[00:00:01.620] - Wesley You're listening to Journal Entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode Eric Schwitzgebel's talks about his paper, The Unreliability of Naive Introspection, published in Philosophical Review in 2008. Eric is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, where he studies the connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind, the nature of belief and several other topics you could read about on his blog The Splintered Mind. [00:00:35.270] - Eric In this paper, I argue that our ordinary introspective judgments about our currently ongoing conscious experiences are often grossly mistaken, even about what you might think, were big, major pieces of experience. We go badly wrong in our introspective judgments about our experience. In the first few sections of the paper, I give some examples of cases where I think it's plausible that people go badly wrong. And then I walk through some responses to objections. [00:01:12.360] - Eric So let me define conscious experience. I think the best way to fight to define conscious experience is by pointing to examples. Don't think you can actually do a good reductive or analytic definition of it or a functional definition of it that doesn't beg the question against some of the major contending theories. So I think when you're defining consciousness, you just have to think about examples. So you currently have some visual experience. Probably if you're not blind and your eyes are open, you're thinking about it. [00:01:39.420] You might have conscious experiences of tunes running through your head or saying something to yourself might have a conscious experience of an emotional reaction of say you dropped something on your toe, you have an experience of pain. Those are the kinds of things that are examples of conscious experience. When I say that we're unreliable in our judgments about conscious experiences, in our introspective judgments about them, what I mean is that we're unreliable in reaching judgments about those sorts of experiences. [00:02:11.050] By introspection. Well, I have a theory of what introspection is, but I don't feel like we need to get into it for this paper. Whatever process it is by which we ordinarily reach judgments like this is what my pain experiences like these are what my visual experiences are like, these are the emotional experiences that I'm having, those sorts of things. So whatever process normally produces those judgments. That's what I'm going to call introspection. [00:02:36.610] So what I think is when we engage in the normal process, when ordinary people engage in the normal processes by which we reach judgments about those sorts of things, we actually very often go badly wrong in the judgments that we produce. I've said that we're unreliable. By that, I mean that we make pretty serious, pretty large mistakes a substantial portion of the time. More often than you might intuitively think was the case. And for purposes of comparison, I compare it with the frequency with which we make mistakes or are confused about our judgments about ordinary middle sized objects around us. [00:03:16.900] So here I'm holding up a teacup, right? It would be surprising if I were to make a mistake about, oh, there's a cup in my hand and it's easy for me to make perceptual judgments about the nature of the cup. Like it's a little more than half full. It's got a liquid and it's kind of brown. Right. It's got a handle on it in the side. All that stuff is like super easy. [00:03:35.080] But the same level of detail about something like your emotional experience or your visual experience is actually quite hard. And often we're stumped where we come up with wrong answers. When we reach those kinds of judgments. [00:03:49.280] So there are two ways in which introspection can be unreliable. One is that it could deliver the wrong answer and another is that it could fail to deliver an answer at all. Compare with secretary. A secretary could be unreliable if he botches the job or could be unreliable if he doesn't do the job at all, right. To be unreliable is to fail to do what you're supposed to do. Right. So. Or a stock quote program could be unreliable because it gives the wrong price or because it fails to give any price at all. All right. So that's a sense of reliability that I mean, and I think that introspection can be unreliable in both ways. [00:04:27.390] If a stock quote program gives you the right price 50% more than 50%, 51% of the time, would you say that's a reliable program? No! Of course you wouldn't. If Charles Schwab is giving you stock prices and 10% of the time they're wrong, you don't say oh right it's a reliable program because they're right 90% of the time [00:04:27.460] I'm hesitant to use a percentage criterion for reliability, partly because I don't think a 50 percent cut off is always a good way of thinking about reliability, as the stock program example suggests. And partly because, you know, how do you count up judgments, right? If you do lots of really easy ones, then maybe it's easy to get over 50 percent, whereas if you're doing lots of fine grained ones, then it's going to be hard to get over 50 percent. I think the better comparison is thinking in terms of similar sized types of judgments about external objects. [00:05:01.870] The reason I got into thinking about this is that I was in a developmental psychology laboratory