Consciousness Live! with Maja Spener (S7 E8)

0:01 Okay, we are live. Joining me this early morning for some, not not so early for others, but uh for some of us. Uh joining me this morning, a very special guest, uh Ma May Ma Spinner. Um Maya, thank you for joining me this morning. Um I hope it's not too early uh there. Not for me. Yeah, not for you. Exactly. Great. Um, well, I wonder if before we get started this morning, if you could tell us a little bit about who

0:34 you are and what you do for those who might not know you. Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on. Um, so I'm a philosopher uh working at the University of Birmingham in the UK and my main interest has been on introspection, but I look at that specifically in the context of how that's used in various kinds of theorizing about the mind. And um

1:08 what that means is that my work sort of falls in intersections of different areas. Philosophy of science and philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, epistemology. Um and growing out of that work, I have increasingly strong interests in the history of psychology and um the nature of abilities and on uh the science of metacognition. Of course, still on sort of introspection in the

1:41 philosophy of mind and self-nowledge, but these other areas are growing in sort of focus now. Interesting. Okay. Um, yeah. And so, how it's been two years since your book on introspection came out? Is that uh in the beginning of 2004 2024? Okay. Oh, so it's only been a year. Okay. Um, relatively recent. Well, it's a great book. I hope that that people read it uh and that um it gets a a good

2:15 reception. I enjoyed reading it. So, um, I thought it was very thorough and and well written and take you through it in a in a way that's, uh, easy to understand. Um, and one of the things that you mentioned at the beginning and that you just mentioned currently right now that I wanted to kind of bring up at the beginning was the early psychologist because in your standard textbook psychology uh intro class, you often find a story about them um that you want to clear the

2:49 record on or or set it uh set it a bit straight. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what that story is and and how you uh aim to correct the standard story. Okay. Yeah, that is an important um I guess um endeavor of mine to do that. Um partly because it's a very very interesting area um of psychology and philosophy. And what I'm talking about is sort of the 19th century really. But um that's

3:24 I'm only restricting it and in the early 20th I'm only restricting it that way because that's as far as I got and so I would like to go back further. Okay. Um and I have looked mainly at um psychology in Germany with a little bit again that there needs I feel the need to expand out to the other all the other European and countries in America especially also some of Russia. But the so the standard narrative I'm sure everybody is familiar with is that

3:56 there were these introspectionist psychologists that just went and asked themselves, oh, you know, what is the mind like? So, let me introspect a little bit and let me train myself to really be good at it by just doing more of it. And and then here's my theory. And what you find actually is an incredible sophistication and modern way of approaching um work using introspection. Mhm. So much so that I think that we should

4:33 in order to theorize with introspection, we should look to these people to these this body of work to really find obviously technology has moved on. Um but we can find just theoretical distinctions or tricks of the trade that have been developed that are perfectly in line with um work that can be that that is done today. and that would be helpful and enriching to look at. So, uh I don't know how um how much detail to give but because

5:07 there's just so much of it and I'm interested now just in the I'm just interested as a as a more from a historical point of view just in itself in this area. But one thing that strikes me is that these psychologists were also often philosophers and they were well-versed in, you know, all the philosophy that went on in philosophy of science as well as in in philosophy of mind such as it was. And so you have just a very rich

5:43 conception. These people thought hard about what what is what is psychology as distinct from philosophy as distinct from physiology and what is the theoretical framework that we're bringing to investigating the mind? What what is observation supposed to tell us? And there were different views about that. Um and they all sort of got discussed and um worked out in adversarial um discussions about this. So yeah, I I could say more, but I I um

6:17 Well, I mean, one of the things that um I want you to say a little bit more about is the general theme of the unreliability of introspection and the kind of downfall of introspectionist psychology often in the textbooks, you know, due to the rise of behaviorism. um where it doesn't it doesn't really seem when you really pay attention to the actual history of what happened that there was this kind of uh mass disarray confusion of how the method uh and then

6:52 an abandonment of it because of the rig rigorous demands of uh scientific methodology or something like that which is the sort of standard part of the standard picture I think. Yeah. So what I do in the book um and I say that I do that sort of in developing it by finding it reflected very much in this early period of psychology is distinguishing between two senses of introspection. One is the introspection as a type of first person access or

7:27 types of first a kind of first person access a mental capacity and introspection as an inquiry where why is it an introspective inquiry an introspective method. It's because it deploys some of those introspective um mental capacities in whatever the in you know carrying out the inquiry or the investigation. Mhm. And the early psychologists especially people like Wilhunt um really were very good but also William um William James

8:03 for example very good at distinguishing these two senses. It didn't always sort of leap off the page, but when you look at how they did things, they thought that what they were doing is carrying out this meth this inquiry, this scientific inquiry using introspection. But when it came to the method, there was so much more to um introspection as method than just the deployment of this mental capacity. And in particular, they had they they they drew attention to there being different types of those

8:35 that you could use. You could use a form of attention uh introspect introspectively attending to your ongoing conscious situation. You could use retrospection. Mhm. So a form of memory or this other thing that typically is associated with brantano a kind of um nonfocal side awareness, peripheral awareness. you could exploit that as well. Um in um trying to gather this data

9:07 in psychology, they all felt that we needed to use some form of first person access, some form of introspective access. And then they were very good at um thinking about how you might put together a particular form of uh a particular method where you're using a particular um introspective access form or type of introspective access. And depending on what your goal was, your your target was, you'd need to have the experimental setup in the right way to um support and compensate

9:44 weaknesses or bring out strengths of this particular type of introspective access. So there were of course also people um especially following on from wound his some of his students um which are the the kind of the much more the people we're thinking of today when we're having this caricature of the introspectionists who basically did much more this qualitative they they ask you to hey focus on for example um

10:18 you know answer this question about ancient they were also um cultured something about the ancient Greeks you know think about the ancient Greeks in these ways now now tell me how did this thought go you know and then there would be a half an hour conversation about you know and so the this kind of gathering of qualitative reports was then thought to be what introspectionists did but actually that was just one type that was also criticized greatly by others in the field. So you have actually people like

10:51 wouldn't they're much more psychopysicists. Yeah. Than um than what we now standardly think of as introspectionists. Yeah. That's interesting. I I I want to just by way of a parenthesis here, I wonder about this other kind of standard line that you find in the intro textbooks. uh so often they'll contrast like William James as a functionalist about the he's interested in questions about what the function of the mind could be as opposed to the introspectionists who were trying to

11:25 understand the fundamental elements of the mind and how they fit together uh which might even be distinguished from the gestalt psychologists who were interested in a different question alto together so do you think that that part of the Sanders story holds up. Um, and it's just this question about the introspectionist that gets muddled or is it a general feature or do you not know? I wonder. Yeah, I'm not sure. Okay. So I think parts of this story pick up pick

12:02 up on on trends and in particular you have the one dividing line in the in this period is the increasing influence of the positivists on doing science more generally but also on especially doing psychology. And you have two competing pictures that um play out in these different views and where the Kestalt theorists and people like that fall on one side and other

12:35 people fall on another side. And the the the two pictures are the what you might call the explanatory picture of science and the descriptive picture of science. So the descriptive picture is the positivists who think that and this this concerns what observation is supposed to do for you and if you're a psychologist what introspective observation is supposed to do for you. So the descriptive um picture says that you're not to um bring theory to what observation tells you, but everything

13:12 must be derived from observation. Theory too. So theory can go beyond what you can observe. And that means that and this is the it is the radical empiricist positive this thought that the scientific theory in the end or psychology psychological theory in the end is a very economical summary of the regularities and functional relationships in that you find in observation in experience. And that's contrasted with the so-called

13:47 explanatory or speculative more speculative picture where you observe and then you explain the idea is that you causally explain what you observe the regularities by positing positing something that causally explains what's going on there but where your theory really can go beyond what you're strictly observing. So like co cognitive science is a example of this of which side of the side where you're positing something to explain what you're observing going beyond.

14:20 That's right. I mean, I think nowadays we I mean, we're not radical empiricists, uh, rabbit positivists anymore, though, I think the echoes of that really do hang around sometimes, um, in in some weird ways. And that is an interest of mine looking at the history to to then bring those questions to contemporary theorizing and ask what the background conception is here that uh underlies you know the connection

14:53 between observation and and theory and but villain for example was on the explanatory side and he was superseded by his students who became more and more uh taken by the descriptive side. But then you have there too strands that go that grow apart where there's influences from say Brentano which is the the James James kind of is is more in line with that I think and and the the later Oswite Kooper and the Bzborg school they are in line with a

15:29 kind of descriptive uh picture but rejecting what Titner went on to do um which was the sensational atomist uh conception of uh psychology. So there you have really two strands that differ from Vontigan who was really just a straightforward much more as I said he's quite modern. Right. Right. Yeah. He's interested just in reaction times and things of that nature. Absolutely. And um but also in terms of how he thought um

16:02 how restricted he was about what introspective observation could deliver for him. What it could deliver was good description of the phenomena to be explained and then constraints on theorizing where you develop your theory and apply it always in line with observational data. But you wouldn't you did he didn't think that you needed to derive the the um in fact he thought that that was silly to derive the the um the theory itself from the observation.

