Making Sense of Dennett's Views on Introspection

Dan Dennett and I have something in common: We both say that people often go grossly wrong about even their own ongoing conscious experience (for my view, see here). Of course Dennett is one of the world's most eminent philosophers and I'm, well, not. But another difference is this: Dennett also often says (as I don't) that subjects can no more go wrong about their experience than a fiction writer can go wrong about his fictions (e.g., 1991, p. 81, 94) and that their reports about their experience are "incorrigible" in the sense that no one could ever be justified in believing them mistaken (e.g., 2002, p. 13-14).

But how can it be the case both that we often go grossly wrong in reporting our own experience and that we have nearly infallible authority about it? I recently pubished an essay articulating my puzzlement over this point (see also this earlier post) to which Dennett graciously replied (see pp. 253ff and 263ff here). Dennett's reply continued to puzzle me -- it didn't seem to me to address the basic inconsistency between saying that we are often wrong about our experience and saying that we are rarely wrong about it -- so I had a good long chat with him about it at the ASSC meeting in June.

I think I've finally settled on a view that makes sense of much (I don't think quite all) of what Dennett says on the topic, and which also is a view I can agree with. So I emailed him to see what he thought, and he endorsed my interpretation. (However, I don't really want to hold him to that, since he might change his mind with further reflection!)

The key idea is that there are two sorts of "seemings" in introspective reports about experience, which Dennett doesn't clearly distinguish in his work. The first sense corresponds to our judgments about our experience, and the second to what's in stream of experience behind those judgments. Over the first sort of "seeming" we have almost unchallengeable authority; over the second sort of seeming we have no special authority at all. Interpretations of Dennett that ascribe him the view that there are no facts about experience beyond what we're inclined to judge about our experience emphasize the first sense and disregard the second. Interpretations that treat Dennett as a simple skeptic about introspective reports emphasize the second sense and ignore the first. Both miss something important in his view.

Let me clarify this two-layer view with an example. People will often say about their visual experience that everything near the center has clearly defined shape, at any particular instant, and the periphery, where clarity starts to fade, begins fairly far out from the center -- say about 30 degrees. Both the falsity of this view and people's implicit commitment to it can be revealed by a simple experiment suggested by Dennett: Take a playing card from a deck of cards and hold it at arm's length off to the side. Keeping your eyes focused straight ahead, slowly rotate the card toward the center of your visual field, noting how close you need to bring it to determine its suit, color, and value. Most people are amazed at how close they have to bring it before they can see it clearly! (If a card is not handy, you can get similar results with a book cover.) Although this isn't the place for the full story, I believe the evidence suggests that visual experience is not, as most people seem to think, a fairly stable field flush with detail, hazy only at the periphery, but rather a fairly fuzzy field with a rapidly moving and very narrow focal center. We don't notice this fact because our attention is almost always at the focal center. (See section vi of this essay.)

Now when people say, "Everything is simultaneously clear and precisely defined in my visual field, except at the far periphery" there's a sense in which they are accurately expressing how things seem to them -- a sense in which, if they are sincere, they are inevitably right about their experience of things -- that's how things seem to be, to them! -- and also a sense in which they are quite wrong about their visual experience. When Dennett attributes subjects authority and incorrigibility about their experience, we should interpret him as meaning that they have authority and incorrigibility over how things seem to them in that first sense. When he says that people often get it wrong about their experience, we should interpret him as saying that they often err about their stream of experience in the second sense.

Dennett's view on these matters is complicated somewhat by his discussion of metaphor in his response to me, because metaphor itself seems to straddle between the authoritative (it's my metaphor, so it means just what I intend it to mean) and the fallible (metaphors can be objectively more or less apt), but this post is already overlong....

Update, February 28, 2012:
As time passes, I find myself less convinced that Dennett should endorse this interpretation of his view. Unfortunately, however, I can't yet swap in a better interpretation.