[FRIAM] Your worst nightmare

[Pieter Steenekamp]

To put a Popper inspired philosophy of science-hat on this topic. The key
is in the falsification and good explanations process. Conjectures form in
a human's mind without consciously knowing where it comes from. To try to
use introspection to understand the roots of the conjecture is fruitless. A
process of cognitive falsification then takes this conjecture further. The
first stages might be a very informal process. Without expressing it like
that, the mind asks - I have this idea, why could it be false. If it passes
the first stages then a good explanation for the conjecture is
developed and it could be put out there in the world. This idea which
originally started as a conjecture now develops into knowledge whilst
continuously open to be falsified and better explanations are developed.
There is no knowledge that is immune against falsification and attempts to
hamper the falsification process limits the growth of knowledge.
I think this is a different paradigm in support of Nick's point that too
strong emphasis on introspection shuts down rather than inspiring inquiry.

On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 at 00:38, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
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