third-person position forms the basis of all forms of scientific reductionism; it emphasises the subjective/objective, internal/external dichotomy in an effort to create a pure objectivity that eliminates the researcher from view. Cognitive science and the science of consciousness challenge this position by taking, as the external data, the internal workings of the subject whilst also recognising that the subject is implicated in the study of themselves. In contrast to the third-person position, the second-person position takes the external behaviours of another as traces or manifestations of their internal mental life. Like Dennett’s heterophenomenologist (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003) the second-person creates from these behaviours a model of the internal life of another. Akin to the anthropologist, who tries to become a member of the tribe, the second-person retains a certain critical distance but otherwise acts like an empathic resonator.
In fact, that is how he sees his role: as an empathic resonator with experiences that are familiar to him and which find in himself a resonant chord. This empathic position is still partly heterophenomenological, since a modicum of critical distance and of critical evaluation is necessary, but the intention is entirely other: to meet on the same ground, as members of the same kind. … The position here is not that of a neutral anthropologist; it is rather one of a coach or a midwife. His/her trade is grounded on a sensitivity to the subtle indices of his interlocutor’s phrasing, bodily language and expressiveness, seeking for indices (more or less explicit) which are inroads into the common experiential ground, as we shall elaborate below. Such encounters would not be possible without the mediator being steeped in the domain of experiences under examination, as nothing can replace that first-hand knowledge. (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.10)
The second-person position makes possible “exchange between situated individuals focusing on a specific experiential content developed from the first-person position” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.81). The empathic resonance of the second-person is not uncritical but it attempts to construct a common ground that is based on a familiarity with the kind of experience being explored (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.84). For the purposes of this research, the second-person position provides a clear role for the researcher.
The second-person position provides a means for ‘expression’ and ‘validation’. These two phases of becoming aware are optional to the basic cycle of epoche (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.65). ‘Expression’ refers to all the means of signification. ‘Expression’ that uses language is referred to as ‘verbalisation’. The act of ‘verbalisation’ does not necessarily occur simultaneously with the act of reflecting on the experience that is verbalised. The simultaneous verbalisation that is assumed possible by disciplines such as psychology overlooks the fact that reflecting on lived experience can “soak up most of our mental capacity” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.67). Such an approach does not allow for the ‘letting come’ or ‘letting arrive’ of epoche and the temporality of intuitive evidence. In support of this view Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003) observe that when a subject is reflecting on an experience they are most often silent. Any form of expression, such as ‘verbalisation’, involves a process, a particular act of suspension and a specific quality of intuitive evidence (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, pp.68-70). Depraz, Varela et al. detail these aspects of expression drawing a distinction between “expression of the product of the reflecting act and the expression of the reflecting act itself” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.65). The authors discuss both autonomous verbalisation and the role of second-person mediation in this process and the use of both written and oral reporting (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, pp. 73-74).
Although ‘expression’ and ‘validation’ are mutually implicative, validation most often requires a linguistic act (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.65). “Validation intrinsically concerns the intersubjective establishment of criteria of veracity in an investigation” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.80). It is only through a research community putting in place the means to intersubjectively validate descriptive categories that experience can be elaborated. The mode of validation within a research project is, therefore, very dependent on the relations between first, second and third-person in any given context and, conversely, those relations are equally dependant on the chosen modes of validation (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.82). This said, fully accomplished intuitive insight can be considered the most immediate first-person form of validation (Depraz and Cosmelli 2003, p.170). Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003) propose four stages to the process of ‘validation by practice’.
1. The existence and determination of the reference experience [vécu de référence] (E1), that is, what is grasped as a target by the reflecting act.
2. The qualities of the act by which this lived experience (E1) is reflected upon; this act of reflection is thus another lived experience (E2).
3. The qualities of the verbal description of E1 (truth, completion, fine-grained quality).
4. The analysis of results that have issued from the descriptive verbalization. (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.86)
Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003) provide a detailed account of the interactions between these aspects of validation and their relation to the basic cycle of epoche and intuitive evidence (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, pp.86-96). The authors discuss how the intersubjective contradiction that arises from ‘inter-individual variability’ can be a source of richness that deepens both the description of phenomenal invariants and their validation (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.94). This conception of expression through verbalisation provides the research with the further components to the ‘model’ of the actions that are necessary for the participants to undertake so that validation of the phenomenal domain may become possible.
In circumstances where a separate mediator is not necessary the subject may take up the position of the second-person themselves. In such cases the subject would look towards their actions or expressions for validation of their model of their own mentation.
This call for intersubjective validation is not obligatory in every case. But the converse is: there is no possibility of first-person methodology in our sense of the term without at some point assuming the position of direct experience that seeks validation. Otherwise the process then becomes purely private or even solipsistic. (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.11)
Depraz, Varela et al. show that forms of validation range from those that are intrinsically internal and closest to the first-person position to those that are primarily forms of third-person validation (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, pp.78-96). Meditative traditions, for instance, provide validatory criteria that focus on a “careful verification of the presence and properties of the results arrived at along the way of [the meditator’s] own paths of experience” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p. 78). These traditions are focused more towards the internal first-person end of the spectrum whereas phenomenology puts “forth the strong, and extremely strict, criterion of apodicticity and the intuitive criterion of lived experience” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p.79).
It is entirely possible that a subject might engage in constructing an imaginary world that would be regarded by others as an illusion. What is critical here is that for a method to examine the first-person it must involve some form of second-person mediation. Varela and Shear argue that this mediation role is unique to first-person methods. Such empathic resonation requires “a sustained dedication and interactive framing before significant phenomenal data can be made accessible and validatable” (Frith 2002, p.11).
The process whereby experience can be translated into verifiable report is, according to Frith (2002), one of the major programmes for science in this century. First, second and third-person positions form a dynamic continuum of validatory strategies which are constitutively open to each other (Depraz and Cosmelli 2003, pp. 166-168). Within each position there are variations and within any process of validation a combination of positions may be used in complement (Depraz and Cosmelli 2003, p.165). This is particularly the case for the second-person position which is more “a plastic spectrum of interaction” or “a relational dynamics in which we are unavoidably immersed” than an “isolated entity” (Depraz and Cosmelli 2003, p.165). Depraz and Cosmelli provide an assessment of these mutlifarious positions (Depraz and Cosmelli 2003, pp. 175-182).
With this circulation between first, second and third-person position, first-person research brings into focus two key issues: intersubjectivity and empathy.