I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accounted for in the sciences. — Marchesk

I agree that it is something to have experiences; it is to have experiences. But there is nothing it is like to have experiences, because anything that was like having experiences would be having experiences.

I could simplify this further and say 'to experience is something'; it is something different than not to experience. Any explanation as to how we are able to experience would have to be given in material, in physical, terms, otherwise it could not be a cogent (testable) explanation. But all explanation, all science, presupposes experience.

It doesn't seem to me that what it is (what it is like, if you prefer) to experience could be explained by science. We actually don't really explain what it is to experience; we describe it, or evoke it. Phenomenology and poetry serve here, not science.

That's well put. :up:

Cheers Manuel. :smile:

:up:

It's nothing to do with comparison. "I wonder what it is like to be a seagull" just means "I wonder how it feels to be a seagull"

"Is there something it is like to be a snail?" just means "Are snails conscious?"

By the way I was asking the question about befuddlement not insisting it was the case. — Tom Storm

Of course it's amusing to say that any canonical text in philosophy runs the risk of increasing the perplexity of many readers, but I suppose it may be hardly an exaggeration. In which case that ironic claim should have serious implications for our conception of philosophy and human understanding, as well as for our conception of the social role and obligations of prominent authors and interpreters of philosophical texts.

That's an interesting thing to say. Your not interested in mind/body because you feel it is unanswerable? [...] I'm only interested in the question because it seems to inform the current discussions about physicalism versus idealism. — Tom Storm

Right, something like that. What sort of empirical evidence or discursive gymnastics could ever put a definitive end to such controversies? In the meantime, what's gained by constructing "metaphysical theories" one way or another along such lines?

Even if the reductive physicalist could predict every observable phenomenon in the record, down to the next words out of my mouth, would this amount to conclusive disproof of philosophical idealism or theism, or make them any less likely? Would it amount to conclusive proof of philosophical materialism or atheism, or make them any more likely? So far as I reckon, it would only show that someone had gotten hold of an extremely useful scientific model of the universe as it has been observed to date.

It seems that no matter how far empirical science may advance, it could never blot out the range of conceivable alternatives that things like us project beyond the balance of appearances.

As a wholehearted skeptic, I sympathize with materialists and atheists who argue it's unreasonable to bear down on any of those merely conceivable alternatives as if they were warranted claims. But I depart from them where they neglect to note or to give due weight to the proposition that metaphysical materialism and atheism are located among those fantastic projections. Why seek to weigh anchor in imaginary waters? Why strain to answer questions that cannot be answered on reasonable grounds?

I suppose the prevalence of that dogmatic metaphysical tendency is one symptom of the immoderate scientism of the 20th-century naturalists, still alive and kicking in our time. We might trace the tendency further, to the Gothic quest for certainty, with roots in medieval dogmatism and formalism. Perhaps it's no accident that the immoderate scientism of our time emerged within an Anglophone tradition that had inherited a mangled view of skepticism, which seems better understood by Gassendi at the start of the "modern" era than by Moore at the end. The negative force of the arguments of the materialist and atheist may be just as well applied from a skeptical point of view, with less intellectual hubris, less unwarranted bias, and less overbearing bullshit.

Consider the rhetorical strategy of duplicity adopted by some leading advocates for atheism, for instance. Russell says he prefers to call himself agnostic when he's addressing "a purely philosophical audience", and to call himself an atheist when he's addressing "the ordinary man in the street". I recall Dawkins (I think in an early passage of The God Delusion) drawing a distinction between two sorts of theism, and claiming he objects to only one of those two sorts -- yet he spends the rest of his life calling himself an atheist and promoting a view he calls atheism. It might be more fitting to call him a theologian who contributes to a theological distinction between reasonable and unreasonable theology.

I don't mean to suggest there's no legitimate role for such pig-headed rhetoric. In the short run, it may function as a counterweight to egregious excesses on the other side of a popular debate. But there's also room, and arguably urgent need today, for more complete devotion to the practice of truth, sincerity, and integrity in reasonable discourse. So far as I can tell, it's the skeptic, not the materialist or atheist, who more accurately marks the boundaries of that space. Though public intellectuals like Russell and Dawkins may well intend for their doubletalk to nudge us in the long run toward that very place.

So far as I can tell, it's the skeptic, not the materialist or atheist, who more accurately marks the boundaries of that space. — Cabbage Farmer

Could be. You raise some interesting points. I would have thought the atheist properly makes just one claim about God and as for the rest of their views, they could believe in astrology or the Loch Ness Monster (like some atheists I have known).

