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Your worst nightmare

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thompnickson2

Your worst nightmare

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

[hidden email]

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

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Pieter Steenekamp

Re: Your worst nightmare

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, <[hidden email]> 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
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove