Introspection in Problem Solving
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'Introspectionism' and the Mythical Origins of Scientific Psychology
Consciousness and Cognition Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006) 634–654 www.elsevier.com/locate/concog ‘Introspectionism’ and the mythical origins of scientific psychology Alan Costall Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO1 2DY, UK Received 1 May 2006 Abstract According to the majority of the textbooks, the history of modern, scientific psychology can be tidily encapsulated in the following three stages. Scientific psychology began with a commitment to the study of mind, but based on the method of introspection. Watson rejected introspectionism as both unreliable and effete, and redefined psychology, instead, as the science of behaviour. The cognitive revolution, in turn, replaced the mind as the subject of study, and rejected both behaviourism and a reliance on introspection. This paper argues that all three stages of this history are largely mythical. Introspectionism was never a dominant movement within modern psychology, and the method of introspection never went away. Furthermore, this version of psychology’s history obscures some deep conceptual problems, not least surrounding the modern conception of ‘‘behaviour,’’ that continues to make the scientific study of consciousness seem so weird. Ó 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Introspection; Introspectionism; Behaviourism; Dualism; Watson; Wundt 1. Introduction Probably the most immediate result of the acceptance of the behaviorist’s view will be the elimination of self-observation and of the introspective reports resulting from such a method. (Watson, 1913b, p. 428). The problem of consciousness occupies an analogous position for cognitive psychology as the prob- lem of language behavior does for behaviorism, namely, an unsolved anomaly within the domain of an approach. -
EDUCATION in CHINA a Snapshot This Work Is Published Under the Responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD
EDUCATION IN CHINA A Snapshot This work is published under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of OECD member countries. This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. Photo credits: Cover: © EQRoy / Shutterstock.com; © iStock.com/iPandastudio; © astudio / Shutterstock.com Inside: © iStock.com/iPandastudio; © li jianbing / Shutterstock.com; © tangxn / Shutterstock.com; © chuyuss / Shutterstock.com; © astudio / Shutterstock.com; © Frame China / Shutterstock.com © OECD 2016 You can copy, download or print OECD content for your own use, and you can include excerpts from OECD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgement of OECD as source and copyright owner is given. All requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to [email protected]. Requests for permission to photocopy portions of this material for public or commercial use shall be addressed directly to the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at [email protected] or the Centre français d’exploitation du droit de copie (CFC) at [email protected]. Education in China A SNAPSHOT Foreword In 2015, three economies in China participated in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, for the first time: Beijing, a municipality, Jiangsu, a province on the eastern coast of the country, and Guangdong, a southern coastal province. -
Running Head: a REVIEW and EVALUATION of an OPEN 1
Running Head: A REVIEW AND EVALUATION OF AN OPEN 1 A Review and Evaluation of an Open-Source Mood Assessment, the Brief Mood Introspection Scale Rachael M. Cavallaro University of New Hampshire Victoria Bryan University of New Hampshire John D. Mayer University of New Hampshire A REVIEW AND EVALUATION OF AN OPEN 2 Abstract The Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS) is an open-source, 16-item assessment of current mood regularly used in psychological research. The scale has two sets of scales: one pair of scales assesses mood using Pleasant-Unpleasant and Arousal-Calm dimensions; the other (less used alternative) assesses mood using Positive and Negative Affect. However, since its publication in 1988, there have been no systematic reports of its usage pattern, norms or of evidence for its validity. The present meta-analysis aims to (1) identify the nature of the studies that employed the BMIS (i.e. research areas and design), (2) establish the norms for the BMIS the scale means, standard deviations, and reliabilities, and (3) evaluate for the BMIS’s validity. One hundred and fifty studies that utilized the BMIS over a five-year timespan (2016-2011) were identified, including 27 studies that reported information pertinent to the scale’s norms. Our findings indicated that BMIS was primarily used in experimental research, and that its norms were similar to those from the original report. We make recommendations for use of Likert response scales and scoring conventions. A more qualitative review suggested that the Pleasant- Unpleasant mood scale had considerable evidence for its validity from its relation to criteria. -
Wilhelm Wundt & Herman Ebbinghaus Wilhelm Wundt & Herman
