Introspection

This document contains the two papers referenced below:

Grimes, J.O., Cheek, J.M., & Norem, J.K. (2011, January). Four meanings of introversion: Social, thinking, anxious, and inhibited* introversion. Presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX.
[*Note: After the 2011 paper, we renamed the Inhibited factor as Restrained Introversion, with reference to the work of J.P. Guilford.]

Cheek, J.M., Brown, C.A., & Grimes, J.O. (2014, Sept.). Personality Scales for Four Domains of Introversion: Social, Thinking, Anxious, and Restrained Introversion. Preliminary Research Manual (2nd ed)., Department of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley MA. 02481-8203  with addendum -- Cheek, J.M., Brown, C.A., & Grimes, J.O. (2020, Sept.). STAR Scales Update -- Revised Restrained Introversion Scale. Unpublished, Wellesley College Psychology Department 
jcheek@wellesley.edu with

.

RESUMEN:

1.-  "En cuanto a la doctrina de la represión, es seguro que la concebí yo independientemente; no sé de ninguna influencia que me haya aproximado a ella, y durante mucho tiempo tuve a esta idea por original, hasta que Otto Rank nos exhibió aquel pasaje de El mundo como voluntad y representación, de Schopenhauer, donde el filósofo se esfuerza por explicar la locura. Lo que ahí se dice acerca de la renuencia a aceptar un fragmento penoso de la realidad coincide acabadamente con el contenido de mi concepto de represión, tanto, que otra vez puedo dar gracias a mi falta de erudición libresca, que me posibilitó hacer un descubrimiento. No obstante, otros han leído ese pasaje y lo pasaron por alto sin hacer ese descubrimiento, y quizá lo propio me hubiera ocurrido si en años mozos hallara más gusto en la lectura de autores filosóficos. En una época posterior, me rehusé el elevado goce de las obras de Nietzsche con esta motivación consciente: no quise que representación-expectativa de ninguna clase viniese a estorbarme en la elaboración de las impresiones psicoanalíticas. Por ello debía estar dispuesto-y lo estoy de buena gana-a resignar cualquier pretensión de prioridad en aquellos frecuentes casos en que la laboriosa investigación psicoanalítica no puede más que corroborar las intelecciones obtenidas por los filósofos intuitivamente. La doctrina de la represión es ahora el pilar fundamental sobre la que descansa el edificio del psicoanálisis".
FREUD, S. Contribución a la historia del movimiento psicoanalítico.(1)

2 - “Schopenhauer dio una sacudida, anticipándose a Freud en medio siglo, a la filosofía de la conciencia que había predominado en el pensamiento occidental. En Schopenhauer aparece por vez primera una filosofía explícita del inconsciente y del cuerpo.”
SAFRANSKI, Rüdiger,  Schopenhauer y los años salvajes de la filosofía. Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 2008. Introducción.

3.- “Schopenhauer fue el primer filosofo de categoría en darse de baja de la iglesia occidental de la razón. Junto a Marx y a los jóvenes hegelianos fue quien fundamentalmente llevó a cabo la ruptura revolucionaria en el pensamiento del siglo XIX. Con él da comienzo la larga del buen motivo, dando así una despedida concisa a las teologías griegas y judeo-cristiana. Lo más importante de todo había sido dejar de ser para él una entidad espiritual divina y racionalmente justa. Con su doctrina de la voluntad salta por los aires la teoría del fundamento del mundo en torno al racionalismo religioso, tal como seguía en vigor desde los tiempos de Platón, para pasar a un reconocimiento de lo irracional marcado por el horror y el asombro: Schopenhauer es el primero en intuir la naturaleza energética e impulsiva, exenta de razón, del ser. En esto es uno de los padres del siglo psicoanalista … fundador de una época sistémica y teorizante del caos. En el hecho de que abrió las puertas europeas con gran respeto a las doctrinas asiáticas de la sabiduría, en especial al budismo, podría radica a largo plazo su repercusión más importante en la historia intelectual. Puede que, en el anhelo de vida de la humanidad en el primer mundo actual, la doctrina de Schopenhauer de la resignación de la voluntad suene por fuerza aún más sorprendente que a sus contemporáneos, los positivistas progresistas y los revolucionarios creyentes en la humanidad; pero en la actualidad sigue recordando que el anhelo desatado de vida no podrá solucionar, mediante su intensificación, los problemas que crea  su desbordamiento libre. De Schopenhauer podría proceder la frase: sólo la desaparición puede salvarnos aún; claro está que él no habló de desaparición, sino de renuncia. Para los modernos, “renuncia” es la palabra más difícil del mundo. Schopenhauer la invocó contra viento y marea. Tras él, las cuestiones éticas están abiertas de una manera más radical de lo que nunca lo había estado hasta entonces.”
SLOTERDIJK, Peter, Temperamentos filosóficos. De Platón a Foucault,  Madrid, Siruela, 2010.