I am an atheist - I am probably not disciplined enough to call my self a skeptic. I am a methodological naturalist - only in so far as the case for the non-natural hasn't been made coherently.

I see figures like Dawkins as essentially fundamentalist busters. I don't think he is doing philosophy, he is simply taking on the literalists. Given how many literalists there are and how influential they can be in politics, law and social policy, the work is not without merit.

I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accounted for in the sciences. — Marchesk

I don’t know about that. Zahavi reads Husserl as saying that the ‘something it is like’ is a ‘for-meness’ present in all experiences. Essentially Zahavi is claiming that for Husserl the subjective pole of every subject object relation has its own ‘feel’, as if each of us has a kind of affective signature that accompanies all our experiences, the feeling of being ‘me’.
I don’t think this is what Husserl is saying. He is instead arguing that they is a certain normative dimension to all my experiences. They are organized by me on the basis of likeness , similarity, commonality with respect to my previous knowing. So this ‘feeling of being me’ isn’t a static intrinsic quality at all. It is just the perspectival nature of each of our encounters with the world.
Wittgenstein recognizes this personal, perspectival , situated basis of experiencing. I don’t think he and Husserl are all that far apart.

It's nothing to do with comparison. "I wonder what it is like to be a seagull" just means "I wonder how it feels to be a seagull"

"Is there something it is like to be a snail?" just means "Are snails conscious?" — bert1

Exactly! But the point is that the "what is it like" question fosters the illusion that there could be a comparison.

Also when you ask "how does it feel to be a seagull", what kind of answer would you expect? The question needs to be asked in specific ways. How does it feel for a seagull when it dives into the water after a fish? We know how it feels for us to dive into the water; how would it be different for a seagull? We have bare skin and the seagull has feathers; what kind of difference would that make to the feeling of diving into the water? How would it feel to eat with a beak instead of lips and teeth? What difference does it make to how the world looks to have eyes on each side of the head? And so on. Would the question "how does it feel to be a seagull" have any meaning beyond these specific inquiries?

Yes, and 'how does if feel' implies there is an awareness of feeling which can be described/understood. Does a seagull have a sense of feeling in this way?

Right, good point; that's a further dimension to the question. If there were no capacity for self-reflection would anything feel like anything?

Would the question "how does it feel to be a seagull" have any meaning beyond these specific inquiries? — Janus

Probably not. I wouldn't really expect any answer to that query. Yet one may still idly wonder what it would feel like to be a seagull, even though the question is impossible to answer. One could guess at approximations, as you say, based on comparisons with human experience. So yeah, I agree with you.

The whole comparison thing comes up every time the phrase 'what it is like' is discussed, and it's a total red herring, but an understandable one. I think it's revealing though, as it is an indicator of whether or not the concept of consciousness has actually been grasped. Stephen Priest has often said "Some philosophers have not noticed they are conscious." I always used to think that this was an uncharitable and ridiculous. But now I think he might have been right.

The whole comparison thing comes up every time the phrase 'what it is like' is discussed, and it's a total red herring, but an understandable one. I think it's revealing though, as it is an indicator of whether or not the concept of consciousness has actually been grasped. Stephen Priest has often said "Some philosophers have not noticed they are conscious." I always used to think that this was an uncharitable and ridiculous. But now I think he might have been right. — bert1

The interesting thing about "the whole comparison thing" is that. on the one hand we can say that being human or being a bat is not like anything, in the sense that neither are comparable with anything else, as I've said. On the other hand the only way to answer the question as to what it is to be some animal or other would be by specific comparisons with the human. So, being a bat is not like being a human, obviously, but how it might feel to be a bat may be guessed at by noting specific differences with how it might feel for a human. For example if I hung upside down and urinated all over myself I might get some inkling of how that particular dimension of bat experience feels...or not, since I am not covered in fur.

We all forget we are conscious much of the time. Is not remembering that we are conscious simply to repeat to ourselves "I am conscious"? I mean doesn't it just consist in entertaining, in that moment of remembering that I am conscious, a specific conception of myself?

Is not remembering that we are conscious simply to repeat to ourselves "I am conscious"? — Janus

Yes, although if, say, Banno said that, he would likely just mean that he was awake. If I say that when I'm in a philosophical mood, I would mean "I am a centre of experience" or something like that. But Banno rejects these other definitions. It's baffling to me, but one explanation is that he hasn't noticed he is conscious in that sense. I struggle to believe that though.

