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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Heterophenomenology reconsidered
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1-2):247-270 (2007)
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The Elephant and the Blind is a book about why we need a new culture of consciousness, and how to get it. A culture of consciousness (or Bewusstseinskultur) is a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way. No categories |
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In this paper I aim to defend David Rosenthal's higher-order thought theory of consciousness against a prominent objection. The central claim of HOT theory is that a mental state is conscious only if one has the HOT that one is in that state. In broad outline, the objection is that HOT theory is unable to account for cases where the relevant HOTs are false. I consider two variants of the objection, corresponding to two kinds of false HOT: those that merely (...) |
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Dennett (_Synthese,_ _53_(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, _Journal of Consciousness Studies,_ _10_(9–10), 19–30, 2003, _Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _6_, 247–270, 2007 ) proposes and defends a method called _heterophenomenology_. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness _from a third-person objective point of view_ as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett’s schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this (...) |
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While first-person methods are essential for a science of consciousness, it is controversial what form these methods should take and whether any such methods are reliable. I propose that first-person experiments are a reliable method for investigating conscious experience. I outline the history of these methods and describe their characteristics. In particular, a first-person experiment is an intervention on a subject's experience in which independent variables are manipulated, extraneous variables are held fixed, and in which the subject makes a phenomenal (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Neuroscientist Maxwell Bennett and philosopher Peter Hacker defend the need to eradicate the mereological fallacy of cognitive neuroscience. This fallacy attributes to the parts of an animal psychological predicates that make sense only when applied to the whole animal. In contrast, philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that it is possible to explain behavior and cognitive abilities by applying the Intentional Stance to the brain, a stance that attributes increasingly simple psychological capacities to increasingly less intelligent homunculi. So, among other things, taking (...) |
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Science aims to transform the subjectivity of individual observations and ideas into more objective and universal knowledge. Yet if there is any area in which first-person experience holds a particularly special and delicate role, it is the sciences of the mind. According to a widespread view, first-person methods were largely discarded from psychology after the fall of introspectionism a century ago and replaced by more objective behavioral measures, a step that some authors have begun to criticize. To examine whether these (...) |
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Human behavior can range from automatic and even unconscious bodily movements to very elaborate and rational decisions. In this paper I develop a taxonomy based on the empirical analysis of the phenomenology associated with selected instances of different forms of behavior. The transition from sub-actional behavior to proper actions is shown to take place when the agent intervenes actively in the causal process leading from her mental states to the bodily movement by exercising her power to form intentions to act. (...) No categories |
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This paper assesses five main empirical scientific arguments against the reliability of belief formation on the basis of introspecting phenomenal states. After defining ‘reliability’ and ‘introspection’, I discuss five arguments to the effect that phenomenal states are more elusive than we usually think: the argument on the basis of differences in introspective reports from differences in introspective measurements; the argument from differences in reports about whether or not dreams come in colours; the argument from the absence of a correlation between (...) |
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lnek rekapituluje ideov vchodiska Alfreda Schtze, kter se na pd metodologie spoleenskch vd sna o syntzu pspvk Edmunda Husserla a Maxe Webera. Pestoe v ranm obdob Schtz blzce nsleduje Husserlv fenomenologick pstup, projevuje se ji zde v prvn ad draz na empirick charakter zkoumn, kter navazuje na weberovskou linii argumentace a stav se i proti nzorm dalho ze Schtzovch velkch uitel, Ludwiga von Misese. lnek postupn analyzuje klov znaky Schtzovy vlastn metody a ukazuje klov postaven, kter hraje pi naem vdeckm (...) No categories |
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Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal justification. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated. Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents, the study found that in (...) |
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Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) |
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In this paper, we first extract from Susan Carey’s seminal account of the origin of concepts a notion of rationality, which is applicable to human infants and non-human animals; significantly different from the notions of rationality prevalent in behavioral ecology and yet, like these notions, amenable to empirical testing; conceptually more fundamental than the latter notions. Relatedly, this notion underlies a proto-conceptuality ascribable, by a key component of Carey’s account, to human infants and non-human animals. Based on a Kantian-inspired analysis (...) |
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This paper argues for a position of ‘dark pessimism’ towards introspective reports playing a strong justificatory role in consciousness science, based on the application of frameworks and concepts of measurement. I first show that treating introspective reports as measurements fits well within current discussions of the reliability of introspection, and argue that introspective reports must satisfy at least a minimal definition of measurement in order to play a justificatory role in consciousness science. I then show how treating introspective reports as (...) No categories |
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This paper argues for a position of ‘dark pessimism’ towards introspective reports playing a strong justificatory role in consciousness science, based on the application of frameworks and concepts of measurement. I first show that treating introspective reports as measurements fits well within current discussions of the reliability of introspection, and argue that introspective reports must satisfy at least a minimal definition of measurement in order to play a justificatory role in consciousness science. I then show how treating introspective reports as (...) |
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Dennett’s theory of consciousness is often misread as broadly anti-realist. His aversion to ontology encourages readers to form their own interpretations, and the rhetoric he employs often seems to support the anti-realist reading. Dennett does offer defenses against the anti-realist charge, but these are piecemeal and diffuse. This paper examines Dennett’s most current expression, which proves insufficient on its own as a resolution to the ontological dispute. Drawing on related discussions in an attempt to find a resolution leads to a (...) |
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Most people believe that consciousness is real. But illusionists say it isn’t—they say consciousness is an illusion. One common illusionist strategy for defending their view involves a debunking argument. They explain why people _believe_ that consciousness exists in a way that doesn’t imply that it _does_ exist; and, in so doing, they aim to show that that belief is unjustified. In this paper I argue that we can know consciousness exists even if these debunking arguments are sound. To do this, (...) |
