The Phenomenological Mind

Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000202953
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition introduces fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. One of the outstanding books in the field, now translated into eight languages, this highly regarded exploration of phenomenology from a topic-driven standpoint examines the following key questions and issues:

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• what is phenomenology?
• phenomenology and the cognitive sciences
• consciousness and self-consciousness
• time and consciousness
• intentionality and perception
• the embodied mind
• action
• knowledge of other minds
• situated and extended minds
• phenomenology and personal identity.

This third edition has been revised and updated throughout. The chapter on phenomenological methodologies has been significantly expanded to cover qualitative research, and there are new sections discussing important, recent research on topics such as critical phenomenology, imagination, social cognition, race and gender, collective intentionality, and selfhood.

Also included are helpful features, such as chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and boxed explanations of specialized topics, making The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.

1 Introduction

Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and phenomenology

This is a book about the mind. What the mind is, and how it works, are currently the topics of many complex debates that span a number of disciplines: psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind—disciplines that belong to what is generally referred to as the cognitive sciences. The interdisciplinary nature of these debates is no coincidence; rather, it is necessitated by the fact that no single discipline can do full justice to the complexity of the issues at hand. In this book, we intend to explore a variety of issues that have traditionally been studied by philosophers of mind. However, we do not intend to take a pure philosophical approach—that is, we do not take a philosophical approach that would ignore the other sciences. We will frequently appeal to the details of scientific evidence from studies in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging, developmental and cognitive psychology, and psychopathology. This is, however, a book on the philosophy of mind, and no matter how interdisciplinary it gets, it remains an attempt to address philosophical problems.

Everything we said so far, however, could be the basis for a standard philosophy of mind or philosophy of cognitive science textbook, of which there are already a sufficient number. We propose to do things differently, and for reasons that will become clear as we proceed, we think this difference is important and productive, and one that signals a change in the way things are developing in the cognitive sciences. Specifically, we will take a phenomenological perspective on the issues that are to be discussed, where phenomenology refers to a tradition of philosophy that originated in Europe and includes the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other more recent thinkers. We will not try to do justice to all aspects of phenomenology; rather, our treatment involves a selection of topics that we think are of particular importance for contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Also, our focus will not be historical or based on textual exegesis of figures in the phenomenological tradition, although we will certainly cite their work where relevant. To understand the motive for this selection of perspective, let us look briefly at the way philosophy and psychology have developed in the past century or so.

AN OVERSIMPLIFIED SUMMARY OF THE LAST 120 YEARS

If we took a snapshot of the philosophical and psychological debates about the mind around the end of the nineteenth century, we would find complex discussions about the nature of consciousness (e.g., in the writings of the American philosopher/psychologist William James, and the European philosopher Edmund Husserl), the intentional structure of mental states (e.g., in the work of the Austrian philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, Bertrand Russell, and again, Husserl), as well as discussions about the methodology needed for a proper study of the mind (e.g., Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and again, James and Husserl). One would also notice that all of these people were influencing each other, sometimes directly (corresponding by letters in a pre-electronic age) or indirectly (by reading each other’s work). So, for example, James was inspired by theorists and experimentalists in Europe, and in his 1890 Principles of Psychology (1950) he cited the work of Brentano and many of his students, including the psychologist Carl Stumpf. Although James did not cite Husserl, a student of both Brentano and Stumpf, the latter had recommended that Husserl read James’s Principles. Husserl did so, and he clearly learned from James. Husserl also corresponded with the logician Frege. Both criticized the then prevalent doctrine of psychologism, that is, the idea that the laws of logic are reducible to laws of psychology.¹ Both of them had a strong interest in the philosophy of mathematics and logic, which was also of interest to Russell, who had a copy of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in his prison cell (where he served time for civil disobedience).