16:34 But so the interesting bit about the other side that that's kind of what superseded bunt in the end this descriptive sweep of the positivists on the one hand it was Titna who I think he's responsible for a lot of what people think now about um introspectionists because he had this he wanted to say that um what we want to do is explain complex psychological phenomena in terms of very basic sensory elements,

17:11 sensational elements where you could introspect these and then see how they combined to form the more complex uh psychological phenomena. And one reason why he did that was because he was a reductivist um and wanted to in the end discharge sort of experience in being able to account for the sensory elements or sensational elements in terms of physiological underlying um physiological processes. So you would really have absorbed

17:44 um psychology into uh physiology and then downwards. So so that was that was one aim. Um and and so that that this is a part of the source of the debate over imageless thoughts. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And that went then with with Kuba where Kuba rejected this idea of sens of elementism. Um and I can say something later if you want about wood also shared a certain elementism but it was very very different from Titchner's view much more

18:18 sensible in a way. Um but the but so inspired by Brentano and and also then going into the Gestal theorists, you have people like KBA focusing just on different aspects of experience, not on the on the on the basic sort of sensory or perceptual elements, but he wanted to think of more higher um cognitive elements like um judgment and thought Mhm. and uh didn't think that you could

18:52 do this reductive thing at all. Yet hanging on to the descriptive picture of thinking you wouldn't you don't want to draw your theory from outside what information what um experience gives you in obser what what you can obtain in observation. And um that's how you get a lot of the kind of positing these things just into into the experience as something introspectable in some in some way. Mhm. Whereas Wood never did any of that. Right. Yeah. Okay. So if we So So why why then I mean I guess

19:29 I have a couple questions. one that I can't help asking but that's kind of an aside is about why these guys thought that sensations were a part of physiology as opposed to psychology where as now I would assume that we think that sensation is as you know uh the be the beginning of perception as you know this process that begins when sensation ends with perception or both squarely within the purview of uh psychology and the cognitive sciences. Um, so is why did they think it was

20:05 physiology? Is this uh Yeah, I'm not Yeah, why did they why did they think that? So, I'm not quite sure about exactly the theory that they had. Okay. But the idea is just that if you get experience analyzed into very simple components that seem not further analyzable in terms of what you can introspect and you know what you've you've reached the

20:38 atoms of experience. Yeah. And these are very very simple sensory elements. Then it's just the thought that look we will be able to at some point reduce these to something physiological. Uhhuh. Right. So but they didn't think the higher level stuff itself could be reduced to something physiological just directly. Well no no and and I mean that's that's the business of psychology, right? you you you show how the higher level stuff comes about in terms of how it's um put together from the simple components plus

21:14 principles of combination or synthesis. Okay. And that that p that picture I again that doesn't that's not so wild right I mean in in the end that that kind of basic idea we we do that all the time we want to explain what something is that seems a compound in terms of the simpler elements and how they're put together right um and um shared that picture very much um it's just that he thought that introspection wasn't going to deliver to you these simple elements

21:48 They were going to be a matter of abstraction, right? And posits in the end that you would get via exact observation, introspective observation, but you couldn't glean them from the observation itself, you know, right there. Whereas Titchner thought your training can needed to introspective training was going to help you to get through the naive overlay down onto the the sheer bottom you know basic level of experience. Nothing like that was true

22:21 for he he he didn't think that you could do that. But if introspective observation delivered data to you that helped you maybe isolate and abstract but via a kind of abstraction what these basic elements would be and but he was more interested in the principles of combination and there he had really interesting views. He liked Mills analogy the mental chemistry that's often mentioned. Yeah. He liked that very much. Um and he thought that there was something very right about it in that you had to think about um the basic

22:56 components, sensory components uh sensor sensational components as being put together in a way where you can have properties emerging at the compound on at the complex level or compound level that weren't had by the elements. And so that's like in chemistry you have whatever an alkan propane made from hydrogen and carbon. Right. Right. And so propane has properties that aren't had by either

23:28 hydrogen carbon but it's how they're put together, how they bond that um means that at that propane gets to have those properties. where he disagreed with Mill. Mill really took that quite seriously and thought you could still derive those higher level properties in some sense from the properties had by the lower level and how they combine. Whereas Bunt was open to thinking that there are some what he called creative synthesis um like that truly emergent properties in the sense that they cannot be analyzed in terms of their base. That's right.

24:02 Yeah. And you um I think so I haven't looked at this debate yet that's um I think Eric Mandelbal and people like that talk about you know associationism versus um other ways. So that debate went on there too. Um the empiricists were much more straightforwardly just associationists whereas bunt wanted to um this is very hard for a German by the way W and and V's in in succession but anyway yeah well I we don't know how to

24:35 say it either. So V is fine with me. No it's just that if there's a W word right after that's what trips me out. Oh, I got it. Uhhuh. V went w um so B um used extensively in his um account for what how how compounds get made especially at higher levels the Kian idea of a perception. And that was part of the debate that um went on in psychology at the time like

25:08 what are the right principles of association? And again I'd be interested to see how in today's um I haven't really mapped those things on yet properly how apperception versus association plays out in in the kind of in the modern terminology. Yeah. Yeah. That's because I was thinking the same thing as you were going through. I was thinking that one view sounds very human in a sense and the other view sounds contean in a sense. So it it does seem like that these uh early psychologists not were

25:43 aware of the philosophy that came before. They weren't just accidentally rediscovering you know oh a human type view or an associationist view. They they seems like they were aware of that and chosen sides and thought that absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I um and um I mean not for nothing you know can't and hum you can think of them as also talking about what science is right they do that deliberately and so this was a continuous ongoing conversation now focused on whether there could be and

26:16 can't deny that there could be a separate science of psychology right exactly and so that was still being worked out whereas we take that for granted obviously now but um again It's interesting to see how the influences have percolated down. Exactly. So, do uh what was Kant's reasoning about why there couldn't be an empirical psychology or a transcendental psychology or I don't want to get just too distracted by K. Yeah. And I don't know. Okay. Frankie, I have sort of I have I I know a little bit about why he um

26:50 didn't think uh introspection was suitable and bring this brings it back to the use of introspection because people thought that you needed to use introspection. Mhm. Some sort of awareness, self-awareness to um theorize about in the mind. It was that bit putting it together with the ever developing sense of science requiring experiment and regimented observation, right?

27:23 How would these go together? And Khan thought you couldn't um because of the nature of an you know he he focused on attention inner what I'm calling inner attention a kind of introspective attention. He thought that that just couldn't uh deliver right what scientific observation required. Exactly. Um so okay um so there's a bunch of things that I wanted to ask you about in what we've been talking about. It's easy to get distracted by all the passing shiny objects. But um uh when when we go back

27:59 to these early psychologists and then you trace the history of psychology itself uh what one of the so things we're talking about is the way that these guys were misconstrued a little bit by their uh contemporary people um and how the discussion was much more nuanced and is awfully portrayed. But at the same time it's is it still accurate to say that there was like intractable disagreement about these questions. The the big examples being whether there can be images thoughts and

28:35 the other one being whether a circle a coin at an angle looks like a circle or looks like an oval. Um those are the two that I know of anyway, but I I think there's others as well. But I but I wonder so is that still part of the reason why this whole school of thought kind of dissipated or is that um because you're saying that they're sophisticated and they thought about these things very carefully and but but yet at the same time this as a method did kind of go away and on you had the two competing forces on the one hand the

29:09 Freudians who are not using introspection really um and maybe would even say that the things that they're after can't be introspected at all because they're in the deeply repressed part of the mind and on the other hand in America mostly I guess the behaviorists who are saying you know we we don't need to posit any internal anythings will do it all just by stimulus and response um so both of those camps and even in a way the cognitive uh revolution are maybe um

29:44 well at least as they're often portrayed at odds with this way of thinking and show thought to be sort of correctives to these early naive psychologists yuck. Um so is that and is that part of the story inaccurate as well on your view or or what is the reason that they kind of this way of doing things ceased to be dominant um on your way of thinking? All right. Um, and I didn't answer, by the way, earlier when you asked about the reliability issue, and I guess that touches on on on this as well. Yeah. So,

30:19 as you know, I think that there's always different ways to tell a story, to tell a you know, to spin. Now, but I think no. um a there wasn't any if you think that there was intractable self-combusting um you know disagreement there and that's why it all died. Um I think you're sort of wrong. Oh, one is wrong. You're just what? Oh my goodness. On

30:53 several counts here. One is that it wasn't that there was one method and oh it gave these conflicting results and hence it's a bad method. And so part of what my efforts were like there wasn't one method, right? There were many different ones. Well, there were loads of different ones. Um but I'm I'm just I don't know them all. Um I mean I don't know that you know here's the ones that I'm familiar with. And so there were these different ways to do it. And as I'm trying to always say is like the the

