Over at Brains Blog Uriah Kriegel has been doing a series of posts (starting here) on some themes from his book The Varieties of Consciousness, and in particular his identification of six kinds of phenomenology.

I haven’t read the book (yet) and there may be important bits missing from the necessarily brief account given in the blog posts, but it looks very interesting. Kriegel’s starting point is that we probably launch into explaining consciousness too quickly, and would do well to spend a bit more time describing it first. There’s a lot of truth in that; consciousness is an extraordinarily complex and elusive business, yet phenomenology remains in a pretty underdeveloped state. However, in philosophy the borderline between describing and explaining is fuzzy; if you’re describing owls you can rely on your audience knowing about wings and beaks and colouration; in philosophy it may be impossible to describe what you’re getting at without hacking out some basic concepts which can hardly help but be explanatory. With that caveat, it’s a worthy project.

Part of the difficulty of exploring phenomenology may come from the difficulty of reconciling differences in the experiences of different reporters. Introspection, the process of examining our own experience, is irremediably private, and if your conclusions are different from mine, there’s very little we can do about it other than shout at each other. Some have also taken the view that introspection is radically unreliable in any case, a task like trying to watch the back of your own head; the Behaviourists, of course, concluded that it was a waste of time talking about the contents of consciousness at all: a view which hasn’t completely disappeared.

Kriegel defends introspection, albeit in a slightly half-hearted way. He rightly points out that we’ve tacitly relied on it to support all the discoveries and theorising which has been accomplished in recent decades. He accepts that we cannot any longer regard it as infallible, but he’s content if it can be regarded as more likely right than wrong.

With this mild war-cry, we set off on the exploration. There are lots of ways we can analyse consciousness, but what Kriegel sets out to do is find the varieties of phenomenal experience. He’s come up with six, but it’s a tentative haul and he’s not asserting that this is necessarily the full set. The first two phenomenologies, taken as already established, are the perceptual and the algedonic (pleasure/pain); to these Kriegel adds: cognitive phenomenology, “conative” phenomenology (to do with action and intention), the phenomenology of entertaining an idea or a proposition (perhaps we could call it ‘considerative’, though Kriegel doesn’t), and the phenomenology of imagination.

The idea that there is conative phenomenology is a sort of cousin of the idea of an ‘executive quale’ which I have espoused: it means there is something it is like to desire, to decide, and to intend. Kriegel doesn’t spend any real effort on defending the idea that these things have phenomenology at all, though it seems to me (introspectively!) that sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. What he is mainly concerned to do is establish the distinction between belief and desire. In non-phenomenal terms these two are sort of staples of the study of intentionality: Bel and Des, the old couple. One way of understanding the difference is in terms of ‘direction of fit’, a concept that goes back to J.L. Austin. What this means is that if there’s a discrepancy between your beliefs and the world, then you’d better change your beliefs. If there’s a discrepancy  between your desires and the world, you try to change the world (usually: I think Andy Warhol for one suggested that learning to like what was available was a better strategy, thereby unexpectedly falling into a kind of agreement with some religious traditions that value acceptance and submission to the Divine Will).

Kriegel, anyway, takes a different direction, characterising the difference in terms of phenomenal presentation. What we desire is presented to us as good; what we believe is presented as true. This approach opens the way to a distinction between a desire and a decision: a desire is conditional (if circumstances allow, you’ll eat an ice-cream) whereas a decision is categorical (you’re going to eat an ice-cream). This all works quite well and establishes an approach which can handily be applied to other examples; if  we find that there’s presentation-as-something different going on we should suspect a unique phenomenology. (Are we perhaps straying here into something explanatory instead of merely descriptive? I don’t think it matters.) I wonder a bit about whether things we desire are presented to us as good. I think I desire some things that don’t seem good at all except in the sense that they seem desirable. That’s not much help, because if we’re reduced to saying that when I desire something it is presented to me as desirable we’re not saying all that much, especially since the idea of presentation is not particularly clarified. I have no doubt that issues like this are explored more fully in the book.
Kriegel moves on to consider the case of emotion: does it have a unique and irreducible phenomenology? If something we love is presented to us as good, then we’re back with the merely conative; and Kriegel doesn’t think presentation as beautiful is going to work either (partly because of negative cases, though I don’t see that as an insoluble probem myself; if we can have algedonia, the combined quality of pain or pleasure we can surely have an aesthetic quality that combines beauty and ugliness). In the end he suspects that emotion is about presentation as important, but he recognises that this could be seen as putting the cart before the horse; perhaps emotion directs our attention to things and what gets our attention seems to be important. Kriegel finds it impossible to decide whether emotion has an independent phenomenology and gives the decision by default in favour of the more parsimonious option, that it is reducible to other phenomenologies.
On that, it may be that taking all emotion together was just too big a bite. It seems quite likely to me that different emotions might have different phenomenologies, and perhaps tackling it that way would yield more positive results.
Anyway, a refreshing look at consciousness.