Abstract
Dennett’s contrast between auto- and hetero-phenomenology is badly drawn, primarily because Dennett identifies phenomenologists as introspective psychologists. The contrast I draw between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology is not in terms of the difference between a first-person, introspective perspective and a third-person perspective but rather in terms of the difference between two third-person accounts – a descriptive phenomenology and an explanatory psychology – both of which take the first-person perspective into account.
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Notes
I refer to available translations of Husserl’s work, but I shall preface that reference with a reference to the German edition in square brackets. Where only a single reference occurs it is to the German edition.
Husserl ([1973, 43] 1999, 33) first names this bracketing the “epistemological reduction,” but immediately thereafter adopts the language of “phenomenological reduction.” In Ideas I Husserl ([1976] 1983) also uses the language of “bracketing” and “epochē” as well as the language of the “phenomenological reduction.” He also employs the language of “transcendental epochē” and “transcendental reduction (Husserl, [1976, 69] 1983, 66; [1962, 138–56] 1970b, 135–51) and, in especially perverse moments, the language of “transcendental–phenomenological reduction” ([1963, 61] 1970a, 21). There has been much discussion of the subtle differences among these usages and of the “stages” in the performance of the reduction. For present purposes, I put them aside as not crucial to the distinction between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology that I draw in this paper.
I disagree, as is evident above, with Damasio’s tendency to think of mind as physiological operations; indeed, Damasio leaves the relation between brain and mind unclear, for while he distinguishes the latter from the brain, he speaks of the mind solely in neurophysiological terms. I also disagree with his views that the emotions underlie instances of feelings (rather than vice-versa) and that feelings are our not-yet-conscious awareness of the underlying emotion, i.e., of a bodily state; cf. Drummond, 2004, 116–17.
Husserl uses the technical term “noema” to refer to the intentional object, but, as we have seen, he characterizes the noema (1) as the intended objectivity as intended and (2) as (or including) a sense. These different characterizations have generated much controversy about how best to interpret the noema. The controversy was first characterized by Hubert Dreyfus (1972, 135; 1984, 98) as a debate between those who view the perceptual noema as a percept and those who view it as a concept. But the debate was not limited to a debate about the perceptual noema, and it came to be more broadly characterized as one between content-theories of intentionality (and of the noema) and object-theories, or between mediator-theories and object-theories, or between the Fregean interpretation and the non-Fregean interpretation, or between propositional and transcendental readings, or between west-coast and east-coast readings (or yet others!).
The boundaries of the interpretational debate were first defined by the competing interpretations of Aron Gurwitsch and Dagfinn Føllesdal. Gurwitsch (1964, 228–79; 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1966d; 1967) while recognizing that the noema is also a sense, emphasizes the noema or intentional object as the intended object itself simply as intended. The identification of the object which is intended with the object as intended, that is, with the noema as sense, raises the questions of how to explicate, first, the difference and, second, the relation between the object intended and the object as intended. Gurwitsch’s responses to these questions were united in his claim that the intended object itself is a whole of noematic parts or presentational moments or senses, that is, a whole, as it were, of intentional objects.
Føllesdal (1969, 680–87; 1990, 263–71), on the other hand, emphasizes the noema as sense, as an abstract intensional entity which semantically mediates the experience’s reference to the object. Smith and McIntyre developed this view, but rejected the idea that meaning is a species. Instead, they argued that the noema is an abstract particular. They analyze intentional directedness is analyzed as a triadic relation. To iterate their formulation, the experience entertains a noema (that is, a sense) and thereby prescribes an intended object which might or might not actually exist (Smith and McIntyre, 1984, 143). An experience’s entertaining a sense refers the subject of the experience to an object in a determinate manner in much the same way that a word’s expressing a sense refers the speaker (or author) and audience to an object in a determinate manner. The sense is a determinate manner of presenting.
Some authors (Larrabee, 1986; Mohanty, 1982; 1985; Welton, 1983) have adopted an irenic approach to the controversy. For a brief overview of the controversy, see Drummond (1997). For criticisms of the approaches of both Gurwitsch and the mediator views, as well as of the irenic approach, cf. Drummond (1980; 1990; 1992; 1998; 2003b).
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Drummond, J.J. Phenomenology: Neither auto- nor hetero- be. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 57–74 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9037-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9037-8