The View from Among: a Relational Epistemology for Structural Approaches

<p>Consciousness science remains caught between a first-person approach that cannot independently corroborate its data and a third-person approach that excludes its target of explanation. We argue that this is a false dichotomy, and propose a third option, the first-person plural perspective (FPP): the position that the primary route of epistemic access to the structure of experience is the plural “we”, the field of structural features recoverable across perspectives, rather than the singular “I” or the observer’s “them”. FPP is an epistemic position, not an ontological one; it posits no group mind, and it is a modest, deflationary realist about the relational structure of experiences as they are had. We show that this is the epistemology already implicit in the Qualia Structure paradigm, and illustrate it with a free-report paradigm.</p>