ABSTRACTS
Mark Engelbert and Peter Carruthers
Descriptive Experience Sampling: What is it good for?
Abstract: We defend the reliability of Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience
Sampling method against some of Schwitzgebel’s attacks. But we agree with
Schwitzgebel that the method could be used much more widely than it has
been, helping to answer questions about the nature and structure of consciousness
in addition to cataloguing the latter’s contents. We sketch a number of
potential lines of further enquiry.
Correspondence: Mark Engelbert, University of Maryland Email: marke@umd.edu
Peter Carruthers, University of Maryland Email: pcarruth@umd.edu
Christopher S. Hill
How to Study Introspection
Abstract: In this paper I celebrate the virtues of Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s
path-breaking book on introspection, but I also express dissatisfaction
with a few of its recurring themes. The main body of the paper consists
of seven theses about the way in which the study of introspection should
be conducted. Thus, to a large extent, the paper is a methodological proposal,
though it also makes a number of concrete claims about the nature of introspection,
and about the epistemological status of its deliverances. The methodology
I endorse is quite different than the one that Hurlburt advocates, but
even so, it is compatible with assigning a large role to Descriptive Experience
Sampling. Equally, while I am no fan of Schwitzgebel’s radical scepticism
about introspection, he and I are of like mind on a number of specific
epistemological issues, and we share the sense that it would be useful
to draw on other areas of cognitive science in extending Descriptive Experience
Sampling and refining it.
Correspondence: Christopher S. Hill, Department of Philosophy, Brown
University, Providence, RI 02915 Email: Christopher_Hill@brown.edu
Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons
Introspection and the Phenomenology of Free Will: Problems and Prospects
Abstract: Inspired and informed by the work of Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel
in their ‘Describing Inner Experience’, we do two things in this commentary.
First, we discuss the degree of reliability that introspective methods
might be expected to deliver across a range of types of experience. Second,
we explore the phenomenology of agency as it bears on the topic of free
will. We pose a number of potential problems for attempts to use introspective
methods to answer various questions about the phenomenology of free-will
experience — questions such as this: does such experience have metaphysical-libertarian
satisfaction conditions? We then discuss the prospects for overcoming some
of these problems via approaches such as Hurlburt’s DES methodology, the
so-called ‘talk aloud’ protocol, and forms of abduction that combine introspection
with non-introspection-based forms of evidence.
Correspondence: Terry Horgan, University of Arizona Email: thorgan@email.arizona.edu
Mark Timmons, University of Arizona Email: mtimmons@u.arizona.edu
Michael J. Kane
Describing, Debating, and Discovering Inner Experience
Review of Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel (2007), ‘Describing Inner Experience?
Proponent Meets Skeptic’
Abstract: In the spirit of the competitive-collaborative approach that
Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel take to examining the Descriptive Experience
Sampling (DES) method, I review ‘Describing Inner Experience? Proponent
Meets Skeptic’ — and consider the scientific potential of DES — from the
inside, in light of my own subjective experience as a DES subject, as a
person who lives with the unusual symptoms of Tourette Syndrome, and as
a cognitive psychologist who conducts idiographic and experience-sampling
work on volitional control and mind-wandering experiences.
Correspondence: Michael J. Kane, Department of Psychology, 321 McIver
St., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412,
Phone: 336.256.1022 Email: mjkane@uncg.edu
Eric Klinger
Response Organization of Mental Imagery, Evaluation of Descriptive Experience
Sampling, and Alternatives
A Commentary on Hurlburt’s and Schwitzgebel’s ‘Describing Inner Experience?’
Abstract: This commentary explores a number of issues raised by Hurlburt
and Schwitzgebel (2007) in ‘Describing Inner Experience’. The commentary
argues for expanding the definition of mental imagery, by which it is a
virtually universal human attribute; reintroduces a theory of response
organization, the meaning complex, to conceptualize unsymbolized thinking;
draws on work with Guided Affective Imagery to comment on the fragility
versus robustness of mental imagery; comments on the virtues and probable
flaws of Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), including an evolutionary
explanation of the flaws; and describes a pair of alternatives to DES:
idiothetic experience sampling in which rating scales immediately follow
the narrative reports, in place of delayed interviews, and the growing
promise of coupling experience sampling with brain imaging.
