introspection
- Key People:
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Related Topics:
- consciousness
- reflection
- classical introspection
introspection, (from Latin introspicere, “to look within”), the process of observing the operations of one’s own mind with a view to discovering the laws that govern the mind. In a dualistic philosophy, which divides the natural world (matter, including the human body) from the contents of consciousness, introspection is the chief method of psychology. Thus, it was the method of primary importance to many philosophers—including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain—as it was to the 19th-century pioneers of experimental psychology, especially Wilhelm Wundt, Oswald Külpe, and Edward Bradford Titchener.
To all these men, the contents of consciousness appeared to be immediate experience: to have an experience was to know that one has it. In this sense, introspection appeared to be self-validating; it could not lie.
Wundt and his disciple Titchener believed that introspection finds in consciousness a dynamic mixture of essentially sensory materials—sensations proper, images, and feelings that closely resemble sensations. Known as classical introspection, this view remained popular only as long as Titchener continued to expound it. Many other psychologists found different kinds of content in consciousness. The German philosopher Franz Brentano saw consciousness as constituted of both sensory contents and more-impalpable acts.
Controversy about the results of introspection made it quite clear by 1920 that introspection is not infallible and, later, that its fallibility is due to the fact that it is not immediate but is an observational, inferential process that takes time and is subject to errors of observation (see inference). By 1940 both the concept of dualism and the word introspection had largely disappeared from scientific psychology in the United States, where behaviourism, which rejected the significance of consciousness, ruled.
Actually, the repudiation of dualism by modern experimental psychology led only to the surrender of the word introspection, not to the abandonment of the method. Practitioners of Gestalt psychology used the general method, without the name, in phenomenological description, and phenomenologists and existentialists—mostly in Europe—used it as well (see phenomenology; existentialism).
The method also is employed in the description of experience in studies of perception and in psychophysics, which determines the relations of conscious events, usually of a sensory nature, to magnitudes of the stimulus, especially in the determination of the sensory thresholds and sensory scales. In addition, the method is used in the reports of patients as they describe their conscious states to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts during free association. (See also stream of consciousness.)