Does Phenomenology Consist Merely in Introspection? Dennett and Zahavi on Phenomenology.
Phenomenology is often charged by it's critics to be a matter of mere introspection, since it is understood to be dealing, not with publicly available data, but with "subjective contents" supposed to be accessed by "looking within" the mind.
Dennett levels this criticism at phenomenology in Consciousness Explained and proposes that, because of this subjective nature of phenomenology, which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with, it should be thought of as "autophenomenology", and as a supposed corrective he proposes a discipline he names "heterophenomenology", which is the "third person" recording, analysis and critique of the reports of others about what they take to be the nature of their consciousness. He says that this is not a new discipline but is in fact just Cognitive Science. The other dimension of this investigation is brain imaging to look for neural correlates with what people report is going on in their minds.
Dan Zahavi critiques Dennett's understanding of phenomenology in this paper
Here is a passage from the paper to get the ball rolling:
[i]Phenomenology is not concerned with establishing what a given individual might
currently be experiencing. Phenomenology is not interested in qualia in the sense of
purely individual data that are incorrigible, ineffable, and incomparable. Phenomenology is not interested in psychological processes (in contrast to behavioral
processes or physical processes). Phenomenology is interested in the very dimension
of givenness or appearance and seeks to explore its essential structures and
conditions of possibility. Such an investigation of the field of presence is beyond any
divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since it is an
investigation of the dimension in which any object – be it external or internal –
manifests itself (cf. Heidegger, 1986, 419, Waldenfels, 2000, 217). Phenomenology
aims to disclose structures that are intersubjectively accessible, and its analyses are
consequently open for corrections and control by any (phenomenologically tuned)
subject:[/i]
And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing.
Have at it!
Dennett levels this criticism at phenomenology in Consciousness Explained and proposes that, because of this subjective nature of phenomenology, which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with, it should be thought of as "autophenomenology", and as a supposed corrective he proposes a discipline he names "heterophenomenology", which is the "third person" recording, analysis and critique of the reports of others about what they take to be the nature of their consciousness. He says that this is not a new discipline but is in fact just Cognitive Science. The other dimension of this investigation is brain imaging to look for neural correlates with what people report is going on in their minds.
Dan Zahavi critiques Dennett's understanding of phenomenology in this paper
Here is a passage from the paper to get the ball rolling:
[i]Phenomenology is not concerned with establishing what a given individual might
currently be experiencing. Phenomenology is not interested in qualia in the sense of
purely individual data that are incorrigible, ineffable, and incomparable. Phenomenology is not interested in psychological processes (in contrast to behavioral
processes or physical processes). Phenomenology is interested in the very dimension
of givenness or appearance and seeks to explore its essential structures and
conditions of possibility. Such an investigation of the field of presence is beyond any
divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since it is an
investigation of the dimension in which any object – be it external or internal –
manifests itself (cf. Heidegger, 1986, 419, Waldenfels, 2000, 217). Phenomenology
aims to disclose structures that are intersubjectively accessible, and its analyses are
consequently open for corrections and control by any (phenomenologically tuned)
subject:[/i]
And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing.
Have at it!
Comments (155)
:cry:
This is clearly one place in which @Joshs is at home and can teach us many things (agree with him or not) as he usually does.
My simple-minded take would be that speaking in terms of subjective and objective, while fine in our ordinary dealings with the world, can be problematic in this area of philosophy.
For there is a clear sense in which what we experience and try to analyze is subjective, it is "object knowledge", available to subjects.
There is another sense in which it is objective, you see these letters here and so does everyone else who may be reading them, likewise you can see your laptop (or phone or Ipad or whatever) and hence there is no rooms for reasonable disagreement.
I understand introspection as focusing on what my mind is doing, try to find "depth" in this "blooming buzzing confusion", but I think (some) phenomenology, at least, is carefully attending to and revealing what objects look like to us, much in a way an artist can do with her art.
Then we notice some aspects we took for granted. It's good in so far as people find this informative. I do. Others don't.
The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth.
From the first paragraph of Zahavi's paper:
I have said time and again that this is what Dennett says, and every time I say it you tell me I'm attacking a straw man version of his ideas (e.g. here, here, and many other examples.) But, prima facie, I say that claim is sufficient reason not to discuss him further, so I'll bow out.
Yeah, formal descriptions of percepts. But to what end? Apparently not Dennett's, so what's Zahavi's (or your) point, Janus?
Dennett repurposes "phenomenology" for analysis of (folk)concepts used in cognitive neuroscience, which is not any more of a "misunderstanding" than e.g. Heidegger or Levinas, Merleau-Ponty or Derrida misunderstood Husserl.
Objective truth can interfere with subjective truth when the latter is faith. Does it matter if all is material when faith can lead to states that don't seem physical? Does phenomenology imply faith?
Yep.
Have you ever seen one idea collide with another in such a way that momentum was conserved? The mind world has its own thing going on, quite distinct from physics & chemsitry.
Except claiming the subjective as ‘quite distinct’ from the objective is precisely what phenomenology is arguing against.
Wordplay. People say the darndest things these days.
There are religious approaches within phenomenology , but both these and the non-religious versions avoid splitting apart the subjective and the objective.
Quoting 180 Proof
It is a gross misunderstanding of Husserlian phenomenology, an error that neither Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty nor Derrida ever made.
Quoting 180 Proof
There are many important implications for psychology of demonstrating that the third person perspective is parasitic on the first personal stance.
What is the or a main argument in favor of phenomenology?
A novel use of a tool to perform a novel task is not, itself, "a gross misunderstanding". Mere ad hominem at best, a projection of your "gross misunderstanding" of Dennettian heterophenomenology otherwise.
If the basis (host of) ... is only a "first person stance", then it is necessarily undemonstrable (i.e. not publically accessible or corroborable). Idealist incoherence (e.g. transcendental ego).
That the world we experience is an appearance provided by our mental faculties. You can trace the arguments for this back to Kant. And Kant was responding to Hume's skepticism, which was based on his empiricism. The meaningful world we experience is provided by reason, which makes sense of the sensory streams. That's why we believe in causality set inside a spatio-temporal world of material objects. So we could even go back to Plato or Heraclitus. What makes sense of the ever changing world? What gives it form? Why is our experience comprehensible? Why do we believe the future will remain intelligible?
Ecologically-nested embodiment of psychosocially acculturated, large forebrains. (à la Hume re: "customary habits of mind") Nothing "transcendental" required.
Please ignore the previous reply. I was in a hurry and didn't read your post carefully enough. My sincerest apologies.
To my knowledge, phenomenology isn't as much about the subjectivity-objectivity distinction as it is about what I have described as tier/level-specific/restricted phenomena. Even on the off chance that thoughts are reducible to chemical reactions, thoughts themselves don't actually obey any conservation law like chemicals do, the very idea is N/A or a category mistake.
Of course, there is something "non phenomenological" about phenomenology, which is really why phenomenology rules the day at the presuppositional level of analysis: In the presence of things qua presence, the lack of foundational discovery undermines knowledge claims of all kinds, and here lies the most profound revelation of our being human.
You're right, and it confuses me. Here are some definitions of "phenomenology" from the web:
These sure sound like they are talking about introspection, maybe self-awareness. But when you start digging, you find the whole thing is just another western philosophical mountain of words. They seem to want to discuss human experiences without talking about the experiences themselves.
My personal way of seeing things focusses on self-awareness and the experience of the world. This is why I find eastern philosophies so attractive. Seems like I should be attracted to phenomenology too, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I think you and I agree, but this is a subject I'm still working on. Have you read "More is Different" by Anderson.
When I talk about mind or consciousness I use words like "feeling," "thought," "memory," or "imagination." When I talk about biology and neurology, I use words like "neuron," "neurotransmitter," or "synapse." To say this use of different language shows that the two phenomena are not the same thing is not to deny that they are intimately related.
Could you elaborate a bit? I do t see phenomenology as restricting itself to some special category of experience( subjective vs objective). On the contrary, it claims to
ground all forms of experiencing.
