Page 131 - Contribution To Phenomenology

124 TOMNENON

must and will continue to play its own specific role in any inter-
disciplinary approach to cognition in general, including Connectionism.^^
But would that not imply that the Phenomenology of mental life can
proceed independently, and thus need not be affected in any way by
what we believe we have learned from other fields? I think not. Husserl's
extensive methodological reflections concerning such techniques as
phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation describe practices that
are meant to guarantee the possibility of ascertaining essential connections
between various contents of consciousness without any reference to
empirical facts. However, even if one grants what Husserl says about the
conditions necessary to establish Phenomenology as a rigorous science and
about the immunity of the results of phenomenological research from
challenges that originate in the empirical sciences, then it still does not
necessarily follow that the concrete practice of Phenomenology will not
and cannot be strongly influenced by what we think we have learned
from other spheres.
If for instance the successful practice of eidetic variation depends upon
one's first having surveyed all of the relevant counter-examples, then
there will always remain a problem about whether the limits of the
imagination of the researcher are the limits of imaginability simpliciter}^
What one will take to be an adequate intuition at the moment might
turn out not to have been an adequate intuition upon further inspection,
and is often influenced by what one thinks one knows otherwise. So one
can affirm the phenomenological program and what the attainment of any
final scientific results in Phenomenology would involve and still deny that

^^ It is also interesting to note that Husserl's critique of psychologism actually
applies more appropriately to classical AI than Connectionism. For it is classical AI that
is committed to the view that human thinking not only conforms to rules such as those
expressed in formal logic and mathematics, but that it is actually rule-governed, i.e., that
these laws causally determine actual human cognition. For classic AI, cognition is simply
rule-governed symbol manipulation according to things like the laws of logic and
mathematics, so that it is a natural assumption to think that the laws of logic are causally
determining factors in human thinking. In fact, Husserl's critique parallels that of
connectionists who emphasize the differences between the models provided by formal
logic and discrete mathematics, on the one hand, and the way that human beings actually
think and speak on the other. Husserl and many connectionists in fact share the desire to
distinguish carefully between the two and avoid reducing questions of logical validity to
questions of how human beings think (or the other way around).
^^ Husserl's careful distinction between evidence and apodicticity in §§ 59 ff. of
Formal and Transcendental Lo^ suggests something very close to this point.