Lakoff and Johnson's term for radical subjectivism or, equivalently, the rejection of Structuralism.
They characterize cafe phenomenology as:
> * *Meaning is private:* meaning is always a matter of what is meaningful and significant *to* a person. What an individual finds significant and what it means *to* him are matters of intuition, imagination, feeling, and individual experience. What something means to one individual can never be fully known or communicated to anyone else.
> * *Experience is purely holistic:* There is no natural structuring to our experience. Any structure that we or others place on our experience is completely artificial.
> * *Meanings have no natural structure:* Meaning to an individual is a matter of his private feelings, experiences, intuitions, and values. These are purely holistic: they have no natural structure. Thus, meanings have no natural structure.
> * *Context is unstructured:* The context needed for understanding an utterance – the physical, cultural, personal, and interpersonal context – has no natural structure.
> * *Meaning cannot be naturally or adequately represented:* This is a consequence of the facts that meanings have no natural structure, that they can never be fully known or communicated to another person, and that the context needed to understand them is unstructured. – p. 224
They are perhaps not being entirely fair.
Their rejoinder is:
> We have argued that our experience is structured holistically in terms of experiential gestalts. These gestalts have structure that is not arbitrary. Instead, the Dimensions that characterize the structure of the gestalts emerge naturally from our experience.