A paper co-authored by Dr. Francesco Ellia, a member of the second-term Publicly Offered Research Group, and our representative Prof. Naotsugu Tsuchiya has been released as a preprint on PsyArXiv. The full text is available. We invite you to read it! It is also posted on ResearchGate.

Paper Information

Authors: Francesco Ellia and Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Title: The View from Among: a Relational Epistemology for Structural Approaches

Preprint: PsyArXiv (2026)

Note: To appear in Qualia Structure, Springer Nature (scheduled for publication in 2027)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6dycm_v1

Summary

 Consciousness science has long been pulled between a first-person approach that cannot independently corroborate its own data and a third-person approach that leaves out the very thing it sets out to explain. This paper argues that the choice between them is a false one, and proposes a third option: the first-person plural perspective (FPP). On this view, the primary route of epistemic access to the structure of experience is the plural “we” — the field of structural features that can be recovered across perspectives — rather than the singular “I” or the observer’s “them”. FPP is an epistemic position rather than an ontological one: it posits no group mind, and takes a modest, deflationary realist stance towards the relational structure of experiences as they are had. The authors show that this is the epistemology already implicit in the Qualia Structure paradigm, and illustrate it with a free-report paradigm.

Abstract

 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.