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On the unreliability of introspection

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Abstract

In his provocative and engaging new book, Perplexities of Consciousness, Eric Schwitzgebel makes a compelling case that introspection is unreliable in the sense that we are prone to ignorance and error in making introspective judgments about our own conscious experience. My aim in this commentary is to argue that Schwitzgebel’s thesis about the unreliability of introspection does not have the damaging implications that he claims it does for the prospects of a broadly Cartesian approach to epistemology.

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Notes

  1. See Bayne and Spener (2010) and Spener (this volume) for defence of the claim that introspection is reliable within a restricted domain of operation.

  2. See Kriegel (this volume) for further discussion of the methodological implications of the unreliability thesis for the science of consciousness.

  3. See MacPherson (2010, pp. 234–240) for a defence of the claim that patients with Anton’s syndrome do not have visual experiences, but merely report falsely that they do.

  4. Burge (1988, p. 657) uses the term ‘brute error’ in a distinct, but related sense to denote errors that “do not result from any sort of carelessness, malfunction, or irrationality on our part.”

  5. See Kriegel and Horgan (2007) for an exposition of this view.

  6. See Smithies (2012a) for an extended discussion and defence of the simple theory of introspection.

  7. I am grateful to Eric Schwitzgebel for pressing me to consider this objection.

  8. See Smithies (2012b) for a similar diagnosis of the problem of the speckled hen. If one’s perceptual experience represents that a hen is 48-speckled, or more realistically, that it has a determinate shade, red-48, then this is what one has justification to believe. Nevertheless, one may be unable to form a justified belief that the hen is red-48, since one’s doxastic dispositions are not sufficiently sensitive to the distinction between representing red-48 versus -47 or -49.

  9. Compare: it may be justified by ordinary standards to withhold belief in logical truths, but if probabilistic coherence is ideally justified, then it is justified by ideal standards to be certain of all logical truths.

  10. This is not something that Schwitzgebel disputes. See Schwitzgebel (2012, pp. 42–43) for the claim that introspective judgments must reflect, or at least aim to reflect, “some relatively direct sensitivity to the target state”.

  11. See Smithies (forthcoming) for this account of higher-order evidence.

References

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eric Schwitzgebel, Daniel Stoljar and an audience at the Pacific Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in April 2012 for helpful comments and discussion.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University, 350 University Hall, 230 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Declan Smithies

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  1. Declan Smithies
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Correspondence to Declan Smithies.

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For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Eric Schwitzgebel’s, Perplexities of Consciousness.

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Smithies, D. On the unreliability of introspection. Philos Stud 165, 1177–1186 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0150-6

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