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Notes
I discuss this pattern of misconstrual in my essay, “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained,” in the special issue of JCS (2003) on “Trusting the Subject,” (subsequently published as a book of that title), responding to Anthony Jack’s challenge to say what isn’t heterophenomenology and there I cited Chalmers, Goldman, and Velmans as instances of the misconstrual. In fact two other essays in that issue – essays I had not seen when I wrote mine – are even more vivid examples of the unwitting re-invention of heterophenomenology. Piccini (2003), after labeling me an “introspection agnostic” who is seen as “rejecting introspective reports as sources of evidence” (142), insists that “we do have means to evaluate the accuracy of introspective reports” (147) and then goes on, in a section entitled “The Epistemic Role of Introspective Reports in Science” to describe, quite accurately, the assumptions that heterophenomenologists use to turn the raw data of verbal reports into data about what it is like for the subject. He quotes Jack and Roepstorff (2002) as saying we should adopt a “second-person” perspective, in which subjects are treated “as responsible conscious agents capable of understanding and acting out the role intended” (149) as if this contrasted with heterophenomenology. Gallagher (2003) surmises that my motivation for heterophenomenology is ‘longstanding suspicions about introspection as a psychological method” while his motivation is to address the problem of “how the use of introspection might be made methodologically secure” (91) but here we are in agreement. I also discuss this gravitation back to heterophenomenology in chapter 2 of Sweet Dreams, 2005), and the pattern continues, with variations, in the papers in this volume by Thompson, Roy, Zahavi and Velmans once more.
There are two distinct ontologies to consider at these subpersonal levels: what you might call the parts catalogue – the discrimination-mechanisms, buffer memories, data-structures, operations, sub-routines, and the like that compose the model-maker’s ontology of real things and events in the brain, and the dramatis personae, the set of things, events, states, relationships, etc., that these parts are best seen as being about – the model’s ontology of events, opportunities, changes, affordances, objects, situations, agents, beliefs, desires, intentions, nouns, verbs, adjectives, phonemes, . . . . The latter is close kin to the conscious subject’s manifest ontology, but we should leave room for the discovery that in some regards false consciousness reigns; subject’s only think that their environment is filled with the things they are aware of, while at the subpersonal level, their brains and bodies are dealing with a different world.
I will persist in my habit of capitalizing “Phenomenology” to refer to the “brand-name” (as Siewert puts it) phenomenology championed by Husserlians.
Thompson cites Lutz and Thompson (2003) as an instance of proper first-personal phenomenology and neurophenomenology, but the fact that their method is not ‘lone wolf autophenomenology’ but rather involves using subjects other than oneself is enough to establish it as third-person science in the sense that I intended. Zahavi (this volume) applauds the rapprochement of his kind of phenomenology and cognitive science, but does not distinguish the approach he favors from heterophenomenology in any way that I can see. Gallagher (2003) cites Lutz and Varela with approval, as well as experiments by Decety and Frith and their colleagues, and Braddock, but all of this work falls crisply into the methodology of heterophenomenology. No one, so far as I know, has advocated dropping the (“third-person”) prohibition against relying on oneself as the sole subject. Marcel (2003) usefully clarifies the historical background on first-person, second-person, and third-person approaches to science, and the grounds for resisting Cartesian presumptions, for asking when, and why, we can trust ourselves.
Drummond presents a lucid and sympathetic account of the Phenomenologists’ self-imposed exile from naturalism and causal explanation, and suggests, ingeniously, that since I have maintained that natural science needs to posit theoretical fictions – beliefs, selves, and the other items revealed to the intentional stance – in order to make sense of significance, my own physicalist metaphysics begins to look like a bit of “ill-envisaged dogma” (quoting me). This permits me to highlight the value of my aligning my theoretical fictions with those of, say, physics – centers of mass, equators, parallelograms of forces – since it is not just the complexity of the mind (or significance) that encourages and justifies the adoption of such useful fictions. Drummond says that “for Dennett the relation between the intentional and physical accounts remains obscure, whereas the phenomenological program has a specific way of locating the scientific or empirical within the phenomenological” (Drummond, 2007). Does it? It “locates the logical space within which the empirical account has its validity” (Drummond, 2007), but I do not see how it addresses any of the “specific” problems that must be solved for us to move comfortably back and forth between that “logical space” (descriptions of the world of subpersonal processes) and the logical space of phenomenological descriptions of experience. He quotes and rejects Carr’s “paradoxical” opinion (1999, p135) that these two descriptions are “equally necessary and essentially incompatible” (Drummond, 2007) but he says nothing in detail about how his “location of the logical space” resolves the problems that inspired the opinion.
