Phenomenological Epistemology Research Articles

Organizational Restrictions for the Sustainable Development of the Artsianal Cheese Business in Argentina: The Case of Sheep Cheese

The stagnation and presumable setback of the sheep’s milk activity in Argentina has usually been explained in terms of productive and reproductive aspects and, only recently, of organizational aspects. The organizational design of this business (actors and their relations), a possible cause of the low sustainability of artisan-type businesses, has not been properly explored in Argentina or worldwide. The object of this study is to identify and describe the organizational aspects that might be restricting the sustained development of the sheep cheese business in Argentina, in spite of the opportunities offered by the market. The methodology used was phenomenological epistemology, combining qualitative and quantitative research. A survey was conducted of 19 ovine dairy farms in the province of Buenos Aires, selected on the basis of a random sample stratified by production scale. The survey was analyzed with PC-ORD software (McCune and Meford, 1999) with multivariate analysis techniques – Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Based on the PCA, the first two eigenvalues were retained as they accumulated 59.6% of the total variance. Two principal components were identified: F1 (36.4%), interpreted as “Governance Structures” and F2 (26.14%), interpreted as “Specialization Level”. In T2 (Producer – Industry Transaction), the points of conflict revolved around the quality of the raw material, its price, the payment terms and the difficulty to change buyers for the milk, while in T3 (Industry – Distribution Transaction), these revolved around the quality of the raw material, the marketed volume and the product’s supply regularity. Vertical integration (in T2 and T3) prevails as the governance structure selected to solve transactions independently from production scale. In T3, the interests of industry and distribution were asymmetrical in relation to asset specificity. Elevated transaction costs, derived from opportunism and the bounded rationality of the actors and enhanced by asymmetrical information and isolated efforts, raised the levels of conflict. This had a negative effect on specialization, competitiveness and, therefore, on the sustainability of the businesses.

GURBANI KIRTAN RENAISSANCE: REVIVING MUSICAL MEMORY, REFORMING SIKH IDENTITY

This article examines the modes of revival within the contemporary renaissance of traditional Gurbani Kirtan (Sikh devotional music) in an effort to differentiate historically operative practices from modern products being sold as tradition. Modern reformist tendencies have attempted to institutionalize a normative Sikh musical identity into one homogeneous ‘Gurmat Sangeet’ genre through codifying Sikh raga forms and promoting a particular Sikh musical orthopraxy and history. The process of institutionalization privileges written sources as authoritative, erasing the memory of operative practices passed down orally since the time of the Sikh Gurus through the Gurbani Kirtan parampara (tradition). In questioning how Sikh musical knowledge has been propagated and authenticated since modernity, I propose a reassessment of what values and musical modes are indelible to the fabric of Gurbani Kirtan, what aspects are modern derivatives, and what aspects are negotiable. I believe such an approach will not limit Sikh musical expression to a past identity subsumed by orthodox rigidity. Instead it will move toward a phenomenological epistemology that recognizes how orality and embodied experience are intrinsic to the Gurbani Kirtan parampara that remembers, practices, and teaches a particular methodology to embody the Bani as Guru for newly creative Sikh subjectivities.

The ethic-aesthetic way of wonders

Developments in the theoretical field of ecosophy have demonstrated the co-dependence of different human and natural factors, as well as connections between societal organization, natural sustainability and individual experience. Exploring these complex and organic relations between the social, the mental and the environmental, is an important task for contemporary research. A central question is where and how such research can be undertaken. This article traces central ecosophical lines of thinking, links them to ethic and aesthetic theory, and shows how these theories stand in a direct relation to three contemporary, on-going art projects. Ecosophy is proposed as a relational and practice-near research ideology, depending on the complexity-oriented principles of relationality, ethicality and immediacy. Finally, aesthetic research and research through art emerge as field-merging and practical-theoretical approaches, which should be given more attention and resources in current science and education politics. As an alternative field of knowledge production, referring to Jacques Ranciéres ‘distribution of the sensuous’ as well as phenomenological epistemology, ethic-aesthetic research not only constitutes new ways of sensing, but acknowledges larger parts of what we already know.