1 2 Wilhelm Wundt & Herman Ebbinghaus Wilhelm Wundt & Herman Ebbinghaus 1. Wundt 2. Ebbinghaus A. Biographical details A. Biographical details B. Career history B. Career history C. Psychological theories C. Psychological theories D. Impact on Psychology D. Impact on Psychology Setting the Scene… 3 4 (After Darwin, Descartes (d. 1650) – psychologists William James (1890) – we consist of a preferred the study we are not automata; material body & of learning to that of consciousness selects immaterial soul consciousness) (Newton) Copernicus (1543): J.-O. la Mettrie (1748) Charles Darwin (1859) Wilhelm Wundt Sigmund Freud heliocentric theory of the L’Homme Machine – (On the Origin of Species) (1879) established (1899) – unconscious universe – Earth, and humans are just more – evolution by common first lab for study of more important than human race, are not the complex animals descent of all creatures human psychology consciousness centre of the universe Opposing views… 5 6 Humans are special. We’re not just smarter monkeys. Reflective self- consciousness (subjective experience) is unique to humans. It is too Wilhelm Wundt remarkable to have evolved for no reason. It permits selection. It creates (1832-1920) our experience of the world. It makes us care whether we live or die. William James Wilhelm Wundt Humans are not special – we are not the center of the universe. We’re just more complex animals on a little planet in an uncaring universe. Consciousness is not special (in any useful way) – it doesn’t produce our behavior; our behavior issues from unconscious processes shared with animals and generated by brains. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. -
Private Browsing
Away From Prying Eyes: Analyzing Usage and Understanding of Private Browsing Hana Habib, Jessica Colnago, Vidya Gopalakrishnan, Sarah Pearman, Jeremy Thomas, Alessandro Acquisti, Nicolas Christin, and Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2018/presentation/habib-prying This paper is included in the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. August 12–14, 2018 • Baltimore, MD, USA ISBN 978-1-939133-10-6 Open access to the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security is sponsored by USENIX. Away From Prying Eyes: Analyzing Usage and Understanding of Private Browsing Hana Habib, Jessica Colnago, Vidya Gopalakrishnan, Sarah Pearman, Jeremy Thomas, Alessandro Acquisti, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Faith Cranor Carnegie Mellon University {htq, jcolnago, vidyag, spearman, thomasjm, acquisti, nicolasc, lorrie}@andrew.cmu.edu ABSTRACT Prior user studies have examined different aspects of private Previous research has suggested that people use the private browsing, including contexts for using private browsing [4, browsing mode of their web browsers to conduct privacy- 10, 16, 28, 41], general misconceptions of how private brows- sensitive activities online, but have misconceptions about ing technically functions and the protections it offers [10,16], how it works and are likely to overestimate the protections and usability issues with private browsing interfaces [41,44]. it provides. To better understand how private browsing is A major limitation of much prior work is that it is based used and whether users are at risk, we analyzed browsing on self-reported survey data, which may not always be reli- data collected from over 450 participants of the Security able. -
Some Properties of Bilingual Maintenance and Loss in Mexican Background High-School Students
Some Properties of Bilingual Maintenance and Loss in Mexican Background High-School Students KENJI HAKUTA and DANIEL DANDREA Sianford Univcniry Universiry of California, sanra cnu Propenies of the maintenance and loss of SpanishEnglish bilingualism were investigated in 308high-schoolstudents ofMexican background. Subjects were classijied by their depth of familial establishment in the United States. The key variables investigated were their actual and selfreported proficiencies in Spanish and English, seq-reported language choice behavior in various settings, and their language attitude. The largest difference in Spanish pro- ficiency was found between the cohort who were born in the United States but whose parents were born in Mexico and the cohon whose parents were born in the United States, with maintenance of Spanish evident up to this group. Maintenance of Spanish proficiency was principally associated with adult language practice in the home, and was not predicted by the subject's language choice outside the home or their language attitude. In turn, adult language choice was found to be affected by the demographic fact of immigration, the adult's ability to use English in the home, and increasing distance in the familial social network ties to Mexico. Outside of the home domain, language choice was found to show rapid and constant shift towardr English. This sh@ in language choice was unrelated to Spanish proficiency, but instead was predicted by the subject's language amtude. Language attitude also appeared to contaminate self reported proficiency in both Spanish and English. Final/y, a response latency task for vocabulary production and recognition in Spanish suggested that attrition of Spanish is best characterized as difficulty in retrieval rather than total loss. -
Introspection Mark Engelbert and Peter Carruthers∗
