Method
Phenomenological Reduction
Classification
- Method family
- Experiential
- Domains
- Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind
Overview
Phenomenological reduction brackets ordinary existential commitments so that the inquirer can examine how objects and world are given in experience.
Purpose. The method redirects inquiry from whether the experienced object exists independently to the structures through which it appears and has meaning. Applied to the question of the external world it argues neither for nor against a world outside us; it asks what the sense "existing independently of me" is built from in experience. Reduction is not introspection alone, and careful phenomenological description is an operation within the inquiry rather than a natural-scientific causal explanation.
Characteristic operations
- Identify the natural attitude: Notice the ordinary commitment that the world simply exists as taken for granted.
- Perform the epoché: Suspend use of that commitment without denying the world's existence.
- Redirect attention: Examine the intentional relation between experience and what appears in it.
- Describe structures: Articulate recurring features of givenness without immediately reducing them to external causes.
- Vary the example freely: Change an example's features in imagination until the features it cannot lose without ceasing to be that kind of thing stand out — Husserl's eidetic variation, an operation inside this method rather than a separate one, used to seek essences.
Used by traditions
Applied to questions
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edmund Husserl, §3 ('The transcendental turn: Epoché, phenomenological reduction, and transcendental idealism')
- Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment (1939), §87
- Edmund Husserl, Ideas I (1913), §§31–33 (the epoché) and §49 (the world's being as constituted for consciousness)
- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (1931), §§40–41 (phenomenology as transcendental idealism, its answer to the question of a transcendent world)
- Husserl, Ideas I