[FRIAM] Your worst nightmare
thompnickson2 at gmail.com
thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 23 17:38:18 EST 2020
New Abstract:
As psychologists in the behaviorist tradition, we have long had misgivings
about the concept of introspection. The metaphor behind the concept is
misleading, and despite the wide use of the concept in both vernacular and
professional settings, we doubt that anybody has ever resorted to
introspection in the sense that the concept is usually understood.
Additional misgivings arise from the study of the philosophy of C S Peirce.
Peirce's Pragmaticism, one of the foundations of modern behaviorism, rejects
the Cartesian notion that all knowledge first arises from direct
knowledge of one's own mind - i.e., from introspection. Peirce declares
that all knowledge arises from inference. He even reverses the flow,
declaring that self-knowledge is largely inference from what we do and what
happens to us. The logical operation by which we infer our selves is that
called "Abduction" by Peirce. When we engage in abduction, we use one or
more properties of an individual event or object to infer its membership in
a class of events or objects that share this properties with our initial
event or object. Abductions have potential heuristic power because when we
infer what class an individual event belongs to we may infer by deduction
other properties that this individual may have. However abductions vary
tremendously in their heuristic power ranging from the from highly useful
and testable expectations to implications that are mere vacuous or
misleading. We argue that the manner in which "introspection" is understood
in psychology abuses the logic of abduction, prematurely shutting down,
rather than inspiring inquiry. Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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