Claire Petitmengin
Mines Paris - PSL
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Claire Petitmengin, of Mines Paris - PSL, is the leading developer of micro-phenomenology, a technique for guiding a subject through the fine-grained structure of a lived experience, moment by moment, until its pre-reflective dynamics become describable. Her papers on the elicitation method and on the micro-dynamics of intuition (PMID 30502663, co-authored with Michel Bitbol) argue that first-person data can be stabilized, validated, and contested like third-person data, provided the collection method is disciplined. This site tracks the epistemic stakes of that claim in the introspection evidence debates, where AI self-reports face the same validity questions.
The position her method embodies is that the report-versus-experience gap, the oldest confound in consciousness science, is an engineering problem with a partial solution. Trained elicitation reduces, though never removes, the confabulation that ordinary self-report produces. The same logic now appears in machine research, where reflection training teaches models to report their processing more faithfully.
Petitmengin’s profile anchors the first-person-methods wing of the site’s database, the tradition descending from Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology that insists subjective data, properly gathered, are evidence.
Known for. Micro-phenomenology, the elicitation method for first-person data, pre-reflective experience, validation of introspective reports
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Claire Petitmengin is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.