The Unreliability of Naive Introspection
Eric
Schwitzgebel
Department
of Philosophy
951
827 4288
eschwitz
at domain: ucr.edu
September
7, 2007
The Unreliability of
Naive Introspection
Abstract:
We are prone to gross
error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own
ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our
self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy.
We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include:
emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a
common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and
stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the phenomenology of thought
(does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine
knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside
world. Infallible judgments about
ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that
we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is
almost exactly backward.
The Unreliability of Naive Introspection
i.
Current conscious experience is generally the last refuge of the skeptic
against his own uncertainty. Though we
might doubt the existence of other minds, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that
the Earth existed five minutes ago, that there’s any “external world” at all,
even whether two and three make five, still we can know, it’s said, the basic
features of our ongoing stream of experience.
Descartes espouses this view in his first two Meditations. So does Hume,
in the first book of the Treatise,
and – as I read him – Sextus Empiricus.[1] Other radical skeptics like Zhuangzi and
Montaigne, though they appear to aim at very general skeptical goals, don’t
grapple specifically and directly with the possibility of radical mistakes
about current conscious experience. Is
this an unmentioned exception to their skepticism? Unintentional oversight? Do they dodge the issue for fear that it is
too poor a field on which to fight their battles?[2] Where is the skeptic who says: We have no
reliable means of learning about our own ongoing conscious experience, our
current imagery, our inward sensations – we are as in the dark about that as
about anything else, perhaps even more in the dark?
Is
introspection (if that’s what’s going on here) just that good? If so, that would be great news for the
blossoming – or I should say recently resurrected? – field of consciousness
studies. Or does contemporary discord
about consciousness – not just about the physical
bases of consciousness but seemingly about the basic features of experience
itself – point to some deeper, maybe fundamental, elusiveness that somehow
escaped the notice of the skeptics, that perhaps partly explains the first,
ignoble death of consciousness studies a century ago?
ii.
One must go surprisingly far afield to find major thinkers who hold, as I
do, that the introspection of current conscious experience is both (i.)
possible, important, necessary for a full life, central to the development of a
full scientific understanding of the mind, and (ii.) for the most part badly
done. In Eastern meditative traditions,
I think this is a commonplace. Also the
fiercest advocates of introspective training in the first era of scientific
psychology (circa 1900) endorsed both claims – especially E.B. Titchener.[3] Both the meditators and Titchener, though,
take comfort in optimism about introspection “properly” conducted – so they
hardly qualify as general skeptics or
pessimists. It’s as though their
advocacy of a regimen sets them free to criticize introspection as ordinarily
practiced. But might they be right in
their doubts, less so in their hopes?
Might we need introspection, though the prospects are bleak?
I won’t say much to defend (i), which I take
to be both common sense and the majority view in philosophy. Of course we have some sort of attunement to our ongoing conscious experience, and we
impoverish ourselves to try to do without it.
Part (ii) is the project. In less
abbreviated form: Most people are poor introspectors of their own ongoing
conscious experience. We fail not just
in assessing the causes of our mental
states or the processes underwriting them; and not just in our judgments about
non-phenomenal mental states like traits, motives, and skills; and not only
when we are distracted, or passionate, or inattentive, or self-deceived, or
pathologically deluded, or when we’re reflecting about minor matters, or about
the past, or only for a moment, or where fine discrimination is required. We are both ignorant and prone to error. There are major lacunae in our self-knowledge
that are not easily repaired; and we make gross, enduring mistakes about even
the most basic features of our currently ongoing conscious experience (or
“phenomenology”), even in favorable circumstances of careful reflection, with
distressing regularity. We either err or
stand perplexed, depending – rather superficially, I suspect – on our mood and
caution. (This essay will focus on
error, but sufficient restraint can always transform error to mere ignorance.)
Contemporary philosophers and psychologists
often doubt the layperson’s talent in assessing such non-conscious mental
states as her personality traits, her motivations and skills, her hidden
beliefs and desires, the bases of her decisions; and they may construe such
doubts as doubts about “introspection”.
But it’s one thing not to know why you chose a particular pair of socks
(to use an example from Nisbett and Wilson 1977), and quite another to be unable accurately
to determine your currently ongoing visual
experience as you look at those socks, your auditory experience as the interviewer asks you the question, the
experience of pain in your back making you want to sit down. Few philosophers or psychologists express
plain and general pessimism about the latter sorts of judgment. Or, rather, I should say this: I have heard
such pessimism only from behaviorists,
and their near cousins, who nest their arguments in a theoretical perspective
that rejects the psychological value, sometimes even the coherence, of
attempting to introspect conscious experiences at all – and thus reject claim
(i) above – though indeed even radical behaviorists often pull their punches
when it comes to ascribing flat-out error.[4]
Accordingly, though infallibilism – the view
that we cannot err in our judgments about our own current conscious experience
– is now largely out of favor, mainstream philosophical criticism of it is
surprisingly meek. Postulated mistakes
are largely only momentary, or about matters of fine detail, or under
conditions of stress or pathology, or at the hands of malevolent neurosurgeons.[5] Fallibilists generally continue to assume
that, in favorable circumstances, careful introspection can reliably reveal at
least the broad outlines of one’s currently ongoing experience. Even philosophers most of the community sees
as radical are, by my lights, remarkably tame and generous when it comes to
assessing our accuracy in introspecting current conscious experience. Paul Churchland (1985, 1988) puts it on a par
with the accuracy of sense perception.
Daniel Dennett (2002) says that we can come close to infallibility when
charitably interpreted.[6] Where are the firebrands?
A word about “introspection”. I happen to regard it as a species of
attention to currently ongoing conscious experience, but I won’t defend that
view here. The project at hand stands or
falls quite independently. Think of
introspection as you will – as long as it is the primary method by which we
normally reach judgments about our experience in cases of the sort I’ll
describe.[7] That method, whatever it is, is unreliable as
typically executed. Or so I will argue
in this essay.
iii.
I don’t know what emotion is, exactly.
Neither do you, I’d guess. Is
surprise an emotion? Comfort? Irritability?
Is it more of a gut thing, or a cognitive thing? Assuming cognition isn’t totally irrelevant,
how is it involved? Does cognition
relate to emotion merely as cause and effect, or is it somehow, partly,
constitutive?
I’m not sure
there’s a single right answer to these questions. The empirical facts seem ambiguous and
tangled.[8] Probably we need to conjecture and stipulate,
simplify, idealize, to have anything workable.
So also, probably, for most interesting psychological concepts. But here’s one thing that’s clear: Whatever
emotion is, some emotions – joy, anger, fear – can involve or accompany
conscious experience.
Now, you’re
a philosopher, or a psychologist, presumably interested in introspection and
consciousness and the like, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. You’ve had emotional experiences and you’ve
thought about them, reflected on how they feel as they’ve been ongoing or in
the cooling moments as they fade. If
such experiences are introspectible, and if introspection is the diamond
clockwork often supposed, then you have some insight. So tell me: Are emotional states like joy,
anger, and fear always felt phenomenally – that is, as part of one’s stream of
conscious experience – or only sometimes?
