Introspection Research Paper

1. The Philosophical Background

1.1 Origins

There is no documented occurrence of the term introspection before the late seventeenth century. Serious discussion of the phenomenon described by this term began a century later and only gathered momentum during the course of the nineteenth century. Positivists like Auguste Comte now began to contrast the reliable, objective methods of science with the speculations of philosophers supposedly based on self-observation. Introspection would then be as old as philosophy, a claim that is hardly supported by an analysis of the relevant early texts.

The origins of the modern concept of introspection are closely tied to the rise of an empiricist philosophy at the end of the seventeenth century. For John Locke (1690) all knowledge was based on experience, but there were two sources of experience: the external senses and ‘the perception of our own mind within us’ which he likened to an ‘internal sense.’ The modern concept of introspection emerged out of the empiricist philosophers’ belief that self-knowledge was based on acts of internal observation that were closely analogous to the acts of observation by which we gain knowledge of the external world.

1.2 The Classical Controversy

Objections to the empiricist concept of introspection were launched from two entirely different directions, though there was some convergence on specific criticisms. One set of objections came from German Idealist philosophers, the other from scientific positivists like Comte. Among the first group a beginning was made by Immanuel Kant, who gave several reasons why an empirical study of the psyche could never amount to a natural science. Among these reasons was the consideration that one could not observe one’s mental states without thereby altering them. This position was based on a rejection of the empiricist analogy between knowledge of the natural world and self-knowledge. At best, self-observation would yield information about the self as it appears to itself, not as it really is. Idealism led to the development of methods of investigation in the human sciences that were neither introspective nor natural scientific in character.

Scientific positivism, on the other hand, rejected introspection along with any knowledge gained by methods other than those of the natural sciences. These methods demanded a strict separation of the observer and the objects observed, a separation that, according to Comte, no one could achieve in regard to their own mind. Introspection did not merely modify what was observed, it was actually impossible.

Safeguarding the foundations of philosophical empiricism, John Stuart Mill replied to Comte by offering what came to be the classical defense of introspection: mental events do not disappear in a flash, they are remembered. What is actually observed during introspection are the memories of recently past mental events, not the events as they occur. In other words, introspection is really retrospection, the examination of memory images. This defense was taken over by William James (1890) and other empiricists, though by the closing years of the century their advocacy of introspection was qualified by warnings about possible errors of memory. Some conceptual clarification was introduced by Franz Brentano (1973/1874), who distinguished between the immediate awareness of ongoing mental events, which he called ‘internal perception,’ and ‘self-observation,’ the retrospective attending to past mental events. It can be confusing to refer to both as ‘introspection.’

2. Introspection And Experiment

The turn to experimental methods of psychological investigation was closely linked to the controversial nature of introspection. Wilhelm Wundt, who played a major role in the launching of experimental psychology, believed that the psychological laboratory provided the only conditions under which reliable introspective data could be gathered (Danziger 1990). He accepted the distinction between inner perception and self-observation but, unlike his predecessors, totally rejected the latter. Instead, he advocated a control of the conditions of internal perception so as to approximate the conditions of external perception. This could be accomplished in the laboratory by such measures as the repetitive presentation of relatively simple stimuli and the requirement that reactions be immediate and automatic. However, adherence to these conditions would necessarily limit the scope of experimental psychology (and of valid introspection) to the investigation of ‘elementary’ psychological events, mainly in the areas of sensation and reaction times.

At the beginning of the twentieth century these restrictions were rejected by a new generation of experimental psychologists who greatly extended the scope of experimental introspection so as to enable them to investigate more complex psychological processes like thinking and problem solving. The reliability of results was now thought to depend on the adoption of certain attitudes while introspecting. But there was no unanimity about the nature of these attitudes. E. B. Titchener, a major exponent of experimental introspectionism, demanded that introspective descriptions should be in terms of simple, irreducible, units and should abstract from any meaning the stimulus might have. In Europe, members of the Wurzburg School (see Humphrey 1951) emphasized the importance of clearing one’s mind of preconceptions while introspecting. (Titchener’s requirements were prime examples of such preconceptions). Later, the Gestalt psychologists extended this phenomenal approach by insisting that perceptions should be described exactly as they appear in daily life, i.e., in terms of interrelated, meaningful, patterns.

