Method
Introspection
Classification
- Method family
- experiential
- Domains
- Philosophy of Mind
Overview
Introspection forms judgments about one's own current mental states by attending to them directly, rather than by inference from behaviour or physiology.
Purpose. The method supplies the first-person evidence that theories of mind have to accommodate, and its reliability is itself a live philosophical question. Introspection reports what is presently going on in one's own mind; it is not memory, not self-interpretation after the fact, and unlike Phenomenological Reduction it involves no methodical suspension of belief in the external world.
Characteristic operations
- Turn attention inward: Direct awareness to a mental state one is currently in.
- Report the state: Classify what is found — a sensation, an image, a thought, an emotion.
- Separate observation from theory: Distinguish what is noticed from the account one already holds of the mind.
- Weigh the report's reliability: Treat introspective evidence as defeasible, since attending to a state can alter or misclassify it.
Used by traditions
Applied to questions
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Introspection
- René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Meditations II and VI (the mind examined through attention to its own thinking, and that examination used to argue the distinction between mind and body)