Is their phenomenology, their experiential character, always more or
less the same, or does it differ widely from case to case? For example, is joy sometimes in the head,
sometimes more visceral, sometimes a thrill, sometimes an expansiveness – or,
instead, does joy have a single, consistent core, a distinctive, identifiable,
unique experiential character? Is
emotional consciousness simply the experience of one’s bodily arousal, and
other bodily states, as William James (1890/1981) seems to suggest? Or, as most people think, can it include, or
even be exhausted by, something less literally visceral? Is emotional experience consistently located
in space (for example, particular places in the interior of one’s head and
body)? Can it have color – for instance,
do we sometimes literally “see red” as part of being angry? Does it typically come and pass in a few
moments (as Buddhists sometimes suggest) or does it tend to last awhile (as my
English-speaking friends more commonly say)?
If you’re like me, you won’t find all such
questions trivially easy. You’ll agree
that someone – perhaps even yourself – could be mistaken about some of them,
despite sincerely attempting to answer them, despite a history of
introspection, despite – maybe – years of psychotherapy or meditation or
self-reflection. You can’t answer these
questions one-two-three with the same easy confidence that you can answer
similarly basic structural questions about cars – how many wheels? hitched to
horses? travel on water? If you can –
well heck, I won’t try to prove you wrong!
But if my past inquiries are indicative, you are in a distinct minority.
It’s not just language that fails us – most of us? – when we confront such
questions (and if it were, we’d have to ask, anyway, why this particular linguistic
deficiency?) but introspection itself.
The questions challenge us not simply because we struggle for the words that best attach to a patently
obvious phenomenology. It’s not like
perfectly well knowing what particular shade of tangerine your Volvo is, stumped
only about how to describe it. No, in the case of emotion the very phenomenology itself – the
“qualitative” character of our consciousness – is not entirely evident, or so
it seems to me. But how could this be
so, if we know the “inner world” of our own experience so much better than the
world outside? Even the grossest
features of emotional experience largely elude us. Reflection doesn’t remove our ignorance, or it
delivers haphazard results.
Relatedly, most of us have a pretty poor
sense, I suspect, of what brings us pleasure and suffering. Do you really enjoy Christmas? Do you really feel bad while doing the
dishes? Are you happier weeding or going
to a restaurant with your family? Few
people make a serious study of this aspect of their lives, despite the lip
service we generally pay to the importance of “happiness”. Most people feel bad a substantial proportion
of the time, it seems to me.[9] We are remarkably poor stewards of our
emotional experience. We may say we’re happy – overwhelmingly we do –
but we have little idea what we’re talking about.[10]
iv.
Still, you might suggest, when we attend to particular instances of ongoing emotional experience, we can’t go
wrong, or don’t, or not by far. We may
concede the past to the skeptic, but not the present. It’s impossible – nearly impossible? – to
imagine my being wrong about my ongoing conscious experience right now, as I diligently reflect.
Well, philosophers say this, but I confess to wondering whether they’ve really thought
it through, contemplated a variety of examples, challenged themselves. You’d hope they would have, so maybe I’m
misunderstanding or going wrong in some way here. But to me at least, on reflection, the
possibility that I could be infallible in everything I’m inclined to say about
my ongoing consciousness – even barring purely linguistic errors, and even
assuming I’m being diligent and cautious and restricting myself to simple,
purely phenomenal claims arrived at (as far as I can tell) “introspectively” –
well, unfortunately that just seems blatantly unrealistic.
Let’s try an
experiment. You’re the subject. Reflect on, introspect, your own ongoing
emotional experience at this instant. Do
you even have any? If you’re in doubt,
vividly recall some event that still riles you, until you’re sure enough you’re
suffering some renewed emotion. Or maybe
your boredom, anxiety, irritation, or whatever, in reading this essay is
enough. Now let me ask: Is it completely
obvious to you what the character of that experience is? Does introspection reveal it you to as
clearly as visual observation reveals the presence of the text before your
eyes? Can you discern its gross and fine
features through introspection as easily and confidently as you can, though
vision, discern the gross and fine features of nearby external objects? Can you trace its spatiality (or
nonspatiality), its viscerality or cognitiveness, its involvement with
conscious imagery, thought, proprioception, or whatever, as sharply and
infallibly as you can discern the shape, texture, and color of your desk? (Or the difference between 3 and 27?) I cannot, of course, force a particular
answer to these questions. I can only
invite you to share my intuitive sense of uncertainty. (Perhaps I can buttress this sense of
uncertainty by noting, in passing, the broad range of disputes and divergences
within the literature on the experiential character of emotion – disputes that
at least seem to be about emotional
phenomenology itself, not merely about its causes and connections to
non-experiential states, or about how best to capture it in a theory.[11])
Or consider this: My wife mentions that I
seem to be angry about being stuck with the dishes again (despite the fact that
doing the dishes makes me happy?). I
deny it. I reflect, I sincerely attempt
to discover whether I’m angry – I don’t just reflexively defend myself but try
to be the good self-psychologist my wife would like me to be – and still I
don’t see it. I don’t think I’m angry. But I’m wrong, of course, as I usually am in
such situations: My wife reads my face better than I introspect. Maybe I’m not quite boiling inside, but there’s plenty of angry phenomenology to be
discovered if I knew better how to look.
Or do you think that every time we’re wrong about our emotions, those
emotions must be nonconscious, dispositional, not genuinely felt?
Or felt and perfectly apprehended phenomenologically but somehow
nonetheless mislabeled? Can’t I also err
more directly?
Surely my “no anger” judgment is colored by a
particular self-conception and lack of coolness. To that extent, it’s less than ideal as a
test of my claim that even in the most favorable circumstances of quiet
reflection we are prone to err about our experience. However, as long as we focus on judgments about
emotional phenomenology, such distortive factors will probably be in play. If that’s enough consistently to undermine
the reliability of our judgments, that rather better supports my thesis than
defeats it, I think.
Infallible judges of our emotional experience? I’m baffled.
How could anyone believe that? Do
you believe that? What am I missing?
v.
Now maybe emotional experience is an unusually difficult case. Maybe, though we err there, we are generally
quite accurate in our judgments about other
aspects of our phenomenology. Maybe my
argument even plays on some conceptual confusion about the relation between
emotion and its phenomenology, or relies illegitimately on introspection’s
undercutting the emotion introspected. I
don’t think so, but I confess I have no tidy account to eradicate such worries.
So let’s try vision. Suppose I’m looking directly at a nearby,
bright red object in good light, and I judge that I’m having the visual
phenomenology, the “inward experience”, of redness. Here, perhaps – even if not in the emotional
case – it seems rather hard to imagine that I could be wrong in that judgment
(though I could be wrong in using the term “red” to label an experience I otherwise perfectly well know).
I’ll grant that. Some aspects of visual experience are so
obvious it would be difficult to go wrong about them. So also would it be difficult to go wrong in
some of our judgments about the external world – the presence of the text
before your eyes, the existence of the chair in which you’re sitting and are
now (let’s suppose) minutely examining.
Introspection may admit obvious cases, but that in no way proves that
it’s more secure than external perception – or even as secure.
Now of course many philosophers have argued
plausibly that one could be wrong
even in “obvious” judgments about external objects, if one allows that one may
be dreaming, or allows that one’s brain may have been removed at night and
teleported to Alpha Centauri to be stimulated by genius neuroscientists with
inputs mimicking normal interaction with the world. Generally, philosophers have supposed (with
Descartes) that such thought experiments don’t undermine judgments about visual
phenomenology. So perhaps obvious
introspective judgments are more
secure than obvious perceptual ones, after all, since they don’t admit even
this peculiar smidgen – usually it only seems like a smidgen – of doubt?
But in dreams we make baldly incoherent
judgments, or at least very stupid ones.
