Summary of Heterophenomenology: A Limited Critique

Summarize:

(Entire text of this paper omitted from prompt)

Here’s the gist in plain terms.

What the paper does

• Offers a limited critique of Dennett’s method of heterophenomenology—not the whole method, just its third step: how we interpret a subject’s cleaned-up first-person reports.
• Dennett says we should interpret those reports like we interpret novelist fiction and use the intentional stance (treat the subject as a rational agent making meaningful speech acts).

Dennett’s setup (as presented)

1. Generate a report (record speech/behaviour).

2. Purify it (clean up the transcript; exclude noise and obvious errors).

3. Interpret it using an analogy to fiction: don’t worry about truth/referents yet (metaphysical minimalism); treat “I” as possibly just a logical construct; allow that

   • P1: “What’s true in a story exceeds what’s explicitly stated.”
   • P2: Many facts in a story are indeterminate.
   • Also: I3: “You can know the fictional world independently of the text” (e.g., via TV adaptations).

The paper’s core objection

• P1 and I3 can’t both be maintained without contradiction.

  • Example: Dennett says it’s true there are no jet planes in Holmes’s London even though it’s not stated or implied. But if I3 lets adaptations inform the world, then jet planes might appear (e.g., BBC’s Sherlock), undermining that “truth.”

• Fix: Only count as “true in the story” what is explicitly stated or logically implied by the text; everything else should be indeterminate.

• If that’s right, Dennett’s analogy can’t license an interpreter to go beyond the text to make further “truths” about a subject’s heterophenomenological world, nor to sideline the subject’s authority so easily.

Relation to prior critiques

• Recaps earlier worries (Levine: beliefs ≠ experiences; Piccinini: against metaphysical minimalism; Goldman: not a standard scientific method; Zahavi: misreads phenomenology; Carman/Dokic & Pacherie: seeming vs. judgment; Schwitzgebel: reports aren’t fiction).
• Novel move here: rather than arguing the two kinds of texts are disanalogous, it attacks Dennett’s assumptions about fiction interpretation itself.

UpShot

• The interpretation step in heterophenomenology needs revision or a new foundation: the fiction analogy, as used, is unstable.
• Limiting “truths in the story” to text + logical consequence restores a stricter boundary (and some authority to the reporting subject) and undercuts Dennett’s attempt to claim extra, text-transcending truths about the subject’s “heterophenomenological world.”

TL;DR: Yadav accepts heterophenomenology’s first two steps but argues Dennett’s fiction analogy for step three rests on inconsistent assumptions (P1 vs I3). Once corrected, the analogy can’t do the work Dennett needs—so the method’s interpretive backbone needs rethinking.