31:25 conceptions of what these people were doing from each other were so different that it's sometimes it's apples and oranges. You you know there wasn't re the conflict wasn't always about this datim versus this datim. It was really the much more broadly approaches to what how you should do psychology to begin with or what kind of theorizing you ought to do and were there so were there theories that uh methods and ways of doing things that

31:57 uh we don't do anymore for good reason and the that were also you know lamented by the behaviorists absolutely you know and some of the you know titcher for example example or um some of the Ritzbook school using qualitative um introspective reports um in very extravagant ways. Absolutely. Having said all that, we're actually still carrying on many many of the approaches just you know updated with

32:34 modern technology and having we've never stopped doing that. um using subjective report or you know the the the subject's tapping into the subject's own access to right what's going on in trying to do this refine this in ever better ways and there is really a line of continuity um where I think we you know the behaviorists are the odd ones out and they die you know take that behaviorist

33:07 but in So, but there's then there are some purely uh contingent reasons for why we we think that none of this work has survived at all. Partly it's because a lot of it hasn't been translated and um the these um you know so we just don't know it's not it's not and um I guess you know because that there was such a

33:39 different you know such a different vibe to the behaviorists in between we've sort of really you weren't to say too loudly that you were using introspection but you you know you did it anyway. Um and and a lot of the yeah the we've inherited so much from it that I think it's really it's it's been going on most of the time just under a different name if you like and so it's it's also not due to the privacy issue which is the other thing that is often thrown around which is that in order to

34:12 be a truly scientific it has to be something that's observable publicly and introspection as a as a method I guess although they're not clear about making this distinction that you make between the mode of access that we have and a capacity and the method uh by which you try to harness that capacity what you could do in many different ways um but but still uh that well I I lost what I was going to say sorry

34:47 I mean so let me just say something about privacy. Um, okay. Oh, yeah. That's what I was talking about, right? Yeah. Um, sure. That's still a problem and it's still a problem, right? So, again, if you are using subjective reports or introspective reports in some irresponsible unscientific manner, then that's bad, you know, because it's not. Yes. I think very controversial statement here. But and you still have today I um you

35:21 know methods where I think you know they're they're not called introspective methods straightforwardly but they are using qualitative reports gathered in various ways from subjects and right you can worry about the scientific uh propriety of that. I mean this is something that I've always been curious about because a lot of the times you can take reports about the stimulus. It's not clear that those are

35:53 introspective reports. On the other hand, as you distinguish if you if you make this distinction between inner attention and inner apprehension, like for example, the binoculars example that you gave, I I found very interesting cuz I was thinking to myself, so so you for people not familiar with that example, you're looking through the binoculars and so you're trying to focus the binoculars as you look at a bird or something in the distance and your attention is focused on the bird. So it's you're not employing inner attention, but the claim was that you're still using a kind of uh

36:27 introspective access to determine whether the focus is needs to be adjusted or not. Um but you're not doing it by attending to your experience because your attention is on the on the bird. Did I do justice to the basic idea there? Yeah. And um that is this what I'm trying to say is that this sort of example brings out what this notion of I'm calling it inner apprehension but it's the Brentano um Brenano articulated this idea of he you know it's translated as inner

37:02 perception which is unhelpful I think but um because it has all sorts of connotations about what um the metaphysics of the state is supposed to be But just in terms of a type of self-awareness um you know you can be aware of your experiences that way and we can exploit that that the example is meant to show that we exploit this right all the time you know but where it's not that we're focusing or attending to anything you know no attention stays firmly on the outside. Exactly. So, so uh in these kinds of examples, do you uh

37:39 do you take them to show that all of the data that we get in psychology is introspective data in some sense or is there do you get truly non-introspective data? I'm sure you get truly non-introspective data in psychology. I mean, you just do, you know, stick people and get them to re react in some way. It's not always that you're asking them to provide a button press or you know it it's what you instruct them to do. Um but you you do get behavioral data that's not

38:13 introspective or you you know you can look at what hap you know you can stick people in scanners and look what happens where the happening isn't connected to the subject carrying out any instructions um that you know would involve them tapping first personally into something going on with them internally. So, it's just that the the range of um what you might think of as introspective responses or you know introspective

38:46 reports, subjective reports is really quite wide. And the the the what the the the kind of the vehicle of report may not be directly you know it it doesn't have a that clause in it and it's not a report explicit report by the subject but it could be something that where if the experiment is set up in a certain way the experimentter can take it that this report is the result of the subject first personally accessing something. Right. Exactly. Now, really interesting

39:18 case here is the the the whole business of confidence ratings um where this kind of connection isn't isn't straightforward, but it's super interesting and it's something I'm thinking about a lot at the moment. Yeah. So, what's the connection to confidence ratings here? Okay. So in so today confidence ratings are held to be um superior to often to visibility

39:52 ratings say because v vis visibility ratings are much more I see it or I didn't see it or it was fuzzy or something like that. Okay. Um where the thought is you're reporting directly on you introspect and then you report on what it's like for you or how well you saw it or whereas confidence rating the thought is don't do that. They don't ask the subject to introspect. They ask the subject to just um you know say how confident they were that they did something right that they they chose the

40:24 right thing or they they pressed the right button or they saw and yet confidence ratings are taken to be reflective of or indicative of whether the subject was consciously aware of um the stimulus say or not. Right? So sometimes the way it's talked about is that it's got this massive advantage over visibility rating because it's not introspective in that way. On the other hand, it is often also mentioned in the

40:58 same breath as introspective reports. So it's it's unclear and there's definitely some obviously some I think of it as there's a thought that there's a brute connection. People think that there's this brute connection between high confidence that in in your decisions and um in your correct decisions and um being consciously aware of whatever the decision was about. Yeah. Um I think you're right exactly how that goes. It's unclear. Yeah. Yeah.

41:33 No, I was going to say I think you're right to point out that the it's unclear how the details go, but I think you're also right that the basic idea that these guys have like I'm thinking of Hawwan and Steve um Fleming and Lao and those guys. I think that the basic idea that they have is that when you have a conscious experience that they kind of generates confidence automatically or or or something like that so that uh one is a good reliable indicator of the other. Um, right. That's supposed to be, right? And that seems that seems totally plausible, right? Yeah. Um, it Yeah,

42:07 exactly. It doesn't seem too bad except that. So, from my point of view, one is just in I'm just then interested in what exactly that relationship is. Mhm. Um such that um you think it avoids all the problems that um you know your classic introspective move involving visibility ratings um has those problems but competence ratings doesn't. And I'm not saying that then they are wrong about this. I'm just interested in in in the details of this

42:39 story. And the other thing is that while I think this makes total sense and it's very very plausible in the clear cases of course what the interest here is in the threshold cases and there I would really like to see more details right because what how you interpret those is really going to depend on the background uh assumptions you make because at especially at the threshold levels yeah and that's where the that's where the the experiments really go to right yeah the good the interesting test cases is I mean I've always been kind of

43:11 sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn't be too reli re reliant on confidence judgments because we have confidence judgments and blindsight patients like from GY and and they they can become quite conf confident taking their I mean they're you know it's takes them time but over time they they come to rely on the judgment that they're making even though they claim not to be able to experience anything that distinguishes is the stimula that they're making these pronouncements about. But but nonetheless, um they can

43:46 say, you know, well, I'm fairly confident that that was that I'm right, that that was a plus or X or whatever. Um so I'm not sure I I don't think that means that we should rule out confidence judgments altogether. I just think that it does kind of make us wonder about what it is exactly we're tapping into, whether it's something cognitive or directly experiential and these kinds of questions aren't answered by. So yeah, I'm just I guess I'm kind of agreeing with what you're saying more than anything else. But I

44:19 wonder what is your feeling about the the blind side case and the inconidence? How would you incompetence? Um, is it I'm a great fan of Ian Phillips paper um on this. So I um I guess I'm I've embied a lot of his um okay take on on the debate. So I I don't find it so I find it it certainly has removed this as a any sort of cornerstone in um you know

44:55 fixing you know being a test case for the goodness of a theory um just because there's these different interpretations available right exactly and and I think that you know Ian's paper is very um persuasive yeah I agree I I want been wanting to talk to Ian about this stuff for on on here for a long time. So, we'll keep working on that. Um, okay. So, I want to I did have one question from the audience from Anatol Wgner who was asking about reliability. We

45:29 were talking about this a while ago uh but I think it I wanted to make sure to get to it but he asks uh do you have an answer to Chsky's critique that one can introspect as much the inner workings of the mind as one can introspect the inner workings of digestion. Um so I I think he's alluding to the idea that on Chsky's view we can we can't really inspect much of what's happening in the mind. So whatever we do have access to is going to be very limited um and not really give us a a kind of handle on the true nature of the inner workings which

46:02 is something that I was alluding to earlier about the nature of the cognitive sciences not using introspection like for for example I don't think you know the universal grammar and those kinds of things is is unless you're going to say judgments by grammicality uh involve the introspective judgments which maybe anyway anyway So yeah, what are your your thoughts about this question especially with respect to the early psychologist but also just generally with respect to science? Um sure I mean first I should clarify I think you can actually introspectively

