Describing Inner Experience?
Proponent Meets Skeptic
Russell T. Hurlburt
Eric Schwitzgebel
In Press
The MIT Press
Anticipated Summer 2007
Prepublication version
Do not quote without permission
of the authors.
Part One
Proponent Meets Skeptic
Chapter One
Introduction
On a remarkably thin base of evidence –
largely the spectral analysis of points of light – astronomers possess, or
appear to possess, an abundance of knowledge about the structure and history of
the universe. We likewise know more than might even have been imagined a few
centuries ago about the nature of physical matter, about the mechanisms of
life, about the ancient past. Enormous theoretical and methodological ingenuity
has been required to obtain such knowledge; it does not invite easy discovery
by the untutored.
It may seem odd,
then, that we have so little scientific knowledge of what lies closest at hand,
apparently ripe for easy discovery, and of greatest importance for our quality
of life: our own conscious experience – our sensory experiences and pains, for
example, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotion. Scientists know quite
a bit about human visual capacities and the brain processes involved in vision,
much less about the subjective experience of seeing; a fair bit about
the physiology of emotion, almost nothing about its phenomenology.
Philosophers
began in earnest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe and
classify our patterns of conscious experience. John Locke (1690/1975), for instance,
divided experienced “ideas” into those that arise from sensation and those that
arise from reflection, and he began to classify them into types. David Hume
(1739/1978) distinguished what we would now call images from perceptual
experiences in terms of their “force” or “liveliness.” James Mill (1829/1967) attempted a definitive
classification of sensations into the traditional five senses (sight, hearing,
touch, taste, and smell) plus muscular sensations and sensations in the
alimentary canal. However, despite such efforts, not even the most basic
taxonomy of experience was agreed upon; and it is still not agreed upon.
The study of
conscious experience acquired a more scientific look with the introspective
psychologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Researchers
such as Gustav Fechner (1860/1966), Wilhelm Wundt (e.g., 1896/1897), and E. B.
Titchener (1910/1915), presented carefully measured stimuli to subjects who had
been trained to “introspect” – to take careful note of their immediately
occurring (or just passed) experiences. These psychologists aimed to understand
how these introspected experiences covaried with changes in stimulation. However,
as is well known, after a few decades, behaviorism (which stressed measuring
relationships between stimulus and behavioral response rather than stimulus and
introspected experience) won the day in mainstream experimental psychology,
driving out or marginalizing the study of consciousness. Subsequent
elaborations of behaviorism, and later “cognitivism,” allowed more room for the
postulation of internal states and mechanisms mediating behavioral responses;
yet these internal states and mechanisms were generally assumed to be
nonconscious.
Central to the
behaviorists’ complaint about the introspective study of consciousness was the
unreliability of the introspective method, the fact that several decades of
work yielded little consensus on even the most fundamental issues. John B.
Watson, the early standard-bearer for behaviorism, in his seminal 1913 article
“Psychology as the behaviorist views it,” criticized the lack of consensus in
introspective psychology as follows:
One psychologist
will state with readiness that the attributions of a visual sensation are quality,
extension, duration, and intensity. Another will add clearness.
Still another that of order. I doubt if any one psychologist can draw up
a set of statements describing what he means by sensation which will be agreed
to by three other psychologists of different training…. I firmly believe that
two hundred years from now, unless the introspective method is discarded,
psychology will still be divided on the question of whether auditory sensations
have the quality of ‘extension’, whether intensity is an attribute that can be
applied to color, whether there is a difference in ‘texture’ between image and
sensation and upon many hundreds of others of like character…. The condition in
regard to other mental processes is just as chaotic… (p. 164-165).
The considerable truth in this complaint
partially explains the success of the behaviorist overthrow of introspective
methodology. The fact that introspective psychologists had failed to reach
consensus about such issues revealed a serious weakness in their methodologies.
Furthermore, much of the consensus they did manage to reach was undermined by an
early 20th-century shift, among those still interested in
consciousness, away from the early introspectionists’ focus on the basic
“elements” of experience in favor of a more holistic conception of a sensory
“Gestalt,” indivisible into individual elements. Thus, despite the obvious
importance of conscious experience to our lives, and its apparent ready
availability for research, conscious experience had largely resisted systematic
attempts at scientific description, and its study fell into disrepute.
Although
research on consciousness has enjoyed a considerable resurgence since the
1990s, the most basic structural and methodological questions remain unanswered.
With little examination, introspection has re-entered psychology and philosophy.
Even hard-nosed cognitive neuroscientists ask their subjects about their subjectively
felt experience while in the fMRI magnet. However, it should be clear from the
history just described that such casual and haphazard introspection cannot be
trusted to yield robustly replicable results and accurate generalizations. Furthermore,
it seems to us that the introspective methods employed by most current
researchers in consciousness studies are less careful than the methods used by
introspective psychologists a century ago. Unless better methods can be found,
we fear that the scientific study of consciousness may again stall. And if
there simply are no better methods, the scientific study of consciousness may prove
wholly impossible in principle: vacuous without introspective report,
intractably conflictual with it. Scientists could perhaps elude this difficulty
if they found a way to study consciousness without the help of introspective
report. We doubt such an enterprise makes sense, but we will not argue the
point here. We will assume that any science of consciousness must take, as a
fundamental source of data, people’s observations and descriptions of their own
experience. Thus a re-examination of the adequacy of introspective reports is
of central importance to consciousness studies.
That leads us to
the question that stands at the heart of this book: To what extent is it
possible accurately to report conscious experience? One author of this book,
Russ Hurlburt, has argued that we can profit from the demise of classical introspection
and create methods for reporting conscious experience that largely avoid the
old pitfalls. He has developed one such method, Descriptive Experience Sampling
(DES), to be described in the next chapter, that he has claimed (Hurlburt,
1990, 1993; Hurlburt & Heavey, 2006) does provide largely accurate
descriptions of experience. The other author, Eric Schwitzgebel, without
addressing DES in particular, has argued that introspective reports in general
are greatly prone to error, even in what would seem the most favorable of cases
(Schwitzgebel & Gordon, 2000; Schwitzgebel, 2002a-b, 2004, forthcoming, in
preparation-b).
In this book,
Russ and Eric confront each other directly and concretely on the adequacy and accuracy
of introspective reports, using the particular reports of an actual subject as
the starting point. Throughout the book, we will use the term “introspection”
to refer only to the observation of particular instants of experience as they
occur, or immediately thereafter. Sometimes, but not in this book,
introspection refers to chewing over, musing, reflecting – to a certain type of
self-oriented, retrospective or prospective contemplation. Our usage is quite
specific: we wish to discuss whether, or to what extent, it is possible for
people to report what is ongoing in their experience as it is currently
happening.
1. The Origins of This Book
In April, 2002, Russ presented a paper
titled “Describing inner experience: Not impossible but also not trivially
easy” at an interdisciplinary conference in
At the same
meeting, Eric presented a paper titled “Some reasons to distrust people’s
judgments about their own conscious experiences.” In this paper, Eric argued
that the introspection of emotion, sensory experience, imagery, and thought –
which together comprise much if not all of our experiential life – is
unreliable, and that even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection on
these aspects of our mental lives as they transpire, we often make gross
mistakes regarding their basic features. Thus, he advocated a skeptical
position that seemed to be considerably at odds with Russ’s cautious optimism. Eric
was in the midst of publishing a series of papers defending this view (see the
citations above).
Prior to the
Tucson 2002 convention, we had never met, but the papers and our conversations
showed that we shared a substantial intellectual history, despite Russ’s
training in psychology and Eric’s in philosophy. We had both independently
encountered the introspective literature on conscious experience and concluded
that there was good reason for skepticism. We had both examined the methodology
of the early introspectionist school and had written criticisms of those
practices (Hurlburt, 1990; Schwitzgebel, 2002a). We had both written criticisms
of the armchair introspections that underlie philosophical and psychological
thought about consciousness (Hurlburt, 1990; Schwitzgebel & Gordon, 2000;
Schwitzgebel, 2002a-b, 2003a-b).
However, despite
these similarities, we had by 2002 reached opposing positions. Russ had
responded to the methodological inadequacies of introspection by creating, in
the late 1970s, a method of exploring inner, conscious experience that sought
to avoid the pitfalls that had doomed earlier introspective attempts. This
method came to be known as Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), and the
project had culminated in two books (Hurlburt, 1990, 1993). Russ argued in
those two books, as well as in the paper at Toward a Science of
Consciousness, that his method solved enough of the methodological problems
that DES could be taken as providing largely correct descriptions of inner
experience (and perhaps other methods could as well). Russ will describe DES
more completely in Chapter 2, but for now it is enough to know that DES uses a
beeper to signal the subject to pay attention to the “inner experience” that
was ongoing at the moment of the beep. Subsequently, the subject and
investigator meet to discuss the details of such beeped moments.
Eric was not won
over. Over the centuries, many people had made enthusiastic claims about the
accuracy of their introspections, and most if not all of them had not proven
credible. Why should he regard Russ’s claim about DES any differently? He
agreed that the DES beeper did seem likely to overcome some of the difficulties
involved in introspective report, but it appeared to aggravate other
difficulties, and he thought it likely that, all things considered, substantial
doubt would still be warranted. Yet at the same time, he had never examined the
DES methodology closely.
We both
recognized that it was crucial to determine whether it was possible to provide
trustworthy accounts of conscious experience. The pressure was rising both in
psychology and in philosophy to explore inner experience, consciousness, the
phenomenology of thought and emotion. If Russ was right, then we should
redouble our efforts to explain to psychologists and philosophers how it is
possible accurately to observe conscious experience. If Eric was right, even
the most apparently credible reports of inner experience should not be accepted
at face value without substantial independent support from non-introspective data.
We agreed that
Eric would serve as a DES subject for a few days, right there at the Toward
a Science of Consciousness conference. This would give Eric the opportunity
to explore Russ’s approach from the inside, to gain a more direct and intimate
knowledge of it. Furthermore, it would provide a series of concrete occasions
on which to discuss introspective methodology. We would thus move from the
realm of general statements to the realm of concrete particulars. Eric’s being
a subject would turn Russ’s method inside out, would let the fox explore the
chicken coop from the inside. It would also test Eric’s commitment to
skepticism when his own experiential report was the one on the table.
We recognized
that Eric was by no means a typical subject. He was open to participating in
DES, but at the same time he had already thought extensively about the
difficulties of introspection and was on the public record as a harsh critic of
it. Thus, whereas most of Russ’s subjects are simply trying to report the
features of their experiences, Eric was trying both to report and at the same
time to examine the limits of that reporting.
These interviews
initiated a conversation that was continued by email over the next six months. We
wrote each other at length, discussing the history of introspection, examining
Eric’s experience as a subject, considering and reconsidering both of our
skepticisms and Russ’s explanations of how DES attempts to limit the risks
inherent in earlier methods. That correspondence could be simplified as
follows: We agreed that the history of introspection showed that most
introspective reports were not to be trusted. But we disagreed about the extent
to which the failure of earlier methods reflected general, ineliminable
difficulties in introspection. Russ was optimistic. He argued that an
interviewer like himself, carefully avoiding bias and focusing the interview on
individual moments of experience, could often generate largely reliable reports.
Eric remained relatively pessimistic, even when he himself was the subject.
2. Sampling with Melanie
To continue the
conversation usefully, we felt that Eric needed more experience with interview
techniques where his roles as skeptic and investigator wouldn’t be complicated
by his also simultaneously serving as the subject. So Russ proposed a new
endeavor. We would jointly take the role of investigator and interview a naive
subject, someone who had not previously been interviewed by Russ. In these
interviews, Eric would be free to cross-examine the subject in whatever way he
found useful, probing the subject’s opinions about her sampled experiences
without being confined to DES interviewing principles. For the role of subject,
Russ found Melanie, a friend of a friend. Melanie had just graduated from
college with a joint degree in philosophy and psychology and was new in town,
looking for a connection to the local psychology scene. Before coming to town,
she had had no prior direct contact with either Russ or Eric or their views.