at the time with Alison Gopnik and I was reading all of this stuff and talking with Alison about how bad children are in their judgments about their own minds. [00:05:17.990] And at the same time a was reading all this philosophical literature about how we have this special, maybe perfect knowledge of what's going on in our own minds. And I just it didn't seem to fit very well with me. I mean, children make really amazingly it's funny actually when you read literature like amazingly what we would think of as silly mistakes about their own minds and other people's minds. So why would children be so bad? But adults, like completely perfect? And at the same time I was also reading history of psychology and introspective psychologists didn't think we were perfect in our judgments about our minds. [00:05:52.930] In fact, Titchner, the great early American introspective psychologist thought that you needed a lot of training to become good in your introspective judgments about your experience. I've also was influenced by I read a lot of Eastern philosophy. So in Asian traditions, in meditative traditions, it's often thought that it's difficult actually, and requires a lot of meditative practice to get to be good about your judgments, about your experiences. There are all these things in my mind that we're pushing toward thinking we might not be so good in our judgments about experiences. [00:06:26.380] While the philosophical literature in the 20th century, when I started thinking about this in the late 20th century, was pretty unanimous in thinking either we are perfect in our judgments that our minds we can't actually even go wrong about it possibly. Or well, maybe we're not perfect, but we're very good. We're very reliable. [00:06:44.250] And I thought, you know, we're much less reliable than either of those kind of either end of the spectrum of debate as it existed at the time. That's so was actually that kind of that was what inspired me to do it more than any particular personal experience. [00:07:01.240] With the emotion case I chose it because it's an easy place to start. Everyone knows the case of the guy banging his fist on the table, red-faced saying, I'm not angry. [00:07:13.480] It's like come on dude you're angry, right. He's got some phenomenology of anger, some experience of anger going on there. We're pretty sure that. Right. But he's wrong about it. Right. So even people who are optimists about introspection generally can kind of say, oh, yeah, well, you know, maybe an emotional cases, you can kind of go wrong. So it's an easy place to start start the case because it seems like we do often go wrong in our judgments about our own emotion. [00:07:44.090] I think also of my my wife this to the extent there is some personal like family stuff in this, right. My wife knows my emotions better than I do. She reads my face better than I introspect. Right. And I think a lot of people may have that experience of their spouses can tell better what emotions they're undergoing then they themselves. Especially because you get invested in having certain kinds of emotions and having others. [00:08:05.000] So particular emotions we can go wrong about in particular ways. You might not know that you're angry. You might not know that you're feeling a little sad. Right. It's not totally obvious. Now, a lot of times it's really vivid emotions. You can tell I am having that emotion. But one of the things that's I think a little harder. And remember the case of the cup. Right. So not only can I reach the judgment very easily, there's a cup here, but I can also reach the judgment very easily that it's got one handle on the side. [00:08:34.810] It's about half full. And all that stuff like middle-sized features are pretty easy with emotion. And I think actually with all experiences, but we do with emotion to start, right? It can be you can it can't be easy if you have a vivid emotion and you're not invested in seeing yourself otherwise to say I I'm feeling really bored right now for example, right now that's just like there's a cup there. That's the equivalent. Right. Now, let's think about the character of that boredom, I think. [00:09:02.130] Think about questions of middle-sized structural questions like does it have a handle over here? How full is it? Think about how do you experience that boredom. Exactly right. Is it a heaviness in your face? Is spread around your body? Is there a cognitive aspect as well as the emotional aspect? How does it fluctuating in some way or kind of staying constant? Those questions I mean, you can reach judgments about them, but they're not like easy and obvious the way the question equivalent kinds of questions about a middle sized object with a cup are. You can certainly imagine people going wrong about such things. Maybe yourself then if you look at the history of psychology and philosophy, psychologists and philosophers say totally different things all over the map about the these kinds of mid-level structural details about emotional experience. Right. Like referring back to the eastern tradition is common in meditative traditions to think that emotions are things that come and go pretty fast. [00:09:55.200] Most of my Western friends and I ask them, think of emotions as things that endure for long periods of time. Some people think emotions are really basically bodily experiences. Other people think that they're, you know, but