We describe a form of structuralism that focuses on the mereological parts of conscious states, drawing on the metaphor of a symphony where the removal or alteration of any contributor affects the whole in a holistic but determinate way. This variational method is applied to what we call the "minimal experience of self", a composite encompassing (1) a feeling of agency, (2) a feeling of...
I describe and partially formalize two aspects of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, in a way that highlights their relevance to cognitive science. First, I describe “constitutive phenomenology”, the study of structures (what I call phenomenological “models”) that constitute a person’s sense of reality. These structures develop incrementally over the course of a person’s life, and...
Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to...