Can we trust the phenomenological interview? Metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological objections

Abstract

The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psychological, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic must either heed the methodological and epistemological justification of the phenomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a “deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious processes as explananda , with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science.

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Vol.:(0123456789)
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09744-z
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Can we trust thephenomenological interview?
Metaphysical, epistemological, andmethodological
objections
SimonHøding1,2 · KristianMartiny3· AndreasRoepstor4
Accepted: 15 April 2021
© The Author(s) 2021
Abstract
The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich
source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid
than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic
objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability
of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psycho-
logical, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic
must either heed the methodological and epistemological justification of the phe-
nomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a
“deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious pro-
cesses as explananda, with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science.
Keywords Phenomenological interviews· Qualitative interviews· Ontological·
Epistemologicaland methodological objections· Introspection
1 Introduction
“Cognitive scientists should not fear that introspective evidence will impugn the sci-
entific credibility of their work. They should fear the Frankenstein science they will
create without it.” (Jack & Roepstorff, 2003, xx).
* Simon Høffding
simon.hoffding@imv.uio.no
1 RITMO Centre forInterdisciplinary Studies inRhythm, Time, andMotion. University ofOslo,
Oslo, Norway
2 Department ofSports Science andBiomechanics, University ofSouthern Denmark, Odense,
Denmark
3 Enactlab. Copenhagen/Centre forSubjectivity Research, University ofCopenhagen,
Copenhagen, Denmark
4 Interacting Minds Centre, University ofAarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

S.Høffding et al.
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So ends Roepstorff’s and Jack’s introduction to the double special issue of Journal
of Consciousness Studies called “Trusting the subject”. The credibility of subjective
reports and their integration into quantitative science is a recurrent issue and hot topic
in the scientific community (see Frank etal.,2019), not least within philosophy of
mind and the cognitive sciences (Roepstorff & Jack,2003; Frankish, 2016; Hurlburt
& Schwitzgebel, 2007; Varela etal.,1991; Lutz & Thompson, 2003).
This paper deals with a sub-question in this grand debate and defends the reli-
ability and validity of what we call phenomenological interviews: semi-structured,
ethnographically inspired interviews that inform discussions in phenomenology,
philosophy of mind, and cognitive sciences, for instance as presented in Høffding
(2019) and Martiny etal. (2021). The paper defends the position that, when properly
conducted and analyzed, such interviews and the phenomenological analyses and
conclusions drawn from them, are in no principled way less reliable or valid than
other quantitative or experimental methods in general. The defense is against the
general claim that interview based data is inherently unreliable and invalid, which
we from now on shall call the “skeptical objection”. We shall soon define what we
mean by “reliable” and “valid”.
The scope of the paper needs not be restricted to what we have defined above
as the phenomenological interview, as it certainly also is of concerns to investiga-
tions in other interview based methods such as Micro-Phenomenology (Petitmengin,
2006, 2017), Phenomenological Psychology (Giorgi, 2009), Interpretative Phenom-
enological Analysis (Smith etal., 2009) and the Existential Hermeneutic approach
(Van Manen, 1990). Collectively, these approaches all face the skeptical objection
that interview subjects are unreliable. The solutions offered in this paper, however,
may not equally apply to all these methods, but intend a defense of the particular
kind of phenomenological interview that combines qualitative, ethnographic meth-
ods with phenomenological research questions.
The skeptical objection usually consists in variations over the claim that interview-
ees are not trust-worthy or reliable and that their testimonies cannot be validated. We
agree with Jack & Roepstorff when they write that: “Most scientists do not have, or
at least cannot coherently formulate, any principled objection to introspective reports;
rather, they simply lack faith that introspective reports are reliable in practice.” (Jack
& Roepstorff, 2003, vi). Rather than precise objections, the use of interview-based
data seems to stir a more general kind of scientific anxiety or skepticism. We see this
for instance in philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel’s general claim that: “We must aban-
don…research paradigms in psychology and consciousness studies that depend too
trustingly on introspection” (Schwitzgebel, 2002, 50) or Ellen Fridland’s that: “I’m
deeply skeptical about what phenomenology can teach us about the nature of our
mental states, conscious or nonconscious” (Fridland, 2014, 2733). A precise formu-
lation of this skepticism is rarely found in writing and therefore difficult to defend
oneself against.1
1 This paper is not primarily motivated by a specific set of arguments or papers, but rather by the social,
academic reality of presenting interview-based papers at academic conferences. Only counting the first
author, almost all of the approximately one hundred talks about musical consciousness delivered to
philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists have spurred one or more versions of the skeptical
objection, with which all three of us have firsthand acquaintance. In a neighboring field, colleagues in

