Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
But isn’t there something left out? Isn’t there more in P-consciousness than we can
access? Isn’t heterophenomenology only studying what people say and leaving
out the experiences themselves? Isn’t it treating their inner world as a fiction when
it really exists? Isn’t it only treating people as if they have beliefs, desires, emotions,
and mental images when they really do? Is Dennett – who is so obviously a real
self with real consciousness – just fooling himself (and us) by pretending to have
come up with a non-fictional account of why self and consciousness are fictions?
These questions get to the heart of the issue, so it is worth trying to be clear
about how heterophenomenology responds. Heterophenomenology maintains
neutrality on all these points. Just as in traditional phenomenology, theories are
bracketed while the investigation proceeds. But whereas for phenomenology, the
question being asked is ‘why does this person experience X?’, for heterophenom-
enology, the question is ‘why does this person say “I experience X”?’ Heterophe-
nomenology leaves open the question whether there is something more to be
discovered, pending further investigation. One day we might discover a blue-
eyed healer who was clearly the source of the Feenomanists’ beliefs. Even if they
resisted the identification, it might one day become clear, perhaps even to them,
that the new guy was sufficiently like their old god to say we had discovered what
they were really talking about – just as the goings-on in our brains may one day
be understood well enough to say we could accept their identity with the phe-
nomenology. Some diehard believers might still object that the real phenomeno-
logical items only accompanied the goings-on without being identical to them,
but how much credence that claim should be given would be another matter.
While conducting their explorations, heterophenomenologists use the fiction of
the heterophenomenological world much like a physicist might use the fiction of
a centre of gravity, or the equator. They leave it open whether Feenoman really
exists or not; whether as-if intentionality is different from real intentionality (Chap-
ter 12). Dennett presumably thinks there is no difference, but heterophenome-
nology, as a method, is not committed either way.
What role remains for ‘looking into our own minds’? Heterophenomenology has
attracted much criticism from those who believe it is somehow opposed to the
first person. But Dennett describes those who say they want a first- or second-
rather than a third-person perspective as ‘bickering over labels’ (2007, p. 252). He
says that ‘heterophenomenology could just as well have been called – by me –
first-person science of consciousness or the second-person method of gathering data’
(p. 252). Indeed, ‘Collaborating with other investigators on the study of your own
consciousness (adopting, if you like, the “second-person point of view”) is the way
to take consciousness, as a phenomenon, as seriously as it can be taken’ (Dennett,
2017, p. 351).
He chose the third-person label instead, he explains, to emphasise continuity
with the objective standards of natural sciences, but ‘the critiques are directed
at the label, not the method’ (2007, p. 252). He objects to what he calls ‘lone wolf
autophenomenology’ (relying on oneself as the sole subject), and the ambition
to found a ‘single, unified first-person science of consciousness’, which for him
would amount to a ‘solipsistic science’ (p. 264). But everything else that brings in
first-person methods is good – and is, he claims, already heterophenomenology.
Certainly one can adopt the heterophenomenological stance towards oneself in
the reflexive way that Velmans and others advocate.
Heterophenomenology
is ‘the maximally
open-minded
intersubjective science
of consciousness’(Dennett, 2007, p. 264)