Phenom Cogn Sci (2007) 6:99–106
DOI 10.1007/s11097-006-9026-y
Dennett on seeming
Taylor Carman
Published online: 14 November 2006
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2006
Abstract Dennett’s eliminativist theory of consciousness rests on an implausible
reduction of sensory seeming to cognitive judgment. The “heterophenomenological”
testimony to which he appeals in urging that reduction poses no threat to
phenomenology, but merely demonstrates the conceptual indeterminacy of smallscale sensory appearances. Phenomenological description is difficult, but the
difficulty does not warrant Dennett’s neo-Cartesian claim that there is no such thing
as seeming at all as distinct from judging.
Key words phenomenology . Dennett . heterophenomenology
Phenomenology is, in a loose sense, the study of how things seem. Yet how things
seem is bound up in deep and complex ways with how they are. It is natural to
suppose that any knowledge we have of how things are must be based on or
mediated by how they seem. But this is not obvious. For seeming presupposes being,
and in two ways. On the one hand, seeming is often, if not always, precisely, a
seeming to be; to understand a seeming as a seeming is to understand it in relation to
an actual or possible being. On the other hand, seemings are beings; whether they
turn out to be objects or properties or events or relations, they are in any case not
nothing.
Or so it seems to me. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett (1991) argues, on the
contrary, that there is no distinction to be drawn between how things seem to us and
how we think they seem. His “heterophenomenological” approach to consciousness
thus involves the systematic substitution of direct first-person observations of
experience itself with overt first-person reports about experience, which can
themselves then safely be regarded as publicly available behavioral data. Hetero-
T. Carman (*)
Department of Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University,
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
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T. Carman
phenomenology has both methodological and ontological implications. On the one
hand, it discourages psychologists and cognitive scientists from simply introspecting
and describing their own experiences and urges them instead to attend to verbal
reports of subjects presumably undergoing various sorts of experiences. On the other
hand, more ambitiously, Dennett’s approach urges us to abandon the very idea that
there is a difference between seemings and judgings. His “Multiple Drafts model” of
consciousness, that is, amounts to a “first-person operationalism, for it brusquely
denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of
the subject’s belief in that consciousness” (Dennett 1991: 132).
Dennett’s view is what was once upon a time called “rationalism,” then
“intellectualism,” then “cognitivism.” The term “intellectualism” was common in
the psychological literature a century ago, though its meaning varied. William James
identifies intellectualism with the Kantian thesis that sensations exist but “are
combined by activity of the Thinking Principle” (James 1950: II, 27; cf. 218–19).
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, often restricts the term to the more radical idea, which
Descartes and Dennett share, that sensation just is a kind of thought; that perception
is cognitive “all the way down.” Like Descartes, that is, intellectualists and
cognitivists want to assimilate all mental phenomena to thinking, above all believing
and inferring. In Principles of Philosophy, for example, Descartes defines “thought”
(cogitationis) as “everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far
as we have awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here not merely with
understanding, willing and imagining, but also with sensory awareness” (Descartes
1984: 195). But whereas Descartes’s equation between sensory awareness and
thought arguably just amounts to a stipulative definition of the term cogitationis,
Dennett seems to maintain that conscious states are themselves constituted by the
subject’s beliefs or judgments about them.
Yet if experiences are constituted by our judgments about them, then those
judgments must be either false or infallible. They will be false whenever they
purport to be about an experience not constituted by a judgment, for the theory
tells us there are no such things, and they will be incorrigible inasmuch as they in
fact turn out to be about themselves, which renders them self-validating, hence
infallible. On Dennett’s theory, then, judgments about experience must either fail
to refer, and thus be false, or refer to themselves, and thus be self-certifying. In
any event, for Dennett, judgments about experience cannot be about experience in
the robust sense of there being such a thing as experience distinct from our
judgments about it.