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
We want to target the skeptic objection through a representative example, namely as
voiced by the philosopher Daniel Hutto who claims that: “they might not even know
what they are experiencing.”2 Specifically, he has written about the poverty of episodic
memory (Hutto & Myin, 2017), and generally, mistrust in experience abounds from
the onset of cognitive science for instance with Tversky and Kahneman’s research
on cognitive bias (Tversky & Kahneman,1972). Let us call this the “mistrust objec-
tion”. Analyzing the mistrust objection, this article is structured into two halves. The
first half consist in four “preliminaries” (reliability and validity; the phenomeno-
logical interview; introspection; metaphysical skepticism), which sets the necessary
conceptual stage for understanding the mistrust objection. The second half analyzes
three possible interpretations of the mistrust objection. First, the ontological objection
claiming that experience is an improper scientific explanandum and that we should be
after its psychological, cognitive, and biological underpinnings. Second, the episte-
mological objection, stating that bias and flawed episodic memory makes interview-
ees unreliable. Third and final, the methodological objection, claiming that there is no
valid method for using interviews.
2 Preliminaries
2.1 Validity andreliability
Within qualitative methodology, the meanings of the terms reliability and validity are
complex, confused and contested (see discussion in for instance Morse, 2017; Burke,
2017; Kvale, 1996, Chap. 12 & 13) often because qualitative researchers from the
human sciences object to the application of standards from the so-called hard sciences
into their own domain (see Morse, 2017; Kvale, 1996, Chap. 12 & 13). The skeptical
objection could target several kinds of validity and reliability in the method of concern
to this paper, for instance whether the interviewee is reliable and whether the interpre-
tations following are valid. Here, one could understand validity in terms of consist-
ency – whether the method consistently applies the same methodological steps or tools
and arrives at somewhat reproducible conclusions – and transparency – whether the
method discloses all its steps and presents the reasons for these steps, also such that it
could potentially be reproduced. The part of the skeptical objection primarily targeted
2 Thanks to Daniel Hutto for the objection, voiced at the “Enactivism: theory and performance” confer-
ence at the University of Memphis, March 2018.
phenomenological psychiatry also report being met with the objection that Schizophrenic patients cannot
be trusted or that they are inventing their symptoms. In clinical practice, the skeptical objection leads to
the refusal to admit mentally very ill people and therefore sometimes has dire consequences. A different
area of research that has suffered from some version of the mistrust objection, is research into synesthe-
sia. According to Cytowick and Eagleman (2009, 4), for a long time synesthesia was ridiculed as fake
and therefore not pursued in research because of the neurocentric bias: since the brain’s processing
of sensory input is modular, experiences of synesthesia as meshed modes of perception, were not reli-
able. Synesthetes were “just imagining” (ibid.) what is now recognized a real perceptual phenomenon.
Footnote 1 (continued)

S.Høffding et al.
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in this paper, however, concerns whether the interview subjects themselves are reliable
or trustworthy, giving less attention to the question of interpretation (but see again
Morse, 2017; Kvale, 1996, chap. 12). Reliability rests on a correspondence claim i.e.
whether a statement corresponds to a state of affairs in the world (as described and
criticized by for instance Kvale, 1996, 231; Petitmengin, 2017, 142). For instance, a
medical thermometer is reliable, if accurately and consistently shows the temperature
of the person using it – if it corresponds to the state of affairs of body temperature.
In the context of the phenomenological interview and in agreement with Petitmengin
(2017), this definition is problematic for both pragmatic and metaphysical reasons.
Pragmatically considered, we often have no way to assess a state of affairs other than
through the interview. Metaphysically, the correspondence claim often entails a belief
in a mind-independent world – a belief the phenomenologist in no way can accept.
So, in this paper we shall pragmatically define reliability as trustworthiness: are we
generally warranted in believing what interview subjects report? In contrast, we will
define validity as pertaining to the method of generating and analyzing the interview,
i.e. are we warranted in believing that, even if interviewees are reliable, that we can
analyze the data in a transparent and consistent way such that the conclusions obtained
have some degree of replicability? This choice of definition to some extent mirrors
that of standard logic. Reliability, pertaining to the interviewee’s utterances, will refer
to the truth of a proposition or premise. Validity, pertaining to the method for analyz-
ing those utterances and drawing wider conclusions, will refer to whether the conclu-
sion follows from those premises. Defined as such, reliability and validity of course
intersect in many ways. The skeptic might assert that the latter doesn’t matter because
the interviewee is inherently unreliable. In contradistinction, the qualitative researcher
might retort that the former makes no sense apart from the latter, because it is the
validity of the interview techniques and analyses, which confers reliability onto the
interview itself. The present paper can be seen as an analysis of this discussion.
2.2 The Phenomenological interview
There is nothing particularly phenomenological about the phenomenological inter-
view itself. It is a short hand term for a phenomenologically informed or phenom-
enologically enhanced qualitative interview. In our context, it refers to a semi-
structured, qualitative, ethnographically inspired interview conforming to best prac-
tice (See Ravn, 2016, 2021; Allen-Collinson, 2009; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011;
Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) that “is informed by certain phenomenological
commitments and in turn informs a phenomenological [or phenomenologically
relevant] investigation” (Høffding & Martiny,2016, 540). The phenomenological
interview is not one integrated method, but two distinct methods that criss-cross in
various ways, described as two tiers (Høffding & Martiny, 2016).
The first tier is the actual interview in which the interviewer has prepared an
interview guide and preferably contextualized herself in the lifeworld of the inter-
viewee through ethnographic participatory or non-participatory observations. Rules
of thumb in this interview are to establish rapport, to listen intently and patiently to
the interviewee and to elicit as nuanced descriptions (rather than opinion or theories)