46:36 tell something about your digestion you know it's not you know whether it's going well or bad. Yeah, I'm just saying it's not it's not chop liver, but um um yeah, sure. In a way, that's partly my point has always been it's like don't expect the world of um don't expect introspection to tell you everything. Okay. Um, but you need to and the early introspectionists especially people like were incredibly good at limiting at at

47:10 being clear about what the limits are of what introspection can do for you. Having said that, um, investigating the mind entirely without it seems also problematic. Uhhuh. Right. And by that I just mean um you've got to get some observational data that at least um clarifies what the phenomenon is that

47:46 you're theorizing about um from the first person perspective. Um there had there is some constraining um force coming from that side. Now then it's a good question how much are you going to expect uh from this sort of observational data and we were just talking about that earlier that there were these different pictures about what observation is supposed to deliver right and you can be more or less um extravagant about that and you should

48:19 get it right but I think that even Chsky is going to rely and I don't know anything about uh that area but aren't there judgments of grammaticality for example, um that I'd work there and you know what are those? They are kind of at least in some sense connected to first person tapping into right what seems right. So so the idea is not that um introspection is the only method that psychology can use but rather that it's a reputable method that can be used in

48:53 the right circumstances. That that's the more important message. Well, yes, but I mean I'm almost surprised that that needs pointing out, right? I mean, it's a Well, I mean, one one reason that one our one tool in the back in the back of the scientists is of the the psychologist is that and you know, it's an important tool and it needs to be used correctly. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, so I think there's depending on who you talk to, you know, if you if you talk to people that do like animal work, then

49:26 they they don't have access to this sort of data. You might think depending on how you define these things to uh if you think that a a mouse pressing a button for, you know, whether a certain stimulus appears or not counts as using introspection. I I don't know. So, uh I I guess that that could be debated. But if you don't take that view then a large part of psychology which is done in animal research just is sort of excluded from these kinds of uh methological considerations because

50:02 obviously we're considering just from the human case exclusively. Uh so that would be you know you would that would be much too narrow if you just said this was the only way that psychology could proceed or that the only way to understand um the mind could proceed this way. But yeah go ahead. Sorry. But as you said I mean the um it depends how you configure how you think about first person access and introspection. Now um and that is an interesting uh question obviously. Um partly the problem is that in in discussion often like any sort of

50:37 self-reflection is going to count and sometimes people have something very very narrow in mind and it's it's never clear but but here we were talking about confidence uh ratings are they you know kinds of you know ver kinds of introspection if you don't like that word say first person access right well in that case lots of animal studies now um test you know try elicit competence ratings uh from animals and and that's a that's a super interesting question. Exactly. And that's why I think the

51:10 blind side question is so relevant in this case because it's the closest we have to like the the the case of the non-human animals where they can't report um and if they still if they can still you know have confidence um then one wonders like how we should interpret the fact that you know these non-human animals have confidence. Um so I mean I'm not saying we should interpret one way or the other. I just think that the methodological question about this exact question about whether confidence judgments are count as

51:42 introspective or not is very thorny. Um and in that sense I wonder do you think we've made re really have we made progress on this I mean we as a field of persons interested in the science of the mind have we made progress on this issue um at the disciplinewide level as opposed to the individual like level I think so I mean um so I think Matias Michelle for example is doing really really interesting um

52:16 work on on just this issue as well. And um and the whole area of metacognition is in a sense starting to unravel a bunch of these um you know notions in a way that one can you know it's it's really exciting what's happening there and one can just sort of start to see how we find different ways of configuring and talking about first person access. um that's much more control, you know,

52:51 controlled and and tethered to specific um roles and experimental paradigms that that that's quite helpful always in this is you know I'm not focused on it's good not to focus on the word itself. It doesn't you know nobody owns the word introspection. So it's sometimes it gets a bit sidetracked by it's like but is it introspection? It's like just sort of what is it and does it map on to something that we think we're talking

53:23 about when we're using introspection in more everyday context, right? And perhaps also how it was used. I mean, that's why it's used in the in the early psychology literature where it did have specific there were specific meaning. So, we can track these different roles and and um ideas and see what happens to them now. So, I was going to ask something else, but since you just said this, I wondered so if we sort of jumped from the like first half of the book to the second half of the book uh in a nonlinear way

53:58 all of a sudden because of what you just said. Um so in the second part of the book where you're sort of examining so not this question from you know what's the right method for psychology more generally speaking but sort of what is introspection um in these three different ways of accessing from the first person that you distinguished. Um, and part of the story that you want to argue for is there's a there's an eliminative is in in there somewhere um about some of these

54:31 concepts. So me yeah from your point of view is that not is that not right or am I misreading the Yeah, I guess that's my question is uh um from from your point of view because the way I was interpreting it was that you wanted to say we're we're going to be kind of limitist about one notion of these kinds of things um and not about the other one. Um, and then you wanted to distinguish uh the kind of scientific concept from the folk concept or

55:04 something like that. Um, so yeah, could you it I was going to connect that that to what what you were just saying, but I wonder could you tell us a little bit about what's going on in that part of your your work? Yeah. So good. So one useful thing for me having distinguished the introspective method use of introspection from introspective access which is a kind of mental capacity is that we can really separate issues of reliability and um and again I haven't still haven't spoken to

55:35 reliability but um one day we're going to get there hopefully. Yes. Right. That's a good point. So and one interest is like in when we look at um introspection as a mental capacity. So one question is like is it reliable you know can we come to know anything be can we do we have introspective knowledge this kind of self-nowledge via introspection where that may involve a in my books introspection involves a kind of detection it's a self-detection

56:08 how to spell that out I'm not quite there yet something I'm working on but okay okay then I want to say that there are these different types of introspection introspective access retrospection inner attention and inner apprehension. I'm just labeling these now and and it's for me then a good question how maybe there's more types than that but let's start with these that I can find in the literature and where I make a case that we can find at least the seeds for that in how we're putting to use

56:48 selfattributions and attributions to other you know listening to selfattributions from others of introspective um states. Mhm. And hang on, let me I can talk about that more in a second. But just to go straight forwardly to to what you were saying, my view is that we can think of introspection as a mental capacity, introspective access as a common sense category. It's a common

57:22 sense kind. Mhm. You know, it it plays a role in everyday in everyday business when we and in particular, it plays a role in how we self-manage and how we plan using, you know, kind of needing to self-manage and plan. And so from that point of view, introspective access is sort of tied to how we think of ourselves as agents and what we can and can't do. And

57:53 these it these this kind of planning role that introspection in in common sense has we can see that there's patterns that sort of at least give us the seeds to start theorizing about these three different types of introspective access again in the context of common sense explanatory role. Mhm. However, I want to say that for these three minimally three or whatever three different types of introspective access that we can find in common sense at

58:29 least the seeds of it. We can see how they connect, how we could scientifically theorize them and they they can be up for in each case for scientific investigation and revision and correction and so forth. And that's because we can look at memory, attention, and I'm not quite sure yet what to do with the inner apprehension, but I think that there's definitely something that we could also see whether there's a certain um scientific approach to these. Not though for the overall category. So in

59:02 terms of what do all of these three why would we group all three together as an introspective kind? I think so far we've got not much to show for in the sciences to motivate that but it there is a re you know there is a um substance in common sense explanation in in in common sense practice to think of this as one kind. So there's a kind of common sense kind. But so my aim is always to to to um

59:37 answer the sellers challenge, the manifest image and the scientific image of the mind. And I would like to have it the case that whatever we talk about as real, a real mental phenomenon, we find in common sense that it's sort of real only if we can naturalize it in some sense. Right? Okay. But at least there are sort of connection points where we can see ah okay there's a science of that. So so so just to be clarify from my own point of view the the idea is that that there's

1:00:11 inner attention inner apprehension and retrospection and those are real uh psychological capacity psychological processes that you could investigate and do a science of. But there's no instance of a kind of which you would want to say that all three of those things are instances of that kind. Even though we intuitively think that they are all introspective in some sense, so they must have something in common, they really don't. That's the view. That's the view. Although I've recently looking

1:00:43 having looked more at the what's happening in the science of metacognition, you know, um perhaps the best way to put it is that right now um there's no reason we don't yet have anything identified. I think that would like be the mechanism or something like that that would you like this is what all these different types of stuff you know first person access have in common it's that mechanism there all versions of that I

1:01:17 think that perhaps the best way to put it is that is still open and depends how things are going in in that science and but it's an interest of mine to see how introspection as I conceive of it from the agency related common sense perspective how that fits anyway with the scientific construct of metacognition. So I developed this picture about introspection in the context of self-management being sort of helpful to to plan and explain um

1:01:50 how we have self-management abilities and how we can self-manage. that really does fit super nicely with the idea of metacognition as a kind of um evaluation and control, right, of um that we have to to self-govern in in in various ways. Well, can you just before you go any further, sorry to interrupt, but can you give us an example of like this common sense control guidance thing that that you have in mind? Yeah. the one you mentioned earlier