Dennett is often criticized for denying the existence of consciousness, and he has
often denied denying it. Disagreement of this sort can arise, it seems to me, only
because his view equivocates between on the one hand a subtle and plausible
challenge to a cluster of traditional assumptions about consciousness, and on the other
hand a boldly counterintuitive conjecture that challenges not just expert opinion but
also common sense, indeed manifest appearance (assuming there is such a thing). As
Dennett himself says, “I will soon be mounting radical challenges to everyday
thinking,” for his theory “is initially deeply counterintuitive” (Dennett 1991: 45, 17).
More precisely, when his imagined interlocutor objects that “there seems to be” more
to phenomenology than mere judgments about how things are, Dennett replies,
“Exactly! There seems to be phenomenology....But it does not follow from this
Dennett on seeming
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undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology” (Dennett
1991: 366). Finally, referring to the various labels philosophers have attached to the
phenomenal qualities of experience (“raw feels,” “sensa,” “qualia”) Dennett writes,
“In the previous chapter I seemed to be denying that there are any such properties,
and for once what seems so is so. I am denying that there are any such properties.
But...I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be qualia” (Dennett 1991: 372).
What does it mean to deny “that there are any such properties?” Dennett’s denial
of the reality of qualia, it seems to me, equivocates between a weaker and a stronger
pair of assertions. The weaker pair are (in my words): (1) that the qualitative aspects
of experience are neither discrete objects internal to the mind nor fully determinate
properties of consciousness observable and describable in terms comparable to those
in which we observe and describe external objects and their properties; and (2) that
there is no sharp boundary, only a gradual difference, between the qualitative aspects
of experience and the propositional contents of attitudes such as belief or judgment.
These are by no means trivial claims. But although they depart from traditional
philosophical and psychological orthodoxy, I want to suggest, they pose no threat to
phenomenology. They certainly imply nothing like eliminativism with respect to
phenomenal consciousness itself. At best, they remind us to resist the temptation to
assimilate our understanding of experience to our understanding of the world itself
and its objective features.
Now compare those two weaker claims with the following stronger claims (again
in my words): (3) that people often suppose that conscious experience has qualitative
features of its own, distinct from the qualities of the objects of our awareness – but they
are mistaken, for there are no such qualities; and (4) that people suppose that things are
given in perception and really seem a certain way, as distinct from and often as the
basis of their judgments about them – but again they are mistaken, for perception is
itself just a form of thought or judgment. Does Dennett give us any reason to believe
theses (3) and (4), over and beyond (1) and (2)?
As readers of Consciousness Explained will recall, experiments conducted by
Paul Kolers, prompted by questions from Nelson Goodman, show that subjects who
are shown a red spot, followed by a displaced green spot, followed by another red
spot in the original location, report seeing one spot rapidly moving back and forth
and changing color about halfway between the two points (Kolers and von Grünau
1976). How, Goodman reasonably asks, are the subjects able “to fill in the spot at the
intervening place–times along a path running from the first to the second flash before
that second flash occurs?” (Goodman 1978: 73; Dennett 1991: 114ff). Dennett
considers two hypotheses: either we concoct false memories of having seen the spot
change color, though in fact we had no immediate sensory awareness of the change,
or we really do have a genuine, albeit delayed, sensory awareness of the light
moving continuously and changing color.
Dennett’s thesis is that it is impossible in principle to decide between these two
hypotheses. It’s not just that we lack sufficient data to determine which one is true,
but rather that there is no empirical difference between the two descriptions. The
intuition that one must be correct to the exclusion of the other, he thinks, is part of
the crippling legacy of the notion of a “cartesian theater,” a single discrete place in
the mind or brain where consciousness finally happens, subsequent to its physical
causes and preceding its physical effects. The Multiple Drafts model, by contrast,
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deliberately blurs the line between putative events of consciousness and the various
cognitive attitudes we ordinarily regard as higher-order processes responding to, but
distinct from, phenomenal awareness. There is no difference, he thinks, between
how things seem to us and how we think they seem. He concedes that it seems to us
as if there is a difference between what we might call real seemings and merely
apparent seemings, but this seeming is itself no more a real seeming than any other,
prior to and independent of our judgment; it is instead just our (poor) judgment
concerning what we (wrongly) take to be the purity and plenitude of phenomenal
consciousness, distinct from all our psychological and folk-psychological judgments
about it. “There seem to be qualia, because...it seems that what is in here can’t just
be the judgments we make when things seem colored to us” (Dennett 1991: 372).
