The following is a longish quotation from the beginning of Chapter 4 of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. I post it here not as an endorsement, since I disagree with Dennett’s conclusions, but because I may want to use it as a reference later on.
You don’t do serious zoology by just strolling through the zoo, noting this and that, and marveling at the curiosities. Serious zoology demands precision, which depends on having agreed-upon methods of description and analysis, so that other zoologists can be sure they understand what you are saying. Serious phenomenology is in even greater need of clear, neutral method of description, because, it seems, no two people use the words in the same way, and everybody’s an expert. It is just astonishing to see how often “academic” discussions of phenomenological controversies degenerate into desk-thumping cacophony, with everybody talking past everyone else. This is all the more surprising, in a way, because according to long-standing philosophical tradition, we all agree on what we find when we look inside at our own phenomenology.
Doing phenomenology has usually seemed to be a reliable communal practice, a matter of pooling shared observations. When Descartes wrote his Meditations as a first-person-singular soliloquy, he clearly expected his readers to concur with each of his observations, by performing in their own minds the explorations he described, and getting the same results. The British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, likewise wrote with the presumption that what they were doing, much of the time, was introspecting, and that their introspections would be readily replicated by their readers. Locke enshrined this presumption in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1696) by calling his method the “historical, plain method” — no abstruse deductions or a priori theorizing for him, just setting down the observed facts, reminding his readers of what was manifest to all who looked. In fact, just about every author who has written about consciousness has made what we might call the first-person-plural presumption: whatever mysteries consciousness may hold, we (you, gentle reader, and I) may speak comfortably together about our mutual acquaintances, the things we both find in our streams of consciousness. And with a few obstreperous exceptions, readers have always gone along with the conspiracy.
This would be fine if it weren’t for the embarrassing fact that controversy and contradiction bedevil the claims made under these conditions of polite mutual agreement. We are fooling ourselves about something. Perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the extent to which we are all basically alike. Perhaps when people first encounter the different schools of thought on phenomenology, they join the school that sounds right to them, and each school of phenomenological description is basically right about its own members’ sort of inner life, and then just innocently overgeneralizes, making unsupported claims about how it is with everyone.
Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the high reliability of introspection, our personal powers of self-observation of our own conscious minds. Ever since Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum,” this capacity of ours has been seen as somehow immune to error; we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider. (”Imagine anyone trying to tell you that you are wrong about what you are thinking and feeling!”) We are either “infallible” — always guaranteed to be right — or at least “incorrigible” — right or wrong, so no one else could correct us.
But perhaps this doctrine of infallibility is just a mistake, however well entrenched. Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in on our phenomenology, some observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it, but since they are so sure they are right, they are relatively invulnerable to criticism. (They are incorrigible in the derogatory sense.) Either way, controversy ensues. And there is another possibility, which I think is much closer to the truth: what we are fooling ourselves about is the idea that the activity of “introspection” is ever a matter of just “looking and seeing.” I suspect that when we claim to be just using our powers of inner observation, we are always actually engaging in a sort of impromptu theorizing — and we are remarkably gullible theorizers, precisely because there is so little to observe and so much to pontificate about without fear of contradiction. When we introspect, communally, we are really very much in the position of the legendary blind men examining different parts of the elephant.
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