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Payne: Buddhism and Cognitive Science 7As discussed by Wallace in his paper here, for most of the twentiethcentury Western psychology attempted to exclude consciousness fromconsideration. What may well have begun as a reasonable methodologicalstrategy (“We can’t figure out how to meaningfully study consciousnessright now, so we’ll set it aside until later.”) soon developed into a doctrinaireclaim that consciousness does not exist except as a “mere” epiphenomenon,and as such is hardly worthy of consideration. One of the valuesof the recent turn by some cognitive scientists to the philosophic traditionof Husserlian phenomenology is that consciousness has been of centralconcern to phenomenology and existentialism throughout the period ofbehaviorism’s dominance in psychology. For example, the still-importantPhenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was publishedin French in 1945, and in English translation in 1962, and remains in printtoday. The continuity of phenomenological concern with consciousness isdemonstrated by Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness, which waspublished in French in 1957 (English translation, 1964), and Henri Ey’sConsciousness: A Phenomenological Study of Being Conscious and BecomingConscious, which appeared in French in 1963 (English translation,1978). As often seems to be the case, disdain for philosophy means thatpsychology has to recapitulate much that has already been thought through.A unified or non-dual view of human cognition, which is a potential forcognitive science under the embodied-enactive approach, can provide ameans of discussing practice and its effects in such a fashion as to avoidimplicitly reinstantiating dualistic conceptions of the body and mind.Buddhism, cognitive science, and phenomenology all make claimsregarding human cognition, and often these claims are asserted as applyingto all humans no matter when or where they lived. In Buddhism, forexample, we find such claims as all human existence is marked by dissatisfaction(du©kha), and that full awakening is possible for all humans—oreven more universally, for all sentient beings. For most Buddhists it wouldseem that these and similar universal claims are accepted on the basis of theauthority to whom the claims are attributed, whether the BuddhaÛåkyamuni, or one of the later masters such as Dharmak∆rti, Tsong khapa,Zhiyi, or Shinran. 22 In phenomenology, such universal claims are supportedby the epistemological value of the phenomenological method—epoché and reduction. 23 Cognitive science can provide additional tools forthe evaluation and understanding of such claims about consciousness. Forexample, in Pascal Boyer’s application of cognitive science to religion theconstraints of conceptual organization and the recurrence of religiousphenomena provide the means by which claims about human consciousnesscan be evaluated. According to Boyer, constraint by the organizationof concepts has two dimensions, an internal and an external. By internal hemeans “what holds a category together and makes it a mental structure thatcan encompass various objects or events or thoughts.” External aspects of