# Frame Methodology Pack -- Phenomenological (`phenomenological`)

**Source anchor:** Husserl, *Crisis of European Sciences* (1936); Merleau-Ponty, *Phenomenology of Perception* (1945); Giorgi, *Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology* (2009); Van Manen, *Phenomenology of Practice*; Öhlén & Friberg (2023).
**Status:** Public-Evaluator. Loaded by Frame Host E3; readable by E2, E4, E5, E8, E9.

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## 1. Methodology

Husserl's *Crisis* diagnoses the **forgetting of the lifeworld** by objectivist science: when inquiry reduces a lived phenomenon to an operationalized proxy, the phenomenon's originary meaning is severed from the practices, perceptions, and embodied conditions in which it is lived. The **phenomenological reduction (epoché)** brackets the natural attitude to return the lived phenomenon to its first-person conditions of constitution. Merleau-Ponty extends this into **embodied constitution**: perception is not a representation inside a mind but a structured engagement of a body with its world. Giorgi operationalizes this through a descriptive, stepwise reduction to essential structures; Van Manen extends to hermeneutic-phenomenology, in which reflective writing is part of the method.

A phenomenological audit asks: did the RAM inquiry reduce a lived phenomenon to an operationalized proxy without declaring the severance? Did it handle lifeworld variations or smooth them into a composite? Is the claim still intelligible to someone who lives the phenomenon, or has it migrated to a third-person register while keeping first-person vocabulary?

## 2. Claim Types Best-Audited

- First-person experience and meaning claims.
- Perceptual and embodied-practice claims.
- Lived-practice claims where the "what it is like" is constitutive of the phenomenon.
- Caregiving, clinical, educational, and craft claims whose warrant depends on lifeworld fidelity.

## 3. Typical Weaknesses

- Weak against aggregate, statistical, and mechanism claims -- the reduction does not provide traction on these.
- Van Manen's hermeneutic-phenomenology is criticized as impressionistic when reflective writing substitutes for disciplined analysis.
- Giorgi's descriptive method criticized as relativistic when essential structures are asserted without adequate variation analysis.
- Can fail to distinguish "first-person report" from "first-person structured through researcher pre-understanding."

## 4. Compatibility Profile (Three Kuhnian Dimensions)

- **Methodological signature:** descriptive / reductive. Inquiry strips the natural attitude to recover essential structures.
- **Semantic signature:** lifeworld-anchored. Meaning is indexed to the pre-theoretical lived field.
- **Ontological signature:** intentionality / embodied constitution. What there is is given through constituting acts of embodied subjects.

DISTINCT against all three RAM frames: S02 grades evidence by epistemic hierarchy, phenomenology grades by lifeworld fidelity; S03 locates mechanisms in stratified reality, phenomenology locates meaning in constituting acts; S08 measures informational redundancy, phenomenology measures invariant structures across variations.

## 5. Retrieval Hook

- **Corpora:** first-person accounts; descriptive-phenomenological studies (Giorgi lineage); hermeneutic-phenomenological texts (Van Manen lineage); lifeworld documents (journals, practice diaries, interview transcripts kept in first-person form).
- **Query style:** pair the claim with the lived-phenomenon description it purports to represent; seek convergent and variant first-person accounts.
- **Exclusion rules:** aggregate statistics treated as primary evidence for lived meaning; third-person reconstructions that have lost first-person traceability.

## 6. Scoring Hook

- **axis_warrant:** lifeworld fidelity. Score on whether the claim remains anchored to the lived phenomenon without severance into operationalized proxy.
- **axis_fit:** phenomenological-reduction completeness. Has the natural attitude been bracketed, or has it leaked into the claim as unmarked presupposition?
- **axis_robustness:** invariant structures across described variations. Do essential features hold across varied first-person descriptions of the phenomenon?
- **aggregation_rule:** `non_collapse` (architectural lock).

## 7. Termination Hook

- **rule_id:** `hermeneutic_closure`.
- **minimum_artifacts:** 4 first-person descriptive artifacts spanning non-redundant variation conditions.
- **closure_test:** saturation of essential structures -- additional descriptions produce variant expressions of already-identified structures rather than new essential features.

## 8. Authors Cited

Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Giorgi, Van Manen, Öhlén & Friberg. No overlap with authors reserved for RAM S02 (Guyatt, Sterne, Hammersley), RAM S03 (Pawson, Tilley, Shadish, Cook, Campbell), or RAM S08 (Glaser, Saunders, Guest, Callaghan).
