Method
Introspection
Classification
- Method family
- Experiential
- Domains
- Philosophy of Mind
Overview
Introspection forms first-person judgments about one's own mental life as it is happening or has just happened, 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. Its window is narrow: introspection reports the state one is in or has just been in, not remote autobiographical recollection and not self-interpretation worked up afterwards. Turning attention inward is the usual way of doing it, though accounts differ over whether attending to a state, or detecting it directly, is what makes a judgment introspective at all. 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 in, or has just been 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), Meditation II (the question 'what am I?' pursued by attending to his own thinking, which yields a thinking thing while every bodily attribute is set aside)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Introspection, §2.3.1 (Descartes takes the thought that he is thinking as indubitable and builds further knowledge on it)
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), 1.4.6.3 (entering most intimately into what he calls himself, he always stumbles on some particular perception and never observes a self without one)