Introspection: First‐person access in science and agency: By MajaSpener Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780198867449

A history of philosophy could be written in which all of the major fault lines corresponded to ideas about introspection. The ancient difference between the styles of the Eastern and Western canons would be attributed to a variance in the role that introspection plays in their most venerated forms of inquiry, with the East finding its paradigms in the introspective mediations of the Buddha while the West looks instead to the public dialectics of Socrates. This Western tradition would be said to have entered its modern phase when Descartes took facts known by introspection to be uniquely qualified for the role of epistemic foundations, and the acme of empiricism's rebellion against his rationalism would be located a century later, when Hume declared that introspection provides no idea of the self that Descartes had taken as his primum notum. After a gothic interlude, in which the Idealist philosophers took a mind's introspective relationship to its own ideas as their model for God's relationship to His creation, the twentieth century would then get underway with a breach between the analytic and continental schools emerging from their disagreement as to the viability of Husserl's attempt to bracket the introspectively manifest aspects of experiences from their objective purport. The outbreak of Wittgensteinian excitement in the middle of that century would be attributed to the way in which Wittgenstein's private language argument gave a fresh perspective on introspection's peculiarity. And once psychology was established, its history might also be told as one in which an epoch-defining role was played by differing views of introspection, and of its vagaries. Such an introspection-fixated history would have such large blindspots that it is probably for the best that nobody has ever actually tried to write it. The idea of doing so is a cautionary tale, the moral of which is that it is easy to get carried away in the philosophical drama that results when the status of introspective thought is in contention. For those who are wary of such dramas, Maja Spener's Introspection provides a valuable illustration of one way in which this large and volatile subject can be made safe for handling with tools that are suited to precise, detail-drawing work. Such work is Spener's métier. Her book aspires throughout to the fine rendering of overlooked details, and it takes a disregard for those details to be the main shortcoming of the recent literature. We are told that ‘approaches to a solution’ of the problems faced by introspection's use in science ‘must start with a detailed understanding of the kinds of introspective access at work in a given subjective measure’ (p. 16). Standard histories of psychology are reproached for their failure to include sufficient details (pp. 16, 48, 125, 142n), and, when the work of other theorists is found to be at fault, lack of detail is invariably among the charges. Those psychologists who attempt to use confidence ratings as a tool for introspectively probing consciousness are said to provide ‘a surprising lack of detail’ (p. 91). Those who use the ‘Perceptual Awareness Scale’ are said to operate with a notion of introspective access that ‘is not worked out in serious detail’ (p. 99); and ‘contemporary debates about subjective measures of consciousness’ are said to show ‘a curious mix of presumption of common understanding and lack of articulated detail’ (p. 161). When a recent philosopher of science invokes introspective considerations, his work is said to exemplify ‘the extraordinary casualness and looseness with which introspection is often treated’ (p. 162). Wilhelm Wundt emerges as this book's hero for being ‘very detailed and remarkably clear’ (p. 33n), but he too gives fewer details than Spener would like: ‘Although Wundt spends a lot of time on the details of inner attention, inner apprehension is hardly elucidated at all’ (p. 140). There is even a footnote in which Spener repudiates the ‘liberal conception’ of introspective access that she herself adopted in earlier work (p. 188-9n). To forestall any temptation to reach for a broad brush here, Spener works within the lines of two cross-cutting distinctions. The first separates instances of introspection into three different ‘modes’, depending (in ways which we consider below) on the contributions made to them by attention and by memory. The second separates ‘introspection as access’ from ‘introspection as inquiry’. This second distinction divides the philosopher of mind or perception's questions about introspection from those that are more appropriately handled by a historian/philosopher of the science of psychology. Whereas a philosopher of perception asks about the metaphysics and epistemology of an introspective mind's access to itself, the philosopher of psychology asks which of the introspectively-accessed facts are able to meet the standards that scientifically-disciplined inquirers must impose on their evidence. As the subtitle of her book indicates, this distinction between ‘introspection as access’ and ‘introspection as inquiry’ serves as the organizing framework for Spener's whole discussion. It is set out in a brief preliminary chapter, and then used to cleave the remainder of her book into two parts, with questions about introspection's serviceability to