Bravo, Donuel. THis is exactly the point I was groping for, and a quick search for definitions brings this statement forward which is highly germane to the current discussion:

"In psychology, phenomenology is used to refer to subjective experiences or their study. The experiencing subject can be considered to be the person or self, for purposes of convenience. In phenomenological philosophy (and particularly in the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) 'experience' is a considerably more complex concept than it is usually taken to be in everyday use. Instead, experience (or Being, or existence itself) is an 'in-relation-to' phenomena, and it is defined by qualities of directedness, embodiment and worldliness which are evoked by the term 'Being-in-the-World' [1].

Nevertheless, one abiding feature of 'experiences' is that, in principle, they are not directly observable by any external observer. The quality or nature of a given experience is often referred to by the term qualia, whose archetypical exemplar is "redness". For example, we might ask, "Is my experience of redness the same as yours?" While it is difficult to answer such a question in any concrete way, the concept of intersubjectivity [2] is often used as a mechanism for understanding how it is that humans are able to empathise with one another's experiences, and indeed to engage in meaningful communication about them. The phenomenological formulation of Being-in-the-World, where person and world are mutually constitutive, is central here."

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The interesting thing is that a degree of heuristic balance can be arrived at even though one is dealing with phenomenological data, by (a)comparing a significantly large set of such data for patterns and (b) weighing the data for importance, and other qualities, to sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were.


A