Quoting 180 Proof
Matthew Ratcliffe writes:
Dennett, in describing his own conception of phenomenology, appeals to the Sellarsian contrast
between scientific and manifest images, and proposes that:
What phenomenology should do is adumbrate each individual subject?s manifest image of what?s going on with them. The ontology is the manifest ontology of that subject. It can be contrasted with the ontology that is devised by the cognitive scientist in an effort to devise
models of the underlying cognitive processes. (2007, p.250)
However, each subject?s experience is not simply „subjective? but involves being part of a shared experiential world. A subjective manifest image is not to be contrasted with the manifest image. The „manifest ontology of a subject? includes a sense of its not just being an ontology for the subject but a world shared with other subjects. Consciousness was never a matter of some idiosyncratic, subjective view of the world, estranged from all other such views and from the objective world as described by science. Consciousness is not just a matter of having a subjective perspective within the world; it also includes the sense of occupying a contingent position in a shared world. From within this experiential world, we manage to conceive of the world scientifically, in such a way that it fails to accommodate the manner in which we find ourselves in it. Hence the real problem of consciousness is that of reconciling the world as we find ourselves in it with the objective world of inanimate matter that is revealed by empirical science. It should not simply be assumed from the outset that a solution to the problem will incorporate the view that science reigns supreme.”
How do phenomenologists conceive of the hierarchical nature of interpersonal relationships?
Normally, when people communicate, the implicit assumption is that the person who holds a position of more power is objective, while the one in the position of power is not objective. For example, when your boss reviews your work, he does it in a language of providing an objective image of your work performance, as opposed to just his opinion of your work.
Or, to give another example, somewhat loaded, for clarity:
Tom says, "Dick is an idiot".
Why doesn't Tom say "I think Dick is an idiot" or "I can't stand Dick"?
People generally prefer the objective form (A is x), rather than first-person statements.
First person statements being formulated as the objective form qualified with "I think" and similar qualifiers of subjectivity, or I-statements.
How do phenomenologists explain these uses?
Kind of like having a map of the territory without including the map's location on the map. The map is as much a part of the territory (the world) as the rest of the world. Why exclude the map when making a map of the territory - if you want an accurate representation of the territory? There are some that think the map isn't important to represent on the map, as we aren't interested in the map - just the territory. Now, if we were talking about cartography and not geography, then the map would be more important than the territory. The same goes if we are talking about psychology vs physics.
The thing to remember though, is that all great theories can be integrated with the conclusions discovered in other fields. All knowledge must be integrated. The way we talk about brains shouldn't come into conflict with how we talk about minds and vice versa. Any good theory will be able to account for them both without the need to assert that one is an illusion to make their own explanation work.
Quoting baker
I'm assuming the boss is using statistics that were produced by a computer, not feelings the boss has about their performance. The computer statistics would be more objective because the computer doesn't care, or bears no responsibility, if the employee is fired or not. The boss could have ulterior motives, or even subconscious biases that they could be applying to the decision to fire or hire.
The distinction between subjective and objective is simply where unrelated reasons and assumptions are used in the process of interpreting sensory data compared to not using unrelated reasons and assumptions to interpret sensory data. Computers don't seem to have that problem of using unrelated reasons to reach a conclusion because they are programmed with a strictly defined and limited work flow and access to information, as well as no goals to use the data they display for personal reasons.
How would such a view be reflected in how people communicate with eachother?
Could you please illustrate this with two short dialogues on the same theme, in one version, using the usual manner in which people talk (ie., mostly objectivist/objectivizing you-statements), and the other one that would be consistent with the above view presented by Ratcliffe?
Quoting baker
Husserl says that we can passively give in to group
consensus assumptions concerning the relative legimacy of an individual’s authority. Or we can take our own position on the matter.
“What comes from others and is "taken over" by me, and is more external or less so, can be characterized as issuing from the other subject, first of all as a tendency proceeding from him and addressed to me, as a demand, to which I perhaps yield passively, perhaps reluctantly, but by which I am still overpowered. Alternatively, I might annex it on my own accord, and then it becomes part of me. In that case it no longer has the character of a mere demand to which I yield and which determines me from the outside; it has become a position-taking that issues from my own Ego and is not merely a stimulus coming from the outside and retaining the character of a borrowing of something that came forth from another Ego, of something that has its primal instauration in him.”(Ideas II, p.281))“
I should add that when you attempt to include the map as part of the territory when making a map of the territory, it involves jumping down a never-ending rabbit hole where your map includes itself and the territory in an infinite regress - kind of like looking down an never-ending corridor when two mirrors are placed opposite of each other - and kind of like what it is like when contemplating the self - and turning thinking upon itself in thinking about thinking.
I'm talking about how people usually talk: they usually present their own opinion of a matter of objective fact, even when it is an opinion. They externalize.
Some real examples:
Neighbor: Try these cherry tomatoes.
I: (tasting them) Hm ... I don't particularly like them.
Neighbor: You don't know what's good!
I: James' The Portrait of a Lady is one of my favorite books.
"Friend": You're wrong. This is actually a very boring book.
Both the neighbor and the friend considered themselves to be the arbiters of reality, the judges of what is objectively a good tomato or a good book.
I made a point of speaking assertively, to use assertive formulations, I-statements. They, on the other hand, used the objective form.
Sure, it could simply be a matter of communicating more efficiently. When someone says that the cherry tomatoes are good, it is short for "I feel that the cherry tomatoes are good". For some, using the short-hand version could make a listener think that they are projecting when they actually aren't. I expect you to know I'm talking more about my feeling when eating the cherry tomatoes, and less about the cherry tomatoes. Ripeness would be an attribute of the cherry tomatoes that I wouldn't be projecting as ripeness is a property of cherry tomatoes, not feelings.
Given that my neighbor replied "You don't know what's good!", it's clear that he didn't operate on the above principle.
We can usually see from the other things the person says whether this is the case or not. In the examples I gave, it's not.
As a rule, it seems that people typically conflate the two, their feelings about something and the thing itself. (Gourmet culture is a vivid example of such conflation.)
And this isn't a benign matter. If people wouldn't conflate like that, they couldn't come to statements like "Jews are inferior".
Sure, but there is also a clear sense in which there is a difference between introspected "contents" and publicly available objects. In any case the point of this thread is to determine whether Dennett is correct in his characterization of phenomenology as consisting in mere introspection.
Quoting 180 Proof
Zahavi's point is to refute Dennett's characterization of phenomenology as consisting in mere introspection..As already pointed out, according to Zahavi he refers to phenomenology as practiced by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty and others as "autophenomenology", a merely introspective "first person" practice which can yield no substantive knowledge, and proposes that it should become a
"third person practice" (Cognitive Science). Is it true according to you that "traditional" phenomenology as practiced is a practice that yields no substantive knowledge or not?
Does phenomenology necessarily lead to existentialist?
Right, it does seem that way. But if you read the paper you will see that Zahavi argues that phenomenology is much more than that. He presents it as being concerned with reaching inter-subjective agreement as to how human experience seems to be structured.
Now Dennett might reject such results as being "mere folk understanding" and claim that we need to subject the reports of subjects to scientific testing and analysis in order to discover whether they are valid.
I think Zahavi is arguing that this alternative approach of Dennett's predicated as a substitute for traditional phenomenology, a substitute justified due to the latter's purported inadequacy, vacuity or whatever, is based on a misunderstanding of traditional phenomenology, a misunderstanding due to Dennett's lack of familiarity with the tradition.
Sartre considered himself a phenomenologist but was callled an existentialist by many. There are no clear-cut boundaries between the two since there is no single agreed upon definition of either. I tend to think of existentialism as a precursor to phenomenology, not just historically but also in terms of content.
It's also because Dennett has to deny that the first-person perspective contains any elements that are not in principle reproducible from a third-person point of view. Dennett's philosophy is bounded entirely by what can be regarded as objective knowledge according to scientific method. He's the poster-boy of scientism.
Dennett's "heterophenomenology" uses for its data, first person reports of experience, and then attempts to match, or discover mismatches, of what is revealed about neural activity by brain imaging with what is reported to be going on by subjects. As he admits this is just Cognitive Science as already practiced. It is an entirely different approach than traditional phenomenology. Zahavi argues that Dennett has misunderstood traditional phenomenology.
I was hoping that participants in this thread would read the paper and respond to the arguments therein. I;m not interested in your opinions about whether Dennett is a "poster boy" for scientism. I also don't want to get into arguments about which is the better approach. That said, it seems obvious Dennett thinks his is the better approach, even the only cogent approach. If that is so, is his attitude based on a misunderstanding of traditional phenomenology as Zahavi argues?
I haven't, unfortunately.
