The Grounding of Psychological Research in a Phenomenological Epistemology

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of how psychological research can be grounded in phenomenological epistemology, as it has been articulated in particular by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. This article begins by establishing that mainstream academic psychology has placed subjective, meaningful experience secondary to natural-scientific descriptions of the world. Mainstream psychological research can be said to carry out its research within a physicalist framework. Once the physicalist framework of mainstream psychology has been depicted, the analysis in this article consists of two measures. First, it is argued that natural-scientific description of the world is a construction, which has the subjective, meaningful cultural experience (life-world experience) as its presupposition. Once this `reaffirmation' of the priority of life-world experience is established, the second measure follows, which entails a phenomenological analysis of consciousness as the subject-matter of psychological research. A phenomenological analysis reveals that consciousness is characterized by intentionality. Some of the implications of basing psychological research on consciousness-as-intentionality are discussed. It is argued, among other things, that psychology must give up any attempt to explain experience in terms of causal laws. A phenomenologically based approach to decision/choice-making is presented and discussed in light of a more traditional (cognitive) approach in the final section of this article.