Super naive question: given all we know about the myriad ways in which the brain fools itself, and more specifically, the ways that subconscious mental activities fool our conscious selves, why should we trust introspection? More specifically, why should I believe that the way I perceive myself to think is the way I actually think (as opposed to an abstraction put up by my subconscious)?
My model is that any psychological model that relies on introspection is going to be inherently flawed. If we want to learn how people think, we should observe their actions, and carefully watch how people behave in response to different stimuli and situations. I think asking people how they think tells us more about how they rationalize their thinking than it does about how they actually think.
There is both some actual fact of what it is like to experience your own mind, and then there is the way you make sense of it to explain it to yourself and others that has been reified into concepts. Just because the reification of the experience of our own thinking is flawed in a lot of ways doesn’t make it not evidence of our thoughts, it only makes it noisy, unreliable, and “known” in ways that have to be “unknown” (we have to find and notice confusion).
You worry that asking people who they think will tell us more about their understanding of how they think rather than how they actually think, and that’s probably true, but also useful, because they got that understanding somehow and it’s unlikely to be totally divorced from reality. Lacking better technology for seeing into our minds, we’re left to perform hermeneutics on our self reports.
Super naive question: given all we know about the myriad ways in which the brain fools itself, and more specifically, the ways that subconscious mental activities fool our conscious selves, why should we trust introspection? More specifically, why should I believe that the way I perceive myself to think is the way I actually think (as opposed to an abstraction put up by my subconscious)?
My model is that any psychological model that relies on introspection is going to be inherently flawed. If we want to learn how people think, we should observe their actions, and carefully watch how people behave in response to different stimuli and situations. I think asking people how they think tells us more about how they rationalize their thinking than it does about how they actually think.
There is both some actual fact of what it is like to experience your own mind, and then there is the way you make sense of it to explain it to yourself and others that has been reified into concepts. Just because the reification of the experience of our own thinking is flawed in a lot of ways doesn’t make it not evidence of our thoughts, it only makes it noisy, unreliable, and “known” in ways that have to be “unknown” (we have to find and notice confusion).
You worry that asking people who they think will tell us more about their understanding of how they think rather than how they actually think, and that’s probably true, but also useful, because they got that understanding somehow and it’s unlikely to be totally divorced from reality. Lacking better technology for seeing into our minds, we’re left to perform hermeneutics on our self reports.