Quoting T Clark
Yes, that's what I was getting at.
Quoting Agent Smith
I don't think I said that. Was it implied?
I read the article and it seems to me Dennett gets close to Wittgenstein's philosophy. Like I said, he can't get away from philosophy of all kinds
Quoting Gregory
I agree. I think there are various possible philosophical approaches, and it is not my intention to denigrate Dennett's heterophenomenology.To repeat, the question is as to whether Dennett's denigration of traditional phenomenology is misplaced.
Quoting Gregory
I don't think Dennett is trying to "get away from philosophy of all kinds"; I mean he self-identifies as a philosopher after all.
Yes, but the question that phenomenology asks is whether we need to recognize that talking about biology or neurology is not departing from the grounding phenomenological structures that makes taking about mind or consciousness possible.
I think this is an important point. Dennett's approach and cognitive science generally seem to be predicated on the idea that we cannot elucidate the "grounding phenomenological structures" by practicing phenomenology, but that "third person" scientific investigations are necessary lest we fall into mere "folk" science or philosophy.
I understand the thinking that is taken to justify this stance in general, but I wonder whether Dennett would change his mind if his stance is based on this (purported) misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding were to be cleared up for him, I doubt it: I think his stance comes first and his misunderstanding of phenomenology is driven by the presuppositions involved in that standpoint. But I'm interested to hear what others have to say about it.
To put it another way, should phenomenology be considered to be a failure, a waste of time, vacuous and so on just because it is not a science in the usual understanding of what it is to be a science? I think it is more of an art than a science in that narrow sense of "science', and that it has much value on that account. I mean the rest of philosophy doesn't count as science in that narrow sense, either; so could there be a reason to dismiss phenomenology that doesn't apply to all the other domains of philosophy?
For my part I agree with the passage quoted from Zahavi; phenomenology does not merely consist in introspection, but of course introspection is involved just as it is with heterophenomenology. So, I see the two approaches as two possible ways to investigate the data supplied by subjective reports concerning experience; accounts of what is experienced and how that experience feels and how it is understood.
Ah, then I misread the OP, I thought you were asking if we thought that phenomenology was merely introspecting into one's mind, not to evaluate Dennett's critique.
I don't profit from him nor can I talk much about him without getting very annoyed, so, I'll take my bow.
Apologies for my clumsy reading.
Husserls observation that to experience someone else's qualia would be to become that person is pure philosophy and not psychology. Dennett is a philosopher but he seems to me to want to control others philosophical musings and iron them out so that little if any philosophy of being remains. Heidelberg too speaks of man as time. Surely that is something psychology and brain science can't get it's hands on, right?
You said:The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth.
Phenomenology is indeterminate on the issue of foundational knowledge claims, and for most, the only foundation one can defend is hermeneutics, and this applies across the board, even to the itself, which is hard for many to grasp. There really is no way out: Language itself is inherently indeterminate.
Keep in mind that Dennett does not believe that his assumptions about science's knowledge claims are absolutes, but that, following Russell, he thinks science is simply the only wheel that rolls. And it does roll so well! Thus you get outrageous utterances like "which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with." he really isn't even trying to understand phenomenology, and I doubt he has read much, or any. He reads scientific journals, I imagine exclusively. Heidegger? I think not.
People like this are simply out of their depths. They don't see that phenomenology is not at all in conflict with scientific perspectives; it's just that science is altogether something OTHER than philosophy. Dennett doesn''t seem to want to look closely at this because he's too busy reading other things, and also, I think, because it does take a certain capacity to freely pull away from the paradigms of science and move to a higher order of thinking, which he doesn't have. Training forbids.
So this philosophically myopic thinker really doesn't understand anything about phenomenology. He thinks it's like studying qualia, and if you ever take a little time to read Being and Time, you would see this is Heidegger (as well as the post modern thinking that followed him) says nothing at all like this. Husserl was a bit like this (Heidegger said he was "walking on water).
Anyway, never listen to a scientist turned philosopher. All they produce is dogmatic reassurances that everything is okay and we really DO understand the world. They are a silly bunch.
Whaddaya mean?
I mean when we make statements about the world, the first place basic inquiry begins is the beginning: the language event that produces meaning that is presupposed in the utterance. THE phenomenological insight is that what is there sitting before waiting for analysis already possesses the terms for analytic work, and these terms are not magically hooked up with their referents: they are pre-understood in the language of an evolved knowledge base. So, the geologist isn't looking at "properties" exhibited by the object that are stand alone; their "standing" is a composite of what the understanding brings to the occasion.
This is the kind of thing Dennett and his ilk do not want to talk about. But there is a whole history of philosophy that does talk about this, right up to the present time.
The point is that we already have a way of using words that can refer to our feelings in an objective way. The problem is confusing one for the other - our feelings and the object our feelings are associated with, not a problem of language. Our minds and our feelings are just as real as everything else and can be talked about objectively, just like everything else.
Quoting baker
Is this a result of how they see the world independent of language, or how language has made them see the world?
We agree that people conflate the two, but my point was that some people don't, and that there is no limitations in our language that prevent us from talking about the world and the mind objectively.
A more interesting example of the subjective nature we view the world is how we view it as a species vs. other species. Being able to determine what you perceive is real or an illusion is by using your observations of how others behave in a similar instance, is fine for limiting personal subjective errors, but what if we all have the same kind of illusion because of how our particular brains and senses function compared to other species? Using the behavior of others that share the same illusion isn't going to be very helpful. The use of animals, like dogs with heightened senses of hearing and smell are often used in addition to our own senses to determine if the noise you heard isn't just a figment of your imagination.
Now consider how any brain processes information compared to the other processes of the world. The brain takes time to process information, and the time it takes to process that info is relative to the process of change everywhere else. So how the brain perceives the world can be relative to how fast or slow everything else changes. Stable, slow changing processes would appear as fixed, unchanging objects, while faster processes would appear as processes of the objects themselves.
Think of how we perceive the three states of matter. Solid objects are composed of slow-moving, stable molecular interactions. Liquids are composed of faster and less stable molecular interactions, and gases even more so. Could it be that the quantified three states of matter are really more to do with how we perceive other processes relative to the frequency of how our brains process the information? This isn't to say that the interaction between molecules doesn't change, only that our compartmentalized view of these changes is a projection, kind of like digitizing an analog signal.
This would mean that the objects that we perceive are the result of our own subjective frequency of processing information relative to these frequency of change in the other processes that we are perceiving. This would mean that brains as objects don't really exist. Everything is process. This would explain why what we perceive appears differently to how we perceive (objects vs process).
I heard two sayings recently:
"Everything is so relative that it becomes absolute"
"If the world is God, then the laws of science of science are his mind"
Dennett doesn't like God and he is putting the horse behind the cart when he says (or seems to say) that philosophy is physiology
What's pre-understood? If I catch your drift, you seem to be saying something to the effect that we already comprehend/know the world; all that's needed is to become conscious/aware of it. If it's remembering then we're in rationalist territory (innate ideas). :chin: Fascinating!
Depend on whose phenomenology you have in mind. Husserl, the originator of modern phenomenology, was quite determinate on knowledge claims. The only apodictically certain science is transcendental phenomenology. All other scientific results are contingent and relative.
I put Searle in a similar category to Dennett concerning his understanding of phenomenology, and unfortunately Hubert Dreyfus also. I say unfortunately because he influenced a whole generation of Husserl and Heidegger scholars.
In your view did Searle fail to understand phenomenology or did he have a particularly tendentious reading of the source material?
So, the question that follows is as to what else phenomenology consists in (because it seems that introspection is definitely part of it). Off the top of my head seems to consist in extending the kind of synthetic a priori thinking that began with Descartes and was improved by Kant into more corporeal areas of inquiry.
So this is what I had in mind with the reference to the synthetic a priori: Quoting Joshs
Is there even more than that going on?
What you say about Searle I can understand, but I'm also interested to know hear your criticism of Dreyfus' understanding of phenomenology.
I keep wondering what the force of this 'accusation' is supposed to be.
Why does it sound so much like saying phenomenology is "merely philosophy"?
I’m going to be lazy and quote Evan Thompson from his recent book:
READERS FAMILIAR WITH MY EARLIER BOOK, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), might be surprised by the importance I give to Husserlian phe-nomenology here, given the cridcal attitude toward Husserl that book expressed. What accounts for this change of atdtude? The purpose of this Appendix is to clarify this matter.
