Abstract
This paper reviews and defends Wittgenstein’s examination of the notion of introspecting psychological states and his critique of introspectionism, in the sense of using reflective awareness as a tool for philosophical or psychological investigation. Its focus is on inner psychological states, like pains or thoughts—it provisionally excludes perceptual states from this category. It approaches the philosopher’s concept of introspection through an analysis of concepts of awareness and self-awareness. It identifies at least two different forms of self-awareness, just one of which is attention to conscious processes. It sides with those who deny that any self-awareness is perception. It outlines and evaluates the primary objections Wittgenstein made to the notion that we can find out about the nature of our mental states through introspection. These objections involve, inter alia, the privacy of psychological states and the inherent fallibility of judgments based on introspective awareness. The critique motivates more cautious and effective psychological investigation of mental states, including proper use of subjects’ introspective reports, and a conceptual approach to the philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein’s reflections prefigure much later views about the problematic nature of introspective knowledge; yet, Wittgenstein receives virtually no mention or credit for this work from contemporary writers.
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Notes
See Rosenthal (2000), p. 201. He objects to the use of ‘introspection’ in the sense (1) and reserves it for sense (2). However, he allows (1) is used by some philosophers (p. 207).
PI, §116
Usually ironically, as at RPP I, §792, but sometimes straightforwardly, as perhaps at RPS II, §250.
See also §677 for a legitimate ordinary use of ‘introspection’.
A distinction I ignore in what follows is Shoemaker’s between ‘awareness of’ and ‘awareness that’. I ignore it because I cannot make out a consistent way of mapping it onto our standard uses of these terms. His view appears in ‘Self-Knowledge and Inner Sense’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: 54, 1994, pp. 259ff.
Nothing hangs on using the first person here. These could as easily be in the second or third person.
Kenny (see ‘Cartesian Privacy’ in Canfield, p. 136) distinguishes between states that are modes of consciousness (sensation), rather as I am proposing, and states that are accompanied by consciousness (willing). I would rather say, even in the case of willing, that there is a use of ‘willing’ in which consciousness of one’s will is separate from willing but this need not always be the case.
See OC, §36
PI, §416. See also § 281
§417
This is without prejudice to there being cases in which the desire or belief is initially subliminal and one becomes aware of it through awareness of one’s experiences or even one’s behaviour.
PPF ix, §67. I do not deny that there is a use of ‘grieve’ that, like ‘desire’, does apply to conscious feelings that one can attend to. It is not my impression that Wittgenstein denies there are such uses in the paragraph cited.
In Wittgenstein studies, the definitive study of this sense of ‘self-awareness’ is Canfield’s The Looking Glass Self: An Examination of Self-awareness, New York, etc.: Praeger, 1990.
An early mention of this, dating from 1965, is in John W. Cook, “Wittgenstein on Privacy” in Canfield 1986, p. 75.
Hume, p. 10. I do not know if Hume used the term ‘introspection’ for such “internal perceptions” (I cannot find an instance in a brief scan).
p. 9
James, I, 1890, p. 185. His treatment of perception appears in vol. II, chapter 19.
Russell, p. 118
See Prinz and Peacocke in McLaughlin and Cohen. Peacocke denies that all psychological states are perceptual but, by implication, accepts that some are.
Alan Fogel calls interoception a monitoring of the inner states of the body and proprioception the ‘felt sense of location’, pp. 11, 83.
Hume, op. cit., pp. 31–32; James, II, p. 283
PPF, §111
§148
PPF, §67; RPS I, §1085
PI, §486
§253
§248
This seems implied at PI, §281, inter alia. A human being is the subject of sensations, so they are properties of her. However, Wittgenstein, as far as I know, does not say explicitly psychological states are properties of persons.
The same reference as the penultimate. This is what we usually mean but it does not rule out talking about a pain as the same one if it has persisted continuously or talking about a pain non-generically, this or that pain being the one that NN has.
§669
§619
§620
A useful summary of the history of introspectionism in psychology appears in Schwitzgebel 2004.
James 1890, I, pp. 189–90
PI, §314
RPP I, §8
PI, §316
Roughly §271 ff., but it overlaps extensively with the section on private language that precedes it.
PI, §412
§240 ff. The literature on the so-called private language argument is vast. Many older pieces are collected in Canfield and a classic statement of an influential view appears in Baker and Hacker, Meaning and Mind, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990 (vol. 3 of Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations) pp. 15–113. More recent contributions include Baker, “The Private Language Argument”, Language and Communication, 18 1998, pp. 225–56 (a departure from the view in Meaning and Mind), Canfield, “Private Language: the Diary Case”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79, 2001, pp. 377–94 (which challenges the thesis that there is “an argument” and views the material as offering reasons for aspects of the private linguist’s view) and Schulte’s comment on Baker in the Oxford Handbook, electronic source, pp. 429–50.