As we move further into the twentieth century, these thinkers and their particular philosophical approaches start to move apart. James became less involved in psychology and occupied himself with the development of the philosophy of American pragmatism. The kind of logical analysis found in the work of Frege and Russell became the basis for what has become known as analytic philosophy. And Husserl developed an approach to the study of consciousness which he called phenomenology. By mid-century and, indeed, throughout most of the latter part of the twentieth century, we find that with respect to discussions of the mind (as well as other topics) very little communication is going on between analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology.²

In fact, on both sides, the habitual attitude toward the other tradition has ranged from complete disregard to outright hostility. Indeed, up until the 1990s, it was unusual to find philosophers from these different traditions reading, let alone talking to each other. There has been plenty of arrogance on both sides of the aisle. Thus, for example, Jean-Luc Marion (1998) suggested that during the twentieth century, phenomenology had essentially assumed the very role of philosophy, apparently ignoring any contribution by analytic philosophy. On the other side, Jack Smart proclaimed that “I have moments of despair about philosophy when I think of how so much phenomenological and existential philosophy seems such sheer bosh that I cannot even begin to read it” (Smart 1975, p. 61). Even when phenomenologists do talk with analytic philosophers we find reactions such as John Searle’s claim, in response to a critique by Dreyfus, that phenomenology suffers from serious limitations, or as he puts it, using the less reserved economic metaphor, “I almost want to say … bankruptcy – and [it] does not have much to contribute to the topics of the logical structure of intentionality or the logical structure of social and institutional reality” (Searle 1999a, pp. 1, 10).

To explain how these different philosophers came to think of themselves as so opposed to each other, or perhaps even worse, indifferent toward each other, would involve telling a larger story than is necessary for our purposes. In this book, however, you will be able to discern some of the important differences between the approaches of the analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology, as well as some of their overlapping concerns.

Another part of the relevant history involves what happens in psychology. Here is the standard version, which is a somewhat distorted history of what actually happened, although it is the one given in almost every textbook account. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, there was a great interest in explaining conscious experience and the cognitive processes involved in attention and memory. The early experimental psychologists relied on introspection as a method that aimed to produce measurable data about the mind. Around 1913, however, the emphasis shifted to the notion of behavior as the proper object of psychological study. Behaviorism, as an approach to the study of animal and human psychology, was defended and articulated in the work of the American psychologist John Watson (1913), and came to dominate the study of psychology, especially in America, until the 1970s, peaking around 1950. The shift to behavior and its emphasis on the measurement of observable action was at the same time a shift away from the interior life of the mind and the method of introspection. Watson explains:

From the time of Wundt on, consciousness becomes the keynote of psychology. It is the keynote of all psychologies except behaviorism. It is a plain assumption just as unprovable, just as unapproachable as the old concept of the soul. And to the behaviorist the two terms are essentially identical, so far as concerns their metaphysical implications. […] In his first efforts to get uniformity in subject matter and in methods the behaviorist began his own formulation of the problem of psychology by sweeping aside all medieval conceptions. He dropped from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensations, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined. […] The behaviourist asks: Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? […] Well, we can observe behavior – what the organism does or says. And let me make this fundamental point at once: that saying is doing—that is, behaving. Speaking overtly or to ourselves (thinking) is just as objective a type of behavior as baseball.

(Watson 1924, pp. 5–6)

Behaviorism, however, was ultimately replaced by cognitive approaches that returned to the earlier interest in the interior processes of mental life, this time armed with computational models developed in computer science, and more recently, all of the scientific advancements in brain research. For cognitive science, however, interior processes meant either subpersonal (neural) mechanisms, or functional and representational states. Then, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, researchers again focused on attempts to understand and explain consciousness with the primary aim of identifying its neural correlates.

This story is distorted and oversimplified even in its broad strokes. One could easily point to historical evidence that suggests, in complete contrast to the standard story, that behaviorist approaches and attempts to obtain objective measures were common in the earliest psychology laboratories of the nineteenth century, and that introspection was frequently considered problematic, even by the so-called introspectionists, although it continued to play some part in psychological experimentation throughout the twentieth century. Furthermore, computational concepts of the mind can arguably be traced back to the eighteenth century; and consciousness has been of continuing interest since the time of René Descartes, in the first half of the seventeenth century, and perhaps since the time of the ancient Greeks. One might also claim that the standard story is simply partisan, reflecting the interests of the people who pieced it together. As Alan Costall (2004, 2006) has argued, the understanding of the early history of psychology as introspectionist was an invention of John Watson, who wanted to put behaviorist psychology on everyone’s agenda. Yet the psychologist that Watson most associated with introspection, Wilhelm Wundt, expressed his own distrust of introspection: “Introspective method relies either on arbitrary observations that go astray or on a withdrawal to a lonely sitting room where it becomes lost in self-absorption. The unreliability of this method is universally recognized” (Wundt 1900, p. 180; translated in Blumental 2001, p. 125). Furthermore, although cognitivists claimed to offer a revolution in psychology, as Costall (2004, p. 1) points out, “Cognitivism is very much a continuation of the kind of mechanistic behaviorism it claims to have undermined.”