Advanced Review Introspection Mark Engelbert and Peter Carruthers∗ Two main questions about introspection are addressed: whether it exists, and whether it is a reliable source of self-knowledge. Most philosophers have assumed that the answers to both questions are positive, whereas an increasing number of cognitive scientists take the view that introspection is either nonexistent (with self-attributions of mental states being made on the same sort of interpretative basis as attributions of mental states to other people) or unreliable. A number of different models of self-knowledge are discussed, and the evidence bearing on the existence and reliability of introspection is reviewed. New experiments are required to tease apart some of the alternatives. 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Cogn Sci 2010 1 245–253 hilosophers have traditionally assumed that the form of noninterpretative access is what is normally Phuman mind is largely transparent to itself.1–3 referred to as ‘introspection.’ (Some reserve the term The thesis of mental transparency can be divided into ‘introspection’ for those cases where one consciously a conjunction of two claims: (1) mental states are self- and deliberately pays attention to one’s mental states.4 presenting (if one is undergoing a given mental state, We will not follow this usage.) then one knows that one is) and (2) our knowledge of A distinction should be drawn between access mental states is infallible (if one believes that one is to our own mental states that is inferential and access undergoing a given mental state, then so one is). The that is interpretive. Many cognitive processes—in- scope of this thesis has generally been restricted to cluding perceptual processes like vision and language current mental events of judging, deciding, reasoning, parsing—are thought to be inferential in that they experiencing, imagining, and feeling, however. -
Introspecting in the Twentieth Century Maja Spener (University of Birmingham)
Introspecting in the Twentieth Century Maja Spener (University of Birmingham) Forthcoming in Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, A. Kind (ed.), Routledge. This version of the paper is only a draft. For quotation please consult the published version. Introspection in the 20th century is a vast topic. Discussions involving introspection figured in the relatively new discipline of experimental psychology, as well as in various debates in philosophy of mind and epistemology. Introspection has been a focus of interest as a method of investigation and as a psychological and epistemic capacity itself. Over the course of the century, these theoretical interests did not always connect well, although they have intersected and influenced each other at different points. But there is no helpful sense in which one might talk of ‘the history’ of introspection in the 20th century if by that one means a straight line of development across ten or so decades of psychological and philosophical theorizing with, and about, introspection. Instead, there is a criss-crossing pattern of various storylines and what I shall do here is track a couple of different strands in the overall pattern to the exclusion of many others.1 In particular, I shall concentrate on philosophers’ and psychologists’ use of introspection, and the discussions surrounding such use. A story we are often told is that during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, experimental psychology was synonymous with introspectionism, exemplified by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and E. B. Titchener. According to the story, these early psychologists took the subject-matter of psychology to be conscious states only and their main method of investigation was introspection. -
Confessional Reflexivity As Introspection and Avowal
Establishing the ‘Truth’ of the Matter: Confessional Reflexivity as Introspection and Avowal JOSEPH WEBSTER University of Edinburgh The conceptualisation of reflexivity commonly found in social anthropology deploys the term as if it were both a ‘virtuous’ mechanism of self‐reflection and an ethical technique of truth telling, with reflexivity frequently deployed as an moral practice of introspection and avowal. Further, because reflexivity is used as a methodology for constructing the authority of ethnographic accounts, reflexivity in anthropology has come to closely resemble Foucault’s descriptions of confession. By discussing Lynch’s (2000) critical analysis of reflexivity as an ‘academic virtue’, I consider his argument through the lens of my own concept of ‘confessional reflexivity’. While supporting Lynch’s diagnosis of the ‘problem of reflexivity’, I attempt to critique his ethnomethodological cure as essentialist, I conclude that a way forward might be found by blending Foucault’s (1976, 1993) theory of confession with Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of ‘epistemic reflexivity’. The ubiquity of reflexivity and its many forms For as long as thirty years, reflexivity has occupied a ‘place of honour’ at the table of most social science researchers and research institutions. Reflexivity has become enshrined as a foundational, or, perhaps better, essential, concept which is relied upon as a kind of talisman whose power can be invoked to shore up the ‘truthiness’ of the claims those researchers and their institutions are in the business of making. No discipline, it seems, is more guilty of this ‘evoking’ than social anthropology (Lucy 2000, Sangren 2007, Salzaman 2002). Yet, despite the ubiquity of its deployment in anthropology, the term ‘reflexivity’ remains poorly defined. -
Wundt's "New Psychology"
