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subject of experience, and what it's like to be one, is not explained by any materialist
account I know of.
But now, the qualophobe argues, moving on to strategy (2), if you really aren't prejudging
the metaphysical issue in an a prioristic way, then the question comes down to which
theory the qualophile's or the qualophobe's better meets our general epistemological
norms for theories. Qualia, she continues, like all mental states, are posited as part of a
theory,  folk psychology. Like all theoretical entities, we have reason to believe in them
only to the extent that they do explanatory work. If we can find a more elegant,
parsimonious way to do the explanatory work qualia do, but without the problems they
cause, then of course we should eliminate qualia from our ontology. In fact,
psychological explanations can get along very well without adverting to qualia.
Functional and neurophysiological processes can take us from stimuli, through the
various levels of cognitive processing, all the way to behavior. What theoretical function
then do qualia perform? Without sufficient reason to believe in qualia, the rational default
is to eliminate them.
If qualia, or the qualitative characters of conscious experiences, entered the game only as
theoretical posits, then of course they would be more trouble than they're worth. When
people speak of mental states as theoretical entities, part of the explanatory machinery of
folk psychology, they have in mind a pre-theoretical delineation of the data relative to
which these theoretical entities are expected to do their explanatory work. The data are
usually presumed to be behavioral responses to stimuli. We want to know why English
speakers sort wave forms into two categories grammatical and ungrammatical and
posit an internal representation of the grammar of English to explain this.4 The  posit
here is the internal representation, not the sorting behavior itself.
My response to the second strategy, then, is to challenge the status of theoretical posit to
which conscious experience is relegated, instead treating it as a basic datum that itself
requires explanation. No one ever proposes to doubt that human beings behave in various
ways that require explanation, though of course there are quarrels within psychology over
the validity of particular bits of behavioral data. Any theory that denied human linguistic
behavior to start with wouldn't be worthy of even superficial consideration. Sure, you can
deny that the behavior is sufficiently systematic to warrant positing internally represented
rules, but you can't deny that people talk to and understand each other. This isn't a logical
truth, and of course Descartes's demon could be invoked to doubt it, but it's still the data
you have to begin with and you can't reasonably deny.5
It's precisely this question of what the data are that Dennett attempts to address with his
 heterophenomenological method, and with this we slide gracefully into strategy (3). He
claims that the theory of consciousness ought to be constrained by everything we are
tempted to say about our experience. The constraint isn't that there must turn out to be a
phenomenon that satisfies our intuitive descriptions, but rather that our theory of the
mind, taking what we say about our experience as data, must be capable of accounting for
why we say what we say. If we are compelled to describe our experience as consisting of
an internal, mental field of figment, then the correct theory ought to explain this
compulsion. As mentioned above, this is the point of examples like the Jell-O box: to
demonstrate how something could be one way though we are tempted to think of it quite
another way.
Though I don't think it is obvious that even if we adopt the heterophenomenological
method Dennett's account succeeds, I do think he has won the better part of the battle if
we accept this move from the outset. As he describes it, heterophenomenology is  a
method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most
private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological
scruples of science. As for the latter  scruples, they include, essentially,  insistence on
the third-person point of view (1991, 72).
end p.133
Now, you might well wonder how a phenomenon like subjective experience, with its
apparent privacy and ineffability, to which we seem to have access primarily from the
first-person point of view, is going to be done justice from the third-person point of view.
The answer is that it is the pronouncements we make about conscious, subjective
experience that are to be done justice, and these of course are readily available to the
third-person point of view. It is our statements, our verbalized and verbalizable
judgments, that constitute the data concerning experience which are to constrain the
construction of theory. Of course if these are your data, then conscious experiences
themselves, qualia, become legitimate only as explanatory posits. Once we see how to
account for the data without qualia, their legitimacy is undermined.
I maintain, however, that conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal
judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer. Of course
this means taking the first-person point of view seriously not, as the Cartesian
perspective of the bold qualophile demands, by treating it as a source of theoretical
hypotheses itself, but still as a legitimate source of data. I maintain, that is, that I don't
just say, or think (in the sense of verbalized judgment) that I am having an experience of
a certain sort right now, but I am having such an experience.
Anticipating just such a response, Dennett presents the following, instructive dialogue
between himself and the qualophile Otto:
otto: Look, I don't just say that there seems to be a pinkish glowing ring; there really does
seem to be a pinkish glowing ring! [He's here talking about the color spread phenomenon
depicted on the back of Dennett's book. The crucial point is that the pinkish glowing ring
is an illusion.]
dennett: I hasten to agree. . . You really mean it when you say there seems to be a pinkish
glowing ring.
otto: Look. I don't just mean it. I don't just think there seems to be a pinkish glowing ring;
there really seems to be a pinkish glowing ring!
dennett: Now you've done it. You've fallen in a trap, along with a lot of others. You seem
to think there's a difference between thinking (judging, deciding, being of the heartfelt
opinion that) something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you.
But there is no difference. There is no such phenomenon as really seeming over and
above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case.
(1991, 363 364, emphasis in original)
Of course, if Dennett is right that there is no difference of the sort that Otto is worried
about, then there really is nothing left about which to argue. But Dennett, at least in this
passage, isn't really arguing for the claim of no difference as much as he's asserting it.
He's basically saying that there are these judgments concerning what's going on around
us, and though we are tempted to endow some of them with the title  conscious, there is
no principled difference marked by the term. Well, that is the qualophobic position.
end p.134
But what is supposed to show that Otto is making a mistake,  fallen into a trap, as
Dennett puts it?
I think what's doing part of the work here is the unclarity over the relation between a
state's qualitative, phenomenal character and its representational content; in a sense, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]