In The Embodied Mind, we asserted (i) that Husserl was a method-ological solipsist (p. 16); (ii) that his theory ignored "both the consen-sual aspect and the direct embodied aspect of experience" (p. 17); (iii) that his theory of intentionality was a representational theory (p. 68); (iv) that his theory' of the life-world was reductionistic and representa-tionalist (that he tried to analyze the life-world "into a more funda-mental set of constituents" (p. 117) consisting of beliefs understood as mental representations (p. 18)); and (v) that his phenomenology was a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension (pp. 19,117). We concluded that the Husserlian project was a "failure" (p. 19) and even wrote about the "breakdown of phenomenology" more generally (p. 19). This assessment then motivated our turn to the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness-awareness medita-tion as a more promising phenomenological partner for cognitive sci-ence.
As Chapter 2 indicates, however, I no longer subscribe to this assess-ment of Husserlian phenomenology. Our earlier interpretation of Husserl was mistaken. Husserlian phenomenology has far more re sources than we realized for productive cross-fertilization with both the sciences of mind (Petitot et al. 1999; Varela 1996) and Buddhist thought (Thompson 2005; Varela 2000b; Varela and Depraz 2003). In particular, I now believe (i) that Husserl was not a methodological solipsist; (ii) that he was greatly concerned with the intersubjective and embodied aspects of experience; (iii) diat his theory of intentionality was not a representational theory; and (iv) that his theory of the life-world was not reductionistic and representationalist. Furthermore, al-though I think phenomenology has tended to overemphasize theoret-ical discussion in the form of textual interpretation (to the neglect of phenomenological pragmatics as well as original phenomenological analyses and philosophical argumentation), I think it is too facile to say simply that phenomenology is a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension. It follows that I would now not charac-terize Husserlian phenomenology as a "failure." Nor would I assert that phenomenology suffered a "breakdown" owing to its neglect of phenomenological pragmatics.
My viewpoint has changed for two reasons. The first is that when Varela and I were writing The Embodied Mind (during 1986-1989; Eleanor Rosen joined the project near the end of 1989) our knowl-edge of Husserl was limited. We were familiar with the main published works in English translation (Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenome-nology) but had not studied them carefully enough, and we did not know about Husserl's writings on passive synthesis (then untranslated) and intersubjectivity (still untranslated). We were both more familiar with Heidegger and were influenced by his (largely uncharitable) reading of Husserl. We also had little knowledge of other phenomeno-logical thinkers who were deeply influenced by Husserl (Merleau-Ponty excepted), and we had studied only a litde of the secondary lit-erature on Husserl.
The second reason is that we accepted Hubert Dreyfus's (1982) in-fluential interpretation of Husserl as a representationalist and pro-tocognitivist philosopher, as well as his Heideggerian critique of Husserl thus interpreted. Dreyfus has been a pioneer in bringing the phenomenological tradition into the heardand of the cognitive sci-ences through his important critique of artificial intelligence (Dreyfus 1972, 1992) and his groundbreaking studies on skillful knowledge and action (Dreyfus 2002; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Yet his work is also marked by a peculiar interpretation of Husserl. Dreyfus presents Husserl's phenomenology as a form of representationalism that antici-pates cognitivist and computational theories of mind. He then re-hearses Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl thus understood and deploys them against cognitivism and artificial intelligence. Dreyfus reads Husserl largely through a combination of Heidegger's interpretation and a particular analytic (Fregean) reconstruction of one aspect of Husserl's thought—Husserl's notion of the noema. Thus the Husserl Dreyfus presents to cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind is a problematic interpretive construct and should not be taken at face value.
For a while Dreyfus's interpretation functioned as a received view in the cognitive science community of Husserl's thought and its relation-ship to cognitive science. This interpretation has since been seriously challenged by a number of Husserl scholars and philosophers. 1 This is not the place to review these conuoversies at length. Suffice it to say that I take these studies to have demonstrated the following points:
1. Husserl does not subscribe to a representational theory of mind, and certainly not a representational theory of the sort Dreyfus wishes to criticize. Intentional experiences do not acquire their directedness in virtue of "a special realm of representational entities" (Dreyfus 1982, p. 1). Rather, the intentional openness of consciousness is an in-tegral part of its being (Zahavi 2003a, p. 21). 2
2. Husserl is not a methodological solipsist. The transcendental phe-nomenological reduction is not a way of trying to characterize the con-tents of consciousness purely internally, apart from their relation to the world. It is a way of characterizing the world, namely, at the phe-nomenal level at which it is experienced, and of studying the relation of the world so characterized to our subjectivity.
3. Husserl does not assimilate all intentionality to object-directed in-tentionality; he does not "claim that all mental life, even our awareness of practical activity and our sense of existing in a shared world, must be a form of object-directedness" (Dreyfus 1982, p. 9; see also Dreyfus 1988). On the contrary, as the above discussion of passive synthesis in-dicates, die notion of a precognitive and non-object-directed "opera-tive intentionality" is central to the subject matter of Husserl's phe-nomenology in its genetic register.
Right, that is what it sounds like. Which is why I wrote in an earlier post, referring to first to phenomenology, and then to the rest of philosophy:
Quoting Janus
I think this raises a question as to what the analytic tradition consists in if not some kind of introspection and synthetic a priori analysis, that is some kind of phenomenology. I mean it doesn't seem to be doing empirical science.
I was thinking the same thing. It shows, among others things , the gap between Anglo-American and continental styles of philosophical thinking, and how only in recent years have we begun to be able to ‘read’ the continental authors.
Oh yeah, big time. Dreyfus wanted to turn heidegger into Kierkegaard. I think Heidegger makes some good points against Husserl , but they are much more subtle than it might first appear.
Right, so a predominantly existentialist reading of Heidegger?
:rofl:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is that introspection is notoriously difficult to schematise. It originated with Wilhelm Wundt, a German-American who was one of the founders of psychology. Its method was to have patients report on their inner states. But the problem was that the terminology and criteria for assessing such reports were so slippery that it seemed utterly impossible to codify in any objective way.
Zahavi's paper notes:
But then Zahavi goes on to show that the phenomenological reduction is not the kind of introspective analysis that Wundt's method demonstrated the failure of.
--
Quoting Janus
I have read the paper now, if anything it's quite a good primer on phenomenology overall.
On the first couple of pages Zahavi summarises Dennett's approach:
[quote=Dan Zahavi]...from the fact that people believe that they have experiences, it doesn’t follow that they do in fact have experiences....we shouldn' t simply assume that every apparent feature or object of our conscious lives is really there, as a real element of experience. By adopting the heterophenomenological attitude of neutrality, we do not prejudge the issue about whether the apparent subject is a liar, a zombie, a computer, a dressed up parrot, or a real conscious being (Dennett, 1991,81). Thus, heterophenomenology can remain neutral about whether the subject is conscious or a mere zombie (Dennett, 1982, 160), or to be more precise, since heterophenomenology is a way of interpreting behavior, and since zombies, per definition, behave like real conscious people, there is no relevant difference between zombies and real conscious people as far as heterophenomenology is concerned (Dennett, 1991, 95). But from this alleged stance of neutrality where we bracket the question of whether or not there is a difference between a zombie and a non-zombie, Dennett quickly moves a step further, and denies that there is any such difference. As he puts it, zombies are not just possible; they are real, since all of us are zombies. If we think we are more than zombies, this is simply due to the fact that we have been misled or bewitched by the defective set of metaphors that we use to thinkabout the mind. It is important not to misunderstand Dennett at this point. He is not arguing that nobody is conscious. Rather he is claiming that consciousness does not have the first-person phenomenal properties it is commonly thought to have, which is why there is in fact no such thing as actual phenomenology.[/quote]
I think this passage summarises many of the disagreements we have had in threads about Dennett. I say that Dennett believes that humans are no different to zombies, to which you generally reply that I haven't read Dennett, that I don't understand him. But as Zahavi says, Dennett is not saying that 'nobody is conscious', but rather that the first-person element of experience is not what we take it to be. He denies that the first-person nature of experience is significant.
