Since our lived experience is the most personal and intimate thing about us, we think we are familiar with it, and cannot imagine for a moment that we could fail to perceive it or be misled about it. Yet the spontaneous descriptions we provide of our experience, whether sensory, emotional, or cognitive, are usually very poor. Worse, many studies show that our awareness is not only very partial, but biased, and that we are often wrong when we try to describe it.
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However, recent studies convincingly show that specific inner acts enable us to refine the consciousness of our experience and describe it with reliability and great precision.
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One line of research consists in deepening our knowledge of these acts, of their learning modes, of the devices that make it possible to elicit them (notably through interviews), and of their criteria of accurate realization. A second line of research consists, on the basis of a refined knowledge of these acts, in progressing towards a new definition of the validity of a description, conceived not as correspondence but as consistency.