Siewert describes this process in his excellent criticism of Brentano’s theory of consciousness as inner perception. He notes that in “the outer case” we can draw a distinction between “a presentation of the object, and both: the object that is presented, and a judgment about the object” but no analogue of these distinctions can be drawn in “the inner case.” (Siewert, 2007). I commend Siewert’s discussion of these issues, and see little disagreement between us. Such as remains would take a lengthy exposition, and I have decided to devote this essay to the more damaging disagreements and misunderstandings.
There could have been; we could have discovered, surgically, that there is a control room in the brain, inhabited by an inner agent, like the tiny green alien sitting in the control room behind the hinged face of a bald “corpse” in the morgue in the movie Men in Black. In that case, there would literally have been a Cartesian Theater. But we know, from empirical investigation, that there is no such place in the brain, and nothing functionally equivalent to it, either.
I slid past the technical question of just how one might extend Shakey’s very limited capacity to compose “speech acts” to include reports that were informed by one or another level of its visual operations (Dennett 2001, 92). Why didn’t I go into the details? Because although the existing techniques for controlling human–computer linguistic interfaces at the time were hugely unrealistic as models of human speech act production (so an explicit account would bog the reader down in irrelevant details), there was no clear sign – to me – of any principled barrier or obstacle to improving and extending the techniques into the human (or at least informatively humanoid) range of competence. This lack of explicitness on my part might, of course, harbor a fatal flaw in my example, but to my knowledge no one has developed this possible objection.
This is standard practice in computer circles, where virtual machine talk is allowed to pass for the truth with no raised eyebrows, no need for the reminder that it is, officially, just metaphorical. A close kin to this interpretation is to treat the speech acts as making topic-neutral claims, which can be considered candidates for literal truth if there is a mutual understanding that they are to be interpreted functionalistically. Do people speak the truth when they say they are rotating images in their mind’s eyes? It will depend on a judgment call about the fit between their claims and what is subsequently learned. (This is like the ultimately political question of whether the shaman was right after all when he said his patient was inhabited by demons – the demons turn out to be bacilli or protozoa.) Thanks to Andrew Jewell for pressing this alternative.
Thompson (Thompson, 2007) draws attention to Georges Rey’s related distinction between what he calls the “phenomenal mental image” on the one hand and the ‘functional mental image’ or “depictive structures in the brain” (ms 26) on the other. Heterophenomenology treats these phenomenal mental images as the intentional objects of the subject’s reports.
There are definitely reasons to identify a host of utterly unrecognized subpersonal brain events as unconscious seemings of a sort–they are content discriminations that lead to behavioral adjustments without ever achieving cerebral celebrity–but these are not the real seemings defended by these authors. See Siewert’s long footnote 9 (this volume) on this topic, which expresses some disagreements that may be dissolved by these remarks.
Briefly, two other corrections: in his attempt to distinguish his “critical” phenomenology from my heterophenomenology, Velmans says that his view “does not assume that subjects are necessarily deluded and scientifically naive about their experiences.” Nor does heterophenomenology. Critical phenomenology is “reflexive,” he says: about others and about oneself. Heterophenomenology is no different; one can certainly adopt the heterophenomenological method towards oneself, treating oneself as an experimental subject, indirectly.
For more on this, see “Scientists from Mars” in Sweet Dreams, chapter 2.
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Dennett, D.C. Heterophenomenology reconsidered. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 247–270 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9044-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9044-9