A metaphysical reflection
Let's revisit a basic word - 'phenomena'. This word is liberally sprinkled through that document. But I question whether first-person experience is 'a phenomenon' or among phenomena. Phenomena are 'that which appears'. And first-person consciousness does not appear - my consciousness of myself is not appearance. Rather, one of the fundamental attributes of consciousness is that it knows that it is. This is where any conscious being, even a very simple organism, differs from any non-conscious object, although (as Schopenhauer says) it is only in the human that this becomes an object of conscious reflection.
It's not as if it has to make a judgement about the existence of something called 'consciousness', or that there can be a question about whether my own existence is real or not; were my own consciousness not real, I would be unconscious. (This is obviously reminiscent of Descartes.) But, furthermore, this self-knowing attribute of consciousness is not a phenomenal reality. Whereas Dennett says, in effect, that there are only phenomena, or rather that the scope of what can be considered real is what is amenable to phenomenal analysis. Which is why his critics said his book 'Consciousness Explained' should be called 'Consciousness Ignored' or 'Consciousness Explained Away'.
But it doesn't matter what his critics say - Zahavi, or David Chalmers, or John Searle, or Galen Strawson. You can't kill a zombie.
The point we disagreed on was your claim that Dennett denied that consciousness exists. That's it. You certainly said that was what you are claiming in several of our exchanges; so if that was not what you were saying you have either changed your mind about that, or you are contradicting yourself.
I don't dismiss Dennett's approach, and (of course) I don't dismiss phenomenology, because I have more interest in that approach than Dennett's. I try to take a more balanced view, which involves thinking that all approaches are worth following because we cannot pre-determine what they will turn up.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a lame, low blow! :roll:
Yes, I think the idea is quite simply that if it’s introspection then it’s not science, and there’s an optional detour through philosophy. (If introspection, then philosophy, and if that then not science.)
There is still a part of world in which introspection is considered a good thing, a praiseworthy thing, perhaps even a thing one ought to do or one must do to lead a rich and fulfilling life. (We get threads about it here.) Still, it’s not science, which makes it — from a point-of-view I’ll cheerfully admit is made of straw — something like a ‘hobby’, all well and good but not something ‘serious’.
I don’t think this puts only the “analytic tradition” in question. What was Aristotle up to? Or Kant?
Anyway, what you (not you, @Janus) call ‘introspection’ I might just call ‘thinking’ and some people might call ‘reason’. Or ‘reflection’.
I almost feel tempted to let science win whatever argument it wants to have with philosophy. If science wants to claim it’s the only sound or reliable way of producing knowledge systematically — sure, you can have that; philosophy can produce something else, understanding maybe.
(In this context, I always thought it odd that the new biologically sophisticated version of psychology ends up being called “cognitive science”, as if knowledge is the only mental phenomenon that matters.)
Interesting. This is not my area so forgive my clumsy wording. Is it not the case that through an introspective approach phenomenology enhances our appreciation of just how much of what we call knowledge is a kind of intersubjective agreement and truth building exercise between individuals and communities? It strikes me that so much of what what have names for is actually poorly understood, it's as if the act of naming passes for an explanation.
I would think that phenomenology would be of assistance in broadening our understanding of how experience and perceptions become opinions and how groups come to conclusions about values and truth.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It may be a bit simplistic to distinguish science as a single unified enterprise from philosophy in general or phenomenology in particular. Husserl argued that psychological sciences incorporating Brentano’s intentional stance , like gestalt theory, were forms of phenomenological investigation, only lacking the transcendental element.
I might add that first generation cognitivism ignored the biological body, but embodied cognitivism treats the whole body with its affectivity inputs as part and parcel of cognition. In many of these accounts , affectivity matters more than cognition.
This is indeed Zahavi’s stance, but I don’t believe it is Husserl’s, and it certainly isn’t Merleau-Ponty’s or Heidegger’s. Zahavi believes that the subjective dimension of the subject-object interaction is not contingently but transcendentally self-identical, non-horizontal and nonecstatic. In other words, I know that I am because there is an identical feeling of self that accompanies all of my intentional experiences of objects.
I, along with a number of other interpreters of Husserl, don’t believe that such a self-identical feeling of self exists for him. Instead, Husserl argues that “As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.”(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. This suggests that for Husserl, the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity rather than a consciously sensed feeling of any kind.
A coherently unified sense of self for Husserl is an intentional accomplishment, not an a priori. A pre-given sense of self would not be phenomenology, but neo-Kantianism. Thus, one of the fundamental attributes of consciousness is not that it knows that it is , but that what it is is what it does.
I would like to examine this statement a bit. When you say that introspection isn't science, do you mean that introspection can't be studied by science. That's clearly wrong. If you mean that introspection has to be a fundamentally different method of gaining knowledge than science, I think I disagree. First, clearly introspection is required to study introspection scientifically. Also, a personal report of introspection can be verified, or at least corroborated, by looking at other reports of introspection, examination of brain activity, evaluation of differences in behavior, and other pretty standard psychological testing methods. Or are you saying, as many here do, that psychology isn't science?
Much of my way of knowing the world is based on introspection. That's certainly true of mental processes, but also more objectively observable phenomena (do I believe that?) and, certainly, philosophical approaches.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If this actually does represent a common view here on the forum and in philosophy in general, it represents a massive failure of introspection in itself. If you think that you know things just based on reason and logic, you are not even aware of how you know things. Is knowing how you know things science?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Science has no argument with introspection, just some scientists.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It pleases me that you recognize that cognitive science is psychology. Many people who like to denigrate psychology as not a science are unwilling to acknowledge that. Perhaps if they were a bit more introspective they wouldn't.
A question that just popped into my head - is introspection the same as intuition? I think the answer is clearly "no," but I think they are painted with the same brush by many.
Here's where it gets interesting: logic is part of the objectivity approach (science?) to consciousness which is considered as the antithesis of phenomenology. Doesn't it strike you as odd that science utilizes a phenemonological tool/entity (logic) to study consciousness and then claims phenomenology is bogus? Isn't that like drinking Pepsi and claiming that Pepsi is no good? :chin:
Whereas, as Zahavi says, he claims that he doesn’t deny that consciousness exists, but then proceeds to define it out of existence anyway.
Quoting Janus
Don’t worry, that feeling is a mere artefact of folk psychology.
Quoting Joshs
Interesting, but I don’t really understand the distinction you’re trying to describe.
Quoting Joshs
I’m not trying to come up with a glorified description of ego. I’m simply saying that any kind of being has one fundamental attribute, which is a sense that it is. Of course that is not articulated or reflective in bacteria or algae but it is still germinally present. Whereas there’s not even an analogy for that in inorganic matter. Which is why living things are broadly designated as ‘beings’ and not as ‘objects’, which I say is a genuine ontological distinction; beings have something that objects do not. To me it is just the requirement to deny this that leads to eliminativism, which is at bottom the conviction that there is no difference between beings and things. Which is an inevitable consequence of any kind of consistent materialism, for which the very existence of the mind is an insuperable stumbling block, which must therefore be elimated.
In what way is "apodictic certainty" applicable to any modern science? What does a (like Kant, unsound) 'transcendental' deduction of "the essential structure of consciousness" from "apodicity" have to do with hypothetico-deductive explanations of nature or history?
(Yeah, a lifetime ago I'd read Cartesian Meditations & The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.)
He doesn't define consciousnesses out of existence; he defines what he understands to be the folk conception of consciousness out of existence. I don't agree with him about that; but I don't dismiss his position, since his position is equally an imaginable possibility as the folk understanding, or phenomenological understandings are.
Quoting Wayfarer
No it's not; it's an artifact of your inability to accept that there are other imaginable positions than your own; the inability to accept that those who disagree with you actually do understand what your position consists in but just happen to think it is the the less plausible of the possibilities.
No, I'm not a dualist. All knowledge consists of explanations for facts of the matter. On the other hand, woo is either "pseudo-knowledge" or (mostly) "fact-free just-so stories" (H. Frankfurt) – not to be confused with poetry or other literary forms. And whereas sophistry dogmatizes the latter, philosophy interprets the former by exposing its own traces of sophistry. Btw, Wayf, I'm an immanentist (i.e. emergentist).
Ah, so a positivist. Thanks for clearing that up.
No ... we're just maggots accelerating the cosmic decomposition of this zombie universe. Nature, haven't you heard, is undead. (Blame the ghoulery on my pandeistic urges. :mask:)
:lol:
We’ll at least you can look forward to pupating.