Yes, although if, say, Banno said that, he would likely just mean that he was awake. If I say that when I'm in a philosophical mood, I would mean "I am a centre of experience" or something like that. But Banno rejects these other definitions. It's baffling to me, but one explanation is that he hasn't noticed he is conscious in that sense. I struggle to believe that though. — bert1

I can't answer for @Banno, but I suspect he is quite capable of the thought: "I am conscious"; which would mean that he is capable of remembering that he is conscious, but like the rest of us, he is not remembering that he is conscious, when he is not thinking that thought.

He might come and correct me and explain that he is not capable of that thought, though; but that would be surprising, and I doubt I would be capable of believing him. :wink:

Even if the reductive physicalist could predict every observable phenomenon in the record, down to the next words out of my mouth, would this amount to conclusive disproof of philosophical idealism or theism, or make them any less likely? Would it amount to conclusive proof of philosophical materialism or atheism, or make them any more likely? So far as I reckon, it would only show that someone had gotten hold of an extremely useful scientific model of the universe as it has been observed to date. — Cabbage Farmer

Good question.

I don't think the way to argue about phenomenology's idealism is to disprove it. Nor is it reasonable to do so in favor of materialism. You might want to read an essay by Patrick Heelan - Perceived Worlds Are Interpreted Worlds .

An excerpt:

Perceiving is a skill; it is not a species of deductive or inductive inference but an interpretative skill. CS Peirce gave it a special name, "abduction". It does not belong to the categories of induction or deduction, nor is it just another term for hypothetico-deductive method. Its goal is not explanation but vision -- or more generally, perception - and it heralds a perceptual revolution. Perception in this sense is historical, cultural, and hermeneutical. Failing to recognize this is a source of many of those recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of science that seem to have no solution within the predominant traditions.

He defines hermeneutical phenomenology as: "all human understanding - and perception is included in this - is existentially and methodologically interpretative."

You might disagree with him on some points, but he does provide 3 analytical questions to satisfy the problem of perception:
- the semantics of a perceptual world
- the epistemic validity
- ontology of a perceptual world

From this, he explains that the individual perceivers, with or without the aid of an instrument, are a "community of skilled interpreters", and provides an explanation of a "paradigmatically scientific inquiry leading into, among other things, neurophysiological networks, instruments, and readable technologies."

And from it, I'm hoping that we can agree that materialism stays and can be reconciled with phenomenology.

I like my phenomenology simple, which is why I really like Tallis here. He doesn't call it "phenomenology", but that's what he seems to do.

The problem from the outset is one that continues to plague us even if we know better already, for over 100 years: we assume that by "matter" we mean what was referred to as "dead and stupid" matter. We perceive matter as solid, when we see tables and chairs or trees and statues. Yet we know that deep down, matter is insubstantial not solid at all.

And then we have a brain, from which our minds emerge and we can do phenomenology. We discover that this specific matter "in the head" has intentionality, which can consider objects outside of the given context.

Furthermore we can "tear them apart" from where we see them (a flower in a garden) and analyze that flower in the context of its color compared to this other flower in some garden in a different part of the world.

The puzzles come in, at least for me, is when we try to think away these sense qualities and try to imagine what's left. It becomes an object of the intellect of sorts, but we intuit that there has to be something behind these qualities which we can't perceive.

In any case, there's lots of rich territory here to explore.

The real object is in fact an idealization, so they say. And I think objectivity in this sense doesn't fit with Husserl's explanation of spatial objects. Because as much as he or any other phenomenologist wants to make his narrative as objective as possible, he inadvertently implicates his own explanation, thereby exposing his own idealization of the phenomenon. They should not have started with the denial of objects in itself and the denial of access to other minds. They should have, for all intents and purposes, admitted that the "kinaesthetics sensation of our voluntary movement" is indeed physical and material, therefore, no matter how much we call it idealization, we are inextricably made of matter. — Caldwell

Husserl doesn't 'deny' any such thing. Husserl cares about the experience of some 'object' as an experience of some 'object'. If I see a table it doesn't matter if it is there or not for the purposes of looking at conscious experience. If I 'experience' a table I cannot deny that I experience a table. The 'existence' of the table is not important other than as an item of cognition.

