Heterophenomenology reconsidered

Abstract

Descartes' Method of Radical Doubt was not radical enough. -A. Marcel (2003, 181) In short, heterophenomenology is nothing new; it is nothing other than the method that has been used by psychophysicists, cognitive psychologists, clinical neuropsychologists, and just about everybody who has ever purported to study human consciousness in a serious, scientific way. -D. Dennett (2003, 22) I am grateful to Alva Noë for organizing this most stimulating and informative congregation of essays. They have opened my eyes to aspects of my own work, and the different contexts into which it must be shoehorned, and forced me to articulate, and revise, points about which I have been less than clear. Instead of providing seriatim answers to each essay, I am running my reactions together, taking advantage of the contexts they provide for each other, and concentrating on a few themes that emerged again and again. I apologize to those whose essays are given at most a glancing response; typically I found much to agree with in them, and nothing that needed discussing here. This essay threatened to grow much too large in the making, and I felt it was better to try to do justice to the most perplexing points raised at whatever length was required, at the cost of postponing other responses to some other occasion. A bridge too far?My epigraphs allude to the difficulties that people have had trying to see whether heterophenomenology is a trivial redescription of familiar practices, or a restatement

Being confident without seeing: What subjective measures of visual consciousness are about

“…It has been questioned whether subjective measures are an acceptable method for empirical science at all (Hannula et al, 2005)-for example, because they might be corrupted by uncontrolled changes of the response criterion (Schmidt & Vorberg, 2006). By contrast, according to Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology (Dennett, 2003(Dennett, , 2007, the participant's utterances about his or her experience should be considered as empirical raw data, which requires a scientific explanation. This means that the modulation of verbal reports in an experiment can be an object of scientific study in the same way as other kinds of behavior, such as buttonpresses.…”

The Researcher as Experimental Subject: Using Self-Experimentation to Access Experiences, Understand Social Phenomena, and Stimulate Reflexivity

“…Indeed, recent research provides many illustrations of how new technologies and digital methodologies enable forms of firstperson perspective research (e.g., Lahlou, Le Bellu & Boesen-Mariani, 2015) that were unavailable (and perhaps unimaginable) to experimenters of prior generations, yet among whom many of the issues regarding the legitimacy of first-person self-observation methods were supposedly settled. Further impetus for exploring new formats of self-experimentation in social psychology is provided by recent debate concerning the status of phenomenology (and its primary method, introspection) in relation to psychology (see Dennett, 2007;Marbach, 2007), the details of which we will touch upon briefly. In our discussion we outline a number of procedural proposals for researchers interested in deploying first-person methodologies for self-experimentation, and argue that participating in one's own social experiment and being exposed to experimental manipulations first-hand affords researchers at least three potential benefits: (1) the acquisition of subjective experiential knowledge (i.e., "social qualia") regarding particular social psychological phenomena that could otherwise only be understood descriptively or indirectly through third-person perspective analysis; (2) the development of richer mental models regarding the nature of social phenomena in the world beyond the experimental setting, which in turn can stimulate new research questions; Social Self-Experimentation 5 and (3) the improved ability to be reflexive about an experiment by virtue of understanding the co-occurring perspectives within the experimental setting.…”

“…Phenomenological psychology, for instance, lived for many decades far outside mainstream psychology producing Husserlian self-studies on the nature of experiential phenomena, yet has in the last decade attracted increased attention and elicited loud debate concerning whether an objective approach to understanding the mind can (and should) involve first-person research (for discussions on the historical trajectory of 20 th century phenomenological psychology, see Giorgi, 1998;Klein & Westcott, 1994). Some proponents vigorously defend the practice and legitimacy of autophenomenology (e.g., Marbach, 2007;Varela & Shear, 1999) in contrast to others who advocate a more guarded approach that seeks to verify first-person experience via third-person data (Dennett's heterophenomenology; Dennett, 2007), while others point out that variants of introspective reports (e.g., self-report questionnaires) are ubiquitous throughout psychology as it is, and that the domains of emotion, attitude, memory, and developmental research attest to this fact (Wilson, 2003). Despite this renewed focus on phenomenology within psychology, phenomenological studies primarily involve subjects reporting to a researcher their beliefs about the conscious phenomena they experience in a given experimental condition, and most of the studies reported in the literature involve not social experiences per se, but basic perceptual experiences that speak more to researchers in cognitive science than to social researchers (for examples of typical contemporary phenomenological experiments, see Gallagher & Sørensen, 2006).…”

First-Person Experiments: A Characterisation and Defence

“…The introspectors were not unreliable, rather it was the experimenters themselves who produced the disagreement in the form of a theoretical dispute. Scientific methods should be intersubjectively reliable, that is, they should in principle produce results that are repeatable by other observers with the same capacities in similar conditions (Dennett, 1991(Dennett, , 2003(Dennett, , 2007Piccinini, 2003Piccinini, , 2009Piccinini, , 2010. 13 Experiments 1-4 certainly meet this criterion for being scientific.…”

“…13 Dennett (1991Dennett ( , 2003Dennett ( , 2007 classifies methods by whether they are private (first-person) or public (third-person). Dennett's interchangeable use of 'third-person methods' and 'public methods' obscures the fact that all 'third-person observations' are made from a first-person perspective.…”