Working with despair: A phenomenological investigation

Psychotherapy as an appropriate treatment for clients in despair is an important area of inquiry, particularly given its problematic nature in the therapy and the resulting impact on the therapeutic relationship. This study aimed to explore how psychotherapists experience working with a client in despair through a phenomenological investigation. A phenomenological epistemology and methodology was adopted as the study was focused on understanding the phenomenon in terms of the participant's meanings of the lived situation. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight accredited psychotherapists who had worked with clients in despair. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using the method of Empirical Phenomenological Analysis (EPA). Four main themes emerged from the analysis: Psychotherapist's experience of client's despair, Evocation in the psychotherapist, Therapeutic ways of responding, and Supporting the psychotherapist. The phenomenological findings inform and support the idea of a client's despair as something that challenges the psychotherapist personally and professionally. With implications for practice, the findings also suggest that in order to prevent the despair from encompassing the psychotherapist, they must locate a therapeutic balance; one that allows them to be with the client's despair, whilst allowing a certain degree of distance from the despair which may enable the psychotherapist to consider hope and to see the client's situation from different perspectives.

Docile bodies, supercrips, and the plays of prosthetics

In this paper, I consider the implications of representations of women with prosthetics in popular culture, specifically Heather Mills and Sarah Reinertsen. Using analyses from feminist and disability studies, I explore prosthetized bodies as docile bodies “fixed” to aesthetic and functional near-perfection. I then employ narratives emphasizing the complex corporeal experience of prosthetics to destabilize this seeming docility. I argue that “docile” readings are problematic and insufficient, building from faulty grounds of distinctions between “natural” and “technological,” and “therapy” and “enhancement.” Finally, I posit a more complex, phenomenological epistemology from which to consider prosthetized bodies and to reground prosthetic interpretations.

Docile bodies, supercrips, and the plays of prosthetics

In this paper, I consider the implications of representations of women with prosthetics in popular culture, specifically Heather Mills and Sarah Reinertsen. Using analyses from feminist and disability studies, I explore prosthetized bodies as bodies fixed to aesthetic and functional near-perfection. I then employ narratives emphasizing the complex corporeal experience of prosthetics to destabilize this seeming docility. I argue that docile readings are problematic and insufficient, building from faulty grounds of distinctions between natural and technological, and therapy and enhancement. Finally, I posit a more complex, phenomenological epistemology from which to consider prosthetized bodies and to reground prosthetic interpretations.

The Meaning of Close Relationships and Sexuality: Women's Well-Being Following a Myocardial Infarction

Relationships and sexuality following heart attack (MI) have been studied; nevertheless, little is known about the meaning of social support and relationships to health and well-being after an MI. To our knowledge, no qualitative studies have further investigated the phenomenon. In this study we explore the meaning of close relationships and sexuality to women's health and well-being following MI. Ten women were interviewed using a reflective lifeworld approach and phenomenological epistemology. The meaning of women's close relationships following an MI appears to be closely intertwined with their long-term health process; both health processes and the relationships are affected. Suffering after an MI can be compared to taking a fall in that close relationships can become a safety net. Close relationships and sexuality are integrated into their lived bodies, and in that way have profound influence in their lifeworld experiences. Not all close relationships are intimate; however, all close and meaningful relationships can provide power and strength to the women's health processes. At the same time, these relationships also appear to drain energy and cause suffering.

Humanizing the Understanding of the Acculturation Experience with Phenomenology

Multiple disciplines have contributed to acculturation research with aims to measure, conceptualize, and theorize this complex phenomenon. Few studies, however, have attempted to find meaning in how acculturation is lived and, this lack may have contributed to acculturation being understood as a construct removed from human experience. The purpose of this article is to show how a research methodology based on phenomenological epistemology can humanize the understanding of the acculturation experience. This contribution is demonstrated in a study that used a phenomenological approach to describe and elucidate acculturation as a lived experience in the context of Latina adolescents who emigrated from Mexico to the US. Thus, this article illustrates how the phenomenological approach used in this study allows new meanings of acculturation to be experientially revealed.