I think I can protrude my tongue without its coming out; I think I see
red carpet that’s not red; I see a seal as my sister without noticing any
difficulty about that. In dream
delirium, these judgments may seem quite ordinary, or even insightful. If you admit the possibility that you’re
dreaming, I think you should admit the possibility that your judgment that you
are having reddish phenomenology is a piece of delirium, unaccompanied by any
actual reddish phenomenology. Indeed, it
seems to me not entirely preposterous to suppose that we have no color experiences
at all in our sleep – or have them only rarely – and our judgments about the
colors of dream-objects are on par with the seal-sister judgment, purely
creative fiction unsupported by any distinctive phenomenology.[12] If so, the corresponding judgments about the coloration
of our experiences of those
dream-objects will be equally unsupported.
Likewise, if we allow malevolent
neurosurgeons from Alpha Centauri to massage and stoke our brains, I see no
reason to deny them the power to produce directly the judgment that one is
having reddish phenomenology, while suppressing the reddish phenomenology
itself. Is this so patently impossible?[13]
Absolute security, and immunity to skeptical doubt,
thus eludes even “obvious” introspective judgments as well as perceptual
ones. If we rule out radically skeptical
worries, then we’re left with judgments on a par (“red phenomenology now”,
“paper in my hands”) – judgments as obvious and as secure as one could
reasonably wish. The issue of whether
the introspection of current visual experience warrants greater trust than the
perception of nearby objects must be decided on different grounds.
vi.
Look around a bit. Consider your
visual experience as you do this. Does
it seem to have a center and a periphery, differing somehow in clarity,
precision of shape and color, richness of detail? Yes?
It seems that way to me, too. Now
consider this: How broad is that
field of clarity? Thirty degrees? More?
Maybe you’re looking at your desk, as I am. Does it seem that a fairly wide swath of the
desk – a square foot? – presents itself to you clearly in experience at any one
moment, with the shapes, colors, textures all sharply defined? Most people endorse something like this view
when I ask them.[14] They are, I think, mistaken.
Consider, first, our visual capacities. It’s firmly established that the precision
with which we detect shape and color declines precipitously outside a central,
foveal area of about 1-2 degrees of arc (about the size of your thumbnail held
at arm’s length). Dennett (1991) has
suggested a way of demonstrating this to yourself. Draw a card from a normal deck without
looking at it. Keeping your eyes fixed
on some point in front of you, hold the card at arm’s length just beyond your
field of view. Without moving your eyes,
slowly rotate the card toward the center of your visual field. How close to the center must you bring it
before you can determine the color of the card, its suit, and its value? Most people are quite surprised at the result
of this little experiment. They
substantially overestimate their visual acuity outside the central, foveal
region. When they can’t make out whether
it’s a Jack or a Queen, though the card is nearly (but only nearly) dead center, they laugh, they’re
astounded, dismayed.[15] You have to bring it really close.
By itself, this says nothing about our visual
experience. Surprise and dismay may
reveal error in our normal (implicit) assumptions about our visual capacities,
but it’s one thing to mistake one’s abilities, quite another to misconstrue
phenomenology. Our visual experience
depends on the recent past, on general knowledge, on what we hear, think, and
infer, as well as on immediate visual input – or so it’s plausible to
suppose. Background knowledge could thus
fill in and sharpen our experience beyond the narrow foveal center. Holding our eyes still and inducing ignorance
could artificially crimp the region of clarity.
Still, I doubt visual experience is nearly as
sharp and detailed as most untutored introspectors seem to think. Here’s the root of the mistake, I suspect:
When the thought occurs to you to reflect on some part of your visual
phenomenology, you normally move your
eyes (or “foveate”) in that direction.
Consequently, wherever you think to attend, within a certain range of
natural foveal movement, you find the clarity and precision of foveal
vision. It’s as though you look at your
desk and ask yourself: Is the stapler clear?
Yes. The pen? Yes.
The artificial wood grain between them and the mouse pad? Yes – each time looking directly at the
object in question – and then you conclude that they’re all clear
simultaneously.[16]
But you needn’t
reflect in this way. We can prize
foveation apart from introspective attention.
Fixate on some point in the distance, holding your eyes steady while you
reflect on your visual experience outside the narrow fovea. Better, direct your introspective energies
away from the fovea while your eyes continue to move around (or “saccade”)
normally. This may require a bit of
practice. You might start by keeping one
part of your visual field steadily in mind, allowing your eyes to foveate
anywhere but there. Take a book in your
hands, and let your eyes saccade around its cover, while you think about your
visual experience in the regions away from the precise points of fixation.
Most of the people I’ve spoken to, who
attempt these exercises, eventually conclude to their surprise that their
experience of clarity decreases substantially even a few degrees from center. Through more careful and thoughtful
introspection, they seem to discover – in fact, I think they really do discover
– that visual experience does not consist of a broad, stable field flush with
precise detail, hazy only at the borders.
They discover that, instead, the center of clarity is tiny, shifting
rapidly around a rather indistinct background.
My interlocutors – most of them – confess to error in having originally
thought otherwise.
If I’m right about this, then most naive
introspectors are badly mistaken about their visual phenomenology when they
first reflect on it, when they aren’t warned and coached against a certain sort
of error, even though they may be patiently considering that experience as it
occurs. And the error they make is not a
subtle one: The two conceptions of visual experience differ vastly. If naive introspectors are as wrong as they
seem to be, as wrong as they later confess they are, about the clarity and
stability of visual experience, they’re wrong about an absolutely fundamental and pervasive aspect of their sensory
consciousness.
I’m a pretty skeptical guy, though. I’m perfectly willing to doubt myself. Maybe I’m wrong: Visual experience is a
plenum. But if so, I’m not the only
person who’s wrong about this. So also
are most of my interlocutors (whom I hope
I haven’t browbeaten too badly) and probably a good number of philosophers and
psychologists.[17] We – I, my friends and cobelievers – have
been seduced into error by some theory or preconception, perhaps, some blindness,
stupidity, oversight, suggestibility.
Okay, let’s assume that. I need
only, now, turn my argument on my head.
We tried to get it right. We reflected, sincerely, conscientiously, in
good faith, at a leisurely pace, in calm circumstances, without external
compulsion, and we got it wrong.
Introspection failed us. Since
what I’m trying to show is the aptitude of introspection to lead to just such
errors, that result would only further my ultimate thesis. Like other skeptical arguments that turn on
our capacity for disagreement, it can triumph in partial defeat.
I do have to hold this, though: Our
disagreement is real and substantial. My
interlocutors’ opinions about their ongoing visual experience change
significantly as a result of their reflections.
The mistake in question, whichever side it’s on, though perhaps
understandable, is large – no miniscule, evanescent detail, no mere subtlety of
language. Furthermore, opinions on both
sides arise from normal introspective processes – the same types of process
(whatever they are) that underwrite most of our “introspective” claims about
consciousness. And finally, I must hold
that those who disagree don’t differ in the basic structure of their visual
experience in such a way as to mirror precisely their disagreements. Maybe you can successfully attack one of
these premises?
vii.
In 2002, David Chalmers and David Hoy ran a summer seminar in
There can be little doubt that sometimes when we think, reflect,
ruminate, dwell, or what have you, we simultaneously, or nearly so, experience imagery of some sort: maybe visual
imagery, such as of keys on the kitchen table; maybe auditory imagery, such as
silently saying “that’s where they are”.
