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A hesitant defense of introspection

Philosophical Studies volume 165, pages 1165–1176 (2013)Cite this article

Abstract

Consider the following argument: when a phenomenon P is observable, any legitimate understanding of P must take account of observations of P; some mental phenomena—certain conscious experiences—are introspectively observable; so, any legitimate understanding of the mind must take account of introspective observations of conscious experiences. This paper offers a (preliminary and partial) defense of this line of thought. Much of the paper focuses on a specific challenge to it, which I call Schwitzgebel’s Challenge: the claim that introspection is so untrustworthy that its indispensability for a genuine understanding of the mind only shows that no genuine understanding of the mind is possible.

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Notes

  1. The argument is too complex to rehearse here, but the broad outlines are as follows. In a first stage, I argue for a certain asymmetry between our ascription of experiential mental states to ourselves, on the one hand, and our ascription of mental states to others and non-experiential states to ourselves, on the other. In a second stage, I argue that the best explanation of this asymmetry is that we have direct observational contact with our own experiential mental states but not with any other mental states. For details, see Kriegel (2011a), pp. 9–43.

  2. Let us say that an understanding of P is legitimate just when it is constructed or arrived at in an epistemically responsible manner. There is also the question of what is meant by an ‘understanding’ of a phenomenon. I propose that we think of this as a substantial conjunction of theoretical (i.e., not entirely observational) claims about a phenomenon that may or may not amount to a theory of the phenomenon.

  3. According to many, there are principled reasons for this limited success. For example, Chalmers (1995) has argued that while standard cognitive science is suited to explain structure and function, the phenomenon of phenomenal consciousness is not exhausted by structure and function. Other diagnoses are possible.

  4. This is a case in which the scientist uses his or her own introspection to form the relevant scientific hypothesis. As we will see in the next paragraph, this is not always the case.

  5. Here the scientist is using others’ introspective reports to form his or her hypothesis—unlike the case of the Shepard experiments, for example.

  6. In fact, often an introspectively obvious claim is established in such a third-person way, so that no real increase in humanity’s knowledge is effected in the process: the entire purpose of the exercise seems to be to showcase the scientist’s ingenuity in devising a task that allows for the relevant third-person measure of what was already introspectively manifest. I am tempted to say that the operative goal of cognitive-scientific research is thus not always to increase our understanding of the mind; often it is rather to devise increasingly ingenious introspection-purged ways of ratifying (‘legitimating’) knowledge we already have. In saying this, however, I assume that introspectively formed beliefs can qualify as knowledge, which means that they can qualify as epistemically justified. This may of course be rejected by the opponents of introspection.

  7. Sadly, however, I am unsure how to go about arguing for this grim suspicion.

  8. As I have presented a detailed critical discussion of Schwitzgebel’s (2011) sustained argument for his untrustworthiness claim elsewhere (Kriegel 2011b), I will restrict myself here to a more general response to Schwitzgebel’s Challenge, endeavoring to articulate a position on the trustworthiness of introspection that is neither so pessimistic as to undermine legitimate appeal to it in cognitive science nor too sanguine to be plausible.

  9. Needless to say, in this formulation (and all sequels) ‘introspect’ is used as a non-factive verb. In other words, the claim is not meant to be trivial. If one cannot hear ‘to introspect P’ as non-factive, we would have to introduce the notion of ‘seeming-introspection’ and the claim would have to be reworded thus: If S seemingly-introspects having P, then S has P.

  10. Consider the following view, which we may call introspective skepticism, and which can be factorized into these two theses: (a) A subject S introspecting phenomenology P is no indicator of S having P; (b) A subject S having P does not tend to make S introspect P. The conjunction of (a) and (b) casts introspection as entirely untrustworthy. But of course, nothing in the implausibility of introspective dogmatism supports the plausibility of introspective skepticism. More plausibly, the right view is somewhere in the middle, casting introspection as usefully but not awesomely trustworthy.

  11. I remind the reader that here I assume without argument a broadly perceptual model of introspection (but am fully aware that such a model requires defense).

  12. Thanks to Jay Garfield for pressing me on this.

  13. As I sit in front of my laptop and visually experience it in an attentive and focused manner, I am also aware, much more peripherally and as it were almost imperceptibly, of the tactile sensation of soles of my shoes, a low-humming anxiety about a looming appointment with a plagiarizer, and so on.

