## 1. General Features of Introspection


### 1.1 Necessary Features of an Introspective Process



Introspection is generally regarded as a process by means of which we
learn about our own currently ongoing, or very recently past, mental
states or processes. Not all such processes are introspective,
however: Few would say that you have introspected if you learn that
you're angry by seeing your facial expression in the mirror.
However, it's unclear and contentious exactly what more is
required for a process to qualify as introspective. A relatively
restrictive account of introspection might require introspection to
involve attention to and direct detection of one's ongoing
mental states; but many philosophers think attention to or direct
detection of mental states is impossible or at least not present in
many paradigmatic instances of introspection.



For a process to qualify as "introspective" as the term is
ordinarily used in contemporary philosophy of mind, it must minimally
meet the following three conditions:


1. *The mentality condition*: Introspection is a process that
generates, or is aimed at generating, knowledge, judgments, or beliefs
about *mental* events, states, or processes, and not about
affairs outside one's mind, at least not directly. In this
respect, it is different from sensory processes that normally deliver
information about outward events or about the non-mental aspects of
the individual's body. The border between introspective and
non-introspective knowledge can begin to seem blurry with respect to
bodily self-knowledge such as proprioceptive knowledge about the
position of one's limbs or nociceptive knowledge about
one's pains. But in principle the introspective part of such
processes, pertaining to judgments about one's mind--e.g.,
that one has the feeling as though one's arms were crossed or of
toe-ishly located pain--can be distinguished from the
non-introspective judgment that one's arms are in fact crossed
or one's toe is being pinched.
2. *The first-person condition*: Introspection is a process that
generates, or is aimed at generating, knowledge, judgments, or beliefs
about *one's own mind only* and no one else's, at
least not directly. Any process that in a similar manner generates
knowledge of one's own and others' minds is by that token
not an introspective process. (Some philosophers have contemplated
peculiar or science fiction cases in which we might introspect the
contents of others' minds directly--for example in
telepathy or when two people's brains are directly wired
together--but the proper interpretation of such cases is
disputable see, e.g., Gertler 2000.)
3. *The temporal proximity condition*: Introspection is a process
that generates knowledge, beliefs, or judgments about one's
*currently ongoing* mental life only; or, alternatively (or
perhaps in addition) *immediately past* (or even future) mental
life, within a certain narrow temporal window (sometimes called the
specious present; see the entry on the
 experience and perception of time).
 You may know that you were thinking about Montaigne yesterday during
your morning walk, but you cannot know that fact by current
introspection alone--though perhaps you can know introspectively
that you currently have a vivid memory of having thought about
Montaigne. Likewise, you cannot know by introspection alone that you
will feel depressed if your favored candidate loses the election in
November--though perhaps you can know introspectively what your
current attitude is toward the election or what emotion starts to rise
in you when you consider the possible outcomes. Whether the target of
introspection is best thought of as one's current mental life or
one's immediately past mental life may depend on one's
model of introspection: On self-detection models of introspection,
according to which introspection is a causal process involving the
detection of a mental state (see Section 2.2 below), it's
natural to suppose that a brief lapse of time will transpire between
the occurrence of the mental state that is the introspective target
and the final introspective judgment about that state, which invites
(but does not strictly imply) the idea that introspective judgments
generally pertain to immediately past states. On self-shaping and
self-fulfillment models of introspection, according to which
introspective judgments create or embed the very state introspected
(see Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 below), it seems more natural to think
that the target of introspection is one's current mental life or
perhaps even the immediate future.



Few contemporary philosophers of mind would call a process
"introspective" if it does not meet some version of the
three conditions above, though in ordinary language the temporal
proximity condition may sometimes be violated. (For example, in
ordinary speech we might describe as "introspective" a
process of thinking about why you abandoned a relationship last month
or whether you're really as kind to your children as you think
you are.) However, many philosophers of mind will resist calling a
process that meets these three conditions "introspective"
unless it also meets some or all of the following three
conditions:


4. *The directness condition*: Introspection yields judgments or
knowledge about one's own current mental processes relatively
*directly* or *immediately*. It's difficult to
articulate exactly what directness or immediacy involves in the
present context, but some examples should make the import of this
condition relatively clear. Gathering sensory information about the
world and then drawing theoretical conclusions based on that
information should not, according to this condition, count as
introspective, even if the process meets the three conditions above.
Seeing that a car is twenty feet in front of you and then inferring
from that fact about the external world that you are having a visual
experience of a certain sort does not, by this condition, count as
introspective. However, as we will see in Section 2.3.4 below, those
who embrace transparency theories of introspection may reject at least
strong formulations of this condition.
5. *The detection condition*: Introspection involves some sort of
*attunement to* or *detection of* a
*pre-existing* mental state or event, where the introspective
judgment or knowledge is (when all goes well) *causally* but
not *ontologically* dependent on the target mental state. For
example, a process that involved creating the state of mind that one
attributes to oneself would not be introspective, according to this
condition. Suppose I say to myself in silent inner speech, "I am
saying to myself in silent inner speech, 'haecceities of
applesauce'", without any idea ahead of time how I plan to
complete the embedded quotation. Now, what I say may be true, and I
may know it to be true, and I may know its truth (in some sense)
directly, by a means by which I could not know the truth of anyone
else's mind. That is, it may meet all the four conditions above
and yet we may resist calling such a self-attribution introspective.
Self-shaping (Section 2.3.2 below), expressivist (Section 2.3.3
below), and transparency (Section 2.3.4 below) accounts of
self-knowledge emphasize the extent to which our self-knowledge often
does not involve the detection of pre-existing mental states; and
because something like the detection condition is implicitly or
explicitly accepted by many philosophers, some philosophers (including
some but not all of those who endorse self-shaping, expressivist,
and/or transparency views) would regard it as inappropriate to regard
such accounts of self-knowledge as accounts of *introspection*
proper.
6. *The effort condition*: Introspection is not *constant,
effortless, and automatic*. We are not every minute of the day
introspecting. Introspection involves some sort of special reflection
on one's own mental life that differs from the ordinary
un-self-reflective flow of thought and action. The mind may monitor
itself regularly and constantly without requiring any special act of
reflection by the thinker--for example, at a non-conscious level
certain parts of the brain or certain functional systems may monitor
the goings-on of other parts of the brain and other functional
systems, and this monitoring may meet all five conditions
above--but this sort of thing is not what philosophers generally
have in mind when they talk of introspection. However, this condition,
like the directness and detection conditions, is not universally
accepted. For example, philosophers who think that conscious
experience requires some sort of introspective monitoring of the mind
and who think of conscious experience as a more or less constant
feature of our lives may reject the effort condition (Armstrong 1968,
1999; Lycan 1996).



Though not all philosophical accounts that are put forward by their
authors as accounts of "introspection" meet all of
conditions 4-6, most meet at least two of those. Because of
differences in the importance accorded to conditions 4-6, it is
not unusual for authors with otherwise similar accounts of
self-knowledge to differ in their willingness to describe their
accounts as accounts of "introspection".


### 1.2 The Targets of Introspection



Accounts of introspection differ in what they treat as the proper
*targets* of the introspective process. No major contemporary
philosopher believes that all of mentality is available to be
discovered by introspection. For example, the cognitive processes
involved in early visual processing and in the detection of phonemes
are generally held to be introspectively impenetrable and nonetheless
(in some important sense) mental (Marr 1983; Fodor 1983). Many
philosophers also accept the existence of unconscious beliefs or
desires, in roughly the Freudian sense, that are not introspectively
available (e.g., Gardner 1993; Velleman 2000; Moran 2001; Wollheim
2003; though see Lear 1998). Although in ordinary English usage we
sometimes say we are "introspecting" when we reflect on
our character traits, contemporary philosophers of mind generally do
not believe that we can directly introspect character traits in the
same sense in which we can introspect some of our other mental states
(especially in light of research suggesting that we sometimes have
poor knowledge of our traits, reviewed in Taylor and Brown 1988;
Paulhus and John 1998; Vazire 2010).



The two most commonly cited classes of introspectible mental states
are *attitudes*, such as beliefs, desires, evaluations, and
intentions, and *conscious experiences*, such as emotions,
images, and sensory experiences. (These two groups may not be wholly,
or even partially, disjoint: Depending on other aspects of her view, a
philosopher may regard some or all conscious experiences as involving
attitudes, and/or she may regard attitudes as things that are or can
be consciously experienced.) It of course does not follow from the
fact (if it is a fact) that some attitudes are introspectible that all
attitudes are, or from the fact that some conscious experiences are
introspectible that all conscious experiences are. Some accounts of
introspection focus on attitudes (e.g., Nichols and Stich 2003), while
others focus on conscious experiences (e.g., Hill 1991; Goldman 2006;
Schwitzgebel 2012); and it is sometimes unclear to what extent
philosophers intend their remarks about the introspection of one type
of target to apply to the other type. There is no guarantee that the
same mechanism or process is involved in introspecting all the
different potential targets.



Generically, this article will describe the targets of introspection
as *mental states*, though in some cases it may be more apt to
think of the targets as processes rather than states. Also, in
speaking of the targets of introspection as *targets*, no
presupposition is intended of a self-detection view of introspection
as opposed to a self-shaping or containment or expressivist view (see
Section 2 below). The targets are simply the states self-ascribed as a
consequence of the introspective process if the process works
correctly, or if the introspective process fails, the states that
would have been self-ascribed.


### 1.3 The Products of Introspection



Though philosophers have not explored the issue very thoroughly,
accounts also differ regarding the *products* of introspection.
Most philosophers hold that introspection yields something like
beliefs or judgments about one's own mind, but others prefer to
characterize the products of introspection as "thoughts",
"representations", "awareness", or the like.
For ease of exposition, this article will describe the products of the
introspective process as judgments, without meaning to beg the
question against competing views.


## 2. Introspective Versus Non-Introspective Accounts of Self-Knowledge



This section will outline several approaches to self-knowledge. Not
all deserve to be called introspective, but an understanding of
introspection requires an appreciation of this diversity of
approaches--some for the sake of the contrast they provide to
introspection proper and some because it's disputable whether
they should be classified as introspective. These approaches are not
exclusive. Surely there is more than one process by means of which we
can obtain self-knowledge. Unavoidably, some of the same territory
covered here is also covered, rather differently, in the entry on
 self-knowledge.


### 2.1 Self/Other Parity Accounts



Symmetrical or *self/other parity* accounts of self-knowledge
treat the processes by which we acquire knowledge of our own minds as
essentially the same as the processes by which we acquire knowledge of
other people's minds. A simplistic version of this view is that
we know both our own minds and the minds of others only by observing
outward behavior. On such a view, introspection strictly speaking is
impossible, since the first-person condition on introspection
(condition 2 in Section 1.1) cannot be met: There is no distinctive
process that generates knowledge of one's own mind only.
Twentieth-century
 behaviorist
 principles tended to encourage this view, but no prominent treatment
of self-knowledge accepts this view in its most extreme and simple
form. Advocates of parity accounts sometimes characterize our
knowledge of our own minds as arising from "theories" that
we apply equally to ourselves and others (as in Nisbett and Ross 1980;
Gopnik 1993a, 1993b). Consequently, this approach to self-knowledge is
sometimes called the *theory theory*.


#### 2.1.1 Behavioral Observation Accounts



Among leading researchers, Bem's (1972) view, though now dated,
perhaps comes closest to a simple self/other parity view, arguing on
the basis of psychological research that our knowledge of the
"internal states" of both self and other derives largely
from the same types of behavioral evidence and employs the same
principles of inference. We notice how we behave, and then we infer
the attitudes evidenced by those behaviors--and we do so even
when we actually lack the ascribed attitude. For example, Bem cites
classic research in social psychology suggesting that when induced to
perform an action for a small reward, people will attribute to
themselves a more positive attitude toward that action than when they
are induced by a large reward (Festinger and Carlsmith 1959; see also
Section 4.2.2 below). When we notice ourselves doing something with
minimal compensation, we infer a positive attitude toward that
activity, just as we would if we saw someone else perform the same
activity with minimal compensation. Likewise, we might know we like
Thai food because we've noticed that we sometimes drive all the
way across town to get it; we might know that we're happy
because we see or feel ourselves smiling. Bem argued that social
psychology had consistently failed to show that we have any
appreciable access to private information that might tell against such
externally-driven self-attributions. On Bem's view, if we are
better at discerning our own motives and attitudes, it's
primarily because we have observed more of our own behavior than of
anyone else's.


#### 2.1.2 Theory Theory Accounts



Nisbett, Wilson, and their co-authors (Nisbett and Bellows 1977;
Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Nisbett and Ross 1980; Wilson 2002) similarly
argue for self/other parity in our knowledge of the bases or causes of
our own and others' attitudes and behavior, describing cases in
which people seem to show poor knowledge of these bases or causes. For
example, people queried in a suburban shopping center about why they
chose a particular pair of stockings appeared to be ignorant of the
influence of position on that choice, including explicitly denying
that influence when it was suggested to them. People asked to rate
various traits of supposed job applicants were unaware that their
judgments of the applicant's flexibility were greatly influenced
by having been told that the applicant had spilled coffee during the
job interview (see also Section 4.2.2 below). In such cases, Nisbett
and his co-investigators found that participants' descriptions
of the causal influences on their own behavior closely mirrored the
influences hypothesized by outside observers. From this finding, they
infer that the same mechanism drives the first-person and third-person
attributions, a mechanism that that does not involve any special
private access to the real causes of one's attitudes and
behavior and instead relies heavily on intuitive psychological
theories.



