The Importance of Intentions in Introspection

Abstract

When it comes to the introspection of sensory states, two dominant views have emerged within the last few decades — process-based accounts and conceptual accounts. Whereas contemporary process-based theorists (e.g Gertler 2001; Goldman 2006; Lycan 1997) believe that some sort of introspective attention is necessary to have introspective access to one’s sensory states, conceptualists (e.g Dretske 1994; Rosenthal 2000; Tye 2000) believe that introspection of sensory states is primarily the entertaining of higher-order thoughts about these states. The latter usually add that these higher-order thoughts are formed not by conceiving of the way things are, but by conceiving of the way things appear. Tye claims that ‘if you are attending to how things look to you, as opposed to how they are independently of how they look, you are bringing to bear your faculty of introspection’ (2000: 46). Rosenthal states that introspection ‘tells us only how things appear, not how they actually are’ (2000: 237), and Dretske argues that in introspection ‘we are conceiving of how things seem’ (1994: 266–267). What it means to conceive of how things appear remains mostly unclear. More specifically, although appearance statements are probably the most common way for people to express their introspective awareness of sensory states, it is hardly ever discussed which appearance statements count as introspective and which do not.