Concept
Heterophenomenology
Overview
In the thought of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how subjects see the world themselves, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Our knowledge of the human mind must, he thinks, be acquired by observing other people. How we are to observe other people's mental operations, or how interpret the signs of them without having learnt what the signs mean by knowledge of ourselves, he does not state. But it is clear to him that we can learn very little about the feelings, and nothing at all about the intellect, by self-observation.
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Close in meaning to Heterophenomenology; the term itself is not named.
It is these two characteristics, both connected with mnemic phenomena, that distinguish perceptions from the appearances of objects in places where there is no living being. Theoretically, though often not practically, we can, in our perception of an object, separate the part which is due to past experience from the part which proceeds without mnemic influences out of the character of the object. We may define as…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Heterophenomenology is.
But the study of pathogenic repressions and of other phenomena which have still to be mentioned compelled psychoanalysis to take the concept of the “unconscious” seriously. Psychoanalysis regarded everything mental as being in the first instance unconscious; the further quality of “consciousness” might also be present, or again it might be absent. This, of course, provoked a denial from the philosophers, for whom…
Sigmund Freud, The problem of lay-analyses
Close in meaning to Heterophenomenology; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Heterophenomenology
Related ideas
- Bracketing (phenomenology)
- Philosophy
- René Descartes
- Scientific method
- Consciousness
- Anthropology
- Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy)
- Phenomenology (philosophy)
- Daniel Dennett
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.