The conclusion Dennett wants to draw, then, is that there is no perceptual or
sensory seeming at all, distinct from the conceptual contents of judgments we make
about how things seem to us. There is no distinction to be drawn, he thinks, between
how things seem to us, and how we judge that they seem; seemings and judgings
collapse into a single cognitive effect:
Consider how natural is the phrase ‘I judged it to be so, because that’s the way
it seemed to me.’ Here we are encouraged to think of two distinct states or
events: the seeming-a-certain-way and a subsequent (and consequent) judgingthat-it-is-that-way....There must be ‘evidence presented’ somewhere, if only in a
Stalinesque show trail, so that the judgment can be caused by or grounded in
that evidence.
Some people presume that this intuition is supported by phenomenology. They are
under the impression that they actually observe themselves judging things to be
such as a result of those things seeming to them to be such. No one has ever
observed any such thing ‘in their phenomenology’ because such a fact about
causation would be unobservable (as Hume noted long ago). (Dennett 1991: 133)
It is worth pointing out that Dennett’s parenthetical appeal to Hume here is
misleading. Hume insisted on the unobservability of causal necessity, not mere
causal regularity. I can see the movement of the eight ball “constantly conjoined”
with the impact of the cue ball; what I cannot see is the impact of the cue ball
making the eight ball move. So too, I can observe, just as Hume took himself to have
observed, perceptions conjoined with but not necessitating judgments.
What about the intellectualist thesis itself, namely, that perceptual content is
constituted by acts of thought or judgment? Merleau-Ponty seems almost to have
had a premonition of Dennett’s view in Phenomenology of Perception when he
criticizes intellectualism for in effect obliterating the phenomenon it purports to
analyze. Intellectualist accounts of perception, he argues, fail to acknowledge the
embodiment and environmental situatedness of experience, reducing perceptual
content to the abstract, free-floating judgments of a disembodied subject:
Perception is thus thought about perceiving. Its incarnation furnishes no
positive characteristic that has to be accounted for, and its haecceity is simply
its own ignorance of itself. Reflective analysis becomes a purely regressive
doctrine, according to which every perception is just confused intellection,
every determination a negation. It thus does away with all problems except one:
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that of its own beginning. The finitude of a perception, which gives me, as
Spinoza put it, ‘conclusions without premises’, the inherence of consciousness
in a point of view, all this reduces to my ignorance of myself, to my negative
power of not reflecting. But that ignorance, how is it itself possible? (MerleauPonty [1945] 2002: 44)
Intellectualist accounts of perception like Dennett’s, not only rely on implausible
phenomenologies, but lapse into incoherence by offering a theory of something the
existence of which the theory itself cannot acknowledge. Yet if sensory awareness is
just ignorance or illusion, it must at least be the kind of ignorance or illusion that a
theory of sensory awareness is obliged to recognize and describe.
Does Dennett make a convincing case for the intellectualist position? It is not
hard to see how the two weaker claims, (1) and (2), gain momentum from what he
says. There are often no good answers to questions about the precise qualities of our
perceptual experience. How much bigger does the moon look on the horizon than at
its zenith? By how much do the Müller-Lyer lines differ in length? At what angle do
the lines in Zöllner’s illusion appear to diverge? Which object do you see just inside
the outer boundary of your visual field? What does the edge of your visual field look
like? And of course we do sometimes draw a merely verbal distinction between how
things seem and how we judge them to be. To say that the price of something
“seems” high to us is often just to say that we judge it to be high, and it can indeed
be pseudoexplanatory to say that we judge it that way because that’s how it strikes
us. It is also clear that our beliefs trickle down and color our perceptual experience,
just as our perceptual experience reaches up and shapes our beliefs. But common
sense knows this. Squeamish eaters are a reminder that the taste of food is highly
sensitive to what you think you are ingesting, just as we all know that pain is made
more intense by fear and the expectation of injury. Eagerly expecting to see your
friend in the airport can produce multiple false sightings, since every remotely
resembling physical trait tends to leap out and “catch your eye.” So too, a language
will look and sound very different to you depending on whether or not you
understand it: foreign speech sounds like a continuous stream of noises; intelligible
speech sounds like a series of discrete words.
