To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com From: "Jeremy Bowman" Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 12:45:06 +0100 Subject: Re: [evol-psych] Phenomenology It's worth remembering that the people who write entries in dictionaries on philosophical topics are generally non-scientists who yearn to be scientists. Half-crazed with an unrequited love of "science", they tend to CALL their own field a "science" -- but it does NOT follow that their field actually IS a science. (Obviously, there are remarkable affinities between phenomenology and disciplines such as Creationism and psychology.) As a student I studied a little bit of Edmund Husserl, father of modern phenomenology. I can safely assure everyone that there's hardly anything remotely scientific about it. The basic idea is that Descartes' "I think therefore I am" is the most profound thought anyone can have. All knowledge is supposed to start from there, and all science is supposed to be "based" on conscious experience. So the most important thing is to study the nature of conscious experience. Hence the word 'phenomenology' -- the "ology" of conscious experiences or "phenomena". First, this is bad epistemology. We know all sorts of things about the outside world before we can even begin to refer to our own "inner" experiences, let alone study them. This obsession with conscious experience is really a fixation with certainty, because we cannot be wrong about having a pain, say. Second, it's bad philosophy of science. Science involves creating and testing hypotheses, which are guesses. They are not "based" on anything. The popularity of phenomenology as a philosophical movement is a measure of the backwardness and self-importance of continental European philosophy compared with its English-speaking counterpart. But even the Continentals dropped phenomenology in the early twentieth century, when they embraced the psychotically unclear Nazi Heidegger (who got Husserl thrown out of his job because he was Jewish -- and guess who got that job?). More recently, Daniel Dennett has been saying that we should take conscious experience seriously as an object of study. But any such study must involve inter-subjectively verifiable, repeatable reports. Rather impishly, he has given it the name "heterophenomenology" ("hetero", because different people are involved -- it isn't just one guy contemplating his own internal conscious feelings). (Phenomenology must not be confused with "phenomenalism", the earlier philosophical movement whose inspiration was Berkeley.) Jeremy Bowman