Correspondence: Eric Klinger, Division of Social Sciences, University
of Minnesota, Morris; Morris, MN 56267 Email: klinger@morris.umn.edu
Claire Petitmengin
Describing the Experience of Describing? The blindspot of introspection
Abstract: My comments on this pioneering book by Russ Hurlburt and Eric
Schwitzgebel do not focus on the descriptions of experiences that it includes,
but on the very process of description, which seems to me insufficiently
highlighted, described and called into question. First I will rely on a
few indications given by Melanie herself, the subject interviewed by the
authors, to highlight an essential difficulty which the authors only touch
upon: the not immediately recognized character of lived experience. Then
I will look for clues about what Melanie does to come into contact with
her experience and recognize it. These clues — completed by elements of
description of this act collected through explicitation interviews — provide
criteria enabling a more precise evaluation of what the authors do to guide
Melanie in the realization of this act, and therefore the accuracy of Melanie’s
descriptions. I will defend the idea that the description of the very process
of becoming aware and describing is an essential condition for the understanding,
refinement, teaching, and evaluation of introspection methods, as well
as for the reproducibility of their results.
Correspondence: Claire Petitmengin, Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie
Appliquée (CREA), École Polytechnique/CNRS, Paris
Institut Télécom — TEM, Paris. Email: Claire.Petitmengin@polytechnique.edu
Gualtiero Piccinini
Scientific Methods Must Be Public, and Descriptive Experience Sampling
Qualifies
Abstract: I defend three main conclusions. First, whether a method is public
is important, because non-public methods are scientifically illegitimate.
Second, there are substantive prescriptive differences between the view
that private methods are legitimate and the view that private methods are
illegitimate. Third, Descriptive Experience Sampling is a public (and hence
legitimate) method.
Correspondence: Email: piccininig@umsl.edu
Charles Siewert
Socratic Introspection and the Abundance of Experience
Abstract: I examine the prospects of using Hurlburt’s DES method to justify
his very ‘thin’ view of experience, on which visual experience is so infrequent
as to be typically absent when reading and speaking. Such justification
would seem to be based on the claim that, in DES ‘beeper’ samples, subjects
often deny they just had any visual experience. But if the question of
‘visual experience’ is properly construed, then (judging by the example
of Melanie) it is doubtful they are denying this. And even if they were,
that would not generally warrant overturning belief in the abundance of
one’s own visual experience.
I defend use of non-DES introspective judgments in reaching this
conclusion. These are no more dubious overall than the near-term retrospective
judgments in response to open-ended prompts employed in DES. Moreover,
DES itself needs to presuppose subjects enjoy an introspective competence
not confined to their beeper reports. The true power of DES to revise introspection
thus lies in its interview portion. This view is further supported by considering
Hurlburt’s and Schwitzgebel’s discussion of detail in visual imagery.
Introspectively based conceptions of experience should be improved
and corrected, not by means of a supposedly privileged class of reports,
but by questioning that clarifies distinctions and makes explicit the implications
of what one says in making introspective judgments. My advocacy of this
sort of ‘Socratic introspection’ leads me to broad agreement with many
of Schwitzgebel’s conclusions. But it also makes me regard myself as a
‘proponent’ of — not a ‘sceptic’ about — the use of introspection to study
experience.
Correspondence: Charles Siewert, Rice University Philosophy Department
MS 14, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251, USA Email: siewert@rice.edu
John Sutton
Time, Experience, and Descriptive Experience Sampling
Abstract: Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) rightly encourages concrete,
experience-near description of specific psychological states. But it needs
to be further connected and opened up, both to the search for converging
methods and objective corroborating evidence for the reports of subjective
experience, and to more temporally-extended sequences in experience. I
criticize DES for deliberately eradicating the dynamics of conscious experience
by providing only a flash snapshot of ‘the last undisturbed moment before
the beep’. This restriction rules out certain significant experiential
phenomena, and renders the kind of ‘personal truth’ revealed strangely
thin, by neglecting the fact that we are creatures whose present experience
is often animated in many distinctive ways by our past. I query the distinction
between recalling and reconstructing, and re-examine parts of two reports
discussed by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel. These examples reveal rich cross-temporal
interactions that should encourage us to explore, in ways DES officially
rules out, how kinaesthetic memory and autobiographical memory respectively
animate present experience. A slightly extended experience-sampling practice
could take a central place among other methods for investigating experience.
Correspondence: John Sutton, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
Email: john.sutton@mq.edu.au http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton
Maja Spener
Using First-Person Data About Consciousness
Abstract: In Describing Inner Experience, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel explore
the proper limits of scepticism about consciousness and the prospect of
a scientific investigation of consciousness. Their debate with each other
focuses on the question about whether we can trust people’s reports about
their inner experiences and on Hurlburt’s introspective method, DES. I
point out that their discussion leaves unclear the crucial question of
the aims and objectives of DES. This makes it difficult genuinely to assess
DES’s merits and the problems for theorizing that might be created by inaccuracy
in the introspective data. I then provide a taxonomy of different introspective
methods, depending on different roles played by introspective data and
on the kinds of questions that are being asked. I suggest that introspective
methods tasked to answer a certain group of questions — certain philosophical
questions about experience — are more vulnerable to the possibility of
introspective error than others.
Correspondence: Email: maja.spener@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
