Introspection and Belief: Failures of Introspective Belief Formation

Review of Philosophy and Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00585-y Introspection and Belief: Failures of Introspective Belief Formation Chiara Caporuscio 1,2,3 Accepted: 6 September 2021/ # The Author(s) 2021 Abstract Introspection has traditionally been defined as a privileged way of obtaining beliefs about one’s occurrent mental states, and the idea that it is psychologically and epistemically different from non-introspective belief formation processes has been widely defended. At the same time, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have pointed out the unreliability of introspective reports in consciousness research. In this paper, I will argue that this dissonance in the literature can be explained by differentiating between infallible and informative introspective beliefs. I will argue that the latter are formed similarly to beliefs about the external world, and are therefore susceptible to similar success and failure conditions. Understanding introspection as belief-like will help to locate possible sources of error in regular as well as in pathological cases, carrying relevant implications for the relationship between experience, belief, and delusion. 1 Introduction Think of the following belief: “A storm is coming”. Your belief formation process is likely to be triggered by looking outside and noticing some dark clouds approaching. You know that clouds like these usually mean that it is going to rain soon. Then you might look for alternative evidence: you have a look at the weather forecast and read that evening showers are likely. All these sources of evidence are weighted together to infer the best possible interpretation: a storm is coming. You might then act according to this newly formed belief, for example by fetching the clothes drying on your * Chiara Caporuscio 1 Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany 2 Research Training Group 2386 “Extrospection”, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany 3 Present address: Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Faculty of Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Caporuscio C. balcony. If the evidence changes (for example, the sky gets cleared up by a sudden wind) you might re-evaluate your belief and update it. Despite this process of accumulation and assessment of evidence, your belief is still prone to ignorance and error: maybe the weather forecast was imprecise, or maybe your pessimistic attitude made you jump to conclusions about an innocuous passing cloud. Now think of your belief that you are feeling anxious, or that you are in pain, or that you are having a visual experience of a certain kind. These are all introspective beliefs: beliefs that have as their object not the external world, but your occurrent mental experience. Are these beliefs radically different from your beliefs about the external world? Can you doubt and revise them the same way you can doubt and revise your belief that a storm is coming? Are they prone to the same errors, or do they benefit from a special epistemic status? When trying to answer this question by appealing to experience, a dissonance emerges. On one hand, my occurrent mental states seem tangible and accessible in a way that no external fact can be. On the other hand, if I am asked to precisely describe what I am feeling, that certainty dissolves. How detailed is my experience outside of the center of my visual field? Is that tingling sensation I am feeling on my back pain, or is it itchiness caused by the fabric of my clothes? Am I anxious about a meeting I have in a couple of hours, or am I excited? Am I hungry, or am I just feeling peckish because I am bored? Hohwy (2013) vividly describes the challenges we face when we try to answer questions on introspection’s epistemic status from our subjective experience of it1: “When we introspect, the introspected state seems easily accessible, for example, the pain or colour experience is as it were right there; and introspection seems certain and sometimes beyond doubt [...]. But equally, when we introspect, it doesn’t take much for the introspection to be elusive, fleeting, and uncertain: we are stumped for words when trying to describe precisely whether the experience was like this or like that; we find it hard to sustain an experience stably in introspection for any length of time and the experience often seems to slip out of grasp when we focus on its individual aspects. When we introspect it seems we harbour both attitudes: introspection seems both accessible and certain, and inaccessible and uncertain.” (Hohwy 2013, p. 247) This dissonance is mirrored in the philosophical debate about introspection. On one side, proponents of the difference thesis argue that introspection is psychologically and epistemically different from our capacity to acquire beliefs about the external world, and less prone to ignorance and error. A long philosophical tradition attributes to introspection at least some epistemic privileges, including infallibility, omniscience, 1 It should be noted that Hohwy’s prediction error approach to introspection explains such dissonance differently than I propose. According to Hohwy, introspection is unconscious probabilistic inference of mental causes, which in turn are the current probabilistic winners of a perceptual or interoceptive inference. He argues that introspection feels certain because it targets a winning hypothesis that is represented as highly invariant and noise-free; however, trying to decompose the experience or focus on its individual aspects means decomposing the winning inference, which brings back noise and uncertainty (Hohwy 2013, p. 245–249). Instead, I will argue that the dissonance stems from a different degree of fallibility and protection from error between different types of introspective judgments. Introspection and Belief: Failures of Introspective Belief Formation incorrigibility, indubitability, truth-sufficiency or self-warrant(Descartes 1641; Locke 1690; Ayer 1956; Alston 1971; Chalmers 2003; Smithies 2012; Gertler 2012). On the other side, the unreliability of using introspection as a measure of conscious experience has often been highlighted, and empiricists and philosophers alike have pointed out how we often cannot trust our judgments about the contents of our minds (Schwitzgebel 2008; Pronin 2009). In the first part of the paper, I will argue that this tension stems from a confusion between different types of introspective beliefs and judgments2. Some introspective judgments are indeed infallible, like “I am feeling this” (Gertler 2012). I will argue that the infallibility of such judgments derives from the fact that they are exclusively sensitive to the mental state they are about, and they do not depend on other sources of knowledge. For this reason, they are immune from error in a way regular beliefs are not. However, these judgments lack in other respects, such as the capacity to convey and commu (...truncated)