The Heterophenomenological Fallacy, Part 2: Is Heterophenomenology Scientific?

At first, heterophenomenology sounds very clean and elegant, and most of all, scientific.  But is it really scientific?

For comparison, let's take a toy physics experiment that we can compare with our toy phenomenology experiment.  Let’s say I go outside with a basketball and throw it up in the air.  Before long, the basketball comes down.  Now I want to know: was the basketball’s return to earth some kind of happenstance?  Do basketballs always come back down, or do they sometimes just keep going up?

So I throw the basketball up ten more times, and each time, it comes back down.  I start to get excited; I seem to have stumbled on a Law of Nature, “When a person throws a basketball up, it always comes back down.”  (This is not a fundamental law, of course, but it is a law.)  I publish a paper with my findings.

Other scientists read my paper and get interested.  But they don’t just take my findings on faith: they either see if they can reproduce my results, or if they are busy and lazy, they hope that others will try to reproduce the results.  Ten scientists repeat my experiment, and they all get the same results: the basketball comes down every time.  Satisfied, The Scientific Community arrives at Consensus: when a person throws a basketball up, it really really must come back down.

Let’s look at the basketball story from the point of view of philosophy of science.  What is the explanandum?  Is the explanandum (A) “Ten experimentalists threw basketballs up in the air ten times, and each time the basketball came down” or (B) “Ten experimentalists *reported that* they threw basketballs up in the air ten times, and each time the basketballs came back down”?  I submit, Dear Reader, that it is A, not B.  The explanandum is the event, not the experimentalist’s report of the event.

What is true of basketballs is true of all real experiments in physics, chemistry and biology, those that are being performed today and all those that have been performed since the invention of Real Science.  Theorists try to explain the physical outcomes of experiments, not the reports of the experimentalists.