Until then, our
conversations had been either about introspection in general (“should we trust
introspective reports?”) or about Eric’s own (atypical) DES experience. The
first kind of question was too broad. The second was confounded by Eric’s dual
role and prior investigations. Now, however, the questions would be specific,
concrete, and relatively straightforward: Should we believe Melanie’s report
about her experience at 11:34:21? We could explore the question in any way we
wished. To what extent would we agree, when faced with specific, individual
reports? Would we disagree broadly about all the reports, or would the
disagreement be concentrated on just a few reports, or a few aspects of them? We
would be faced throughout with a concrete person, Melanie. It would not be
adequate to say the impersonal, “I don’t believe introspective reports”. We
would have to be concretely personal: “I don’t believe Melanie’s report”.
Our aims were
also personal. Russ wanted candidly to
expose his views to Eric, who seemed an open-minded but unsympathetic audience,
to gain a skeptic’s perspective on his methodology, to refine his own
skepticism, to reconsider how much skepticism about Melanie’s reports might
indeed be warranted. Eric was exploring the limits of his skepticism, wavering
between the radical pessimism about introspection with which he was flirting in
his papers and a more nuanced caution that admitted the possibility of progress
and discovery. Our collaboration was intended to be a private conversation
between the two of us, facilitated by Melanie’s willingness to be questioned. We
did not begin with the intention of making our conversations public.
After half a
dozen sampling interviews with Melanie, spread over a month or so, we felt we
had sufficient material to drive our discussion to the next phase, so we
thanked Melanie for her participation and had the interviews transcribed by
Sharon Jones-Forrester, one of Russ’ students. The transcription was intended
to serve as the basis for our continuing personal conversation about the
trustworthiness of Melanie’s reports in particular, and about DES reports and
introspective reports in general. We independently read the transcripts and emailed
comments about specific details to each other. We then replied to each other’s
comments and replied to those replies and so on, back and forth until we judged
we had reached a point of diminishing returns. Over the course of the
interviews and subsequent discussions, we gradually came to think that our
concretely based considerations of the limits of skepticism, designed
originally to be a private and candid conversation, might have value to others
facing some of the same issues. Thus this book was born.
3. The Format of This Book
The sampling interviews that form the
heart of this book were thus intended to be a personal confrontation between
Russ and Eric. Because these interviews were real-time exchanges, we
occasionally meandered, repeated ourselves, misunderstood each other, assumed
shared knowledge unavailable to an outsider, phrased things poorly. In making
these interviews available to the reader, therefore, we cut such portions of
the transcripts; these cuts were never made unless we both agreed the remaining
interview material stayed faithful to the original whole. We also slightly
eased the remainder, removing some of the vocalized pauses and false starts,
for example, again only where we jointly agreed to the fidelity of the
alterations. Our aim in editing was to remove unnecessary distractions, thus
focusing the remainder more sharply on what we took to be the issues of
greatest general interest. We will make the complete, unaltered interview sound
files and their transcripts available on the World Wide Web (see www.mit.edu/hurlburt-schwitzgebel.html)
for those who wish to compare.
The heart of
this book is therefore the transcripts of our interviews with Melanie along
with 88 boxed discussions of issues raised in those interviews. To a large
extent, those boxes are streamlined versions of the personal e-mail exchanges
between Russ and Eric as we tried to hammer out our similar or differing takes
on the adequacy of some particular aspect of our interviews with Melanie. We
could have presented our views in the more traditional format for a co-authored
pro-and-con book, each writing a discursive essay and reply. However, we felt
that the presentation of a verbatim transcript, with inserted comments and
replies, would have substantial advantages over the more standard format. The
transcript format forces the reader to begin with, and constantly confront, the
particular. By contrast, most other discussions of introspective method begin
with abstractions and general considerations, invoking particular instances, if
at all, only selectively for the advancement of the author’s more general
thesis. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach, we feel
that there is something salutary in presenting the reader with randomly obtained
particular reports, one at a time, prior to reaching general conclusions, with
each report confronted on its own terms before proceeding to the next. Russ’s
and Eric’s reactions and comments, both in the course of the original dialogue
and in their later amplifications, may help the reader get some bearing on the
kinds of doubts that may reasonably be raised and the resources available for
responding to them.
Although this
book looks wholly at the reports of one subject, Melanie, the reader will
swiftly discover that the issues it raises are quite general. If the reader
finds some of Melanie’s claims about her experience to be believable and others
to warrant doubt – as we think most readers will – this book invites
consideration of what might drive these evaluations, and it offers different
and sometimes conflicting suggestions on that topic. Temporarily replacing the
factious and general debate about the trustworthiness of introspective reports
with a personal and particular look at the details of Melanie’s reports will,
we think, take us a long way toward honing or refining, trimming or amplifying,
shifting or otherwise altering the skepticism that is desirable when
encountering reports about conscious experience.
Thus this book
is not a debate between opposing partisans, each trying to convince the other. Instead,
it is a forthright collaboration between opposing partisans, each
genuinely seeking to refine his own level of skepticism and to replace, as much
as possible, partisanship with balanced critical judgment. The result, we hope,
is an illumination of some of the major issues from two sides at once.
Our
confrontation and dispute has also produced one potentially very useful
byproduct: an examination, in unprecedented detail, of random moments of one
person’s experience. To the extent readers accept Melanie’s reports, they will
find a wealth of information about imagery, emotion, self-awareness, inner
speech, and so forth, as experienced by a particular individual at particular moments
in time. In the upcoming chapters we comment frequently on general issues
pertaining to such experiences, such as the bearing of Melanie’s reports on
various psychological or philosophical theories, and the apparent similarities
and differences between Melanie and other subjects we have read about or
studied, including ourselves.
A Note to
the Reader
Chapter Two
presents the general rationale behind Russ’ belief that satisfactory
introspective methods may exist; Chapter Three presents Eric’s general
rationale for doubting such claims. We’re ambivalent about including these
chapters here. On the one hand, this background seems worth presenting, and
this is the natural place. On the other hand, we’ve just argued for the value
of starting with concrete instances instead of theoretical generalities, and on
that logic it would be better for you to dive right into our interviews with
Melanie beginning with Chapter Four. The interview transcripts don’t assume
knowledge of Chapters Two and Three, though you may have a fuller sense of what
we’re up to if you read these chapters first. We encourage you to follow your
inclinations in this matter.
Chapter Two
Can There Be a Satisfactory Introspective Method?
Russ Hurlburt
Eric’s and my interest in introspection stem from
the same source: we agree that most attempts at the observation of inner
experience have not been successful. But we have diverged in our response to
that source. I have tried to capitalize on earlier introspective failures and
build a better method than was used in the previous attempts; so far, the best
method I have discovered is Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES; Hurlburt,
1990, 1993; Hurlburt & Heavey, 2006). Eric has publicized the skeptic’s
position, criticizing all attempts at introspection without excluding new and
perhaps better ones. In a nutshell, I want Eric to examine DES (or any other
method that avoids earlier pitfalls) on its own merits without damning it by
association with other not-so-sophisticated attempts; he wants me to recognize
that history includes many enthusiastic supporters of introspective methods
that have ultimately proven to be problematic. What makes this conversation
engaging is the fact that we both recognize the legitimacy of the other’s point
of view, and are both pretty darn honestly trying to figure out the appropriate
balance of these necessarily confrontational positions. Neither of us is trying
to win the argument; both of us are as happy to hone the other’s position as
our own in the service of more adequately answering the Can we believe
people’s reports about their inner experience? question.
This chapter makes the case that there might well be
introspective methods that deserve the scrutiny of even the most skeptical
observer of introspection. I use DES as an example of such a method, not
because it is the best method, but because it is the best method that I know
of. I will show why it is reasonable to suppose that it is enough different
from previous attempts to escape from the broad criticisms that have been
leveled against introspection repeatedly over the last century. My attempt in
this chapter is not to argue that DES actually does provide accurate
descriptions. Here I simply wish to demonstrate why I think it possible that
introspective methods can be devised that avoid the earlier pitfalls.
This chapter is in many ways a reconstruction for the reader
of the extended conversations that Eric and I had prior to deciding to sample
with Melanie. The reader will recall from Chapter 1 that the outcome of those
conversations was that Eric came to see that introspective methods might be
able to be improved upon and to see DES as potentially interesting,
sufficiently worthy of his skeptical attention to devote a substantial chunk of
his professional time. In this chapter I have the same aim for the reader.
The chapter has the following organization: First, I survey a
century of psychological science to discover what the characteristics of a good
method might be. Then I describe DES, a method that embodies those
characteristics. Then I describe ten reasons that DES reports might be
considered plausible, and then describe a few compelling idiographic cases.
[See
Eric: Russ, you’ve called the
subject matter of your work “inner experience.” I don’t like that term, because
I think it favors experiences like thoughts and feelings (which are generally
thought of as inner) over things like sensations (which are more outwardly
directed). I prefer to call it “conscious experience” or even just
“experience.” I’m also concerned about how the phrase seems to build in the
idea of the mind as interior and the world as external. I’m sympathetic with
recent trends in cognitive science that reject a strict inner/outer division
(sometimes called “embodied” views of the mind, or “externalism” or
“contextualism”).
Russ: I agree that the “inner” in “inner experience”
has the disadvantage that you point out – it does seem to favor thoughts over
sensations. But DES subjects don’t seem to be affected by that; and it avoids
the psychological and philosophical traditions in ways that I find highly
desirable.
“Experience” (unmodified) can refer not only to inner experience,
but also to “external” or “environmental” or “surrounding” experience, as in “I
was affected by the space-shuttle-disaster experience” or “I took the job to get management
experience.” Thus I think we need some kind of an adjective to indicate that
“experience” refers to thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the like.
“Conscious experience” seems to awaken either (a) the contrast to
the “unconscious” in Freud and many others’ sense awaken the existence of
“states of consciousness”; or (b) the contrast to sleeping, dreaming,
drug-altered, and so on experience.
“Attention” and “awareness” have an implication of a
meta-awareness that I do not intend.
There is thus no nonproblematic terminology to refer to what might
variously be called inner experience, conscious experience, experience,
awareness, attention, or whatever. I have preferred “inner experience” as the
being the least misleading, but it is far from perfect.
The good news is that in DES it simply doesn’t seem to matter what
you call it, and therefore, I alternate quasi-randomly between all those
terminologies in the attempt to distance myself from any one particular
connotation. For example, in the set of interviews that we will display in
Chapters 4-9, we use the term “inner experience” a total of 5 times,
“experience” about 250 times, “awareness” about 100 times and “attention” about
70 times.
Eric: I’m not entirely convinced that it doesn’t matter what you call
it, but I do agree that every terminology has shortcomings. ”Conscious
experience” also suggests a possible contrast to “unconscious experience” – a
phrase that sounds incoherent to me. And does the phrase “conscious experience”
invite the idea that we’re normally conscious of our experiences, in
some self-observational way? Though some philosophers appear to endorse such a
view (e.g., Rosenthal, 1986; Lycan, 1996), I’d prefer not to be committed to
simply by the terminology. So maybe the phrase “inner experience” isn’t worse
than any other. The reader will notice that I’ve reconciled myself to having it
in the title of this book.
Thread: Loose language.
Next:
1. Toward a Better Introspective Method: 15 Guidelines from a
Century of Science
The question this book is exploring is whether it is possible
(or the extent to which it is possible) to obtain accurate descriptions of
inner experience. Chris Heavey, Todd Seibert, and I (Hurlburt, Heavey, &
Seibert, 2006) surveyed the last century or so of psychological science
research to ascertain what that literature (most of it not introspective) has
to say about the characteristics of a good introspective method. That paper
extracted 15 guidelines for any good introspective method; this section
paraphrases those guidelines; the reader is referred to the original article
for amplification.
Guideline 1: The Stakes Are High. Bluntly stated,
introspective methods failed and non-introspective methods came to dominate
psychology largely due to introspection’s failure. Should psychological science
reawaken an interest in introspection without adequate discussion and
improvement of introspective method, there may be an even more severe reaction
(if that is possible) to a reawakened introspective era.
Guideline 2: Skepticism is Appropriate. Except perhaps
for think-aloud procedures, all introspective procedures require memory to
greater or lesser extent. [For a brief description of think-aloud procedures,
see
Russ: For comparison
purposes, here is a brief description of some current methods that attempt to
explore inner experience.
Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES; Hurlburt, 1990) uses random
beepers to trigger the qualitative description of experience. DES differs from
all other sampling methods in that it is descriptive, not quantitative.
Thought sampling (or cognition sampling; Hurlburt, 1979) uses
beepers to trigger subjects to fill out questionnaires. These questionnaires
examine a variety of features of thought and mood.
The Experience Sampling Method (ESM; Larson &
Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) is predominantly a quantitative methodology that
collects standardized data about internal and external aspects of experience
and situational/contextual variables. ESM differs from thought sampling
primarily in its interest in situational variables and in the standardization
of the questionnaires.
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA; Stone & Shiffman, 1994)
is also a quantitative time-sampling method that differs from ESM in that it is
not exclusively a random time
sampling method; instead EMA sampling may occur at regular intervals (every
hour, for example) or triggered by specific events (while jogging, for
example).
Think-aloud procedures (Ericsson & Simon,1980) ask subjects to
verbalize their ongoing inner processes while performing some particular tasks
(solving an anagram, for example). Sometimes these methods are called “verbal
protocol analyses.”
Articulated Thoughts in Simulated Situations Paradigm (ATSS;
Davison, Robbins, & Johnson, 1983) is a verbal protocol analysis approach
where subjects listen to audiotapes describing “stimulus scenarios” designed to
elicit particular responses (social anxiety, for example). Subjects are to
imagine actually being involved in the scenarios; immediately after hearing
each scenario, they verbalize what they were thinking and feeling during the
simulated situation.
Guideline 6: Disturb the
Experience as Little as Possible. James (1890/1981) famously suggested that it
would be impossible to capture ongoing inner experience because the attempt to
capture it would destroy the experience:
As a snow-flake
crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead
of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught
some substantive thing, usually the last word we were producing, statically
taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence
quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in
fact like … trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness
looks (p. 158).
John S. Mill suggested that it might be possible to capture
ongoing experience through the medium of memory just after the experience has
passed: “A fact may be studied through the medium of memory, not at the very
moment of our perceiving it, but the moment after: and this is really the mode
in which our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We
reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its
impression in the memory is still fresh” (Mill, 1882/1961, p. 64). James and
Mill were correct in pointing out we should try to disturb the targeted
experience as little as possible
Guideline 7:
Explore Natural Situations. External validity (Campbell & Stanley,
1963), “mundane realism” (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1968), and “ecological
validity” (Brunswik, 1949) concerns about generalizability indicate that
explorations should take place in the subject’s own natural environments.
Guideline 8: Minimize
Demands.
Explorations of private phenomena should seek to minimize “demand
characteristics” (Orne, 1962) or the “Pygmalion Effect” (R. Rosenthal &
Jacobson, 1968), employing double-blind testing when possible (R. Rosenthal,
1976) and scrupulously bracketing presuppositions when double-blind testing is
not possible (as is often the case in DES).
Guideline
9: Terminology Is Problematic. B. F. Skinner observed
that verbal behavior about private events may be impoverished because it is
difficult for the verbal community to shape a person’s speech about inner
experience:
The verbal response “red”
is established as a discriminative operant by a community which reinforces the
response when it is made in the presence of red stimuli and not otherwise. This
can easily be done if the community and the individual both have access to red
stimuli. It cannot be done if either the individual or the community is
color-blind. The latter case resembles that in which a verbal response is based
upon a private event, where, by definition, common access by both parties is
impossible. How does the community present or withhold reinforcement
appropriately in order to bring such a response as “My tooth aches” under the
control of appropriate stimulation? (1953, pp. 258-259, italics in original)
Thus Skinner established that talk about inner
experience, such as “I was thinking…,” “I am feeling…,” “I am depressed,” and
so on, are not likely to have the same precision as talk about external events.
My DES colleagues and I have made this observation
frequently in our sampling studies. For example, people often use the term thinking
to mean something entirely non cognitive; others use the word feeling to
refer to cognitive events (see
Guideline
10: Don’t Ask Participants to Infer Causation. Nisbett and T.
Wilson (1977), in a highly influential paper, reviewed research examining the
attribution of causality and concluded that people often cannot describe “why”
they behave/think the way they do. The moral seems clear: Avoid asking “why”
questions.
Guideline 11: Abandon
Armchair Observation. It follows from all that has gone before that casual observation
about inner experience is not likely to yield scientifically valid results.
Merely asking someone about their inner experience is simply not good enough.
Furthermore, asking someone to perform armchair observations about their own
experiences is problematic, even if that observation is done with careful
instruction or by sophisticated observers:
I have conducted this brief examination of our introspective knowledge of
visual imagery to promote the more general thesis that we can be, and often
are, grossly mistaken about our own current conscious experiences even in
favourable circumstances of quiet attention…. We must abandon not only research
paradigms in psychology and consciousness studies that depend too trustingly on
introspection … but also some of our ordinary assumptions about our knowledge
of our own mental lives and what it’s like to be ourselves. Human judgment
about anything as fluid, changeable, skittish and chaotic as conscious
experience is bound to error and confusion (Schwitzgebel, 2002, p. 50).
Guideline
12: Separate Report from Interpretation. Neuroscience has
effectively used introspective reports throughout the past century. Reports of
experience by those suffering from brain damage and disease have led
neuroscience to an ever greater understanding of brain processing. Neuroscience
has been successful because they have appropriately separated the introspective
report from the interpretation of that report. It is the patient’s job to
provide the introspective reports, and the neurologist’s job to provide the
interpretation.
Guideline
13: Don’t Require Too Much. Classical introspection observed many
or most of the above guidelines and still Titchener’s group disagreed
vehemently with the Würzburg school about the existence of imageless thought:
The Würzburgers thought they had discovered a new “imageless” element of
thinking, whereas Titchener thought that images were present but very faint.
Many observers see this lack of agreement as a primary cause of the fall of
introspection a century ago (Misiak & Sexton, 1966; but see Danziger,
1980). However, Monson and Hurlburt (1993; see also Hurlburt & Heavey,
2001) reviewed the introspectionist reports and found that Titchener and the
Würzburgers substantially agreed about the phenomena in question, even though
they disagreed about the interpretation of those observations. Had the introspections
limited themselves to the careful description of phenomena, rather than trying
to resolve an issue in their theory of mind, they would not have disagreed and
introspection might not have been discredited.
Guideline 14: Value
Prospective Research. Prospective designs offer the possibility of tapping a wide range
of information relatively irrespective of theoretical perspective, collecting
evidence that may or may not be related to some later question. Particularly at
this early stage of the science of inner experience, this ability to allow the
emergence of perhaps unexpected relationships or characteristics is especially
important.
Guideline 15: Situate
introspective observations in a nomological net. Those who would use
introspective observations should explore the relationships of those
observations to other kinds of research results.
These 15 guidelines highlight desirable features of any
introspective method. There are doubtless other ways of slicing the
century-of-psychological-research pie, which would yield a somewhat different
set of guidelines. That is, I’m not claiming that this is the only nor the best
set. Yet, it does seem to me that this set is a reasonable summary of the
desirable characteristics of introspective methods.
2. Descriptive Experience Sampling
Beginning in 1974, I began developing a method shaped by the
thinking that is embodied in the guidelines we have just reviewed. That method
is called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), which is my best shot at an
accurate method for describing inner experience.
I emphasize that I do not think that DES is the ultimate
method, only that it is the best method that I know of at this time. Should a
method come along that I judge to be better than DES, I’d be happy to abandon
DES in its favor. That is, I am personally, and this book is specifically, much
more committed to the high quality study of inner experience than to the DES
method in particular.
I have described DES in a variety of places (Hurlburt, 1990,
1993, 1997; Hurlburt & Heavey, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006; Hurlburt &
Akhter, in press) and will discuss its basics and rationale only fairly briefly
here. Readers interested in more detail are referred to the works cited above.
DES uses a random beeper in the subject’s natural environments to signal the
subject to pay attention to the experience that was ongoing at the moment of
the beep. The subject then jots down notes about that now-immediately-past
experience. The subject collects a half-dozen such beeped experiences and then
meets with the investigator within 24 hours for an expositional interview,
whose aim is to describe the experiences that were ongoing at each of the six
beeped moments.
The beep/interview procedure is repeated over a number
(usually between three and ten) sampling days. The “iterative” nature of the
procedure interviews allows the subject’s observational and reporting skills to
improve over the course of the several sampling days: Each day’s interview
informs/refines/differentiates the next day’s observations, and in turn those
newly refined observations inform/refine/differentiate the subsequent
interviews (Hurlburt & Akhter, in press).
Occasionally critics of DES have disparagingly referred to
the “magic beeper,” but whereas there is nothing magic about it, its characteristics
are important (Hurlburt & Heavey, 2004, 2006):
·
The beep is random. This makes it clear (a) that I and my subject
are on equal footing with respect to the beep (that there is no manipulation
involved); and (b) that I have no presuppositional expectations about what are
important or unimportant occasions or events.
· The beep has a rapid
onset or “rise time.” This makes it clear that I am interested in a precise
moment, measured to the fraction of a second, perhaps. A vibrator of the type
used in pagers is not adequate, for example.
· The beep should be easily
detectable. A beep that is too loud will startle the subject, and the startle
response will destroy the contents of experience. A beep that is too soft will
trigger the subject’s asking, “Is that the beep? Is that the beep? Yes! That’s
the beep!” but by now the experience that was occurring at the moment of onset
of the beep may be lost.
· The beep is unambiguous.
It means “Sample now!” and nothing else. Some critics have attempted to
simulate the DES procedure by using, for example, a telephone ring as the
signaling device. That doesn’t work, because the subject’s response must be,
“That’s a telephone ring, but I’m not supposed to answer the telephone, I’m
supposed to pay attention to my experience.” However, that response is likely
to destroy the experience that was ongoing at the moment of the beep.
· The beep should be
private. DES subjects generally use an earphone. If the beep is delivered
through an external speaker, the subject must think about what she will say to
anyone who might also have heard the beep, or must hasten to stop the beep so
as not to annoy others. Either way, the ongoing experience has been lost.
· The beeper must be easily
portable, so it can be easily used in the subject’s natural environments.
The expositional
interview asks essentially one and only one question: “What were you
experiencing at the moment of the beep?” The object is to get as complete and
detailed an answer to that question as possible, while at the same time avoiding
confabulation. We want “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” and the
interview (in fact, the entire DES project) is aimed at that result. The
interview is not structured, but instead asks that question over and over, in
as many different forms as necessary, to focus the subject on the precise
moment of the beep and nothing else. [See
Russ: Society often takes the
statement “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” to mean
substantially less than its literal meaning. In the courtroom, “nothing but the
truth” sometimes cynically means “anything that is not technically a lie.” Witnesses
are routinely admonished not to provide the “whole truth” in the sense
that they are instructed to answer only the question being asked and not to
volunteer additional information, even if that additional information seems
necessary to the understanding of the whole truth.
However, in DES, we mean “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth” to be taken as completely literally as possible. We give
subjects the explicit choice: It’s okay not to tell us anything. But if you
decide to tell us something about a beeped experience, we would like you to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as straightforwardly
is possible. Our intention is the opposite of an attorney’s. We want to
discover the complete truth, not to hide behind a technical truth or show only
one side of the truth. We want you to help us get to the heart of your
experience, not to lead us away from it. We want you to help us discover as
accurately as possible the details of your experience, not to blur them in the
service of hiddenness. If we overlook something in what you’ve said, bring that
to our attention. If we distort some feature of your experience, bring that to
our attention. If our questions don’t help you describe accurately your
phenomena, help us to ask better questions. If you are unwilling to expose as
accurately as possible the details of a beeped experience, then we would prefer
not to talk about that experience at all.
Thread: Interview
techniques. Next:
By
“the moment of the beep” we mean the last undisturbed moment before the beep
begins – a millisecond before the beep. That is, we are not interested in the
subject’s reaction to the beep; we are not interested in what led up to the
beep; we are not interested in what caused the experience; we are not
interested in whether the experience is typical or rare. We are interested in
the experience that was naturally ongoing at the millisecond before the beep
began. We often use the metaphor of a flash snapshot: we are interested in
whatever the flash (beep onset) happens to catch.