He wasn't interested in dualistic arguments only to frame phenomenology as a Science of Consciousness. There is no attempt to make any narrative objective because that isn't anything like what Husserl had in mind. He states this is various ways multiple times (probably because people didn't get it at first) which led to a lot of confusion.

Husserl cares about the experience of some 'object' as an experience of some 'object'. If I see a table it doesn't matter if it is there or not for the purposes of looking at conscious experience. If I 'experience' a table I cannot deny that I experience a table. The 'existence' of the table is not important other than as an item of cognition. — I like sushi

I don't think you understand my contention.

There is no attempt to make any narrative objective because that isn't anything like what Husserl had in mind. — I like sushi

Please direct this to Josh's post.

I don't think you understand my contention. — Caldwell

I don't think you understand the point of what Husserl was trying to achieve (that is a SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS). He says so plain and clear. If you think it is 'ironic' that cognitive neuroscience makes use of his work/ideas you missed that the whole point of his endeavor was to aid scientific research into consciousness.

I have no more comment for you.

But thank you for the effort.

relearning how to see the world — Tom Storm

:up: I wonder how that differs from the what is common knowledge viz. exploring perspectives, points of view?

Does phenomenology offer something immensely beneficial, exhilirating? Does it put on offer nirvana itself?

My recollection of phenomenology, from an article I read about half a year ago, is that,

1. Discard all (other) theories i.e. wipe the slate clean and give oneself a fresh start and experience the world as it appears to us. So, as an example, forget about the astronomical fact that the earth revolves around the sun and just look up at the sky - what do you see? The sun going around the earth. The world as it appears to us is gets all our attention, the limelight as it were. It's quite radical - phenomonelogy - for the simple reason that it goes against the grain. All this while appearance was treated as inferior, removed from the truth, to be penetrated as quickly and as forcefully as possible in order that we may get to the bottom of the mystery.

2. Bring the description of reality, until now a poor substitute, up to the level of actual experience of reality itself. In other words, descriptions now must match reality in terms of how intense and rich the real deal is.

For the mind-body question, it means go with, run with how the mind and the body appear to you - Do they seem distinct? Then they are distinct. :joke:

Does phenomenology offer something immensely beneficial, exhilirating? — TheMadFool

Well, it does seem to offer a different way of seeing the world and that in itself may be beneficial, possibly exhilarating, given how often we seem to get suck using the familiar approaches. But it seems to me you need to be an academic, a theorist or serious student of philosophy to acquire a robust understanding of phenomenology.

For the mind-body question, it means go with, run with how the mind and the body appear to you - Do they seem distinct? Then they are distinct. :joke: — TheMadFool

Yes, I think that could be one reading.

Well, it does seem to offer a different way of seeing the world and that in itself may be beneficial possibly exhilarating given how often we seem to get suck using the familiar approaches. But it seems to me you need to be an academic, a theorist or serious student of philosophy to acquire a robust understanding of phenomenology. — Tom Storm

I think that, for practical intents and purposes, a major downside of phenomenology is that taking it up as the way to view the world, it has an alienating effect on one's interpersonal relationships and it makes daily work hard to the point of impossible to do. Because in order to meaningfully pursue relationships with others and meaningfully do work, one, generally, has to think as an objectivist, one has to take for granted that there are other people who really exist out there, and that there are real objects out there with which one can do things. In contrast, seeing everything as somehow being a matter of one's own experience is downright debilitating.

Phenomenology is actually incorporated into some Dharmic religions. But where the Western phenomenologists leave off, the Dharmic religions pick up. But from here on, the discussion would necessarily need to get very techincal in and on Dharmic terms.

Thanks B, I can see what you mean and I'm happily attached to my illusion of objectivism.

But from here on, the discussion would necessarily need to get very techincal in and on Dharmic terms. — baker

I shudder at the thought of this.

Appreciate your perspective.

Could be. You raise some interesting points. I would have thought the atheist properly makes just one claim about God and as for the rest of their views, they could believe in astrology or the Loch Ness Monster (like some atheists I have known). — Tom Storm

I don't believe the atheist has the privilege of committing to only one substantive claim -- not a reasonable and honest atheist who's acquainted with the wide variety of theological views in the world. Words like "deity" and "divinity" are used in various ways by various speakers. Ultimately the atheist needs to tell us which conception they're rejecting, which alleged thing "there's no such thing as" on their account.

Some speakers employ a conception of deity in keeping with which the word "God" refers to the whole of existence -- for instance, along the lines of Spinoza's identification of God and Nature. I doubt whether many atheists nowadays mean for their arguments to imply that the world does not exist; but that's what it would amount to say that the thing called God by such philosophers does not exist.

