We have not so far in this six-part discussion taken up the discussions and debates concerning cognitive phenomenology. I've linked the paper below by Galen Strawson, but as I recall we did not read it together and discuss it. The last few days I've been exploring the current attention to cognitive phenomenology and the debates concerning it in two recent books entitled
Cognitive Phenomenology -- one written by Elijah Chudoff, the other a collection of papers edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague. The introduction to the latter is available in part in amazon.com's sample from the book and provides orientation to the issues in the history of the philosophy of mind leading to the concept of cognitive phenomenology, a term that Strawson introduced. So his paper "Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life" is a key work in this subject matter. It's available at academia.edu in whole, and I quote an extract from the first several pages below. I do wish that the four of us would all read this paper for the clarity it brings in critiqueing the ways in which presuppositional thinking and poorly defined terms afforded by our language (such as it is) have blocked our attempts here to understand one another. I've complained several times in the past about how Chalmers's phrase 'what it feels like' has been used again and again by philosophers of the analytic persuasion and also by most neuroscientific researchers in consciousness studies to short-circuit our understanding of the phenomenology of human experience. Here goes:
"Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life"
Galen Strawson
[FINAL DRAFT (minus Appendix) forthcoming in
Cognitive Phenomenology, ed. T. Bayne & M. Montague (Oxford University Press, 2011)
"I will now utter certain words which form a sentence: these words, for instance: Twice two are four. Now,when I say these words, you not only hear them--the words--you also understand what they mean. That is to say, something happens in your minds--some act of consciousness--over and above the hearing of the words, some act of consciousness which may be called the understanding of their meaning." G. E. Moore (1910-11: 57)
"… let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard Street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons at 712d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I loveflowers …" James Joyce
(1922: 642)
"It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality." Saul Bellow (1970: 228)
1 Introduction
In recent analytic philosophy, as opposed to the Phenomenological tradition in philosophy initiated by Brentano and Husserl,1 phenomenology has standardly been taken to be restricted to the study of sensory experiences, including mental images of certain sorts, and feelings, including mood feelings and emotional feelings. I’ll say that phenomenology so understood is confined to sense/feeling experience, or sense/feeling phenomenology, bringing under this heading all sensation-mood-emotion-image-feeling phenomena considered (so far as they can be) entirely independently of any cognitive mental phenomena. There’s a lot more to experience than sense/feeling experience. There’s also what I’ll call cognitive experience, or cognitive phenomenology. There’s meaning-experience,thought-experience, understanding-experience. There is, most generally, everything about experience that isn’t just a matter of sense/feeling experience as just defined. In this paper I’ll take ‘sense/feeling experience’ and ‘cognitive experience’ to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive terms (some think that there’s experience that falls under neither head). It may be that there are no pure cases of sense/feeling alone, or cognitive experience alone, but the distinction may be valid and useful for all that. In analytic philosophy there is considerable resistance to the idea that anything rightly called ‘cognitive experience’ or ‘cognitive phenomenology’ exists. This is remarkable for many reasons, one of which is that it’s doubtful that sense/feeling experience ever occurs without cognitive experience in the experience of an ordinary adult human being. Nor do the two things simply co-occur. They’re profoundly interwoven, although we can for purposes of philosophical analysis distinguish sense/feeling elements of experience sharply from cognitive elements of experience. I’m going to argue for the existence of cognitive experience or cognitive phenomenology, beginning with some assumptions and a few terminological remarks. The main action begins in §6.
2 Terminological preliminaries
In origin and full propriety, ‘phenomenology’ is the name of a theoretical discipline. Phenomenology is the general study, the -ology, of appearances, of the experiential character of experiences—the experiential or qualitative or what-it’s-likeness character that experiences have for those who have them as they have them. Recently the term has come to be used for its own subject matter, so that one can now say that phenomenology (original sense) is the study of phenomenology (new sense). This is less than ideal, but the innovation doesn’t do any great harm. (Something similar happened with ‘ontological’, which is standardly used where ‘ontic’ or ‘ontical’ is more appropriate.)2 I assume that experiences (perceptual experiences, conscious thoughts, and so on) are spatially located events, neural electrochemical goings-on that have as such—in having mass, charge, shape, size, and so on—a certain non-experiential character.3 This non-experiential character is of no concern to phenomenology, which restricts itself to the study of the experiential character of experiences considered just as such: considered without any reference to any part or aspect of the reality of the experiences other than the part or aspect of reality which consists in the existence of their experiential character. Phenomenology also puts aside ‘the world’, considered as that which experiences are typically experiences of.4
In this respect, Husserl’s slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst !’—‘Back to the things themselves!’— is very misleading. I’ll use the plural-lacking mass term ‘experience’ to refer to: that part or aspect of reality that consists in the existence of experiential character considered just as such and nothing else; and I’ll use the plural-accepting count-noun ‘experience(s)’ as I already have, to talk of experiences (plural) as things that we ordinarily take to have properties other than experiential-character properties, e.g. properties attributed by physics and neurophysiology. Experience, then, is the (experiential) what-it’s-likeness of experiences.5
Examples of experience? Basic examples will do—the experiential character of pain, tasting potatoes, seeing the colour blue, finding something funny. What are these things like? You know what they’re like from your own case. This answer, condemned by Wittgensteinians, is exactly right. It doesn’t matter if what it is like for you is qualitatively different from what it is like for me, just so long as it is like something for you, as of course it is.6
3 Real realism about experience
Phenomenology incorporates all-out realism about experience (experience is its whole subject matter). But by ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about experience.
