The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psychological, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic must either heed the methodological and epistemological justification of the phenomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a “deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious processes as explananda, with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science.

该论文捍卫了现象学访谈可以提供丰富的知识来源的立场，并且它们在原则上并不比一般的定量或实验方法更不可靠或更不有效。它回应了一些持怀疑态度的反对意见，例如那些反对内省的反对意见，那些针对情景记忆的不可靠性的反对意见，以及那些声称访谈无法解决经验的心理、认知和生物学相关性的反对意见。它认为怀疑论者必须要么注意所提供的现象学访谈的方法论和认识论理由，要么接受更基本的怀疑论，即“深度不信任”，其中科学话语不能求助于意识过程作为解释，随之而来的是对我们科学概念的可怕后果。