The Phenomenological Turn: From Epistemology to Quantum Mechanics

The proposed project radically breaks with the popular and widespread view in analytic epistemology that significant epistemic concepts/properties must be characterized from a third-person perspective. According to this popular approach, a subject’s knowledge, justification, or evidence is supervenient on, grounded in, or determined by external factors such as the reliability of the underlying belief-forming process. Instead, my project stresses the epistemic role of the subject’s experiences, locating their justificatory force in the internal feature of their phenomenal character or phenomenology. The phenomenological experience-first epistemology I seek to establish has it that every piece of knowledge can be traced back to epistemically foundational experiences. It promotes a new way of doing epistemology such that a descriptive first-person analysis of experience must be at the very beginning of all epistemological endeavors. 

However, the radically novel thesis that drives this project is the idea that the implications of these phenomenological-epistemological results are not restricted to epistemology. Instead, these results should also affect the way we do and understand science. More precisely, the thesis is that a truly fundamental scientific/physical theory must embrace the first-person perspective by incorporating the scientist and her experiences such that it constitutes a phenomenological theory of knowledge that tells the subject what she should believe based on her previous experiences and what she should expect to experience next. Quantum mechanics is a natural candidate for a concrete scientific theory that, if interpreted accordingly, may exemplify these demands. One of the main objectives of this project is to establish a phenomenological-epistemological framework for reconstructing, interpreting, and understanding quantum mechanics. If successful, my project establishes a new way of doing epistemology and provides a novel understanding of science.