SCHOPENHAUER:
EL DESCUBRIMIENTO DE LO INCONSCIENTE,
LA METAFÍSICA DE LA VOLUNTAD
Y LA ETIOLOGÍA DE LAS NEUROSIS.

INFLUENCIA SOBRE FREUD
Y CONTRIBUCIONES A LA PSIQUIATRÍA MODERNA.
____________________________________________________
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

Very early in the history of psychology and philosophy, introspection was criticized for reasons of principle. It was accused of self-disturbance, linguistic distorsion, instability, infinite regress (of subjects and objects), and lack of any kind of objectivity. In spite of this, there was a burst of systematic introspective work in psychology during the turn of the nineteenth and  twentieth century. By controlling either the experimental context or the personal skill of their subjects, the researchers of this field elaborated methods that they used in coherent programs of investigations, without however reaching the minimal consensus needed for a paradigm. But this phase of the history of psychology was short-lived and introspection came under such intense attacks, from behaviorists as well as from its own ranks, that it (apparently) disappeared. Psychologists overtly discarded it, even though they were unable to dispense completely with it in practice. In recent years, a strong movement of  renewal, and redefinition, of introspection has been witnessed. Refining the techniques of control of the experimental context in which subjects are immersed, gave rise to a rebirth of the research program of Wundt’s German school of introspection. Besides, developing techniques of interview able to trigger and stabilize a state of “phenomenological reduction” even in untrained subjects, as well as strategies of structural analyses of their reports, gave rise to a research program that is not far in its spirit from that of Titchener’s American school of introspection. One may then raise  several questions of epistemological relevance about this renewal of introspection. What changed  between nineteenth century introspection and current introspection ? Are the  conditions for a successful study of first-person experience now fulfilled ? Is the modern conception of truth of scientific theories more able to accommodate the type of knowledge afforded by introspection than the classical conception ? And above all, was the historical eclipse of introspection unavoidable ?

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of eluci- dating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on simi- larity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their expe- rience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense.

