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‘Does it exist at all?' is the central question in Cognitive Phenomenology by Tim Bayne & Michelle Montague, an interesting array of ‘supporters' and ‘rejecters' of this question. The article by Jesse J. Prinz, The Sensory Basis of Cognitive Phenomenology, presents us with a negative answer. He calls his view restrictivism as opposed to expansionism, the latter allowing for non-sensory cognitive phenomenology. I intend to show that his restrictivism is wrong, bottom-up by arguing for the opposite view, namely that cognitive phenomenology forms the basis of all phenomenology, all science, and top-down by extending the reach of cognitive phenomenology even beyond the limits that expansionists set themselves. I will do this by using a technique called ‘Observing One's Thinking', which is closely related to but extends what a cognitive phenomenologist like Christopher Shields calls:”I now step back and reflect in a second-order sort of way on my entertaining of that proposition'.
Using the technique of Observing One's Thinking makes it clear that all perception is conceptually structured, sensory phenomenology in its strongest, restrictivist, form is wrong. This same technique leads us beyond the argumentative proofs of the existence of cognitive phenomenology, it forms an ontological proof, it creates and lifts into our usually discrete consciousness an entirely new, clear and distinct continuous field of exact images that, in their purest form, have no sensory content. Nothing against sensory phenomenology, but the evolution of our philosophical and scientific thinking requires something stronger.
