have experiences, thoughts, and feelings as a result of brain activ-
ity. Neurophenomenology is said by its practitioners to be able
to address this problem by combining the subject’s own phe-
nomenological investigation with simultaneous neuro-imaging
data. The goal of neurophenomenological experiments is to pro-
vide a two-fold description of what is going on in one’s mind –
from the subject’s own point of view and from the perspective
of ‘objective’ neuro-images of their brain activity obtained using
fMRI scans or EEG monitoring. The most important point here
is that experience cannot be reduced to what is happening on
the biological level in the brain, which means that adding the
first-person description of experience to the brain scan data
allows us to formulate a more reliable answer to the question
‘What’s going on in thinking?’
Heterophenomenology, on the other hand, is an approach advo-
cated by Daniel Dennett, and reflects his naturalistic and reduc-
tionist views. Even though it also utilizes first-person data, it has a
radically different method and goals from neurophenomenology.
Dennett allows participants to express freely what it is like to be
them or to be experiencing; but he treats their reports as fictions
insofar as what they say is not what experimenters see through the
‘objective’ measurement of participants’ brain states with scien-
tific instruments. (See Dennett’s paper ‘Shall we tango? No, but
thanks for asking’, Journal of Consciousness Studies18(5–6), 2011).
Neurophenomenology-oriented experimenters treat the partici-
pants’ first-person reports as pieces of the puzzle of consciousness,
while for heterophenomenology-oriented experimenters, first-
person reports are no different from any other kinds of raw data:
that is, prone to errors and useless as long as not interpreted.
There are several differences between Daniel Dennett’s and
Evan Thompson’s approaches, but the ones most often empha-
sized involve what they say about their methodologies rather than
what the methodologies actually are. For example, they disagree
on whether we have direct access to our experience, or whether
this is always mediated by our beliefs. In neurophenomenology,
the first-person reports are acknowledged as expressions of the
experiences themselves, and the aim is to “free experience from
its status of a habitual belief” (‘Neurophenomenology: A method-
ological remedy for the hard problem’, Francisco Varela, JCS 3(4),
1996). However, from Dennett’s heterophenomenological per-
spective, the first-person reports are always expressions of beliefs
aboutthe experiences rather than about the experiences themselves.
But are the theoretical differences so important for conduct-
ing research? Some scientists would answer “No.” Gualtiero Pic-
cinini is another scholar trying to mend the gap between philos-
ophy and neuroscience. He points out that for the development
of a methodology it isn’t particularly important what the thing
is that’s being measured (raw experiences compared to beliefs
about experience, say) so long as the measurement is sound. At
the same time he argues against heterophenomenology’s lack ofW
hat would come to mind if I asked you about
phenomenology, the systematic study of human
experience? If you know something about it,
you might imagine its founding father, Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) meditating on his warm cup of fragrant
black coffee. If you’re interested in psychology, maybe you’d
think about ‘introspection’.
For an uninvolved observer, phenomenological investigation
may look just like introspection, which it is often mistaken for.
There are some similarities – the examiner and the person being
examined are the same individual, and the experiment takes place
inside the person’s mind. However, unlike introspection, phe-
nomenology does not simply consist of an unbound stream of
consciousness. It does not deal with what we think or feelabout
both our experiences or the objects that the experiences are about
(we’re supposed to put this ‘in brackets’ when we practice phe-
nomenology). It is not even about the things the experience is
about. It is about the nature of the experience itself.
Phenomenology originally dealt with questions like ‘What
makes human experience possible?’ or ‘How do we perceive
different parts and wholes of the world that surrounds us?’ If
we want to practice phenomenology, we should follow these
four steps that constitute the phenomenological method:- We should bracket what we think we know about the experience;
- Reflect upon how the world manifests itself to us;
- Produce a public description of the experience – speak it or
write it down; and - Do this repeatedly in order to find out which language and
categories seem suitable for describing the way we experience.
Opposing Mentalities
Although the subject of phenomenology may seem vague, mys-
terious, and even esoteric to some, there have been numerous
cases where the methods of phenomenology were applied in
scientific studies of mind.
I stumbled upon phenomenology and the ways it can be
applied to cognitive science or cognitive semiotics (the inter-
disciplinary study of meaning-making, which is said to be phe-
nomenology-inspired), and my professor at Lund University,
Jordan Zlatev, gave me the task of trying to further develop the
method of phenomenology. I must confess that I miserably
failed to do so; but I recognized some interesting things that
remained unnoticed throughout a twenty-year-long debate
involving the two most important phenomenology-related
methodologies in neurological research.
Neurophenomenology is the first of them. It was introduced by
Francisco Varela in 1996 and promoted by him and by Evan
Thompson as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness- the problem of how humans (and other conscious organisms)
14 Philosophy Now ●^ August/September 2019Science & Phenomenology
Kalina Moskaluk tells us how an idea outside of her theoretical background
destroyed her research project and her faith in ‘simple’ phenomenology.
Science