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
of the phenomenon under joint investigation as possible. This tier is best conceptual-
ized as a co-generation of data (rather than a “collection”, see e.g. Brinkmann and
Kvale (2014)), because the interviewer’s interests and preferences partially steer the
interviewee in his or her descriptions. The end of this tier can overlap with tier two
and include the transcription and even early stages of coding or categorization of the
interview. Throughout all of these phases, the researcher works under validity crite-
ria of transparency and consistency.
In tier two, the greater amount of time is spent after the interview, analyzing it
and drawing conclusions of phenomenological interest. The second tier, however,
begins before the interview, with the formation of interest in certain research ques-
tions – usually of a phenomenological nature – that the interview(s) ideally can help
enlighten. This interest pervades and guides the whole research process including
the questions asked in the interview. However, the often more general and abstract
questions of tier two cannot be directly answered by the interviewee in tier one,
because the methodic strength of such an interview is, vis-à-vis its explanatory
potential, restricted to the co-development of nuanced descriptions. These descrip-
tions, once clarified in the end of tier one, can then enter into the tier two inquiry
and be used to inform phenomenological discussions usually with more universal
claims.3 Here, validity criteria will be those that normally pertain to philosophical
discussion, such as argumentative, or even logic, consistency or strength.
Relevant examples of phenomenological interviews can be found in the phenom-
enology of disability (Martiny, 2015a,b;Martiny & Aggerholm,2016), the bodily
phenomenology of spatial neglect (Klinke etal., 2015), the development of bodily
intentionalities in expert dancers (He & Ravn, 2018; Legrand & Ravn, 2009; Ravn
& Hansen, 2013), the role of pre-reflection in aesthetic experience and museum
curation (Høffding et al., 2019), or the effect of high-level reflection in
expert music performance (Høffding & Satne, 2019). The approach has similarities
with that of Microphenomenology (Petitmengin, 2006), Phenomenological Psychol-
ogy (Giorgi, 2009) and the EASE interviews in phenomenological psychopathology
(Parnas,2005). We will not here discuss the similarities and differences between all
of these.4 Rather, we conclude this preliminary by emphasizing again, that the phe-
nomenological interview consists in a two-tier juxtaposition of two distinct meth-
ods with the aim of producing empirically enriched phenomenological discussions.
Mastering two methods is demanding and time consuming and naturally requires
methodological justification. Such justification has been attempted in previous work
(Høffding & Martiny, 2016),which also addresses the pragmatics of the phenom-
enological interview. This paper will not address these pragmatics, but will remain
with the philosophical analysis of the mistrust objection.
3 If the phenomenon remains too obscure after the intended tier two clarifications, one can in a loop-like
fashion return to tier one and do more interviews. See (Høffding & Martiny,2016) for details.
4 These similarities and differences should become more clear throughout this special issue, as well as in
the forthcoming one on “Working with Others’ Experience: Theory, Practice and Application” (Heimann,
Martiny & Høffding, forthcoming).

S.Høffding et al.
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2.3 Introspection
It goes without saying that if one has no trust in one’s interviewees, be they musi-
cians or people with a disability, then one has blocked the way to learn anything sci-
entific by way of interviewing such individuals. This is where Jack and Roepstorff’s
volumes on Trusting the Subject pick up. Their discussion, however, concerns the
extensive debates of at least a century, on introspection. The same holds for Eric
Schwitzgebel’s position that we already quoted: “We must abandon…research para-
digms in psychology and consciousness studies that depend too trustingly on intro-
spection”. (Schwitzgebel, 2002, 50).
We cannot present the full discussion on the nature of introspection or its histori-
cal roots in Titchener’s training program (see Schwitzgebel, 2004, 58–76). It must,
however be distinguished from phenomenology as Gallagher and Zahavi discuss
in chapter two of The Phenomenological Mind (2008). Phenomenology is not an
exercise of looking inside the mind (introspectio),5 but among other things a way
of describing the external world and simultaneously analyzing the co-dependence
of mind and world (see Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, 24 on “constitution”). Further,
Zahavi repeatedly mentions that phenomenology is not only, or primarily about the
“what” of experience, be it the difference of various shades of red or about whether
lime or lemon is more acidic. It is ultimately a transcendental endeavor aimed at
revealing “how”s or “for whom”s,6 i.e. relatively invariant structures of conscious-
ness (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, 114–5; Zahavi, 2019, 9). Shedding light on the
relation between content and structure of experience, between reflective and pre-
reflective self-awareness, or on the relation between subjectivity, objectivity and
intersubjectivity are phenomenological aims. And such aims are certainly differ-
ent than those we associate with introspection: The contents of consciousness, the
“what” might be available to introspection, but no act of looking inside on can by
itself give us the “hows” and “for whoms” of consciousness – inquiries to undertake
with a phenomenological method of the kind described by Husserl and his tradition.
The distinction between introspection and phenomenology, however, does not by
itself redeem a phenomenological interview from objections raised against intro-
spection. One further step, referring back to our two tiers, is necessary for such a
redemption: reporting from memory instantiates an act of introspection. Hence, an
interview asking for an interviewee’s description of a past activity involves reference
to an act of introspection. A phenomenological interview, however, does not consist
in holding the microphone and reporting everything that one’s interviewees utter.
5 Note also, that phenomenology as it has inspired much thinking in 4e cognition, denies that the mind
exists solely inside the head.
6 A classical phenomenological example might go something like this: the vase in front of me is co-presented
with a visually hidden backside as something I can grab (a “how” it is presented). This indicates that my per-
ception is inherently bodily (things appear grabbable because I have a body with grabbing capacities) and
intersubjective (things appear with backsides, because I tacitly perceive the world from the perspective of
other people, or as objectively available). Further, when I keep looking at the vase, it appears to be the same
vase. This identity seems to point to a diachronic identity of myself. The “for whom” is an inherently temporal
being.

