Consciousness and brain mechanisms: Epistemological investigations between phenomenology and clinical neuroscience

Abstract

This paper investigates epistemological differences in the cognitive neuroscientific and phenomenological approaches to outstanding questions in psychiatry. We argue that clinical neuroscience provides scientific explanations in line with a mechanistic approach and describe several examples from computational approaches that illustrate what research on neural processing can tell us about psychiatric diseases. By contrast, phenomenology offers complex descriptions of experiential phenomena. Through a discussion of executive function and the related construct of impulsivity, we show that both cognitive neuroscience and phenomenology provide valuable types of explanation. Our focus on psychopathology also allows us to address some important epistemic differences between these two disciplines.

Keywords

• phenomenology
• consciousness
• clinical neurosciences
• computational neuroscience
• cognitive mechanisms