‘The Individual in the World - The World in the Individual’: Towards a Human Science Phenomenology that Includes the Social World

Human science researchers tend to be targeted for critique on the grounds that their approach is too individualistic to take due cognisance of societal and political influences. What is accordingly advocated is that the phenomenological and so-called romantic theories should be abandoned in favour of analytic or continental theories that have as their main focus the system, the group, the society, and the various influences of the social world on the existential reality of the individual.Without trying to invalidate these social science strategies, this paper attempts to show that it is not necessary to surrender phenomenology in order to understand not only the individual, but also the social world in which individuals live. It is argued that the desired goal of a less individualistic human science’s theoretical basis can still be founded in phenomenology, in that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, which has its origin in Husserlian phenomenology, provides us with an adequate ontology for understanding human existence more comprehensively. Merleau-Ponty’s ontological philosophy elucidates the in-between world, that structure of existence where the individual cannot be separated from her/his world context. In his exploration of the reversibility of existence, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that there is no ontological gulf between the individual and the social world. Instead, the world is ‘in’ the individual as much as the individual is ‘in’ the world. With this phenomenological epistemology, it is argued, it is possible to generate research that is capable “of more than a frozen existence”, as Merleau-Ponty puts it.

Idea and Phenomenon: On Intellectual History, Foucault and Various Other Things

This essay addresses the still contentious status of Michel Foucault as intellectual historian. Making a set of larger classifications for intellectual history as a field, the essay argues that the basic problem of intellectual history remains an engagement with ‘ideas’ and, moreover, with the notion that ‘ideas’ are most meaningful when addressed in their historicity. By these criteria, Foucault is accepted as an intellectual historian. However, this essay also suggests that such a view of intellectual history demands a specific phenomenological and hermeneutic epistemology. The paper thus concludes with the suggestion that a tying‐together of intellectual history and phenomenological and hermeneutic epistemology may bear fruit for future research.

Persona ed esistenza. Note sull'epistolario inedito Frankl-Binswanger

The inventory of the unpublished letters between Viktor Frankl, founder of logo therapy and existential analysis, and the phenomenological psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, and the reconstruction of their correspondence, enable to acquire a view on the intellectual vicissitudes of the two thinkers; vicissitudes which contain some elements of great interest for the establishment of phenomenological epistemology and anthropology, preliminary not only to psychiatry and psychology, but also to education. Besides the evidences of a warm friendship among the two writers who are the most representative of the phenomenological-existential turn in human sciences, these letters reveal the problematic issues in the development of the thought on the human presence in the world and in the understanding of the forms of existence which stand at the basis of the treatment.

Descartes in the Matrix

With the 1999 film The Martix as its point of departure, this work explores the meaning of ‘reality’ outside the scope of empirical positivism. Drawing on the phenomenological epistemology of the interplay of noetic and noematic dimensions of experience postulated by Husserl, and on the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, this work considers how the reality of our experience derives not from some correspondence to a universal ‘objective’ point of view, but from our concernful involvement with our lived world as the horizon of our lived and known projects. Finally, in light of Ricoeur’s work on imagination and productive reference, this work considers whether and on what grounds the distinction between so called ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences is meaningful.

Living with experiences following a myocardial infarction.

Coronary heart disease is a major cause of sudden death and morbidity in the developed world, as well as a cause of great suffering. Research within this area has primarily focused symptoms, risk factors and treatment. The aim of this paper was to explore women's experiences following a myocardial infarction (MI). Eight women were interviewed; the interviews were audiotaped and transcribed into text and analysed using a phenomenological approach. To explore the meaning that is experienced in the lived world of the patient a method of reflective lifeworld research, based upon phenomenological epistemology has been used. The results indicate that the body is vital for the women in their lifeworlds. After a MI the patient's natural and unreflective relationship with the body and the lived world is interrupted. Uncertainty about life and death as well as the body is experienced as a suffering in the women's lifeworlds. In relation to this, the women's existence is characterised by an uncertainty and a loss of context. It is through reconciliation with their bodies and their illnesses that the women can achieve a sense of well-being and harmony in life. In that process the women can re-establish a natural relationship with their bodies and lifeworlds.