See Moyal-Sharrock, “Words as Deeds: Wittgenstein’s ‘Spontaneous Utterances and the Dissolution of the Explanatory Gap”, Philosophical Psychology, 13, issue 3, 2000, pp. 355–72.
Wittgenstein does not, as far as I can see, discuss the nature of evidence but a requirement that evidence be public seems implied in the treatment of private language. Moreover, although the fit is not exact, one can draw a parallel in this respect between evidence and criteria (discussed in the case of pain at §288–290). The fit is not exact because criteria are standards for meaningful utterance, not for truth (at least, in my view).
§258, 293
PI, §293. Sharrock and Coulter make a similar point about ordinary physical activities like tying one’s shoelaces. Reflection on what one is doing would get in the way. ‘Revisiting “The Unconscious”’, Perspicuous Presentations, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 111–12. My manner of putting this point may be more general than Wittgenstein intended. See Canfield, op. cit, 2001.
At PPF, §296, he notes the difficulty of finding out by introspection what it is like to have a word you have been searching for occur to you. The original paragraph at LW, §850, makes explicit the idea of interference: ‘And how can I pay attention to it at all while I am philosophizing?’
I am reminded of an undergraduate professor who, in talking about the Kantian approach to epistemology said knowledge is by a subject of an object (S → O) but when one does philosophy S’s attention is on the relation itself, as if an arrow circles up from S and down to the arrow conjoining S with O. I wondered why I could not perform such intellectual acrobatics that philosophers apparently performed with ease.
That is, there could be evidence that one’s brain and neural system are at work in monitoring one’s physical state even though we have no conscious awareness of anything. Such states are sometimes called subconscious, but it seems to me we should call them non-conscious.
I assume here that he is talking about impressions in general and not the vacillation between what one ‘sees’, e.g. duck and rabbit, in an aspect perception case.
E.g. PI, §165–67
§169
RPP I, §794
PPF, §66 in PI.
§63
§56–57, 66
§170
See also RPP I, §770–71and LW, §614–15.
See, e.g. PI, §177 and later §598, where he speaks of hypostatizing feelings that are not there, and the parenthetical remark in §321.
I focus on reports because incorrigibility is an epistemic term. We should bear in mind Wittgenstein’s point that ‘I am in pain’ need not be a report and usually would not be. It would be an expression of pain, like saying ‘Ouch!’
An early supporter of this view was H.H. Price in the 1930s. A modified version was defended by A.J. Ayer in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, London: Macmillan, 1963, pp. 52–81, the original paper dating from 1957. A defence against Armstrong, “Is Introspective Knowledge Incorrigible”, Philosophical Review: 72, no. 4, 1966, pp. 417–32, was made by Charles Raff, “Introspection and Incorrigibility”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: 27, 1, 1966, pp. 69–73. This is but a tiny sample of the literature. There was an empiricist alternative to this view even before it was first introduced, holding that introspective reports are empirically based and therefore falsifiable (an empiricist critique of incorrigibility was subsequently part of Armstrong’s case, op. cit.), but the main assault on it was mounted in the 1950s by J.L. Austin, appearing in Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962, pp. 110–15.
In OC, Wittgenstein appears to allow uses of ‘I know’ and ‘I am certain’ in a specialized sense meaning that the report admits of no possibility of mistake or doubt. E.g. see §11, 12, 16, etc.
Shoemaker, p. 271, mentions such a non-standard use by Armstrong but in the end finds it unsatisfactory.
See Porges 2011, pp. 77–78.
Fogel, discusses this extensively at pp. 41ff.
I make these mundane and tedious observations because of their philosophical importance. I by no means assert that Fogel or Porges has made or would make such confusions.
PI, §571
E.g. PI, §254
Schwitzgebel 2008
See below.
E.g. succinctly at 1890, vol. I, p. 299
pp. 298–300
p. 300
p. 301
PI, §413
His view is summarized in James 1894.
This is expressed in particularly accessible form in Fogel 2009, chapter 1, pp. 1ff.
Op. cit.
PPF, §268
James 1890, I, p. 299
Schwitzgebel 2008, p. 246
Prinz, passim. In philosophy, introspectionism is common. An example is Shoemaker (see bibliography) but he does not consider introspection to be perceptual.
Schwitzgebel 2004, pp. 66, 69, 70–74, 75; 2008, p. 266
PI, §354, OC, §87. The latter is about more than rules of meaning; it includes all certainties not open to doubt, whether or not such certainties should be treated as rules.
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Waterfall, D.E. Wittgenstein on Introspection and Introspectionism. SOPHIA 54, 243–264 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0468-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0468-y