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 thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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