Wundt's "New Psychology" Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) was the first professional to call himself a psychologist. He founded one of the first psychological laboratories in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Wundt believed the "only certain reality is immediate experience" (Blumenthal, 1975). If psychology were to be a science, then psychologists would have to collect data about experience. To do this, Wundt used procedures similar to those developed by the psychophysicists. He arranged controlled laboratory settings. He carefully administered stimulation such as sounds and sights. He gathered information about how quickly people responded to a stimulus (reaction time) and what they experienced. Wundt believed these experiments would lead to a consensus or agreement among scientists about the nature of experience. Wilhelm Wundt Wundt's approach was not unreasonable. It resembled the way most natural sciences developed in the 1800s. Science like botany and zoology began with careful observation and an effort to arrive at consensual validation (agreement among different observers). For example, biologists began with careful descriptions of plants and animals before trying to classify them. Wundt believed the same approach would work in psychology. Careful scientific observers could simply look inside themselves to see the mind in action, and they should be able to agree on the basic phenomena of psychology. After agreeing about basic observations, they could do a deeper analysis of what they had found. The technique of "looking inside" to gather data about the mind is called introspection . The problem with Wundt's program is fairly obvious to those of us in the modern world, where differences between people are taken for granted. -
The Nature of Mid-Life Introspection with the Goal of Understanding the Fullness, Or Essence, of the Experience
Copyright 2014, Lee DeRemer Abstract I explore the nature of mid-life introspection with the goal of understanding the fullness, or essence, of the experience. I use research from interviews with nine people who have had deeply personal, highly intentional mid-life introspection experiences. In these interviews I seek to appreciate the motivation of the individuals, the dynamics of the experience, the role of others, lessons learned, and the impact on interviewees’ approach to questions of meaning and purpose. I also interview the spouses of six of the participants to obtain additional perspective on each introspection experience. I employ a transcendental phenomenological methodology to discover whether any aspects of the mid-life introspection experience are common, regardless of differences in world view, background, gender, occupation, education level, or socioeconomic status. By learning the stories of each of these mid-life introspection experiences, I discover the nature of mid-life introspection and develop the following definition of mid-life introspection: a deeply personal quest for a fresh understanding of one’s identity, purpose, values, goals, and life direction, influenced but not necessarily constrained by one’s life history and present circumstances. This research will enable the reader to conclude, “I understand the nature of mid-life introspection and what to expect from a mid-life introspection experience.” The research also reveals a framework that depicts the mid-life introspection experience graphically and a collection of questions that can guide one’s own mid-life introspection. iii Dedication This paper is dedicated to three people. I am who I am because of them, and I am forever grateful. -
Consciousness and Introspection in Plotinus and Augustine Suzanne Stern-Gillet University of Bolton, [email protected]
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Bolton Institutional Repository (UBIR) University of Bolton UBIR: University of Bolton Institutional Repository Philosophy: Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed) Philosophy 2007 Consciousness and Introspection in Plotinus and Augustine Suzanne Stern-Gillet University of Bolton, [email protected] Digital Commons Citation Stern-Gillet, Suzanne. "Consciousness and Introspection in Plotinus and Augustine." (2007). Philosophy: Journal Articles (Peer- Reviewed). Paper 1. http://digitalcommons.bolton.ac.uk/phil_journalspr/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at UBIR: University of Bolton Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy: Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by an authorized administrator of UBIR: University of Bolton Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 CONSCIOUSNESS AND INTROSPECTION IN PLOTINUS AND AUGUSTINE Suzanne Stern-Gillet I. Introduction Philosophers of mind and philosophical psychologists no longer care to rely on introspection as a method for investigating the human mind. From the early years of the twentieth century, introspection has gradually disappeared from the methods favored by serious philosophers and psychologists. This fading away is the object of William Lyons‟ well-known 1986 book, The Disappearance of Introspection. Curiously, if introspection has all but disappeared from the armory of philosophers and psychologists, it has survived as an exegetical category. It continues to be used routinely in accounts of Descartes‟ epistemology, it is unquestioningly applied to Augustine‟s De Trinitate and Confessions, and it regularly slips from the pen of practically anyone who writes on Plotinus‟ concept of soul, theory of dual selfhood or, indeed, mysticism.