The pleonasm would be unnecessary if a number of analytic philosophers hadn’t in the last eighty years or so tried, more or less covertly, to ‘reduce’ the experiential to the non-experiential, continuing to speak of the experiential in a seemingly realist way while holding that, really, only the non-experiential exists. A good way to convey what it is to be a real realist about experience is to say that it’s to continue to take colour experience or taste experience, say, or experience of pain, or of an itch, to be what one took it to be wholly unreflectively—what one knew it to be in having it—before one did any philosophy, e.g. when one was five.
However many new and surprising facts7 they learn about experience from scientists, real realists’ basic grasp—knowledge—of what experience is remains exactly the same as it was before they did any philosophy. It remains, in other words, entirely correct, grounded in the fact that to have experience at all is already to know what experience is, however little one reflects about it. I think this way of specifying what I mean by ‘experience’ is helpful because it guarantees that anyone who claims not to know what I mean is being disingenuous.8
When I say that experiences are neural goings-on, I’m not in any way denying the reality of experience as just defined. I’m assuming that materialism is true, for the purposes of this paper. I am, though, a real materialist, a realistic materialist, and a real materialist is someone who is fully realist (real-realist, five-year-old realist) about the thing whose reality is more certain than the reality of anything else—experience. I’m an ‘adductive’ materialist, not a reductive materialist. Adductive materialists don’t claim that experience is, in being wholly physical, anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be. They claim, rather, that the physical must be something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, if only because many of the wholly physical goings-on in the wholly
physical brain are experience, experience as defined above (experiential) what-it’s-likeness.
Many philosophers think that there’s a major puzzle in the existence of experience. But the appearance of a puzzle arises only given an assumption there is no reason to make. This is the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of the physical that gives us reason to think that it cannot itself be experiential. It’s not just that this assumption is false. There is in fact zero evidence for the existence of anything non-experiential in the universe. There never has been any evidence, and never will be. What we have instead is a wholly unsupported assumption about our capacity to know the nature of things (in particular the physical) which must be put severely in doubt by the fact that it seems to create this puzzle if by nothing else. One of the most important—revelatory—experiences a philosopher brought up in the Western tradition can have is to realize that this assumption has no respectable foundation. This experience is life-changing, philosophically, but it comes only to some—although the point is elementary. The fact that physics has no terms specifically for experiential phenomena (I’m putting aside the view that reference to conscious observers is essential in quantum mechanics) is not evidence in support of the view that experience doesn’t exist. It isn’t even evidence in support of the view that something non-experiential exists.9
4 Cognitive experience (cognitive phenomenology)
The fact that experience has irreducibly cognitive aspects in addition to sense/feeling aspects was perhaps never questioned throughout the history of philosophy until the advent of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century.10 It was only that curious and in many respects admirable academic culture (to which I belong) which gave rise to the view I want to dispute,
The Remarkable View
that the subject matter of phenomenology (the completely general study of the experiential character of experience) is nothing more than sense/feeling experience as characterized above. This view achieved such dominance that the phrase ‘qualitative character’, used to refer quite generally to the experiential character of experience, came to many to sound synonymous with ‘sense/feeling’. In this way the mistake was built into the words with which the question was discussed.11 We can put aside here the remarkable fact that the Remarkable View grew up alongside
The Astonishing View
that there’s actually no such thing as the experiential character of experience (no such thing as conscious experience, experiential what-it’s-likeness, as real realists understand it), from which it follows that there’s really no such thing as the discipline of phenomenology. And we can put aside
The Astonishing Fact
that the Astonishing View was for a considerable period of time the dominant view among a significant number who considered themselves, and were by some others considered, to be at the forefront of their subject, along with its bedfellow
The Truly Incredible Fact
that this was part of a movement one of whose openly stated aims— under various names, such as ‘behaviourism’ and ‘functionalism, and now, it seems, ‘strong representationalism’ — was to reduce the experiential to the non-experiential, i.e. to show that the experiential was, in some way, really wholly non-experiential.12
We can put aside the Astonishing and Truly Incredible Facts in order to focus on the Remarkable View: the view that the subject matter of phenomenology is nothing more than sense/feeling experience; the view, in other words, that one can in principle give an exhaustive account of all aspects of human experience, all aspects of the actual character that experience has for us as we have it from moment to moment and from day to day—everything about human lived experience, everything that our lives are to us and for us—purely by reference to sense/feeling experience.
