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Nature's Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2013

David Roden*
Affiliation:
Open Universitydavid.roden@open.ac.uk

Abstract

Phenomenology is based on a doctrine of evidence that accords a crucial role to the human capacity to conceptualise or ‘intuit’ features of their experience. However, there are grounds for holding that some experiential entities to which phenomenologists are committed must be intuition-transcendent or ‘dark’. Examples of dark phenomenology include the very fine-grained perceptual discriminations which Thomas Metzinger calls ‘Raffman Qualia’ and, crucially, the structure of temporal awareness. It can be argued, on this basis, that phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e. ‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality: phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’. This does not mean we should abjure phenomenology. It implies, rather, that the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.). Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013

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References

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10 See, for example, Tieszen, ‘Gödel and the Intuition of Concepts’, 371–5.

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24 Where working memory is the cognitive ability to retain contents of experience for wider cognitive tasks such as reflection, categorization, planning and the production of verbal reports.

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31 An access relation is epistemically deficient if it is relatively uninformative about the nature of what it is accessed. It is informationally deficient if its content is indeterminate or coarse relative to the content of the state accessed.

32 This merits an epistemological aside: When considering phenomenology as a candidate for first philosophy, arguably, it is realism and not verificationism that is deflationary. First person verificationism assures intuitive closure since, then, there can be nothing given to the phenomenologist that is not conceptually accessible or describable in principle. Phenomenological realism – by contrast – implies that what the subject claims to experience should not be granted special epistemic authority since it is possible for us to have a very partial and incomplete grasp of its nature.

Real phenomenology – the states of mind and contents into which the discipline of phenomenology sinks its hooks – would then be as epistemically distant from us as any entity outside the head. This implies that post–Kantian attempts to parse reality as possible intersubjectivity or as the capacity of a thing to reveal different aspects in different experiences should be rejected. This model requires that there is a principled difference between an actual presentation of a thing and its possible presentation. The table is a real physical object insofar as no experience of it is exhaustive. It is always possible for the table to reveal further aspects in further experiences. Even though the table is never given completely, there is something about the table that is given in each case: namely the visible, audible or tactile aspect that it reveals to a subject.

However, phenomenological realism entails that the phenomenology of the visible table can be as epistemically removed from me as the deep structure of matter (and may be necessarily so, if, as I argue in Section 3, the phenomenology of subjective time is inherently dark). Thus I do not become apprised of the nature of its visible aspect of the table merely by seeing the table. The post–Kantian equation of reality with possible givenness is epistemically useless if all givenness is impossible.

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34 Ibid., 82.

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43 Thanks to Jon Appleby for the Ussachevsky reference.

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