What about Dennett’s more radical claims, (3) and (4)? What, specifically, does
the phi movement in Kolers’s experiment tell us about the reality of phenomenal
consciousness and its distinctness from judgment in general? Dennett may be right
that there is nothing to choose between a priori in the two claims in this case: on the
one hand, that the subjects literally see the spot seeming to move and change
gradually from red to green by “filling in” the missing stages in its journey, after
which the doctored evidence reaches consciousness intact; and on the other hand,
that they instead concoct false judgments and memories of having seen its
continuous transition, though in fact they did not. But can Dennett plausibly extend
his skepticism beyond this special case? Two points are worth noting.
First, it is worth remembering that these experiments involve perceptions (or
misperceptions) occurring on a scale of only fractions of a second. If we turn our
attention to a wider temporal framework, it becomes much harder to swallow the
idea that there is no difference in principle between immediate sense experiences and
memories or judgments. Even if our present sensory awareness blurs gradually into a
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retention of the immediate past, it does not follow that there is no difference at all
between perceptual experience and processes such as memory or judgment. Why
should we generalize ambiguities on the micro scale to the macro perceptual world
in which we readily distinguish such psychological operations? As Merleau-Ponty
says, “Ordinary experience draws a clear distinction between sense experience and
judgment.” However, “This distinction disappears in intellectualism, because
judgment is everywhere pure sensation is not, which is to say everywhere. The
testimony of phenomena will therefore everywhere be impugned” (Merleau-Ponty
[1945] 2002: 39). Hasty generalizations from microstructures and a contempt for the
phenomena are as ill advised in phenomenology as they are in physics, and we have no
more reason to abandon the distinction between perception and judgment in normal
cases in deference to isolated experimental effects than Sir Arthur Eddington had to
infer from the vast stretches of empty space between atoms that his desk was not a
perfectly solid object. Solid oak desks are solid physical objects, and the proportion of
intervening space at the atomic level is irrelevant to that fact.
Second, conversely, if the phi phenomena in Kolers’s experiment seem to
undermine any sharp distinction between immediate sensory awareness and shortterm memory and judgment, surely the conclusion to draw is that such
commonsense psychological categories, which figure so prominently in everyday
life, fail to apply in any obvious way on a very small scale and in highly artificial
experimental conditions. This might sound like Dennett’s own conclusion, namely,
that common sense is a notoriously unreliable guide when we set out to construct a
sound scientific theory of consciousness. But my point is different. It is not that the
results of such experiments reveal for the first time the real facts about
consciousness, rendering the categories of our ordinary understanding obsolete.
Rather, they serve to point up qualitative indeterminacies that specify lower
spatiotemporal thresholds beneath which some ordinary concepts pertaining to
perception fail to get a grip. That such concepts have only a limited range of
application is hardly surprising.
If we are unable to choose between the two apparently conflicting hypotheses in
the case of perceptions of very quickly flashing spots of light, then, it is not because
they are equally good when extended to the general case, as Dennett seems to
suggest, but because they are equally bad. Neither hypothesis seems particularly
plausible, even in the experiment as Dennett describes it. On the one hand, to say
that the subjects had distinct visual sensations of a red spot appearing, moving to one
side, turning green at a single discrete instant at a constant rate at every point on its
path, reversing direction, moving back, instantaneously turning red again perfectly
gradually, then disappearing, would obviously be to overstate their visual acuity. On
the other hand, to deny that the subjects saw any continuity, movement, or color
change at all is implausible, and it would be absurd to suggest that no one ever really
sees continuity, movement, or color change in phi phenomena. To bite that bullet
would surely be to deny the phenomenon you’re pretending to explain.
