Abstract
Dennett’s recent defense in this journal of the heterophenomenological method and its supposed advantages over Husserlian phenomenology is premised on his problematic account of the epistemological and ontological status of phenomenological states. By employing Husserl’s philosophy of science to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and evidence and the implications of this relationship for the empirical identification of ‘real’ conscious states, I argue that the naturalistic account of consciousness Dennett hopes for could be authoritative as a science only by virtue of the very phenomenological evidences Dennett’s method consigns to the realm of fiction. Thus heterophenomenology, qua scientific method, is incoherent.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is worth noting that the title Dennett gives to the transcript from which this quote is taken is “The Fantasy of First-Person Science”, despite his assertion quoted above that his method could just have well been called a ‘first-person science of consciousness’.
As Zahavi notes, both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty explicitly rejected the view that the contents of one’s consciousness are inaccessible to others; the contents are not directly accessible in quite the same manner (otherwise there would be no detectable difference between oneself and another), but they are intersubjectively accessible nonetheless. (Zahavi 2007, 32) Nor is the intersubjective access just a matter of the subject’s reporting the content of her mental states, as if the content itself remained concealed from others. Rather, the content is often directly manifest in a public way, through speech, gesture and other bodily expression.
This is why consciousness itself ‘ain’t in the head’, to adapt Putnam’s much-celebrated phrase. There is one further subtlety that cannot be ignored, namely, that among the ‘really inherent’ elements of an experience is the sense of the object as given [in that experience itself]; excluding still the robustly noematic sense of the object as an entity transcendent to that particular experience. Hence the reell contents of consciousness do include the evidences of perception qua evidences, though they do not include as inherent parts the objects made evident in perception. (Husserl 1913, Section 97)
One might of course have indirect evidence of a subject’s lived experience without the testimony of that subject, e.g., EEG indicators of consciousness, however, those have been validated as reliable indicators of consciousness only by correlating their patterns with subjects’ expressions, in speech or other behavior, of first-personal experiences.
Certain terms employed liberally in the relevant literature by phenomenologists and physicalists alike are equally confounding: ‘mental life’, ‘real seemings’, and ‘third-person evidence’ chief among them.
Hence while Marbach is right to insist that no one would ever take up the study of consciousness and develop concepts concerning it in the absence of phenomenal experience (Marbach 2007, 76), the conclusion is too narrow: no one would ever take up any study or develop any concepts whatsoever in the absence of phenomenal evidence to motivate that study and validate its concepts.
References
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown.
Dennett, D. C. (2001). The fantasy of first-person science. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm.
Dennett, D. C. (2002). How could I be wrong? How wrong could I be? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(5–6), 13–16.
Dennett, D. C. (2003). Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(9–10), 19–30.
Dennett, D. C. (2007). Heterophenomenology reconsidered. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 247–270. DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9044-9.
Drummond, J. J. (2007). Phenomenology: neither auto- nor hetero- be. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 57–74. DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9037-8.
Heelan, P. (1986). Interpretation and the structure of space in scientific theory and in perception. Research in Phenomenology, 16, 187–199.
Hurley, S. L. (1998). Consciousness in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Husserl, E. (1913 [1976]). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (First Book). Trans. F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Husserl, E. (1929 [1978]). Formal and transcendental logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1948 [1973]). Experience and judgment: Investigations in a genealogy of logic. L. Landgrebe (Ed.), trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1950 [1995]). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Husserl, E. (1952 [1989]). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (Second Book). Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Husserl, E. (1954 [1970]). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1962). Phanomenologische psychologie. Vorlesungen sommersemester 1925. Husserliana IX. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Marbach, E. (2007). No heterophenomenology without autophenomenology: Variations on a theme of mine. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 75–87. DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9027-x.
Merleau-Ponty, M. M. (1964 [1968]). In C. Lefort (Ed.) The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge: MIT.
Noë, A. (2007). The critique of pure phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 231–245. DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9043-x.
O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor approach to vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–973 Medline.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT .
Zahavi, D. (2007). Killing the straw man: Dennett and phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 21–43.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vallor, S. The fantasy of third-person science: Phenomenology, ontology and evidence. Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 1–15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9092-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9092-4