"An Epistemology for Phenomenology

Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Springer's series Studies in Brain and Mind, 2013, pp An Epistemology for Phenomenology? INTRODUCTION There is a tendency to assimilate so called "consciousness studies" to studies of the phenomenology of experience, and it seems to me that this is a shame. It is a shame, I think, because there is no such thing as a legitimate phenomenology of experience whereas there certainly is such a thing as consciousness. So long as people assimilate studies of consciousness to studies of phenomenal experience, they are side stepping the real issues -the ones for another lifetime. What then are the problems I see with phenomenology? In outline, they are as follows. First, if one holds a Sellarsian view of cognition, ideas are not given in perception. If you can describe or know in some way about your phenomenal experience, you must have ideas that apply to it, say, applicable empirical concepts. But on a Sellarsian view, the origins and certifications for such ideas are not Humean or Russellian. Concepts are not obtained merely by copying or by naming or abstracting from sensory data, by giving names to directly experienced properties. A theory of what concepts are -or, in classical idiom, preferred for reasons to be explained later, a theory about the nature and origin of ideas -is needed before one can begin to discuss phenomenology. Only with such a theory in hand can it be legitimate to ask how ideas pertaining to phenomenal experience might be obtained, and whether there is reason to think we have or could have any adequate ones. Second, the theory of the nature and origin of ideas I would advocate implies that adequate empirically-based ideas can be developed and validated only through ongoing experience both over time and over a variety of perspectives. But the phenomena that phenomenology purports to investigate cannot be studied over time and over a variety of different perspectives. This makes phenomenology inherently wide open to the breeding and feeding of chimaeras. Third, I think a coherent and empirically respectable theory can probably already be sketched to explain what really is going on when people think they are describing their phenomenal experience, a theory that explains away the chimaeras. I will describe such a candidate theory, and although I am not committed to arguing for any of its neurological details, if I should be right about empirical ideas more generally, then that some theory of this general kind is right about phenomenology becomes highly plausible. The upshot of the whole would be, of course, that Dan Dennett is right -that the closest we can get to a legitimate phenomenology of experience is what he calls "heterophenomenology" (1991, 2003). INTRODUCING UNICEPTS I'll start by jumping right in to explain the picture of empirically-based "ideas" that underlies my skepticism about phenomenology.