- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Heterophenomenologists need both more scepticism (about ourselves as well
as our subjects) and more wonder (about what we are studying), says Den-
nett. Finding things out about someone’s experience in a heterophenomeno-
logical way is different from having an ordinary conversation with someone
because we have to maintain ‘a deliberate bracketing of the issue of whether
what they are saying is literally true, metaphorically true, true under-an-
imposed-interpretation, or systematically-false-in-a-way-we-must-explain’ (2007,
p. 252). But we have to acknowledge that we can never be completely neutral,
with everything bracketed off. We have to acknowledge that we cannot do
anything without interpreting (for example, without adopting the intentional
stance), and that whatever other methods might claim about not interpreting,
this is impossible. Yet we also have to acknowledge that interpretation (con-
trary to what many humanities scholars believe) can be subject to rules and
agreements.
Meanwhile, Dennett suggests, we should be more amazed at our ability to trans-
late experience into report at all.
We tacitly take the unknown pathways between open eyeballs and
speaking lips to be secure. Because we all can do it (those of us who are
not blind) we don’t scratch our heads in bafflement over how we can just
open our eyes and then answer questions, with high reliability, about
what is positioned in front of them in the light. Amazing! How does it
work?
(Dennett, 2007, p. 255)
We have no more privileged access to this process than we do ‘to the complicated
processes that maintain the connectivity between our reporter’s cell phone and
ours’, says Dennett in a later book (2017, p. 349).
Explanation has to stop somewhere – and it tends to stop much sooner than we
might think. This is clearer in the case of imagining rather than seeing, Dennett
suggests: when we imagine something, we know we don’t know exactly what
we’re experiencing or why or how to describe it. If you’re still not convinced,
try the example of an invented cognitive capacity. Imagine you can spread your
toes and thereby come to have breathtakingly accurate convictions about what
is happening in Chicago. And imagine not being curious about how this is pos-
sible. How do you do it? ‘Not a clue, but it works, doesn’t it?’ (2007, p. 255; 2017,
p. 350).
Heterophenomenological agnosticism obviously makes sense for the new Chi-
cago reports; and it should just as obviously make sense for our reports about
conscious experience. All the experiences we take for granted are just as strange
to us as this one; we think we have much more access to our own experiences
than we can ever convey to other people through verbal report, but we do not.
We are therefore deluded if we think that autophenomenology (the study of
one’s own phenomenology) is a ‘more intimate, more authentic, more direct way’
of studying consciousness than heterophenomenology (the study of another
person’s phenomenology) (2017, p. 351). And we should not take the immense
variety of introspective reports between individuals (including on questions as
fundamental as whether or not thought has a distinctive phenomenology) as evi-
dence that our conscious experiences really are vastly divergent, says philosopher
