Philosophy Now-Aug-Sept 2019

(Joyce) #1
trust in the reliability of descriptions of experience (‘How to
improve on heterophenomenology’, JCS 17(3–4), 2010).

A Conceptual Spanner in the Mental Cogs
Personally, the problem I found the most striking (and I was
shocked that it went so long unnoticed) was that practicing phe-
nomenology – the systematic study of human experience –
changes the experience it’s supposed to reliably explore!
This is almostexplicitly said by Evan Thompson when he crit-
icizes Dennett’s heterophenomenology for having nothing to do
with the original idea of phenomenology. Thompson writes that
heterophenomenology “has had nothing to say about the pro-
posal to use first-person methods of training attention and aware-
ness in order to sensitize individuals to their experience in ways
enabling them to describe it more precisely” (‘Reply to Com-
mentaries’, JCS, 18(5-6), 2011). A similarity struck me between
this proposed ‘awareness training’ to the training in mindfulness
that has gained a lot of attention in different areas of our culture
over the past few years. However, while for phenomenology this
training is supposed to allow the production of a standardized
and reliable description of the experience as it is experienced,
mindfulness training is supposed to be a tool for change! On
reflection, it seemed reasonable to think that being aware of or
paying close attention to phenomena in our experience makes us
experience them in a different way than we would without that
attentiveness. Does this mean, in a paradoxical, Catch-22 manner,
that a systematic first-person exploration of experience destroys
the picture it’s supposed to grasp? Yes, probably. This is a fun-
damental difficulty for phenomenology.

To indicate how this problem might affect experimental
results, I would like to share an example from the research pro-
ject my team and I designed (but never actually conducted, for
reasons that will become clear). We created two hypothetical
groups: a neurophenomenological one and a heterophenomeno-
logical one. The neurophenomenological group was to be trained
in categorizing and reporting relevant experience before per-
forming a task and reporting their experience, while the het-
erophenomenological one was not. Instead, the heterophe-
nomenological group would be allowed to describe the experi-
ence without any training, or indeed, constraints. The task in the
experiment would be for each participant to keep one hand under
a stream of water with varying temperature and report any tem-
perature changes. But the color of lights fixed to the tap would
also change. We hypothesized that the light color shifting from
red to blue could trick the heterophenomenological group into
believing that the temperature changed, which, we thought, might
make their reports less reliable. We initially considered that the
neurophenomenologically trained group, by contrast, might be
better at reporting the objective, measureable temperature of the
water – so, better at reporting their experience. But after we
thought about it some more, we rejected this. In fact, we con-
cluded that it would be silly to think that an experiment like this
could tell us anything about which method provides a better
insight into one’s subjective experience. First, since those in one
group would be mindful in a trained manner about their experi-
ences, and those from the other would not, the experiences would
already be different. This would make their descriptions unhelp-
ful for examining which group described their experience more
reliably, as we could not compare like for like. Second, experi-
ence is not created by only one, separate, measureable aspect of
the world. So for example, if the light changed from red to blue
but the water temperature stayed the same, a report that would
reliably reflect the participant’s perspective might be “I know
that what has changed was not the water temperature, but the
light color, yet I still feel that the water is cooler now” rather than
simply “The temperature hasn’t changed”. The complexity of
both human experience and human language, even under con-
trolled conditions, would make it extremely difficult to judge
whether a description was good or not.
This brings us back to attempts to compare first-person
descriptions of experience with more objectively measureable
parameters such as changes in brain activity. To subscribe either
to a reductionist perspective from which a simple brain scan
could tell us everything we need to know about subjective expe-
rience, or to the unqualified phenomenological claim that “con-
scious experience needs to be explored from within the first-
person perspective” (Thompson in ‘Reply to Commentaries’),
is to oversimplify the situation so much as to misrepresent it.
Is experience itself impossible to explore reliably, then? Pos-
sibly not. But for now I would hypothesize that experience is
described best when it is lived, and our experience in a lab dif-
fers significantly from our experience in real life. So go out and
play some phenomenology! Just remember that experiences in
the phenomenological mirror may be different than they appear.
© KALINA MOSKALUK 2019
Kalina Moskaluk is doing a Master’s in Language and Linguistics,
specialising in Cognitive Semiotics, at Lund University, Sweden.

August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 15

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Husserl and his coffee
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