Of
course it would be naïve to think that we actually get to a perfectly
undisturbed moment; the beep has to have been processed by the subject to
identify the “last undisturbed moment.” One of the aims of this book is to get
a sense of how undisturbed that moment is likely to be. Most subjects report
that it seems that something like a “sensory store” for experience seems to
exist, giving them time to “freeze” the experience and then to report it. But
the believability of those reports is part of what is at issue in this book.
Russ: DES questions are
sometimes called “open-ended,” but I think it makes as much sense to call my
questions “open-beginninged” as open-ended. An open-beginninged question is one
that does not presume the content about which it asks.
“Tell me about your image” is an open-ended question, because it
allows the respondent to elaborate as much or as little as possible about
images. But its beginning is fixed: the question is about images, nothing else.
By contrast, “Tell me about your experience, if any, whatever it
happened to be” is an open-beginninged (as well as an open-ended) question,
because it allows the respondent to discuss images, speech, emotions,
sensations – whatever was occurring at the moment of the beep, including none
of the above or no experience at all.
The failure to appreciate the importance of open-beginninged
questions has been, in my opinion, one of the major problems in the development
of the science of inner experience, including most of the approaches described
in
It is possible to have a particular interest (say, in images) and
still ask open-beginninged questions. You ask, in an open-beginninged way, what
was going on at this moment. If the experience happens to include an image,
then you include that in your study. If the experience happens not to include
an image, then you discard it. Such a study is, it seems to me, the only way to
gain an accurate view of the way images are actually experienced. The argument
(as I have heard it) that such a way is too inefficient actually proves my
point. If it is inefficient, that must be because many moments do not include
images, and to ask about images at those times must have been misguided.
Thread: Interview
techniques. Previous:
Thread: Richness. Next:
We
accept that Skinner was correct in his observation that people, including our
DES subjects, are not differentiated observers or reporters of their inner
experience (see Guideline 9 above). That is, subjects say many things about
their experiences that are false or misleading, not because they wish to
deceive but because in their life encounters until now they have not learned an
adequate vocabulary to describe their experiences accurately; they have not
learned to discriminate adequately between their actually occurring experience
and their self-theories about their experiences; they have not learned to focus
on one moment. The series of DES expositional interviews must therefore provide
training on those important observational and reporting skills at the same time
as it is acquiring reports of inner experience. Therefore, the first sampling
day or two (or more in some cases) is generally considered entirely training,
not data gathering, and training continues past that time when necessary.
Thus
the expositional interview consists of the subject’s saying some things that
are faithful and some that are misleading about her inner experience. The
interviewer’s task is to help the subject, over the course of sampling, say
more and more of the faithful and less and less of the misleading. A metaphor
that appeals to me is that I’m standing under the chute of a thresher with
wheat and chaff pouring down. I try to grab the wheat and just ignore the
chaff. (I actually don’t know whether threshers work like that.) As the subject
finds out that I’m very interested in the characteristics of particular moments
and I’m not interested in the extra-sampling general statements, almost always
there eventually becomes more wheat and less chaff, more talk about moments and
less about general characterizations.
All
this assumes that the subject is truly motivated to provide faithful
descriptions of her inner experience. There may be some subjects who are
motivated to lie, and probably nothing can be done about that. But DES does
take seriously the attempt to enlist the subject’s interest in faithful
descriptions. First, we present ourselves as co-investigators: the subject has
something (her experience) and we have something (the DES method), and together
we can discover something that probably neither of us separately can do.
Second,
we actually are, and present ourselves as being, genuinely interested in the
faithful apprehension of her experience, as it occurred, with as few
embellishments as possible. We demonstrate that genuine interest in a variety
of ways: We question carefully to make sure we understand precisely what is
being said; we encourage the careful focus on the precise moment of the beep by
discouraging wandering away from that moment; we encourage the careful focus on
the precise moment of the beep by discouraging speculation about what might
have caused the currently experienced phenomenon; we consistently try to keep
our own presuppositions out of the picture, maintaining a focus on the
subject’s experience as the subject experiences it; we let a random beeper
choose the moment, rather than presume to know what moments are important.
Third,
we protect the subject’s privacy, telling her that we will not divulge her
experiences until she explicitly agrees that we may do so; that she should feel
free to discontinue sampling at any time without prejudice; that she should
feel free to decline to discuss any experience for any reason (we have things
that are none of her business and presume that she has things that are none of
ours). We do ask that that if she wishes to decline to discuss an experience,
that she tell us up front, and we will simply omit discussion of that beep
entirely. Then if we do discuss a sample, we can delve as thoroughly as we
desire (certainly the subject knows that she can change her mind and
discontinue reporting or sampling at any time).
The
result of all this is that the subject typically comes to realize that our aim
is actually to apprehend the reality of the subject’s experience, one moment at
a time. Most subjects, I think, find that a very powerful and quite rare event:
Someone really cares about my experience! Most subjects, I think, find it an
unusual opportunity to be as honest as possible about personal experiences.
Most subjects, I think, find it an opportunity to discover something about
themselves, and the more accurate the better. [See
Russ: Nisbett and Wilson’s
1977 criticism of introspection is so widely quoted as to require comment: “The
accuracy of subjective reports is so poor as to suggest than any introspective
access that may exist is not sufficient to produce generally correct or
reliable reports” (Nisbett & T. Wilson, 1977, p. 233).
Critics of introspective-like methods have often taken the Nisbett
& Wilson article to be an unconditional refutation of introspection in
general. However, it is not widely known that Nisbett and Wilson, later in that
same 1977 paper, recognized the possibility of accurate reports about inner
experience:
We also wish to
acknowledge that the studies do not suffice to show that people could never
be accurate about the processes involved. To do so would require ecologically
meaningless but theoretically interesting procedures such as interrupting a
process at the very moment it was occurring, alerting subjects to pay careful
attention to their cognitive processes, coaching them in introspective
procedures, and so on (p. 246, italics in original).
DES, as we have just
seen, involves precisely “interrupting a process at the very moment it was
occurring, alerting subjects to pay careful attention to their cognitive
processes, coaching them in introspective procedures, and so on.” It is thus
fair to say that Nisbett and Wilson, among the staunchest critics of
introspection, agreed that methods like DES were at least “theoretically
interesting” and might “be accurate about the processes involved.” (I think
Nisbett and Wilson were mistaken about their further claim of ecological
meaninglessness, but readers may judge for themselves by the end of this book.)
Eric: Let me go further, Russ, and point out that – despite the
mythology that Nisbett and
In general, psychologists have done a poor job separating
skepticism about the self-reports of nonconscious processes, traits, behavioral
dispositions, etc., from skepticism about self-reports of inner experience or
consciousness; and when they do distinguish the two, it often turns out – as with
Nisbett and Wilson – that they are only skeptical about the first.
Russ: I agree with all that.
3. Does DES-Apprehended Inner Experience Faithfully Mirror
Inner Experience?
At the outset, I acknowledge that DES reports about inner
experience mirror inner experience absolutely accurately only in rare cases if
ever. So the issue is not whether the mirror is perfect, only whether it is
scientifically adequate.
There
are, it seems to me, two kinds of evidence for believing that DES reports might
faithfully reflect inner experience. First, there are what I will call plausibility
arguments – characteristics of the world and the method that lead me to
think that accurate characterizations is the most plausible state of affairs.
Second, and by far more important to me personally, are what I will call compelling
idiographic observations – one-case-at-a-time observations of single
individuals.
3.1. Ten
Plausibility Arguments
Here are ten plausible reasons to believe that DES reports
accurately reflect inner experience. None of them, by themselves, carry the day
– one can argue against any of them. But all of them together are, to me,
pretty persuasive. However, I emphasize that I do not think that arguments
based on plausibility are ever an adequate foundation for science. They are
important in that they clarify issues, but one person’s plausibility is
another’s doubt. Science must be built on direct observation, not plausibility;
that is why I believe that the compelling idiographic observations that I
discuss in the next section are far more important that the plausibility
arguments discussed here. I see these plausibility arguments only as setting
the stage for what I find to be the convincing idiographic observations.
. 1.
The DES method is sophisticated. There is, historically, much good reason
to doubt introspective reports. However, those introspective reports have been
gathered in ways that I find seriously methodologically flawed. By following
the guidelines and employing the characteristics described earlier in this
chapter, DES in a sophisticated way may avoid those flaws. That of course
doesn’t imply that its introspections are necessarily successful, but it does
open the possibility for more accuracy than earlier introspections.
2.
Prospective DES subjects are skeptical too. Nearly all prospective DES
subjects think DES will be difficult or impossible, but they find it easy once
they actually engage in the DES procedure. It seems reasonable to suppose that
the subjects’ initial skepticism is somewhat similar to others’ (perhaps the
reader’s) skepticism: it is based on armchair attempts at observing inner
experience. But as I observed in 1997,
critics [should] not
dismiss the descriptive experience sampling method on the basis of informal
attempts at replicating the procedure. Informal sampling attempts such as
asking oneself on occasion, “What am I thinking right now?” are nearly always
discouraging, leading the typical critic to believe that he or she would be
unable to perform the sampling task. However, I reported (Hurlburt, 1990, p.
269) that most subjects find the actual task of responding to the random beep
to be quite easy and unambiguous, stating that “unsuccessful [informal]
attempts at thought sampling should not lead you to conclude that [descriptive
experience] sampling ... is impossible; but rather should lead you to an
appreciation of the relative delicacy of the method” (Hurlburt, 1997, p. 947).
The fact is that most subjects at the outset
believe they will have a hard or impossible time capturing their inner
experience, but over the first day or so of DES they become convinced that they
can in fact capture their inner experience. This often-repeated trajectory from
skepticism to acceptance based on their own directly-observed experience seems
an argument against unrelenting skepticism.
3.
DES subjects say they give accurate and complete reports. Despite the fact
that I, in a skillfully repetitive way, give DES subjects the opportunity to
say that there is more in their experience that they can’t quite describe, they
say the opposite – that they are giving pretty complete reports. They are
convinced of that, and I am confident that that is not the result of my asking
of leading questions.
4.
Variability in within-subject reports implies their openness to a variety of
experience. People often give quite different reports at different beeps,
for example, inner speech at one beep, an image at another, unsymbolized
thinking (the experience of thinking without words, images, or any other
symbols; Hurlburt 1990, 1993, 1997; Hurlburt & Heavey, 2006) at another, a
combination of inner speech and feelings at another, and so on. This seems to
indicate that people have a willingness and ability to report a variety of
kinds of inner experience. It is therefore not the case that these
subjects have a “favorite” kind of inner experience, or are “blind” to all
other kinds of inner experience. (Certainly they might be blind to things they
never report.)
Said
another way, if one believes that reports of putative inner experience are
purely artifactual, you’d expect the reports to be always the same. They are
not.
There
are other possible explanations for variability within subject’s reports; for
example, that a subject has a self-theory of himself as highly variable, and
therefore gives variable reports. However, in my experience most people think
of variability in content, not variability in form. A person would have to be
quite sophisticated about inner experience (to recognize the existence of
unsymbolized thinking, for example), for self-theory to influence the form in
this way.
5.
Variability in between-subject reports implies my openness to a variety of
experience. Different people have quite different patterns of responding.
For example, one person reports nearly all inner speech; another reports nearly
all images; another reports a mix of forms of inner experience. This seems to
indicate that I, as one particular DES investigator, am open to a variety of
experience. It is therefore not the case that I have a “favorite” kind
of inner experience, or am “blind” to all other kinds of inner experience.
6.
The analogy from visual perception. The phenomenology of figure-ground
perception has been well known at least since the Gestalt psychologists. Their
work was largely in the visual realm; they showed that people spontaneously,
seemingly immediately, create strongly felt patterns out of the visual arrays,
and they proposed laws that govern such perception: proximity, similarity,
closure, good continuation, and so on. Their main point was that people do not
see everything that is available to be seen; they create, as part of the active
perceptual process, a well-defined object to “see.”
It
seems likely (and this is the way it is reported by DES subjects) that a
similar process occurs across modalities. Thus, in much the same way that the
faces disappear when I pay attention to the vase way of seeing the face/vase
ambiguous figure, it seems reasonable to conclude that the sounds around me
disappear when I pay attention to the visual, and that the visual disappears
when I pay attention to the tactile, and so on. Certainly there are cases where
I can pay attention to two or several aspects of the environment, but for most
people most of the time, the number of such things is apparently small.
