How to Improve on Heterophenomenology: The Self-Measurement Methodology of First-Person Data1

Heterophenomenology is a third-person methodology proposed by Daniel Dennett for using first-person reports as scientific evidence. I argue that heterophenomenology can be improved by making six changes: (i) setting aside consciousness, (ii) including other sources of first-person data besides first-person reports, (iii) abandoning agnosticism as to the truth value of the reports in favor of the most plausible assumptions we can make about what can be learned from the data, (iv) interpreting first-person reports (and other first-person behaviors) directly in terms of target mental states rather than in terms of beliefs about them, (v) dropping any residual commitment to incorrigibility of first-person reports, and (vi) recognizing that thirdperson methodology does have positive effects on scientific practices. When these changes are made, heterophenomenology turns into the self-measurement methodology of firstperson data that I have defended in previous papers. 1. Reinventing Heterophenomenology? In a previous paper (Piccinini 2003a), I argued that when psychologists and neuroscientists rely on first-person reports as sources of data, they follow – or at any rate they should 1 Special thanks to David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and Marcin Miłkowski for prompting me to be more explicit on the contrast between Dennett’s heterophenomenology and my view on the methodology of firstperson data. Thanks to David Chalmers, Pete Mandik, Marcin Miłkowski, Anna-Mari Rusanen, and Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions on heterophenomenology and related topics; to Justin Sytsma, Marcin Miłkowski, and Eric Schwitzgebel for helpful comments on a previous draft; and to Jim Virtel for editorial assistance. 2 follow – public (i.e., third-person) methods. By ‘public method’ I mean, roughly, a method that different investigators can follow to the same effect (Piccinini 2003b). All sciences are based on public methods. Therefore, it is incorrect to maintain, as some have (e.g., Chalmers 2004, Gertler 2009, Goldman 1997, Varela and Shear 1999), that reliance on firstperson reports as scientific evidence constitutes a “first-person” method, different in kind from public scientific methods. The debate between first-person and third-person methodologies may also be framed in terms of first-person data, such as data derived from first-person reports. Firstperson methodologists maintain that first-person data are private, that is, directly accessible only to the subject issuing the reports. Since first-person data are private, they are different in kind from ordinary (public) scientific data. Some first-person methodologists define first-person data so that they are private by definition. I am using the term in a broader, more neutral sense. As I use the term, first-person data are a class of data associated with first-person reports (or other “first-person behaviors”; more on this below). The question of whether first-person data in the present sense are private is not settled by definition—it is a further, substantive question. First-person methodologists answer in the positive. By contrast, third-person methodologists (myself included) argue that first-person data are public – that is, directly accessible to any competent external observer. So far, the view I defend is the same as Daniel Dennett’s. Dennett has been a critic of first-person methodologies for decades (Dennett 1982, 1991) and has proposed an alternative called ‘heterophenomenology’. Heterophenomenologists record first-person reports as raw data and then process the raw data to obtain final data about a subject’s