Gopnik (1993a, 1993b; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1994) deploys developmental
psychological evidence to support a parity theory of self-knowledge.
She points to evidence that for a wide variety of mental states,
including believing, desiring, and pretending, children develop the
capacity to ascribe those states to themselves at the same age they
develop the capacity to ascribe those states to others. For example,
children do not seem to be able to ascribe to themselves past false
beliefs (after having been tricked by the experimenter) any earlier
than they can ascribe false beliefs to other people. This appears to
be so even when that false belief is in the very recent past, having
only just been revealed to be false. According to Gopnik, this
pervasive parallelism shows that we are not given direct introspective
access to our beliefs, desires, pretenses, and the like. Rather, we
must develop a "theory of mind" in light of which we
interpret evidence underwriting our self-attributions. The appearance
of the immediate givenness of one's mental states is, Gopnik
suggests, merely an "illusion of expertise": Experts
engage in all sorts of tacit theorizing that they don't
recognize as such--the expert chess player for whom the strength
of a move seems simply visually given, the doctor who immediately
intuits cancer in a patient. Since we are all experts at mental state
attribution, we don't recognize the layers of theory
underwriting the process.


#### 2.1.3 Restrictions on Parity



The empirical evidence behind self/other parity views remains
contentious (White 1988; Nichols and Stich 2003; Carruthers 2011).
Furthermore, though Bem, Nisbett, Wilson, and Gopnik all stress the
parallelism between mental state attribution to oneself and others and
the inferential and theoretical nature of such attributions, they all
also leave some room for a kind of self-awareness different in kind
from the awareness one has of others' mental lives. Thus, none
endorses a *purely* symmetrical or self/other parity view. Bem
acknowledges that the parallelism only holds "to the extent that
internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable" (1972,
5). With this caveat in mind, he states that our self-knowledge is
"partially" based on external cues. Nisbett and Wilson
stress that we lack access only to the "processes" or
causes *underlying* our behavior and attitudes. Our attitudes
themselves and our current sensations, they say, can be known with
"near certainty" (1977, 255; though contrast Nisbett and
Ross 1980, 200-202, which seems sympathetic to Bem's
skepticism about special access even to our attitudes). Gopnik allows
that we "may be well equipped to detect certain kinds of
internal cognitive activity in a vague and unspecified way", and
that we have "genuinely direct and special access to certain
kinds of first-person evidence [which] might account for the fact that
we can draw some conclusions about our own psychological states when
we are perfectly still and silent", though we can
"override that evidence with great ease" (1993a,
11-12). Ryle (1949) similarly stresses the importance of outward
behavior in the self-attribution of mental states while acknowledging
the presence of "twinges", "thrills",
"tickles", and even "silent soliloquies",
which we know of in our own case and that do not appear to be
detectable by observing outward behavior. However, none of these
authors develops an account of this apparently more direct
self-knowledge. Their theories are consequently incomplete. Regardless
of the importance of behavioral evidence and general theories in
driving our self-attributions, in light of the considerations that
drive Bem, Nisbett, Wilson, Gopnik, and Ryle to these caveats, it is
probably impossible to sustain a view on which there is complete
parity between first- and third-person mental state attributions.
There must be some sort of introspective, or at least uniquely
first-person, process.



Self/other parity views can also be restricted to particular
subclasses of mental states: Any mental state that can only be known
by cognitive processes identical to the processes by which we know
about the same sorts of states in other people is a state to which we
have no distinctively introspective access. States for which parity is
often asserted include personality traits, unconscious motives, early
perceptual processes, and the bases of our decisions (see Section
4.2.1 below for more on this). We learn about these states in
ourselves, perhaps, in much the same way we learn about such states in
other people. Carruthers (2011; see also Section 4.2.2 below) presents
a case for parity of access to
 propositional attitudes
 like belief and desire (in contrast to inner speech, visual imagery,
and the like, which he holds to be introspectible).


### 2.2 Self-Detection Accounts



Etymologically, the term "introspection"--from the
Latin "looking into"--suggests a perceptual or
quasi-perceptual process. Locke writes that we have a faculty of
"Perception of the Operation of our own Mind" which,
"though it be not Sense, as having nothing to do with external
Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be
call'd internal Sense" (1690 [1975, 105], italics
suppressed). Kant (1781/1997) says we have an "inner
sense" by which we learn about mental aspects of ourselves that
is in important ways parallel to the "outer sense" by
which we learn about outer objects.



But what does it mean to say that introspection is like perception? In
what respects? As Shoemaker (1994a, 1994b, 1994c) points out, in a
number of respects introspection is plausibly *unlike*
perception. For example, introspection does not involve a dedicated
organ like the eye or ear (though as Armstrong 1968 notes, neither
does bodily proprioception). Both friends and foes of self-detection
accounts have tended to agree that introspection does not involve a
distinctive phenomenology of "introspective appearances"
(Shoemaker 1994a, 1994b, 1994c; Lycan 1996; Rosenthal 2001; Siewert
2012): The visual experience of redness has a distinctive sensory
quality or phenomenology that would be difficult or impossible to
convey to a blind person; analogously for the olfactory experience of
smelling a banana, the auditory experience of hearing a pipe organ,
the experience of touching something painfully hot. To be analogous to
sensory experience in this respect, introspection would have to
generate an analogously distinctive phenomenology--some
quasi-sensory phenomenology in addition to, say, the visual
phenomenology of seeing red that is the phenomenology of the
*introspective appearance* of the visual phenomenology of
seeing red. This would seem to require two layers of appearance in
introspectively attended sensory perception: a visual appearance of
the outward object and an introspective appearance of that visual
appearance. (This isn't to say, however, that introspection, or
at least conscious introspection, doesn't involve some sort of
"cognitive phenomenology"--if there is such a
thing--of the sort that accompanies conscious thoughts in
general: See Bayne and Montague, eds., 2011.)



Contemporary proponents of quasi-perceptual models of introspection
concede the existence of such disanalogies (e.g., Lycan 1996). We
might consider an account of introspection to be quasi-perceptual, or
less contentiously to be a "self-detection" account, if it
meets the first five conditions described in Section 1.1--that
is, the mentality condition, the first-person condition, the temporal
proximity condition, the directness condition, and the detection
condition. One aspect of the detection condition deserves special
emphasis here: that detection requires the ontological independence of
the target mental state and the introspective judgment--the two
states will be causally connected (assuming that all has gone well)
but not *constitutively* connected. (Shoemaker (1994a, 1994b,
1994c) calls models of self-knowledge that meet this aspect of the
detection condition "broad perceptual" models.) Maybe on a
liberal understanding of "detection" that does not require
ontological independence, containment or other accounts of
introspection (see Section 2.3.1 below) might qualify as involving
"detection". However, that is not how
"detection" is being used in the present taxonomy.



Self-detection accounts of self-knowledge seem to put introspection
epistemically on a par with sense perception. To many philosophers,
this has seemed a deficiency in these accounts. A long and widespread
philosophical tradition holds that self-knowledge is epistemically
special, that we have specially "privileged access"
to--perhaps even infallible or indubitable knowledge of--at
least some portion of our mentality, in a way that is importantly
different in kind from our knowledge of the world outside us (see
Section 4 below). Both self/other parity accounts (Section 2.1 above)
and self-detection accounts (this section) of self-knowledge either
deny any special epistemic privilege or characterize that privilege as
similar to the privilege of being the only person to have an extended
view of an object or a certain sort of sensory access to that object.
Other accounts of self-knowledge to be discussed later in Section 2.3
are more readily compatible with, and often to some extent driven by,
more robust notions of the epistemic differences between
self-knowledge and knowledge of environmental objects.


#### 2.2.1 Simple Monitoring Accounts



Armstrong (1968, 1981, 1999) is perhaps the leading defender of a
simple, quasi-perceptual, self-detection account of introspection. He
describes introspection as a "self-scanning process in the
brain" (1968, 324), and he stresses what he sees as the
important ontological distinction between the state of awareness
produced by the self-scanning procedure and the target mental state of
which one is aware by means of that scanning--the distinction,
for example, between one's pain and one's introspective
awareness of that pain.



Armstrong also appears to hold that the quasi-perceptual introspective
process proceeds at a fairly low level cognitively--quick and
simple, typically without much interference by or influence from other
cognitive or sensory processes. He describes introspection as
"completely non-inferential", similar to the simple
detection of pressure on one's back (1968, 97), and he says it
can be (and presumably typically is) continuous and
"reflex", involving no more than keeping "a watching
brief on our own current mental contents, but without making much of a
deal of it" (1999, 115). Since Armstrong allows that inferences
are often non-conscious, based on sensory or other cues that the
inferring person cannot herself discern, his claim that the
introspective process is non-inferential is a substantial commitment
to the simplicity of the process. He contrasts this reflexive
self-monitoring with more sophisticated acts of deliberate
introspection which he thinks are also possible (1999, 114). Note that
in calling reflexive self-monitoring "introspection",
Armstrong violates the effort condition from Section 1.1, which
requires that introspection not be constant and automatic. Lycan
(1996) endorses a similar view, though unlike Armstrong, Lycan
characterizes introspection as involving *attentional*
mechanisms, thus presumably treating introspection as more demanding
of cognitive resources (though still perhaps nearly constant).



Nichols and Stich (2003) employ a model of the mind on which having a
propositional attitude such as a belief or desire is a matter of
having a representation stored in a functionally-defined (and
metaphorical) "belief box" or "desire box"
(see also the entries on
 belief
 and
 functionalism).
 On their account, self-awareness of these attitudes typically
involves the operation of a simple "Monitoring Mechanism"
that merely takes the representations from these boxes, appends an
"I believe that ...", "I desire that
...", or whatever (as appropriate) to that representation,
and adds it back into the belief box. For example, if I desire that my
father flies to Hong Kong on Sunday, the Monitoring Mechanism can copy
the representation in my desire box with the content "my father
flies to Hong Kong on Sunday" and produce a new representation
in my belief box--that is, create a new belief--with the
content "I desire that my father flies to Hong Kong on
Sunday". Nichols and Stich also propose an analogous but
somewhat more complicated mechanism (they leave the details
unspecified) that takes percepts as its input and produces beliefs
about those percepts as its output.



Nichols and Stich emphasize that this Monitoring Mechanism does not
operate in isolation, but often co-operates or competes with a second
means of acquiring self-knowledge, which involves deploying theories
along the lines suggested by Gopnik (see Section 2.1.2 above). They
offer a "double dissociation" argument for this view. That
is, they present, on the one hand, cases which they interpret as cases
showing a breakdown in the Monitoring Mechanism, while the capacity
for theoretical inference about the mind remains intact and, on the
other hand, cases in which the capacity for theoretical inference
about the mind is impaired but the Monitoring Mechanism continues to
function normally, suggesting that theoretical inference and
self-monitoring are distinct and separable processes. Nichols and
Stich argue that autistic people have very poor theoretical knowledge
of the mind, as suggested by their very poor performance in
"theory of mind" tasks (tasks like assessing when someone
will have a false belief), and yet they succeed in monitoring their
mental states as shown by their ability to describe their mental
states in autobiographies and other forms of self-report. Conversely,
Nichols and Stich argue that schizophrenic people remain excellent
theorizers about mental states but monitor their own mental states
very poorly--for example, when they fail to recognize certain
actions as their own and struggle to report, or deny the existence of,
ongoing thoughts.


#### 2.2.2 Multi-Process Monitoring Accounts



Goldman (2006) criticizes the account of Nichols and Stich (see
Section 2.2.1 above) for not describing how the Monitoring Mechanism
detects the attitude type of the representation (belief, desire,
etc.). If talk of "belief boxes" and the like is shorthand
for talk of functional role (as Nichols and Stich say), then the
Monitoring Mechanism must somehow detect the functional role of the
detected representation. But functional role is a matter of what is
apt to cause a particular mental state and what that mental state is
apt to cause (see the entry on
 functionalism),
 and Goldman argues that a simple mechanism could not discern such
dispositional and relational facts (though Nichols and Stich might be
able to avoid this concern by describing introspection as involving
not just one but rather a cluster of similar mechanisms: 2003, 162).
Goldman also argues that the Nichols and Stich account leaves unclear
how we can discern the strength or intensity of our beliefs, desires,
and other propositional attitudes.



Goldman's positive account starts with the idea that
introspection is a quasi-perceptual process that involves attention:
"Attention seems to act like an orienting organ in
introspection, analogous to the shift of eye gaze or the sniffing of
the nose" (2006, 244). Individual attended mental states are
then classified into broad categories (similarly, in visual perception
we can classify seen objects into broad categories). However, on
Goldman's view this process can only generate introspective
knowledge of the general *types* of mental states (such as
belief, happiness, bodily sensation) and some properties of those
mental states (such as degree of confidence for belief, and "a
multitude of finely delineated categories" for bodily
sensation). Specific contents, especially of attitudes like belief,
are too manifold, Goldman suggests, for pre-existing classificational
categories to exist for each one. Rather, we represent the specific
content of such mental states by "redeploying" the
representational content of the mental state, that is, simply copying
the content of the introspected mental state into the content of the
introspective belief or judgment (somewhat like in the Nichols and
Stich account). Finally, Goldman argues that some mental states
require "translation" into the mental code appropriate to
belief if they are to be introspected. Visual representations, he
suggests, have a different format or mental code than beliefs, and
therefore cognitive work will be necessary to translate the
fine-grained detail of visual experience into mental contents that can
be believed introspectively.