There
are exceptions to that, but it is the exceptions that prove the rule. Some
subjects do not “filter out” alternative modalities of alternative perceptions
in the same modality. That indicates, it seems to me, that I am prepared to
hear such reports if they are given (that is, that I am not biased against
them); because most people don’t make such reports, even when thoroughly
discussed in the expositional interviews, that I would be willing to hear more
complex accounts if experience was more complex. (See
7.
Compare the alternatives. An alternative that is sometimes advanced is that
there is always visual experience ongoing. If the DES subject doesn’t report
it, it must therefore be neglected. I am not persuaded by that as a
possibility, because the same argument can be made for other sensory
modalities. Auditory experience must also always be ongoing because if someone
says my name, I’m likely to hear it even if I’m paying attention to something
else. Therefore, the argument goes, a piece of my awareness must have been
auditory. Kinesthetic experience must also always be ongoing, because if I’m
walking down the street and the pavement suddenly becomes spongy, I
spontaneously adjust my gait. Therefore, the argument goes, a piece of my
awareness must have involved the pavement feel and my body’s reaction to it.
And I see no reason to stop there: taste, smell, and so on are equally arguably
always ongoing. So, on this model, I am always simultaneously experiencing many
simultaneous multimodal things. I just don’t think that’s true. We certainly process
input from multiple modalities at once, but most of that input does not
become a recognizable part of our stream of experience, as the response of our
immune system to invading bacteria or the expansion and contraction of our
pupils as lighting conditions change do not become recognizable parts of the
stream of experience. See also
8.
Subjects are not reluctant to report everything. As we saw in the previous
section, part of the DES method is to impress on subjects that if a feature of
their experience is none of my business, we shouldn’t discuss that sample. I
tell them that it is far easier if they just say up front, “This sample is none
of your business,” rather than try to disguise or hedge. I say that I will try
to get a complete account, and if they’re hiding something, we’ll just go
‘round and ‘round; I won’t feel a sense of completion.
Subjects
occasionally do say “None of your business,” which indicates that the message
is heard. But they don’t say it often, primarily (I think) because the beeped
moments are usually pretty mundane.
I
conclude that subjects are usually not reluctant to report as completely as
possible; if they were, they’d say “None of your business” more often. In fact,
subjects often report things that are embarrassing or run counter to their self
concept [as indicated by verbal (You’re sure this is confidential…”) and
non-verbal (blushing, stammering, etc.) evidence].
9.
I myself am pretty good at bracketing presuppositions. I don’t mean to be
arrogant, or to single myself out, but the ability to bracket presuppositions
probably has to be evaluated one person at a time. The evidence for the
adequacy of my own bracketing efficacy: (1) My reports vary dramatically from
subject to subject, indicating that I am not “out looking for” my favorite
characteristic. (2) I have reported many phenomena that were surprising to me
myself (unsymbolized thinking, the absence of figure-ground phenomena, the
absence of inner experience altogether). (3) I have worked at it and written
about it. (4) I have been observed by at least one skeptic (Eric) who
acknowledges that I seem to be pretty good at it (see Chapter Ten,
introduction).
10.
Leading the witness is less a problem with reports about actually occurring
events than with general statements. Descriptive psychology is plagued by
the problem of demand characteristics of the communications. I believe that the
ability for demands to be effective in altering a subject’s perceptions
diminishes as the situation becomes more concretely immediate. “See that stop
sign there? It’s blue with white polka-dots” is not likely to be effective in
the face of a red stop sign because your own immediate perception can refute
it. DES tries to limit reports to immediately occurring events, and thus avoids
much of the problem with demand.
3.2
Compelling Idiographic Observations
The plausibility arguments that I have just discussed suggest
to me, in a weight-of-the-evidence kind of way, that the general answer to the
question “Does DES-apprehended inner experience mirror inner experience?” is
Yes. But I recognize that someone else might advance ten plausible reasons to
the contrary, and conclude that the answer is therefore No. There is, I
believe, no clear-cut way out of this dueling plausible generalities scenario.
However,
I believe that the general attempt to answer the “Does DES-apprehended inner
experience faithfully mirror inner experience?” question is somewhat misguided.
The fact is that, while I believe the ten factors I just listed do support the
plausibility of the Yes answer, I myself am not persuaded by those
arguments. The arguments I gave in the previous section tried to give an
analytic answer to a question that may at heart require an inductive answer.
So let me recast the
question to read, “Does the DES-apprehended inner experience of Allen
faithfully mirror his inner experience? Does the DES-apprehended inner
experience of Beatrice faithfully mirror her inner experience? Does the
DES-apprehended inner experience of Chuck faithfully mirror his inner
experience? Does the DES-apprehended inner experience of Dolores faithfully
mirror her inner experience? and so on. And if the answer to many of those
sub-questions is Yes, then we can perform the true inductive generalization and
conclude that the DES-apprehended inner experience of (many) subjects mirror their
inner experience.”
I have performed many DES
investigations, and my answer to most of those inductive questions about them
are “Yes, yes, yes, yes…and therefore Yes.” And, furthermore, that inductive
series is capable of compelling me to believe the final Yes in a way that the
analytically plausible generality series of arguments simply cannot. I, as an
individual, am pretty darn sure that DES-elicited reports of inner experience
often or usually mirror actual inner experience; and I believe that I have been
compelled to that belief by observing a series of single individuals for whom a
contrary position seems bizarre. I’ll cite two such cases here, both of which
I’ve written about elsewhere. You’ll get to judge for yourself the adequacy of
the account of Melanie later on in this book.
3.2.1. The Case of Fran. In 1993 I reported the case of Fran, a
woman who had been diagnosed as having a borderline personality disorder. In
1997 I discussed the “idiographic validity” of that case, arguing that my DES characterization
of her inner experience reflected her actual inner experience:
“Fran” [was] a woman
diagnosed as having a borderline personality (Hurlburt, 1993). Hurlburt
described many salient characteristics of Fran’s inner experiences, of which I
discuss three. First, Hurlburt reported that Fran’s inner experience was
frequently populated by multiple (as many as five or ten) visual images, all
occurring simultaneously and in the same “visual space” (that is, these images
were not a side-by-side collage, but were instead all viewed straight ahead in
a physically impossible overlaying that somehow did not provide any confusion
for Fran herself). Fran’s case is thus an example of the extreme complexity
that inner experience can attain as reported by the descriptive experience
sampling method. Such complexity cannot possibly be reported by any method
other than sampling. For example, had Fran used a think-aloud technique, the
most detailed non-sampling method, she simply could not have had time to report
adequately one image, to say nothing of five or ten simultaneous images.
Second,
Hurlburt (1993) reported that some of Fran’s visual images (usually those with
extremely negative content) often lasted for hours or days, nonstop,
uninterrupted. (By contrast, the descriptive experience sampling method finds
that images in healthy participants last for only a moment.) For example, Fran
reported a visual and auditory image of her father “telling her off.” In this
image, Fran was seated at the dining room table. Her father was standing over
her, pointing his finger at her, telling her she was “no good – a failure.” Her
mother was seen at the kitchen sink in the background looking over her shoulder
at Fran. This image appeared in several successive samples, with the description
being the same at each sample, and apparently continued uninterrupted during
the time in between, for a total of at least several hours (pp. 202-205). This
long-duration-image phenomenon might be considered impossible without sampling
evidence.
Third,
Hurlburt (1993) reported that Fran had no figure–ground phenomenon in
either her inner image perception or her external perception—she took in an
entire visual scene without focusing on any of its aspects. This conclusion was
based on the fact that in repeated descriptive experience sampling interviews,
Fran consistently denied the occurrence of phenomena associated with figure and
ground: no part of an image appeared to be “closer” or “in better focus,” and
when she shifted her gaze from one image (or external object) to another, she
had no experience of “zeroing in” or of the previous center of attention
“losing focus.”
A major
question is of course whether Hurlburt’s (1993) descriptive experience sampling
reports about Fran accurately reflect Fran’s inner experience: Fran was clearly
the only person in a position to know that experience. Direct reliability
studies are therefore impossible, so reliability must be indirectly inferred
from validity considerations. Furthermore, one cannot apply standard
validity-checking procedures (which intrinsically use across- group measures)
to the idiographic observations of a single person; instead, one must infer
validity idiographically, considering the unique characteristics of the
particular description. I can identify five such idiographic validity
considerations regarding the case of Fran:
First, the
question of idiographic validity applies not to the descriptive sampling method
per se but to the particular individuals who apply the method. In Fran’s case,
I was the investigator (Hurlburt, 1993). I might be expected to be a valid
applier of the method because my previous descriptions of different people
differ dramatically from each other, are sometimes surprising even to me
myself, and are in agreement with other observers in those cases where more
than one observer have sampled jointly (Hurlburt, 1993).
Second, the
lack of figure–ground phenomenon in inner experience leads to an obvious but
risky prediction that if Fran viewed the classical ambiguous figures such as
the faces–vase or Jastrow’s duck–rabbit, they would not “alternate” in her
experience. I (Hurlburt, 1993) performed this informal validity experiment and
found that Fran did in fact see both aspects of each drawing simultaneously
with no alternation. A correct risky prediction can be taken as support for an
underlying proposition (Popper, 1963) and therefore here as evidence of
validity.
Third, I
(Hurlburt, 1993) ruled out miscommunication, misunderstanding, or language
deficit as alternative explanations of her failure to report figure–ground
experience as follows. Fran asked to borrow the ambiguous figures to show to
her coworkers, believing that I was mistaken about the existence of the
alternation phenomenon. She telephoned me a few hours later to report that to
her surprise, her coworkers did in fact report the experience of alternation.
In this conversation she gave an accurate description of her coworkers’
alternating experiences but still denied that such alternation occurred for
her. Thus it seemed clear that Fran understood what figure–ground phenomena are
and was capable of describing them if they had existed for her.
Fourth, the
descriptive experience sampling descriptions of Fran’s inner experience
provided plausible explanations of two characteristics of her external
behavior. First, during Fran’s discovery of her coworkers’ figure–ground
phenomenon, the coworkers came to realize, much to their surprise, that Fran
could pay attention to many aspects of one thing or many different things
simultaneously (such as her frequent multiple images), as had been discovered
by descriptive experience sampling. The coworkers observed that this
multiple-attention ability explained a trait that angered them all: They worked
in a bank, and a frequent task was counting money. Each person would stand at a
counter and count their own individual stacks of bills. Fran irritated her
coworkers by repeatedly initiating conversations while counting, causing them
to lose count. The simultaneous tasks of counting and conversing were
impossible for her coworkers but simple for Fran. Thus, it seemed clear to me
that the multiple-experience characteristic of Fran’s inner world had real
ramifications in Fran’s exterior everyday world.
The second
sampling-based plausible explanation of external behavior came from Fran’s
psychotherapist. Before Fran had become involved in the sampling study, her
psychotherapist had responded to her complaints of being preoccupied with
negative thoughts by training her in thought substitution—a
cognitive-therapeutic technique aimed at teaching her to think about something
positive, based on the rationale that increasing her frequency of positive
thoughts would lower the frequency of negative thoughts. However, that
therapeutic intervention had been unsuccessful; sampling provided the plausible
explanation that Fran was quite capable of thinking about something positive
without ceasing to think about something negative.
Fifth,
changes in external behavior were reflected in changes in inner experience.
Near the end of sampling Fran experienced a remarkable improvement in her
borderline symptoms: her exterior disorganization and chaotic psychological
fragility vanished. Samples obtained after this improvement were now much less
complex and now included the experience of figure–ground phenomena.
Taken
together, these observations led me (Hurlburt, 1993) to conclude that the
idiographic descriptions of Fran were indeed valid. If their validity is at
least tentatively accepted, they are extremely provocative; for example, to my
knowledge, no reports of visual perception without figure–ground phenomenon
appear in the perception literature, and no mention is made of the possible
connection of the lack of figure–ground to psychopathology (Hurlburt, 1997,
946-947).
