University of Ljubljana
FIRST-PERSON RESEARCH AND ITS EPISTEMOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

We are engaged in a special domain of cognitive science: the research into lived human experience. Ranging from experiences that one frequently encounters in everyday life - experiences of thinking, believing, remembering, or inhabiting emotions - to more extraordinary experiential states - such as dreaming and meditative experience, we are interested in what it is like for someone to live them. In other words, we are aiming at the so-called "first-person aspects" of studied cognitive phenomena. What is it like to be you when you are thinking a certain thought; when you are solving a certain memory task; when you are feeling a certain joy or pain; when you are entering a certain meditative state?

Answering such research questions - especially answering them scientifically - is a challenging endeavour. Among the central difficulties of first-person research is the fact that the act of observing and reporting on one's experience makes one experience differently. Just try to observe at the present moment the way in which your body feels against the chair that you are sitting on. Was the contact with the chair present in your experiential field already before you brought yourself to notice it - perhaps throughout the entire time that you were reading this text? Or did the experience of the contact, on the contrary, appear only at the very moment that you turned your attention towards it? Does observing the feeling of how your body is touching the chair transform the very feeling in question? How can you tell?

Further difficulties in observing experience arise from the fact that one can turn towards one's experience in different ways. A certain feeling of pain or discomfort in your contact with the chair, for instance, might be observed (and therefore experienced) differently when you are attempting to ignore it, fight it, become mindfully aware of it, or carefully describe it to the doctor.

The self-referential character of observing experience - the fact that every observation of experience is itself experienced, and that the way in which we observe our experiential field cannot be ignored in accounting for what we eventually "find" - makes first-person research a particularly challenging endeavor, both in theory and in practice.

On the theoretical side - What is the nature of knowledge about experience that we can attain with our observational methods? What are the criteria for the reliability and validity of such knowledge? How can we combine our empirical data with findings generated by other lines of research in cognitive science, most notably with neuroscientific measurements and behavioral observations?

On the practical side - What kind of methodologies can enable us to generate viable reports on experience? How can we make sure that our participant is not inventing her experience as she is attempting to observe it, or that we are not leading her to comply with our scientific agenda? How can we ascertain that our empirical findings reflect our participant's actual experiential landscape, rather than our own (or her own) expectations and beliefs about what her experience should be like?

Rather than merely circumventing these epistemological and methodological issues, we are interested in studying and understanding them, as well as explicitly taking them into account in our research. We think that examining the peculiar nature of investigating experience (and the knowledge it generates) is vital for the field of first-person research. Furthermore, understanding the self-referentiality that marks such research can also prove relevant for other areas of inquiry - in the field cognitive science and beyond.