Hill (1991, 2009) also offers a multi-process self-detection account
of introspection. Like Goldman, Hill sees attention (in some broad,
non-sensory sense) as central to introspection, though he also allows
for introspective awareness without attention (1991, 117-118).
Hill emphasizes dissimilarities between introspection and perception,
while retaining a broadly self-detection account. Hill (2009) argues
that introspection is a process that produces *judgments
about*, rather than perceptual awareness of, the target states,
and suggests that the processes that generate these judgments vary
considerably, depending on the target state, and are often complex.
For example, judgments about enduring beliefs and desires must, he
says, involve complex procedures for searching "vast and
heterogeneous" long-term memory stores. Central to Hill's
(1991) account is an emphasis on the capacity of introspective
attention to transform--especially to amplify and enrich, even to
create--the target experience. In this respect Hill argues that
the introspective act differs from the paradigmatic observational act
which does not transform the object perceived (though of course both
scientific and ordinary--especially gustatory--observation
can affect what is perceived); and thus Hill's account contains
a "self-fulfillment" or "self-shaping" aspect
in the sense of Section 2.3.1 and Section 2.3.2 below, and only
qualifiedly and conditionally meets the detection condition on
accounts of introspection as described in Section 1.1 above--the
condition that introspection involves attunement to or detection of a
pre-existing mental state or event.



Like Hill, Prinz (2004) argues that introspection must involve
multiple mechanisms, depending both on the target states (e.g.,
attitudes vs. perceptual experiences) and the particular mode of
access to those states. Access might involve controlled attention or
it might be more of a passive noticing; it might involve the verbal
"captioning" or labeling of experiences or it might
involve the kind of non-verbal access that even monkeys have to their
mental states. Prinz (2007) sharply distinguishes between the
*conceptual classification* of our conscious experiences into
various types that can be recognized and re-identified over
time--classifications which he thinks must necessarily be
somewhat crude--and non-conceptual knowledge of ongoing conscious
experiences attained by "pointing" at them with attention.
The latter type of knowledge, Prinz argues, is much more detailed and
finely structured than the former but cannot be expressed or retained
over time. Prinz also follows Hill in emphasizing that introspection
often intensifies or otherwise modifies the target experience. In such
cases, Prinz argues, introspective "access" is only access
in an attenuated sense.


### 2.3 Introspection Without Self-Detection?



There are several ways to generate judgments, or at least statements,
about one's own current mental life--self-ascriptions,
let's call them--that are reliably true though they do not
involve the detection of a pre-existing state. Consider the following
four types of case:


1. *Automatically self-fulfilling self-ascriptions*: I think to
myself, "I am thinking". Or: I judge that I am making a
judgment about my own mental life. Or: I say to myself in inner speech
"I am saying to myself in inner speech:
'blu-bob'". Such self-ascriptions are automatically
self-fulfilling. Their existence conditions are a subset of their
truth conditions.
2. *Self-ascriptions that prompt self-shaping*: I declare that I
have a mental image of a pink elephant. At the same time I make this
declaration, I deliberately cause myself to form the mental image of a
pink elephant. Or: A man uninitiated in romantic love declares to a
prospective lover that he is the kind of person who sends flowers to
his lovers. At the same time he says this, he successfully resolves to
be the kind of person who sends flowers to his lovers. The
self-ascription either precipitates a change or buttresses what
already exists in such a way as to make the self-ascription accurate.
In these cases, unlike the cases described in (A), some change or
self-maintenance is necessary to render the self-ascription true,
beyond the self-ascriptional event itself.
3. *Accurate self-ascription through self-expression*: I learn to
say "I'm in pain!" instead of "ow!" as
an automatic, unreflective response to painful stimuli. Or: I use the
self-attributive sentence "I believe Russell changed his mind
about pacifism" simply as a cautious way of expressing the
belief that Russell changed his mind about pacifism, this expression
being the product of reflecting upon Russell rather than a product of
reflection upon my own mind. Self-expressions of this sort are assumed
here to flow naturally from the states expressed in roughly the same
way that facial expressions and non-self-attributive verbal
expressions flow naturally from those same states--that is,
without being preceded by any attempt to detect the state
self-ascribed.
4. *Self-ascriptions derived from judgments about the outside
world*: From the non-self-attributive fact that Stanford is south
of Berkeley I derive the self-attributive conclusion that I believe
that Stanford is south of Berkeley. Or: From the non-self-attributive
fact that it would be good to go to home now, I derive the
self-attributive judgment that I want to go home now. These
derivations may be inferences, but if so, such inferences require no
specific premises about ongoing mental states. Perhaps one embraces a
general inference principle like "from *P*, it is
permissible to derive *I believe that P*", or
"normally, if something is good, I want it".



The following accounts of self-knowledge all take advantage of one or
more of these facts about self-ascription. Because these ways of
obtaining self-knowledge all violate the detection condition on
introspection (condition 5 in Section 1.1 above), and because
philosophers are divided about whether methods of obtaining
self-knowledge that violate that condition count as
*introspective* methods strictly speaking, philosophers are
divided about whether accounts of self-knowledge of the sort described
in this section should be regarded as accounts of introspection.


#### 2.3.1 Self-Fulfillment and Containment



An emphasis on infallible knowledge through self-fulfilling
self-ascriptions goes back at least to Augustine (c. 420 C.E./1998)
and is most famously deployed by Descartes in his *Discourse on
Method* (1637/1985) and *Meditations* (1641/1984), where he
takes the self-fulfilling thought that he is thinking as indubitably
true, immune to even the most radical skepticism, and a secure ground
on which to build further knowledge (at least under certain
conditions; see Paul 2018).



Contemporary self-fulfillment accounts tend to exploit the idea of
*containment*. In a 1988 essay, Burge writes:



> 
> When one knows one is thinking that *p*, one is not taking
> one's thought (or thinking) that *p* merely as an object.
> One is thinking that *p* in the very event of thinking
> knowledgeably that one is thinking it. It is thought and thought about
> in the same mental act. (654)
> 



This is the case, Burge argues, because "by its reflexive,
self-referential character, the content of the second-order
[self-attributive] judgment is locked (self-referentially) onto the
first-order content which it both contains and takes as its subject
matter" (1988, 659-660; cf. Heil 1988; Gertler 2000, 2001;
Heil and Gertler describe such thoughts as introspective while Burge
appears not to think of self-knowledge so structured as introspective:
1998, 244; see also 1988, 652). In judging that I am thinking of a
banana, I thereby necessarily think of a banana: The self-attributive
judgment contains, as a part, the very thought self-ascribed, and thus
cannot be false. In a 1996 essay, Burge extends his remarks to include
not just self-attributive "thoughts" as targets but also
(certain types of) "judgments" (e.g., "I judge,
herewith, that there are physical entities" and other judgments
with "herewith"-like reflexivity, 92)



Shoemaker (1994a, 1994b, 1994c) deploys the containment idea very
differently, and over a much wider array of introspective targets,
including conscious states like pains and propositional attitudes like
belief. Shoemaker speculates that the relevant containment relation
holds not between the *contents* or *concepts employed*
in the target state and in the self-ascriptive state but rather
between their neural realizations in the brain. To develop this point,
Shoemaker distinguishes between a mental state's "core
realization" and its "total realization". One might
think of mental processes as transpiring in fairly narrow regions of
the brain (their core realization), and yet, Shoemaker suggests,
it's not as though we could simply carve off those regions from
all others and still have the mental state in question. To be the
mental state it is, the process must be embedded in a larger causal
network involving more of the brain (the total realization).
Relationships of containment or overlap between core realization and
total realization between the target state and the self-ascriptive
judgment might then underwrite introspective accuracy. For example,
the total brain-state realization of the state of pain may simply be a
subset of the total brain-state realization of the state of believing
that one is in pain. Introspective accuracy might then be explained by
the fact that the introspective judgment is not an independently
existing state.



More recently, philosophers have applied Burge-like
content-containment models (as opposed to Shoemaker-like
realization-containment models) to self-knowledge of conscious states,
or "phenomenology", in particular--for example,
Gertler (2001), Papineau (2002), Chalmers (2003), Horgan and Kriegel
(2007), and Balog (2012). Husserl (1913/1982) offers an early
phenomenal containment approach, arguing that we can at any time put
our "cogitatio"--our conscious
experiences--consciously before us through a kind of mental
glancing, with the self-perception that arises containing as a part
the conscious experience toward which it is directed, and incapable of
existing without it. Papineau offers a "quotational"
account on which in introspection we self-attribute "the
experience: \_\_\_", where the blank is completed by the experience
itself. Chalmers writes that "direct phenomenal beliefs"
about our experiences are "partly *constituted* by an
underlying phenomenal quality", in that the two will be tightly
coupled across "a wide range of nearby conceptually possible
cases" (2003, 235).



One possible difficulty with such accounts is that while it seems
plausible to suppose that an introspective thought or judgment might
contain another thought or judgment as a part, it's less clear
how a self-attributive judgment or belief might contain a piece of
conscious experience as a part. Beliefs, and other belief-like mental
states like judgments, one might think, contain *concepts*, not
conscious experiences, as their constituents (Fodor 1998); or,
alternatively, one might think that beliefs are functional or
dispositional patterns of response to input (Dennett 1987;
Schwitzgebel 2002), again rendering it unclear how a piece of
phenomenology could be part of belief. Perhaps with this concern in
mind, advocates of containment accounts often appeal to
"phenomenal concepts" that are, like the introspective
judgments to which they contribute, partly constituted by the
conscious experiences that are the contents of those concepts. Such
concepts are often thought to be obtained by demonstrative attention
to our conscious experiences as they are ongoing.



It would seem, at least, that beliefs, concepts, or judgments
containing pieces of phenomenology would have to expire once the
phenomenology has passed and thus that the introspective judgments
could not be used in later inferences without recreating the state in
question. Chalmers (2003) concedes the temporal locality of such
phenomenology-containing introspective judgments and consequently
their limited use in speech and in making generalizations. Papineau
(2002), in contrast, embraces a theory in which the imaginative
recreation of phenomenology in thinking about past experience is
commonplace.


#### 2.3.2 Self-Shaping



Although we can seemingly at least sometimes arrive at true self
ascriptions through the self-shaping and the self-expression
procedures (B and C) described at the beginning of Section 2.3, and
although such procedures may meet the first three conditions on an
account of introspection as described in Section 1.1--that is,
they may (depending on how they are described and developed) be
procedures that can yield only knowledge or judgments (or at least
self-ascriptions) about one's own currently ongoing or very
recently past mental states--few philosophers would describe such
procedures as "introspective". Nonetheless, they warrant
brief treatment here, partly for the same reason self/other parity
accounts warranted treatment in Section 2.1 above--that is, as
skeptical accounts suggesting that the scope of introspection may be
considerably narrower than is generally thought--and partly as
background for the "transparency" accounts to be discussed
in Section 2.3.4 below, with which they are often married.



It is difficult to find accounts of self-knowledge that stress the
self-shaping technique in its purest, forward-looking, causal
form--perhaps because it's clear that self-knowledge must
involve considerably more than this (Gertler 2011). However, McGeer
(1996, 2008; McGeer and Pettit 2002) puts considerable emphasis on
self-shaping, writing that "we learn to use our intentional
self-ascriptions to instill or reinforce tendencies and inclinations
that fit with these ascriptions, even though such tendencies and
inclinations may at best have been only nascent at the time we first
made the judgments" (1996, 510). If I describe myself as brave
in battle, or as a committed vegetarian--especially if I do so
publicly--I create commitments and expectations for myself that
help to make those self-ascriptions true. McGeer compares
self-knowledge to the knowledge a driver has, as opposed to a
passenger, of where the car is going: The driver, unlike the
passenger, can make it the case that the car goes where she says it is
going (505).



There are also strains in Dennett (though Dennett may not have an
entirely consistent view on these matters; see Schwitzgebel 2007) that
suggest either a self-fulfillment or a self-shaping view. In some
places, Dennett compares "introspective" self-reports
about consciousness to works of fiction, immune to refutation in the
same way that fictional claims are--one could no more go wrong
about one's consciousness, Dennett says, than Doyle could go
wrong about the color of Holmes's easy chair (e.g., 1991, 81,
94). Such remarks are consistent with either an anti-realist view of
fiction (there are no facts about the easy chair or about
consciousness; see 366-367) or a self-fulfillment or
self-shaping realist view (Doyle *creates* facts about Holmes
as he thinks or writes about him; we create facts about what
it's like to be us in thinking or making claims about our
consciousness, as perhaps on 81 and 94). More moderately, in
discussing attitudes, Dennett emphasizes how the act of formulating an
attitude in language--for example, when ordering a menu
item--can involve self-attributing a degree of specification in
one's attitudes that was not present before, thereby committing
one to, and partially or wholly creating, the specific attitude
self-ascribed (1987, 20).



*Commissive* accounts of self-knowledge also involve
self-shaping, but not a form of self-shaping in which the
introspective judgment brings into existence an ontologically distinct
target state, but rather a kind of self-shaping involving a
self-fulfillment or containment component similar to that discussed in
Section 2.3.1 above. Moran (2001), for example, argues that normally
when we are prompted to think about what we believe, desire, or intend
(and he limits his account primarily to these three mental states), we
reflect on the (outward) phenomena in question and make up our minds
about what *to* believe, desire, or do. Rather than attempting
to detect a pre-existing state, we open or re-open the matter and come
to a resolution. Since we normally do believe, desire, and intend what
we resolve to believe, desire, and do, we can therefore accurately
self-ascribe those attitudes. Coliva (2016) argues that the
self-ascription "I believe that P" is like a performative
statement in that it constitutes a comment to the belief that P. (See
also Wright 1989; Falvey 2000; Heal 2002; Boyle 2009,
forthcoming.)