Yet we can theorize about the underlying causes of behaviors of organic and inorganic matter that we can't observe directly all the time. That's why they're theories as opposed to observations. Only by designing and constructing the right measuring devices can we then observe the underlying causes to confirm our theories. Like Galileo said, "Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured".
Atoms were theorized to exist before observing their existence. Why didn't we refer to atoms as "subjective contents" when we could only theorize their existence as a result of the impact they have on the macro objects we do observe? The same goes for organisms. The difference is that we each have direct knowledge of the existence of our own phenomenological experiences, and which have an impact on our behaviors that can be observed by others, including making statements like "I feel great!" or "I feel awful!" P-zombies could probably only understand and use phrases like, "I am great!", or "I am awful!". So there appears to be a distinction between how something is vs. how it can feel. Is that distinction an illusion, or a "folk" distinction?
The difference that we have when theorizing about the existence of things we can't observe except by the effect those things have on the things that we can observe and theorizing the existence of minds, is that with minds we start off with two different views - the 1st and 3rd person views, whereas, with atoms, we only have a 3rd-person view, yet this 3rd person view is always like a 1st-person view - just from some imagined place in space-time. The problem is that we have these two "opposing" views - which is what creates doubt in that we know the world or our minds as they actually are. The difference in doubting the existence of your mind as opposed to the world is that you only know the world by the "subjective contents" of your mind, so if you doubt your understanding of your own mind, you automatically undermine your understanding of the world.
Being that our "subjective contents" have an impact on how we behave, how are they not as real as atoms, and can be talked about like we talk about atoms like we did after we theorized their existence, but before we observed their existence?
I think Dennett cannot make that dramatic move away from a scientist's model of the way the world is put together. He cannot prioritize meaning over material substance, is one way to put it. Heidegger asks, what is the very first thing we encounter in the world? It is meaning, not material substance, and by this, as we see in Being and Time, it is not conceptual meaning, but, and I find him aligned with dewey here, the whole ball of wax: affect, caring/concern, being with others, ready to hand "spatial" relations and so on. This is, no, CAN BE, the kind of analysis you get if you allow the phenomenon to take center stage. A lot of post Heideggarians these days.
I think you have to put Kant's synthetic apriori judgments aside for Heidegger. Heidegger does not live and think in the same world. Phenomena are not representations. They are the only basis for ontology we have, and the entirety of what IS, is analyzed very differently. Being and Time takes Descartes' res extensa and res cogitans (I think I have that right) as one big presence-at-hand error error, failing to understand the fundamental ontological ready-to-hand relations.
As I think of Heidegger, I see that it is impossible to fit him in Dennett's (and the analytic pov) simple thinking. Heidegger is kind of sui generis, even though when you read him, you find the whole history of philosophy throughout.
For me, I don't have a pro's detailed understanding, but I like to read Heidegger more than Husserl because the former really takes one on a trip, like an intellectual's adventure, a radically new way to conceive the world. But Husserl's epoche has this undeniable intuitive, revelatory dimension. Consider his Four Principles of Phenomenology:
so much appearance, so much being”
“that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”
“zu den Sachen selbst!”: To the things themselves!
“so much reduction, so much givenness.”
This where my interests lie now.
I never thought of Descartes in terms of synthetic priori judgments, and I don't really understand how this would work. How does this go?
Quoting Astrophel
I was profoundly impressed by Being and Time, but I think Husserl took the more radical leap, relative to what was being thought before him. Yes, he had Brentano, Hegel and Kant as reference points, but phenomenology was a sharp departure from Brentano. Heidegger, on the other hand, had Husserl.
Quoting 180 Proof
If you remember from Husserl’s work, Crisis of European Sciences, the hypothetico-deductive method as originally expounded by Bacon was expected to lead to adodictic certainties. This was before Humean skepticism or Kant’s unattainable thing-in-itself.
“ the true idea of rationality, and in connection with that the true idea of universal science, was not yet attained in ancient philosophy—such was the conviction of the founders of the modern age. The new ideal was possible only according to the model of the newly formed mathematics and natural science. It proved its possibility in the inspiring pace of its realization. What is the universal science of this new idea but—thought of as ideally completed—omniscience?
This, then, is for philosophy truly a realizable, though infinitely distant, goal—not for the individual or a given community of researchers but certainly for the infinite progression of the generations and their systematic researches. The world is in itself a rational systematic unity—this is thought to be a matter of apodictic insight—in which each and every singular detail must be rationally determined. Its systematic form (the universal structure of its essence) can be attained, is indeed known and ready
for us in advance, at least insofar as it is purely mathematical. Only its particularity remains to be determined; and unfortunately this is possible only through induction. This is the path— infinite, to be sure—to omniscience. Thus one lives in the happy certainty of a path leading forth from the near to the distant, from the more or less known into the unknown, as an infallible
method of broadening knowledge, through which truly all of the totality of what is will be known as it is 'ln-itself"—in an infinite progression.”(Crisis of the European Sciences)
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, you are right. Let me go back to your earlier question.
Quoting 180 Proof
The hypothetico-deductive method that Popper popularized belongs to the ‘crisis’ that Husserl talks about in the book , a move away from the apodoctic
grounding of Cartesian realism. Husserl wants to recover appdicticity , but not by returning to Descartes. What phenomenology claims to be certain is the formal structure of time consciousness on which intentionality is based. Husserl calls this a science , but it is not one of worldly facts, which will always be contingent and relative. Yet, it is what makes objectivity, logic and mathematics possible, and in this way is the condition of possibility of all empirical sciences.
Nah, we'll make silk out of his cocoon.
It depends on what that is taken to mean. I agree that some aspects of the so-called folk conception of consciousness are most likely mistaken. I think the idea of qualia is a gratuitous reification, but I don't agree that there is no inner life tout court.
Remember that zombies are not Dennett;s invention but Chalmer's; to distinguish between having the experience of 'what it is like' to have experience, and not having it. I think the idea makes little sense. We feel our aliveness I would say; and if a zombie is defined as an entity that does not feel it's own aliveness then we are not zombies.
Dennett denies that a being could be constituted exactly as we are and yet lack some aspect of our experience. So if zombies, beings who are constituted exactly as we are, and yet do not have a certain kind of experience (that we take ourselves to have), are possible, then according to that argument we must be zombies. I agree with that; but it's not exactly clear to me just what zombies are taken to lack; so I think the whole idea is pretty useless.
Interesting read. So...thanks for the link.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree: the distinction between knowledge (that) and understanding is a very important one. Our understandings don't have to be true or false; they are the ways we conceive of things that allow us to act in and deal with the world. I imagine they provide for the possibility of language and communication and any knowledge-that or science at all.
Sure, the idea of mind is how we conceive of what we take to be the faculty doing the thinking and experiencing. It doesn't seem necessary to hold to any particular conception of mind in order to have an understanding of what we take to be the workings of the world.
You are taking it as read that we 'have' "subjective contents"; that is the default understanding, based on the intuitive analogy of the mind as a kind of container, but is it the best way to understand the mind. Wouldn't we need to consider all the other conceivable alternatives before deciding?
I generally agree with what you said. It seems to me the "cogito" is a synthetic a priori judgment.
For Kant, a priori synthetic judgments are about the non-empirical world. So it matters to ask if the self is non-empirical (Descartes) or not. When we examine the world, there is debate among German idealists and latter generations if and when we use posterior analytic judgments or posterior synthetic judgments. Where the self falls in all this is what phenomenology is about. My 2 cents
I just finished rereading for the 20th time the first three chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology (skipping over the Preface and Introduction). I think they are very important for philosophy. The rest of Hegel is just commentary on this. Its a question of the paradox of perception. The world, on say the left side, is how we perceive it. We manipulate reality because we know it as other, are a part of it, and have intellect. On the other hand, we construct reality and make it what it is. We bring waves to particles, create colors and sounds and smalls in existence, and form the material of the world into the structure of our own personal worlds. So it is really both ways: the world creates us and we create the world. At least, that's my opinion from my Hegel studies.
Yes, this is like the Buddhist idea of interdependent co-arising.
Quoting Gregory
While this seems to be the case, it means that somewhere buried in the depths of the phenomenology literature, must be some sort of proof that the self is a phenomenon. Hence, the debate amongst later German idealists and neo-Kantians, all in the name of justifying the evolution of transcendental philosophy from its Enlightenment origins, in which the self cannot be a phenomenon.