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
It rests on a careful, two-tiered ethnographic and phenomenological analysis (each
with their requisite validity criteria) of interviews and the debates to which they per-
tain. This analysis is not least meant to confer a higher degree of generality – moving
from personal interviewee descriptions to general phenomenological conclusions
– than any conglomeration of introspective utterings could ever yield. The mistrust
objection risks mistaking the phenomenological interview for a purely introspective
method. More precisely, the mistrust objection risks falling prey to a decoupled or
static understanding, thinking that interviewer is merely collecting data based on the
interviewee’s introspective utterings, when in fact the interview process is a highly
dynamic, shared investigation: the interviewer attempts to guide the interviewee to
ever more precise descriptions of some past action or state of affairs. In other words,
the mistrust objection that is often a disguised objection against introspection, sets
up a strawman, because it misconstrues the phenomenological interview for a sim-
ple conglomeration of introspective utterances and fails to take the methodology of
the former into consideration.
We believe that neurophenomenology in its early days ran this same risk of a
decoupled or static understanding: Lutz and Thompson (2003) defined neurophe-
nomenology as the mutual adaptation of first-person reports and neurological evi-
dence and defended it against standard objections such as bias and the explanatory
gap between reports and biological data. The conceptualization of neurophenom-
enology as a combination of first- and third-person science, downplays the role of
the interview as co-generated and therefore grounding an interactive, second-person
science. This is consistent with neurophenomenology’s idea of training subjects to
provide more accurate reports of lived experience (Lutz & Thompson, 2003, 33)
– the seeming assumption here is that if the interviewees are trained well enough,
the interaction between those reports and the neurological data, can more easily
get around the second-person perspective. In contrast, the phenomenological inter-
view requires no training of the interviewee (see also Bockelman etal., 2013, 7).
Instead, the interviewer takes on more work and interpretative responsibility: firstly
by attempting to generate as detailed descriptions as possible, and secondly by inter-
preting what these descriptions mean. Lutz and Thompson, however, do emphasize
interaction or “reciprocal, empathetically grounded exchange” (Lutz & Thompson,
2003, 40) in their conceptualization and enactivism at least in Thompson’s work has
recently endorsed the phenomenological interview as “fully enactive” (Thompson,
2017, 42) exactly because of the role of interactive co-generation of data.
In conclusion, in preliminary number two, we have established that arguments
levelled against “introspection” do not necessarily pertain to the phenomenological
interview as well. This is because the phenomenological interview does not consist in
gathering introspective or first-person statements and correlating them with standard
scientific third-person data. Rather, it is an interactive second-person methodology
employed for the sake of phenomenological discovery and clarification.

S.Høffding et al.
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2.4 Metaphysical skepticism
The final preliminary is a restriction of the scope of the argument of the paper. While
we want to deflate skeptical arguments levelled against phenomenological interviews,
we are uninterested in deflating skeptical arguments of a more metaphysical nature:
examples of the latter can be found in Frankish’s (2016) recent, edited double volume
on “illusionsism” of Journal of Consciousness Studies, which concerns “the view that
phenomenal qualities are an illusion” (Printz, 2016, 186). Here Garfield, for instance
asserts that “there is no phenomenal consciousness” (Garfield, 2016, 73). The view
that across the board denies either the existence or the reliability of phenomenal con-
sciousness is widespread, as we already saw for instance in Fridland’s work: “I’m
deeply skeptical about what phenomenology can teach us about the nature of our
mental states, conscious or nonconscious” (Fridland, 2014, 2733).7 Let us label this
position the “deep mistrust” objection. It is deep because it doesn’t merely hold that
experience is sometimes unreliable, but that it is inherently and irrevocably unreliable
or illusory. We do not want to engage the deep mistrust objection because of its fun-
damentally metaphysical character: metaphysical in the sense of making claims about
the relation between mind and reality.
If one makes the deep mistrust objection, i.e. if one fundamentally rejects the exist-
ence or reliability of phenomenal consciousness, then it follows that one is also mak-
ing the ordinary mistrust objection because one will mistrust any statement generated
through a phenomenological interview. To the deep mistrust objection, there can be no
methodological remedy to ensure the scientific credibility of interviews. This implies
that no methodological suggestion made in this paper can counter the deep mistrust
objection. In line with much phenomenological thinking, we do believe that the effort
to eradicate the first-person perspective, or reliance on phenomenal consciousness from
science is impossible, non-sensical and self-defeating, but we will not argue for that here.
Those of our readers who endorse the deep mistrust objection will then not be convinced
by the arguments presented here and are advised to approach the phenomenological
classics on science, experience, and their relation such as Phenomenology of Perception
(Merleau-Ponty, 2002) or Krisis (Husserl, 1970).
3 The Skeptic’s worry
Before engaging the various skeptic objections, let us elucidate our argumentative strat-
egy: the objections are structured beginning with the metaphysically most weighty. At
each objection or juncture, the skeptic is confronted with the choice to relinquish her
position and move to the next “milder” objection, or to embrace a more fundamental
metaphysical skepticism, i.e. a deep mistrust with serious consequences for the very
possibility of conducting science. This leads to a conclusion, at which the skeptic either
7 One is tempted to use Varela to reply to Fridland: “Any science of cognition and mind must, sooner or
later, come to grips with the basic condition that we have no idea what the mental or the cognitive could
possibly be apart from our own experience of it.” (Varela,1996, 331).