science being addressed in chapters two to six, and questions about the metaphysics and epistemology of introspective access being addressed (at half the length) in chapters seven and eight. Both Schwitzgebel and Prinz talk about introspection […] without clearly distinguishing introspection as a mental capacity from introspection as inquiry […] and so where appropriate I am presenting their views in my more specific terminology. (p. 201n). The term ‘introspection’ is used ambiguously in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It is used to talk about both a mental capacity and a form of inquiry. […] The distinction between introspective access individuals have to their conscious minds and the deployment of such access in an investigation of our minds is crucial to a proper assessment of uses of introspection in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. […] Unfortunately, as reflected in the ambiguous use of ‘introspection’, the notions of introspective method and introspective access are often run together or they are seriously underdeveloped. (p. 3) Spener laments the inadequacy of English, of French (particularly Comte's French), and of German (particularly Kant's German) for keeping track of the distinction that she is drawing here (p. 23), but treating her point as if it were primarily a verbal one would sell it short. One can endorse her claim that there is a useful distinction to be drawn here, without needing to say that it has been overlooked on account of anything so muddleheaded as a tendency to equivocate on a lexical ambiguity. If there is such an ambiguity, it is the shadow of a more general contrast, with which Spener is more fundamentally concerned, and which would be worth observing even if there were no ambiguity to avoid. It would be one thing to ask about the basis of our introspective capacities, and another to specify criteria for their use in the course of a scientific inquiry, even if our language for referring to introspection were unequivocal. That point is a general one. We could say a lot – both philosophically and psychologically – about, for example, our capacity for smell, and about the conditions of its proper functioning, without yet having said anything that explicitly addresses the question of how scientists who use olfaction in the course of their inquiries should proceed; and we could say a lot about the best-practice of olfaction-using scientists without yet saying anything explicitly about the fundamentals of smell. This contrast also applies in cases with no psychological aspect: One might identify the physical and biological principles underlying radiocarbon dating without saying anything explicitly about the protocols for scientific inquiries that use it, and one might specify those protocols without yet saying anything about that technique's underlying principles. When Spener insists that the scope and limits of introspective inquiries be discussed somewhat separately from the epistemic credentials of our introspective capacity – and when she structures her book so as to enforce the observation of such a separation – she is applying a version of this general point. The order in which Spener addresses the two sides of this distinction might, therefore, be surprising. One might have supposed that we need to understand the limitations inherent in a source of information before we go on to gauge the possibility of conducting an inquiry that works within those limitations, but it is the first half of Spener's book that considers instrospection's use in scientific enquiry, while the second considers the capacity that these enquiries employ. Again the organizing principles of Spener's discussion are no less significant here than the conclusions that she reaches in the course of it. Rather than attempting to derive general rules for the conduct of introspective inquiry from a priori principles concerning the capacities that are used in it, she instead starts from claims about what does and does not prove to be effective in the conduct of actual introspective enquiries, some of which are enquiries that we engage in spontaneously, as we keep track of the ways in which our ongoing actions develop, and some of which are enquiries whose occurrence has been documented in psychology labs, especially during the early phases of lab-based psychology, when the use of introspective methods was prominent. Spener's discussion of ‘introspection as inquiry’ therefore begins with an attempt to rehabilitate these early phases of psychology, which have often been maligned by accounts suggesting that the first experimental psychologists naively disregarded the perils of using introspection as a source of evidence (thereby triggering a behaviourist reformation that led subsequent psychologists to be drastically sceptical of evidence gathered by introspective means). Through a careful reading of this early psychological literature (some of which has not been translated into English), Spener shows that there never was a phase in which psychologists were guilty of such naïveté. Kant and Comte had already sounded the alarm about introspection's perils in the eighteenth century, and the need to avoid those perils shaped the methods that were developed over the course of the nineteenth. Focussing on psychologists of the Würzburg school, Spener shows how a critical dialogue about the limitations of introspective methods led Wilhelm Wundt and Georg Elias Müller