It seems to me you are saying "anatman". And again Buddhism enters the conversation!
They are applied like scaffolding to objects ( ‘things’) that are held to be enduringly self-identical. Without this assumption of enduring objective presence there could be no formal logical or mathematical scaffolding.
“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities [Weisheiten], its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging.”(Husserl)
“…it is not primarily the dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines this ontology of the world (empirical science), rather this ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)
But is the self-identical object irreducible? It is for Frege, Peirce and Popper, all of whom are following Kant here, who defines objectivity in terms of the mathemetizable. But not for phenomenology , which shows the self-identical object to be the product of a process of intentional constitution. Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure.
“ The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)
“useful for the task at hand.” In other words , relative to an ongoing activity of significance and context of relevance. Which presupposes a subjective background. There can no coherent notion of usefulness without such an assumption. At the same time, what is useful is determined by the present context of use, which implies an objective dimension. In sum, any notion of pragmatic use is inseparably subjective and objective. Whether we want to use one perspective over the other, in either case we are presupposing this pragmatic subjective-objective condition of possibility. That, in a nutshell, is phenomenology.
By sheer accident.
Overwhelmingly agree.
Language: there is a temptation to look at computers and say, that's just syntax without semantics, which leads to a further temptation to say that our ability to "attach" meaning to symbols is what makes us special -- but now we're distinguishing ourselves not just from machines but from animals that don't have language. Lacking our higher mental capacities, their behavior is, insofar as it is instinctive, mechanical.
But I think that's wrong. I think Chomsky might have been right to focus on recursive, generative grammar as what's special about language, because I think maybe you find semantics anywhere you find life -- and that's why you don't find it in computers.
What I mean is something like this: a living thing is something things matter to. Nothing matters to a machine. But nutrients matter even to a bacterium, and this is not a question of how the bacterium 'conceptualizes' or 'categorizes' bits of its environment. For everything living, food matters, threats, shelter, offspring, and thus these things have meaning, and there is the potential for their environment to be a meaningful world, something that could be understood. (I remember reading years ago that wolves are sometimes clearly puzzled by cattle, because they don't behave like wild prey.)
There's plainly an 'affinity' between natural science and the mechanical, as an object of knowledge, which might not quite define the limits of possible science. Don't care. I think there's a similar 'affinity' between philosophy and the meaningful. Whether it's possible for them to meet in the middle is not my concern; I'll be arriving from the meaning side.
No, no; not that at all.
It's a long, long story. And it is far more fascinating than I could possibly say here. But if you take a given perceptual event of any kind at all, you have to ask questions about how the event itself is constructed is constructed AS an event, just like a scientist would observe a blade of grass or a star spectrum. It is always description first, then the impressive mathematizing and all the, call it paradigmatic work, begins. Phenomenology treats things before us AS things before us, and gives a descriptive account. A thing is in time, e.g., and time is past, present and future, and the agency that witnesses the event is also in time, but this is not quite right already because we are using a scientist's model of things: this object, this agency, this event arenot so much in IN time--- they ARE time, that is, time is an essential feature of their Being. This past, present and future is part of the analysis of the object itself, so when we ask what is it? IT is a past, present and future. Then this analysis turns to time. In our encounter with the object, how is time presented? Here there is history, and just think about Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions, how the present theories about the object are built our of the past, not transcending the past, constructed from the ages of thought, and on a personal level, constructed out of your own persona' history, your time in school and daily familiarities.
That which stands before you is an amalgam, and phenomenology is not interested in all the knowledge claims of all the disciplines that give us the historical dimension of an object; it is interested in the "how is stands here as it IS now. Its Being is historical, but then, this is arguable. Time is far more general, for it qualifies the Being of all possible worlds and everything inaginable. Their must be a more primordial analysis of time.
And so on more hundreds and hundreds of pages. This is, roughly in the extreme, and introduction to what Being and TIme by Heidegger is about. Husserl is before him underlies it, as do Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant and so on.
Trouble with Dennett and his ilk is they are scientists, and they do not think out of this box. The thinking here really requires a different set of values of inquiry. You have to want to know what it is that is presupposed by science. This is Heidegger and Husserl et al. This is philosophy.
I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it.
I would ask Dennett and his ilk Rorty's question: how does anything out there get in here? Of course, the "in here' part is the brain, and Dennett thinks the brain is simply this organ, like a liver or a kidney, that produces consciousness, but answer Rorty's question and you end up with the very troublesome conclusion that consciousness is PRESUPPOSED by talk about brains.
This is where Dennett's thinking turns tail and runs.
Yes, I though the word pretend might not pass muster. Fair enough. I'm aware of the history from Greek philosophy. But I wonder what philosophers might say about our capacity to accomplish it. Can it be done to better or worse effect, for instance? I wonder how achievable it is not to attend to something and abstract away from it?
This runs into Derrida: in even the simplest utterance, the most primordial, the meaning issues what is not uttered. There is no "true" affirmation at all, just this web of signification that has an emergent singularity. And this itself would go under erasure (like Wittgenstein "erasing" his own Tractatus).
The only way to take Husserl seriously is to actually perform this method of reduction, which means standing there confronting the this house, this tree, and, well, not-thinking. When Sartre's Roquentin in Nausea does this reduction he has...errrr, visions of the superfluity of existence. But forget about Sartre's hellish imagination. I think when a perceptual event is consciously set apart from all the assumptions that would otherwise claim it, in time, because this method takes practice, there is something transformational in this, as if one is brought to the threshold of a revelation, but no further. Going further one would have to meditate, which is, the ultimate reductive act.
Dennett, by contrast, thinks, rather smugly, that the enlightening transformation involves disillusionment in favor of a rigorous common sense, and he is irredeemably dogmatic on this.
Ok, here’s my take. You can’t abstract away from presuppositions without already having an alternative in mind. In other words, I believe that Husserl’s method of epoche came after he already discovered his more primordial grounding for philosophy. I also want to add that although in the face of it the epoche is a reducing, eliminating , setting aside of phenomena, in a more fundamental sense it is an enriching of experience. For instance, once we have performed the epoche on predicative logic and discover the pre-predicative strata of intentional constitution that predicational logic is built from, we are in a position to append these more originary processes to what we already knew about predicational logic. So the epoche gives us a richer understanding of the phenomena that we bracket not by eliminating them but by showing us what we were missing.
“If I abstained as I was free to do and as I did
and still abstain from every believing involved in or founded on sensuous experiencing, so that the being of the experienced world remains unaccepted by me, still this abstaining is what it is; and it exists, together with the whole stream of my experiencing life. Moreover, this life is continually there for me. Continually, in respect of a field of the present, it is given to consciousness perceptually, with the most originary originality, as it itself.
Meanwhile the world experienced in this reflectively grasped life goes on being for me (in a certain manner) "experienced" as before, and with just the content it has at any particular time. It goes on appearing, as it appeared before ; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world though that believing too is still there and grasped by my noticing regard.”
“ This- universal depriving of acceptance, this "inhibiting" or "putting out of play" of all positions taken toward the alreadygiven Objective world and, in the first place, all existential positions (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being likely, probable, etc.), or, as it is also called, this "phenomenological epochd" and "parenthesizing" of the Objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary we gain possession of something by it ; and what we (or, to
speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them.”
Right, I do too. It seems to me our difference from machines is one of kind, whereas our differences from the other animals are differences of degrees.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I'm always nonplussed by the claim that the fact/ value distinction is ontologically robust; the way I view it is that it is only when take an artificially distanced, abstracted view of the world that it could appear as devoid of value and meaning. Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. Human exceptionalism seems to be a curse—for the other animals, but for humans as well.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Nicely put: I relate strongly to that disposition. We don't have, for fear of disgracing ourselves by proposing anything which would appear to be nonsense from that science-driven point of view, to confine our intellectual lives to what accords with the kind of third person views of ourselves that science enables, .
The idea that the mind is working memory is a way of understanding the mind as both the faculty doing the thinking (working) and as a kind of a container (memory). It seems to me that memory is a required concept for understanding mind, as information in the mind persists through time and there is only so much information that the mind can work with and recall at any moment.
Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information?
Quoting Janus
You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory.
Not as I understand it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think memory, in one sense, just is the totality of "inscriptions", In another sense we could say it is the faculty of being able to recall those "inscriptions" to consciousness. No "container" to be found or required.