Phi movement occurring in an isolated stimulus within a fraction of a second is an
interesting effect, then, but I think it reveals nothing very important about the
application of our ordinary concepts of perception, memory, and judgment under
normal conditions; at best, it points up a kind of boundary condition for the
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application of those concepts. Far from showing that there is no difference in general
between seeing and judging, Kolers’s experiment shows only that our ordinary
notions of seeing and judging break down with appearances on a very small scale.
An interesting result, but hardly a reason to deny the existence of qualitative sensory
experience as distinct from judgment wholesale, as Dennett does. Denying that there
is any distinction at all between phenomenal seemings and cognitive judgings is a
drastic conclusion to draw from the evidence. We should not infer from a few
ambiguous cases in highly artificial conditions that there is never a difference
between how things seem to me and how I judge them to be, or indeed how I judge
them to seem, as if those distinctions were just conceptual or verbal confusions, like
the distinction between pain and the feeling of pain.
What is especially striking about Dennett’s proclaimed “disqualification of
qualia,” however, is his admission that “There seems to be phenomenology.” This
apparent concession sounds conciliatory at first blush: “I wholeheartedly agree that
there seem to be qualia,” he says (Dennett 1991: 366, 372). But in fact it is no
concession at all to our ordinary understanding of perceptual seeming, and his
agreement with his phenomenological interlocutor is not as wholehearted as it
sounds. For it sounds superficially as if Dennett is admitting that, when it comes to
the seeming of seeming, in this case at least, we have a genuine nonjudgmental
seeming on our hands, a “real” seeming. But this is not what he means. He means
only that we are all initially prone to judge that things really seem to us a certain
way, independent of our judgment. What he is acknowledging is not a real seeming
at all, but rather what he regards as a quasitheoretical intuition (not a Kantian kind of
intuition, but an “intuition” in the philosopher’s sense of a naive judgment). What he
grants the phenomenologist, in short, is not the phenomena, only reflective
judgments about the phenomena.
But this begs the question, for whether there can be a difference between our
judgments about our experience and that experience itself is precisely what is at
issue between Dennett and phenomenology, and for that matter between Dennett and
common sense. Dennett recognizes no difference between perceptual phenomena
and what we report about them upon reflection. This is the methodological point of
heterophenomenology, which regards experiential reports as just so much behavioral
evidence to add to the mix of empirical evidence for any theory of consciousness.
Dennett chides “the Husserlian school(s) of Phenomenology” for the method of
epoché, or “bracketing,” which, he says, “excuses the investigator from all inquiry,
speculative or otherwise, into the underlying mechanisms” of consciousness
(Dennett 1998: 235). As a matter of historical record, most of the major
representatives of that movement rejected the epoché as a phenomenologically
unmotivated dogma, and what Dennett is really chiding them for is the fact that they
all took the perceptual phenomena seriously, as distinct from the judgments we form
about them on reflection.
I believe Dennett ignores that distinction at his peril. Indeed, renouncing the
dogma of incorrigibility, as Dennett does, means recognizing, as phenomenologists
have, the various ways in which we can be, and often are, mistaken in our judgments
concerning the structures and qualities of our own experience. Indeed, we can know
we are mistaken precisely because such judgments are possible. Good phenome-
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nology, like good observation and description of any kind, captures appearances
fresh and pulls our attention away from long-standing theoretical prejudices and the
ingrained reflective habits of common sense. Good phenomenology, if there is to be
such a thing, must be committed to getting it right about how things actually show
up for us, prior to our reflecting and theorizing about them.
References
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Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.
James, W. [1890] (1950). The principles of pscyhology, vol 2. Dover: Henry Holt.
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