For reasons of focus in my 1993 and 1997
accounts, I did not include the following additional anecdote. Recall the
conversation between Fran and her coworkers, when they discovered that Fran’s
multiple-attention ability was the reason that she could count money and hold a
simultaneous conversation. During that same conversation, Fran discovered that
her coworkers had only one TV in their living rooms. Fran herself had three
(didn’t everyone!?!), and watched them all simultaneously—not one after the
other but all at the same time without switching her attention back and forth.
She was surprised when her coworkers reported that they could not do the same
thing! Furthermore, after the improvement in her borderline symptoms, she
reported that she had lost this simultaneous-TV-watching ability, a substantial
disappointment.
This case compels me to
believe that my DES characterizations of Fran’s inner experience correspond in
some important way to her actual inner experience. Sampling had putatively
“discovered” a highly unusual phenomenon of Fran’s inner experience (no
figure–ground phenomenon in image and external perception). This was
“corroborated” by three highly unusual external characteristics: (a) no
alternation of ambiguous figures; (b) the ability to count and hold a
conversation (the ability was actually stronger than that – she could count,
participate in one conversation, and simultaneously listen without difficulty
to one or more other simultaneous conversations); and (c) the existence of
three TV’s in her living room and the ability to watch all of them at the same
time. And as if that weren’t enough, when Fran’s remarkable recovery occurred,
both her inner experience and her external skills dramatically (literally
overnight) lost their unusual characteristics.
It is therefore difficult
for me to believe that the DES multiple-image characterization of Fran’s
experience was not substantially correct. How else can one explain these
remarkable characteristics? It is of course possible that Fran was lying and
inventing reports to seem “special,” as those diagnosed with borderline
personality sometimes do, was feeding off my interest and trying to confirm
what she supposed to be my hypotheses. That doesn’t seem likely to me, because
she would have had to have been very psychologically sophisticated, because I
myself had no hypotheses to confirm, and because I was quite skeptical about
her reports. The most reasonable conclusion seems to me that sampling
discovered and accurately reported important characteristics of her experience;
substantially more sampling case studies and corroborating objective
investigations will be required to be fully confident.
3.2.2. The Case of Robert. In 1994 Asperger Syndrome expert Uta
Frith, her student Francesca Happé, and I reported the case of Robert, a 25‑year‑old
man diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome, a form of Autism where the level
of intellectual functioning can be quite normal
(Hurlburt, Happé, & Frith, 1994). Robert’s IQ was 90, and he was
quite able to perform the sampling task. Here are excerpts from our account:
The characteristics of
all Robert’s 16 samples were strikingly uniform. All 16 involved visual images,
with no other aspects of experience reliably available to be reported—no
feelings, no inner speech, no bodily sensations, etc. All Robert’s images were
seen clearly and in accurate colour, with the centre of the image being most
clear and losing focus at the periphery, apparently exactly the same as his
real-world perception…
Robert’s samples
were marked by the absence of any characteristics of inner experience except
images. Except for the imagined sensation of a cat scratch on the back of his
hand in one sample of an image of a cat, no samples included inner speech,
feelings, bodily sensations, or other features of inner experience that have
been reported by other subjects. Robert clearly had adequate ability to
describe such features, and on occasion we specifically enquired whether such
features were present, so as to rule out the possibility that they were simply
being overlooked. Our conclusion was that they simply did not occur to Robert
as aspects of experience at any of the sampled moments.
Because the
lack of non-image forms of inner experience was so striking, we structured [informal,
non-DES ]exercises during the interviews to explore the ways in which Robert
experienced unambiguous strong bodily sensations. For example, with Robert’s
consent one of the authors (R.H.) leaned him forward and sideways to very
tilted body positions; his inner experience (seeing a recalled image) remained
constant, and a bodily awareness did not occur to him. In another such
experiment, R.H. twisted the skin of Robert’s wrist in opposite directions,
creating what in most people would be a moderately painful experience. The
wrist sensation did not create its own image or disturb the image that was
present in his real-time inner experience: the image that he had been
describing to us remained constant. Robert said he could feel the skin twisting
but insisted it was not painful (Hurlburt, Happé & Frith, 1994, pp.
388-389).
On
the basis of DES, Hurlburt, Happé, and Frith characterized Robert’s inner
experience as being almost always exclusively visual. The question we are
dealing with here is whether that characterization is true. The informal
experiments we performed were specific attempts to induce non-visual experience
(leaning him to the side, applying painful twists to his wrist). Those
manipulations were only slightly effective: what in most individuals would
immediately dominate experience became, apparently, only slightly or not at all
a part or Robert’s experience. That fact that images persisted despite explicit
attempts to elicit non-image experience seems to corroborate the
characterization of Robert’s experience as being largely visual. Nonetheless,
it is still possible that this visual focus is simply a characteristic of
Robert’s report, not of Robert’s actual experience – maybe Robert felt pain but
simply didn’t have the vocabulary to report it.
However,
there are other facts not reported by Hurlburt, Happé, and Frith (1994) which
compel me to the view that his reports accurately mirrored his actual
experience. During the session in which we had explored the painful
wrist-twisting, Robert told the following anecdotes. When he was a child and
lost his first baby tooth, his parents instructed him to put it under his
pillow; the next morning, the tooth was gone, replaced by “a quid left by the
tooth fairy.” Later that day, Robert took a pair of pliers and pulled out four
more teeth! A more recent story occurred a few months before I had met Robert.
He was in his apartment kitchen, and he smelled something burning. Looking
around, he discovered it was his hand, which was accidentally resting on a hotplate!
Those
remarkable and objectively corroboratable stories compel me to believe that
pain does not figure Robert’s his inner experience, just as sampling had shown.
It is highly implausible that Robert’s pain experience was similar to
that of most other people, and that only his pain reporting differed
from the norm. Certainly such accounts do not verify that Robert’s experience
is visual, but they do lend credence to the accuracy of his no-pain description
of our arm-twisting experiment. That, in turn, lends credence to the accuracy
of his ongoing-undisturbed-visual-image portion of that description, and that
in turn does support, in my view, his credibility as a reporter of ongoing
imagery. I simply cannot accept the notion that we should treat Robert’s DES
accounts as “mere reports.” By contrast, they are, it seems to me,
substantially related to what Robert actually experienced.
By
the way, neither absence of pain nor ubiquitous presence of images are known to
be frequent characteristics of Asperger individuals, although there are similar
reports by others (e.g. Grandin, 1995). It is therefore difficult to argue that
we set out, knowingly or unwittingly, to look for those characteristics in
Robert. Thus it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that these were actual
characteristics of Robert’s experience. [See
Eric: I find the case of Fran
more compelling (assuming she’s being honest) than the case of Robert. Your
phraseology here confuses me; and if I’m confused, I worry that Robert may have
been confused too. What do you mean when you say, for example, that Robert had
no “bodily awareness” as he was tilted forward and sideways? Was he completely
ignorant of the fact that he was being tilted? You report no general disorder
in his sense of balance. Or was Robert in some sense aware of being tilted (and
able to report it?), though aware without “inner experience”? Do you mean to
suggest that Robert navigated the world for the most part entirely
non-consciously, no more having tactile or auditory experience than the rest of
us have experience of our immune system or the growth of our fingernails? Or do
you mean only something weaker?
How confident are you that Robert was alive to such distinctions
as I’m asking about here and that he interpreted your questions as you intended
them? Did you ask him about sensory visual experience, which you seem to
assume he had, though it sounds like it’s not reported in any of his samples?
Especially without verbatim transcripts to look at, I don’t feel I can give
much credit to this strange material, confusingly presented, and therefore
possibly born of confusion in the original interview. Pardon my frankness!
I do concede that you have some anecdotal evidence that comports
nicely with Robert’s denial of pain. However, it should be noted that total
incapacity to feel pain is a rare and serious disorder, typically accompanied
by serious injury and deformity, due to insufficient self-care (Rosemberg,
Marie & Kliemann 1994; Nagasako, Oaklander & Dworkin 2003). You don’t
report this in the case of Robert.
Russ: I offer the case of Robert only to open the reader to
possibilities, not as proof. You, Eric, discredit the report because it seems
“strange” to you, and doesn’t match your presuppositions about our experiences
of balance and touch, the relation between bodily injury and the experience of
pain. I, too, found Robert’s reports initially rather strange. But as I argue
repeatedly throughout the book, we must set aside (or “bracket”) such
presuppositions when faced with DES reports (see Chapter Eleven, Section 1.7).
Furthermore, I think the general rarity of pain insensitivity strongly supports
my point. We discovered Robert’s pain insensitivity as a result of an
exploration of inner experience that had nothing to do with pain. The
ubiquity of Robert’s images led to the risky prediction of little or no bodily
or pain experience, and as in the case of Fran, a correct risky prediction is
supportive evidence.
I agree that our discussion of Robert is incomplete. One advantage
of the present project, Eric, is that you can explore any similar
presupposition-based doubts you have about Melanie’s reports as deeply as you
like.
Thread: Bracketing
presuppositions. Next:
Thread: Human similarity
and difference. Next:
3.2.3. Discussion. Fran and Robert’s cases provide corroboration in
instances where you might expect such corroboration the least. These
were individuals with serious disorders, and yet their characterizations of
their inner experience seemed compellingly accurate. If seriously disturbed
individuals can be faithfully accurate reporters of experience, healthy
individuals should be able to be at least as accurate.
When
I consider the many subjects I have examined with DES, some as dramatically
compelling as Fran and Robert, I see little choice in believing that DES is
about the exploration of inner experience, not merely about the reports
of inner experience. To say that we are just examining reports of inner
experience is, of course, true in a fundamental way that I can fully accept –
everything has to be filtered through and understood in the context of
reporting. But to say that we are just examining reports of inner
experience seems substantially far-fetched, at the same level of
far-fetchedness as to say that we are just examining perceptions of
reality with nothing substantial implied. Just as I stop at red traffic lights
because I believe in the substantial existence of the oncoming cars, I believe
in the substantial existence of the inner experience that DES intends to
describe. Just as I do not understand the nature of the reality of the oncoming
cars, I also do not understand the nature of the reality of inner experience.
But just as I do in fact get out of the way of oncoming traffic, I do treat
inner experience as a fact.
It
is possible to argue that the cases of Fran and Robert were exceptional –
that’s why I discussed them – or that perhaps my characterizations of Fran and
Robert were somehow biased by my personal characteristics. The present book
seeks to examine such reservations. We chose as a subject Melanie, who was not
thought to be particularly exceptional in the Fran or Robert sense – in fact, we
knew little about her other than that she had been a successful college
student. In the coming chapters we will expose the entire process, so that you
can decide for yourself the extent to which the account of Melanie’s experience
that our interviews provide should be taken to be accurate.
Chapter Three
Descartes Inverted
Eric Schwitzgebel
1. Some History
René Descartes argues, in
his famous Meditations on First Philosophy (1641/1984), that the mind –
including especially conscious thought and experience – is better known than
the body. He supports this view with his dream doubt and demon doubt thought
experiments, which are now standard fare in introduction to philosophy. You may
think it certain that there’s a book in front of you. But can you, really, be
absolutely sure? Haven’t you had the experience of dreaming that you were
reading, falsely confident that you were awake? Or perhaps a demon is bent on
deceiving you, and is thus feeding you false sensory impressions – or (in the
more contemporary version) perhaps a genius neuroscientist from Alpha Centauri
removed your brain last night while you slept, relocating it to a vat where
it’s being stimulated so as to mimic exactly the inputs it would receive from a
normal waking day, including the reading of a hallucinatory book.
Of what can you be
certain, according to this argument? Only that you exist, that you’re thinking,
that you have certain conscious experiences – a visual experience of blackish
figures against a whitish background, a tactile experience as if there were a
book in your hands. Such facts about currently ongoing events in your mind,
Descartes argues in his first two Meditations, are known indubitably and
infallibly as no external fact could be. Indeed, later thinkers, such as Locke
(1690/1975), and perhaps Descartes himself (on standard interpretations, like
Russell’s [1945]), argue that our knowledge of our own minds serves as the basis
of our knowledge of the world outside. We apprehend our sensory experiences
first; our judgments about the external world flow indirectly, derivatively,
from a primary and more secure knowledge of our own consciousness. You know
there’s a book in your hands only because you know, antecedently and with
greater certainty, that you’re having visual and tactile experiences of a
certain sort.
