Husserl’s phenomenology entered the world not as a philosophical method but as a psychological propaedeutic to logic. In the Logical Investigations Husserl criticized logical psychologism as a contradictory attempt to explain logical validity by appeal to psychological facts, but he embraced the idea that the meaning of logical concepts and operators could be clarified through “descriptive psychological” reflection on the mental processes in which such concepts and operators are given (Hua 19/1, p. 24/262). As reflective description, this sort of investigation of mental processes is irreducibly first-personal. Though it is not concerned with an individual mental process in its datable particularity, but rather with its “essence” or type, descriptive psychology is a mode of direct self-knowledge. For while information can be gained about mental processes from the third-person point of view, as in Daniel Dennett’s “hetero-phenomenology” (1989, pp. 153–58), it is only from the first-person point of view that the “thing itself,” the mental process as such, can be given. And only on the basis of such givenness can its distinctive characteristics be described.

From the beginning the first-person character of phenomenology was a point of criticism. Paul Natorp, for instance, spoke of a “logical uneasiness” in Husserl’s juxtaposition of logic and descriptive psychology, and he urged Husserl to adopt the kind of constructivism advocated by the neo-Kantians (Natorp 1901). Emil Lask, a student of Heinrich Rickert’s, denied that phenomenology’s commitment to describing what is “immanent within experience or consciousness” could provide the basis from which genuine philosophical issues might be addressed – for instance, the issue of how conceptual thought could “hold” or be valid for real things independent of the subject (Lask 2003a, p. 351/414).