to each find ways of addressing the fact that theories formulated on the basis of introspective evidence are liable to give a distorted picture of those mental phenomena that can be influenced by the acts of recollection and attention that are implicated in the gathering of such evidence. None of these psychologists ever denied that that fact creates methodological difficulties. Scarcely any took those difficulties to be insurmountable, but there was no consensus as to how they should best be handled (and, therefore, no one weak-spot in the attempt to handle them). It is from these early psychologists that Spener inherits the second of the distinctions that define her framework. This second distinction gives a trichotomy between three different modes of introspection. It does so by reference to the acts of recollection and attention on which they depend. If recollection and attention were orthogonal then one would expect there to be four modes of introspection in this taxonomy. We could present them (together with the Brentano-derived vocabulary that Spener uses to refer to them) in a two-by-two table: in Wundt's hands inner attention is a deliberate act of attention to one's experiences. […whereas…] Inner apprehension is the fairly automatic and passive peripheral awareness one has of one's own ongoing conscious states and episodes. (p. 36) This is presented as a ‘first pass’, and Spener later drops the suggestion that the attention definitive of Selbstbeobachtung must be ‘a deliberate act’. That is clearly in line with Wundt's own understanding. His methods aimed to ensure that the attention of experimental participants in a state of innere Wahrnehmung was not inadvertently drawn to the character of their experiences, since this would shift their state to one of Selbstbeobachtung. He therefore took attention to make the difference between those two states, whether that attention is deliberate or inadvertent. The precaution that he would take against attention being drawn to one's experiences was to ensure that that attention was instead held by the events in the world that are being experienced (§3.3.2). His method was therefore based on the assumption that a participant who was paying undivided attention to the external stimulus that gives their experience its first-order content would be enjoying an inner apprehension of that experience, and not inner attention to it. The question on the x axis of our table therefore cannot be whether the introspective subject is attending at all. Instead it asks whether, in addition to whatever attention they might be paying to the first-order content of their experience, they are also attending to themself as the subject of that experience. Wundt takes ‘inner attention’ to be a non-optimal source of evidence for psychology just because it requires attention to be divided in this way, between the external stimuli that are the objects of an introspected experience and the internal states of the person who is that experience's subject. Most basically, inner apprehension might be held to involve awareness of having an experience while undergoing it. Beyond this existential content, a likely candidate for content is perhaps the experiential modality in which the experiencing takes place (visual, auditory, affective, pain, pleasure, etc.). (p. 143) Since the columns of our table are differentiated by the presence or absence of attention to oneself as the subject of the experience that is being introspected, the thing that we need to ask, in order to understand whether or not the unfilled cell of this table represents a genuine possibility, is whether one can apprehend the character of a recollected experience without now paying attention to oneself as having then been the subject of that experience. The empty cell in our table corresponds to a genuine possibility only if one can. I suspect that this is indeed a possibility, since I suspect that just such a capacity for recollection without first-person-directed attention plays a role in explaining the possibility of introspective knowledge of facts in which recollected experiences figure only as an implicit comparison: as when one knows, on simple introspective grounds, that one's mood is lightning, or that a pain is worsening. Although this point may seem like a nicety, it may be of more than philosophical interest. Recollection features prominently in some recent work that attempts to use regimented forms of introspection as a source of scientific evidence. It marks one of the places in which introspection-using psychologists are less cautious than philosophers might like. In Russell Hurlburt's studies using ‘Descriptive Experience Sampling’ (Hurlburt and Ackter, 2006), or in Claire Petitmengin's studies using the ‘Microphenomenological Interview’ (Bitbol and Petitmengin, 2017), experimenters purport to direct their participant's attention to remembered but hitherto unattended aspects of their past experiences, including some from the non-recent past. A better understanding of the ways in which retrospection differs from other forms of introspection might help us to address the question of whether the recollections that these experimenters elicit have the epistemic authority of other first-person reports. Progress towards such an understanding is likely to require further elaboration of the framework that Spener here so helpfully articulates.

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