#### 2.3.3 Expressivism



Wittgenstein writes:



> 
> [H]ow does a human being learn the meaning of the names of
> sensations?--of the word "pain" for example. Here is
> one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural,
> expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt
> himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him
> exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new
> pain-behaviour.
> 



> 
> "So you are saying that the word 'pain' really means
> crying?"--On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain
> replaces crying and does not describe it. (1953/1968, sec. 244)
> 



And 



> 
> "It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke)
> that I *know* I am in pain. What is it supposed to
> mean--except perhaps that I *am* in pain?"
> (1953/1968, sec. 246).
> 



On Wittgenstein's view, it is both true that I am in pain and
that I say of myself that I am in pain, but the utterance in no way
emerges from a process of *detecting* one's pain.



A simple expressivist view--sometimes attributed to Wittgenstein
on the basis of these and related passages--denies that the
expressive utterances (e.g., "that hurts!") genuinely
ascribe mental states to the individuals uttering them. Such a view
faces serious difficulties accommodating the evident semantics of
self-ascriptive utterances, including their use in inference and the
apparent symmetries between present-tense and past-tense uses and
between first-person and third-person uses (Wright 1998; Bar-On 2004).
Consequently, Bar-On advocates, instead, what she calls a
neo-expressivist view according to which expressive utterances can
share logical and semantic structure with non-expressive utterances,
despite the epistemic differences between them.



Expressivists have not always been clear about exactly the range of
target mental states expressible in this way, but it seems plausible
that at least in principle some true (or apt) self-ascriptions could
arise in this manner, with no intervening introspective
self-detection. The question would then be whether this is how we
*generally* arrive at true self-ascriptions, for some
particular class of mental states, or whether some more archetypically
introspective process is also available. (For a more detailed
treatment of expressivism, consult the section about the expressivist
model of self-knowledge in the entry
 self-knowledge.)


#### 2.3.4 Transparency



Evans writes:



> 
> [I]n making a self-ascription of belief, one's eyes are, so to
> speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward--upon the
> world. If someone asks me, "Do you think there is going to be a
> third world war?", I must attend, in answering him, to precisely
> the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering
> the question "Will there be a third world war?" I get
> myself into the position to answer the question whether I believe that
> *p* by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for
> answering the question whether *p*. (1982, 225)
> 



*Transparency* approaches to self-knowledge, like Evans',
emphasize cases in which it seems that one arrives at an accurate
self-ascription not by means of attending to, or thinking about,
one's own mental states, but rather by means of attending to or
thinking about the external states of the world that the target mental
states are about. Note that this claim has both a negative and a
positive aspect: We do *not* learn about our minds by as it
were gazing inward; and we *do* learn about our minds by
reflecting on the aspects of the world that our mental states are
about. The positive and negative theses are separable: A pluralist
might accept the positive thesis without the negative one; an advocate
of a self/other parity theory or an expressivist account of
self-knowledge (with respect to a certain class of target states)
might accept the negative thesis without the positive. (N.B.: In the
philosophical literature on self-knowledge "transparency"
is also sometimes used to mean something like self-intimation in the
sense of Section 4.1.1 below, for example in Wright 1998; Bilgrami
2006. This is a completely different usage, not to be confused with
the present usage.) Because transparency accounts stress the outward
focus of our thought in arriving at self-ascriptions, calling such
accounts accounts of "introspection" strains against the
etymology of the term. Nonetheless, some prominent advocates of
transparency accounts, such as Dretske (1995) and Tye (2000), offer
them explicitly as accounts of introspection.



The range of target states to which transparency applies is a matter
of some dispute. Among philosophers who accept something like
transparency, belief is generally regarded as transparent (Gordon
1995, 2007; Gallois 1996; Moran 2001; Fernandez 2003; Byrne
2018). Perceptual states or perceptual experiences are also often
regarded as transparent in the relevant sense. Harman's example
is the most cited:



> 
> When Eloise sees a tree before her, the colors she experiences are all
> experienced as features of the tree and its surroundings. None of them
> are experienced as intrinsic features of her experience. Nor does she
> experience any features of anything as intrinsic features of her
> experiences. And that is true of you too. There is nothing special
> about Eloise's visual experience. When you see a tree, you do
> not experience any features as intrinsic features of your experience.
> Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of
> your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features
> there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented
> tree. (Harman 1990, 667)
> 



Harman's emphasis here is on the negative thesis, which goes
back at least to Moore (1903; though Moore does not unambiguously
endorse it). The view that it is impossible to attend directly to
perceptual experience has been especially stressed by Tye (1995, 2000,
2002; see also Evans 1982; Van Gulick 1993; Shoemaker 1994a; Dretske
1995; Martin 2002; Stoljar 2004), and directly conflicts with accounts
according to which we learn about our sensory experience primarily by
directing introspective attention to it (e.g., Goldman 2006;
Petitmengin 2006; Hill 2009; Siewert 2012; and back at least to Wundt
1888 and Titchener 1908 [1973]).



Gordon (2007) argues (contra Nichols and Stich 2003 and Goldman 2006)
that Evans-like *ascent routines* (ascending from
"*p*" to "I believe that *p*")
can drive the accurate self-ascription of all the attitudes, not just
belief. He makes his case by wedding the transparency thesis to
something like an expressive account of self-ascription: To answer a
question about what I want--for example, which flavor ice cream
do I want?--I think not about my desires but rather about the
different flavors available, and then I *express* the resulting
attitude self-ascriptively. Similarly for hopes, fears, wishes,
intentions, regrets, etc. Gordon points out that from a very early
age, before they likely have any self-ascriptive intent, children
learn to express their attitudes self-ascriptively, for example with
simple phrases like "[I] want banana!" (see also Bar-On
2004).



Commissive accounts of self-knowledge (see Section 2.3.2 above) also
generally affirm transparency: Reflecting on the world generates
commitment to a belief, desire, or intention, which one thereby also
knows or self-ascribes (Falvey 2000; Moran 2001; Coliva 2016; Boyle
forthcoming). 



The transparency thesis is in fact consistent, not just with
expressivism and commissive accounts, but with any of the four
non-detection-based self-ascription procedures described at the
beginning of this section (and indeed Aydede and Guzeldere 2005
attempt to reconcile aspects of the transparency view with a broadly
detection-like approach to introspection). This manifold compatibility
flows from the fact that by itself the transparency thesis does not go
far toward a positive view of the mechanisms of self-knowledge.



Byrne (2018) and Dretske (1995) bring together transparency and
something like a derivational model of self-knowledge--a model on
which I derive the conclusion that I believe that *P* directly
from *P* itself, or the conclusion that I am representing
*x* as *F* from the fact that *x* is
*F*--a fact which must of course, to serve as a premise in
the derivation, be represented (or believed) by me. Byrne argues that
just as one might abide by the following epistemic rule:



> 
> DOORBELL: If the doorbell rings, believe that there is someone at the
> door
> 



so also might someone abide by the rule:



> 
> BEL: If *P*, believe that you believe that *P*.
> 



To determine whether you believe that *P*, first determine
whether *P* is the case, then follow the rule BEL. Byrne (2018)
offers similar accounts of self-knowledge of intention, thinking,
seeing, and desire.



Dretske analogizes introspection to ordinary cases of "displaced
perception"--cases in which one perceives that something is
the case by way of directly perceiving some other thing (e.g., hearing
that the mail carrier has arrived by hearing the dog's barking;
seeing that you weigh 110 pounds by seeing the dial on the bathroom
scale): One perceives that one represents *x* as *F* by
way of perceiving the *F*-ness of *x*. Dretske notes,
however, two points of disanalogy between the cases. In the case of
hearing that the mail carrier has arrived by hearing the dog's
bark, the conclusion (that the mail carrier has arrived) is only
established if the premise about the dog's barking is true, and
furthermore it depends on a defeasible connecting belief, that the
dog's barking is a reliable indicator of the mail's
arrival. In the introspective case, however, the inference, if it is
an inference, does not require the truth of the premise about
*x*'s being *F*. Even if *x* is not
*F*, the conclusion that I'm representing *x* as
*F* is supported. Nor does there seem to be any sort of
defeasible connecting belief.



Tye also emphasizes transparency in his account of introspection,
though he limits his remarks to the introspection of conscious
experience or "phenomenal character". In his 2000 book,
Tye develops a view like Dretske's, analogizing introspection to
displaced perception, though Tye unlike Dretske explicitly denies that
inference is involved, instead proposing a mechanism similar to the
sort of mechanism envisioned by simple monitoring accounts like those
of Nichols and Stich (2003; see Section 2.2.1 above), a reliable
process that, in the case of perceptual self-awareness, takes
awareness of external things as its input and yields as its output
awareness of phenomenal character. (The key difference between
Tye's 2000 account on the one hand and the Nichols and Stich
account on the other that warrants the classification of Tye's
view here rather than in the section on self-detection models is this:
Tye rejects the idea that the process is one of internal detection,
while Nichols and Stich stress that idea. To adjudicate the dispute
between those two positions, and to determine whether it might, in
fact, be merely nominal, it would be helpful to have a clearer sense
than has so far been given of what it means to say that one
subpersonal system detects, or "monitors" or
"scans", the states or contents of another.) However, in
his 2009 book, Tye rejects the displaced perception model in favor of
a version of the transparency view that *identifies* phenomenal
character with external qualities in the world, so that perceiving
features of the world just is perceiving phenomenal character--a
view that he recognizes is then charged with the difficult task of
explaining how phenomenal character is a property (or
"quality") of external objects rather than, as is
generally assumed, a property only of experiences of those
objects.



Several authors have challenged the idea that sensory experience
necessarily eludes attention--that is, they have denied the
central claim of transparency theories about sensory experience. Block
(1996), Kind (2003), and Smith (2008) have argued that
phosphenes--those little lights you see when you press on your
eyes--and visual blurriness are aspects of sensory experiences
that can be directly attended. Siewert (2004) has argued that
what's intuitively appealing in the transparency view is
primarily the observation that in reflecting on sensory experience one
does not *withdraw* attention from the objects sensed; but, he
argues, this is compatible with also devoting a certain sort of
attention to the sensory experience itself. In early discussions of
attention, perceptual attention was sometimes distinguished from
"intellectual attention" (James 1890 [1981]; Baldwin
1901-1905; see also Peacocke 1998; Mole 2011), that is, from the
kind of attention we can devote to purely imagined word puzzles or to
philosophical issues. If non-sensory forms of attention are possible,
then the transparency thesis for sensory experience will require
restatement: Is it only sensory attention to sensory experience that
is impossible? Or is it any kind of attention whatsoever? Simply to
say we don't attend sensorily to our mental states is to make
only a modest claim, akin to the claim that we see objects rather than
seeing our visual experiences of objects; but to say that we cannot
attend to our mental states even intellectually appears extreme. In
light of this, it remains unclear how to cast the transparency
intuition to better bring out the core idea that is meant to be
conveyed by the slogan that introspecting sensory experience is not a
matter of attending to one's own mind.


### 2.4 Introspective Pluralism



Philosophers discussing self-knowledge often write as if approaches
highlighting one of these non-self-detection methods of generating
self-ascriptions conflict with approaches that highlight other of
these non-self-detection methods, and also as if approaches of this
general sort conflict with self-detection approaches (Section 2.2
above). While conflicts will certainly exist between different
accounts intended to serve as *exhaustive* approaches to
self-knowledge, it is implausible that any one or even any few of
these approaches to self-knowledge is exhaustive. Plausibly, all of
the non-self-detection approaches described above can lead, at least
occasionally, to accurate self-ascriptions. Enthusiasts for another of
the models, or for a self-detection model, needn't deny this. It
also seems hard to deny that we at least *sometimes* reach
conclusions about our mental lives based on the kind of theoretical
inference or self-interpretation emphasized by advocates of self/other
parity accounts (Section 2.1 above). Finally, even philosophers
concerned about strong or oversimple self-scanning views might wish to
grant that the mind can do *some* sort of tracking of its own
present or recently past states--for example, when we trace back
a stream of recently past thoughts that presumably can't
(because past) be self-ascribed by self-fulfillment, self-shaping,
self-expression, or transparency methods.



Schwitzgebel (2012) elevates this pluralism into a kind of negative
account of introspection. Introspective judgments, he says, arise from
a shifting confluence of many processes, recruited opportunistically,
none of which can be called introspection proper. Just as there is no
single, unified faculty of poster-taking-in that one employs when
trying to take in a poster at a psychological conference or science
fair, there is, on Schwitzgebel's view, no single, unified
faculty of introspection or one underlying core process, nor even a
few dedicated mechanisms or processes. Instead, the introspector, like
the poster-viewer, brings to bear a diverse range of cognitive
resources as suits the occasion. Although, he says, a process
wouldn't be worth calling "introspective" unless the
introspector aimed to reach a judgment about their current or very
recently past conscious experience, using at least some resources
specific to the first-person case and that exhibit some relatively
direct sensitivity to the target state, this limitation does not imply
the existence of any dedicated introspective processes. Defenders of
less extreme versions of pluralism that are compatible with the
existence of several dedicated introspective processes include Prinz
(2004), Hill (2009), Coliva (2016), and Samoilova (2016).


