We argue that heterophenomenology both over-and under-populates the intentional realm. For example, when one is involved in coping, one's mind does not contain beliefs. Since the heterophenomenologist interprets all intentional commitment as belief, he necessarily overgenerates the belief contents of the mind. Since beliefs cannot capture the normative aspect of coping and perceiving, any method, such as heterophenomenology, that allows for only beliefs is guaranteed not only to overgenerate beliefs but also to undergenerate other kinds of intentional phenomena.Key words heterophenomenology . coping skills . belief . intentionality Phenomenology faces problems concerning the content and legitimacy of its introspective reports. It would be much appreciated if Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology could avoid them, but, while it avoids the problem of the status of introspective evidence, it turns out heterophenomenology both over and under populates the intentional realm.Husserl originally thought of phenomenology as a descriptive science of the content of everyday consciousness based on a special method of reflection. However, the very idea that phenomenological description makes available what was already implicit in everyday experience begs the question of just how much the reflective stance transforms what it allegedly articulates.Later Husserl (1960) came to realize that things are experienced differently when I am involved with them than when I reflectively bracket their existence and report my beliefs about them. He acknowledges that "therewith, to be sure, an essentially Phenom Cogn Sci (2007) 6:45-55
I begin by examining a recent debate between John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke over whether the content of perceptual experience is non‐conceptual. Although I am sympathetic to Peacocke's claim that perceptual content is non‐conceptual, I suggest a number of ways in which his arguments fail to make that case. This failure stems from an over‐emphasis on the “fine‐grainedness” of perceptual content ‐a feature that is relatively unimportant to its non‐conceptual structure. I go on to describe two other features of perceptual experience that are more likely to be relevant to the claim that perceptual content is non‐conceptual. These features are 1) the dependence of a perceived object on the perceptual context in which it is perceived and 2) the dependence of a perceived property on the object it is perceived to be a property of.
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