This dissertation defends the reliability of first-person
methods for studying consciousness, and applies first-person
experiments to two philosophical problems: the experience of size
and of the self. In chapter 1, I discuss the motivations for
taking a first-person approach to consciousness, the background
assumptions of the dissertation and some methodological
preliminaries.
In chapter 2, I address the claim that phenomenal judgements
are far less reliable than perceptual judgements (Schwitzgebel,
2011). I argue that the main errors and limitations in making
phenomenal judgements are due to domain-general factors, which
are shared in the formation of perceptual judgements. Phenomenal
judgements may still be statistically less reliable than
perceptual judgements, though I provide reasons for thinking that
Schwitzgebel (2011) overstates the case for statistical
unreliability. I also provide criteria for distinguishing between
reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgements, hence defending
phenomenal judgements against general introspective scepticism.
Having identified the main errors in making phenomenal
judgements, in chapter 3, I discuss how first-person experiments
can be used to control for these errors. I provide examples, and
discuss how they overcome attentional and conceptual errors,
minimise biases, and exhibit high intersubjective reliability.
In chapter 4, I investigate size experience. I use
first-person experiments and empirical findings to argue that
distant things looking smaller cannot be explained as an
awareness of instantiated objective properties (visual angle or
retinal image size). I also discuss how an awareness of
uninstantiated objective properties cannot adequately account for
the phenomenal character of size experience. This provides
support for a subjectivist account of variance in size
experience.
In chapter 5, I investigate the sense of self. I distinguish
between a weak sense of self (for-me-ness) and a strong sense of
self in which there is a polarity between subject and object. I
use first-person experiments from Douglas Harding to demonstrate
an explicit strong sense of self, specifically when I point at
where others see my face. I also argue that this sense of self is
not explained by inference, thoughts, feelings, imagination nor
the viewpoint. Rather, it is part of the structure of experience
that I seem to be looking from here.
Even if there is a sense of self, there may be no self. The
question of chapter 6 is whether there can be a direct experience
of the self. I argue that to function as a bearer of experience
the subject must be single and lack sensory qualities in itself.
I use Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the
visual gap where I cannot see my head. I argue that it conforms
to the above criteria, and hence is a candidate for being the
subject. This finding, in conjunction with the fact that I seem
to be looking from the same location, provides prima facie
evidence for the reality of the subject. I hold then that
contrary to Hume and most philosophers since, that there can be a
direct self-experience, if one knows which direction to attend.

We are trying here to object to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to reduce qualia to structural predicates, which is the way we understand his ontology of the “flesh”, as he seems to us to develop it already in his first works on “expression”. We are more generally objecting through him to any kind of “structural” theory concerning sensation, meaning by this any theory which claims that one cannot attribute a relation to a sensorial content without intrinsically altering it. Our task is complicated by the great number of empirical facts that Merleau-Ponty calls for to prove his structural theory. He notably finds great help in the structural interpretation Kurt Koffka had already laid down for these facts as a Gestalt psychologist. Consequently, we begin with the examination of this theory and of the facts that support it, showing that they cannot seem to corroborate a structural theory unless one confuses “abstraction” and “real separation” of a quale from its context. We then call for William James to support these conclusions, reminding that he had already showed the illegitimacy of the claim by the neo-Hegelian writers of his time to find empirical proof for their own structural theories in similar psychological data. He had also suggested a “knowledge by acquaintance” theory against those writers that we are trying to use in defense for introspection pure and simple.

This study investigated the relationship between public and private self-consciousness and social and personal aspects of identity. As predicted by self-consciousness theory, public self-consciousness correlated significantly more strongly with social than with personal aspects of identity, and private self-consciousness correlated significantly more strongly with personal than with social aspects of identity. Implications for the psychology of identity are discussed. [This was the first publication in the development of the Aspects of Identity Questionnaire.]

Nightly transitions into sleep are usually uneventful and transpire in the blink of an eye. But in the laboratory these transitions afford a unique view of how experience is transformed from the perceptually grounded consciousness of wakefulness to the hallucinatory simulations of dreaming. The present review considers imagery in the sleep-onset transition— " microdreams " in particular—as an alternative object of study to dreaming as traditionally studied in the sleep lab. A focus on microdream phenomenology has thus far proven fruitful in preliminary efforts to (i) develop a classification for dream-ing's core phenomenology (the " oneiragogic spectrum "), (ii) establish a structure for assessing dreaming's multiple memory inputs (" multi-temporal memory sources "), (iii) further Silberer's project for classifying sleep-onset images in relation to waking cognition by revealing two new imagery types (" autosensory imagery, " " exosensory imagery "), and (iv) embed a potential understanding of microdreaming processes in a larger explanatory framework (" multisensory integration approach "). Such efforts may help resolve outstanding questions about dream neurophysiology and dreaming's role in memory consolidation during sleep but may also advance discovery in the neuroscience of consciousness more broadly.