It was because the Remarkable View was prevalent at the end of the last century that I adopted the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’, rather than simply ‘phenomenology’, when trying to describe what it is to experience oneself as a free agent, or as a ‘self’ in the sense of an inner mental presence distinct from the whole human being (Strawson 1986, 1997). The discussion of free will was ‘centrally concerned with what one might call the “general cognitive phenomenology” of freedom … with our beliefs, feelings, attitudes, practices, and ways of conceiving or thinking about the world, in so far as these involve the notion of freedom’ (1986: p. v, new edn. p. vi); the aspects of the sense of the self that were under consideration were ‘conceptual rather than affective: it is the cognitive phenomenology of the sense of the self that is fundamentally in question, i.e. the conceptual structure of the sense of the self, the structure of the sense of the self considered (as far as possible) independently of any emotional aspects that it may have’.13
These are wide uses of the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’ or ‘cognitive experience’. I want now to consider something more specific: the experience one has— one could call it ‘understanding-experience’ or ‘meaning-experience’14 — when (for example) one hears someone speak in a language one understands. I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive (or semantic) experience understood in this narrow sense.
5 Definition of ‘content’, ‘internal content’, ‘external content’
I say I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive experience. I could equally well say that I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive-experiential content as something that exists over above sense/feeling content. It may seem unwise to introduce another term at this stage, especially one as troublesome as ‘content’, but I think it will be helpful. The content of an experience, as I take the term, is absolutely everything that is experienced in the having of the experience, everything that is experientially registered in any way.15
It’s everything that the experience is an experience of, where ‘of’ is understood in the widest possible manner, and, in particular, in such a way that it covers everything that it is like to have the experience, experientially, in addition to whatever external objects the experience may have. So all experience, what-it’s-likeness, considered just as such, is mental content. When I look at a tree, the whole experiential being of my experience of the tree is a matter of the content of the experience, just as much as the tree is in being the thing in the world that my experience is an experience of. Suppose (temporarily and for purposes of argument) that sensation isn’t in itself intentional or representational in any way. It certainly doesn’t follow that sensation isn’t a matter of mental content. It is of course a matter of mental content: it’s ‘sensory content’. Mental content doesn’t have to be of anything other than itself in order to be mental content. All experiential what-it’s-likeness is phenomenological content, quite independently of whether or not it can be said to be intentional in any way.16
Consider a few of my philosophical ‘Twins’, my ‘Instant Twin’, my ‘Brain in a Vat Twin’, and my ‘Perfect Twin Earth Twin’.17 Our four courses of experience are very different, when it comes to the question what they are of, non-experientially speaking; they have in that sense very different contents. But there’s a no less fundamental sense in which they have identical content, simply because they are by hypothesis experientially-qualitatively identical: they’re of the same phenomenological-content type, although they are of course numerically distinct occurrences of content. May we say that they have different external content and identical internal content?Perhaps—but the internal/external content (or narrow/wide broad content) distinction is very unclear.18 This is partly because philosophers have thought too much about trees, mountains, natural kinds, and so on, when characterizing external content, and not enough about other equally concrete, equally worldly items like other people’s pains and colour experiences (or indeed their own pains and colour experiences).
We can certainly distinguish between phenomenological content and non-phenomenological content, but this distinction doesn’t line up neatly with the distinction between internal and external content. In this situation of unclarity, I propose to define ‘internal content’ as follows.
Internal content is concretely occurring phenomenological content. It’s concretely occurring experiential what-it’s-likeness considered just as such. The internal content of an experience is if you like the actual intrinsic phenomenological being of that experience.
What about external content? External content is every other sort of mental content. It not only includes trees, and so on; it can also include mental states, including phenomenological states.
Internal (phenomenological) content can itself be external content, for it is part of the world, and can be an object of thought. I can think about concretely occurring phenomenological content, yours or mine, for I can think about anything real.19
So we can consider internal content, as defined, both as internal content and as external content. We consider it simply as internal content when we consider it as immediately phenomenologically given. When it’s thought about (say), it’s also external content. The internal/external distinction remains in place; it’s robust as defined. For although external content can include internal content (although internal content can be external content), still the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having external content is never the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having internal content. . . . ."
. . . continues at
Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life
Best to read the whole paper at that link so that you can also read Strawson's footnotes, which are heavily substantive.
