ABSTRACT

One of the risks of a rhetorical question is that the hearer or reader will give an answer different from that presupposed by the posing of the question. And, in this case, one might wonder how Paolo Bozzi’s reference to ethology bolsters his case for thinking that an adequate phenomenology of perception must take account of much more than what can be ticketed by the standard procedures of holding laboratory subjects in unnatural positions of stress to answer artificial yes/no questions, and of drawing up diagrams on a blackboard. As regards Bozzi’s characteristic approach to gathering phenomenological data, perhaps a key point comes out when he says that “people who are asked the question without having the facts in front of them produce an evasive and physicalistic answer”.