This paper critiques contemporary proposals to employ Buddhist meditation practices within cognitive science as forms of introspective training. I draw out under-appreciated complexities in the Buddhist path to introspective proficiency and reflect upon the bearing these might have for future incorporation of meditation into scientific research programmes. §1 delineates existing suggestions to utilise meditation within science. §2 then casts doubt on these proposals by invoking recent worries over the utility of meditation that has been " stripped for export " and practised in isolation from traditional ethical and philosophical frameworks. I illustrate a prevailing consensus in scholarly, pedagogical and psychotherapeutic circles that the therapeutic value of meditation practice suffers when undertaken without these traditional supports. I demonstrate that a parallel problem emerges for meditation's introspective value and thereby its utility for cognitive science. §3 surveys this broader web of supportive practices, fleshing out a " broader path " to introspective skill within Buddhism that is much more demanding than is often credited. §4 then crystallises a dilemma that is revealed for proponents of meditation in science, and highlights a methodological choice needing to be made between promoting broad or narrow paths of training, each of which affords science different kinds of benefit. I comment on how to make this choice effectively. In §5, I conclude with some comments on the how science might make best use of meditative practice going forwards.

This paper argues for the need to broaden the scholarly focus on the history of the modern discipline of psychology to include the history of psychological knowledge. It seeks to demonstrate the benefits to be derived from this endeavor by focusing on late antique psychology and presenting the novel methods of psychological investigation that emerged within the Christian monastic movement, especially introspection. Far from being a historically recent invention, I argue that introspection was systematically and self-consciously employed by late antique monks as a method for producing knowledge about the human mind. Yet, rather than arguing for a simple continuity between late antique and modern introspective procedures, a comparison between early monastic introspective accounts and those of the founders of the modern psychology reveals profound differences in the interpretation and evaluation of introspective data. Thereby it allows to address fundamental questions related to the nature of psychological knowledge and its relationship with culturally constructed categories.

This paper sketches how transformation of the mind through Buddhist meditation practice can support introspective investigations of experience in science. Rebuffing conventional associations between transformation and distortion, it carves out a space for epistemically-beneficial transformations. §1 first introduces meditation's place within Buddhist thought, outlining traditional claims that the practice cultivates attentional gestures important for interrogating the mind. It then outlines proposed uses of these practices within science, before introducing worries over their utility. Such worries propose that meditative gestures transform and thereby distort the mind, making resultant introspective judgements unrepresentative of untrained or inattentive experience. The remainder of the paper combats these worries using material from two distinct fields. §2 introduces literature from the cognitive psychology of attention to sketch a first-pass account of how meditative transformations might be of benefit. It argues that converging models of attention here can precisify the phenomenological changes available through meditative training, such that their epistemic merits can be better evaluated. I identify one kind of meditation practice as training a form of top-down attentional control. And using cognitive psychological models of this capacity, I argue that it can (i) accentuate and (ii) isolate particular features of experience, to our epistemic advantage. §3 outlines some more challenging, distortive dangers surrounding the introspective use of top-down attentional control, showing how it can be misappropriated to yield genuinely unrepresentative accounts of experience. Responding to these, §4 brings the attention literature into dialogue with the pedagogical literature on meditation practice to show how to use this attentional faculty appropriately in introspective investigations, addressing such dangers. This allows me to conclude in §5 with some comments on prudent approaches to introspective inquiry within science.

The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science, more specifically the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition, and I consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework.

In this paper, I argue that the method of transparency --determining whether I believe that p by considering whether p -- does not explain our privileged access to our own beliefs. Looking outward to determine whether one believes that p leads to the formation of a judgment about whether p, which one can then self-attribute. But use of this process does not constitute genuine privileged access to whether one judges that p. And looking outward will not provide for access to dispositional beliefs, which are arguably more central examples of belief than occurrent judgments. First, one’s dispositional beliefs as to whether p may diverge from the occurrent judgments generated by the method of transparency. Second, even in cases where these are reliably linked — e.g., in which one’s judgment that p derives from one’s dispositional belief that p — using the judgment to self-attribute the dispositional belief requires an ‘inward’ gaze.