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
has gone “deep” or relinquished her objections, thus accepting that interviewees are
indeed reliable, and that we are warranted in using this source of knowledge to inform
our scientific investigations. Making this argumentative strategy bullet-proof, would
require a great deal of space to work out all the details, so we are sure that the skeptic
will somehow find wiggle room to resist our forced choices. Should that be the case, we
will at least have clarified the stakes of the debate.
One example of the mistrust objection comes from Hutto who worries that “they
might not even know what they are experiencing”. Hutto elaborated this worry into
three sub-objections that encapsulate most of the formulations of the general mis-
trust objection we have encountered. The precise formulation here is our own:
a) There is a categorical problem for people knowing the cognitive, psychological
and biological underpinnings of their experience. We call this the ontological
objection.8
b) There is a categorical problem for people knowing their own experience. We call
this the epistemological objection.
c) There is a methodological problem in how to “control” that interviews are valid.
We call this the methodological objection.
It will not be possible to exhaust the explanation necessary to fully address each
of the three because doing so would necessarily involve a presentation of the pragmat-
ics of the interview, or the “what, why, and how” of the interview. Such a presentation
is much beyond the scope of this paper and has been treated in Høffding and Martiny
(2016). The following will therefore only make the minimally necessary reference to
interview pragmatics in order to stick to the deflation of the mistrust objection.
3.1 The Ontological objection
The ontological objection has a naturalistic bias attributing more importance to biol-
ogy, (neuro)psychology, and (unconscious) cognition than to experience: understanding
experience on its own is not our intended scientific explanandum. Experience is not the
domain of real science. Rather, we should be explaining experience by understanding
its cognitive, psychological or biological underpinnings. And interviews are unsuited for
this, because experience doesn’t give the requisite access and interviewees hence do not
know anything about these underpinnings. Before addressing this objection directly, it
might be wise to remember Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on the founding-founded relation
between our experience of the life-world and scientific data:
8 To both the general mistrust objection and the specific ontological objection, there is a question of exactly what
is meant by knowledge. We do not want to engage in a classical discussion of epistemology here, however. We
chose a pragmatic answer and claim the following: in the ontological objection, knowledge means conscious
access to psychological, cognitive and biological underpinnings. In the epistemological objection, knowledge
means something like unbiased or undistorted access to a past experience. In the methodological objections, the
claim is not about the interviewee’s knowledge per se, but about the interviewer’s ability to report on that knowl-
edge. Our replies to these objections are meant to problematize these conceptions of knowledge.

S.Høffding et al.
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“The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced,
and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a pre-
cise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the
basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression.
Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua
form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a
rationale or explanation of that world.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, ix)
Qua phenomenology and Husserl’s entire project (Husserl, 1970; Zahavi, 2017),
we might want to simply dismiss the ontological objection and remind the skeptic
that in order to do science properly, we must first understand how experience works
as a foundational project. Only then can we turn to correlations with psychologi-
cal, cognitive and biological mechanisms. Even if we believe that this rejection of
the ontological objection is warranted at a principled level, we do not advocate get-
ting stuck in an orthodox corner: we only began to engage with interview methods
because we believe phenomenology can be enriched through empirical investiga-
tion. This belief demands more than a mere dismissal of the ontological objection.
To claim that experience does not give us access to its own cognitive, psychologi-
cal or biological underpinnings is a composite and complex claim that we can attempt
to deflate in several ways. The challenge is similar to what Lutz and Thompson call
“the explanatory gap” which “is the epistemological and methodological problem of
how to relate first-person phenomenological accounts of experience to third-person
cognitive-neuroscientific accounts.” (Lutz & Thompson, 2003, 47).9
In response, we could start out modest and emphasize that phenomenology
since its inception did not mean to explain experience, but simply to describe
it. This grants the objection, but at the prize of greatly restricting the explana-
tory power of the interview methodology. For an enactively inclined philosopher
endorsing a “mind-life continuum” ideal of science, that price is too high, so what
might be other options? We can lift some of the burden of proof by referring to
one of Petitmengin’s studies: in the context of people with epileptic seizures,
her thorough microphenomenological interviews (Le Van Quyen & Petitmengin,
2002; Petitmengin etal., 2007) enabled some of her interviewees to better antici-
pate the onset of seizures as a result of heightened attention to experiential or phe-
nomenal details in their own mental lives. Such an ability is directly connected to
the cognitive underpinnings, in this case, the neuro-physiological causes of expe-
rience. It is easily defeasible to claim that mental sharpening could grant us direct
experiential access to all our bodily and sub-conscious processes. Petitmengin’s
9 It seems confusing that what we call an ontological objection, Lutz and Thompson call a “epistemolog-
ical and methodological problem”. The difference can be explained as follows: We are trying to convince
the skeptic to abandon first the ontological objection, then the epistemological objection, and finally the
methodological objection. Lutz and Thompson, qua enactivist, consider mind and life to be continuous.
They are not skeptics, but accept the reliability of experience. To them, there is no ontological problem
and they can therefore skip directly to the epistemological and methodological problems of how to con-
struct a scientific program that incorporates experience and biology.

