Talk:Heterophenomenology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Philosophy Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.
Additional information: Related task forces (major fields): Philosophy of mind Related task forces (major traditions): Continental philosophy Related task forces (periods): Contemporary philosophy

This article is currently nothing more than two quotations slapped together. Anyone want to work on it? — Adam Conover † 05:32, Jun 12, 2004 (UTC)

Adam,

I'd be happy to work on it some more, but Dennett's paper seems like the right place to go for more on the topic. What do you suggest? — Muness

I added a bit more here, but perhaps it could be fleshed out further. I also set up a redirect from autophenomenology. Alienus 20:45, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes by 198.182.154.4

I've reverted your changes, not because I think you intend to harm the article, but because they were — variously — redundant, wordy or misleading. Please talk about your changes here. If you keep reverting back to your version, this is edit-warring, which goes against Wikipedia rules. Let's talk about this and come to some consensus. Alienus 21:32, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Alienus - I'm new to Wikipedia and didn't realize that someone was actually "reverting" my changes -- I thought they weren't going through. You seem to miss an important point at the end of your post -- that what begins as methodology in Dennett winds up being substance; heterophenomenology is introduced, in Consciousness Explained, as simply a method; Dennett deliberately brackets the question of qualia, not because, at the beginning, he believes they don't exist, but because he thinks there can be no reliable accounts of them. Heterophenomenology, as a method, is agnostic on the question of subjective phenomenon. But, by the end of the book, as the quote you selected betrays, Dennett winds up saying that heterophenomenology reproduces the complete set of conscious data -- that there is nothing more to consciousness than what his method revealed. This is a famous mistake in his argument, and worth pointing out I think. I also think my edits weren't redundant (that point had not been made), wordy (they were rather concise -- even pithy) or misleading -- indeed, including the quote you did at the end of the entry without calling attention to the slippage from method to substance is dangerously misleading. (unsigned by Merlothemagnificent)

When I reverted your changes, I knew there was something biased and misleading about them, but couldn't spell it out in full detail. Now, thanks to your clarification, I can.

From the moment Dennett introduces heterophenomenology in Consciousness Explained, his goal is to render qualia irrelevant and unmotivated so he can throw the concept out. It's not that he starts off with just a methodology and then makes the "mistake" of confusing it with ontology; he never for a moment believed qualia existed. We know this because he said so in as many words, years before this book, in an essay entitled "Quining Qualia".

The only people who would call this entirely intentional progression a "mistake" are those who, like Chalmers, hold out for the existence of qualia despite Dennett's arguments. These people, unfortunately, not only disagree with Dennett but demonstrably fail to understand his arguments. As a consequence, attempts by such people to summarize Dennett tend to be rather inaccurate.

When you add a bunch of words that serve only to spread this inaccurate view, they come across as redundant at best, wordy at the least, and in the end, misleading. Alienus 07:41, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

P.S.

Please sign with ~~~~ so that it adds your name and timestamp.

Observation: You know the author of this article on qualia makes an interesting case that there are, in fact, several different meanings of the term qualia which are at play in the philosophical literature. This is something that I, my myself, have always suspected but was never able to quite pin down what they were. On this view, Dennet may be an eliminativist on one or another (narrow) reading of the term qualia, but not in the full sense. If you actually go and read Dennett, it does seem that he refers almost exclusively to either perception-related qualia or to qualia in some very idiosyncratic sense with connotations of infallibile access and so on. It's certainly not unusual, in philosophy, that people attempt to define the notion they think others have in mind (or should have in mind), but do so in a way that is more conducive to their own position. They then wind up arguing past each other for several millenia. Perhaps this is what Wittgensteing meant by "getting the fly out of the flyblottle"?--Lacatosias 09:16, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

There may well be some notion of qualia that remains untouched by Dennett's arguments. However, it may be clearer to just use a different term to describe these residuals, to avoid confusion. Whatever we call them, though, they are not a threat to physicalism, the way Chalmers' qualia are. Al 16:01, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, there are plenty,probably the majority, of philosophers of mind who are non-reductive physicalists and argue that qualia in any sense are not a threat to physicalism. Probably Dennett would argue that such a position is not very strong. In any case, even coming up with a new term for different senses of qualia would constitute original research for the purposes of an Encyclopedia. We should leave to Dennett to define the kind of eliminativist he is or is not. From some of the things he writes I get the impression that he seems to want to leave it an open question and is not very concerned about such labels. As long as there is no real controversy here anymore--you both seem to agree that he is a qualia eliminativist of some kind and were apparently arguing about wether that is good or bad (a POV issue)--- it's not really necessary to add confusing distinctions. I was just making an observation that struck me as a possible cause of so much confusion and angry debate on this issue: different interpretations of the same term. Just trying to help.--Lacatosias 07:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

In fact, I notice that qualia is not directly addressed in the article anyway. So I would just leave it at that.--Lacatosias 08:00, 21 June 2006 (UTC)