The Fantasy of First-Person Science

Abstract

A week ago, I heard James Conant give a talk at Tufts, entitled “Two Varieties of Skepticism” in which he distinguished two oft-confounded questions.

(a written version of a debate with David Chalmers, held at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL,. supplemented by an email debate with Alvin Goldman). © Dennett 2001, Feb 15.

Appendix: Goldman on Heterophenomenology

Alvin Goldman, responding to the paragraph above about Goldman 1997 (see page 5), entered into an email debate with me, lightly edited by me to avoid repetition and remove material not germane to the topics:

Goldman: First, a brief substantive reply to your points [see above, p5]. When cognitive scientists rely on subjects’ reports about visual illusions, I take them to be relying on the veracity of the Ss’ judgments (beliefs) about how the stimuli look (etc.). That is, after all, what the Ss presumably say, or can be interpreted as saying: “It looks as if such‑and‑such”. And the cognitive scientist takes that to be true, i.e., that it does look that way to the S (roughly at the time of report). Similarly, the cognitive scientist obviously does not conclude that Ss who report a deja vu experience really did have the same type of experience in his/her past. That could not be ascertained by the subject by introspection, which is restricted to present events. So even if the S’s deja vu report implies that he/she believes that a certain event or experience occurred in the past (I am not sure it does imply this), the cognitive scientist does not rely on the accuracy of this belief. However, the cognitive scientist (also) takes the S to report, and to believe, that he/she is currently having a “seems‑like‑this‑happened‑to‑me‑in‑the past” experience. And the cognitive scientist does trust the S’s report of that. In other words, the scientist concludes that the S does have (roughly at the time of report) an experience of the type “seems‑like‑this‑ happened‑ to‑me‑in‑the‑past”.

In the context of the treatment of illusions, I do have to talk more about “looks” or “seems”. As your discussion below indicates (and you have frequently said in print), you take “seems” only to express something about a S’s belief. There is no further fact about S (beyond a belief fact) that is expressed by “It seems to S to be F”. I, on the contrary, think that a seeming‑state is not merely a belief, but a visual state, an auditory state, or other “perceptual‑phenomenal” state. You think (see your discussion [above, p. 5]) that such an alleged state would have to involve “images” of certain sizes in the brain. But that is a totally unwarranted interpretation. Undergoing a perceptual‑seeming episode need involve nothing like “sense‑data” of the sort you conjure up. Cognitive scientists do not have to commit themselves to anything like that when they say that a S really is undergoing a certain type of perceptual‑seeming episode (when the S reports that he is).

DENNETT REPLY interjected: EXACTLY! They don’t have to commit themselves to anything like that. They can remain neutral. My example of mental images in the brain was just a for instance. My point was that to go beyond heterophenomenological agnosticism, they’d have to suppose something was implied by their S’s judgments (beyond the bare fact that these were their judgments, which is what heterophenomenology happily allows). Now it MAY be that your point about “perceptual‑phenomenal” states that go beyond “mere” belief—states will someday be supported somehow. But in the meantime, cognitive science proceeds along merrily, leaving itself strictly neutral about that. And in at least some instances (for instance, sudden hunches of déja vu) the claim that there is anything “perceptual‑phenomenal” about the presentiment over and above the inclination so to judge seems particularly dubious. (Ask yourself what deja vu would be like if it didn’t have any so-called “phenomenal” stuffing. Isn’t that in fact what it is like?) But in any case, cognitive science can and should (and does!) remain strictly neutral about such questions of phenomenality until the case is clearly made. My point for years is that it never has been made, so it counts, so far, as just a set of tempting hunches (versions of the Zombic Hunch) that cognitive science should also be agnostic about. And I know of no research in cognitive science that has violated that neutrality except by accident.

You say that my view is that “There is no further fact about S (beyond a belief fact) that is expressed by “It seems to S to be F”.” Not quite. I have challenged people to show any way in which there is such a further fact. My view is that it has not been shown that there is any such further fact (beyond the obvious other “behavioral” facts that accompany such belief facts, typically) and in the meanwhile cognitive science can proceed quite happily in strict neutrality about this. In fact, it had better be neutral about this from the outset, so that it can actually have a standpoint from which it might confirm (or disconfirm) your belief.

GOLDMAN, continued: So what is going on when people have a perceptual‑seeming episode (whether during actual perception or during imagery)? You point out, in connection with the Shepard, Kosslyn, and Pylyshyn debate, that cogscientists would never rely on Ss’ reports to try to settle that. I reply: That is certainly true! But I would never claim, and have never claimed, that scientists rely on all aspects or all details of what their Ss might say. This is explicitly addressed in my “Science, Publicity, and Consc” (SPC) paper on p. 544, the last page of the article. “Everyone nowadays agrees that introspection is an unreliable method for answering questions about the micro‑structure of cognition. For example, nobody expects subjects to report reliably whether their thinking involves the manipulation of sentences in a language of thought. But this leaves many other types of questions about which introspection could be reliable”. This point is made again in my JCS paper, “Can Science Know When You’re Conscious?” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 2000) Here is what I say on p. 4 of that article: “Cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists would not rely, after all, on their subjects’ reports about all psychological states or processes. When it comes to the nonconscious sphere of mental processing‑‑the great bulk of what transpires in the mind‑brain‑‑scientists would not dream of asking subjects for their opinions. Moreover, if subjects were to offer their views about what happens (at the micro‑level) when they parse a sentence or retrieve an episode from memory or reach for a cup, scientists would give no special credence to these views.”