1 3
Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
study, however, shows that we also should not be too conservative in judging what
physiological processes we hold to be experientially accessible or manipulable.10
We prefer a different explanatory strategy, namely to lift the burden of justifica-
tion from the interviewee to the interviewer: subjects usually do not know the cog-
nitive, psychological, or biological underpinnings of their mental life. And they do
not need to. To expect or demand this, is exactly to conflate the two tiers of the
interview. All that is needed in the first tier, is detailed descriptions. Only in the
second tier are these descriptions analyzed and employed to discuss issues of cogni-
tion, psychology or even biology. For instance, musicians would usually not be able
to pinpoint a change of the sense of agency as explanatory of the various unusual kinds
of experiences they undergo while playing. That is an insight achieved by the researcher
(Høffding, 2019), using the interviews combined with knowledge of phenomenol-
ogy and psychology to understand and interpret something about psychological
and cognitive, although not biological, underpinnings of experience. Note, however,
that on an enactive or 4E view of cognition, those underpinnings are also found in
the environment, and do not exist solely in the brain. Good descriptions from inter-
viewees about the particular situations they find themselves in, when undergoing a
certain experience are likely to be good pointers to understanding those environ-
mentally located underpinnings. Ethnographically inspired methods, in particular,
will be well-suited for accounting for the role of the environment.
Complementary strategies are to “front-load phenomenology” (Gallagher, 2003)
into an experimental design or employ a mixed method set-up that applies mutual
constraints such that interviews becomes a guide and arbiter to conclusions of those
cognitive, psychological and even biological underpinnings. Explaining ways of
working with mixed methods is much beyond the scope of the current argument that
we address elsewhere (Martiny etal., 2021).
From here, the skeptic can make the following moves. She can reject the
responses just presented and repeat that experience is unsuitable for scientific inves-
tigation: that micro-phenomenology helped people with epileptic seizures anticipate
these is too insignificant and arbitrary a result. Shifting the explanatory responsi-
bility from interviewee to interviewer helps nothing because experience just is the
wrong kind of data to begin with and its ensuing interpretation therefore is nothing
more than a kind of hand waving. Such a response is a retreat into the deep mistrust
objection, to which we will not respond, because no amount of evidence will be
able to convince the skeptic. She can also respond that, it may indeed be that the
interviewee can know something about the cognitive, psychological or biological
underpinnings of experience, or alternatively that the interviewer can use the reports
to informs such investigations. She may then reformulate, and consequently claim
that the problem resides in the interviewee misrepresenting her knowledge because
of bias or flawed episodic memory.
10 Another study in the neurophenomenological tradition, likewise found that experienced monks were able to
enter meditative states overriding or strongly inhibiting the startle reflex: a physiological response causally tied
to the “reptilian” brain stem and thought to be completely beyond conscious control (Levenson etal.,2012).

S.Høffding et al.
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3.2 The Epistemological objection
The claim above effectively takes us from the ontological to the epistemological
objection, which could take the following form: “the responses to 3.a are insufficient
because they already presuppose the reliability of experience, which I am not ready
to grant.”
To begin deflating 3b, we may divide it into a weak and a strong position. The
strong one holds that experience is inherently unreliable, which goes back to the
deep mistrust objection and will not be considered here. Instead, the weak posi-
tion remains. It can be taken to claim that there are blind angles in our experiential
life and that we therefore fail to grasp and express our own experience accurately.
This is claim has been discussed since the 1970s under the concept of ‘cognitive
bias’ (Tversky & Kahneman, 1972; Nibett & Wilson,1977). When asking persons
directly about their experiences, perspectives or life situation, the answers are con-
ditioned by many complex biological, psychological, cognitive, and social factors.
In many cases, we don’t know what we do, why we do it, and how we do it, and we
end up giving descriptions that are plainly false and/or gloss over the nuances of
our experiences. This is especially the case if we look at it in a healthcare setting.
In describing their experiences, people living with cerebral palsy (CP) typically
use medical, neuro-physiological and therapeutic terms and explanations instead of
actually describing their experience (Høffding & Martiny, 2016), and they have cre-
ated a self-understanding and -narrative that can be used as coping strategies for liv-
ing with CP (see also Kelley & Clifford, 1997; Tighe etal.,2011).
This worry can be countered for example by constructing hypotheses that can be
confirmed/rejected in a mutual constraint set-up between second- and third-person
methods. This idea is similar to that of neurophenomenology (see also Petitmengin’s
(2017) discussion) or “cardio-phenomenology” (Depraz & Desmidt, 2019). The
interview situation in itself, however, is of course meant to ameliorate the fact that
none of us have perfect self-insight. If we possessed such insight (whatever that
would mean), there would be no point in developing qualitative methodologies and
to train one’s interview techniques to begin with. The interviewer’s work is to gen-
erate reliable and valid data in spite of the fact that the interviewee’s descriptions
are always biased, inaccurate, omissive, hesitant or exaggerated to some extent – an
epistemic challenge Varela and Schear label the “hermeneutical objection” (Varela
& Schear,1999). One way of doing this work is, in the interview situation to alert
the interviewee to confusing statements and seeming contradictions and keep asking
for elaboration. If clarity cannot be obtained or if the interviewee cannot produce
details, then the interview is simply unsuitable for scientific work. An experienced
qualitative interviewer will relatively quickly be able to evaluate whether the current
interview will provide good material and, if that judgment is negative, decide to cut
the interview short.
Another and more specific version of mistrust objection 3.b. pertains to episodic
memory. Hutto himself, as supported by several memory researchers, has demon-
strated that episodic memory is not a mental mechanism whose role it is to report
accurately on the past (Hutto & Myin, 2017, chap 9). Thus, using episodic memory,
interviewees might not even know what they experienced, because they might have

