Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
participant is responding to – an idea known as the Double Blind Interview or DBI
(Froese, Gould, and Barrett, 2011; Olivares et al., 2015).
Interviews conducted by the experimenters themselves were used in an experi-
ment (Petitmengin et al., 2013) where participants were asked to choose which
of a pair of portraits they preferred; on six out of fifteen trials, they were asked
to explain their choice. Three out of the six times they were actually handed the
non-chosen photo, but only 33% detected the deception, and a large majority
gave explanations for why they had supposedly chosen this photo. But if instead
of just being asked to explain their choice, participants had an elicitation inter-
view, 80% did realise they had been misled.
In this experiment the interviewers were not blind, but all they did was assist in
the act of remembering, rather than prompting any particular content, and the
whole point of the interview was to ‘trigger the acts which enable the detection
of truth’ (2013, p. 660), so blinding would have seemed perverse. The experiment-
ers gathered rich descriptions (originally in French) which they then classified into
different varieties of perceptual and decision-making experiences. These kinds of
methods are still in their relative infancy as regards mainstream (neuro)cognitive
research, but current progress is fast and creative.
HETEROPHENOMENOLOGY
Heterophenomenology (which might be translated as ‘the study of other
people’s phenomena’) is an awkward name for our final method of studying
consciousness. According to Dennett (1991, 2001b), it involves taking a giant
theoretical leap, avoiding all tempting shortcuts, and following ‘the neutral
path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-
person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can
(in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experi-
ences’ (1991, p. 72).
Imagine you are an anthropologist, says Dennett, and you are studying a tribe of
people who believe in a forest god called Feenoman and can tell you all about his
appearance, habits, and abilities. You now have a choice. You can become a Fee-
nomanist like them, and believe in their god and his powers, or you can study their
religion with an agnostic attitude. If you take the latter path, you collect different
descriptions, deal with discrepancies and disagreements, and compile as well as
you can the definitive description of Feenoman. You can be a Feenomanologist.
This is possible because you are not treating Feenoman as a creature who might
jump out from behind a tree and give you the right answers. Instead, you are
treating him as an ‘intentional object’, a kind of fiction like Sherlock Holmes or
Doctor Watson. In fiction, some things are true or false within the story, but oth-
ers are neither. So, to use Dennett’s example, it is true that Holmes and Watson
took the 11.10 to Aldershot one summer’s day, but it is neither true nor false
that that day was a Wednesday because the author does not tell us. Similarly,
there is no point in trying to find out whether Feenoman really has blue eyes: on
this, and all other questions about Feenoman, the beliefs of the Feenomanists
are authoritative, but only because Feenoman is being treated as their inten-
tional object, i.e. a fiction. Their reports are authoritative only about how things
seem to them.
AM I EXPERIENCING
MORE THAN I CAN
ACCESS?