they might have a bodily component. But there's much more going on than just kind of perception of your bodily experience. All that kind of stuff, both in the general case and in the specific case, I think is pretty hard. So, you know, the idea that we're infallible judges of every aspect of our emotional experience, we couldn't possibly go wrong in any of our introspective judgments about our currently ongoing experiences of emotion. [00:10:31.550] Even that seems just that seems to me very difficult to sustain in light of just these kinds of reflections. Both personal reflections and reflections from the history of philosophy and psychology. And I don't think it's just that we don't know what words to attach to a perfectly obvious phenomenology or that we're confused about what the causes of the emotions are, I mean, and think those are hard too. But it's also just that, you know, the experience does not present itself with the same kind of obviousness as the experience, the sensory experiences of ordinary things around us. [00:11:08.180] So I think we can be quite wrong in our judgments about our emotion. You know, people say that they care a lot about their happiness, for example. Right. You think introspecting well about your emotional experience would be a really good thing to do to improve your happiness. Notice what kinds of things make you happy? What kinds of things don't make you happy? But people don't really do that very well. I don't think people have a very Dan Haber instance and wonderful work on this. [00:11:32.800] Very good. I think people do a very good job of noticing what their emotions are. I don't think people do a very good job of noticing what actually makes them happy versus makes them unhappy. I noticed, you know, one time was working on this paper. I noticed I was out there in the garden weeding and I thought of myself as hating weeding. I think it's unpleasant chore. You're out there. I like I think waiting. I'm happy. [00:11:54.490] I'm happy. All right. Like, how did I never notice that I actually kind of enjoy weeding? Right. But this you know, we have this whole theory like, well, it's a chore. We think we're not going to like it. We don't actually notice it. So this is one thing, again, maybe harking back to the eastern traditions. Right. People are not so good at noticing these kinds of things. They say that they care about their experience, but they don't show it in terms of where they direct their attention. [00:12:22.090] If you look at how people actually choose, what they actually think about how they actually they're revealed preferences, as it were. They care a lot more about being successful in social tasks and in accomplishing goals that they care about than they do about what their stream of experience is in that process. [00:12:43.730] So now let's talk about why our introspection of our current currently ongoing visual experiences also unreliable. So let me just. Start with the case of how broad a field of clarity you have. [00:12:57.310] Right, so most people, when I ask them, will say that there's this there's a kind of center of vision where visions pretty clear and you see shape and color pretty precisely. And then there's a periphery to it. And that's probably right. Right. And then there's this interesting question of like, how broad is that field of clarity? [00:13:19.560] And most people who haven't thought a lot about the phenomenology of vision or the structure of vision, at least that I've spoken to in our culture will tend to say that oh, well, I see there's a kind of stable range of clarity that's maybe 60 degrees of arc or maybe 30 degrees of arc. It's all kind of stable and clear at the same time. And beyond that, there is a periphery that's easy. But in fact, I don't think that's likely to be correct. [00:13:46.050] So one thing that you can do to think about this is, well, we know that there is an area in the eye called the folbia. This is about 1 to 2 degrees of visual art. That's about the size of your thumbnail held at arm's length. So if you hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail. OK. That's about how much you get really precise shape and color input into your eye at any one moment. And then you move your eyes around like five times a second. [00:14:13.590] So what happens, I think, is that people will, when they're thinking about how clear their visual experiences or what the structure is of the visual field is, they'll saccade they'll look one direction and I'll say it's clear there will look another direction. Directions say, oh, that's clear there, too. That's clear. That's clear. So they keep looking around and saccading so that wherever they look, it's clear. And that leads them at least within a range of natural saccadic movement. You don't usually saccade way one hundred degrees, right. [00:14:41.940] Within a range of natural saccadic movement. You think, OK, that's all clear at the same time. But if you introspect more carefully, you can notice for one thing you can do is you can notice a part of your visual field, attend to it while you're not saccading, you're not looking directly at it. And when you do that, you notice it's actually like I've got my thumbnail out here. Right. And I'm looking this direction. And then my thumbnail is not very clear. [00:15:04.880] Right. You can do that and the various things you can do with it. But I think actually