Abstract
In this paper I critically examine uses of introspection in present-day philosophy of perception. First, I introduce a distinction between two different meanings of the term ‘introspection’: introspective access and introspective method. I show that they are both at work in the philosophy of perception but not adequately distinguished. I then lay out some concerns about the use of introspection to collect data about consciousness that were raised in over a hundred years ago, by some early experimentalist psychologists, part of so-called ‘Introspectionist Psychology’. As I argue, these concerns apply to current philosophical uses of introspection but they are not acknowledged, much less addressed. I explain this by applying the distinction between introspective access and introspective method. As a result, extant arguments relying on introspection-based phenomenal descriptions are methodologically problematic. These problems do not call into question the use of introspection in theorising altogether. But we need to take more care in how we use it.
Highlights
Introspection is a workhorse in present-day analytic philosophy of perception and it has been for much of the past century
An adequate account of perceptual experience, so the thought goes, must do justice to what it is like to undergo a perceptual experience by accommodating its phenomenal character
I use the framework to lay out some basic concerns about the use of introspection to collect data about consciousness that were raised in over a hundred years ago, by early experimentalist psychologists, part of so-called ‘Introspectionist Psychology’
Summary
The term ‘introspection’ is used ambiguously in psychology and philosophy. There are two related but distinct notions of introspection in circulation. The term is used to talk about a type of inquiry, a specific way of deliberately investigating the mind On this meaning, it is a kind of investigation that involves the employment of subjects’ introspective access to their own mental states and episodes. The distinction between introspective access and introspective methods helps to make clear that we cannot equivocate between the psychological or mental upshot of deploying a given mode of introspective access (e.g. a judgement about ongoing experience produced by inner attention) and the output of a given introspective method, i.e. introspective data The latter is the product of a goal-directed procedure of investigation and the result of a complex set of steps designed to control the conditions in which this data is collected so that it can serve to answer theoretical questions. I first turn to another group of theorists known for using introspective methods: the early experimental psychologists, part of the so-called ‘Introspectionist’ tradition from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century
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