Now here’s the question to consider: Does the phenomenology of thinking consist entirely of imagery experiences
of this sort, perhaps accompanied by feelings (emotions?) such as discomfort,
familiarity, confidence? Or does it go
beyond such images and feelings? Is
there some distinctive phenomenology specifically of thought, additional to or
conjoined with the images, perhaps even capable of transpiring without them?
Scholars disagree. Research and reflection generate dissent, not
convergence, on this point. This is true
historically,[18]
and it was also true at the
If the issue were highly abstract and
theoretical, like most philosophy, or if it hung on recondite empirical facts,
we might expect such disagreement. But
the introspection of current conscious experience – that’s supposed to be easy, right? Thoughts occupied us throughout the week,
presumably available to be discerned at any 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 existence of the table?
Unless people diverge so enormously that some
have a phenomenology of thought and others do not, then someone is quite
profoundly mistaken about her own stream of experience. Disagreement here is no matter of fine
nuance. If there is such a thing as a
conscious thought, then presumably we have them all the time. How could you go looking for them and simply
not find them? Conversely, if there’s no
distinctive phenomenology of thought, how could you introspect and come to
believe that there is – that is, invent a whole category of conscious
experiences that simply don’t exist?
Such fundamental mistakes almost beggar the imagination; they plead for
reinterpretation as disagreements only in language or theory, not real
disagreements about the phenomenology itself.
I don’t think that’s how the participants in
these disputes see it, though; and, for me at least, the temptation to recast
it this way dissipates when I attempt the introspection myself. Think of the Price of
viii.
In my view, then, we’re prone to gross error, even in favorable
circumstances of extended reflection, about our ongoing emotional, visual, and
cognitive phenomenology. Elsewhere, I’ve
argued for a similar ineptitude in our ordinary judgments about auditory
experience and visual imagery. I won’t
repeat those arguments here.[20] All this is evidence enough, I think, for a
generalization: The introspection of current conscious experience, far from
being secure, nearly infallible, is faulty, untrustworthy, and misleading – not
just possibly mistaken, but massively
and pervasively. I don’t think it’s just me in the dark here, but
most of us. You too, probably. If you stop and introspect now, there’s
likely very little you should confidently say you know about your own current
phenomenology. Perhaps the right kind of
learning, practice, or care could largely shield us from error – an interesting
possibility that merits exploration! – but I see as yet no robust scientific
support for such hopes.[21]
What about pain, a favorite example for
optimists about introspection? Could we
be infallible, or at least largely dependable, in reporting ongoing pain
experiences? Well, there’s a reason
optimists like the example of pain – pain and foveal visual experience of a
single bright color. It is hard, seemingly, to go too badly
wrong in introspecting really vivid, canonical pains and foveal colors. But to use these cases only as one’s inference base rigs the game. And the case of pain is not always as clear
as sometimes supposed. There’s confusion
between mild pains and itches or tingles.
There’s the football player who sincerely denies he’s hurt. There’s the difficulty we sometimes feel in
locating pains precisely or in describing their character. I see no reason to dismiss, out of hand, the
possibility of genuine introspective error in these cases. Psychosomatic pain, too: Normally, we think
of psychosomatic pains as genuine pains,
but is it possible that some, instead, involve sincere belief in a pain that
doesn’t actually exist?
Inner speech
– “auditory imagery” as I called it above – can also seem hard to doubt – that
I’m silently saying to myself “time for lunch”.
But on closer inspection, I find it slipping my grasp. I lean toward thinking that there is a
conscious phenomenology of imageless thought (as described in §vii) – but as a
result, I’m not always sure whether some cogitation that seems to be in inner
speech is not, instead, imageless. And
also: Does inner speech typically involve not just auditory images but also
motor images in the vocal apparatus? Is
there an experiential distinction between inner speaking and inner
hearing? I almost despair.
Why, then,
do people tend to be so confident in their introspective judgments, especially
when queried in a casual and trusting way?
Here’s my suspicion: Because no one ever scolds us for getting it wrong
about our experience and we never see decisive evidence of error, we become
cavalier. This lack of corrective
feedback encourages a hypertrophy of confidence. Who doesn’t enjoy being the sole expert in
the room whose word has unchallengeable weight?
In such situations, we tend to take up the mantle of authority, exude a
blustery confidence – and genuinely feel
that confidence (what professor doesn’t know this feeling?), until we imagine
possibly being shown wrong later by another authority or by unfolding
events. About our own stream of
experience, however, there appears to be no such humbling danger.
ix.
But wait: Suppose I say “I’m thinking of a pink elephant” – or even,
simply, “I’m thinking”. I’m sincere, and
there’s no linguistic mistake. Aren’t
claims of this sort necessarily self-verifying?
Doesn’t merely thinking such thoughts or reaching such judgments, aloud
or silently, guarantee their truth?
Aren’t, actually, their truth
conditions just a subset of their existence
conditions? – and if so, mightn’t this help us out somehow in making a case for
the trustworthiness of introspection?
I’ll grant
this: Certain things plausibly follow from the very having of a thought: that
I’m thinking, that I exist, that something exists, that my thought has the
content it in fact has. Thus, certain
thoughts and judgments will be infallibly true whenever they occur – whatever
thoughts and judgments assert the actuality of the conditions or consequences
of having them. But the general accuracy
of introspective judgments doesn’t follow.
Infallibility
is, in fact, cheap. Anything that’s evaluable as true or false, if it asserts the
conditions or consequences of its own existence or has the right
self-referential structure, can be infallibly true. The spoken assertion “I’m speaking” or “I’m
saying ‘blu-bob’” is infallibly true whenever it occurs. The sentence “This sentence has five words”
is infallibly true whenever uttered. So
is the semaphore assertion “I’m holding two flags”. So, sure, certain thoughts are infallibly
true – true whenever they occur. This
shouldn’t surprise us; it’s merely an instance of the more general phenomenon
of self-fulfillment. It has nothing
whatsoever to do with introspection; it implies no perfection in the art of ascertaining
what’s going on in one’s mind. If
introspection happens to be the process by which thoughts of this sort
sometimes arise, that’s merely incidental: Infallibly self-fulfilling thoughts
are automatically true whether they arise from introspection, from fallacious
reasoning, from evil neurosurgery, quantum accident, stroke, indigestion,
divine intervention, or sheer frolicsome confabulation.
And how many
introspective judgments, really, are
infallibly self-fulfilling? “I’m
thinking” – okay. “I’m thinking of a
pink elephant” – well, maybe, if we’re liberal about what qualifies as
“thinking of” something.[22] But “I’m not angry”, “my emotional
phenomenology right now is entirely bodily”, “I have a detailed image of the
Taj Mahal in which every arch and spire is simultaneously well defined”, “my
visual experience is all clear and stable 100 degrees into the periphery”, “I’m
having an imageless thought of a pink elephant”. Those are a different matter entirely, I’d
say.
And, anyway,
I’m not so sure we haven’t changed the topic.
Does the thought “I’m thinking” or “I’m thinking of a pink elephant”
really express a judgment about current
conscious experience? Philosophers
might reasonably take different stands here, but it’s not clear to me that I’m
committed to believing anything, or
anything particular, about my conscious experience in accepting such a
judgment. I’m certainly not committed to
thinking I have a visual image of a pink elephant, or an “imageless thought” of
one, or that the words “pink elephant” are drifting through my mind in inner
speech. I might hold “I’m thinking of a
pink elephant” to be true while I suspect any or all of the latter to be false. Am I committed at least to the view that I’m conscious? Maybe.
