Introspection

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The term introspection might be defined as the direct, conscious examination or observation by a subject of his or her own mental processes. The term is derived from two Latin words, spicere ("to look") and intra ("within").

From at least the time of René Descartes up to the early twentieth century, it would have been considered unproblematic that the mind can reflect (or bend its attention back) upon itself. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not earlier, self-reflection began to be interpreted, in the main, as introspection. In turn, to introspect one's own mental processes was explained in terms of the capacities (1) to focus the full glare of one's conscious attention upon the task of observing some particular, first-level, conscious process (or mental act), which was an item in one's stream of consciousness, and (2) to report in a privileged and incorrigible way upon the results of such observation. This introspective act was considered to be a form of inner, though nonsensuous, perception, and deliberate parallels were frequently drawn between it and ordinary outer perception by means of our senses, such as those of vision or hearing.

In the nineteenth century, Franz Brentano and other philosophical psychologists were at pains to distinguish introspection (sometimes called inner observation) from its close relative, self-consciousness (sometimes called inner perception). Introspection was a deliberate act of focusing a subject's attention on some inhabitant in his stream of consciousness. Self-consciousness was an indeliberate but inescapable, though partial, concomitant awareness on the part of a subject of at least some features of some of his first-level conscious mental acts. To put it metaphorically, introspection was a deliberate ogling with the inner mental eye; self-consciousness was unavoidably catching sight of something out of the corner of one's mental eye.

However, even as this canonical version of introspection was being formulated, doubts were being voiced about the possibility of splitting consciousness into two processes that operated at two different levels at the same time. Pushing aside these doubts, the early psychological introspectionists—such as Wilhelm Wundt, Edward B. Titchener, Narziss Ach, Karl Bühler, and William James—believed that either introspection proper or some version of self-consciousness was nevertheless the only possible method for inaugurating a truly empirical, that is, scientific, psychology. For only the subject of mental acts or processes can have "eye witness," knowledge by acquaintance of the denizens of his or her stream of consciousness. So, the very first psychological laboratories were devoted to introspection (for this term came to be used for both introspection proper and for scientific versions of self-consciousness). In carefully designed laboratories bristling with chronograph and tachistocope, subjects were asked to produce detailed introspective reports on various aspects of the inner conscious effects of carefully controlled stimuli applied to their senses.

These experiments resulted in some of the most tedious literature that psychology has ever produced. Also, there could be found little or no agreement about results across schools or from one laboratory to the next. Yet another consequence, which Wundt, for example, readily admitted, was that introspection experiments seemed confined to a study of comparatively trivial mental episodes.

Surprisingly, the failure of introspectionism did not lead many people to question the inherent model of introspection. As psychology and philosophy wound their way through behaviorism and versions of the mind-brain identity theory to contemporary forms of physicalism, such as functionalism, both were faithful to the original, classical model of introspection. They abandoned the Cartesianism of the psychological introspectionists and questioned the privileged status of introspection reports, but they did not question the basic two-level picture—that introspection was a second-level monitoring, observing, registering, or tracking of some first-level process or processes.

Thus, classical psychological behaviorists such as John Broadus Watson or B. F. Skinner gave, as at least one account of one employment of introspection, that it was a literal monitoring by the subject of his thinking (which for a classical behaviorist was to be analyzed as inner truncated movements in the muscles of speech, or "stopped short" speech). Only the repeated failure of experiments seeking to verify this theory led to the abandonment of that particular, and now notorious, explanation.

The philosophers, or most of them, also championed some version of the two-level account of introspection, and still do. Even the most tough-minded of the physicalists, such as David M. Armstrong or Daniel Dennett, stick resolutely to a two-level monitoring account of introspection. Thus, in A Materialist Theory of the Mind Armstrong describes introspection as one part of the brain scanning another part of the brain such that the subject, whose brain it is, generates (in entirely causal fashion) a belief about the nature of the first-level, scanned, brain process. In Content and Consciousness and again in Brainstorms and Consciousness Explained, in an uncompromising functionalist account of mind, Dennett describes introspection in terms of one part of the brain "accessing" another (like one part of a computer accessing another) and then, via the speech center, "printing out" the results.

In philosophy and psychology since the 1950s, there has been a minority view that this two-level account of introspection is simply mistaken. Humans have no such second-level inspecting or scanning or monitoring capacity. Earlier, Gilbert Ryle (1949) argued convincingly that this two-level account did not make theoretical sense. Unfortunately, he substituted for it an unconvincing behaviorist account (in terms of the ordinary perceptual "retrospection" of ordinary behavior). More recently, psychologists and philosophers (such as Wilson and Nisbett 1977 and Lyons 1986) have suggested that, besides those theoretical grounds for rejecting the two-level account of introspection, there are also empirical grounds for rejection drawn from contemporary experimental psychology, anthropology, and the brain sciences. In contemporary introspective experiments subjects produced reports that were more like stereotyped and predictable "folk" interpretations than detailed eyewitness accounts of inner events. Besides, it seems that in cultures more or less uninfluenced by European culture people do not claim to have powers of introspection. More important, there does not seem to be any part of the brain that functions as a monitor of those neurophysiological states that maintain and control conscious states. Finally, it seems both possible and more plausible to give an account of what humans are doing, when they claim to be introspecting, in terms of the exercise of the internal but quite ordinary capacities of memory and imagination. This opposition of views has not yet been resolved, and, because of this, introspection (like consciousness itself) is likely to receive more direct and sustained treatment in the future.

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