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Phenomenology In the Greek sense of an objective study of phenomena, starting from the familiar phenomena of life, eventful reality as subjectively lived, observed, and experienced, including the great discovery of reliable language for exchanging insights and practical responses to everything interesting in the world.

It would include the study of phenomena using scientific methods, analyzing data, and investigating with instruments and tests. The catch is the difference between representing nature as the rules and patterns science finds, taken out of context, and the very ancient accumulative study of phenomena in a context that brought us reliable and shareable knowledge.

So, the wonderful discoveries of science, abstracted from nature, would need to be used to illuminate the phenomena of life *in context* to be considered part of the natural science of phenomenology. Abstract rules taken out of context, like the ability for any relationship to project to infinity, are part of what makes theory potentially so misleading.

Of course, observation is a bit unreliable, and so is what one can recall, so some extra practice is needed to make a direct study of phenomena "phenomenology" a verifiably way to check or follow traces of events, like archaeology does. The method for verifying the features and meanings of phenomena humanity's entire knowledge developed with is *language*, the use of words referring to phenomena with interpretations attached that people passed around and came to anchor our thought to meaningful references to collectively understood phenomena.

This approach to organizing our thoughts about our self-organized world, of course, originated long before history, roughly 850 thousand years before history. That was when Homo Erectus emerged as the dominant human species and demonstrated abilities that would have needed communication as well as organization. The development of language that way would have been the essential precedent to history and language development that could be understood as referring to the same things, just said a different way, perhaps.

Language[edit]

Homo Erectus, Habilis, and then Sapiens also followed each other with great diasporas; that evidence shows also kept in touch, at least for new ideas to spread from end to end over a few decades, as how they formed diverse languages that spoke about the same experiences of nature. So, it appears that oral traditions for referring to phenomena of interest and then attaching to insights, experiences, and useful practices that are verbally anchored to observable things and anchored to cultures make them easy to exchange and accumulate for relating to all interesting phenomena.

We can only piece together this grand process of humanity's learning bit by bit, like archaeology, but reading the signs of advancement in cultures from single-syllable to multi-syllable terms, each level incorporating the one before, like a tree with deep roots. The Initial chapters, as well as the current one, are quite certain to be highly incomplete. A large amount of good work has been done on the mystery of what unified Proto-Indo-European society. Was there a "mother language that all the others spread from? Indo-European migrations tell so many stories; a unified story is needed, like the successive diasporas of the greatest, very early explorers having a way to keep, remotely, in touch.

An ISSS natural systems science research report Exploring Words that Anchor our Thoughts to Nature introduces what is presently traceable of the long history of language presented to the ISSS 2024 world meeting offers a broad model of how the great early languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, might seem to have emerged fully formed as they were written down following the Bronze Age.

The great clue to where they came from seems to be how most of their terms rely on direct references to commonly experienced or observed phenomena, anchoring their meanings to the shared observations of the same subject, contributing the wonderful emergent property of making the translation from one to another of all such languages phenomenologically practical, as all used words rooted in the recognizable phenomena of nature.

Whether named as the study of the phenomena or not all fields appear to be anchored in the reference to the recognizable designs of nature, and the struggle to understand their forms and emergence in context, such as in qualitative research across different scientific disciplines, especially in the social sciences, humanities, psychology, and cognitive science, but also in fields as diverse as health sciences,^[1] architecture,^[2] and human-computer interaction,^[3] among many others. The application of basic phenomenology in these fields aims to gain a deeper understanding of the forms and behaviors of existence.

Pronunciation: Phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy -- /fəˌnäməˈnäləjē/

Etymology[edit]

The term phenomenology derives from the Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon ("that which appears") and λόγος, lógos ("study"). It entered the English language around the turn of the 18th century and first appeared in direct connection to Husserl's philosophy in a 1907 article in The Philosophical Review.<ref>OED, 3rd ed. Husserl's philosophical use did not follow the literal Greek meaning: "study of phenomena."