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Paul Churchland's book is an entertaining and instructive advertisement for a "neurocomputational" vision of how the brain works. While we agree with its general thrust, and commend its lucid pedagogy on a host of difficult topics, we note that such pedagogy often exploits artificially heightened contrast, and sometimes the result is a misleading caricature instead of a helpful simplification. In particular, Churchland is eager to contrast the explanation of consciousness that can be accomplished by his "aspiring new structural and dynamic (...) |
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In this paper the relationship between phenomenology of perception and synthetic phenomenology is discussed. Synthetic phenomenology is presented on the basis of the issues in A.I. and Robotics that required to address the question of what enables artificial agents to have phenomenal access to the environment. Phenomenology of perception is construed as a theory with autonomous structure and domain, which can be embedded in a philosophical as well as a scientific theory. Two attempts at specifying the phenomenal content of artificial (...) |
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Once a marginal affair, applied phenomenology is now a vast and vibrant movement. With great success, however, comes great criticism, and critics have been harsh, accusing applied phenomenology’s practitioners of everything from spewing nonsense to assailing down-to-earth researchers with gratuitous jargon. In this article, I reconstruct the most damning criticisms as a dilemma: Either applied phenomenology merely describes experience, in which case it offers nothing distinctive, or it involves the kind of analysis characteristic of classical phenomenology, in which case it’s (...) |
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The feeling of being alive still constitutes a major blind spot of contemporary affective sciences research. The mainstream view accepts it as an ‘umbrella notion’ comprising different states, such as M. Ratcliffe’s «feelings of being», T. Fuchs’s «feeling of being alive», E.M. Engelen’s «Gefühl des Lebendigseins», etc. In contrast, I argue for an account of the feeling of being alive as a unique feeling that can be described in several ways. Empirical support for this view comes mainly from Carvalho and (...) |
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Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to (...) |
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The paper discusses some recent suggestions offered by the so-called sensorimotor (or enactivist) theorists as to the problem of the explanatory gap, that is, the alleged impossibility of accounting for phenomenal consciousness in any scientific theory. We argue in the paper that, although some enactivist theorists’ suggestions appear fresh and eye-opening, the claim that the explanatory gap is (dis)solved is much overstated. |
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Abstract:Diagnostic classification systems in psychiatry have continued to rely on clinical phenomenology, despite limitations inherent in that approach. In view of these limitations and recent progress in neuroscience, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has initiated the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to develop a more neuroscientifically based system of characterizing and classifying psychiatric disorders. The RDoC initiative aims to transform psychiatry into an integrative science of psychopathology in which mental illnesses will be defined as involving putative dysfunctions in (...) |
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I argue that scientism in general is best understood as the thesis that the boundaries of the natural sciences should be expanded in order to include academic disciplines or realms of life that are widely considered not to belong to the realm of science. However, every adherent and critic of scientism should make clear which of the many varieties of scientism she adheres to or criticizes. In doing so, she should specify whether she is talking about (a) academic or universal (...) No categories |
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Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the (...) |
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This dissertation defends the reliability of first-person methods for studying consciousness, and applies first-person experiments to two philosophical problems: the experience of size and of the self. In chapter 1, I discuss the motivations for taking a first-person approach to consciousness, the background assumptions of the dissertation and some methodological preliminaries. In chapter 2, I address the claim that phenomenal judgements are far less reliable than perceptual judgements (Schwitzgebel, 2011). I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal (...) |
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I have learned a lot from Evan Thompson’s book–his scholarship is formidable, and his taste for relatively overlooked thinkers is admirable–but I keep stumbling over the strain induced by his self-assigned task of demonstrating that his heroes–Varela and Maturana, Merleau-Ponty and (now) Husserl, Oyama and Moss and others–have shattered the comfortable assumptions of orthodoxy, and outlined radical new approaches to the puzzles of life and mind. The irony is that Thompson is such a clear and conscientious expositor that he makes (...) |
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En el marco de un nuevo descubrimiento de la fenomenología, este trabajo ofrece diferentes argumentos para superar la clásica interpretación de Husserl considerándolo un representante prototípico del solipsismo. En primer lugar, se refuta la interpretación mentalista de Dreyfus de la fenomenología husserliana, mostrando que su programa filosófico va más allá de la tradicional dicotomía entre internalismo y externalismo; en segundo lugar, se señalan algunas de las principales contribuciones realizadas por la fenomenología de Husserl al campo de las ciencias cognitivas y (...) |
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The paper deals with some misconceptions concerning ‘privileged’ access to our own experiences from the first-person perspective, points to the limitations of this immediacy, and questions the solipsist privacy of subjectivity. Based on the conviction that the identification of ‘point of view’ with ‘perspective’ proves to be problematic, the author argues that we may take different perspectives from the same point of view. As embodied and embedded cognitive persons we practice the interchange of perspectival attitudes towards our own subjectivity in (...) |
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This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective and the shared world in which I take up that perspective is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which (...) |
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Heterophenomenology is a third-person methodology proposed by Daniel Dennett for using first-person reports as scientific evidence. I argue that heterophenomenology can be improved by making six changes: (i) setting aside consciousness, (ii) including other sources of first-person data besides first-person reports, (iii) abandoning agnosticism as to the truth value of the reports in favor of the most plausible assumptions we can make about what can be learned from the data, (iv) interpreting first-person reports (and other first-person behaviors) directly in terms (...) |
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I defend three main conclusions. First, whether a method is public is important, because non-public methods are scientifically illegitimate. Second, there are substantive prescriptive differences between the view that private methods are legitimate and the view that private methods are illegitimate. Third, Descriptive Experience Sam-pling is a public method. |
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