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Heterophenomenology |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008) |
Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another not oneself"), is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bend, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine his or her mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.
Heterophenomenology is put forth as the alternative to traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which Dennett calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" to emphasize the fact that it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subject authoritative only about how things seem to him or her.
In other words, heterophenomenology requires us to listen to the subject and take what he or she says seriously, but to also look at everything else available to us, including the subject's bodily responses and environment, and be ready to conclude that the subject is wrong even about his or her own mind. For example, we could determine that the subject is hungry even though he or she doesn't recognize it.
The key role of heterophenomenology in Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is that it defines all that can be — or needs to be — known about the mind. To quote Dennett, "The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness."
Dennett stresses that heterophenomenology does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence. This can be seen by how heavily heterophenomenology relies on adopting the intentional stance toward subjects.
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