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Introspection

You can learn about your own mind in the same way you learn about others' minds—by observing behavior, by reading psychology books, by looking at readouts of brain activity. But it's also generally thought that you can also learn about your mind in a way no one else can, by introspection. But what exactly is introspection? No simple characterization is widely accepted. Introspection is a key concept in psychology and philosophy of mind, both as a process worth studying in its own right and as a method (of disputable validity) for learning about the mind. This entry will discuss the general features of introspection, several broad classes of approach to introspection, and the accuracy of introspective judgments.

Accounts of Introspection

General Features of Introspection

For a process to qualify as an “introspective” process as the term is ordinarily used by philosophers and most psychologists, it must be a process that yields judgments, knowledge, belief, or the like (for simplicity, this entry will just refer to judgments) about one's own current or very recently past mental states or processes (for simplicity, this entry will just refer to states). Furthermore, it must be a process (unlike, say, inference or perception) that can only yield judgments about one's own currently ongoing or recently past mental states and not other people's mental states or mental states other than those (at most) a few moments past.

However, there are arguably non-introspective cognitive processes that can only yield judgments about one's own currently ongoing or recently past mental states. For example, inferring that one likes hats from the fact that one feels a hat pressing on one's forehead would not generally be regarded as an introspective process; nor is the process of conforming to a made-up or confabulated self-description simply to render that self-description true; nor is any automatic, subpersonal interaction of different physiological or functional regions of the mind. Thus, there are three further conditions that are sometimes treated as necessary for a process to qualify as introspective: the directness condition, which requires that introspection yield judgments (knowledge, belief, or the like) by relatively direct means (and not, e.g., by inference from how things stand outside the mind); the detection condition, which requires that introspection involve some sort of detection of, or attunement to, a preexisting mental state or event (and not, e.g., a mental state that is brought into existence in the course of introspecting); and the effort condition, which requires that introspection not be constant, effortless, automatic, or subpersonal, but rather requires some sort of special reflection by the individual that is different from the ordinary un-self-reflective flow of thought and action in daily life. Scholars differ in the weight they put on these conditions, and because of this, an account of self-knowledge that violates one of these latter three conditions may be seen by some researchers but not others as an account of “introspection.”

Assertions of First- and Third-Person Parity

It is sometimes asserted that our only methods for knowing our own minds, or some aspect of our own minds, are the methods by which we know others' minds. If so, then there is no distinctive introspective process or no such process that offers access to the sorts of mental states in question. No prominent psychologist or philosopher has embraced the position in its starkest and most universal form, although Daryl Bem's self-perception theory comes close. According to self-perception theory, we learn about our own minds almost exclusively by observing our behavior, with little input from internal cues. For example, we infer what our attitudes are by noticing what we endorse and reject and how much money it requires to entice us to do something, just as we learn about the attitudes of other people. Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson have argued that we have no introspective access to the processes underlying our decisions and attitudes (although we do have uniquely first-person access to mental “content” such as current sensations and evaluations) and that we arrive at judgments about such things as our motives and reasons on pretty much the same basis as, and with no more accuracy than, we arrive at judgments about other people's motives and reasons. However, Bem's view is out of favor and Nisbett and Wilson's remains contentious.

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