This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides the reader with deeper insights into the emotional dynamics of a consumer’s parasocial fan relationship with a celebrity. Following an overview of how fandom and celebrity have previously been portrayed across different academic fields, the chapters take the reader on a narrative journey into the life of a fan. Using the author’s autoethnographic account of his personal fan relationship with a film actress thereby as a case study, this detailed study examines how consumers can become emotionally attached to a celebrity and how this attachment can add meaning to their life. By exploring the complex nature of consumers’ behaviours and experiences, Celebrity Fandom and Consumer Behaviour uncovers the (para)social link between the celebrity and an individual’s personal desires. This book has an interdisciplinary appeal and will provide an insightful read not only to scholars, students and anyone interested in celebrity fandom, but also to talent agents, publicists and marketing managers working in the entertainment industries.

Markus Wohlfeil was Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Stirling, UK, the University of East Anglia, UK, and University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses on celebrity fandom; film tourism & consumption; film marketing & business; the role of myth creation, interpretation & adoption within punk subcultures; the reincarnation of punk's DIY culture on PledgeMusic; and experiential marketing communications. He also has a personal interest in amateur filmmaking, watching & collecting movies, going to punk gigs, listening to vinyl records and playing table tennis.

Please note that this manuscript here is only the first half of the first chapter plus table of contents - and posted for promotional purposes.

Cognitive science has wholeheartedly embraced functional brain imaging, but introspective data are still eschewed to the extent that it runs against standard practice to engage in the systematic collection of introspective reports. However, in the case of executive processes associated with prefrontal cortex, imaging has made limited progress, whereas introspective methods have considerable unfulfilled potential. We argue for a re-evaluation of the standard 'cognitive mapping' paradigm, emphasizing the use of retrospective reports alongside behavioural and brain imaging techniques. Using all three sources of evidence can compensate for their individual limitations, and so triangulate on higher cognitive processes.

In this paper I challenge the physicalist claim, that everything that exists in the universe can be reduced to a physical explanation, and hence, consciousness is reducible to a physicalist explanation as well. I show some of the weaknesses of this argument, and introduce some classic objections to it, but also argue that such objections are not enough to overthrow physicalism and that something more is needed. In the second part of the paper I attempt to show what that something more could be, and show how we can study consciousness from a first-person perspective through methods such as introspection and phenomenology. In the third and last part, I take on naturalized phenomenology in the form of neurophenomenology, and argue that although we can, and should,  study consciousness from a first-person perspective if we want a complete picture, or theory, of consciousness, we still can't bridge the explanatory gap, due to problems and differences in terminology between the third-personal (objective) sciences, and the first-personal (subjective) sciences.

Many philosophers have tried to defend physicalism concerning phenomenal consciousness, by explaining dualist intuitions within a purely physicalist framework. One of the most common strategies to do so consists in interpreting the alleged " explanatory gap " between phenomenal states and physical states as resulting from a fallacy, or a cognitive illusion. In this paper, I argue that the explanatory gap does not rest on a fallacy or a cognitive illusion. This does not imply the falsity of physicalism, but it has consequences on the kind of physicalism we should embrace.

This essay argues that programs for the “repair of the world” (tikkun olam) are often marked by arrogance, overzealousness, and injustice. I consider the biblical interpretations of Meir Kahane and Yitzchak Ginsburgh and point to the need to acknowledge our human limitations as we develop our visions for tikkun olam.  Part of what this essay suggests is that figures like Kahane and Ginsburgh participate in the musar tradition through their arguments about the nature and application of various virtues and vices.  The improvement of the musar tradition, I think, requires guarding against the sorts of moral and intellectual errors that are exemplified in their teachings.

