Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Operational Definition Regressed to the Arts

It is necessary at this time to show that such a procedure evolved here in Dialogos of Eide had to be taken to be interpreted as a an acceptance and assumption of the way the world "is" according to scientific elaborations given in the interpretation of the "back ground."

For example, the weight of an object may be operationally defined in terms of the specific steps of putting an object on a weighing scale. The weight is whatever results from following the measurement procedure, which can in principle be repeated by anyone. It is intentionally not defined in terms of some intrinsic or private essence. The operational definition of weight is just the result of what happens when the defined procedure is followed. In other words, what's being defined is how to measure weight for any arbitrary object, and only incidentally the weight of a given object.


When observe and held in face of the scientific valuation and spoken to in the science world, the veritable conceptual acceptance of any model is its amalgamation into the way one would move into the world. This is a bold step, because you have accepted the way in which such a proposal has been put forward to demonstrate how one may now see the world.

Operational definitions are inherently difficult — arguably, even impossible — to apply to mental entities, because these latter are generally understood to be accessible only to the individual who experiences them and are therefore not independently verifiable. According to this line of thinking, a person's mental image of a brick cannot be operationally defined because it cannot be measured from outside that person's mood. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued that first-person operationalism is possible and desirable, using the anthropological version of the scientific method to bring the mind fully into the third-person realm required by science. As part of the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, Dennett defines a process he calls heterophenomenology, by which the mental is defined operationally in terms of the observed behavior of the subject.


Held in relevance to use of the word background it is necessary to consider the depth and potential of the human being in light of the bulk perspective assigned to that background to demonstrate that the depth and generation of the human interaction is more defined by more then just the compartmentalization assigned to human action.

Ir was necessary in my own mind to recognize the greater foliation of the response to stimuli as a governing factor in the emotive expressions of the human endeavour then just to let it r,main as a consequence without a possible course of direction, as an effect.


Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another not oneself"), is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bend, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine his or her mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.

Heterophenomenology is put forth as the alternative to traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which Dennett calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" to emphasize the fact that it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subject authoritative only about how things seem to him or her.

In other words, heterophenomenology requires us to listen to the subject and take what he or she says seriously, but to also look at everything else available to us, including the subject's bodily responses and environment, and be ready to conclude that the subject is wrong even about his or her own mind. For example, we could determine that the subject is hungry even though he or she doesn't recognize it.

The key role of heterophenomenology in Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is that it defines all that can be — or needs to be — known about the mind. To quote Dennett, "The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness."

Dennett stresses that heterophenomenology does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence. This can be seen by how heavily heterophenomenology relies on adopting the intentional stance toward subjects.

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