Abstract
Ruth Millikan argues that there is no “legitimate phenomenology of experience”: that there is no method—not even a fallible or partially reliable one—for accurately describing our experiences in the first-person. The reason is that there is no method for checking that the ideas we think we have about experience are about anything at all. Like phlogiston, there may be no such things as the properties we take experience to have.
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Notes
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Unfortunately, Dennett is somewhat equivocal about the status of the subjects’ beliefs about their experience. Sometimes he describes them as the causes of first-person reports, which presumably means they are real, while at other times he describes them as merely constituting a fictional heterophenomenological world narrated by the subject. This makes Dennett’s claim that subjects are incorrigible equivocal between a substantive empirical claim about the causes of first-person reports, which we take to be false, and a claim that is true by definition about the fiction narrated by the subject, which is true but trivial (cf. Schwitzgebel 2007).
References
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Piccinini, G. 2010. How to improve on heterophenomenology: The self-measurement methodology of first-person data. Journal of Consciousness Studies 17(3–4): 84–106.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2007. No unchallengeable epistemic authority, of any sort, regarding our own conscious experience—contra dennett? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6: 107–113.
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Piccinini, G., Maley, C.J. (2014). From Phenomenology to the Self-Measurement Methodology of First-Person Data. In: Brown, R. (eds) Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6001-1_3
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