Philosophers of the
mid-twentieth century, despite the skepticism about introspection that was
commonplace in research psychology, commonly accepted something like Cartesian
introspective infallibility or incorrigibility (e.g., Lewis, 1946;
She: Oh, God,
I’m in agony!
He: [looking
at her test results] Honey, you don’t have a headache.
She: Oh,
thank God!
He: [looking
at his test results] Neither do I! [They hug.]
Spokesman: The Home Headache Test. From Leland-Myers. Because
what’s worse – having a bad headache or not knowing if you have a bad headache?
The humor in this derives, of course, from the
preposterous idea that one would need to look to outside sources to determine if
one has a headache. Similarly, it seems difficult to imagine, when one is
looking attentively, in good conditions, at a nearby bright red shirt – and
consequently having a visual experience of red across a large swath of one’s
visual field – that one could possibly be mistaken in the judgment that one is
experiencing the visual phenomenology of “redness” (though one might be
incorrect in using the label “red” for that experience, due to a purely
linguistic mistake). Seeking outside confirmation in such matters seems absurd.
In the last few decades
infallibilism about current conscious experience has fallen out of favor among
philosophers, or has at least been sharply curtailed. Philosophers such as
Armstrong (1963) have argued, and others such as Shoemaker (1994) have
conceded, that it’s at least possible in principle to be mistaken about one’s
own current conscious experience, and that external sources of evidence might
sometimes justifiably override one’s own introspective judgments. Churchland
(1988) offers a typical thought experiment of the sort many have found
convincing: You have been touched on the back nineteen times with a hot poker.
On the twentieth trial, an ice-cube is surreptitiously substituted, and for a
fleeting moment as it touches you, you mistakenly think you feel pain. Or:
You’re blindfolded and told you’ll be tasting orange sherbet, but really it’s
lime (which tastes very similar in blind tests). For a moment – perhaps until
you taste the actual orange – you erroneously think you experience an orangey
taste. (See
Eric: Though I’m sympathetic
with Churchland’s aims, his examples seem to me to invite easy objection: Perhaps
you really do feel pain for a moment, or perhaps your judgment in that case
isn’t genuinely introspective? Perhaps you’re not wrong about the taste
experience itself but only about how to relate it to previous taste experiences
and the world, or perhaps the suggestion of orange in combination with the
lime-sherbet flavoring is enough to generate an actual orangey experience?
In fact, those who would defend infallibilism seem always
to have an array of options when faced with a putative case of introspective
error: Maybe the subject is simply using words differently than the rest of us,
or maybe she is mistaken only in her classification of an experience (an
experience she perfectly well knows) as of a kind with other experiences she
remembers, or maybe she really does experience what she says she experiences
despite the behavioral or physiological evidence. To undermine all such
potential responses generally requires more work (and more empirical work) than
is possible in a typical philosopher’s example; and definitive refutation may
be out of reach – an infallibilist can always stomp his foot and insist that
the behavioral and physiological evidence is misleading. I have devoted whole
articles to developing plausible cases of error, in which I think typical
infallibilist responses are at least a bit strained (the auditory experience of
echolocation in Schwitzgebel & Gordon, 2000; visual imagery experience in
Schwitzgebel, 2002a).
Although such examples
are intended to undermine Cartesian infallibilism, embracing the possibility of
error in some cases is quite compatible with holding – as the great
majority of contemporary philosophical fallibilists do (including Churchland,
1985) – that introspection is generally a reliable process for coming to
know one’s own current experiences (e.g., Armstrong, 1963; Hill, 1991; Audi,
1993; Shoemaker, 1994; Dretske, 1995; Lycan, 1996; Goldman, 1997; Chalmers,
2003). Fallibilists almost always confine their examples of error to marginal
cases, like those discussed above – matters of fine discrimination, or mistakes
made only for a moment, or in circumstances of stress and distraction, or in
pathological or science-fiction cases, or only about the causes of our
experiences rather than about the experiences themselves. Thus, the debate
between fallibilists and infallibilists within philosophy has almost always
been conducted under the umbrella assumption that introspection – that is,
whatever process(es) drive our ordinary judgments about our currently ongoing
or immediately past conscious experience – is a broadly trustworthy method, at
least in favorable circumstances. No prominent philosopher has clearly and
unequivocally put forward a case for thinking that we often go grossly wrong
about our current conscious experiences, even in calm and ordinary
circumstances of extended reflection (though see
Eric: Daniel Dennett’s work,
especially his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, is often read as
arguing for the possibility of pervasive and radical mistakes about conscious
experience. However, I find Dennett far from clear on the point. Sometimes he
seemingly takes himself to be providing examples of gross introspective error
about ongoing conscious experience (e.g., regarding the level of detail in
visual experience, in Ch. 11); but elsewhere, he compares our authority in
reporting our experiences to the authority an author has over his fictional
creations – which seems to imply that we could no more go wrong in our reports
than Arthur Conan Doyle could go wrong in reporting the color of Holmes’s easy
chair (e.g., 1991, p. 81 & 365-366). Dennett also asserts that we can come
“close” to infallibility when charitably interpreted (Dennett, 2002, p. 13,
16), and he allies himself explicitly with Rorty (1970) and other “incorrigibilists”
who argue that we can never be justified in overturning a sincere introspective
report on the basis of outside evidence (Dennett, 2000, 2002). I doubt a
coherent view can be made of all this: See Schwitzgebel (forthcoming-a).
2. My Point of View
This seems to me an odd
state of affairs. Why should philosophers – an ornery lot who rarely reach
general consensus about anything – almost universally regard the
introspection of one’s ongoing phenomenology, or stream of experience, as
trustworthy and reliable? People aren’t especially trustworthy and reliable,
most think, in reporting the real grounds of their judgments and decisions
(e.g., why they chose a particular pair of socks: Nisbett & T. Wilson,
1977) or in reporting their implicit attitudes (e.g., about the characteristics
of other races: Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Is it obvious that the
introspection of current conscious experience deserves better epistemic
credentials?
Autobiographically, my
interest in this issue was first aroused through my work in Alison Gopnik’s
developmental psychology laboratory in the 1990s (while I was simultaneously a
philosophy Ph.D. student under Elisabeth Lloyd and John Searle). Gopnik, at
Berkeley, and the Flavells at Stanford, were exploring the extent to which children
could be mistaken about their own attitudes and experiences (e.g., in Gopnik,
1993a-b; Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000; Flavell, Green,
Flavell & Grossman, 1997; Flavell, Flavell & Green, 2001; Flavell &
Flavell, 2004). It seemed from their research that young children – 4- and
5-year-olds – could be vastly mistaken, denying the presence of beliefs
just expressed, holding that people could go for days without a single thought,
grossly misreporting their own ongoing or immediately past reflections and
expectations. One typical result from Flavell is this:
The experimenter showed the child a library-type bell and
then hid it under the testing table. She said, “In just a few seconds, I’ll
ring it.” After a 4-sec delay she rang the bell and said, “OK, in just a few
seconds I’ll ring it again.” After another 4-sec delay she rang the bell and
reiterated, “OK, one more time. In just a few seconds I’ll ring it again.” This
time she failed to ring the bell and after a 10-12 sec delay instead asked…
“Are you wondering or thinking about anything right now or not?” If the answer
was “yes,” the experimenter asked, “What are you wondering or thinking about?”
(1995, p. 72-73).
Only 38% of five-year-olds responded that they
were wondering or thinking about anything having to do with the bell or the
experimenter’s striking it, and 44% said they weren’t wondering or thinking
about anything at all. Flavell et al. assume that most of the children must
have been thinking about the bell (and that virtually all must have been
thinking about something), so they interpret the majority as mistaken in
their replies. Flavell et al. perform a variety of similar experiments, varying
their methodology and sometimes going to great lengths to explain to the
children what “thinking” means. I don’t view the results as decisive – surely,
children may fail to understand the tasks or the language, despite the
Flavells’ near-heroic efforts in various versions of these experiments. Still,
I’m drawn to the Flavells’ overall conclusion that young children know very
little about the processes of thinking and are remarkably poor introspectors
–and, as Gopnik suggests, if children struggle enormously with understanding
the task or the language, that itself already tells you something. Unfortunately,
I know of no attempts to replicate Flavell’s work on this outside of his
laboratory. (For a concern about Flavell’s interpretation of his results, see
Russ: An alternative explanation
of Flavell’s results is that many five-year-olds simply do not have thoughts,
and that therefore they are not mistaken at all, let alone “vastly
mistaken.” I fear that the Flavells and Eric reject this possibility because it
is too different from their own experience. One of my recurrent themes in this
book is the desirability of bracketing presuppositions about others’
experience, in particular resisting the temptation to believe that everyone’s
experience is like one’s own. We shall see that I think that bracketing
presuppositions is of vital importance to the advancement of a science of inner
experience, while Eric thinks my dismissal of prior research is too cavalier.
See my extended treatment of the Flavell studies in Chapter Eleven, Section
1.7.8.
Thread: Bracketing
presuppositions. Previous:
Thread: Human similarity
and difference. Previous:
If Gopnik and Flavell are
right, young children are far worse at introspecting their experiences than
they are at perceiving outward objects. Now, are we to suppose that this
situation reverses itself by adulthood? Are ordinary adults, unlike young
children, at least as accurate in their judgments about their stream of
experience as they are about the physical and social world around them? Do they
largely avoid gross errors? I was surprised to find that little empirical work
has been done on the question.
It’s a difficult
question. We can’t directly observe someone else’s experience. We may be
tempted to infer error or accuracy in particular cases, but with no dependable,
general theory to hand about the relationship between conscious experiences and
publicly observable brain states or behavior – no theory more dependable than
the subjective reports themselves, anyway – we’re necessarily on shaky ground
in the many cases where a person’s judgment about her experience diverges from
what one might think would be her experience based on other evidence. Witness
my criticisms of Churchland’s examples (in
Still, I think the issue
admits of exploration through a careful blend of introspection (by researchers
and independent subjects), theoretical reflection, and attention to outwardly
observable empirical facts. In the face of ambiguous evidence, we can at least
weigh the plausibilities. The remainder of this chapter will provide a taste of
the kinds of consideration I find persuasive.
Consider, for example,
not the infallibilists’ favorite cases of severe pain and foveal red, but
rather the experience of visual imagery. Create a visual image right now, if
you can: for example, an image of your breakfast table as you sat down to it
this morning (following Galton, 1880), or an image of your house as seen from
the street. Now consider the following questions. Can you, indeed, form and
retain such an image? If so, how stable is that image? Does it fluctuate as you
think about different aspects of the scene, as your attention waxes and wanes,
or does it stay relatively constant? Does it have a focal center and a
periphery, or is everything equally present at once? How detailed is it? Are
objects to the side well articulated in your image before you specifically
think about them (and “fill them in,” as it were)? If you concentrate on one
object in the image (assuming you can do so), how are the other objects
experienced? Do they “fade” in some way? What is that fading like? Is
everything present in color all at once, or does some of the image have
indeterminate color? How is that indeterminate color, if there is any,
experienced – as black and white, or gray, or in some other way?
Most people of whom I ask
such questions – although these are questions about major features of
presumably (but see
Or consider emotional
experience. What’s your emotional experience right now? Do you even have any?
Try to conjure some if you think you don’t. Is it completely obvious to you
what it is? Even if you’re fairly confident in giving it a general label, how
much do you know about its particular experiential character? Does
introspection reveal its details, its somatic manifestations in experience (if
any), its full phenomenological structure, as clearly and certainly as visual
inspection reveals the contents of your desktop? Does this seem to you
like a topic on which you could not possibly go wrong? Speaking for myself, I’m
tempted to suggest that my wife reads my emotional phenomenology better in my
face and posture than I do in my own introspection.
These reflections are
meant only to be suggestive. Not every reader will find the same uncertainty
and doubt that I do. Think of these reflections not so much as arguments but
rather invitations to a point of view too little defended by
philosophers – as, similarly, infallibilists’ reflections on the apparent
impossibility of being mistaken about one’s headaches or about vivid color
experiences are really more invitations to embrace infallibilism than
demonstrations of its truth. Or, if you like, for the purposes of this chapter,
think of these reflections as merely an expression of my point of view as it
stood prior to our interviews with Melanie.
