Cc: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com From: "Phil Roberts, Jr." Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 23:55:49 -0400 Subject: Re: [evol-psych] Phenomenology Jay R. Feierman wrote: > I looked up phenomenology in Webster's New Twentieth Century > Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1983. Under phenomenology it > says, "1. the science of dealing with phenomena as distinct from > the science of being (ontology). 2. the branch of science that > classifies and describes phenomena without any attempt at > explanation. > In 'Consciousness Explained' Dennett offers a nice overview on this matter (p. 44): Philosopher's and psychologists often use the term 'phenomenology' as an umbrella term to cover all the items -- the fauna and flora, you might say -- that inhabit our conscious experience: thoughts, smells, itches, pains, imagined purple cows, hunches, and all the rest. This usage has several somewhat distinct ancestries worth noting. In the eighteenth century, Kant distinguished "phenomena, "things as they appear, from "noumena," things as they are in themselves, and during the development of the natural or physical sciences in the nineteenth century, the term 'phenomenology' came to refer to the merely descriptive study of any subject matter, neutrally or pretheoretically. The phenomenology of magnetism, for instance, had been well begun by William Gilbert in the sixteenth century, but the explanation of that phenomenology had to await the discoveries of the relationship between magnetism and electricity in the nineteenth century, and the theoretical work of Faraday, Maxwell, and others. Alluding to this division between acute observation and theoretical explanation the philosophical school or movement known as Phenomenology (with a capital P) grew up early in the twentieth century around the work of Edmund Husserl. Its aim was to find a new foundation for all philosophy (indeed, for all knowledge) based on a special technique of introspection, in which the outer world and all its implications and presuppositions were supposed to be "bracketed" in a particular act of mind known as 'epoche'. The net result was an investigative state of mind in which the Phenomenologist was supposed to become acquainted with the pure objects of conscious experience, called 'noemata', untainted by the usual distortions and amendments of theory and practice. Like other attempts to strip away interpretation and reveal the basic facts of consciousness to rigorous observation, such as the Impressionist movement in the arts and the Introspectionist psychologies of Wundt, Titchener, and others, Phenomenology has failed to find a single, settled method that everyone could agree upon. So while there are zoologists, there really are no phenomenologists: uncontroversial experts on the nature of things that swim in the stream of consciousness. But we can follow recent practice and adopt the term (with a lower-case p) as the generic term for the various items in conscious experience that have to be explained. Dennett's own approach (heterophenomenology) begins with: The British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, likewise wrote with the presumption that what they were doing, much of the time, was 'introspecting', and that their introspections would be readily replicated by their readers.....(Chapt 4, second paragraph). only to dismiss their considerable accomplishments (e.g., Hume's identification of the three types of association, Hume's discovery of the manner in which association "facilitates the sympathy", etc. ) on the grounds that they occasionally got things wrong: This would be fine if it weren't for the embarrassing fact that controversy and contradiction bedevil the claims made under these conditions of polite mutual agreement. Apparently, introspection is ka ka because it is not infallible: Ever since Descartes and his "cogito ergo sum," this capacity of ours has been seen as somehow immune to error; we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider. As Dennett sees it, the solution to this problem is, not to limit introspective reports to reproducible features as they do in the other sciences, but rather to have the introspectionist write down her observations and hand them to a second party who can bring the full weight of "third person objective science" to bear on the problem. Funny! I always thought of Faraday and Rutherford as engaged in first person observations. Applying Dennett's rationale, their work could have been much improved if they had relied on written reports from lab technicians. Hey! If third person is more scientifically reliable than first person, perhaps fourth person reports would be better yet. Think of the advances science could make with, say, sixth or seventh person reports. :) Admittedly, this is something of a caricature of Dennett's argument and, admittedly there are times when third person observations and experiments can indeed enlighten us about the mind. My point is simply that there is no royal road to truth and, until one is found, perhaps we should worry less about whether data is physical or psychical and worry more about whether data is intersubjectively reproducible, as I have argued in 'Rehabilitating Introspection' (see URL below), so that we can all keep an "I" on each other. :) PR Rehabilitating Introspection A Procedure for a First Person Psychical Science http://www.rationology.net