The Heterophenomenological Fallacy Part 1: Heterophenomenology Explained

I've written a lot about heterophenomenology (also known as "the third person perspective") and I'm going to write some more, so I decided to dedicate a post to explaining heterophenomenology in my own words.

Heterophenomenology is kind of like experimental psychology.  You get a simple random sample of college students (of course a simple random sample of human beings would be better, but more expensive) put them in some well-defined situation, and ask them what they are experiencing.

As a toy example, take the following experiment.  You tell the student to stand in front of a wall and hold a pencil vertically against the wall.  Tell the student to focus on the wall and slowly move the pencil closer to his face, between his eyes.  Ask him to describe what happens to the image of the pencil.  (Hint: in this situation, the student should be seeing double, and the two pencil images should diverge as the pencil moves closer to his face.)

So far this is all very straightforward.  The novelty of heterophenomenology is in how the theorist interprets the data gathered by the experiment.  According to heterophenomenology, the data gathered by the experiment is the report of the experience, not the experience itself.

In the case of the pencil, the data collected by the experiment is the fact that the student *reported* seeing double, not that the student *actually* saw double.  About whether the subject actually experienced what he reported experiencing, the theorist is meant to be agnostic, at least initially.  A successful explanation must account for the fact that the subject reported the experience, but not the fact that the subject actually had the experience.  In theory, the theorist is allowed to conclude that the experience report was accurate, if such a conclusion is warranted; but the theorist is not allowed to assume that the report was accurate.

Dennett compares heterophenomenology to anthropology.  The theorist is like an anthropologist interviewing a tribe of hunter gatherers about their system of mythology.  The anthropologist’s data is not the ghosts and goblins themselves, but rather the reports of the hunter gatherers about those ghosts and goblins.

In philosophical terms, the report of the experience is an explanandum, but the experience itself is not an explanandum.