I don't see that consciousness being presupposed, as it might be said to be by all human discourse, would be a problem for Dennett, since he doesn't deny its existence.
First generation cognitive science used the metaphor of computer to model the mind as an input output device that processes , represents and stores data. That metaphor has been replaced by the biological notion of self-organizing system. Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process.
Right, that makes sense: so memories are reconstructed from traces, which do not remain unchanged in the process of reconstruction.
As I see it: If conscious events are reducible to physical events (Dennett), and physical events are only accessible in conscious observations, then physicality becomes a question begged. Only a phenomenon can be "behind" a phenomenon. Hence hermeneutics.
My own view is that 'physical' and 'mental' are mutually incommensurable bases of explanation. I don't see any reason to posit a transcendent "realm".
There must be something different about us, and the smart money says it’s to do with language or something about us that shows itself most clearly in language. It would also make sense for our world or worlds to be different from the worlds of non-linguistic animals (again, whether that’s because of language itself, or because of whatever underwrites language), but I’m inclined to agree that the difference will not be that only in ours do things mean something, only in ours do things matter.
Margaret Wise Brown was a fine phenomenologist:
First, calling something physical, material, is, in itself, simply vacuous. When scientists and everyday talk refer to some material object, it is just a general term that has no content at all because it is not a particular thing and hence has no properties, so it has no predicative possibilities. Kites and balloons are red, but material substance cannot be. It is just a stand in term for the unseen substratum of all things.
So when a scientist insists the thoughts in our heads are really just a form of material substance, she is really just talking out of her hat, as if there were some meaning to the term. There isn't: there is no ontology of material substance. You can try Descartes' wax metaphor, but, as Wittgenstein tells us, metaphors have to have a referent on both sides. I say my friend is a real tiger when angered, there is my friend, and there is the borrowed tiger qualities. In Descartes' wax example, the wax has the alternative states, solid and liquid. But to say these must have the abiding material existence "behind" this is to have a one sided metaphor, for the other, the "existence" is not there to be observed so that the metaphor can be complete. Nonsense is the result.
Metal fares no better, for if material is nonsense (not saying the term has no application at all. But as stand alone ontology, it is nonsense), then the mental loses its meaning, for what is an ontology of the mental if there is no physical for contrast? It is an up without a down.
so if you want to call it all physical, then you are not referring to some ontological substrate of al things; rather, you are contextualizing ontology to what scientists say and think. And on the other side, there is idealism, and this meets the same fate: calling everything idea is an exclusive contextualization if, well, brain events or the like.
This is why the term phenomenon is superior, for it does not refer to some invisible substrate. It is simply what is present, there in the world before you. Transcendental realms just fall away, though it is not as if the term 'transcendental' has no meaning.
Second, assume the world is Dennett's, and this is the assumption of the empirical scientist, and these guys don't really do ontology, so they feel very comfortable talking about physical this and material that. IN the scientist's world of assumptions, how is it that anything out there gets in my brain thing? This is a very clear question, and the answer should be easy: Here is my brain, there is my lamp, I know it is there on the desk. Now, how does this work, this knowledge relationship? Or better: how is that something like a brain that is about as opaque an object as one can imagine, "receive" the object, and think of this as transparency being a 10 and opacity being a 0, the former a kind of mirror representation, the latter, absolute opacity, like a rock or a fence post.
The point should be clear, very clear: something as opaque as a brain, a three and a half pound grey mass, should have no intimation at all regarding that lamp. Zero. Consider: all one has ever experienced is experience, therefore material substance is NECESSARLY a mental phenomenon, for in order for it to what is "out there" to be other than a mental phenomenon, we would have to first leave mental phenomenal experience to affirm this physical Other, and this is nonsense. Recall Wittgenstein and logic: we can never get at logic's generative source because it would take logic to conceive it, encounter it, at all. Same here.
So this last paragraph is what happens when we take Dennett's side. It all falls apart at the level of basic questions. Dennett gets away with this because he rejects basic questions. He really isn't a philosopher at all. Just, and I am reading his Consciousness Explained as I write, a kind of con man; no seriously: he belittles his opposition; note the language he uses. His is a rhetorical argument working throughout, and his common sense approach is just that: common.
How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology.
Husserl characterizes the physical, material thing in terms of a particular stratum of intentional constitution:
Now once the" sense-thing" is itself constituted, and so is, founded with it, the real-causal thing at the level of genuine experience, sense experience, then a new constitution of a higher level results in regard to the relativity of this "thing" with respect to the Corporeality constituted in a similar fashion. It is this relativity which demands the constitution of a physicalistic thing manifesting itself in the intuitively given thing. But in this
relativity the geometrical determinations and the specifically "sensuous qualities" play quite different roles (both taken, in their own constitutive sphere, as "themselves, " as optimal). The geometrical determinations pertain to the physicalistic Object
itself; what is geometrical belongs to physicalistic nature in itself. But this is not true of the sensuous qualities, which thoroughly belong in the sphere of the appearances of nature.
“ "Physicalistic nature," to which we have now advanced,
presents itself in the following way in accord with our
expositions: the thing itself in itself consists of a continuously or discretely filled space in states of motion, states which are called energy forms. That which fills space lends itself to certain groups of differential equations and corresponds to certain fundamental laws of physics. But there are no sense qualities here. And that means there are no qualities here whatever. For
the quality of what fills space is sense quality.”(Ideas II)
The finite medium where these inscriptions are (stored)? Maybe your confusing memories with memory. Recalled from where?
Quoting Janus
Any links regarding this? How is a process REconstructive without access to the original construction? What does it mean to be self-organizing when natural selection is an external process that has selected, over a very long time, the attributes that enable a neural system to produce behaviors (outputs) given certain sensory information (inputs)? In a sense, natural selection has programmed organisms to handle (store and interpret) sensory data in specific ways to survive.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'd have to read about it. I found The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Varela, Thompson and Rosch. Is this a good source?
Quoting Joshs
Reading The Embodied Mind. I'll get back to you when I have something to say. BTW, thanks for Varela, Thompson and Rosch.
Good choice. That’s the bible of embodied cognition.
If neuroscience shows that memories consist in neural structures, which are not static, but dynamic and changing, then, as @Joshs said, memory is a matter of bringing what is encoded in those structures to consciousness. But since they are dynamic, the process would seem to be, at least to some degree, reconstructive.
@Janus The latter 'reconstruction' is involuntary (neurological) and the former voluntary (phenomenal), no?
It seems to suggest that memories can be dynamic yet also suggest memory as a type of storage. If memories are reconstructed (still not sure what this means), then they must be using a template to reconstruct from, or else it doesn't really qualify as a reconstruction. If memories are not stored information and not reconstructed from a template, then does it even make sense to call them memories instead of imaginings?
To say that memory is "dynamic" means that memories change and therefore would no longer qualify as a memory, but as an imagining.
Erik Rietveld
"Enactive approaches to cognitive science aim to explain human cognitive processes across the board without making any appeal to internal, content-carrying representational states."
But it is the scientists' internal, content-carrying representational states that inform scientists of the way brains work. What other means do scientists have of being informed about the human cognitive processes?
"A challenge to such a research programme in cognitive science that immediately arises is how to explain cognition in so-called ‘representation-hungry’ domains. Examples of representation-hungry domains include imagination, memory, planning and language use in which the agent is engaged in thinking about something that may be absent, possible or abstract. The challenge is to explain how someone could think about things that are not concretely present in their environment other than by means of an internal mental representation. "
The challenge is solved by merely understanding that if thoughts are about things, then thoughts must be representations of those things. In the case of imaginings and dreams, they are simulations of behaviors and their outcomes that we can use to streamline our behaviors in the world when the moment arrives. We can use the memory of a simulated outcome to change our behaviors just as we can use the memory of a real event that happened to change our behaviors. Computers run simulations and the outcome of those simulations are used by humans to understand the world better. So representation-hungry domains are really about certain aspects of the world, or else they would be useless in the world.
:up: That sounds about right to me.
This is interesting in that it seems to posit that all qualities must be sense qualities. So energy, mass, movement, persistence, change, extension and so on would not be qualities on that view.
As long as we keep in mind that such ‘physicalistic’ entities are subjectively constructed as senses themselves.
Right, so that would be the phenomenologist view; on the physicalist view they would be objectively apprehended by subjects, and would thus be understood to be subject-independently real, so, real even if not apprehended.