Relationalism claims that the phenomenal character of perception is constituted by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to mind-independent objects. Although relationalism provides what seems to be the most straightforward and intuitive account of how experience strikes us introspectively, it is very often believed that the argument from hallucination shows that the view is untenable. The aim of this thesis is to defend relationalism against the argument from hallucination. The argument claims that the phenomenal character of hallucination and perception deserves the same account, and that relationalism cannot be true for hallucinations, therefore relationalism must be rejected. This argument relies on the Indiscriminability Principle (IND), the claim that two experiences that are introspectively indiscriminable from each other have the same phenomenal character. Before assessing the plausibility of this principle, I first consider and dismiss versions of the argument which wouldn’t depend on IND.
Although widely accepted, no satisfactory support for IND has been presented yet. In this thesis I argue that defending IND requires that we understand the notion of ‘indiscriminability’ employed in IND in an impersonal sense. I then identify what underwrites IND: the intuition that, in virtue of its superficiality, the nature of a phenomenal character must be accessible through introspection, together with the claim that it is not possible to deny IND without denying the superficiality of phenomenal characters too.
I argue that the relationalist can deny IND while preserving the superficiality of phenomenal characters. This can be done by adopting a negative view of hallucination and an account of introspection whereby the phenomenal character doesn’t exist independently of one’s introspective awareness of it and where having introspective access to our experience depends on our perceptual access to the world.

> Context • There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous methods for obtaining accurate and detailed phenomenological reports of lived experience, i.e., descriptions of experience provided by the subject living them in the “first-person.” > Problem • At the moment although introspection and debriefing interviews are sometimes used to guide the design of scientific studies of the mind, explicit description and evaluation of these methods and their results rarely appear in formal scientific discourse. > Method • The recent publication of an edited book of papers dedicated to the exploration of first-and second-person methods, Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela, serves as a starting point for a discussion of how these methods could be integrated into the growing discipline of consciousness science. We complement a brief review of the book with a critical analysis of the major pilot studies in Varela’s neurophenomenology, a research program that was explicitly devised to integrate disciplined experiential methods with the latest advances in neuroscience. > Results • The book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in impressive recent advances in first- and second person methods, as applied to the phenomenology of lived experience. However, our review of the neurophenomenology literature concludes that there is as yet no convincing example of these specialized techniques being used in combination with standard behavioral and neuroscientific approaches in consciousness science to produce results that could not have also been achieved by simpler methods of introspective reporting. > Implications • The end of behaviorism and the acceptance of verbal reports of conscious experience have already enabled the beginning of a science of consciousness. It can only be of benefit if new first- and second-person methods become well-known across disciplines. > Constructivist content • Constructivism has long been interested in the role of the observer in the constitution of our sense of reality, so these developments in the science of consciousness may open new avenues of constructivist research. More specifically, one of the ways in which the insights from first- and second person methods are being validated is by recursively applying the methods to themselves; a practical application of an epistemological move that will be familiar to constructivists from the second-order cybernetics tradition.

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one’s own thinking).  However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes.  The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content.  Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes.  The result is that, if inner speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is.  The paper concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech.

Les limites rencontrées dans l’étude du fonctionnement cognitif lors de mes débuts dans la recherche (1970) m’ont conduit d’abord à privilégier les enregistrements vidéos de conduites
finalisées pour pouvoir enrichir le recueil de données, puis devant les nouvelles limites tenant à l’exclusion de tout ce qui n’était pas visible et enregistrable, à remobiliser “l’introspection
guidée” pour avoir accès au point de vue du sujet. Après avoir visité toute la bibliographie des apports et critiques de l'introspection (fin 19ème, première partie du 20ème siècle), j’ai
constaté après quelques autres1, qu’il n’y avait pas de critiques décisives quant à l’utilisation de l’introspection rétrospective, mais qu’en revanche, il n’existait aucune technique
systématique experte de recueil et de production de ces verbalisations. J’ai donc créé une technique d’entretien spécifique pour guider l’introspection des vécus : l’entretien
d’explicitation, puis dans un second temps la technique de l’auto-explicitation dans laquelle le chercheur se prend lui-même comme objet d’étude et produit des descriptions de son propre vécu par écrit.