## 3. The Role of Introspection in Scientific Psychology


### 3.1 The Rise of Introspective Psychology as a Science



Philosophers have long made introspective claims about the human
mind--or, to speak more cautiously, they've made claims
seemingly at least in part introspectively grounded. Aristotle (3rd c.
BCE/1961) asserts that thought does not occur without imagery. Mengzi
(3rd c. BCE/2008) argues that our hearts are pleased by moral goodness
and revolted by evil, even if the pleasure and revulsion are not
evident in our outward behavior. Berkeley finds in himself no
"abstract ideas" like that of a triangle that is, in
Locke's terms "neither oblique, nor rectangle, neither
equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at
once" (Berkeley 1710/1965, 12; Locke 1689/1975, 596). James Mill
(1829 [1878]) attempts a catalog of the varieties of sense
experience.



Although a number of early modern philosophers had aimed to initiate
the scientific study of the mind, it wasn't until the middle of
the 19th century--with the appearance of *quantitative
introspective methods*, especially regarding sensory
consciousness--that the study of the mind took shape as a
progressive, mathematical, laboratory-based science. Early
quantitative psychologists such as Helmholtz (1856/1962), Fechner
(1860 [1964]), and Wundt (1896 [1902]) sought quantitative answers to
questions like: By how much must two physical stimuli differ for the
experiences of them to differ noticeably? How weak a stimulus can
still be consciously perceived? What is the mathematical relationship
between stimulus intensity and the intensity of the resulting
sensation? (The Weber-Fechner law holds that the relationship is
logarithmic.) Along what dimensions, exactly, can sense experience
vary? (The "color solid" [see the link to the Munsell
solid in Other Internet Resources, below], for example, characterizes
color experience by appeal to just three dimensions of variation: hue,
saturation, and lightness or brightness.) Although from very early on,
psychologists also employed non-introspective methods (e.g.,
performance on memory tests, reaction times), most early
characterizations of the field stood introspection at the center.
James, for example, wrote that "introspective observation is
what we have to rely on first and foremost and always" (1890
[1981, 185]).



In contrast with the dominant philosophical tradition that has, since
Descartes, stressed the special privilege or at least high accuracy of
introspective judgments about consciousness (see Section 4.1 below)
many early introspective psychologists held that the introspection of
currently ongoing or recently past conscious experience is difficult
and prone to error if the introspective observer is insufficiently
trained. Wundt, for example, reportedly did not credit the
introspective reports of people with fewer than 50,000 trials of
practice in observing their conscious experience (Boring 1953).
Titchener, a leading American introspective psychologist, wrote a
1600-page introspective training manual for students, arguing that
introspective observation is at least as difficult as observation in
the physical sciences (Titchener 1901-1905; see also Wundt 1874
[1908]; Muller 1904; for contemporary discussions of
introspective training see Varela 1996; Nahmias 2002; Schwitzgebel
2011b). This difference in optimism about untrained introspection may
partly reflect differences in the types of judgments foregrounded in
the two disciplines. Philosophers stressing privilege tend to focus on
coarse and (seemingly) simple judgments such as "I'm
having a visual experience of redness" or "I believe
it's raining". The projects of interest to introspective
psychologists often required much finer judgments--such as
determining with mathematical precision whether one visual sensation
has twice the "intensity" of another or determining along
what dimensions emotional experience can vary.


### 3.2 Early Skepticism about Introspective Observation



Early introspective psychologists' theoretical discussions of
the nature of introspection were often framed in reaction to
skepticism about the scientific viability of introspection, especially
the concern that the introspective act interferes with or destroys the
mental state or process that is its
 target.[1])
 The most influential formulation of this concern was
Comte's:



> 
> But as for observing in the same way *intellectual* phenomena
> at the time of their actual presence, that is a manifest
> impossibility. The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one
> reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and
> the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could
> observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then
> radically null and void (1830, using the translation of James 1890
> [1981, 188]).
> 



Introspective psychologists tended to react to this concern in one of
three ways. The most concessive approach--recommended, for
example, by James (1890 [1981]; see also Mill 1865 [1961]; Lyons
1986)--was to grant Comte's point for *concurrent*
introspection, that is, introspection simultaneous with the target
state or process, and to emphasize in contrast *immediate
retrospection*, that is, reflecting on or attending to the target
process (usually a conscious experience) very shortly *after*
it occurs. Since the scientific observation occurs only after the
target process is complete, it does not interfere with that process;
but of course the delay between the process and the observation must
be as brief as possible to ensure that the process is accurately
remembered.



Brentano (1874 [1973]) responded to Comte's concern by
distinguishing between "inner observation"
[*innere* *Beobachtung*] and "inner
perception" [*innere* *Wahrnehmung*]. Observation,
as Brentano characterizes it, involves dedicating full attention to a
phenomenon, with the aim of apprehending it accurately. This
dedication of attention necessarily interferes with the process to be
observed if the process is a mental one; therefore, he says, inner
observation is problematic as a scientific psychological method. Inner
*perception*, in contrast, according to Brentano, does not
involve attention to our mental lives and thus does not objectionably
disturb them. While our "attention is turned toward a different
object ... we are able to perceive, incidentally, the mental
processes which are directed toward that object" (1874 [1973,
30]). Brentano concedes that inner perception necessarily lacks the
advantages of attentive observation, so he recommends conjoining it
with retrospective methods.



Wundt (1888) agrees with Comte and Brentano that observation
necessarily involves attention and so often interferes with the
process to be observed, if that process is an inner, psychological
one. To a much greater extent than Brentano, however, Wundt emphasizes
the importance to scientific psychology of direct attention to
experience, including planful and controlled variation. The
psychological method of "inner perception" is, for Wundt,
the method of holding and attentively manipulating a memory image or
reproduction of a past psychological process. Although Wundt sees some
value in this retrospective method, he thinks it has two crucial
shortcomings: First, one can only work with what one remembers of the
process in question--the manipulation of a memory-image cannot
discover new elements. And second, foreign elements may be
unintentionally introduced through association--one might confuse
one's memory of a process with one's memory of another
associated process or object.



Therefore, Wundt suggests, the science of psychology must depend upon
the attentive observation of mental processes as they occur. He argues
that those who think attention necessarily distorts the target mental
process are too pessimistic. A *subclass* of mental processes
remains relatively unperturbed by attentive observation--the
"simpler" mental processes, especially of perception
(1896/1902, 27-28). The experience of seeing red, Wundt claims,
is more or less the same whether or not one is attending to the
psychological fact that one is experiencing redness. Wundt also
suggests that the basic processes of memory, feeling, and volition can
be observed systematically and without excessive disruption. These
*alone*, he thinks, can be studied by introspective psychology
(see also Wundt 1874 [1904]; 1896 [1902]; 1907). Other aspects of our
psychology must be approached through non-introspective methods such
as the observation of language, mythology, culture, and human and
animal development.


### 3.3 The Decline of Scientific Introspection



Although introspective psychologists were able to build scientific
consensus on some issues concerning sense experience--issues such
as the limits of sensory perception in various modalities and some of
the contours of variation in sensory experience--by the early
20th century it was becoming clear that on many issues consensus was
elusive. The most famous dispute concerned the existence of
"imageless thought" (see the discussion of the imageless
thought controversy in the entry
 mental imagery;
 see also Humphrey 1951; Kusch 1999); but other topics proved
similarly resistant such as the structure of emotion or
"feeling" (James 1890 [1981]; Kulpe 1893 [1895];
Wundt 1896 [1902]; Titchener 1908 [1973]) and the experiential changes
brought about by shifts in attention (Wundt 1896 [1902]; Pillsbury
1908; Titchener 1908 [1973]; Chapman 1933).



By the 1910s,
 behaviorism
 (which focused simply on the relationship between outward stimuli and
behavioral response) had declared war on introspective psychology,
portraying it as bogged down in irresolvable disputes between
differing introspective "experts", and also rebuking the
introspectivists' passive taxonomizing of experience,
recommending that psychology focus instead on socially useful
paradigms for modifying behavior (e.g., Watson 1913). In the 1920s and
1930s, introspective studies were increasingly marginalized. Although
strict behaviorism declined in the 1960s and 1970s, its main
replacement, cognitivist
 functionalism
 (which treats functionally defined internal cognitive processes as
central to psychological inquiry), generally continued to share
behaviorism's disdain of introspective methods.



Psychophysics (the study of the relationship between physical sensory
input and consequent psychological state or response), where the
introspective psychologists had found their greatest success,
underwent a subtle shift in this period from a focus on
*subjective* methods--methods that involve asking subjects
to report on their experiences or percepts--to a focus on
*objective* methods such as asking participants to report on
states of the outside world, including insisting that participants
guess even when they feel they don't know or have no relevant
conscious experience (especially with the rise of "signal
detection theory" in psychophysics: Green and Swets 1966;
Cheesman and Merikle 1986; Macmillan and Creelman 1991; Merikle,
Smilek, and Eastwood 2001). Perhaps in accord with transparency views
of introspection (Section 2.3.4 above), the two types of instruction
seem very similar (compare the subjective "tell me if you
visually experience a flash of light" with the objective
"tell me if the light flashes"). On the other hand,
perhaps in tension with transparency views, subjective and objective
instructions seem sometimes to differ importantly, especially in cases
of known illusion, Gestalt effects such as perceived grouping, stimuli
near the limits of perceivability, and the experience of ambiguous
figures (Boring 1921; Merikle, Smilek, and Eastwood 2001; Siewert
2004).


### 3.4 The Re-Emergence of Scientific Introspection



In no period, however, were introspective methods *entirely*
abandoned by psychologists, and in the last few decades, they have
made something of a comeback, especially with the rise of the
interdisciplinary field of "consciousness studies" (see,
e.g., Jack and Roepstorff, eds., 2003, 2004). Ericsson and Simon
(1984/1993; to be discussed further in Section 4.2.3 below) have
advocated the use of "think-aloud protocols" and
immediately retrospective reports in the study of problem solving.
Other researchers have emphasized introspective methods in the study
of imagery (Marks 1985; Kosslyn, Reisbert, and Behrmann 2006) and
emotion (Lambie and Marcel 2002; Barrett et al. 2007).



Beeper methodologies have been developed to facilitate immediate
retrospection, especially by Hurlburt (1990, 2011; Hurlburt and Heavey
2006; Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007) and Csikszentmihalyi (Larson and
Csikszentmihalyi 1983; Csikszentmihalyi 2014). Traditional immediately
retrospective methods required the introspective observer in the
laboratory somehow to intentionally refrain from introspecting the
target experience as it occurs, arguably a difficult task. Hurlburt
and Csikszentmihalyi, in contrast, give participants beepers to wear
during ordinary, everyday activity. The beepers are timed to sound
only at long intervals, surprising participants and triggering an
immediately retrospective assessment of their "inner
experience", emotion, or thoughts in the moment before the
beep.



Introspective or subjective reports of conscious experience have also
played an important role in the search for the "neural
correlates of consciousness" (as reviewed in Rees and Frith
2007; Prinz 2012; Koch et al. 2016; see also Varela 1996). One
paradigm is for researchers to present ambiguous sensory stimuli,
holding them constant over an extended period, noting what neural
changes correlate with changes in subjective reports of experience.
For example, in "binocular rivalry" methods, two different
images (e.g., a face and a house) are presented, one to each eye.
Participants typically say that only one image is visible at a time,
with the visible image switching every few seconds. Researchers have
sometimes reported finding evidence that activity in
"early" visual areas (such as V1) is not temporally
coupled with reported changes in visual experience, while changes in
conscious percept are better temporally coupled with activity in
parietal and maybe also frontal areas further downstream and to
large-scale changes in neural synchronization or oscillation; however,
the evidence is disputed (Lumer, Friston, and Rees 1998; Tong et al.
1998; Tononi et al. 1998; Polonsky et al. 2000; Tong, Meng, and Blake
2006; Kamphuisen, Bauer, and van Ee 2008; Sandberg et al. 2013;
Frassle et al. 2014; Ishiku and Zeki 2014; Tsuchiya et al. 2015).
Another version of the ambiguous sensory stimuli paradigm involves
presenting the participant with an ambiguous figure such as the Rubin
faces-vase figure:



![](Rubin2.jpg)


Using this paradigm, researchers have found neuronal changes both in
early visual areas and in later areas, as well as changes in
widespread neuronal synchrony, that correspond temporally with
subjective reports of flipping between one way and another of seeing
the ambiguous figure (Kleinschmidt et al. 1998; Rodriguez et al. 1999;
Ilg et al. 2008; Parkkonen et al. 2008; de Graaf et al. 2011; Megumi,
Bahrami, Kanai, and Rees 2015; Brascamp, Sterzer, Blake, and Knapen
2017). In masking paradigms, stimuli are briefly presented then
followed by a "mask". On some trials, participants report
seeing the stimuli, while on others they don't. In trials in
which the participant reports that stimulus was visually experienced,
researchers have tended to find higher levels of activity through at
least some of the downstream visual pathways as well as spontaneous
electrical oscillations near 40 Hz (Dehaene et al. 2001; Summerfield,
Jack, and Burgess 2002; Del Cul, Baillet, and Dehaene 2007; Quiroga et
al. 2008; Salti et al. 2015). However, it remains contentious how
properly to interpret such attempts to find neural correlates of
consciousness (Noe and Thompson 2004; Overgaard, Sandberg, and
Jensen 2008; Dehaene and Changeux 2011; Aru, Bachmann, Singer, and
Melloni 2012; de Graaf, Hsieh, and Sack 2012; Koch et al. 2016;
Phillips 2018).