1:02:22 about the the um being able to focus your binoculars. Uhhuh. Um that would be one that deploys something like the um you know why you know I'm asking you how how can you do that? Well, you're able to tap into. So why am I attributing to you this ability that you can do that is because I think you have access to um your visual experience in in in that way that that you can successfully do that. And similarly, why is it that um you know,

1:02:56 if you're you know, if you're really under stress and you're you're busy doing something, you really need to get something done and you kind of but you're feeling panicky and you know, you can sort of try and get get a hold of yourself, you're racing thoughts and make sure you're tracking everything carefully. you know all of the these are kinds of abilities of self-management which require I say one explanation is that you have access to um your thoughts racing and you are able to manage your conscious situation. It's these kinds of

1:03:31 abilities that I have in mind. Um because I I do wonder like what you're going to say and this is something I was going to bring up a long time ago, but since we're circling back around to it, I wonder what you would say to the skeptic about introspection or whether you can accommodate that the skeptic uh in the kind of view that you're developing someone who says we we don't ever have this kind of first person access. we you know have access to stuff in the external world and then make a judgment about what's happening what must be you know there must be some

1:04:05 internal state uh which is me seeing the the tomato or whatever but it's not that any kind of first person access that I have to the to the state um it's this indirect displaced perception through the the perception of the external object Um and and so this kind of person is going to be someone who might deny the inner apprehension even is like a feature of the phenomenology even that they have or so. So so like do on your view does the

1:04:39 science of uh psychology or consciousness have to incorporate that kind of view as well. Uh so let me distinguish two things first that u might be under attack from uh the kind of corner you you mentioned. One is um the idea that introspective access is a type of self-detection. And then what you were just telling me was a kind of you know Riley

1:05:14 Alex Burn type view which says it's nothing like that. It's, you know, inference, you know, you're just looking or, you know, Gareth Evans, you're looking out. Yeah. Exactly. And you're coming to to know about your mental state. Well, there's a sense in which Okay. Um, it's a different sort of it's a different dispute to have, but that's not undermining the idea that we can acquire that kind of self-nowledge and that that plays a certain role, right? It's just that there the dispute is about how how do you acquire it, right? Is it is it is

1:05:48 it self-detection or something like the having these inference rules or um a kind of Gareth Evans type view so that um but you might have said look we're doing a we we don't need to attribute any such self-nowledge at all no matter how you get it we're not doing that we're just we we there's first order states all the way through. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Um I have nothing to say to somebody like

1:06:21 that. Okay. I mean, okay, I I I can't say something, but it's it's like I don't feel I don't feel that I don't, you know, yeah, at some point it's like too fundamental. I need to, you know, if I if I want to have a dispute with this person, I I I need to do other things. I can't do that from within where I'm trying to explain certain other things about once you think that there are these um introspective states call them

1:06:52 introspective states or high order states and I'm telling you what they do and why we think that they are good sometimes why why they amount to knowledge and um all sorts of other things but okay yes I mean sometimes it's just like the starting points are too and you have to engage on a different uh area. Um, but it's I I should say I should clarify. It's not I think this is a stupid thing to to say or it's just that I can't be doing it all from the same from the same position. I can't be

1:07:27 carrying out all these exactly defenses and disputes. You know, I need to change position to do this other thing. Right. Exactly. This is one dispute that you're engaged in. Um Exactly. Okay. So, when it comes to this idea of self-detection, so one thing that I thought was interesting um and I I think I saw you cite it in in the book um was the idea from Gualtiero Pichanini of the idea of h of people as being kind of um measuring instruments in a sense and that you could treat introspective

1:07:59 judgments as a kind of self- measurement or um and treating them as measurement instruments. Therefore, they could be calibrated in sort of the way we think of, you know, perfectly objective manners. Um, so I I got the the sense from from what I read though that you were setting that kind of approach aside. Um, uh, and I wonder if that was just because of convenience or if you think there's some flaw with that approach or something. Um, and it's just out of curiosity. Neither neither neither convenient nor flaw. Um, so yeah.

1:08:36 Maybe a little convenience I think but um that's because the I did that in the in the following context. Um there is this requirement that reliab this comes to reliability right exactly we're talking about reliability in particular of method right that's really we have to be clear about that of method um and

1:09:09 one and this played a big role in the behaviorist rejection also of the introspectionist is there's this thought that for for a method to be reliable, it's got to be public. Right. Right. And Guierro answers that and says it can be public because we've got we we should just treat the reports as public items, right? And um really we're using people like measurements.

1:09:45 Um and so they just deliver this publicly available stuff the reports. So that's one way to answer that challenge that look um for a method to be scientific it needs to be reliable for it to be reliable it needs to be public hemple and people like that and guier says oh and then people say but introspection is private and hence no reliability because no publicity. Okay. And Gierra says, "No, you know, actually the data is perfectly public, right?

1:10:21 I don't do that." Um, Goldman sort of formulates a different way to answer the challenge. And I'm much more in line with Goldman um on that. Um, so Goldman says, well, wait, it it's not that the um method has to be public for it to be reliable. It's just that it has to be reliable. It has to be such that we don't have any reason to think that it's unreliable, right? It has to do a it has to do some sort of a good job um

1:10:57 in in some we have to specify, you know, intercedingly why this seems to be a good way to get at the data. And so long as we don't really have any good reason to think that it's unreliable, we can go ahead and use it. And that seems right to me, right? So the privacy alone isn't yet any sign of unreliability. What it is is is that if you have reason to think it's unreliable, then you have a problem. Mhm. And so that's why I didn't talk about Guierro's view because I was going down this other route. And so my way of doing

1:11:31 things is trying to say that um there's ways to to build on uh Goldman's approach. the idea that it can be private but still reliable. Well, yeah, that we can. Well, so my whole approach then is to say what we need to do is figure out different ways in which it might be unreliable, right? And we have sort of some ideas about what that what what those are. By looking at things like demand characteristics, um certain types of interferences that can happen in

1:12:06 different experimental contexts, we know we can find out more about the different types. The more we know about the types of first-person access that are being deployed scientifically, the more we can figure out how to support and constrain and set up the experimental design so that we avoid certain pitfalls. um all of these things the blueprint I always say has been delivered already in the early experimentalists that's what partly what they tried to do but obviously now we have even better ways to do that it seems on all fronts um but there so I the whole point there I'm

1:12:41 making there really in in in in the book is to say we need to reduce the the potential for unreliability right and once we've satisifi satisfied ourselves loves to do that. We can really go ahead and use it, you know, until we see that there's a problem. So, Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, it's just that that won't ever answer your your person who says, "Well, there is no introspection to begin with, but then we're not we can't be talking to them at this point, right?" Okay. Exactly. No, we'll talk to them later. Um, so because

1:13:19 to me, the the idea of calibration is tied up tied up here. Uh because part of what we what we want when we're talking about a method being public is that it could be calibrated. You could tell when it goes wrong. You can adjust um you can adjust things if you see that it's going off track and if someone else notices it, they can adjust it. But in the case of introspection of the claim usually goes it's p it's private. Hence there's no calibration. So this is sometimes put in terms of um incorability that that there's a you can't be

1:13:53 corrected. There's no one who's outside who could say is in a better position to say no you're incorrect about that. And that may be completely independent of being infallible whether it's infallible or not. Uh it still has this property of being in incorraible. Um and that is often sometimes taken to be the defining problematic feature. Um so but but you have some interesting things to say about the idea of calibration. So I so I wonder um yeah so can you tell us what what would you say about that?

1:14:27 Yeah so I mean in a sense I've I've given you the outline a bit already that I think that calibration um well the first point is that given the distinction I have between method and access. So introspective method and introspective access calibration really we need to understand that we may mean by calibration just figuring out what is the range of reliability of this um mental capacity of this form of access cognitive access just like we might ask

1:15:04 about visual perception or so what's the range of you know we don't have eagle eyes we you know we have you know there's a certain range and we want to figure out what is the acuity you know equivalent and all of that. So these are so within which range can we expect knowledge by access you know deploying this mental capacity. So what just before you go on from that would you say that like things like metadrime um which has come out of uh work of Hawan and and Steve are are trying to answer that kind of question

1:15:39 that's interesting. Um yes yes yes um yes the kind of the the kind of um metacognitive efficiency for example and and pulling apart these notions and yes this is definitely one aspect o of of um those sorts of efforts. Okay. um how again how applicable these things are to specific ideas about specific forms of introspective access is a super

1:16:13 interesting question. So, but what they haven't done is really distinguish like what mode of introspective access do they think that this is getting at um when they I mean if so I'm not yeah I don't even want to say anything about that because a I think why is no just because um there's a sense in they, you know, they they're doing something

1:16:47 quite different. Um, and they're not interested in that sort of question at that point. But yeah, I actually let's just change topic because um I this is so but it's such a good question, right? It's just I have no good way to I'm still sort of trying to figure out how to approach that. Okay. um specifically I was going to say let you go ahead and continue with what you were saying on the other side of that then that if you have the introspective access um do you have the questions uh that fall out that way but then on the other side the