Can phenomenological evidence play a decisive role in accepting or rejecting social cognition theories? Is it the case that a theory of social cognition ought to explain and be empirically supported by our phenomenological experience? There is serious disagreement about the answers to these questions. This paper aims to determine the methodological role of phenomenology in social cognition debates. The following three features are characteristic of evidence capable of playing a substantial methodological role: novelty, reliability, and relevance. I argue that phenomenological evidence lacks all three criteria and, consequently, should not play a substantial role in debates about social cognition.

An examination of the political and philosophical factors which shape the identities of characters in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and an exploration into the distinction between 'identity' and 'self'.

This thesis aims at laying the groundwork for a research program in philosophy of mind by arguing for two theoretical positions, internalism and representationalism (intentionalism), which are rarely defended jointly, but which together can form the basis for a plausible theory of the mind.

The first chapter argues for internalism against the dominant externalist view. Firstly, it is discussed what the best way is to elucidate the debate between internalism and externalism rooted in the Twin Earth thought experiment. (Putnam 1975) It is argued that the issue between internalists and externalists is whether concrete items that stand in a referential relation to mental states are among the constitutive bases of mental states. The Dry Earth thought experiment (Boghossian 1998) is introduced to make a case for internalism, relying on concepts that do not refer. Externalist counter-arguments are introduced and rejected.

The second chapter argues for representationalism/intentionalism against qualia theory. It is argued that there are no mental qualities (qualia) that account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology. What do account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology are apparent qualities of the intentional objects of conscious experiences, the qualities the world is represented as having by the experiences. Three sets of arguments for qualia are introduced and rejected. The first set of arguments are the type of arguments that are variants of the argument from error, which are rejected by an intentionalist analysis of mentality, and an epistemology of experience is developed where experience provides an acquaintance relation between a subject and something abstract such as a possibility. This makes it unnecessary to postulate epistemic relations both to concretely instantiated items in the environment and to mental items such as qualia or sense-data. Arguments based on allegedly non-representational states such as double vision and afterimages are shown to fail by demonstrating that such states are non-endorsed representations. Arguments that rely on spectrum inversion cases where representational content allegedly differs while qualitative phenomenology stays the same are rejected by arguing against the account of representation that underlies such arguments. (The order of the two chapters is largely arbitrary, though a rejection of externalism is useful in arguing against the argument from spectrum inversion.)

The account is completed by briefly discussing and rejecting the disjunctivist theory of perception, and some other motivations for externalism such as externalism’s advantage in providing a naturalistic account of mentality is discussed. The thesis concludes by pointing at the naturalistic prospects for an account of mentality that analyses mental states as representational states while the representational content is based neither on mental qualities like qualia, nor on causal-informational relations to environmental items. I further speculate about the role of powers and dispositions of organisms that might underpin a future naturalistic analysis of mentality, and also consider the plausibility of a mysterian account of mind where the special mystery regarding the explanatory gap about consciousness is downgraded by suggesting that explanatory gaps might be widespread in nature, such as in our failure to logically link qualities like color and sound as we experience them to the lower-level physical phenomena they supervene on.

I argue against the feasibility of certain employments of introspection as a method in psychological experience research. The chief mistake that dooms these attempts is a deep-seated misconstrual of human experience, namely, the omission or under-appreciation of the role of agency in experience. Adopting a line of thought that is prominent in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and that was later elaborated by Richard Moran, I argue that self-constitutive agency is the linchpin of a viable understanding of the human mind. I then illustrate how missing out on this essential aspect of our mindedness hampers one prominent recent attempt to revive introspection as a method in psychology – Russ Hurlburt's experience sampling method. In closing, I hint at some broader considerations concerning the dangers involved in the scientific objectification of the mind.