phenomenology

n. a movement in European philosophy initiated by German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). In his writings of the 1910s and 1920s, Husserl argued for a new approach to human knowledge in which both the traditional concerns of philosophy (such as metaphysics and epistemology) and the modern concern with scientific causation would be set aside in favor of a careful attention to the nature of immediate conscious experience. Mental events should be studied and described in their own terms, rather than in terms of their relationship to events in the body or in the external world. However, phenomenology should be distinguished from introspection as it is concerned with the relationship between acts of consciousness and the objects of such acts (see intentionality). Husserl’s approach proved widely influential in psychology (especially Gestalt psychology) and the social sciences; it also inspired the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose existential phenomenology provided the basis for existentialism and existential psychology. —phenomenological adj. —phenomenologist n.

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Psychology term of the day

November 16th 2024

dendrogram

n. a type of treelike diagram used in hierarchical clustering. It lists all of the participants at one end and then directs branches out from those participants who are similar and connects them with a node that represents a cluster. A dendrogram could be used, for example, to cluster individuals into various categories of HIV risk, depending on their number of sexual partners, their frequency of unprotected sex, and the perceived risk of their partners. Individuals who had few sexual partners with little or no unprotected sex and who perceived little or no partner risk of HIV infection would be branched into a cluster that could be labeled low risk, whereas individuals with high values on these three variables would branch into a high-risk cluster, with other individuals presumably clustering into a medium-risk group.