Abstract

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn’t just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is also cognitive in character, through and through. This is obviously true of ordinary human perceptual experience, and cognitive phenomenology is also concerned with something more exclusively cognitive, which we may call propositional meaning-experience: occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, for example, as this occurs in thinking or reading or hearing others speak. One source of resistance to accepting this view has been a failure to distinguish sharply between cognitive content and cognitive-phenomenological content.