The ‘Cognitive Science Hexagon’ Redrawn From The Original Cover Of The Sloan Foundation’s 1978

Jack R. Strange, "A Search for the Sources of the Stream of Consciousness", The Stream of Consciousness: Scientific Investigations into the Flow of Human Experience

Esaias van Hulsen

Mezzotint Engravings, 1620

i am not taking questions at this time

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

25 Labyrinths Designs

The natural method involves seeking consistency and equilibrium among different modes of analysis applied to the study of some mental phenomenon…In the case of dreams, phenomenology, will supply us with first-person reports about how dreams seem, especially how particular dreams seem from the point of view of the person who has the dream.

The mental sciences—psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience—are needed to provide answers to a host of questions that are not answered by how things seem, even if we take how they seem to be as how they really are for the dreamer. The mental sciences will tell us about the objective side of dreams.

—Owen Flanagan, Dreaming Souls