once you start thinking about it enough, it becomes more plausible that what's going on with your visual experience is that there's a very narrow range region of clarity that bounces around a fairly hazy background. I could be wrong about that, but that's what I think. And if I'm right, then most people are wrong about the basic structure of visual experience. Notice this is a really simple basic fact about visual experience, right? [00:15:35.150] Do you have a kind of a 30 degree region of clarity against that stable, against a hazy background, or do you have a tiny region of fast moving clarity against a much, you know, a much more generally hazy backdrop? Those are pretty big differences between the way visual experience could be. And if I'm right. Most people have the first view and they're wrong. But even if I'm wrong. Right. I get to win. Right. This is one of the wonderful things about being a skeptic. [00:16:02.450] Right. Well, I tried. I'm wrong. Right. And the people who agree with me. There are definitely other philosophers and psychologists agree with me about this. They're wrong, too. So their introspection failed them. So someone's getting it wrong. So that's one way of thinking about how we could be pretty radically wrong about the basic structure of our visual experience, despite the fact that we have this visual experience like all the time. [00:16:24.290] This is so ordinary. If you think about it carefully and you get it wrong, then right. Isn't that kind of amazing? We don't like we don't do that with ordinary things around us. You visually experience. Now, you might say, OK, well, look, I'm having this visual experience of this cup here, I'm holding up the cup in the video. Right. Had this visual experience of this cup. Right. So I'm having a visual experience of a shape like this in a color like that. [00:16:47.170] And I'm certainly right about that visual experiencing the shape in this color. I think that's probably correct. But this is what I think is going on. You're reaching a judgment first about the outside world and then derivatively reaching a judgment about your experience. Right. So your good knowledge of the outside world serves as a crutch to give you knowledge about your experience. So what know bette and first is there's a couple here. This is the color. [00:17:12.410] And then you make this inference, oh, well, if there's a cup there of that shape, I must be having a visual experience of that shape. If there's a color there of that shape, I must be having a color experience of that shape. Right. So it's not that introspection adds anything whereas reliable. It's kind of like just a little hook that you're putting on the end of an outward process is more reliable. And I think probably when the perceptual experience is correct and you have an unusual visual experience as a result, that inference is gonna get messed up. So this is kind of turning so Descartes. This is I call this move turning Descartes on his head. Right. So it's one standard interpretation of Descartes. You know, of course, Descartes scholars argue about all this stuff. Right. But one standard interpretation of Descartes is that he thought what you know, first and most certainly use your own visual experience or your own sensory experience, your own experiences in general, and then you infer from your certain knowledge of those to how things are in the outside world. [00:18:07.540] And that second inference can be often is shaky. But I want to say is the reverse of that. Well, you know, first and best is the sensory stuff around you. The middle-sized dry goods in your environment. That's what you know, first and best. And then you make a kind of sketchy inference back to what your experience is of those items. So one of the things that Cartesian skeptics sometimes say or people in this Cartesian skeptical mood sometimes say is that, well, look, you know, there you can doubt the outside world, but you can't doubt your own experience of that world, right. [00:18:42.100] That's an important epistemic difference between the two. Right. So you could be a brain in a vat being manipulated by genius neuroscientists. There could be a demon out there is deceiving you. But you know for sure that you're thinking and you're having this experience and all that. Right. So there's a kind of certainty that experience has that the outside world doesn't have. So a lot of people think that. A lot of people think that we do have at least that epistemic difference between our experience, our knowledge of our experience and our knowledge of the outside world. [00:19:11.860] But I actually don't think that works because if you allow the existence of evil demons and neuroscientists, I don't see any reason that they couldn't manipulate your brain to right so as to create the experience, to say, for example, the experience of seeing read while creating also in you the judge the judgment that you're not seeing red or vice versa. [00:19:33.610] As long as these things are ontologically separable enough that one could occur without the other. And I don't see any reason to think they aren't ontologically separable. Then you could have one without the other with a good enough evil demon or a good enough genius neuroscientist. Right. So you can have that same level of Cartesian skepticism about your own experience as you have about the outside world. So I don't I actually