If we report our attitudes by introspecting upon them, then much of
survey research is also introspective, though psychologists have not
generally explicitly described it as such. As with subjective vs.
objective methods in psychophysics, there appears to be only a slight
difference between subjectively phrased questions ("Do you
approve of the President's handling of the war?",
"Do you think marijuana should be legalized?") and
objectively phrased questions ("Has the President handled the
war well?", "Should marijuana be legalized?"). This
would seem to support the observation at the core of transparency
theory (discussed in Section 2.3.4 above) that questions about the
mind and questions about the outside world often call for the same
type of reflection.


## 4. The Accuracy of Introspection


### 4.1 Varieties of Privilege



It's plausible to suppose that people have some sort of
*privileged access* to at least some of their own mental states
or processes: You know about your own mind, or at least some aspects
of it, in a different way and better than you know about other
people's minds, and maybe also in a different way and better
than you know about the outside world. Consider pain. It seems you
know your own pains differently and better than you know mine,
differently and (perhaps) better than you know about the coffee cup in
your hand. If so, perhaps that special "first-person"
privileged knowledge arises through something like introspection, in
one or more of the senses described in Section 2 above.



Just as there is a diversity of methods for acquiring knowledge of or
reaching judgments about one's own mental states and processes,
to which the label "introspection" applies with more or
less or disputable accuracy, so also is there a diversity of forms of
"privileged access", with different kinds of privilege and
to which the idea of access applies with more or less or disputable
accuracy. And as one might expect, the different introspective methods
do not all align equally well with the different varieties of
privilege.


#### 4.1.1 Varieties of Perfection: Infallibility, Indubitability, Incorrigibility, and Self-Intimation



A substantial philosophical tradition, going back at least to
Descartes (1637/1985; 1641/1984; also Augustine c. 420 C.E./1998),
ascribes a kind of epistemic perfection to at least some of our
judgments (or thoughts or beliefs or knowledge) about our own
minds--infallibility, indubitability, incorrigibility, or
self-intimation. Consider the judgment (thought, belief, etc.) that
*P*, where *P* is a proposition self-ascribing a mental
state or process (for example *P* might be *I am in
pain*, or *I believe that it is snowing*, or *I am
thinking of a dachshund*). The judgment that *P* is
*infallible* just in case, if I make that judgment, it is not
possible that *P* is false. It is *indubitable* just in
case, if I make the judgment, it is not possible for me to doubt the
truth of *P*. It is *incorrigible* just in case, if I
make the judgment, it is not possible for anyone else to show that
*P* is false. And it is *self-intimating* if it is not
possible for *P* to be true without my reaching the judgment
(thought, belief, etc.) that it is true. Note that the direction of
implication for the last of these is the reverse of the first three.
Infallibility, indubitability, and incorrigibility all have the form:
"If I judge (think, believe, etc.) that *P*, then
...", while self-intimation has the form "If
*P*, then I judge (think, believe, etc.) that
*P*". All four theses also admit of weakening by adding
conditions to the antecedent "if" clause (e.g., "If
I judge that *P* as a result of normal introspective processes,
then ..."). (See Alston 1971 for a helpful dissection of
these distinctions; all admit of variations and nuance. Also note that
some philosophers [e.g. Ayer 1936/1946; Armstrong 1963; Chalmers 2003;
Tye 2009] use "incorrigibility" to mean infallibility as
defined here, while others [e.g., Ayer 1963; Alston 1971; Rorty 1970;
Dennett 2000] use it with the more etymologically specific meaning of
[something like] "incapable of correction".)



Descartes (1641/1984) famously endorsed the indubitability of "I
think", which he extends also to such mental states as doubting,
understanding, affirming, and seeming to have sensory perceptions. He
also appears to claim that the thought or affirmation that I am in
such states is infallibly true, at least if that thought is clear and
distinct. He was followed in this--especially in his
infallibilism--by Locke (1690 [1975]), Hume (1739 [1978]),
twentieth-century thinkers such as Husserl (1913 [1982]), Ayer (1936
[1946], 1963), Lewis (1946), and the early Shoemaker (1963), and many
others. Historical arguments for indubitability and infallibility have
tended to center on intuitive appeals to the apparent impossibility of
doubting or going wrong about such matters as whether one is having a
thought with a certain content or is experiencing pain or having a
visual experience as of seeing red.



Recent infallibilists have added to this intuitive appeal structural
arguments based on self-fulfillment accounts of introspection or
self-knowledge (see Section 2.3.1 above)--generally while also
narrowing the scope of infallibility, for example to thoughts about
thoughts (Burge 1988, 1996), or to "pure" phenomenal
judgments about consciousness (Chalmers 2003; see also Wright 1998;
Gertler 2001; Horgan, Tienson, and Graham 2006; Horgan and Kriegel
2007; Tye 2009; with important predecessors in Brentano 1874 [1973];
Husserl 1913 [1982]), or to beliefs as "commitments"
(Coliva 2016). The intuitive idea behind most of these structural
arguments is that somehow the self-ascriptive thought or judgment
*contains* the mental state or process self-ascribed: the
thought that I am thinking of a pink elephant contains the thought of
a pink elephant; the judgment that I am having a visual experience of
redness contains the red experience itself.



In contrast, self/other parity (Section 2.1) and self-detection
(Section 2.2) accounts of introspection or self-knowledge appear to
stand in tension with infallibilism. If introspection or
self-knowledge involves a causal process from a mental state to an
ontologically distinct self-ascription of that state, it appears that,
however reliable such a process may generally be, there is inevitably
room in principle for interference and error. Minimally, it seems,
stroke, quantum accident, or clever neurosurgery could break otherwise
generally reliable relationships between target mental states and the
self-ascriptions of those states. Similar considerations apply to
self-shaping (Section 2.3.2) and expressivist (Section 2.3.3)
accounts, to the extent that these are interpreted causally rather
than constitutively.



Introspective incorrigibility, as opposed to either infallibility or
indubitability, was held by Rorty (1970) to be "the mark of the
mental"--and thus as applying to a wide range of mental
states--. Dennett (2000, 2002) defends a similar view, for
conscious experiences. The idea behind incorrigibility, recall, is
that no one else could show your self-ascriptions to be false; or we
might say, more qualifiedly and a bit differently, that if you arrive
at the right kind of self-ascriptive judgment (perhaps an
introspectively based judgment about a currently ongoing conscious
process that survives critical reflection), then no one else, perhaps
not even you in the future, aware of this, can rationally hold that
judgment to be mistaken. If I judge that right now I am in severe
pain, and I do so as a result of considering introspectively whether I
am indeed in such pain (as opposed to, say, merely inferring that I am
in pain based on outward behavior), and if I pause to think carefully
about whether I really am in pain and conclude that I indeed am, then
no one else who is aware of this can rationally believe that I'm
not in pain, regardless of what my outward behavior might be (say,
calm and relaxed) or what shows up in the course of brain imaging
(say, no activation in brain centers normally associated with pain).




Incorrigibility does not imply infallibility: I may not actually be in
pain, even if no one could *show* that I'm not.
Consequently, incorrigibility is compatible with a broader array of
sources of self-knowledge than is infallibility. Neither Rorty nor
Dennett, for example, appear to defend incorrigibility by appeal to
self-fulfillment accounts of introspection (though in both cases,
interpreting their positive accounts is difficult). Causal accounts of
self-knowledge may be compatible with incorrigibility if the causal
connections underwriting the incorrigible judgments are vastly more
trustworthy than judgments obtained without the benefit of this sort
of privileged access. Of course, unless one embraces a strict
self-fulfillment account, with its attendant infallibilism, one will
want to rule out abnormal cases such as quantum accident; hence the
need for qualifications.



Self-intimating mental states are those such that, if a person (or at
least a person with the right background capacities) has them, she
necessarily believes or judges or knows that she does. Conscious
states are often held to be in some sense self-intimating, in that the
mere having of them involves, requires, or implies some sort of
representation or awareness of those states. Brentano argues that
consciousness, for example, of an outward stimulus like a sound,
"clearly occurs together with consciousness of this
consciousness", that is, the consciousness is "of the
whole mental act in which the sound is presented and in which the
consciousness itself exists concomitantly" (1874 [1995, 129];
see also
 phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness).
 "Higher order" and "same order" theories of
consciousness (Armstrong 1968; Rosenthal 1990, 2005; Gennaro 1996;
Lycan 1996; Carruthers 2005; Kriegel 2009; see also
 higher-order theories of consciousness)
 explain consciousness in terms of some thought, perception, or
representation of the mental state that is conscious--the
presence of that thought, perception, or representation being what
makes the target state conscious. (On same order theories, the target
mental state, or an aspect of it, represents itself, with no need for
a distinct higher order state.) Thus, Horgan, Kriegel, and others have
described consciousness as "self-presenting" (Horgan,
Tienson, and Graham 2005; Horgan and Kriegel 2007; the usage appears
to follow Chisholm 1981, but Chisholm actually has an indubitability
rather than a self-intimation thesis in mind). Shoemaker (1995, 2012)
argues that beliefs--as long as they are "available"
(i.e., readily deployed in inference, assent, practical reasoning,
etc.), which needn't require that they are occurrently
conscious--are self-intimating for individuals with sufficient
cognitive capacity. Shoemaker's idea is that if the belief that
*P* is available in the relevant sense, then one is disposed to
do things like say "I believe *P*", and such
dispositions are themselves constitutive of believing that one
believes that *P*.



Self-intimation claims (unlike infallibility, indubitability, and
incorrigibility claims) are not usually cast as claims about
"introspection". This may be because knowledge acquired
through self-intimation would appear to be constant and automatic,
thus violating the effort condition on introspection (condition 6 in
Section 1.1 above).


#### 4.1.2 Weaker Guarantees



A number of philosophers have argued for forms of first-person
privilege involving some sort of epistemic guarantee--not just
conditional accuracy as a matter of empirical fact, but something more
robust than that--without embracing infallibility,
indubitability, incorrigibility, or self-intimation in the senses
described in Section 4.1.1 above.



Shoemaker (1968), for example, argues that self-knowledge of certain
psychological facts such as "I am waving my arm" or
"I see a canary", when arrived at "in the ordinary
way (without the aid of mirrors, etc.)", is *immune to error
through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun*
(see also Campbell 1999; Pryor 1999; Bar-On 2004; Hamilton 2008). That
is, although one may be wrong about waving one's arm (perhaps
the nerves to your arm were recently severed unbeknownst to you) or
about seeing a canary (perhaps it's a goldfinch), one cannot be
wrong due to mistakenly identifying the person waving the arm or
seeing the canary *as you*, when in fact it is someone else.
This immunity arises, Shoemaker argues, because there is no need for
identification in the first place, and thus no opportunity for
*mis*-identification. In this respect, Shoemaker argues,
knowledge that a particular arm that is moving is your arm (not immune
to misidentification since maybe it's someone else's arm,
misidentified in the mirror) is different from the knowledge that
*you* are moving your arm--knowledge, that is, of what
Searle (1983) calls an "intention in action".



Shoemaker has also argued for the conceptual impossibility of
introspective *self-blindness* with respect to one's
beliefs, desires, and intentions, and for somewhat different reasons
one's pains (1988, 1994b). A self-blind creature, by
Shoemaker's definition, would be a rational creature with a
conception of the relevant mental states, and who can entertain the
thought that she has this or that belief, desire, intention, or pain,
but who nonetheless utterly lacks introspective access to the type of
mental state in question. A self-blind creature could still gain
"third person" knowledge of the mental states in question,
through observing her own behavior, reading textbooks, and the like.
(Thus, strict self/other parity accounts of self-knowledge of the sort
described in Section 2.1 are accounts according to which one is
self-blind in Shoemaker's sense.) Shoemaker's case against
self-blindness with respect to belief turns on the dilemma of whether
the self-blind creature can avoid "Moore-paradoxical"
sentences (see Moore 1942, 1944 [1993]; Shoemaker 1995) like
"it's raining but I don't believe that it's
raining" in which the subject asserts both *P* and that
she doesn't believe that *P*. If the subject is truly
self-blind, Shoemaker suggests, there should be cases in which her
best evidence is both that *P* and that she doesn't
believe that *P* (the latter, perhaps, based on misleading
facts about her behavior). But if the subject asserts
"*P* but I don't believe that *P*" in
such cases, she does not (contra the initial supposition) really have
a rational command of the nature of belief and assertion; and thus
it's not a genuine case of self-blindness as originally
intended. Alternatively, perhaps the creature can reliably avoid such
Moore-paradoxical sentences, self-attributing belief in an apparently
normal way. But then, Shoemaker suggests, it seems that she is
indistinguishable from normal people in thought and behavior and hence
not self-blind. For desire, intention, and pain, too, Shoemaker aims
to reveal incoherences between having a rational command of the
concepts in question and behaving as though one were systematically
ignorant of or mistaken about those states. Shoemaker uses his case
against self-blindness as part of his argument against self-detection
accounts of introspection (described in Section 2.2 above): If
introspection were a matter of detecting the presence of states that
exist independently of the introspective judgment or belief, then it
ought to be possible for the faculty enabling the detection to break
down entirely, as in the case of blindness, deafness, etc., in outward
perception (see also Nichols and Stich 2003, who argue that
schizophrenia provides such a case).



Burge has influentially asserted that *brute errors* about
"present, ordinary, accessible propositional attitudes [such as
belief and desire]" are impossible or at least subject to
"severe limits"--where a "brute error" is
an error that "indicates no rational failure and no malfunction
in the mistaken individual" such as commonly occur in ordinary
perception due to "misleading natural conditions or look-alike
substitutes" (1988, 657-658; 1996, 103-104).
However, Burge offers little argument for this claim, apart from the
argument mentioned in Sections 2.3.1 and 4.1.1 above that for certain
sorts of self-ascriptions error in general (and not just "brute
error") is impossible, due to the "self-verifying"
nature of such self-ascriptions.



