Skepticism About Phenomenology

One often finds, in certain M&E circles, a distrust of phenomenology. Or, perhaps, one might say it is a distrust of phenomenology as a study of “how things feel to us” and, by extension, a distrust of the philosophical field called phenomenology. The distrust goes something like this: It is important, when talking about the mind, to get the phenomenology right. But the phenomenology need not influence our view of the mind very much: if we come to a theory independently, and the theory turns out to be out of touch with experience, all that is needed is an added error theory, or debunking strategy, to explain why we systematically make mistakes.

One finds such a strategy, for example, in attacks on free will and, especially, in attacks on conscious will, such as that developed by Daniel Wegner. Very roughly, on this account our decisions are not conscious processes at all: they are sub-personal processes. The same processes that produce our decisions also produce our consciousness of making those decisions. So we rank our desires and motives without conscious input, and then take responsibility for doing all the work consciously, but this is an illusion, a little trick of biology. The phenomenology is important only insofar as we need to get it right in order to explain it away. A good deal of criticism of Wegner, in fact, strikes me as geared primarily not toward arguing against his view that conscious will is an illusion, but rather toward showing that he gets the phenomenology wrong. For those who make such arguments, then, the real problem isn’t that Wegner doesn’t take phenomenology seriously enough; it’s that he hasn’t gotten it right enough to eliminate it. The phenomenology is not important in itself.

And this approach seems reasonable. After all, experience is highly misleading. People often misremember things, for example, and such misrememberings may arise as a result of distorting psychological features of which the agent is not aware. We do not seem to be the best judges of our own, first-personal mental states; our friends, observing us from outside, can often understand why we act in certain ways much better than we can. And, certainly, it is possible to simply be wrong because our neuro-psychological structures are not designed to get things right. Wegner, for example, points to experiments that show structural tendencies to take responsibility for certain events over which, in fact, the subject had no control. So, the argument might go, if we cannot trust our experience to track our true responsibility conditions, we should recognize that the experience of will and responsibility is a sham. The distrust leads to the following premise: we can engage in the scientific study of consciousness without taking phenomenology into account.

This kind of distrust, however, misses the point of phenomenology, which is to study the essences and meanings of mental acts. To see phenomenology as competing with neuroscience or cognitive science is an elementary mistake: phenomenology simply isn’t the sort of method that can provide factual information about physical events. What phenomenology does, rather, is clarify what it is that neuroscience and cognitive science are talking about when they talk about our mental states. Case in point: No phenomenological analysis of memory can help me figure out whether I am currently remembering, misremembering, or simply imagining a past event. And a phenomenological analysis of responsibility, or the phenomena involved in willing, is unlikely to establish whether or not I was the agent of a movement I experienced as mine. Indeed, clever experimental set-ups can throw the mechanisms by which we normally make such determinations out of whack, and phenomenological analysis cannot prevent that from happening.

But how, without phenomenology, would we know what it is we are throwing out of whack? What cognitive system is malfunctioning? In order to be able to determine, third-personally, whether a person is remembering, misremembering, or imagining, we must already know what remembering, misremembering, and imagining are. In order to know that, in a particular instance, a person is mistakenly attributing conscious will to herself, we must know what it is to consciously will something. No scientific approach can tell us what mechanisms are involved in memory, or in willing, or in imagination without appealing to what we already know about remembering, willing, or imagining. The point of phenomenology is precisely to pin down what this appeal is an appeal to. Without that initial knowledge, we could have no means of studying mental processes; we could, at best, study physical occurrences that would explain nothing about our psychology: no amount of tinkering with the brain can tell us what neural processes are involved in remembering if we do not already have some grasp on what remembering is. A scientific study of consciousness, thus, cannot dispose with phenomenology, or leave discussion of how its findings fit (or don’t fit) with phenomenology for last. The phenomenology—explicitly or implicitly—has to come first.