The investigations of the Wurzburg School raised a new kind of question: what is the relationship between the conscious experience of the introspector and the verbal report he or she makes of this experience? In the empiricist tradition it had always been assumed that the relationship is one of description, not different in principle from a description of objects experienced as located outside oneself. However, it now appeared that some of the verbal reports in introspection experiments could not be regarded as descriptions of inner states, they were much more like expressions of these states, e.g., when someone reports feeling: ‘Oh no, not that again!’ The German term for this is Kundgabe, which has connotations of broadcasting and proclaiming. This distinction pointed towards recognition of the communicative features of introspective reports. It also suggested that the result of treating introspective reports purely as descriptions of mental events was likely to be a misleadingly intellectualistic account of such events.

3. Behaviorism And Its Aftermath

Divergent attitudes to the practice of experimental introspection led to divergent results among different laboratories. Titchener claimed that sensory images could always be discovered in any thought activity but this was disputed by the Wurzburg School, by Binet in France, and by others. This became known as the ‘imageless thought controversy.’ Situations in which the results from one laboratory are at variance with those from other laboratories are far from unknown in the history of science. However, the imageless thought controversy acquired a special significance because its existence was used as evidence for the uselessness of introspection by a new movement in American psychology, namely, Behaviorism.

Early behaviorists like J. B.Watson considered introspection to be entirely bogus, while others, like K. S. Lashley, conceded that it might provide ‘cues to physiological problems.’ Certainly, no scientific hypothesis could ever be verified by means of introspection. But in retrospect it seems that the behaviorists drew unwarranted conclusions from the practical difficulties of introspection (Mackenzie 1977, Howe 1991). Both pragmatic and metaphysical reasons were operative here. Pragmatically, it seemed advisable to dispense with a practice that would never yield the kind of knowledge that the science of psychology increasingly aspired to, i.e., knowledge that would be useful in dealing with practical psychological problems on a large scale. Metaphysically, the behaviorists were committed to the elimination of mind from the category of things that could have effects in the real world. Therefore, the study of mental events was pointless.

Behaviorism was more successful at denigrating introspection than at offering an alternative explanation of what actually happened when someone claimed to be introspecting. Its attempts to do so generally involved assumptions about the existence of subtle physical processes like subliminal movements of the vocal cords and other as yet undetectable examples of ‘covert’ behavior. It was these, rather than mental states, that supposedly gave rise to introspective reports. Behaviorism effectively accepted the original philosophical analogy between internal and external observation. It differed from those it called introspectionists only with regard to the kind of stuff that was the target of internal observation.

There was a strong rhetorical element in the behaviorists’ critique of introspection which led to the construction of historical legends. One such legend was that of a category of ‘introspective psychology’ that comprised prebehaviorist and antibehaviorist psychologies in general. This blurred the significant distinctions that existed among those not prepared to outlaw all forms of introspection. None of them had characterized themselves as ‘introspectionists’ and all had often been critical of many forms of introspection.

Debates about the nature of introspection reached their height during the first quarter of the twentieth century and were followed by a period during which the topic was usually regarded as a closed chapter in the history of psychology. Subjects in psychological experiments could still be questioned about the reasons for their responses, but their replies were treated as ‘verbal reports,’ a form of overt behavior, not a description of internal mental events. Theoretical discussions about the nature of introspection were largely restricted to professional philosophers like Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ryle and had little or no influence on scientific psychology. One exception was the latter day behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1953) who continued to regard introspective reports as an effect of various forms of covert behavior, but also added the possibility that at times they might be no more than a claim by a person to have accomplished a particular discriminative task. Disappointing evidence in the area of ‘covert behavior’ as well as the unscientific multiplication of highly speculative hypotheses eventually robbed the behaviorist position of its early plausibility.

More recently, the question of introspection has resurfaced in the context of computer models of mind and consciousness (Dennett 1978). Here, introspective reports are seen as the output of some kind of language processing system that receives input from various sources, notably, one or more memory systems, an attentional perceptual system, and perhaps a central ‘control’ system. The nature of the output will depend on the ‘information’ that is in these systems and on their functional inter-relationships. In some versions of the model the final subsystem only has access to the results of previous information processing, not the processing itself. This accounts for certain inadequacies of introspective evidence; problems of memory account for others (see Ericsson and Simon 1993).

Other recent contributions have begun to be concerned with the obvious fact that all experimental introspection and much everyday introspection occurs in a social context and that introspective reports are always limited by the linguistic resources available to the reporter (Lyons 1986). The content of introspective reports is therefore circumscribed by social and cultural factors.

Bibliography:

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