don't think that Cartesian skeptical argument works to create a principal distinction between our knowledge of our experience and our knowledge of the outside world. [00:20:10.240] A third kind of case that I thought about in this paper was whether there's what philosophers call the phenomenology of thinking. And I was really struck by this because I think it was in 2002, I went to this summer seminar for a week in Santa Cruz, where everyone is debating as a bunch of professional philosophers, mostly early career philosophers. Maybe 15 of us, 20 of us were all debating whether thought has some distinctive phenomenology beyond the phenomenology of imagery and interspeech. [00:20:40.230] Right. So think of the Prince of Wales right now. Maybe you had a visual image, maybe you had an interspeech experience or something like that. Set those aside. Everybody knows those occur, I think. Right. Was there also some kind of distinctive phenomenology of the thought of the Prince of Wales over and above the phenomenology of that interspeech or that image that you had? Well, it turns out, is that philosophers totally disagree about this. [00:21:09.130] And psychologists who thought about it totally disagree about it. And we argued about it for a week. We couldn't agree. And so it's kind of amazing because, of course, rethinking the whole time. Right. The thoughts are as central to our experiences as that seminar table is right with. We didn't disagree about the existence of the seminar table. We knew lots about the seminar table. That was easy to know. Right. But like, do you have a phenomenology of thought? That was really hard to figure out. [00:21:36.310] And it wasn't, I think, just that everybody knew exactly what was going on and was just we have different theories about it in different words to describe. It's totally obvious experience. It's actually pretty introspectively hard to figure out whether there is some additional phenomenology of thinking over and above the phenomenology of interspeech and imagery. So this is a case where, like on one view, there's this whole modality of inner experience. That's there all the time or a lot of the time for you to discover, and some people are trying really hard to discover it, aren't finding it. [00:22:11.320] That's on one view. There is a phenomenology thought, or if you think there's no phenomenology thought, then people thought who invented this whole type of experience that doesn't actually even exist. Right. This is like amazingly, these are huge errors. It almost beggars the imagination to think that people really could be that wrong. And know I think people were that wrong. Right. It's really hard to know. This is not at all an obvious thing, right. [00:22:38.050] When you really try to do it introspectively hard. So this is the this is in the paper. This is the third main example that I go into some detail about the case where we might be pretty radically wrong, pretty unreliable in our judgments about our currently ongoing stream of experience, even when we're try hard, even in favorable circumstances of introspection, even with sincere effort. [00:23:02.420] Pain experience is probably the best experience for the type of experience for the friend of introspection. I think one reason for that is that unlike sensory experiences and unlike emotional experiences, pain experiences invite attention to the experience itself. This is actually something I say in the paper, but it's something I think. So when you have an experience of pain in your toe, you attend to the experience itself, right? Usually when you having a visual experience, you're attending to the objects out there, not attending the experience. Right. So we are in more of a habit of attending to our experiences of pain. [00:23:39.460] So that's one reason that pain experience we tend to be a little better about, I think, than other types of experience. And yet I don't think we're so great again. Here I want to distinguish between the course is there pain versus is there not thing which often for all kinds of experience will tend to get right and in strong, vivid cases. Right. Want to distinguish between strong that is cases where we're likely to get it right and less vivid cases right like right now. Thinking about whether I have been having a headache. Right. Actually, introspecting right now is not totally clear. Maybe I have a little bit of a headache or maybe there's just a little bit of tension there. You know, I'm not totally sure. It's not for non strong paines non obvious pains. It's not totally clear that we're always right. What's the difference between a little discomfort or an itch and a pain or a stretch and a pain? [00:24:39.660] Also, again, like we were doing with the case of emotional experience or distinguish between the courses level of granularity. Is there a pain there versus more still large facts, but not the very top level. Like, what is the basic structure of that pain? How is that a pain experienced? Right there, I think. We often go wrong in ways or at least are unreliable in our judgments, in ways that are uncommon for our ordinary perceptions of objects around us. [00:25:13.300] So, for example, psychologists will distinguish sometimes between affective and sensory components of pain right. And though and there are pains that are associated with different kinds of pain fibers and different kinds of the speed at which