Maybe this is one fact about our conscious experience we infallibly know
(could I reach the judgment that I’m conscious nonconsciously?).[23] But your ambitions for introspection must be
modest indeed if that satisfies you.
x.
I sometimes hear the following objection: When we make claims about our
phenomenology, we’re making claims about how things appear to us, not about how anything actually is. The claims, thus
divorced from reality, can’t be false; and if they’re true, they’re true in a
peculiar way that shields them from error.
In looking at an illusion, for example, I may well be wrong if I say the
top line is longer; but if I say it appears
or seems to me that the top line is
longer, I can’t in the same way be wrong.
The sincerity of the latter claim seemingly guarantees its truth. It’s tempting, perhaps, to say this: If
something appears to appear a certain
way, necessarily it appears that way.
Therefore, we can’t misjudge appearances, which is to say,
phenomenology.
This
reasoning rests on an equivocation between what we might call an epistemic and a phenomenal sense of “appears” (or, alternatively, “seems”). Sometimes, we use the phrase “it appears to
me that such-and-such” simply to express a judgment – a hedged judgment, of a
sort – with no phenomenological implications whatsoever. If I say, “It appears to me that the
Democrats are headed for defeat”, ordinarily I’m merely expressing my opinion
about the Democrats’ prospects. I’m not
attributing to myself any particular phenomenology. I’m not claiming to have an image, say, of
defeated Democrats, or to hear the word “defeat” ringing in my head. In contrast, if I’m looking at an illusion in
a vision science textbook, and I say that the top line “appears” longer, I’m not expressing any sort of judgment
about the line. I know perfectly well
it’s not longer. I’m making instead, it
seems, a claim about my phenomenology, about my visual experience.[24]
Epistemic
uses of “appears” might, under
certain circumstances, be infallible in the sense of the previous section. Maybe, if we assume that they’re sincere and
normally caused, their truth conditions will be a subset of their existence
conditions – though a story needs to be told here.[25] But phenomenal
uses of “appears” are by no means similarly infallible. This is evident from the case of weak,
nonobvious, or merely purported illusions.
Confronted with a perfect cross and told there may be a “horizontal-vertical
illusion” in the lengths of the lines, one can feel uncertainty, change one’s
mind, and make what at least plausibly seem to be errors about whether one line
“looks” or “appears” or “seems” in one’s visual phenomenology to be longer than
another. You might, for example, fail to
notice – or worry that you may be failing to notice – a real illusion in your
experience of the relative lengths of the lines; or you might (perhaps under
the influence of a theory) erroneously report a minor illusion that actually
isn’t part of your visual experience at all.
Why not?[26]
Philosophers
who speak of “appearances” or “seemings” in discussing consciousness invite
conflation of the epistemic and phenomenal senses of these terms. They thus risk breathing an illegitimate air
of indefeasibility into our reflections about phenomenology. “It appears that it appears that
such-and-such” may have the look of redundancy; but on disambiguation the
redundancy vanishes: “It epistemically seems to me that my phenomenology is
such-and-such”. No easy argument renders
this statement self-verifying.
xi.
Suppose I’m right about one thing – about something that appears, anyway,
hard to deny: that people reach vastly different introspective judgments about
their conscious experience, their emotional experience, their imagery, their
visual experience, their thought. If
these judgments are all largely correct,
people must differ immensely in the structure of their conscious experience.
You might be happy to accept that, if the
price of denying it is skepticism about introspective judgments. Yet I think there’s good reason to
pause. Human variability, though
impressive, usually keeps to certain limits.
Feet, for example – some are lean and bony, some fat and square, yet all
show a common design: skin on the outside, stout bones at the heel, long bones
running through the middle into toes, nerves and tendons arranged
appropriately. Only in severe injury or
mutation is it otherwise. Human livers
may be larger or smaller, better or worse, but none is made of rubber or
attached to the elbow. Human behavior is
wonderfully various, yet we wager our lives daily on the predictability of
drivers and no one shows to department meetings naked. Should phenomenology prove the exception by
varying radically from person to person – some of us experiencing 100 degrees
of visual clarity, some only 2 degrees, some possessed of a distinctive
phenomenology of thought, some lacking it, and so forth – with as little
commonality as these diverse self-attributions seem to suggest? Of course, if ocular physiology differed in
ways corresponding to the differences in report, or if we found vastly
different performances on tests of visual acuity or visual memory, or if some
of us possessed higher cognition or sympathetic emotional arousal while others
did not, that would be a different matter.
But as things are, two people walk into a room, their behavioral
differences are subtle, their physiologies are essentially the same, and yet
phenomenologically they’re so alien as to be like different species? Hm!
Here’s another possibility: Maybe people are
largely the same except when they
introspect. Maybe we all have basically
the same visual phenomenology most of the time, for example, until we reflect
directly on that phenomenology – and then some of us experience 100 degrees of
stable clarity while others experience only two degrees. Maybe we all have a phenomenology of thought,
but introspection amplifies it in some people, dissipates it in others;
analogously for imagery, emotions, and so forth.
That view has its attractions. But to work it so as to render our
introspective judgments basically trustworthy, one must surrender many
things. The view concedes to the skeptic
that we know little about ordinary, unintrospected experience, since it hobbles
the inference from introspected experience to experience in the normal,
unreflective mode. It threatens to make
a hash of change in introspective opinion: If someone thinks a previous
introspective opinion of hers was mistaken – a fairly common experience among
people I interview (see, for example, §vi) – she must, it seems, generally be wrong that it was mistaken. She must, generally, be correct, now, that
her experience is one way, and also correct, a few minutes ago, that it was
quite another way, without having noticed the intervening change. This seems an awkward coupling of current
introspective acumen with profound ignorance of change over time. The view renders foolish whatever uncertainty
we may sometimes feel when confronted with what might have seemed to be
introspectively difficult tasks (as in §§iv, vii, and x). Why feel uncertain if the judgment one
reaches is bound to be right? It also
suggests a number of particular – and I might say rather doubtful – empirical
commitments (unless consciousness is purely epiphenomenal): major differences
in actual visual acuity, while introspecting, between those reporting broad
clarity and those reporting otherwise; major differences in cognition, while
introspecting, between people reporting a phenomenology of thought and those
denying it; and so on. The view also
requires an entirely different explanation of why theorists purporting to use
“immediate retrospection”[27]
also find vastly divergent results – since immediate retrospection, if
successful, postpones the act of introspection until after the conscious
experience to be reported, when presumably it won’t have been polluted by the
introspective act.
Is there some compelling reason to take on
all this?
xii.
There are two kinds of unreliability.
Something might be unreliable because it often goes wrong or yields the
wrong result, or it might be unreliable because it fails to do anything or
yield any result at all. A secretary is
unreliable in one way if he fouls the job, unreliable in another if he neglects
it entirely. A program for delivering
stock prices is unreliable in one way if it tends to misquote, unreliable in
another if crashes. Either way, they
can’t be depended on to do what they ought.[28]
Introspection is unreliable in both
ways. Reflection on basic features of
ongoing experience leads sometimes to error and sometimes to perplexity or
indecision. Which predominates in the
examples of this essay is not, I think, a deep matter, but rather a matter of
context or temperament. Some
introspectors will be more prone to glib guesswork than others. Some contexts – for example, a pessimistic
essay on introspection – will encourage restraint. But whether the result is error or
indecision, introspection will have failed – if we suppose that introspection ought to yield trustworthy
judgments about the grossest contours of ongoing conscious experience.
