Repository | Book | Chapter

Some contemporary philosophers, such as Feyerabend,¹ Armstrong,² and Rorty,³ speak as though any distinction between subjective processes and their objective manifestations depended upon the supposed "incorrigibility' of the subjective processes, i.e., the thesis that I cannot think that I experience a pain and be mistaken. Actually, it is not necessary for this purpose that the subjective knowledge of mental states yield any such incorrigible information, but only that it yield different —though perhaps equally corrigible—information about the mental states. We shall attempt to demonstrate in this first chapter that direct phenomenological reflection upon mental states does yield different information from objective observation methods, and that the objectifying methods are incapable in principle of observing consciousness without being supplemented by and correlated with phenomenological data. This is true, we shall argue, in spite of the fact that phenomenological data are by no means incorrigible. In fact, many phenomenologists cheerfully grant that the notion of incorrigible access to one's own subjective consciousness by means of a complete phenomenological reduction went out of style long ago, when the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Sartre (and many say Husserl himself in the Crisis and other posthumous papers) pronounced the idea of a complete phenomenological reduction impossible in principle. There are certain items of information about the nature of consciousness which even phenomenological psychology (not to mention objectivistic psychology) cannot ascertain, but for which it must have recourse to philosophy.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0715-2_2

Full citation: