Self-Consciousness and Introspection
Self-consciousness is awareness of oneself as a subject; introspection is the means by which we seem to know our own mental states.
Definition
Self-consciousness is a subject's awareness of itself as the bearer of its own experiences, while introspection is the capacity by which a subject forms judgments about its own current mental states.
Scope
This topic covers the nature of self-awareness, immunity to error through misidentification, the mechanisms and reliability of introspection, and the special epistemic status often claimed for first-person access to one's own mind.
Core questions
- What is involved in being aware of oneself as a subject?
- How does introspection give us knowledge of our own minds?
- Is introspective knowledge especially secure or privileged?
- How reliable are introspective reports about experience?
Key concepts
- self-awareness
- introspection
- immunity to error through misidentification
- privileged access
- inner sense
- self-knowledge
Key theories
- Immunity to error through misidentification
- Certain first-person judgments cannot be mistaken about who the subject is, even if they err about the property ascribed, marking a distinctive feature of self-reference.
- Inner-sense (perceptual) model
- Introspection works like an internal monitoring or perceptual scanning of one's own mental states, modeled on outer perception.
History
Shoemaker (1968) clarified the logic of self-reference and immunity to misidentification, while Armstrong (1968) developed the inner-sense model on which introspection resembles perception. More recently Schwitzgebel (2008) has argued empirically that naive introspection is far less reliable than traditionally assumed.
Debates
- Reliability of introspection
- Whether introspective reports about one's own current experience are trustworthy or frequently mistaken.
- Mechanism of introspection
- Whether introspection is a quasi-perceptual inner sense, a self-monitoring process, or a non-observational form of self-knowledge.
Key figures
- Sydney Shoemaker
- D. M. Armstrong
- Eric Schwitzgebel
Related topics
Seminal works
- shoemaker1968
- armstrong1968
- schwitzgebel2008
Frequently asked questions
- Is introspection always accurate?
- Not according to recent work. While first-person access was traditionally thought privileged, studies suggest naive introspective reports about experience can be systematically unreliable.