You might reject that last idea. Maybe we shouldn’t expect introspection to
reveal (for example) the bodily or non-bodily aspects of emotion, the presence
or absence of a distinctive cognitive phenomenology. It wouldn’t, then, tell against the
reliability of introspection if such cases baffle us. It doesn’t tell against the reliability of a
stock quote program if it doesn’t describe the weather. A passenger car that overheats going 120
m.p.h. isn’t thereby unreliable. Maybe
I’ve pushed introspection beyond its proper limits, illegitimately forcing it
into failure.
What, then, would be the proper domain of
introspection, narrowly enough construed to preserve its reliability? Our ongoing beliefs and desires? That changes the topic away from current
conscious experience: When I report believing that a body-builder is governor
of
We may generally be right about foveal visual
experience of color and the presence or absence of canonical pains, but it’s
arbitrary to call such reports introspective and not similar-seeming reports
about the overall clarity of the visual field or the presence or absence of
bodily aspects of emotion. In both formal
and informal interviews with me, and in the experiments of early introspective
psychologists like Titchener (1901-1905), and in the recent explorations of
psychologists like Hurlburt (1990; Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel forthcoming),
subjects confidently pronounce on the features of experience discussed in this
essay. Neither I, nor they, nor
Titchener, nor Hurlburt, nor anyone else I’m aware of, sees any obvious
difference in mechanism. These basic
facts of experience are the proper targets of introspection, if anything is. If introspection regularly fails to discern
them correctly, it is not a reliable process.
xiii.
Descartes, I think, had it quite backwards when he said the mind –
including especially current conscious experience – was better known than the
outside world. The teetering stacks of
paper around me, I’m quite sure of. My visual experience as I look at those
papers; my emotional experience as I
contemplate the mess; my cognitive
phenomenology as I drift in thought, staring at them – of these, I’m much
less certain. My experiences flee and
scatter as I reflect. I feel
unpracticed, poorly equipped with the tools, categories, and skills that might
help me dissect them. They are
gelatinous, disjointed, swift, shy, changeable.
They are at once familiar and alien.
The tomato is stable. My visual experience as I look at the tomato
shifts with each saccade, each blink, each observation of a blemish, each
alteration of attention, with the adaptation of my eyes to lighting and color. My thoughts, my images, my itches, my pains,
bound away as I think about them, or remain only as self-conscious, interrupted
versions of themselves. Nor can I hold
them still, even as artificial specimens – as I reflect on one aspect of the
experience it alters and grows, or it crumbles.
The unattended aspects undergo their own changes too. If outward things were so evasive, they’d
also mystify and mislead.
I know better what’s in the burrito I’m
eating than I know my gustatory experience as I eat it. I know it has cheese. In describing my experience, I resort to
saying, vaguely, that the burrito tastes “cheesy”, without any very clear idea
what this involves. Maybe, in fact, I’m
just – or partly – inferring: The thing has cheese, so I must be having a taste
experience of “cheesiness”. Maybe also,
if I know that the object I’m seeing is evenly red, I’ll infer a visual
experience of uniform “redness” as I look at it. Or if I know that weeding is unpleasant work,
I’ll infer a negative emotion as I do it.
Indeed, it can make great sense as a general strategy to start with
judgments about plain, easily knowable facts of the outside world, then infer
to what is more foreign and elusive, our consciousness
as we experience that world.[31] I doubt we can fully disentangle such
inferences from more “genuinely introspective” processes.
Descartes thought, or is often portrayed as
thinking, that we know our own experience first and most directly, and then
infer from that to the external world.[32] If that’s right – if our judgments about the
outside world, to be trustworthy, must be grounded in sound judgments about our
experiences – then our epistemic situation is dire indeed. However, I see no reason to accept any such
introspective foundationalism.[33] Indeed, I suspect the opposite is nearer the
truth: Our judgments about the world to a large extent drive our judgments
about our experience. Properly so, since
the former are the more secure.[34]
References:
Armstrong, D.M. 1963. Is Introspective Knowledge Incorrigible? Philosophical
Review 72:417-32.
Bar-On, Dorit. 2004. Speaking
My Mind.
Bayle,
Bem, Daryl J. 1972. Self-Perception Theory. Advances
in Experimental and Social Psychology 6:1-62.
Berkeley, George. 1710/1965. A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. In Principles,
Dialogues, and Philosophical Correspondence, edited by C.M. Turbayne.
Blackmore, Susan. 2002. There Is No Stream of Consciousness. Journal
of Consciousness Studies 9 (numbers 5-6):17-28.
Boring, E.G. 1921. The Stimulus Error. American
Journal of Psychology 32:449-71.
Brandstätter, Hermann. 2001. Time Sampling Diary: An Ecological Approach
to the Study of Emotion in Everyday Life Situations. In Persons,
Situations, and Emotions, edited by H. Brandstätter and A. Eliasz, 20-52.
Burge, Tyler. 1988. Individualism and Self-Knowledge. Journal
of Philosophy 85:649-63.
Burge, Tyler. 1996. Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society 96:91-116.
Chalmers, David J. 1996. The Conscious
Mind.
Chalmers, David J. 2003. The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief. In Consciousness:
New Philosophical Essays, edited by Q. Smith and A. Jokic.
Chisholm, Roderick M. 1957. Perceiving.
Chuang Tzu. 3rd c.
B.C.E./1964. Basic Writings, translated by B. Watson.
Churchland, Paul M. 1985. Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection
of Brain States. Journal of Philosophy 82: 8-28.
Churchland, Paul M. 1988. Matter
and Consciousness, rev. ed.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1969. Content
and Consciousness.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness
Explained.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2001. Surprise, Surprise. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 24:982.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2002. How Could I Be Wrong? How Wrong Could I Be? Journal
of Consciousness Studies 9 (numbers 5-6):13-6.
Descartes, René. 1641/1984. Meditations
on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch.
Dretske, Fred. 1995. Naturalizing
the Mind.
Dretske, Fred. 2000. Perception,
Knowledge, and Belief.
Dretske, Fred. 2003. How Do You Know You Are Not a Zombie? In Privileged
access, edited by B. Gertler, 1-13.
Ericsson, K. Anders and Herbert
A. Simon. 1984/1993. Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports As Data,
rev. ed.
Gertler, Brie. 2001. Introspecting Phenomenal States. Philosophy
& Phenomenological Research 63:305-28.
Gertler, Brie, editor. 2003. Privileged
Access.
Goldman,
Goldman,
Goldman,
Gordon, Robert M. 1995. Simulation
Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You. In Mental
Simulation, edited by M. Davies and T. Stone, 53-67.
Haybron, Dan. forthcoming. Do we know how happy we are? Noûs.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1962. Cogito Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance? Philosophical
Review 71: 3-32.
Horgan, Terence and John Tienson.
2002. The Intentionality of Phenomenology
and the Phenomenology of Intentionality.
In Philosophy of Mind, edited
by D. J. Chalmers, 520-33.
Horgan, Terence, John Tienson,
and George Graham. 2005. Internal-World Skepticism
and the Self-Presentational Nature of Phenomenal Consciousness. In Experience and
Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein
Symposium, edited by M. Reicher and J. Marek, 191-207. Wien: ÖBV & HPT.
Hume, David. 1740/1978. A Treatise
of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch.
Hume, David. 1748/1975. An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding. In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and
Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H.
Nidditch.
Humphrey, George. 1951. Thinking.