Flying Spaghetti Monster atheism doesn't hold water in such cases. Accordingly, it seems the atheist needs at least two sorts of account to handle two different sorts of theism; and I expect there are more distinctions to be drawn, and many specific claims to be considered, as such conversations proceed.

As I noted above, leading advocates of atheism like Russell and Dawkins acknowledge this problem in the margins of their discourse on rare occasions, then proceed to neglect it as if somehow it's not relevant to the conversation they're having about a philosophical position they call "atheism". I suppose Russell doesn't really call his position atheism; he only markets it that way for "the ordinary man in the street". Dawkins seems to implicate a similar concession.

I see figures like Dawkins as essentially fundamentalist busters. I don't think he is doing philosophy, he is simply taking on the literalists. Given how many literalists there are and how influential they can be in politics, law and social policy, the work is not without merit. — Tom Storm

I'd say it's a much broader target, and includes "moderate" opinions held, often vaguely and uncritically, by many people who count themselves members and believers of traditional religions but who do not consider themselves fundamentalists. The same sort of criticism works just as well against many varieties of new age spiritual belief and magical thinking, for instance.

I am an atheist - I am probably not disciplined enough to call my self a skeptic. I am a methodological naturalist - only in so far as the case for the non-natural hasn't been made coherently. — Tom Storm

I've considered myself a methodological naturalist for decades, though I entered that path on what I thought of as phenomenological grounds. For many years I was puzzled and confused about those grounds. During that period I was powerfully attracted to materialism and atheism, though I never quite made it all the way. My sense of perplexity, at least, has diminished since my thoughts took a skeptical turn nearly a decade ago.

By now it seems that a robust skepticism like that indicated in the Outlines of Sextus Empiricus supports or indeed amounts to a methodological naturalism on phenomenological grounds. Such skeptics learn to train the unruly powers of discourse and belief to "follow appearances quietly", without disturbance from unwarranted claims.

Ultimately the atheist needs to tell us which conception they're rejecting, which alleged thing "there's no such thing as" on their account. — Cabbage Farmer

Generally an atheist will do precisely this whenever a new variation of a deity is raised. But it is one idea they are rejecting; a god - even if there are a range of variations of this idea.

for instance, along the lines of Spinoza's identification of God and Nature. — Cabbage Farmer

i would think most atheists see this use of the word god as more of a linguistic quirk. God as nature or as 'love' or as 'energy' is vague and leaves little to respond to.

I've considered myself a methodological naturalist for decades, though I entered that path on what I thought of as phenomenological grounds. — Cabbage Farmer

How so?

I'd say it's a much broader target, and includes "moderate" opinions held, often vaguely and uncritically, by many people who count themselves members and believers of traditional religions but who do not consider themselves fundamentalists. — Cabbage Farmer

I agree, I'm not arguing they have no broader intent or use, I was simply highlighting their most prominent. They also do 'preventative work' with less severe believers.

Such skeptics learn to train the unruly powers of discourse and belief to "follow appearances quietly", without disturbance from unwarranted claims. — Cabbage Farmer

Can you expand briefly on this last point?

I don't think the way to argue about phenomenology's idealism is to disprove it. Nor is it reasonable to do so in favor of materialism. — Caldwell

On my use of the term, phenomenology -- the study of phenomena, the discourse on appearances -- avoids entanglement with such "metaphysical" doctrines.

You might want to read an essay by Patrick Heelan - Perceived Worlds Are Interpreted Worlds .

An excerpt:

Perceiving is a skill; it is not a species of deductive or inductive inference but an interpretative skill. CS Peirce gave it a special name, "abduction". It does not belong to the categories of induction or deduction, nor is it just another term for hypothetico-deductive method. Its goal is not explanation but vision -- or more generally, perception - and it heralds a perceptual revolution. Perception in this sense is historical, cultural, and hermeneutical. Failing to recognize this is a source of many of those recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of science that seem to have no solution within the predominant traditions. — Caldwell

I agree that our interests and judgments as perceivers are determined in part by conceptual capacities acquired and transformed through the medium of culture, including practices that result in a sort of "perceptual training", practices that guide us to acquire a repertoire of observational concepts, customs of "reasoning" and investigation, customs of fantasy and fiction, and so on. Thankfully, such culturally and conceptually mediated variation in the exercise of our perceptual powers seems radically constrained by physiological and other physical factors of perception.

