The Heterophenomenological Fallacy, Part 3: Are the College Students Really Necessary?

To make my point clear, I will return to the story of the diverging pencils, and retell the story so that it is close as possible to the basketball story.  I will retell the basketball story, keeping all the details constant, swapping in the pencils experiment for the basketball experiment.

One day, I notice that pencils often produce diverging images when I hold them close to my eyes.  I decide to study the phenomenon more carefully.  I stand in front of a wall and hold a pencil vertically against the wall.  I focus on the wall and slowly move the pencil closer to my face, between my eyes.  Sure enough, the two pencil images diverge as the pencil moves closer to my face.

I repeat the experiment ten more times, and each time, the images of the pencil diverge.  I seem to have stumbled on a Law of Nature, “When a person brings a pencil to his nose, he sees two diverging pencil images.”  (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 images diverge every time.  Satisfied, The Scientific Community arrives at Consensus: when a person brings a pencil close to his nose, he really, really sees two diverging images.

Interestingly, in the new story of the diverging images, the college students are nowhere to be found.  This is as it should be.  Real world experiments in hard science do not round up a simple random sample of college students to do the experiment; they simply employ how ever many experimentalists are practically necessary to carry out the experimental procedures and measurements.

As Dennett points out in "Intuition Pumps", when phenomenology was first proposed by Husserl and others, the college students were not part of the deal; the phenomenologists were writing about their own experiences.  In my opinion, this is how it should be.