Dretske (1995, 2004) argues that we have infallible knowledge of the
*content* of our attitudes without necessarily knowing (or even
having a very good idea about) the *attitude* we take toward
those contents. For example, if I believe that *it will rain
tomorrow*, I have infallibly accurate information, which I may
then access introspectively, regarding the presence of a mental state
with a certain content--the content "it will rain
tomorrow"--but I may often have little or no information
about the fact that my attitude toward that content is the particular
attitude it is--belief, in this case (as opposed to supposition
or hope). This view follows from Dretske's accepting something
like a containment account of the introspection of the content of the
attitude (the introspective judgment employing the same content as the
target attitude; see Section 2.3.1 above, especially the discussion of
Burge), while he sees knowledge of the attitude one has toward that
content as requiring complex information about the causal role and
history of that mental state.



Transcendental arguments for the accuracy of certain sorts of
self-knowledge offer a different sort of epistemic
guarantee--"transcendental arguments" being arguments
that assume the existence of some sort of experience or capacity, then
develop insights about the background conditions necessary for that
experience or capacity, and finally conclude that those background
conditions must in fact be met. Burge (1996; see also Shoemaker 1988)
argues that to be capable of "critical reasoning" one must
be able to recognize one's own attitudes, knowledgeably
evaluating, identifying, and reviewing one's beliefs, desires,
commitments, suppositions, etc., where these mental states are known
to be the states they are. Since we are (by assumption, for the sake
of transcendental argument) capable of critical reasoning, we must
have some knowledge of our attitudes. Bilgrami (2006) argues that we
can only be held responsible for actions if we know the beliefs and
desires that "rationalize" our actions; since we can (by
assumption) sometimes be held responsible, we must sometimes know our
beliefs and desires. Wright (1989) argues that the "language
game" of ascribing "intentional states" such as
belief and desire to oneself and others requires as a background
condition that self-ascriptions have special authority within that
game. Given that we successfully play this language game, we must
indeed have the special authority that we assume and others grant us
in the context of the game.


#### 4.1.3 Privilege Without Guarantee



Developing an analogy from Wright (1998), if it's your turn with
the kaleidoscope, you have a type of privileged perspective on the
shapes and colors it presents. If someone else in the room wants to
know what color dominates, for example, the most straightforward
course would be to ask you. But this type of privileged access comes
with no guarantee. At least in principle, you might be quite wrong
about the tumbling shapes. You might be dazzled by afterimages, or
momentarily confused, or hallucinating, or (unbeknownst to you)
colorblind. (Yes, people often don't know they are colorblind, a
point stressed by Kornblith 1998.) It is also at least in principle
possible that others may know better than you, perhaps even
systematically so, what is transpiring in the kaleidoscope. You might
think the figure shows octagonal symmetry, but the rest of us,
familiar with the kaleidoscope's design, might know that the
symmetry is hexagonal. A brilliant engineer may invent a kaleidoscope
state detector that can dependably reveal from outside the shape,
color, and position of the tumbling chunks.



Wright raises this analogy to suggest that people's privilege
with respect to certain aspects of their mental lives must be
different from that of the person with the kaleidoscope; but other
philosophers, especially those who embrace self-detection accounts of
introspection, should find the analogy at least somewhat apt:
Introspective privilege is akin to the privilege of having a unique
and advantageous sensory perspective on something. Metaphorically
speaking, we are the only ones who can gaze directly at our attitudes
or our stream of experience, while others must rely on us or on
outward signs. Less metaphorically, in generating introspective
judgments (or beliefs or knowledge) about one's own mentality
one employs a detection process available to no one else. It is then
an empirical question how accurate the deliverances of this process
are; but on the assumption that the deliverances are in a broad range
of conditions at least somewhat accurate and more accurate than the
typical judgments other people make about those same aspects of your
mind, you have a "privileged" perspective. Typically,
advocates of self-detection models of introspection regard the
mechanism or cognitive process generating introspective judgments or
beliefs as highly reliable in roughly this way, but not infallible,
and not immune to correction by other people (Armstrong 1968;
Churchland 1988; Hill 1981, 2009; Lycan 1996; Nichols and Stich 2003;
Goldman 2000, 2006).


### 4.2 Empirical Evidence on the Accuracy of Introspection



The arguments of the previous section are a priori in at least the
broad sense of that term (the psychologists' sense): They depend
on general conceptual considerations and armchair folk psychology
rather than on empirical research. To these might be added the
argument, due to Boghossian (1989) that "externalism"
about the content of our attitudes (the view that our attitudes depend
constitutively not just on what is going on internally but also on
facts about our environment; Putnam 1975; Burge 1979) seems to
problematize introspective self-knowledge of those attitudes. This
issue will not be treated here, since it is amply covered in the
entries on
 externalism about mental content
 and
 externalism and self-knowledge.



Now we turn to empirical research on our self-knowledge of those
aspects of our minds often thought to be accessible to introspection.
Since character traits are not generally regarded as introspectible
aspects of our mentality, we'll skip the large literature on the
accuracy or inaccuracy of our judgments about them (e.g., Taylor and
Brown 1988; Paulhus and John 1998; Funder 1999; Vazire 2010; see also
Haybron's 2008 skeptical perspective on our knowledge of how
happy we are); nor will we discuss self-knowledge of subpersonal,
nonconscious mental processes, such as the processes underlying visual
recognition of color and shape.



As a general matter, while a priori accounts of the epistemology of
introspection have tended to stress its privilege and accuracy,
empirical accounts have tended to stress its failures.


#### 4.2.1 Of the Causes of Attitudes and Behavior



Perhaps the most famous argument in the psychological literature on
introspection and self-knowledge is Nisbett and Wilson's
argument that we have remarkably poor knowledge of the causes of, and
processes underlying, our behavior and attitudes (Nisbett and Wilson
1977; Nisbett and Ross 1980; Wilson 2002). Section 2.1 above briefly
mentioned their emblematic finding that people in a shopping mall were
often ignorant of a major factor--position--influencing
their judgments about the quality of pairs of stockings. In Nisbett
and Bellows (1977), also briefly mentioned above, participants were
asked to assess the influence of various factors on their judgments
about features of a supposed job applicant. As in Nisbett and
Wilson's stocking study, participants denied the influence of
some factors that were in fact influential; for example, they denied
that the information that they would meet the applicant influenced
their judgments about the applicant's flexibility. (It actually
had a major influence, as assessed by comparing the judgments of
participants who were told and not told that they would meet the
applicant.) Participants also attributed influence to factors that
were not in fact influential; for example, they falsely reported that
the information that the applicant accidentally knocked over a cup of
coffee during the interview influenced "how sympathetic the
person seems" to them. Nisbett and Bellows found that ordinary
observers' hypothetical ratings of the influence of the various
factors on the various judgments closely paralleled the
participants' own ratings of the factors influencing
them--a finding used by Nisbett to argue that people have no
special access to causal influences on their judgments and instead
rely on the same sorts of theoretical considerations outside observers
rely on (the self/other parity view described in Section 2.1). Despite
some objections (such as White 1988), both psychologists and
philosophers now tend to accept Nisbett's and Wilson's
view that there is at best only a modest first-person advantage in
assessing the factors influencing our judgments and behavior.



In series of experiments, Gazzaniga (1995) presented commissurotomy
patients (people with severed corpus callosum) with different visual
stimuli to each hemisphere of the brain. With cross-hemispheric
communication severely impaired due to the commissurotomy, the left
hemisphere, controlling speech, had information about one part of the
visual stimulus, while the right hemisphere, controlling some aspects
of movement (especially the left hand) had information about a
different part. Gazzaniga reported finding that when these
"split brain" patients were asked to explain why they did
something, when that action was clearly caused by input to the right,
non-verbal hemisphere, the left hemisphere would sometimes fluently
confabulate an explanation. For example, Gazzaniga reports presenting
an instruction like "laugh" to the right hemisphere,
making the patient laugh. When asked why he laughed, the patient would
say something like "You guys come up and test us every month.
What a way to make a living!" (1393). When a chicken claw was
shown to the left hemisphere and snow scene to the right, and the
patient was asked to select an appropriate picture from an array, the
right hand would point to a chicken and the left hand to a snow
shovel, and when asked why they selected those two things, the patient
would say something like "Oh, that's simple. The chicken
claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the
chicken shed" (ibid.). Similar confabulation about motives is
sometimes (but not always) seen in people whose behavior is,
unbeknownst to them, driven by post-hypnotic suggestion (Richet 1884;
Moll 1889 [1911]), and in disorders such as hemineglect (anosognosia),
blindness denial (Anton's syndrome), and Korsakoff's
syndrome (Hirstein 2005).



In a normal population, Johansson and collaborators (Johansson et al.
2005; Johansson et al. 2006) manually displayed to participants pairs
of pictures of women's faces. On each trial, the participant was
to point to the face he found more attractive. The picture of that
face was then centered before the participant while the other face was
hidden. On some trials, participants were asked to explain the reasons
for their choices while continuing to look at the selected face. On a
few key trials, the experimenters used sleight-of-hand to present to
the participant the face that was *not* selected as though it
had been the face selected. Strikingly, the switch was noticed only
28% of the time. What's more, when the change was not detected
participants actually gave explanations for their choice that appealed
to specific features of the unselected face that were not possessed by
the selected face 13% of the time. For example, one participant
claimed to have chosen the face before him "because I love
blondes" when in fact he had chosen a dark-haired face
(Johansson et al. 2006, 690). Johansson and colleagues failed to find
any systematic differences in the explanations of choice between the
manipulated and non-manipulated trials, using a wide variety of
measures. They found, for example, no difference in linguistic markers
of confidence (including pauses in speech), emotionality, specificity
of detail, complexity or length of description, or general position in
semantic space. These results, like Nisbett's and
Wilson's, suggest that at least some of the time when people
think they are explaining the bases of their decisions, they are
instead merely theorizing or confabulating.



Wegner has found that people can often be manipulated into believing
that they willed or intended behavior that is in fact caused by
another person's manipulation and, conversely, that they exerted
no control over movements that were in fact their own--as with
Ouija boards, with or without a cheating, intentionally directive
confederate (Wegner and Wheatley 1999; Wegner 2002). The literature on
"cognitive dissonance" is replete with cases in which
participants' attitudes appear to change for reasons they do, or
would, deny. According to cognitive dissonance theory, when people
behave or appear to behave counternormatively (e.g., incompetently,
foolishly, immorally), they will tend to adjust their attitudes so as
to make the behavior seem less counternormative or
"dissonant" (Festinger 1957; Aronson 1968; Cooper and
Fazio 1984; Stone and Cooper 2001). For example, people induced to
falsely describe as enjoyable a monotonous task they've just
completed will tend, later, to report having a more positive attitude
toward the task then those not induced to lie (though much less so if
they were handsomely paid to lie in which case the behavior is not
clearly counternormative; Festinger and Carlsmith 1959; but see Bem
1967, 1972 for an argument that the attitude doesn't change but
only the report of it). Presumably, if such attitude changes were
known to the person they would generally fail to have their
dissonance-reducing effect. Research psychologists have also confirmed
such familiar phenomena as "sour grapes" (Elster
1983/2016; Lyubomirsky and Ross 1999; Kay, Jiminez, and Jost 2002) and
"self-deception" (Mele 2001) which presumably also involve
ignorance of the factors driving the relevant judgments and actions.
And of course the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition has also long held
that people often have only poor knowledge of their motives and the
influences on their attitudes (Wollheim 1981; Cavell 2006).



In light of this empirical research, no major philosopher now holds
(perhaps no major philosopher ever held) that we have infallible,
indubitable, incorrigible, or self-intimating knowledge of the causes
of our judgments, decisions, and behavior. Perhaps weaker forms of
privilege also come under threat. But the question arises: Whatever
failures there may be in assessing the causes of our attitudes and
behavior, are those failures failures of *introspection*,
properly construed? Psychologists tend to cast these results as
failures of "introspection", but if it turns out that a
very different and more trustworthy process underwrites our knowledge
of some other aspects of our minds--such as what our present
attitudes are (however caused) or our currently ongoing or recently
past conscious experience--then perhaps we can call only
*that* process introspection, thereby retaining some robust
form of introspective privilege while acceding to the psychological
consensus regarding (what we would now call non-introspective)
first-person knowledge of causes. Indeed, few contemporary
philosophical accounts of introspection or privileged self-knowledge
highlight, as the primary locus of privilege, the causes of our
attitudes and behavior (though Bilgrami 2006 is a notable exception).
Thus, the literature reviewed in this section can be interpreted as
suggesting that the causes of our behavior are not, after all, the
sorts of things to which we have introspective access.


#### 4.2.2 Of Attitudes



Research psychologists have generally not been as skeptical of our
knowledge of our attitudes as they have been of our knowledge of the
causes of our attitudes (Section 4.2.1 above). In fact, many of the
same experiments that purport to show inaccurate knowledge of the
causes of our attitudes nonetheless rely unguardedly on self-report
for assessment of the attitudes themselves--a feature of those
experiments criticized by Bem (1967). Attitudinal surveys in
psychology and social science generally rely on participants'
self-report as the principal source of evidence about attitudes (de
Vaus 1985/2002; Sirken et al. (eds.) 1999). However, as in the case of
motives and causes, there's a long tradition in clinical
psychology skeptical of our self-knowledge of our attitudes, giving a
large role to "unconscious" motives and attitudes.