Accordingly, I'd prefer to reformulate Heelan's characterization of perception more moderately, without the emphatic bias: Like all human activity, perception is historical and cultural as well as physical and biological. Like all human experience, it involves interpretation from a point of view, but is nonetheless rooted in and constrained by physical and biological processes. So it seems, in keeping with the balance of appearances.

I'm never sure what to make of talk of Peirce's notion of "abduction". So far it strikes me as a puffy and superfluous neologism. I tend to become wary wherever it's given much weight. Of course I'd be grateful if someone were to improve my appreciation for good uses of that term.

How does Heelan's hermeneutical phenomenology, and his bold emphasis on the historicity of perceptual skills, help us remedy "recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of science"? Which "recalcitrant problems" does he have in mind?

He defines hermeneutical phenomenology as: "all human understanding - and perception is included in this - is existentially and methodologically interpretative." — Caldwell

Long ago it occurred to me that the path forward for "continental philosophy" should fuse the horizons of Gadamer's Truth and Method with Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. I suspect anyone who's read those two books may have been similarly inspired. Maybe Heelan's barking up the same tree.

You might disagree with him on some points, but he does provide 3 analytical questions to satisfy the problem of perception:
- the semantics of a perceptual world
- the epistemic validity
- ontology of a perceptual world — Caldwell

What questions are these?

From this, he explains that the individual perceivers, with or without the aid of an instrument, are a "community of skilled interpreters", and provides an explanation of a "paradigmatically scientific inquiry leading into, among other things, neurophysiological networks, instruments, and readable technologies." — Caldwell

How is this a refinement or improvement of more customary ways of describing the interrelations of perception, science, and technology? Does it help us solve those "recalcitrant problems" mentioned above?

And from it, I'm hoping that we can agree that materialism stays and can be reconciled with phenomenology. — Caldwell

As I indicated at the outset, it seems to me that phenomenology is indifferent with respect to "metaphysical" doctrines like materialism and idealism. So far as I reckon, disciplined phenomenology would remain compatible with materialism, compatible with idealism, compatible with the rejection of both of those doctrines, and compatible with skeptical suspension of judgment in such matters.

Are we agreed on this point? Or do you have something else in mind when you say that "materialism... can be reconciled with phenomenology"?

Long ago it occurred to me that the path forward for "continental philosophy" should fuse the horizons of Gadamer's Truth and Method with Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception — Cabbage Farmer

As I indicated at the outset, it seems to me that phenomenology is indifferent with respect to "metaphysical" doctrines like materialism and idealism — Cabbage Farmer

So far as I reckon, disciplined phenomenology would remain compatible with materialism, compatible with idealism, compatible with the rejection of both of those doctrines, and compatible with skeptical suspension of judgment in such matters. — Cabbage Farmer

Was this your conclusion from reading Phenomenology of Perception, or are you taking issue with it? In it
Merleau-Ponty critiques both empiricism, which in his hands I believe encompasses materialism , and what he calls intellectualism , his term for Kantian Idealism.

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.”


In Husserl you will also find an explicit critique of idealism and materialism.

In sum, I think that the phenomenological projects of Husserl and MP are far from indifferent to the metaphysical doctrines of materialism and idealism. So
much so that it could be said their entire focus is on revealing the limits of these approaches.

Accordingly, I'd prefer to reformulate Heelan's characterization of perception more moderately, without the emphatic bias: Like all human activity, perception is historical and cultural as well as physical and biological. Like all human experience, it involves interpretation from a point of view, but is nonetheless rooted in and constrained by physical and biological processes. So it seems, in keeping with the balance of appearances — Cabbage Farmer

Okay.

What questions are these? — Cabbage Farmer

Those are his analysis tests to come up with his theory on perception. Semantics (the meaning we attribute to what we perceive), the epistemic validity (how do we support our assertions), ontology of the perceptual world (what actually exists, or what's real in our world as perceivers.

How is this a refinement or improvement of more customary ways of describing the interrelations of perception, science, and technology? Does it help us solve those "recalcitrant problems" mentioned above? — Cabbage Farmer

According to him, yes. See my points above this.

As I indicated at the outset, it seems to me that phenomenology is indifferent with respect to "metaphysical" doctrines like materialism — Cabbage Farmer

Absolutely not indifferent. Phenomenology cannot exist without disowning materialism, the staple of realism.