1:17:20 method side yeah but you are so right to say that these are the kinds of things where I think we can bring these to bear hopefully fruitfully um in application of method and understanding what you know what it is that um we're even expecting of of these methods. Um well and I I will just say on a random ram ramble that uh this is something that I think that I learned

1:17:52 from Hawwan specifically but Steve as well but just the idea that paying attention to like the history is important in these because a lot of the stuff that we're confused about they were confused about too but had you know worked out some answers. So paying attention to that, but but it's it's missing from the average education of a of an experimentalist or researcher, they don't really get exposed in any sort of detail to the to the history of the discipline. Um but they got a lot of other stuff to cover. You can't cover everything. I was going to say that the

1:18:25 trouble is that there's just too much these days, right? It's true. Um yeah, I um but it took I forgot now where you were. I um Oh, sorry about that. I know. Oh, the the calibration. So, the so one thing is just calibrating um you know the range of reliability for a given mental capacity introspective different type of introspective access. So thinking about the the good circumstances in which to deploy it, you know, in which you can think well or introspect well or perceive well but

1:18:58 have some light on and things like that, you know, in perception and that those are the this is really drawing on on Goldman's work a lot. There's operational conditions and there are um the kind of content the contents we can expect to to come to to know you know what so what we can know. So when it comes to calibrating methods, um that needs to flow in to figure out how best to for any specific method, not in general

1:19:32 because it's always case specific, right? depends what you're looking at, what your kind of theoretical aims are and um now which type of introspective access you're going to deploy, how you're going to set up the experiment and then there's a question about reliability here that or and calibration that concerns the whole shebang right um and there I think we can do a lot a a not to think that there's a one oh introspection is unreliable hence nothing is good here. But we have a lot

1:20:05 in in the in the in the method on the method side, we have a lot of leeway to maneuver. M I mean like I'm sure they're all familiar with in the labs, you know, that you you tinker this way and you you try to um avoid these sorts of pitfalls here and adjust here and um and so you can compensate some problems that might have turned up when you looked at different forms of where there's weaknesses, where there's where there's potential for interference or for being, you know, misleading in various ways.

1:20:41 and you can then set your experiment you calibrate um based on the whole picture. So that's how I think about calibration and that's why I think we can do so much to reduce um worries about unreliability. Mhm. And then if we don't we we can do a really good plausible job then I think we can go right ahead and use it even though you have a component in there that is in some sense private right where you just have to sol you know you can you have to trust the subject to some degree or other

1:21:14 exactly so h how does this like framework that you have developed here uh how would we apply it to a spe to the like a a well-known dispute like for example and you mentioned this in your book, but I want to draw it out a little bit here. Um, uh, the dispute over unconscious perception. So, you know, t take subliminal priming or any sort of thing of this nature and you have one side and and you divide them into the optimists and the um, well, what do you say? the uh religiously optimistic and

1:21:49 the pessimist, the naive pessimist or what I forget the two camps exactly, but anyway, so there's, you know, the one group that we're all doomed and the other group that everything's fine. Um, and so you're trying to chart a way in between there. But in in in this case that your middle way path, um, if you have one camp who says, look, in the case of this subliminal perception, what you have is uh information processing, but it's not perception. And in the other case, you have someone saying, "Oh, no. It's it's definitely a perception. It's just not a conscious perception." Um, and so the these are cases where they may be using, you know,

1:22:23 button pressing um to determine whether or not the subject saw the detected the stimulus and then verbal reports for, you know, the for checking if the subject was conscious. And then there's a dispute about how we interpret all this. um you know having some partially to do with the problem of the criterion but also just generally uh when when do we take the subjects to be at face valuable and so forth and so on. So in in this particular type of case, does your way of approaching things like does it where does it

1:22:59 I'm not having trouble phrasing what I'm trying to say, but what I guess what I'm trying to really ask is what would be the verdict of your way of thinking things given the current evidence we have about this debate? You mean do I solve the problem? No, I don't. Not that you solve the problem, but is there something that your way of doing things like um would let us like how would it interpret what we do? What if anything does that contribute? Yeah. Um yeah, I didn't mean to be asking exactly that way, but yeah, I guess that's what it must do to

1:23:33 good. So just to say it, so what I I I parcel people up into pessimists, you know, really full on wholesome whole full full-on pessimist, faith-based optimists. That's it. The faith that'll be all right. What can you do? And then in the middle, that's the important bit. There are people who like, ah, we can't do with, we can't do without. They're the kind of they sit there, we still want to do this. we still want to do this. We're just not quite sure. And um and so I

1:24:08 think neither of these so what I try to offer is a is a more firmer way to be in the middle. It's not if nobody else is in the middle. I want to try and give a bit more of a principled way to say you can be in the middle and see where the limitations are. Not because you say, well, you know, the pessimists are shouting very loudly and we should listen to them a little bit. But no, but there are really more concrete um reasons that you can spell out for why um there are worries about the method.

1:24:41 So, what I'm hoping is I'm giving a yeah, as I said, a more um detailed and specific middle ground that allows you to draw in principled ways a line where you're more likely to worry about the reliability of your results and where you you don't have to have as great a worry. So taking that now to the dispute, one thing I I I do think is that at at least again things change all the time. Um but when you look at the early um

1:25:19 introspectionists I mean many of them were the good ones I think were pretty clear that you shouldn't use introspective methods in borderline cases too much. You know that's just that's where you are out running a lot of your method is going to be dodgy in in in some significant way. Not that you're get you know where if you're then if you're not then clear that there's dodgginess there given that you're trying to apply introspection. Again helpful to look at

1:25:52 the mental capacity. If if the limits if if the range of reliability for the mental capacity is really starts to give out at the borderline case then deploying it in a method is going to be problematic. Not because there's a problem with introspection. It's just because you're using it. It's like using perception to do something. Just perception isn't really, you know, to get people to give you visual reports on what's happening. very very very far down where we we shouldn't be expecting to have clear.

1:26:25 Right. It's not that vision is suspect. It's just that you're asking them to do something it's not really good at doing. That's right. And that's so that's sort of where how I think about um one thing that I offer in these disputes is is just being more clear about um how severe a criticism it might be to say that this is a bad application of the method. Okay. Yeah. and and but I don't want I

1:26:57 deliberately don't want to say that you shouldn't use it in these cases because we you know things are developing further and further and um but one suppose you know I'm suppose we're thinking now that really um right now the methods are a bit dodgy I'm not saying that they are but let's say we say that then one perhaps one takeaway isn't oh we shouldn't do the science of consciousness at all, but we can just as well use objective meth purely objective

1:27:31 methods such as they are at this point and there isn't that much you know we can use them all in sort of sort of equal footing or something like that and just be clear about what the limitations are and so like I thought that you were going to um maybe defend in Philip's view here uh which is that maybe there isn't the unconscious perception but it sounds like you're kind of staying neutral on the question. Absolutely. Okay. Neutral is my middle name. Oh, I did not know that. Okay. No, it's just it's just because I mean partly I I I um No, I don't want to

1:28:06 defend that either. Um because, as I said, I'm a great fan of the paper. partly because for me it really puts both of these options on the table in a way that I don't I I don't want to then say I'm going for the other one and Ian has arguments for that and all of that but I I for me it's much more the methodological point that that sits at the center there okay I see interesting yeah I mean I'm a I'm a big fan of the of the approach and um

1:28:42 uh much like you I found myself kind sucked into talking about introspection. Um, for me, for kind of the opposite reason, for you, you said you were interested in perception first and then got sidetracked talking about introspection. Um, whereas for me, it was, you know, consciousness generally speaking and then questions about introspection um, arising for the similar reason. So, it's nice to see people paying attention to it and trying to be serious about it and to take it at its, you know, for what it is um a

1:29:14 capacity that we have. It's something that may be useful for doing the sciences. But yeah, I think it's welcome to have this kind of attention um to it. But it is useful for doing science. I mean and and I see also your although I have um you know unfortunate for this podcast but I I don't really have very good views about what consciousness is. That's fine. But I do think you're right that so for me definitely the way would be to approach it via introspection and and and the idea of self-awareness.

1:29:48 Yeah. Um it is also interesting to see because people talk about bust or consciousness in in obviously in in the 19th century and and um there is a big debate about whether the mind is you know for one difference in in the theoretical approaches is between Germany and say Britain for example is that there's different ideas about how the mind does or does not outrun consciousness. Right? So,

1:30:23 Linet seems to have had the view that there is unconscious parts of the mind and that set the frame the the background for a lot of the discussions in Germany where introspection wasn't um certainly introspection wasn't expected even to be the only uh introspective method the only way to get at the mind right but you know the it was just one among others whereas in Britain from the empiricists you at much more of a of a of a co-extension between what's conscious and what's minded. Mhm. And so

1:30:58 there and everything knowledge comes only via observation. And there the expect the the expectation of what introspective observation is supposed to deliver is much higher from the get-go. Right? Um but it is an interesting question what they all had in mind by consciousness to begin with and unconsciousness whereas what because the you know net block hadn't written this paper yet you know. Exactly. Yeah. No it's not clear but um yeah no that's an interesting way of of framing things too between um Britain and uh and

1:31:32 the German traditions. Um the the libinance is the uh petite perceptions or is that what I forget the exact the I I don't know that much about it. Um again I'm I'm working my way backwards but yeah exactly. Well there's a lot to work your way through 1840 at this point. Yeah. Okay. So a little ways further to go back. Um but yeah you'll find I think once you get into the you know talking about Barkley and those guys that a lot of these same issues arise. Um, okay. So, I do notice we're getting on

1:32:07 in time and I can't keep you talking about this forever, but I do want to ask sort of at the end uh whether there was anything that you were wanting to have come up that hasn't come up yet. And the answer can be no, but I always like to check and just see if there was something that you wanted to talk about that we hadn't got to. That's a lot of pressure that question. I'm sorry. It's not supposed to be a pressure question, just a an opportunity to bring up something if you want to.

1:32:41 I guess I mean one interesting for me connection um in all of this is the notion of abilities. Um, it shows up in for me it showed up in self-management at first, you know, because I think that that's just so much of our common sense picture is connected to our conception of ourselves as agents. And um and similarly there's a kind of very crude way of thinking about um you know

1:33:18 what happens in psychology or in the science of the mind where it's a lot about capacity. you know, you're just what you're trying to do is you look at behavior and figure out the capacities and it a lot of it focuses on capacities, right? Um, and so the whole notion of abilities is really interesting and and in its own right and um, so I'm thinking that I would like to be able to have my, you

1:33:52 know, I I'm going in a direction where I'm looking more at agency and abilities as a good place to try and fit the manifest with a scientific image. You know that is a background aim for me always to to not lose the common sense mind the phenomenon as we encounter it um entirely and to to to try and connect what's happening in in in the science of the mind with something

1:34:26 that I can recognize. Not that I want to read off anything from the common sense picture into the science, but I do want there to be connection points and especially with things like consciousness and and all these interesting notions. And I I'm very hopeful that um we can do that so long as we keep talking to psychologists and keep talking to us. But for me right now, the the focus is on these kind of the ideas of abilities and how we can know them. Um, and that's and how does agency play a role there?

1:35:00 Like what? So are you going to try to limit the notion of agency to the personal level or are you going to extend it to the like subpersonal levels um of the mind? Well, I don't you know for a start I don't think I need to extend anything. I mean we talk about chemical agents and um so it's um I think the notion is already ready made to to span different levels of description and understanding uh of the mind and um so but what's nice is that it's also the locus of um being normed

1:35:37 and being all sorts of different types of agents right and yeah I just have this sense that if I go to the I you know if I look abilities and agency as, you know, just something that has abilities or capacities. I can I can perhaps find my way into um a plausible way to graft the two pictures or the several pictures onto each other, right? But so you wouldn't be or would you be going all the way towards uh arguing for the idea that science needs to include these

1:36:11 kinds of teological notions? Um because of a lot some some people might think we spend a lot of time trying to purge those notions like especially from chemistry and related related issues. Yeah. No, see this is perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned because it's a I don't want to sound reductive about anything. Okay. What I just find that it sounds to me like um there is a abilities are such that I can

1:36:50 make sense of them. Mhm. Fully as something had by a biological organism or you know some sort of system. Okay. But also I can make sense of them as being imbued with all sorts of values and you know governed by norms and things like that where it's not as if I I can now reduce one to the other but I can see where they might apply. Mhm. Um okay. So so what do you think of like the new mechanism of people like Carl

1:37:22 Craraver and those of that school of is that too reduction? We have to we may have to cut this out of the recording afterwards to tell you the truth. Okay. Um I'm still having trouble understanding the idea of a mechanism. Okay. And and I I am trying because it does seem important to me to to figure it out. And it is important to I mean it's precise I'm so glad you mentioned that because um you know part of my view of

1:37:56 this kind of I'm calling it a composite pluralism um where I think that there are the scientific kinds that that are more the the the specific types of introspective access. we can find, you know, we can think of there being scientific kinds that answer or at least subject to revision and the uh ordinary kind. But I want to say that um we don't have to think of the ordinary kind as not real just because there's no mechanism

1:38:31 local mechanism that it picks out at the scientific level. But we can think of and the the kind of explanatory patterns that I point to is much more a denian view of um the real patterns pattern there. There's enough pattern there that grounds the the common sense kind for it to give it sufficient reality if you like. So we don't have to be Oh to to say earlier because you're calling me an eliminator. I know. Now I see why you want to resist that. But I I do think of uh Denn's view as an anti-realist view about the

1:39:06 propositional attitudes. Okay. But still I I think you can think of you know who knows exactly what Yeah. Exactly. But some version of that where you don't what you do not require is there be a local mechanism right that underwrites the common sense kind introspective access. And that's why you look for these causal regularities as the thing that underwrites them. That's right. Right. So they're real enough. Um they're kind of the whole environment or the whole system has features these and

1:39:41 local mechanisms do are playing a role in the in the subinds but they don't ground in that sense the so that would be one metaphysically pleasing picture. Right. Um of of that. Yeah. Right. So that and then but that might put your view at odds with that kind of mechanistic view because there there's no sense in which the chain of mechanisms explains the higher level uh features. Yeah. See this is where I first have to understand exactly what the what their view what what this this view really

1:40:15 encompasses and doesn't encompass and I um how you know how really local the mechanism is that that you know what constraints being a mechanism right now I see what you mean yeah exactly because if it can be a more encompass this more global feature of that the higher level then maybe this is a mechanistic account of of that higher level feature And then I don't care, you know, I mean, again, it's about I don't care what you call it, you know? It's it's just the the idea is that I've I've managed to not have to find anything that sort of

1:40:51 directly shows up, right? Um, but it can be built from pattern, you know, patterns that emerge, causal patterns that emerge and they and that they do is I think clear in our everyday agency. M that's the thing these self-manage we do self-manage and we can that's there's empirical um reason to think that these patterns are real and that's what um but if you were like if you were laying out the

1:41:23 building blocks of the mind they wouldn't be included in there they being the these abilities that you're talking about the capacities oh I see no the capacity ah okay hm actually but what would be included it sounds like are things like there would be so there would be capacities there it's just that there wouldn't be a single capacity so we're talking now about the overarching you know common sense concept introspective access that is the the kind of the the group right of the

1:41:58 different so there would be locatable ones let's say but there's probably not there's going to be um more detailed like attention there's No one thing like attention but there's going to be locatable um mechanisms we can the capacities we can um right that are posited but there is none no single one of the same order as it were as as those but yet because of the patterns we get to say it's it's real in that sense now it when I say it like

1:42:33 that it it sounds a bit um brievy. Yeah. No, you do do a lot to flesh it out, but now I'm seeing more why you want to distinguish it from someone like Jesse Prince's view who who wants to say there's just like it's a similar kind of pluralism but in a very different kind of way. 100%. the so Jesse Prince as far as I understand um he um he has a pluralism where he just says look there are all these different types of processes that we can locate and that we might want to call introspection of

1:43:06 sorts nothing in common so I take that to be an argument for eliminativism and he says as much right he thinks that so his the the analogy he gives is that introspection as a category is Just like the category of natural disasters. Yeah. You know there is floods, there is volcanoes, there is droughts. No science there's no science in common of natural disasters. It's just a practical category because it's sort of insurance purposes or something like

1:43:38 that needs to group these together. But that's that's it. And I want to say that that's eliminativist in a way we shouldn't be precisely because introspection does play this really important everyday role explanatory role in agency. So and and I want there to be a certain sense of reality to us being able to introspect. But yet I I I see what he's saying about that maybe not about all the different types that he

1:44:10 mentions, but that there is no single underlying. Right. Well, that and that's the sense I was saying it was a limitist. I I was saying that from the you're eliminating that from the scientific concept as a scientific concept, but want to keep it as a common sense concept or at least that's the way I was interpreting it. Right. and and so I would in the at least the way again it's sort of maybe potatoes potatoes or whatever you Americans say that's what we say but but um

1:44:43 I was thinking of myself as not a limitist because I give us I I give substance to the common sense category but I deny that we have to give that substance by showing that it can be reducible or that that we can we can find a scientific an appropriate scientific uh behind in terms of a single mechanism for it. And I understand how they could uh hold that as a kind of non liimitivism, but I was still I'm still kind of wondering like if you if you had to write the psychology the science of psychology

1:45:16 textbook. Um would those things be included or not is kind of the question that I'm Oh, that's such a nice question. Um first of all, I would take a long time to write this book. Well, you know, James set the precedent, so you could take forever, but but um so in a psychology good. So maybe what I would do, and this goes back to the agency thing. For me, it's always important to not lose sight of the phenomenon

1:45:51 like what are we theor you know, we often in philosophy, I think it can happen. We start to build our theories and then we just we're off, you know, we're just Exactly. Moving back around and you know and so part of what I try to do in the book is I always bring it back to like what is it that we're actually talking about and how much is there before we start theorizing about it. What what what is this notion? how how can we help ourselves to this notion to begin with to think that it's something that warrants um theorizing and thinking of as part of the mind and um so

1:46:29 that's why common you know finding it in common sense was an is an important step for me to even get off the ground right w with with thinking about what what is it that we that we want to talk about here and I definitely would want to make that clear in um in the psychology and to to think that it's a genuinely interesting question to think about how what we specify at the scientific level bears on the creature we recognize.

1:47:04 You know, given that we say we behave in these and these ways and science tells us that we do metacognitively we do this and that but we also self-manage in various ways. We also seem to be reason guided in various ways and I'm not saying you should reduce again not there's no simple story here but um whatever it is that you're saying happens in the mind I want it to be compatible at least with something that I recognize um and vice versa right um and vice versa yeah exactly it's got to go both ways

1:47:38 yeah exactly um I mean I find this question very interesting because at some level we I'll know there's going to be some level of revision um as we as we start to do science from the common sense to the scientific understanding. But the question is like how much do we want to revise and how much are we and that's what a lot of this debate you know going all the way back to the church lens and limit you know has really centered on is like what ultimately does the science want to explain and do we take this as a good starting point or should we get rid of it all started over and that seems very drastic to me it always has been um I

1:48:14 mean at the same time I I've gotten into um thinking about different just explanatory frameworks. Mhm. And that um even the configuring of the initial phenomenon is to some extent already a certain choice certain choices have been made and that's you know just interesting as well to to think about in this this would all go in this textbook

1:48:46 obviously. Yes. Exactly. I mean, I think this is because and this is sort of again to show that this earlier debate in the early psychological literature was hitting on something as well because some some of those guys you could read as this naive idea that there's the data which is sort of theory free and then we go to it and then try to read off use it as a supportive theory. But that's a you know I think from a philosophy of science in the past 100 years or so we could say has been a kind of debunking of that idea that there's

1:49:19 such a thing as observation or theory free observation. Um, so recently I sort of chased some of this back with looking at these two explanatory pictures, the explanatory the these two pictures of science, the explanatory picture and the descriptive picture. Um, some of that goes back to Newton when they were discussing about obs, you know, this was all so new about using observation to theorize and and how much to require that um observation delivers

1:49:55 and he had this very um famous um I'm not going to say in Latin because I don't want to make a spectacle of myself but um you know I don't I do not feain hypothesis. Yes. And um that's been inter interpreted in these different ways that map on to some of the disputes in in that area I was talking about whether um you know I think it was about the theory of gravitation or something like that whether that you know Newtonian thought that that just was derived from observation or whether that was

1:50:29 explanatory of it but still had to mind the observation in really really important ways And so that's that was discussed right then and there and you can find that discussion in terms of philosophy of science. Exactly. Running all the way through. Yeah. Yeah. So that the Newton thing I I guess um the I posit no hypothesis or whatever um was is what you're saying is that's often taken to be the idea that it's a mere description. um not trying to explain what gravity is, but merely describing

1:51:02 what it is. And that it's a different expla scientific pursuit to try to explain what it why that relationship holds as opposed to merely describe it in terms of uh an equation that says this is what you will observe. Um but it's yeah, it seems that Newton himself actually talked out of both sides of his mouth there. Um and and there's support that he actually didn't think that it was merely descriptive. How could it be, right? you couldn't um couldn't get that force out of the observation. Um but that there was needed to be a very very

1:51:36 tight connection um between that. Okay. So that's the idea that there's there's something about the data that's pointing you towards the theory. Uh yeah. And that you in in developing your theory, you in testing it, you need to a develop it in concert with what you find and make sense of it. But also then you need to test it, right? So um and that that was really also part of that was one interpretation of what what what he was saying there. And the other one is

1:52:09 much more more radical. Right. Exactly. And you and you see those carrying through this discussion that we've been having. V for example took the view that it was the um the former interpretation. Um so he has this lovely um analogy for how psychology works with how science works more generally. He said look here observation experimental observation delivers your exact description of the phenomena just like um he said Kepler and Galileo

1:52:45 delivered with careful observation um you know the laws the lawike regularities the planetary motion and the whatever stone dropping yeah you know I'm talking about um and and then he said But it took Newton's gravitational theory to really make coherent sense of to put the two pictures together. Yeah. to the first were just lawike exact descriptions of B observation you know of what happens

1:53:19 right and that's a huge step and that shows the value of experimentation he said but it took the gravitational laws that go beyond to make to really do a scientific explanation right and that so that's how he he thought about that yeah interesting and that's why you know you have that famous expression where they say Newton united heaven heaven and earth under one set of equations or something. So take taking these two realms were thought at the time to be really different in many different ways. I mean the the heavens being made of a different material even

1:53:53 um according to these guys. So it is quite an accomplishment and it is also serving I think to remind us that the discussion that we've been having is one that you always have in the sciences and that psychology is really no different in this respect from except being started a little later but from these other sciences it's always been a question about what what role does observation play and how do you build a theory in light of it. So, it's been maybe some special, you know, little psychological spices here and there that make it unique or interesting, but it's

1:54:27 of a general philosophy of science question that's been around for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, that's how I think about it. And then I think that it's the spice is quite big, you know, because we have this extra problem that what we're talking about is something that we seem to be able to get at partly only by getting subjects to do this thing. Mhm. Um and then we're trying to be really crafty about um getting observation that deploys

1:55:00 subjects doing that. Exactly. And I also would like wish that we would pay more attention to these early psychologists um and do them more justice because I teach like a general psychology class and the textbook we use is very breezy. It introduces like these early guys. Um and so at least there's that, you know, they're in there, but uh it's everything's very condensed to a um to a caricature that doesn't do justice to how rich the discuss and obviously it's a huge field. you can't cover

1:55:32 everything, but at the same time, it really does set the tone. A lot of these issues come up again later in the class. Um, so it would be nice to see more attention paid to this amongst people that are actually doing this stuff. But, uh, hopefully you're part of a new and cool trend where where philosophy and this and the science itself come together in this way. So, yeah. Yeah, there are lots of really great people um who work on sort of I mentioned Matias, you know, it's really fun to engage with and and Steven Fleming too is there

1:56:06 there are lots of people who are interested. Yeah. In in those things. Yeah, exactly. And he's a great scientist, but also he's, you know, he's a secret philosopher as well. I don't think it's much of a secret. Not so secret. Yeah. It's not so secret anymore. I was going to say it's not much of a secret, but uh and you know, but it is funny that in the in the book you have, you know, you're faith-based optimist, but you don't have any sort of there's no faith-based pessimism. So, I I I was sort of just wondering at the end if you think the pessimism is more justified, at least initially before you do all this work, than the optimism. Um,

1:56:40 oh, that's such an interesting question. It never occurred to me. Um I have some adjective for the pessimist as well, right? Yeah, I don't recall actually. I forgot. But um otherwise they would be lopsided. Um but yeah, I guess you're right. Maybe you're right that there's a kind of faith or at least maybe not faith but there's a kind of antecedently committed um so maybe it's more that that there

1:57:15 are some basic commitments that drive the pessimism um come what may in in in some sense right whereas the optimist is faith-based in that they'll think like this will work itself out you know right if we just do it you know a good enough job someday it'll be figured out. Um, but it's not that you think that the case for pessimism is stronger or something like that or that uh that the case for that that maybe what I'm asking is do you think that the default view should be pessimism until you go through all of this work that you've done and

1:57:48 then you can kind of be sort of a in between optimist. Yeah, temperamentally that's definitely meh, right? Um, so I am much more concerned about worries that you might have. So and I am coming from a very pessimist. So the so my whole sort of the way things went for me was you mentioned in the I was raised in the philosophy of perception land in um when I was a graduate student in London. you know the people were lots of people

1:58:22 were doing a philosophy of perception and introspection was obviously used and I um I had trouble I I couldn't I couldn't do what they were doing um and and so I am coming from a much more skeptical perspective off the bat at this and then I had to work myself to thinking well being just a naysayer is really that's not that's nothing, you know, and and you need to be a because

1:58:56 you don't want to go all the way. That's silly. So really, you should flip this around and think about how to draw the line constructively and and and so but but that I was coming from the skeptical side. I see. Uhhuh. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, so but I think you do you make a you make a good case for the um non-faith-based optimism, the the reason based optimism. So uh I I found it was this careful approach very

1:59:30 refreshing and I obviously am very interested especially in the the early psychologist and that and that whole literature. So I found that also very cool as just a separate little corner to be um to be thinking about. So, I really appreciate the project and the and the work that you do on it and I really appreciate the time that you've taken to to have this discussion with me today. So, I want to uh say thank you for that. And if you just hang up for one second, I'll say bye off the air. But other than that, I want to just uh say thanks again for really good conversation. Thanks. Okay,