The story, then, is more complex than standard accounts indicate. The “cognitive revolution,” the emergence of cognitive science after 1950, and mid-century analytic philosophy of mind were all influenced by behaviorist thought. Gilbert Ryle, for example, wrote in his book The Concept of Mind that what we call the mind simply is “overt intelligent performances” (1949, p. 58), and he admits to the importance of behaviorism for this kind of insight (1949, p. 328). In contrast, it is often thought that phenomenology was primarily an introspectionist enterprise. As we will show in the following, this is also a misconception (see Chapter 2). In terms of comprehending the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of mind, however, it is certainly the case that many analytic philosophers of mind thought of phenomenology as being introspectionist, and from their point of view, introspection, as a method for understanding the mind, was dead.

If we set the question of introspection aside for now, another way to characterize the difference between contemporary mainstream analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology is by noting that whereas the majority of analytic philosophers today endorse some form of naturalism, phenomenologists have tended to adopt a non- or even anti-naturalistic approach. However, matters are somewhat complicated by the fact that naturalism is by no means an unequivocal term. We will discuss this point in more detail in Chapter 2. For now, it will be sufficient to point out that science tends to adopt a naturalistic view, so when finally the cognitive revolution occurred, that is, when psychology started to come under the influence of computational theories of mind in the 1950s and 1960s, and when the interdisciplinary study of the mind known as cognitive science started to emerge, the philosophical approach that seemed more attuned to science was analytic philosophy of mind. Moreover, there was quite a lot of work for philosophers of mind to do when the dominant model was a computational one. Logic and logical analysis play an essential role in the computational model. More importantly, however, philosophy of mind contributed important theoretical foundations and conceptual analyses to the emerging sciences of the mind. The philosophical definition of functionalism, for example, plays an important role in explicating the computational model so that it can apply both to natural and artificial intelligence.

In this organization of cognitive disciplines, the specific philosophical approach of phenomenology was pushed to the side and generally thought to be irrelevant. For a long time the one lone voice that insisted on its relevance to issues pertaining to the field of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences was Hubert Dreyfus (1967, 1972, 1992). But this situation has recently changed, and it is this change that motivates this book. Computationalism is no longer as dominant as it had been in the first 30 years of cognitive science. Three developments have pushed it off its throne. The first is a revived interest in phenomenal consciousness. In the wake of an important contribution by Thomas Nagel (1974), psychologists and philosophers such as Marcel and Bisiach (1988), Daniel Dennett (1991), Owen Flanagan (1992), Searle (1992), Galen Strawson (1994), and David Chalmers (1995) started to address the problem of consciousness anew. When methodological questions arose about how to study the experiential dimension scientifically, and therefore, without resorting to old-style introspectionism, a new discussion of phenomenology was started (e.g., Gallagher 1997; Varela 1996). In other words, in some circles, phenomenology as a philosophical approach was thought to be of possible importance when consciousness was raised as a scientific question.

The second thing that happened to motivate a reconsideration of phenomenology as a philosophical-scientific approach was the advent of embodied approaches to cognition. In the cognitive sciences, the notion of embodied cognition took on strength in the 1990s, and it continues today. Scientists and philosophers, such as Francisco Varela et al. (1991), Antonio Damasio (1994), and Andy Clark (1997), objected to the strong Cartesian mind-body dualism that, despite the best efforts of philosophers like Ryle, Dennett, and others, continued to plague the cognitive sciences. Functionalism l...