3. Sources of Introspective Error
The
introspection of conscious experience is difficult for several reasons. First,
experience is fleeting and changeable – or so it seems to me right now as I
reflect, introspectively, upon it. The page before me, as I reread these
paragraphs, is relatively steady, but my visual experience as I look at
the page is in constant flux. As my eyes move, the portion that’s clear, the
portion that’s hazy, constantly changes. I blink, I glance away, I change my
focus, and my experience shifts. My eyes slowly adapt to the black and white of
the page, to the contrast with the surrounding desk, to the changing light as
the sun goes behind a cloud. I parse some bit of the page into familiar words
as my eye scans down it; I form a visual image, reflecting the content of the
discussion; my attention wanders. All this, it seems, affects my visual
experience. Consider your own experience as you read this paragraph. The text
in your hands changes not a whit, but your visual phenomenology won’t stay
still a second, will it? (Or will it?) The same is true, I’m inclined to think,
for our auditory experience, emotional experience, somatic experience,
conscious thought and imagery, taste, and so on: Even when the outside
environment is relatively steady, the stream of experience flies swiftly. It
won’t hold still to be examined. (For some of Russ’s concerns about my claims
here, see
Russ:
Your description of the experience of reading and vision, Eric, is the state of
the art view held by philosophers and psychologists, but I think that view is
mistaken. The experience of reading is never or at most rarely like that.
Certainly the eyes move and the retinal representation of words actually
becomes more or less distinct as it is closer or farther from the fovea. But I
think that level of processing takes place always (or almost always) outside
experience. The actual experience while reading, I think, has little or nothing
to do with such things.
The reason that we can disagree so
dramatically about such a fundamentally important issue is that science has
done a horrible job of exploring experience. That’s why I think this book is so
vitally important. If it’s possible, as I think it is, to obtain accurate observations
of the experience while reading, then science should do so, and then replace
the state-of-the-art (and your) view with a more accurate one based on
carefully obtained experiential data. On the other hand, if it’s not possible
to obtain accurate observations of experience, then science (and I) should
refrain from embarking on a second round of introspection.
Eric: I agree that
we know very little about the experience of reading and about naturally
occurring visual experience generally – an amazing lacuna, really! Perhaps
because I incline toward a relatively “rich” view of experience (see Box 4.8
and Chapter Ten, section 3), I’ve assumed that the reader has a visual
experience as she reads the text, and that this experience changes with the
position of her eyes and the overall state of her visual system. Maybe I could
be talked out of this, though, by clever enough arguments and experiments. My
main point, of course, is that we shouldn’t simply trust our own introspective
judgments about our experience – and I don’t exempt my own from doubt.
For more on the experience of reading,
see
Thread:
Richness. Previous:
Thread:
Sensory experience. Next:
Second,
we’re not in the habit of attending introspectively to experience. Generally,
we care more about physical objects in the world around us, and about our and
others’ situation and prospects, than about our conscious experience, except
when that experience is acutely negative, as with the onset of severe pain.
This may seem strange, given the importance we sometimes claim for “happiness,”
which we generally construe as bound up with, or even reducible to, emotional
experience – but despite the lip service, few people make a real study of their
phenomenology. We spend much more time thinking about, and have much subtler an
appreciation of, our outward occupations and hobbies. And when we do
“introspect,” we tend to think about such things as our motives for past
actions, our personality traits and character, our desires for the future. This
is not, in my view (or Russ’s), introspection strictly speaking; but call it
what you like, it’s not the sort of introspective attention to currently
ongoing (or immediately past) conscious experience that lies at the heart of
consciousness studies. Introspective attention to experience is hardly a
habitual practice for most, perhaps any, of us (except maybe a few dedicated
meditators of a certain sort). If accurate introspection requires a degree of
skill, as I suspect it does, in most people the skill is uncultivated.
Furthermore, relatedly, but perhaps to some extent independently as well,
experience is extremely difficult to remember: Generally what we remember are
outward objects and events – or, rather, outward objects and events as
interpreted, and possibly misperceived, by us – not our stream of experience
as we witness those objects and events. We remember, usually – usually –
that the boss said the work wasn’t up to snuff, not that our visual experience
as he said it was such-and-such or that we felt some particular sinking feeling
in the stomach afterward. These conscious experiences fade like dreams in the
morning unless, as with dreams, we fix them in mind with deliberate attention
within a very short space.
Third,
in part due to our disinterest in conscious experience, the concepts and
categories available to characterize it are limited and derivative. Most
language for sensory experience is adapted from the language we use to describe
outward objects of sensation. Objects are red or square or salty or rough, and
usually when we use the words “red” and “square” and “salty” and “rough,” we
are referring to the properties of outward objects; but derivatively we also
use those words to describe the sensory experiences normally produced by such
objects. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s prone to invite confusion
between the properties of objects and the properties of experiences of those
objects. The practitioners of certain specialties – for example, wine tasting
and sound engineering – have refined language to discuss sensory experience,
but even here our conceptual categories are only rough tools for describing the
overall experience. And, anyway, isn’t the gustatory experience of eating a
burrito as complex as that of tasting a mature wine, and the auditory
experience of sitting in a restaurant as complex as that of hearing a
well-played violin? We almost completely lack the concepts and competencies
that would allow us to parse and think about, talk about and remember, this complexity.
(For more on this point, see Schwitzgebel, 2004.)
Fourth, the introspection of current experience
requires attention to (or thought about) that experience, at least in the
methodologically central case of deliberately introspecting with the aim of
producing an accurate report. Problematic interference between the conscious
experience and the introspective activity thus threatens. Philosophers and
psychologists going back at least to Comte (1830) have complained that the act
of introspection either alters or destroys the target experience, making
accurate report impossible (see also Russ’s Chapter Two, section 1, guideline
6). Much of experience is skittish – as soon as we think about it, it flits
away. Suppose you reflect on the emotional experience of simple, reactive
anger, or the auditory experience of hearing someone speak. Mightn’t the
self-reflective versions of those experiences – those experiences as they
present themselves to concurrent introspection – be quite different from those
experiences as they normally occur in the unselfconscious flow of daily life? A
number of psychologists have attempted to remedy this difficulty by
recommending immediate retrospection, or recall, of past experience rather than
concurrent introspection as the primary method (e.g., James, 1890/1981;
Farthing, 1992). However, deliberately poising oneself in advance to report
something retrospectively may also interfere with the process to be reported;
and if one only reports experiences sufficiently salient and interesting to
produce immediate spontaneous retrospection, one will get a very biased sample.
Furthermore, retrospection is likely to aggravate the final problem I’ll
discuss here, namely:
Fifth, reports of
experience are apt to be considerably influenced, and distorted, by
pre-existing theories, opinions, and biases, both cultural and personal, as
well as situational demands. The gravity of this problem is difficult to
estimate, but in my opinion it is extreme (and considerably larger than the
influence of bias and preconception now generally recognized to permeate
science as a whole). Given the changeability and skittishness of experience,
and our poor tools and limited practice in conceptualizing and remembering it,
we lean especially heavily on implicit assumptions and indirect evidence in
reaching our introspective and immediately retrospective judgments. One major
source of such error is what the introspective psychologist E. B. Titchener
called “stimulus error” (Titchener, 1901-1905, 1912; Boring 1921): We know what
the world, or a particular stimulus, is like (we know for example that we are
seeing a uniformly colored red object), and we are apt to infer that our
experience has the properties one might naively expect such a stimulus to
produce (e.g., a visual experience of uniform “redness”). We’re much better
accustomed to attend to the world than to our experience, and the difference
between sensory attention to outside objects and introspective attention to the
sensory experience of those objects is a subtle one; so the former is
apt to substitute for the latter (for a related point, see Dretske, 1995; Tye
2003; Siewert, 2004; Schwitzgebel, 2005; Stoljar, forthcoming). Even when
experience isn’t so easily traceable to an outside object, I’m inclined to think
our theories can profoundly affect our reports. If we think images must be like
pictures, we’re more apt to instill reports of imagery with picture-like
qualities than if we don’t hold that view (see Box 5.2; Schwitzgebel,
forthcoming-b). If we think cognition takes place in the brain, we’re more apt
to locate our cognitive phenomenology there than if we think it takes place in
the heart (see Box 7.12). If we think that memories must be imagistic, we’re
more apt than those who don’t think so to report memory images.
Thus, in my view,
Descartes got things almost exactly backwards. The outside world of stable
objects, people, and events – the world we spend most of our time thinking
about – is what we know most directly and certainly. The “inner world” of
conscious experience is reflected on only rarely, and known for the most part
only poorly. I’m practically certain there’s a tissue box here before me, and I
know quite a bit about its physical details; however, I’m much less certain of
my visual experience as I look at that tissue box, except at the crudest level.
Furthermore, what I do know, or suspect, about my visual experience is grounded
to a considerable extent in my knowledge of the properties of the box itself.
My judgments about the box’s shape, color, and other visible features in large
part (though not exclusively) drive my judgments about my visual
experience of shape, color, and so forth – not, as many philosophers inspired
by Descartes have suggested – the other way around.
4. Our Difficult Situation
Going into this
collaboration with Russ, I didn’t feel that introspection, or ordinary naive
reflection on ongoing or immediately past “inner experience,” was completely
hopeless as a method for learning about consciousness, but I did – and still do
– feel it must be treated with enormous caution. We cannot blithely assume that
even the most credible-seeming introspective reports are likely to be true.
Yet, despite its
untrustworthiness, introspection must be given a central role in the study of consciousness.
Without introspection, we might not even know that we are conscious in
the relevant sense – that a stream of phenomenology accompanies our outwardly
visible behavior. Behavioral and physiological measures alone tell us nothing
about consciousness unless it’s established that those measures correlate with
conscious experience; and introspection is the most straightforward way to
establish such correlations. All tools for understanding consciousness
are problematic in their application. Perhaps this is why consciousness studies
has been so slow to find firm scientific footing. It’s not as though in the
face of the unreliability of introspection we can substitute some simple set of
behavioral or physiological measures that will consistently generate accurate
and detailed answers to questions about our phenomenology.
Our
situation, I think, is in some ways analogous to that of a foreign intelligence
agency that must depend for its information on a network of unreliable,
double-crossing spies. Just as the reports of spies can to some extent be
corroborated or cast into doubt by such independent means as satellite photos
and bank records (which by themselves may say little), so also can
introspective reports be to some extent checked against behavioral,
physiological, and cognitive measures; and just as consistency or inconsistency
between the reports of independent spies provides at least prima facie reason
to accept or doubt the reports, so also consistency or contrast between
independent introspective reports, when there is no reason to suspect
corresponding differences in conscious experience, may justify tentative
acceptance or rejection of the reports. Given the unreliability of naive
introspection, we need such methods of confirmation, shaky as they are – and
perhaps introspective training as well (Schwitzgebel 2004) – before we can be
truly justified in accepting introspective data.
It seemed to me at the
beginning of this project that Russ’s DES methodology did not change this basic
situation. Although the methodology seemed likely to alleviate my fourth
concern above, regarding the division of attention and selectiveness of
retrospection, it seemed simultaneously to aggravate the fifth concern:
distortion by pre-existing opinions and situational demands. By two seconds
after the beep, it seemed to me from my own sampling, and thus still at the
beginning of the articulation and categorization of the experience, all but the
grossest and most salient features of the experience were gone from memory.
This left a large opening, it seemed to me, for biased or theory-guided
reconstruction, an opening that only expanded as time progressed. (This remains
my opinion after having completed this project: See Chapter Ten, sections 4-5.)
How large a problem is this?
Russ and I agree in general about the difficulties and potential sources of
error in reporting experience, but we disagree about how to weigh them and the
extent to which they can be alleviated with adequate care. All reasonable
people must, I think, stand somewhere between thinking such reports, from
experience sampling or other sources, are absolutely infallible in every detail
and thinking that only sheer accident could ever allow a person accurately to
report basic and apparently obvious features of her own experience. Russ and I
hope the reader will find the following dialogues useful in assessing how much
skepticism is warranted and the extent to which it may be overcome by careful
questioning.