Hurlburt, Russell T. 1990. Sampling
Hurlburt, Russell T. and Eric
Schwitzgebel. Forthcoming. Describing
Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic.
Jack, Anthony I, and Tim Shallice.
2001. Introspective Physicalism As an Approach
to the Science of Consciousness. Cognition 79:161-96.
Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception.
James, William. 1890/1981. The Principles
of Psychology.
Kornblith, Hilary. 1998. What Is It Like to Be Me? Australasian
Journal of Philosophy 76:48-60.
Kriegel, Uriah. 2006. The Same-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness. In Self-representational
approaches to consciousness, edited by U. Kriegel and K. Williford.
Lambie, John A. and Anthony J.
Marcel. 2002. Consciousness and the Varieties
of Emotion Experience: A Theoretical Framework.
Psychological Review 109:219-59.
Lawlor,
Krista. 2006. Knowing What One Believes. Oral presentation, U.C. Riverside.
Locke, John. 1690/1975. An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch.
Lutz, Antoine, John D. Dunne, and
Richard J. Davidson. Forthcoming.
Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness. In Cambridge
Handbook of Consciousness, edited by P. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, and E.
Thompson.
Lycan, William G. 1996. Consciousness
and Experience.
Mack, Arien and Irvin Rock.
1998. Inattentional Blindness.
Montaigne, Michel de
1580/1948. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by D. M. Frame.
Moran, Richard. 2001. Authority
and Estrangement.
Nichols, Shaun and Stephen P.
Stich. 2003. Mindreading.
Nisbett, Richard E. and Timothy
DeCamp
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception.
O’Regan, J. Kevin. 1992. Solving the “Real” Mysteries of Visual Perception. The World As an Outside Memory. Canadian
Journal of Psychology 46:461-88.
Pitt, David. 2004. The Phenomenology of Cognition, or What Is It
Like to Think That P? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
69:1-36.
Prinz, Jesse J. 2004. Gut Reactions.
Rensink, Ronald A., J. Kevin
O’Regan, and James J. Clark. 2000. On
the Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes Across Brief Interruptions. Visual
Cognition 7:127-45.
Robinson, William S. 2005. Thoughts Without Distinctive Non-Imagistic Phenomenology. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 70:534-60.
Rosenthal, David M. 1986. Two Concepts of Consciousness. Philosophical
Studies 49:329-59.
Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept
of Mind.
Sanches, Francisco. 1581/1988. That Nothing
Is Known, edited and translated by E. Limbrick and D. F. S. Thomson.
Schooler, Jonathan, and Charles A. Schreiber. 2004. Experience, Meta-Consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection. Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (numbers 7-8):17-39.
Schwitzgebel, Eric and Michael S. Gordon. 2000. How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation. Philosophical Topics 28:235-46.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2002a. How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery. Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (numbers 5-6): 35-53.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2002b. Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33:649-60.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2004. Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener’s Lab Manual. Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (numbers 7-8): 58-76.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2006. Do Things Look Flat? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72:589-99.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, Changbing Huang, and Yifeng Zhou. 2006. Do We Dream in Color? Cultural Variations and Skepticism. Dreaming 16:36-42.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2007a. Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? Or Is Experience Limited to What’s in Attention? Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (number 3): 5-35.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2007b. No
Unchallengeable Epistemic Authority, of Any Sort, Regarding Our Own Conscious
Experience – Contra Dennett? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
6:107-13.
Sextus
Empiricus. c. 200/1994. Outlines of Skepticism, translated by J.
Annas and J. Barnes.
Siewert,
Charles P. 1998. The Significance of Consciousness.
Skinner, B.
F. 1945. The Operational Analysis of Psychological
Terms. Psychological Review 52:270-277.
Shoemaker,
Sydney. 1994. Self-Knowledge and “Inner Sense”. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 54:249-314.
Spener,
Maja. 2007. Phenomenal Adequacy and
Introspective Evidence. Unpublished MS.
Thomas,
Nigel. 1999. Are Theories of Imagery
Theories of Imagination? Cognitive Science 23:207-45.
Titchener,
Edward Bradford. 1899. A Primer of Psychology.
Titchener,
Edward Bradford. 1901-1905. Experimental Psychology.
Titchener,
Edward Bradford. 1909. Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of
the Thought-Processes.
Titchener,
Edward Bradford. 1910. A Text-Book of Psychology.
Titchener,
Edward Bradford. 1912. The Schema of Introspection. American
Journal of Psychology 23:485-508.
Tye,
Michael. 2003. Representationalism and
the transparency of experience. In Privileged access, edited by B. Gertler.
Unger,
Peter. 1975. Ignorance.
Watson,
John B. 1913. Psychology As the Behaviorist
Views It. Psychological Review 20:158-77.
Wilson,
Robert A. 2003. Intentionality and Phenomenology. Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly 84:413-31.
[1] For Descartes, see
especially his Second Meditation
(1641/1984, 19). For Hume, see the first
Book of his Treatise (1739/1978),
especially I.IV.II, 190, 212 and I.IV.V, 232.
(Hume may change his mind in the Enquiries:
See the first Enquiry [1748/1975],
§1, 13 and §7, 60.) For Sextus, see Outlines of Skepticism (c. 200/1994),
especially Ch. VII and X. Pierre Bayle
takes a similar position in the entry on Pyrrho in his Dictionary (1702/1734-8, vol. 4, especially remark B, 654).
[2] For Zhuangzi, see the
second of his “Inner Chapters” (Chuang Tzu 3rd c. BCE/1964). For Montaigne, see “Apology for Raymond
Sebond” (1580/1948). Sanches’ brief
treatment of the understanding of the mind in That Nothing is Known (1581/1988, especially 243-5 [57-9]) is at
most only a partial exception to this tendency.
So also is Unger 1975, III.§9, who seems to envision only the
possibility of linguistic error about current experience and whose skepticism
in this instance seems to turn principally upon an extremely demanding
criterion for knowledge. Huet’s Against Cartesian Philosophy (1694/2003)
is nicely explicit in extending its skepticism to internal matters of ongoing
thought, though the examples and arguments differ considerably from mine here.
[3] See especially his Primer of Psychology (1899) and his Experimental Psychology
(1901-1905). I discuss Titchener’s views
about introspective training at length in Schwitzgebel 2004.
[4] Consider: Watson 1913; Skinner
1945; Ryle 1949; Bem 1972.
[5] For example: Armstrong
1963; Churchland 1988 – even Kornblith 1998, reading with a careful eye to
distinguish error about current conscious experience from other sorts of
error. See also, recently: Shoemaker
1994; Lycan 1996; Dretske 2000; Jack and Shallice 2001; Nichols and Stich 2003;
Goldman 2004, 2006; Horgan, Tienson, and Graham 2005; and most of the essays
collected in Gertler 2003, among many others.
Gertler (2001) and Chalmers (2003) have recently attempted to revive
restricted versions of (something like) infallibilism. Chalmers’s infallibilism is so restricted I’m
not sure how much useful substance remains.
See §ix for a discussion of the range and nature of infallible
judgments.
[6] For more on Dennett’s
granting people unchallengeable authority regarding their own experience, see
Schwitzgebel 2007b.
[7] I see no necessary conflict between the current view
of introspection and views on which conscious experience involves a “same
order” (for example, Kriegel 2006) or “higher-order” (for example, Rosenthal
1986; Lycan 1996) representation of the conscious state. Such views can allow – and to be plausible, I
think they must allow – erroneous judgments of the sort to be discussed in this
essay. For example, a non-conscious
“higher-order thought” that I am having experience E might conflict with a
conscious judgment that I am not having experience E. Of course, only the conscious judgment is a
reportable result of an introspective process.