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
experienced something else than what they are reporting. Let us call this the episodic
memory objection and consider how to meet it. Here, at least two strategies are worth
mentioning: that from microphenomenology as represented by Petitmengin and that
of more traditional qualitative interviews.
To describe her interviews, Petitmengin uses the language of “evocation” or
“elicitation”, which means a bringing forth or a bringing into existence. Part of the
idea – called “embodied utterance position” (Petitmengin, 2006, 57) and later, theo-
retically more encompassing “performative validation of first-person descriptions”
(Petitmengin, 2017, 141) – is that when the interviewee produces certain physical
cues in the interview such as looking up, closing one’s eyes, speaking in the pre-
sent tense, this indicates a direct pre-reflective access to the past experience. Such
performative validation is supposed to ensure reliability because it makes one re-
live the experience. If the experience is properly evoked or re-lived, this is not an
act of remembering, but of “discovering” (ibid., 142), such that “the past situation
becomes more present for her than the present situation is” (ibid.). This posited
direct reliance on pre-reflective access to “visual, auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic and
possibly olfactory sensations” (ibid), could then potentially get us out of the episodic
memory objection. As Thompson also mentions (2017, 42), however, this account
comes with some metaphysical baggage. Speaking about something episodically
remembered is to bring to present awareness a past state of affairs that is not percep-
tually present. Even if not explicitly intended by Petitmengin, the idea of evocation
seems to imply that one brings a past experience to life, such that is becomes almost
perceptually present – hence the speaking in the present tense. But the state of affairs
isn’t perceptually present. What is perceptually present is the present situation in
which the interview is taking place. The evocation is of something remembered and
imaginatively reinterpreted. The language of evocation risks blurring the distinction
between what is remembered and what is perceived. This confusion might seem to
derail the mistrust and episodic memory objections, but as the experience evoked is
in fact always an experience remembered, this seeming derailing only avoids, rather
than confronts the objection. That does not mean that the behavioral cues of speak-
ing in the present tense of closing one’s eyes do not have some determination of the
quality of an interview. We think they do. What is problematic is merely the meta-
physical interpretation that the evocation label carries with it. This critical presenta-
tion of microphenomenology is certainly not providing the full picture and it should
also be mentioned that its theoretical and practical tools have developed over the
years and are still developing.
Ethnography generally works around the episodic memory objection in another
way, by questioning the assumption of “data collection”: What is going on in the
interview is not the “collection” of experiences from the past, but the “generation”
of experience or data in the present (Legrand & Ravn, 2009, 395; Hammersley &
Atkinson, 2007, 102; Thorpe, 2012, 54. See also the classic “miner vs. traveler” met-
aphor in Kvale, 1996), as the interviewer co-generates the descriptions together with
the interviewee. In other words, the experience is generated because the description
is generated. This move seemingly overcomes the episodic memory objection (I’m
not remembering a past experience, but generating a new one), but introduces the

S.Høffding et al.
1 3
problem of accounting for the relation between the past and present experience and
its generated description.
What is the status of this experience generation? As an interviewer, I am not usu-
ally interested in understanding the experience we are currently generating together.
I am interested in understanding how the interviewee experienced having done x.
I am not interested in our experience, but in yours. While the mode of inquiry is
shared between interviewer and interviewee as a second-person method, the object
of inquiry resides in the interviewee’s narration of her experience and the posterior
analysis hereof. Therefore, it is imprecise to claim that the experience in question
is exclusively co-generated. It exists in a loop of auto-generation and co-generation.
Failing to methodologically account for the role of the interviewee’s auto-generation,
risks an overly relativist position: If we were only co-generating the experience, it
would subtract a lot of, if not all, ontological independence from the interviewee’s
own experience. In other words, we would be claiming that the experience was not
had at a certain past point in time and space, it is not remembered, but produced
in the moment of the interview. This understanding has unfortunate consequences:
if the interviewer returns to the same subject and asks about the same experience,
then she would have no possibility of judging one set of descriptions as better than
another, because the two would be equally generated and in principle have no past,
shared ontological ground or point of origin. They would be two different experi-
ences. But qualitative researchers do acknowledge that one description can be more
accurate than another. Such an acknowledgement requires a conception of the target
experience as existing somewhat independently of its expression and further that dif-
ferent interview techniques or situations respectively, can unearth the target experi-
ence more or less accurately. Laying claim to such independence, however, need not
entail that the target past experience exists in some mental or metaphysical space as
fully constituted. It is possible to recognize that the interview brings new aspects to
light, that perhaps were only vaguely intuited at the moment of its having. In other
words, we advocate opting for a balanced position of shared constitution: one dimen-
sion of the experience in the moment of the interviewee having it, and one dimension
in the moment of its shared remembering and description. This position is consist-
ent with Merleau-Ponty’s on speaking as the realization of thought (Merleau-Ponty,
2002, 206). It is not a distortion or a generation out of nothing, in the same way that
reflection upon a pre-reflective mental act need not be considered a distortion, but
an “opening up” of that act (Zahavi, 1999, 181–9; 2005, 89–96; 2011). There is
something there, which is accomplished in its description. But it might be underde-
termined until it is described and gestured. Description and gesture confer unto it a
different and sometimes higher degree of determination, for example as when one
realizes something profound about one’s character by reflecting on a past action. The
same holds for the interview and its analysis. Each step gives a different and hope-
fully increasing degree of determination to the target experience.
For the idea of generation to be consistent, it must then consist of both an auto-
generation from the interviewee’s memory and a co-generation of the descriptions
of that memory shared between interviewee and interviewer. As was the case for
micro-phenomenology, ethnographic interviews then, also cannot avoid the epi-
sodic memory objection. And they don’t have to. Instead they can push back on the