Learning to have less pain — is it possible?: A one-year follow-up study of the effects of a personal construct group learning programme on patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain

A randomised controlled study with the objective to explore the effects of a group learning programme based on a phenomenological epistemology and personal construct theory. Main outcome measures were: experienced pain, pain coping strategies, absenteeism, disability pension and health care consumption. One hundred and twenty-one patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain and high absenteeism were included in this study. The intervention group ( n=77) consisted of nine smaller groups with 6–10 persons in each and were counselled by health personnel with special training. The control group consisted of 44 persons. The learning programme emphasised awareness, possible relations between bodily symptoms, emotions, mind and life situation, and change of focus from pain and disability to resources and potentials. One year after the end of the learning programme (T3), patients in the intervention group reported significant pain reduction, increased pain-coping abilities and a higher reduction of health care consumption than the control group ( P<0.05). Absenteeism was not significantly reduced compared to the control group, but there were fewer persons receiving disability pension in the intervention group at T3 (38 versus 59%) ( P<0.05). This group-learning programme should be considered an important adjunct to the therapy of patients with chronic muscular pain.

Generalised chronic musculoskeletal pain as a rational reaction to a life situation?

While the biomedical model is still the leading paradigm within modern medicine and health care, and people with generalised chronic musculoskeletal pain are frequent users of health care services, their diagnoses are rated as having the lowest prestige among health care personnel. An epistemological framework for understanding relations between body, emotions, mind and meaning is presented. An approach based on a phenomenological epistemology is discussed as a supplement to actions based on the biomedical model. Within the phenomenological frame of understanding, the body is viewed as a subject and carrier of meaning, and therefore chronic pain can be interpreted as a rational reaction to the totality of a person's life situation. Search for possible hidden individual meanings in painful muscles presupposes meeting health personnel who view the person within a holistic frame of reference.

Whole Earth Measurements

Let us take a very commonplace, often discussed and critical topic within our conversations regarding critical issues: Are we detecting a Greenhouse Effect, and related to this, is it exacerbated by i.e., human actions? At this occasion I suspect that most of you would be inclined to give a positive answer to both of these questions. But, if pushed philosophically, what would be the evidence, and well grounded would it be for such affirmations? Within scientific communities and associated scientifically informed circles, the answers have to be somewhat more ambiguous, particularly when rigorous questions concerning evidence are raised. Were scientific truth to be a matter of consensus-and some contemporary philosophers of science argue that scientific truth often turns out to be just that-then it is clear that there is beginning to be a kind of majoritarian consensus among many earth science practicioners that the temperature of the Earth, particularly of the oceans, is, indeed rising and that this is a crucial indicator for a possible Greenhouse Effect. Most of these scientists admit that the mean oceanic temperature has risen globally in the last several decades. But this generalization depends upon (a) accurate may be, not just for samples, but for the earth. A hot spot-for example the now four year old hot spot near New Guinea, which is part of the El Nino cycle-doesn't count by itself because it might be balanced by cold spots elsewhere. And the fact of the matter is that whole earth measurements are still rare and primitive in the simple sense that we simply don't have enough thermometers out. (b) Secondly, even if we have enough thermometers, a simply synchronic earth measurement over three decades is but a blip in the diachronic history of Ice Age cycles over the last tens of thousands of years. (c) Thirdly, even if we know that the Earth is now heating up, much ofthis is due to homogenic factors, such as CFCs, C02 increases, hydrocarbon burning, and the like? Is it the case, as Science magazine claimed in 1990, that 24% of greenhouse encouraging gases are of homogenic origin? As I have described the current debate it does not sound on the surface to be very philosophical, instead it seems empirical and thus within the domain of scientific discourse. However, in the way in which the story was cast, there lurk some deep epistemological issues which relate to my ironic first subtitle, how many phenomenologists does it take to detect a greenhouse effect? What I wish to do in this essay is to look both at classical phenomenology (Husserl in particular) and at Heideggerian hermeneutics regarding our theme, environmental phenomenology,' and show that both approaches are to be found wanting with respect to the Greenhouse Effect phenomenon. Then I wish to show a rather radically modified hermeneutic and phenomenological epistemology can address this problem. This modification entails two positive concepts, both of which, I will argue, are necessary for a phenomenological approach to issues: Technoscience, as a thoroughly technologically embodied science, as a necessary concept to get at presumed sub-perceptual entities, and Earth-as-Planet, as a necessary presupposition for dealing with earth measurements. Classical phenomenology, I argue, lacks the first of these concepts, and Heideggerian romanticism rejects the latter. Let us begin with a very simple phenomenological question: from what standpoint or perspective can the issue of earth be made? If, at base, our very knowledge is constituted by way of our bodies and through perception as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty seem to contend, then what is claimed about earth measrurements becomes problematical in two senses: First, do we get a sufficiently encompassing perspective to talk about a earth? …