those fibers work. Right. So if you touch something super hot. Right. And then pull your finger back. Right. There is this fast pain just like the sharp sense or Yah. [00:25:37.260] Right. And then there's a little bit slower, a little delay. There's also kind of more throbbing thing. Right. So part of the structure of pain is that there's like this more fast sensory thing. Sometimes more fast sensory thing versus slower, more affective negative feeling thing. That's kind of less since sharp but more motivational, more powerful. That's maybe if, you know, some people are right, that's maybe a basic fact about the structural experience of pain. But it's not like totally obvious and introspection. That's what's going on. [00:26:05.760] Now, maybe, as I describe it, you can kind of like, oh, yeah, it's kind of familiar, but it's not like easy like, oh, yeah, this cup's got a handle here. So though, kind of. Pretty large layers of granularity of the structural experience of pain. I think we can often find it difficult to get right. So that's my that's my brief against being super reliable about pain. [00:26:29.630] The title of paper is The Unreliability of Naive Introspection. Right. And so that's on purpose because I think that there's a possibility that either something like Titchnerian introspective training or something like meditative practice done the right kind of way could make your introspective judgments less than naive and thus reliable. [00:26:50.240] We should have this goal. We should totally turn on ourselves and try to figure this out. And we're pretty crappy at it. [00:26:56.280] And, you know, so that kind of stinks, but it's not totally hopeless. I think we can make some progress. So, you know, the fact that something's hard doesn't mean it's not worthwhile as long as it's like at least possible to make progress towards. So, yeah, if I was a absolutely 100 percent flat out skeptic, there's nothing you can do to at all improve your introspective knowledge. Then I would say, yeah, no point. [00:27:21.940] Right. But I don't think that. I mean, I think it's pretty hard and we're often we wronger than we think we are. But it's not that there's no hope and it's not that we're never right. I think there are various practices or techniques by which we might be able to get better. But also, I think the empirical evidence is on all of these is pretty sketchy still. Mean, you'd think you'd think we'd have better empirical evidence on these things. [00:27:47.060] But, you know, it was kind of amazing how little there is out there. That's really solid skills. So I think those remain open questions how those techniques work. I have one paper on Titchner's view of introspective training where I I went through and I read his whole two thousand page manual of introspective training and I tried a lot of the exercises I I reconstructed on the web. I don't know if it's still I should try it, make sure it still works. [00:28:13.190] One of his introspective exercises know so you can listen for they're called different tones in order to experience and you train yourself to hear. And it's kinda interesting. So I did all the stuff thinking about how Titchner trains people introspectively. And I came to a pretty mixed assessment about that. I don't think he decisively established that he could train people with his methods to be better introspectors. But I also don't think that it's obvious that you can't. What happened in history psychology was that kind of behaviorism won. [00:28:45.200] And then later, functionalism won. And the whole idea of introspective creating kind of fell off fell off of the psychological mainstream project before we could really figure out under what conditions introspective training would work or fail to work. [00:29:02.720] One of the things that I'm hoping for, for the future of introspection is that we figure out how to create good, introspective reports, right. Not just ask people in a really simple way, but really think about the methodology of getting good introspective reports. [00:29:18.950] And then at the same time, we do some sort of neuroscientific and or cognitive behavioral measures. Right. And we look to see whether the neuroscientific and cognitive behavioral measures corroborate or fail to corroborate introspective reports. Right. And if you get like the inspector report says, yes, the visual experience was fluctuating in and out like this. Right. Oh, and if you look at visual areas associated with vision in the cortex. Right. They were fluctuating and the same. [00:29:47.970] Same way. Right. And then there's behavioral evidence that supports that, too. So those introspective reports are probably. Right. Find stuff like that. And you can say, oh, these conditions, introspective reports seem to be doing pretty well with other conditions. Maybe they are falling apart from the behavioral or physiological measures. So we don't know as well what's going on. Right. Those kinds of studies, I think we're only starting to do. But I think that there's a lot of potential in that direction for figuring out more about using introspection as a tool for understanding our stream of conscious experience. [00:30:23.470] - Wesley That's it for today's episode. Visit our Web site at journal entries dot fireside dot fm for more information about Eric Schwitzgebel, his work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode.