ON THE USE OF INTROSPECTION IN THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

For the past half century, introspection has once again become a trusted source of knowledge in the study of consciousness. Some philosophers reflect on their own consciousness to draw metaphysical conclusions; some psychologists hypothesize observable regularities of consciousness by collecting introspective reports. They operate under the doctrine that first-person perspective provides a privileged access to the conscious mind. This dissertation is a critical examination of the use of introspection in the scientific and metaphysical study of consciousness. I first develop classic criticism of the privileged access, with a diagnosis of the failure of introspective psychology and a reflection on the misleading grammar of introspective assertions. I argue that no genuine epistemic faculty can have epistemic privilege. For the scientific study, I defend the traditional skepticism that introspection is an unreliable observation method. First of all, introspection does not have a proprietary neural mechanism, so it inherits all the errors from the sensory, conceptual, and linguistic processes that it consists of in. The worse problem is that the reliability of introspection cannot be calibrated. I show that a recent defense is based on misinterpretations of case studies in the history of science. For the metaphysical study, I argue that introspective data bear no relevance to the nature of consciousness. On the one hand, I use Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument to argue that introspection does not produce the so-called “phenomenal concepts” directly from phenomenal experiences. On the other hand, I point out that the subjective character of consciousness revealed in introspection is not the kind of thing that can be explained in a priori entailment. It can only be described or had. The so-called “epistemic arguments” that use a priori reasoning commit the category mistake of epistemically entailing experience.