So I fully acknowledge that for a wide range of questions, scientists do not allow their Ss’ introspections to settle anything. (Of course, usually the Ss have nothing to offer about what happens at the micro‑level.) But for another large range of questions, I claim, they do trust their Ss’ introspections. (A more precise specification of which questions are which I have not yet tried to give. Nor do I know of anybody who has tried to be precise on this matter.)

DENNETT REPLY interjected: Try me. I have. I have pointed out that they trust their S’s introspective reports to be fine accounts of how it seems to them‑‑with regard to every phenomenon in all modalities. And that this exhausts the utility of their S’s protocols, which they can then investigate by devising experiments that probe the underlying mechanisms. They “trust” their Ss only after they’ve discovered, independently, that their statements, interpreted as assertions about objective, 3rd-person—accessible processes going on in their brains, are reliable. In other words, they only “rely on” S’s statements when they have confirmed that they can be usefully interpreted as ordinary reliable reports of objective properties.

Ask yourself how things would stand if Pylyshyn’s most extreme line of mental imagery had turned out to be true (more than the barest logical possibility, I’m sure you would agree—he was not insane or incoherent to put forward his criticisms). In that case, I submit, everyone would agree that the agnosticism of heterophenomenology had paid off big time; people turn out to be deeply wrong about what they are doing. They think they are manipulating mental images with such and such features when in fact all that is happening in them is X. The fact that it sure seems to them that they are manipulating mental images would then have to be explained by showing how they are caused to have these heartfelt convictions in spite of their now demonstrated falsehood. Now if that was never a possible outcome of the research, what on earth could Pylyshyn have thought he was doing? For that matter, what could Kosslyn have thought he was doing?

GOLDMAN continued: In any case, the main point is that I of course agree that not everything a subject might say, in an introspective spirit, would be regarded as scientific gospel. So some of the things you say about conflicts between scientific practice and my reconstruction of it don’t work.

DENNETT REPLY: I didn’t say you did claim that they held that everything is regarded as scientific gospel. I said that you claimed that cognitive scientists aren’t systematically agnostic. But they are, systematically, so systematically that they don’t even both mentioning it, in all the cases I cite in this passage where I discuss your claim.

The proper way to criticize my view is to develop an independent case for “real seeming.” A number of people have tried. Nobody has yet succeeded. See, e.g., the essays in the Phil Topics issue of 1994, and my response, “Get Real”. But beyond establishing this as a philosophical point, there is the obligation to show that cognitive science has been (or should be) honoring it. When you can show experiments that get misinterpreted, or can’t be analyzed, or would never be dreamt up, by people committed to heterophenomenology, then you can claim that I am mistaken in claiming that heterophenomenology both is, and should be, agnostic.

GOLDMAN, next response: I agree that one of the key issues is whether there is anything more to visual seeming (e.g.) than belief. At the risk of repeating what others have said (possibly ad nauseum, from your point of you), this just seems like the obvious, straightforward interpretation of what goes on in, e.g., the blindsight patient. The patient doesn’t tell his physician that he doesn’t believe that there are any objects of such-and-such type in the vicinity (in the area of his scotoma). He says that he doesn’t see anything in that vicinity [expressing, not reporting his belief that he doesn’t see anything in that vicinity; see CE, pp. 305–6–DCD]. We might even arrange for there to be a case where he does have beliefs about the target properties—as a result of somebody else telling him about such properties. But he’ll still say that he doesn’t see anything there. And the standard, default, entry-level reaction of the cognitive scientist is to trust that report, to conclude that S really doesn’t see anything there. Of course, the scientist might be a little more cautious, since, among other things, the S might be confabulating, or neglecting. But the reason blindsight is an interesting and challenging phenomenon, a phenomenon related to vision, is because it’s an absence of seeing. How do we know about this absence? From the S. From the subjects’ reports. So we are basing our conclusions on a trust of the subjects’ reports.

DENNETT REPLY interjected: Not so. Anticipating this sort of response in my own discussion of blindsight in CE, I pointed out the problem of trust. See p. 326, where I show why “the phenomena of blindsight appear only when we treat subjects from the standpoint of heterophenomenology” and particularly point to how the phenomenon would evaporate if we concluded that subjects were malingering, or suffering from hysterical blindness. Heterophenomenology is tailor made for dealing with blindsight.

Again, in the deja vu case, it doesn’t capture the phenomenon well to describe it as a belief that one experienced a similar thing in the past. Rather, it’s a phenomenon in which it feels like one experienced such a thing in the past; or one has a seeming memory of such a thing. One might not believe that it happened at all, but one still feels as if it did. Again it’s a reliance on the S’s report of this phenomenon that makes the observer think that the S has really undergone this phenomenon at the time of report.

