I’m currently getting paid £80 to participate in an experiment at Warwick’s cognitive neuroscience institute and it’s got me thinking about all the problems I see with what is, essentially, quantitative psychology. In the particular case of the cognitive neuroscience institute, this is profoundly not an attack on what they’re doing (“studying the links between perception and action, in an attempt to better understand how so-called ‘controlled’ processes are instantiated by structures in the nervous system and their automatic functions, and how so-called ‘automatic’ processes are controlled by structural, intentional, and environmental factors“) as much as it’s an observation of the methodological difficulties inherent in non-hermeneutical approaches. They seemingly aim for experimental closure, yet they rely on paying students (in themselves a fairly atypical group and a dangerous starting point for inductive generalisation) and in some cases basically coercing undergraduate psychology students into participating by otherwise forcing them to do extra work. Externalities constantly seep into the experimental situation.

I doubt I’m the only one who finds it impossible to sit and perform a mindless repetitive task without interpreting the situation (e.g. thinking about what the designers of the experiment must be thinking about, thinking about the structure of the experiment) in a desperate attempt to make a banal task take on personal significance. The fact it’s being done for money, with my tendency to start thinking about what I’m going to spend my money on, further aggravates this issue, as the experiment becomes a challenge to distract myself through meaning-making (trying many different ways of understanding the boring repetitive task as having some significance to me). I guess the question at stake is whether the particular phenomenology of the experimental situation precludes their attempt to causally unpackthose cognitive functions usually deemed automatic.

I’m really not sure of the answer to this question but I suspect that the causal structures of cognition are constructed in a way that renders them epistemologically unproblematic and sidelines the phenomenology of cognition. The very way they pose their objectives as peering round the back of concepts naively understood as automatic/natural hints at the assumed epiphenomenality of first-person experience, presumably leaving it quite difficulty to sustain the sort of questions that seem obvious from a hermeneutical standpoint. At the end of the day, the researchers are embodied human interpreters and they are interpreting the interpretations of the participants. This dual hermeneutic is at work in all human science and an awareness of it should always frame inquiry. Obviously quantitative methodologies, which have a time and a place, must in some sense get beyond the dual hermenutic but it must be done so in a pragmatic and methodological way, rather than through a set of tacit ontological and epistemological assumptions that simply dissolve the questions.