As well as finishing off a big project or two, I’ve been writing a short paper for a conference this week. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) is descending, conveniently, on the college where I work. This is them, and this is there. My talk builds on an interest in knowing other minds, especially animal minds, that I’ve discussed on this blog (oh, you know, here and here). Here’s my abstract:

In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, I will argue, there are moments where the interior worlds of a horse, a hare, a boar, and a goddess, are vividly evoked. The only significant human presence, however, remains opaque. In the environmentally-aware Shakespeare criticism of Robert Watson, Gabriel Egan, and Simon Palfrey, it’s apparent that the problem of other minds is an ecological problem. How we go about deciding whether we can know what it is like to be a bat (Thomas Nagel’s classic question, turned over in Peter Hacker’s essay ‘Is There a Thing it is Like to be a Bat?’) has consequences for how we conceive of an interconnected, interdependent world, or don’t. I will focus most of all on what a poem, and the criticism of a poem, can contribute to our thinking about interfaces between heterophenomenology (Daniel Dannett’s contested term) and environmentalism.

That still sounds alright, I think, but I have a turn or two to make. There’s an overlap between two literary-critical approaches (the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘ecocritical’), and maybe there is something interesting to be done with that overlap. It’s a shame I misquoted the title of Hacker’s essay (Is there ANYTHING it is like…), and carried that misquotation through to the very title of my essay. Not least because being precise about language is one of Hacker’s main points. Oh well — I think audiences find it endearing when a paper starts with an apology. Nobody likes a cleverclogs. I will probably post about how it goes.

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I have been thinking a bit more, ahead of the conference, about heterophenomenology — Daniel Dennett’s proposed method for approaching an understanding of other minds, an attempt to compose, from detailed inferences, a sense of what it must feel like to be something else. I read a more recent piece of his — ‘Heterophenomenology Reconsidered’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2007), 247–270. It comes at the end of a special issue in which fifteen other essays offer critiques of his earlier work.
      One new thing I took away from it was that, in the face of some precise objections, Dennett seemed to defend heterophenomenology as an approximation for now, workable until scientists decisively solve the key problems. The essay ends like this:

The Cartesian vision — Cartesian materialism or the original Cartesian dualism — is undeniably compelling, and once we see that there is no — can be no — Cartesian Theater, we have to find a safe haven for all our potent convictions. It sure seems as if there is a Cartesian Theater. But there isn’t. Heterophenomenology is designed to honor these two facts in as neutral a way as possible until we can explain them in detail.

Along the way, he turns to fiction as an analogy, in a way that makes me hopeful (it’s suggestive of fruitful dialogue, and a positive valuation of literary insight) and fretful (as I was in the first post on the topic — the portrayal of fiction is a bit blunt at times). So when it comes to reports of introspection, ‘heterophenomenology takes such purported references almost at face value — the way we take a novelist’s references — by using the category of a theoretical fiction that stands in, pro tempore, for face value reference until the science is in’.
      Dennett, then, is optimistic about the science, or perhaps he is pragmatically deferent towards it because that creates space for his way of thinking. Not surprisingly, I think pausing on the fiction is worth a try. That’s partly because I think we may well have a long wait before we get scientific answers to the hard questions about consciousness, but mostly because I think novelists (and poets and dramatists and all) have been doing heterophenomenology rather well, and for a long time.