DENNETT REPLY interjected: To “feel as if it did”’ is to be strongly tempted to judge that it did. Of course the temptation can be overridden once one is no longer naive. And what is the feeling of temptation? Just noticing that one is so tempted to judge!

GOLDMAN next reply: I realize that a “doxological” (or representational) reductionist like yourself will want to reduce feeling states to dispositions-to-believe. A resistor like myself need not deny, of course, that feeling states do have a tendency to produce beliefs. The question is whether there are “categorical” features of feeling states in virtue of which they have that tendency, or whether they are just pure doxological tendency and nothing else. I find the former view more compelling, and don’t think that representational reductionism will work across the board. But this is another big issue (admittedly one that is intimately tied to the issue at hand).

DENNETT REPLY: Fine. And isn’t it nice that heterophenomenology can proceed with all of its research agenda without our having to settle anything about this “big issue” first! If you’re right, the “categorical” features will eventually be confirmed to be important by some as yet unimagined test. (Or if, as I gather your colleague David Chalmers holds, no empirical or “behavioral” test could shed any light on this important but elusive sort of feature, I guess it will have to be some philosophical argument alone that settles the issue. Seems unlikely in the extreme to me.) In the meantime, a 3rd-person science of consciousness can proceed apace. That’s what is so good about its neutrality.

GOLDMAN: One last question about “neutrality”. In your discussion of blindsight, do you agree that scientists give prima facie credence to a subject who claims to have no sight in a certain area? You stress that they do not uncritically trust these subjects. They want to check to see if there is neurological damage, and they want to rule out the possibility of “hysterical blindness”. But don’t they give some prima facie credence to the subject’s report? Or do you deny this? If you agree that they do this, the question arises as to whether this is “neutrality”, or agnosticism. I think not. Most epistemologists would agree that all of our sources of belief or justification are subject to correction from other sources. We don’t trust vision uncritically, or memory, etc. But to say this is not to say that we are “agnostic” toward vision or memory. By giving prima facie credibility to each of these sources, we are doing the most that we ever do to any one source (or any one deliverance of a particular source). I would argue that the same holds here. Although the scientist does not uncritically trust a S’s introspection (and there’s an additional factor here—the S’s report might not stem from introspection at all), he does give it prima facie trust. And that is very far from agnosticism. So if heterophenomenology ascribes true agnosticism to scientists, as you claim it does, then it doesn’t get matters right.

DENNETT REPLY: As I try to make clear in CE, in the section entitled “The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist,” (pp. 82–3, on “Feenoman”) heterophenomenology is NOT the NORMAL interpersonal relationship with which we treat others’ beliefs—with its presumption of truth (marked by the willingness of the interlocutor to argue against it, to present any evidence believed to run counter, etc.). That is also true of anthropologists’ relationships with their subjects when investigating such things as their religion. Actually, it extends quite far—when the native informants are telling the anthropologists about, say, their knowledge of the healing powers of the local plants, the anthropologists’ first concern is to get the lore, true or false—something to be investigated further later. Ditto for heterophenomenology: get the lore, as neutrally and sympathetically as possible. That is a kind of agnosticism, differing in the ways I detail on pp. 82–3 from the normal interpersonal stance, but it is the normal researcher/subject relationship when studying consciousness with the help of S’s protocols. If it doesn’t fit your (or a dictionary’s, or the majority of epistemologists’) definition of agnosticism perfectly, I have at least made clear just what kind of agnosticism it is, and why it is the way it is.

As for blindsight, do the researchers give some prima facie credence to the reports? Of course—otherwise they wouldn’t even consider investigating them. As I say, their attitude is to take what subjects say as seriously as possible—a policy that is entirely consistent with a kind of agnosticism, of course. The old introspectionism failed precisely because it attempted, unwisely, to give subjects more authority than they can handle; as the years rolled on, more cautious and savvy researchers developed the methodology I have dubbed heterophenomenology. They crafted a maximally objective, controlled way to turn verbal reports (and interpreted button-pushes, etc., etc.) into legitimate data for science. All I have done is to get persnickety about the rationale of this entirely uncontroversial and ubiquitous methodology, and point out how and why it is what it is—and then I’ve given it an unwieldy name. So when, in my forthcoming Cognition essay, in the special issue on the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, I point out that the hundreds of experiments discussed in the various pieces in that issue all conform to heterophenomenology, the editors and referees nod in agreement. Of course. It’s just science, after all. And it does study consciousness. Obviously—unless you believe that the “easy” problems of consciousness are not about consciousness at all.

Now I have challenged David Chalmers to name a single experiment (in good repute) which in any way violates or transcends the heterophenomenological method. So far, he has not responded to my challenge. My challenge to you is somewhat different: to show that I misdescribe the standard methodology of cognitive science when I say it adopts the neutrality of heterophenomenology.