I
am assuming the falsity of a strongly “self-presentational” view of
consciousness (as, perhaps, in Horgan, Tienson, and Graham 2005). The examples in the present essay, I think,
reveal the implausibility of such an approach.
Views
characterizing us as constantly and effortlessly introspecting must either
generate unreportable, non-conscious judgments, or they must in some other way
differ, in mechanism or result, from the sort of self-conscious introspective
efforts that are the topic of this essay and to which the term “introspection”
is here meant to refer.
[8] Prinz 2004 helpfully
reviews a variety of positions and evidence pertinent to them.
[9] See, for example,
Brandstätter 2001. It wouldn’t surprise
me in the least if positive mood even in studies such as this is considerably
overreported.
[10] Haybron forthcoming
presents an impressive array of evidence suggesting that we don’t know how
(un-)happy we are.
[11] James 1890/1981 and Lambie
and Marcel 2002 may be a good place to start on this topic. In principle, of course, one could attempt to
resolve such disputes by attributing vast individual differences in
phenomenology to the participants, differences that perfectly mirror the
divergences in their general claims; see §xi for a discussion of this.
[12] On skepticism about color
in dreams see Schwitzgebel 2002b; Schwitzgebel, Huang, and Zhou 2006.
[13] I take this argument to be
in the spirit of Armstrong 1963. It
needn’t require that the phenomenology and the judgment be entirely “distinct
existences” in the sense Shoemaker 1994 criticizes, though of course it assumes
that the one state is possible
without the other. The only reason I see
to reject such a possibility is a prior commitment to infallibilism.
[14] For example, “Melanie” in
Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel forthcoming.
[15] See also Dennett 2001, 982.
[16] In addition to this type of
“refrigerator light” error (Thomas 1999), an implicit analogy between visual
experience and pictures or photographs may also sway us to overascribe detail
in visual experience (see Noë 2004).
Consider also Dennett 1969, 139-141.
[17] Among recent authors,
Dennett (1991), O’Regan (1992), Mack and Rock (1998), Rensink, O’Regan, and
Clark (2000), and Blackmore (2002) come to mind – though we differ somewhat in
our positive views. Some of these authors
believe we do not visually experience what we don’t attend to. I mean to take no stand here on that
particular question, which I explore in depth in Schwitzgebel 2007a.
[18] The British empiricists
(most famously, Locke 1690/1975; Berkeley 1710/1965; Hume 1739/1978) appear to
have believed that conscious thought is always imagistic. So did many later introspective psychologists
influenced by them (notably Titchener 1909, 1910), against advocates of
“imageless thought” (notably the “Würzburg group”, whose work is reviewed in
Humphrey 1951). Recent philosophers
participating in the controversy include Siewert 1998; Horgan and Tienson 2002;
Wilson 2003; Pitt 2004; Robinson 2005.
See also Aristotle De Anima
431a; Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel forthcoming.
[19] These and related poll
results were published at http://consc.net/neh/pollresults.html (accessed May
2005). I am inclined to read the
disagreement between the “no phenomenology of thought” and the “imagery
exhausts it” camps as a disagreement about terms or concepts rather than about
phenomenology – a disagreement about whether having an image should count as
“thinking”. However, I see no similarly
easy terminological explanation of the central dispute.
As I recall (though this number is not recorded on
the website) only two participants (Maja Spener and I) said they didn’t
know.
[20] See Schwitzgebel and Gordon
2000; Schwitzgebel 2002a. See also
Schwitzgebel 2006 for a discussion of people’s divergent judgments about the
experience of visual perspective, and Schwitzgebel 2007a for a discussion of
our divergent judgments about whether we have a constant flow of peripheral
experiences (of our feet in our shoes, the refrigerator hum, etc.).
[21] I explore the possibility
of classical introspective training, along the lines of early introspective
psychology, in Schwitzgebel 2004 and the possibility of careful interview about
randomly sampled experiences in Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel forthcoming. Schooler and Schreiber 2004 assesses the current
scientific situation reasonably, if not quite as pessimistically. Very recently, there has been some promising
work on meditation: See Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson forthcoming.
[22] Compare Hintikka 1962; Burge 1988, 1996.
[23] But see Chalmers 1996 and Dretske 2003 on the
possibility that we could be experienceless “zombies” without knowing it. Both Chalmers and Dretske think we do know
that we are conscious, but that it’s not straightforward to see how we know that.
[24] Compare Chisholm 1957; Jackson 1977. Naturally, ordinary and philosophical usage
of “appears” is rather more complex than this simple portrayal suggests, if one
looks at the details; but I don’t think that affects the basic observation of
this section.
[25] See Moran 2001 and Bar-On 2004 for versions of this
story.
[26] For more on mistakes in the introspection of nonobvious
or fictional illusions, see Schwitzgebel 2004.
[27] For example, James 1890/1981, 189; Titchener 1912,
491; Hurlburt 1990, ch. 2.
[28] Epistemologists often define “reliability” so that
only the first type of failure counts as a failure of reliability (for example,
Goldman 1986 who calls the second sort of failure a lack of “power”). It’s a semantic issue, but I think ordinary
language is on my side.
[29] See Gordon 1995; McGeer 1996; Moran 2001; Bar-On
2004; Lawlor 2006.
[30] Ericsson and Simon (1984/1993) are optimistic about
the accuracy of descriptions of one’s thought processes when one “thinks
aloud”, expressing the thought concurrently with having it. They are considerably less optimistic about
retrospective reports if the subject is not primed and trained in advance to
express and reflect on her thoughts as they occur.
Burge
(1996) argues that, to be successful, “critical reasoning” requires knowledge
of recently past thought contents. But I
doubt much of our reasoning is “critical” in the relevant sense. (Usually, it is spontaneous and
un-self-reflective; often it is entirely hidden.) Nor is it clear that when we try to reflect
critically on our stream of reasoning we are reliably successful in doing so.
[31] Titchener thinks this
strategy common among untutored introspectors, and he repeatedly warns against
it as “stimulus error” or “R-error”: Titchener 1901-1905; Boring 1921. This strategy bears some relation to the
strategy that “transparency theorists” such as Dretske (1995, 2000) and Tye
(2003) think we always use in reaching judgments about our experience (though
they hardly think of experience as “elusive”).
[32] Whether this is the best
interpretation of Descartes, I am uncertain.
My impression is that Descartes is not entirely clear on this point, and
sympathetic interpretations of him shift with the mood of the times. The view is also associated with Locke
(1690/1985).
[33] Of course, if it were possible to draw a clear line
between the trustworthy and untrustworthy introspective judgments, then maybe a
version of introspective foundationalism could be salvaged. I’m not optimistic that such a line could be
drawn, or that, if it were, enough trustworthy would remain to be of much use.
[34] For helpful comments,
criticism, and discussion, thanks to Donald Ainslie, Alvin Goldman, David
Hunter, Tony Jack, Tori McGeer, Jennifer Nagel, Shaun Nichols, Gualtiero
Piccinini, Josh Rust, Charles Siewert, Maja Spener (whose 2007 is similar in
spirit to this essay), Aaron Zimmerman, and audiences at Washington University
in St. Louis, Cal State Long Beach, University of Redlands, U.C. Santa Barbara,
University of Toronto, and the Philosophy of Science Association.