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Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
mistrust objection with the following options. Either the objection is categorical
in the sense that we tout court cannot trust experience, episodic memory included,
which again leads us to the deep mistrust objection. Or the objection is merely meth-
odological: we do have blindspots in our experiential lives and episodic memory can
be inaccurate. The methodological remedies to which we will turn now, are meant
to manage this situation, even if they can never eliminate the possibility of errors or
misinterpretation. But it is unproblematic to admit this because it merely consists in
admitting that the method is not bulletproof. It never purported to be so, and neither
is any other scientific method. This move pushes the burden of evidence back onto
the skeptic asking him or her to produce evidence that this methodology fares worse
than others.
3.2.1 The Methodological objection
Finally, the skeptic can grant 3.a and b (experience is of concern to science and,
in spite of bias, interviewees can report somewhat reliably on past experience), but
claim that there is no method to validate the reliability of the reports. This takes the
article full circle and we have at least two replies to this objection.
The first is to highlight the scientific validity criteria of the two tiers of the inter-
view that satisfies the skeptic worries. The two first principles applied in this regard
are transparency and consistency (See e.g. Brinkman & Kvale,2014). The former
consists in presenting one’s interview data and methodological considerations in
great detail. This gives the reader occasion to follow through every step of the scien-
tific process and it gives her room to agree or disagree with the conclusions derived
from the interview. Still, this is an ideal to strive for. It is practically impossible to
achieve one hundred percent transparency, for instance for the simple reason that
one cannot present the interview in its entirety in an academic paper.11 But this like-
wise holds for experimental science, that cannot include a description of the totality
of choices made in a prior experiment, but simply strive to communicate the ones
deemed necessary for replication. Transparency also includes presenting the reasons
behind the methodological choices made. Consistency refers to using the same tech-
nique or analysis strategy throughout the process. If methodologically committed
to eliciting descriptions, one cannot suddenly ask the interviewee for her opinions
or theories, at least not without explicit mention, if one includes it in the analysis.
Another example is that if one writes that the transcriptions have been submitted to
several close readings, that this is factually the case.
While transparency and consistency are necessary for valid qualitative work, they
do not on their own deflate the methodological objection. Here it is apt to call on the
concepts of internal and external consistency (Høffding & Martiny, 2016). The former
means that the interview in its totality is making sense and that one’s analysis of the
meaning of the interview follows from its content. If the content is full of contradictions,
for which one has no explanation, it is much less reliable and it will probably be impossible
11 One can of course attach a transcription or recording. But in the case of the first author, whose inter-
views are in Danish, the issue of translation then again impedes a hundred percent transparency.

S.Høffding et al.
1 3
to produce valid interpretations. The notion of internal consistency does not imply
that the interview and analysis should be seen as a method for evaluating the epistemic
strength of each and every utterance. Rather, it is about grasping a general tendency,
pattern, or meaning derived from many statements that support one another. This is
not so different from ordinary scientific practice. Our knowledge of climate change
does not primarily rely on the exactitude of each single study, but on the majority of
studies that point to a general tendency and which support one another. If our inter-
viewees really didn’t know what they were experiencing, it would be highly unlikely
that they could produce such consistent descriptions.
Even if an interview internally makes sense as its own unit, it must be connected
to the wider net of scientific theories. External consistency refers to this exact exer-
cise in which one’s analyses are brought to bear on wider theoretical debates both
“online” in academic talks and conversations and “offline” in peer-review, articles
and books. External consistency provides a reality check for possible misinterpreta-
tions, omissions or exaggerations and can often give occasion to revisit one’s inter-
view material to double check for internal consistency or even to go all the way
back to tier one and conduct more interviews in order to elicit further descriptions
regarding a contended interpretation. One further and ideal step in external consist-
ency is the translation of one’s conclusions into practice or interventions available to
practitioners such as therapists or teachers.
Let us pursue this idea and look at external consistency through the prag-
matic impact of research based on phenomenological interviews. As an exam-
ple, Martiny conducted phenomenological interviews with people with cerebral
palsy (CP) (Martiny, 2015a, b). He found, among other things, in contrast to
the mainstream biomedical conception that CP is not “just” a congenital brain-
damage causing motor control disorder, but that it involves psychological, cogni-
tive, and not least social consequences (Zahavi & Martiny, 2019). Based on these
insights, he developed new strategies for interventions with youth with CP that
emphasized social and playful aspects (Aggerholm & Martiny, 2017; Martiny
& Aggerholm, 2016). These interventions have been successful and are being
implemented into Danish national (re)habilitation strategies for interventions for
people with CP. If Martiny’s interviewees were unreliable, and if his method for
interpreting the interviews was invalid, it seems very unlikely that his interview-
based understanding could lead to improved healthcare strategies and interven-
tions for a large number of other persons with CP.12
12 The skeptic might here object that this claim is too strong and that we need additional arguments
to demonstrate what is mean by «success» of these interventions and further to demonstrate that such
putative success is causally linked to the phenomenological interviews. Even if we were to grant this
objection, the following point nevertheless stands firm: the interviews give the people with CP a voice,
acknowledges their subjectivity and their status as agents with self-determination. This acknowledgement
transforms their role in the intervention from one of receptive objects for a”treatment” to co-creating,
empowered agents.

1 3
Can we trust thephenomenological interview? Metaphysical,…
4 Conclusion
The main claim of this paper harkens back to Jack and Roepstorff’s (2003) special issue:
we should trust the subject. We have provided arguments of both theoretical and
pragmatic nature, justifying this claim and attempted to push the skeptic to either a)
accept these arguments and embrace at least some level of trust in the co-constituted,
two tiered phenomenological interview, or b) acknowledge that she is an incorrigible
skeptic, clinging to the “deep mistrust” objection with its scathing implications for
the potential of all scientific endeavors. Yet, it goes without saying that phenomeno-
logical interviews have a limited scope of applicability, as does any other method. We
are hopeful and excited about the potential of mixed methods designs that combine
interviews, experiments, measures and intervention even if the negotiation of research
paradigms is, at best, complicated (Martiny et al., 2021). The phenomenological
interview, we believe, has an essential role to play here. But we have yet to more
precisely delineate the scope of the explanatory reach of the phenomenological inter-
view, something we hope to accomplish on a large scale inthe future (Heimann
etal., forthcoming).13
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-
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permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly
from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/
by/4. 0/.
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