A key challenge in assessing the accuracy of people's beliefs or
judgments about their attitudes is the difficulty of accurately
measuring attitudes independently of self-report. There is at present
no tractable measure of attitude that is generally seen by
philosophers as overriding individuals' own reports about their
attitudes. However, in the psychological literature,
"implicit" measures of attitudes--measures of
attitudes that do not reply on self-report--have recently been
gaining considerable attention (see Wittenbrink and Schwarz, eds.,
2007; Petty, Fazio, and Brinol, eds., 2009). Such measures are
sometimes thought capable of revealing unconscious attitudes or
implicit attitudes either unavailable to introspection or erroneously
introspected (Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000; Kihlstrom 2004; Lane
et al. 2007; though see Hahn et al. 2014).



Much of the leading research on implicit attitude measures has
concerned racism, in accord with the view that racist attitudes,
though common, are considered socially undesirable and therefore often
not self-ascribed even when present. For example, Campbell, Kruskal,
and Wallace (1966) explored the use of seating distance as an index of
racial attitudes, noting that racially Black and White students tended
to aggregate in classroom seating arrangements. Using facial
electromyography (EMG), Vanman et al. (1997) found (racially) White
participants to display facial responses indicative of negative affect
more frequently when asked to imagine co-operative activity with Black
than with White partners--results interpreted as indicative of
racist attitudes. Cunningham et al. (2004) showed White and Black
faces to White participants while participants were undergoing fMRI
brain imaging. They found less amygdala activation when participants
looked at faces from their own group than when participants looked at
other faces; and since amygdala activation is generally associated
with negative emotion, they interpreted this tendency suggesting a
negative attitude toward outgroup members (see also Hart et al 1990;
and for discussion Ito and Cacioppo 2007).



Much of the recent implicit attitude research has focused on response
priming and interference in speeded tasks. In priming research, a
stimulus (the "prime") is briefly displayed, followed by a
mask that hides it, and then a second stimulus (the
"target") is displayed. The participant's task is to
respond as swiftly as possible to the target, typically with a
classification judgment. In *evaluative priming,* for example,
the participant is primed with a positively or negatively valenced
word or picture (e.g., snake), then asked to make a swift judgment
about whether the subsequently presented target word (e.g.,
"disgusting") is good or bad, or has some other feature
(e.g., belongs to a particular category). Generally, negative primes
will speed response for negative targets while delaying response for
positive targets, and positive primes will do the reverse. Researchers
have found that photographs of Black faces, whether presented visibly
or whether presented so quickly as to be subliminal, tend to
facilitate the categorization of negative targets and delay the
categorization of positive targets for White participants--a
result widely interpreted as revealing racist attitudes (Fazio et al.
1995; Dovidio et al. 1997; Wittenbrink, Judd, and Park 1997). In the
*Implicit Association Test*, respondents are asked to respond
disjunctively to combined categories, giving for example one response
if they see either a dark-skinned face or a positively valenced word
and a different response if they see either a light-skinned face or a
negatively valenced word. As in evaluative priming tasks, White
respondents tend to respond more slowly when asked to pair
dark-skinned faces with positively valenced words than with negatively
valenced words, which is interpreted as revealing a negative attitude
or association (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998; Lane et al.
2007). However, it should be noted that despite its prominence, the
Implicit Association Task has recently been criticized as having poor
test-retest reliability and weak correlations with other measures of
racism (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, and Tetlock 2013;
Gawronski, Morrison, Phills, and Galdi 2017; Payne, Vuletich, and
Lundberg 2017; Singal 2017).



As mentioned above, such implicit measures are often interpreted as
revealing attitudes to which people have poor or no introspective
access. The evidence that people lack introspective knowledge of such
attitudes generally turns on the low correlations between such
implicit measures of racism and more explicit measures such as
self-report--though due to the recognized social undesirability
of racial prejudice, it is difficult to disentangle
self-presentational from self-knowledge factors in self-reports (Fazio
et al. 1995; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998; Wilson, Lindsey,
and Schooler 2000; Greenwald and Nosek 2009). People who appear racist
by implicit measures might disavow racism and inhibit racist patterns
of response on explicit measures (such as when asked to rate the
attractiveness of faces of different races) because they don't
want to be *seen* as racist--a motivation that might drive
them whether or not they have accurate self-knowledge of their racist
attitudes. Still, it seems prima facie plausible that people have at
best limited knowledge of the patterns of association that drive their
responses on priming and other implicit measures.



But what do such tests really measure? In philosophy, Zimmerman (2018)
and Gendler (2008a, 2008b) have argued that measures like the Implicit
Association Test do not measure actual racist beliefs but rather
something else, something under less rational control (Gendler calls
them "aliefs"). Schwitzgebel (2010) argues that people who
are implicitly prejudiced but explicitly egalitarian are "in
between" believing and failing to believe the egalitarian
propositions that they sincerely accept (see also Levy 2015). Machery
(2016) argues that implicit measures reveal multi-track dispositions,
rather than attitudes. Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006) advance a
model according to which there is a substantial difference between
implicit attitudes, defined in terms of associative processes, and
explicit attitudes which have a propositional structure and are guided
by standards of truth and consistency (see also Wilson, Lindsey, and
Schooler 2000; Greenwald and Nosek 2009). Mandelbaum (2016) and
Borgoni (2016) also endorse views on which people who are implicitly
prejudiced but explicitly egalitarian have contradictory attitudes,
though they argue that both the implicit and the explicit attitudes
are propositionally structured and to some extent subject to norms of
rationality. Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg (2017) argue that implicit
measures capture the situationally-variable accessibility of
culturally given concepts.



How one answers this question about the relation between implicit bias
and belief or other attitudes bears on the question of the accuracy of
introspection of the belief or other attitude in question. On the
assumption that people are unaware of the extent of their bias, or at
least have no direct introspective access to their bias, that failure
of introspection of bias constitutes a failure of introspection with
respect to the attitude in question. On the other hand, if what is at
stake is merely an association or trait-like disposition, rather than
an attitude, failure of introspectibility is unsurprising and does not
bear on the general question of the introspection of attitudes.



The issue generalizes beyond implicit bias. To the extent attitudes
are held to be reflected in, or even defined by, our explicit
judgments about the matter in question and also, differently but
perhaps not wholly separably (see Section 2.3.4 above), our explicit
judgments about our *attitudes* toward the matter in question,
our self-knowledge would seem to be correspondingly secure and
implicit measures beside the point. To the extent attitudes are held
to crucially involve swift and automatic, or unreflective, patterns of
reaction and association, our self-knowledge of them would appear to
be correspondingly problematic, corrigible by data from implicit
measures (Bohner and Dickel 2011; Schwitzgebel 2011a,
forthcoming).



Similarly, Carruthers (2011; see also Bem 1967, 1972; Rosenthal 2001;
Cassam 2014) argues that the evidence of Nisbett, Gazzaniga, Wegner,
and others (reviewed in Section 4.2.1 above) shows that people
confabulate not just in reporting the *causes* of their
attitudes but also in reporting the attitudes themselves. For example,
Carruthers suggests that if someone in Nisbett and Wilson's
famous 1977 study confabulates "I thought this pair was
softest" as an explanation of their choice of the rightmost pair
of stockings, they err not only about the cause of their choice but
also in self-ascribing the judgment that the pair was softest. On this
basis, Carruthers adopts a self/other parity view (see Section 2.1
above) of our self-knowledge of our attitudes, holding that we can
only introspect, in the strict sense, conscious experiences like those
that arise in perception and imagery.


#### 4.2.3 Of Conscious Experience



Currently ongoing conscious experience--or maybe immediately past
conscious experience (if we hold that introspective judgment must
temporally follow the state or process introspected, or if emphasize
the concerns raised in Section 3.2 about the self-undermining of the
introspective process)--is both the most universally acknowledged
target of the introspective process and the target most commonly
thought to be known with a high degree of privilege. Infallibility,
indubitability, incorrigibility, and self-intimation claims (see
Section 4.1.1) are most commonly made for self-knowledge of states
such as being in pain or having a visual experience as of the color
red, where these states are construed as qualitative states, or
subjective experiences, or aspects of our phenomenology or
consciousness. (All these terms are intended interchangeably to refer
to what Block [1995], Chalmers [1996], and other contemporary
philosophers call "phenomenal consciousness".) If
attitudes are sometimes conscious, then we might also be capable of
introspecting those attitudes as part of our capacity to introspect
conscious experience generally (Goldman 2006; Hill 2009).



It's difficult to study the accuracy of self-ascriptions of
conscious experience for the same reasons it's difficult to
study the accuracy of our self-ascriptions of attitudes (Section
4.2.2): There's no widely accepted measure to trump or confirm
self-report. In the medical literature on pain, for example, no
behavioral or physiological measure of pain is generally thought
capable of overriding self-report of current pain, despite the fact
that scaling issues remain a problem within and especially between
subjects (Williams, Davies, and Chadury 2000) as does retrospective
assessment (Redelmeier and Kahneman 1996). When physiological markers
of pain and self-report dissociate, it's by no means clear that
the physiological marker should be taken as the more accurate index
(for methodological recommendations see Price and Aydede 2005).
Corresponding remarks apply to the case of pleasure (Haybron
2008).



As mentioned in Section 3.3 above, early introspective psychologists
both asserted the difficulty of accurately introspecting conscious
experience and achieved only mixed success in their attempts to obtain
scientifically replicable (and thus presumably accurate) data through
the use of trained introspectors. In some domains they achieved
considerable success and replicability, such as in the construction of
the "color solid" (a representation of the three primary
dimensions of variation in color experience: hue, saturation, and
lightness or brightness), the mapping of the size of "just
noticeable differences" between sensations and the
"liminal" threshold below which a stimulus is too faint to
be experienced, and the (at least roughly) logarithmic relationship
between the intensity of a sensory stimulus and the intensity of the
resulting experience (the "Weber-Fechner law").
Contemporary psychophysics--the study of the relation between
physical stimuli and the resulting sense experiences or
percepts--is rooted in these early introspective studies.
However, other sorts of phenomena proved resistant to cross-laboratory
introspective consensus--such as the possibility or not of
imageless thought (see the entry on
 "mental imagery"),
 the structure of emotion, and the experiential aspects of of
attention. Perhaps these facts about the range of early introspective
agreement and apparently intractable disagreement cast light on the
range over which careful and well-trained introspection is and is not
reliable.



Ericsson and Simon (1984/1993; Ericsson 2003) discuss and review
relationships between the participant's performance on various
problem-solving tasks, their concurrent verbalizations of conscious
thoughts ("think aloud protocols"), and their immediately
retrospective verbalizations. The existence of good relationships in
the predicted directions in many problem-solving tasks lends empirical
support to the view that people's reports about their stream of
thoughts often accurately reflect those thoughts. For example,
Ericsson and Simon find that think-aloud and retrospective reports of
thought processes correlate with predicted patterns of eye movement
and response latency. Ericsson and Simon also cite studies like that
of Hamilton and Sanford (1978), who asked participants to make yes or
no judgments about whether pairs of letters were in alphabetical order
(like MO) or not (like RP) and then to describe retrospectively their
method for arriving at the judgments. When participants
retrospectively reported knowing the answer
"automatically" without an intervening conscious process,
reaction times were swift and did not depend on the distance between
the letters. When participants retrospectively reported "running
through" a sequential series of letters (such as
"LMNO" when prompted with "MO") reaction times
correlated nicely with reported length of run-through. On the other
hand, Flavell, Green, and Flavell (1995) report gross and widespread
introspective error about recently past and even current (conscious)
thought in young children; and Smallwood and Schooler (2006) review
literature that suggests that people are not especially good at
detecting when their mind is wandering.



In the 20th century, philosophers arguing against infallibilism often
devised hypothetical examples in which they suggested it was plausible
to attribute introspective error; but even if such examples succeed,
they are generally confined to far-fetched scenarios, pathological
cases, or very minor or very brief mistakes (e.g., Armstrong 1963;
Churchland 1988; Kornblith 1998, with an eye to the distinction
between mistakes about current conscious experience and other sorts of
mistakes). In the 21st century, philosophical critics of the accuracy
of introspective judgments about consciousness shifted their focus to
cases of widespread disagreement or (putative) error, either among
ordinary people or among research specialists. Dennett (1991),
Blackmore (2002), and Schwitzgebel (2011b), for example, argue that
most people are badly mistaken about the nature of the experience of
peripheral vision. These authors argue that people experience visual
clarity only in a small and rapidly moving region of about 1-2
degrees of visual arc, contrary to the (they say) widespread
impression most people have that they experience a substantially
broader range of stable clarity in the visual field. Other recent
arguments against the accuracy of introspective judgments about
conscious experience turn on citing the widespread disagreement about
whether there is a "phenomenology of thinking" beyond that
of imagery and emotion, about whether sensory experience as a whole is
"rich" (including for example constant tactile experience
of one's feet in one's shoes) or "thin"
(limited mostly just to what is in attention at any one time), and
about the nature of visual imagery experience (Hurlburt and
Schwitzgebel 2007; Bayne and Spener 2010; Schwitzgebel 2011b; though
see Hohwy 2011).



Irvine (2013, forthcoming) has argued that the methodological problems
in this area are so severe that the term "consciousness"
should be eliminated from scientific discourse as impossible to
effectively operationalize or measure. Feest (2014) and Timmermans and
Cleeremans (2015) similarly highlight the substantial methodological
challenges using introspective reports in the science of
consciousness, though without being quite as pessimistic as
Irvine.