  14. For fuller discussion of this idea, see Kriegel 2009, Ch. 5.

  15. According to Annas (2008), this phenomenology of flow is in fact the experiential signature of virtue: what it is like to be a virtuous agent is to enjoy this un-conflicted, un-bifurcated phenomenology of flow. If so, the phenomenology of virtue itself may be non-introspectible.

  16. There may also be a class of extraordinarily esoteric phenomenologies (say, the phenomenology of sky-diving, if such there be) that for one reason or another evade clear introspection. If so, ACR and/or NNP might need to be restricted to relatively ordinary phenomenologies, the kinds of phenomenology most of us experience routinely.

  17. Thanks to Eric Schwitzgebel for pressing this objection on me.

  18. The question is not whether feeling infuriated makes it more likely that one introspect fury than that one not introspect fury; it is whether feeling infuriated makes it more likely that one introspect fury than not feeling fury does. Thanks to Brie Gertler for making this clearer to me.

  19. Admittedly, however, this may stretch the notion of introspection beyond what the proponent of introspective minimalism would want.

  20. Watson (1913, p. 163) writes: ‘Psychology, as it is generally thought of [i.e., by introspectionists], has something esoteric in its methods. If you fail to reproduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your apparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your introspection is untrained… In [the natural] sciences a better technique will give reproducible results. Psychology is otherwise. if you can't observe 3–9 states of clearness in attention, your introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty. You are seeing too much. Feelings are never clear.’

  21. On the whole, there is virtually no disagreement on whether the sense of taste has a distinctive phenomenology, whether phenomenal pink is experientially more similar to phenomenal red than to phenomenal blue, whether the phenomenology of toothache feels unpleasant, and so on.

  22. These would be rigorously trained subjects. Just as one’s sense of smell can be developed so that one becomes a ‘nose’—i.e., an expert smeller—so one’s introspective faculty can be developed so that one becomes an expert introspector.

  23. Thus, Titchener and his students all maintained that competent introspection reveals that there are no imageless thoughts, while Külpe and his students all maintained that it reveals that there are. The two labs also disagreed on the number of introspectively simple experiential elements in our stream of consciousness: Titchener required 42,415; Külpe managed with only 11,000. Such disagreements, and their persistence across labs, has suggested to many that the introspective judgments of rigorously trained subjects may lie downstream of their prior theoretical commitments. This too points in the direction of the second approach to the problem at hand, which approach I sketch in the second half of the paragraph.

  24. It is also requires that some assurances be produced that such particularly vivid experiences are still otherwise representative of the type of phenomenology they betoken, that is, that they differ from other experiences only along the dimension of vivacity.

  25. For more detail on, and an application of, this approach, see Kriegel forthcoming, appendix. In relevant research I have attempted to study the phenomenology of freedom by closely examining dozens of unsolicited reports on their subjective experience by released and escaped prisoners, liberated and manumitted slaves, and concentration camp survivors. These are all subjects whose phenomenology of freedom is bound to be more vivid and intense than ordinary freedom experience allows for. As I attempt to show, examination of their unsolicited reports reveals surprisingly many recurrent themes and patterns

  26. Frustrated with the cacophonous debate on the existence of cognitive phenomenology, Schwitzgebel (2011, p. 128) writes: ‘But introspection of current conscious experience is supposed to be easy, right? Thoughts occupied us throughout the week, presumably available to be discerned at every moment, as central to our lives as the seminar table. If introspection can guide us in such matters – if it can guide us, say, at least as reliably as vision—shouldn’t we reach agreement about the existence or absence of a phenomenology of thought as easily and straightforwardly as we reach agreement about the presence of the table?’

  27. Moreover, the folk view is often inherited by introspection-friendly philosophers, who tend to take their introspective judgment to be obvious.

  28. This may not have been—indeed, probably was not—exactly how Siewert put it to me.

  29. Observe how unconfident you become of what you see when you are listening to loud music while biking, or of what you hear when you are wearing dark sunglasses.

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Acknowledgments

For comments on a previous draft, I would like to thank Eric Schwitzgebel. This paper has benefited from fruitful exchanges with Will Leonard, Rachel Schneebaum, Eric Schwitzgebel, Charles Siewert, and probably many others. It has also benefited from a presentation at the 2012 Pacific APA meeting. I would like to thank the audience there, in particular Jay Garfield and Brie Gertler.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Uriah Kriegel

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Kriegel, U. A hesitant defense of introspection. Philos Stud 165, 1165–1176 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0148-0

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Keywords

  • Introspection
  • Phenomenology
  • Cognitive science
  • Context of discovery
  • Context of justification