Naive Introspection in the Philosophy of Perception

Review of Philosophy and Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00597-8 Naive Introspection in the Philosophy of Perception Maja Spener1 Accepted: 28 October 2021 © The Author(s) 2021 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. Introspection is a workhorse in present-day analytic philosophy of perception and it has been for much of the past century. It is the backbone of one of the mainstream philosophical approaches to providing an account of the nature of perception. Behind this is the reasonable demand that a good theory of a given phenomenon should be in some sense recognisably of the phenomenon we start with. 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. The approach therefore involves appeal to ‘phenomenal adequacy conditions’ descriptions of the phenomenal character of experience, or of what experience is like, which are then used to constrain an account of the nature of perceptual experience. Such descriptions are typically held to be sourced in introspection and they are frequently called ‘introspective evidence’ in relevant philosophical literature (e.g. Crane 2000, 50; Martin 2000, 219).  Maja Spener 1 University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England M. Spener In this paper I critically examine such uses of introspection. First, I introduce a general framework for understanding and evaluating uses of introspection in theorising. It draws a sharp distinction between two different meanings of the term ‘introspection’, both of which I show are at work in the philosophy of perception, but not clearly distinguished. I then 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’. As I argue, these concerns apply to current uses of introspection in philosophy of perception but they are not acknowledged, much less addressed. As a result, extant arguments relying on introspection-based phenomenal descriptions are methodologically problematic. The main point of the paper, though, is that 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. 1 Introspective Access and Introspective Method The term ‘introspection’ is used ambiguously in psychology and philosophy. There are two related but distinct notions of introspection in circulation. On the one hand, it is used to talk about a mental capacity we take ourselves to have, comparable to perception or memory. According to this meaning, introspection is a mental process that delivers certain kinds of informational states specifically about our own minds. It generates first-person and private awareness of an individual’s own mental states or episodes (of, e.g. experiences, thoughts and emotions). Call this sense of introspection ‘introspective access’. On the other hand, 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. Call this sense of introspection ‘introspective method’.1 1 Introspective access - introspection as mental capacity - is meant to capture a widely recognised aspect of our minds, something that is commonly taken to be part of our mental repertoire. A core assumption I make is that introspective access involves some form of detection or responsiveness to existing mental states. Though not entirely uncontroversial, the assumption offers significant theoretical leeway because detection or responsiveness can be rather loosely understood. It is therefore compatible with a great variety of accounts of introspection. Importantly, it does not presuppose a perceptual or quasi-perceptual account of introspection (e.g. Armstrong 1981, Lycan 2003, Morales Forthcoming) but it is consistent with many other accounts, such as constitutive views (e.g. Shoemaker 1994, Gertler 2001), and even pluralist views (e.g. Prinz 2004, Hill 2009). Discussions of introspection often overlap with discussions of certain kinds of self-knowledge but the relationship is complicated (for an excellent overview of this issue see (Schwitzgebel 2019)). Self-knowledge is not always considered to be introspective knowledge, at least not in terms of the core assumption above. For example, central cases of self-knowledge are sometimes taken to involve a creative or self-fulfilling process, where the act of self-attribution alone brings the attributed state into existence (e.g. Moran 2001). Another cluster of views holds that self-knowledge of one’s mental states, or at least of certain classes of mental states, is primarily derived from available evidence about the external world (e.g. Dretske 1999; 2003, Tye 2000, Byrne 2018). The latter approach is often motivated by the so-called ‘transparency thesis’. See footnote 1 for further comment on how this bears on the focus of the current paper, where the transparency thesis plays an important role. Naive Introspection... A good way to capture the importance of this distinction is when considering the frequently asked question about whether introspection is reliable. We may ask about reliability in relation to introspective access or to an introspective method. They are very different questions to ask in each case. Suppose we ask whether introspective access is reliable. What we want to know is whether introspective access tends to produce accurate states of awareness of our own mind (yielding or providing the basis for true beliefs about or knowledge of our mental states and episodes). We are also interested in the range of its reliability, under which types of circum (...truncated)