Animal Behavior Science as a Social Science: The Success of the Empathic Approach in Research on Apes

AbstractAnimal behavior science has been practiced traditionally as a natural science and, as such, has had success in studying discrete behaviors of species representatives. However, methodological, philosophical, and ethical problems have plagued animal behavior science for centuries. Researchers of animal behavior who operate within a natural science paradigm can be limited by their adherence to positivist epistemologies and the denial of any emotional connections with their research subjects. In the past three decades a new paradigm, identified here as the empathic approach, has developed in this field, transcending the limitations of traditional approaches. A short description of the work of six ape researchers who employ an empathic approach in their studies illustrates how it is possible to conduct successfully at least some areas of animal behavior science as a social science. Their work is informed by a phenomenological epistemology, ethnographic methods, and an emphasis on group cultures and ind...

The Grounding of Psychological Research in a Phenomenological Epistemology

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.

A Purified Sociology of Law: Niklas Luhmann on the Autonomy of the Legal System

Niklas Luhmann is a troublemaker: he writes a great deal, and on very many subjects, and he is still expanding his theory. As a jurist, he started with studies on law and administration, but soon he reached the level of general sociology and published a wealth of books and articles on power, love, religion, morality, education, art, the economy, and the like. With his supertheory he is now on his way to inheriting the philosophical tradition of the Occident (cf. Habermas, 1985: 426–45). Luhmann has developed his own terminology, which sounds familiar, but in which the meaning of customary expressions such as “legitimacy,” “ideology,” “institution,” and “meaning” is intentionally distorted. He also uses new concepts like “autopoiesis” and has created models for a fashionable semantic: “reduction of complexity,” “legitimation by procedure”—now clichés for a social scientist. His compact-hermetic supertheory, his nicely constructed conceptual framework does not derive from a single source or principle only; rather, Luhmann has combined various theories and approaches in his super-mega-world view. Not only does he use cybernetics, formal systems theory (input-output models), sociological systems theory à la Parsons, Husserl's phenomenological epistemology, Gehlen's anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, but he has also recently borrowed from thermodynamics, biology, neurophysiology, theory of cells, and computer theory (cf. Luhmann, 1984: 27). Luhmann claims to have established a general systems theory, for which law and sociology of law are only a single field of application.

A Critique of Firey's Land Use in Central Boston

Starting from the assumption of a phenomenological epistemology, Firey attempts,in his Land Use in Central Boston, to reconstruct human ecology in a framework of values. But his empirical data correspond more closely to traditional human ecological theory than they do to his own frame of reference; they support the Burgess-Hoyt concentric-sector theory of city growth rather than refute it. Firey's study at best serves only to direct more emphasis to sentiment as a factor in urban land use and fails in its avowed aim of producing a reformulation of human ecology.