About this topic
Summary

Introspection is the process through which people (and possibly some animals) become aware of their own current mental states like thoughts and sensory experiences. Statements like ‘I have a red afterimage’, ‘I am thinking about which route to take’, ‘I feel a pain in my toe’, are taken to be introspective reports that are the products of introspection. Disagreement still looms large about whether introspective awareness is a quasi-perceptual process or merely a conceptual affair, i.e. can we attend to or even sense our mental states, or merely think about them. Given that introspection often leads to knowledge about one’s mental states, many scholars are also interested in the epistemic properties, e.g. incorrigibility, certainty, reliability, of introspective reports. This category also hosts articles on introspectionism, a doctrine which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, and which considers introspection to be the primary scientific method for investigating mental states and processes.

Key works

The topic of introspection has a long tradition in philosophy: Locke 1689 and Kant 1781/1998 are considered important forerunners of the inner-sense account of introspection which has been argued for in greater detail by Armstrong 1968 and Lycan 1996. Shoemaker 1994 has criticized the inner-sense account in a series of articles, whereas Dretske 1995 and Tye 2000 have proposed influential transparency-based accounts of introspection of sensory states, highlighting the importance of drawing an appearance-reality distinction in introspective reports. Other important views include self-monitoring accounts by I. Goldman 2006 and Nichols & Stich 2003, and self-fulfillment theories, e.g. Burge 1988.

Introductions Schwitzgebel 2010 and Gertler 2015 provide highly accessible introductions to the topic. Gertler 2003 and Smithies & Stoljar 2012 are useful collections of articles on introspection and self-knowledge.
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623 found
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1 — 50 / 623
  1. The Inescapable Self.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In this paper I discuss the existence of the substantial self and argue against those, like Hume, who deny its reality.
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  2. Eliminativism and Reading One's Own Mind.T. Parent - manuscript
    Some contemporary philosophers suggest that we know just by introspection that folk psychological states exist. However, such an "armchair refutation" of eliminativism seems too easy. I first attack two strategems, inspired by Descartes, on how such a refutation might proceed. However, I concede that the Cartesian intuition that we have direct knowledge of representational states is very powerful. The rest of this paper then offers an error theory of how that intuition might really be mistaken. The idea is that introspection (...)
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  3. On the Everydayness of Trauma.Ryan Wasser - manuscript
    Shaili Jain's The Unspeakable Mind (2019) is an impressive examination of the stress experienced by a veteran community that too often is handled with a sense of clinical sterility that borders on inhumanity, or a that of pandering condescension. However, what is striking about Jain's text is the lack of analysis of how trauma manifests in what Heidegger would refer to as average everydayness. This, to me, seems like a missed opportunity, especially as it pertains to trauma-based ethics since all (...)
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  4. The epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge.Frank Hofmann - manuscript
    Recently, some philosophers have claimed that consciousness has an important epistemological role to play in the introspective self-ascription of one’s own mental states. This is the thesis of the epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge. I will criticize BonJour’s account of the role of consciousness for introspection. He does not provide any reason for believing that conscious states are epistemically better off than non-conscious states. Then I will sketch a representationalist account of how the thesis could be true. Conscious (...)
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  5. Introspection of Raimundus Lullus.Oleg Yur'evich Akimov - forthcoming - Philosophy and Culture (Russian Journal).
    The spiritual quest of Raymond Lull is of interest to modern philosophical discourse as occupying an intermediate position between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and thus combining the features of these two eras in the history of the development of human thought. They are connected with the Middle Ages by theocentrism and traditionalism, and with the Renaissance by emphasizing the peculiar polyphony of the world, the predominance of plurality over unity, given in the autonomous dialogic space of the human (...)
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  6. Strangers to ourselves: a Nietzschean challenge to the badness of suffering.Nicolas Delon - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...)
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  7. Pluralism about introspection.Kateryna Samoilova Franco - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    If we can and do have some self-knowledge, how do we acquire it? By examining the ways in which we acquire self-knowledge—by introspection—we can try shedding some light onto the nature and the breadth of self-knowledge, as others have tried to do with other forms of knowledge. My aim is to show that introspection involves multiple (that is, at least two) distinct processes, a view I call “pluralism about introspection”. One of the virtues of pluralism is that it explains how (...)
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  8. Correction to: Structural Disjunctivism, Indistinguishability and Introspection.Dirk Franken - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-1.
  9. Linguistic Judgments As Evidence.Steven Gross - forthcoming - In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Chomsky. Wiley-Blackwell.
    An overview of debates surrounding the use of meta-linguistic judgments in linguistics, including recent relevant empirical results.
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  10. Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness.Shao-Pu Kang - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-18.
    When you have a conscious experience—such as feeling pain, watching the sunset, or thinking about your loved ones—are you aware of the experience as your own, even when you do not reflect on, think about, or attend to it? Let us say that an experience has “mineness” just in case its subject is aware of it as her own while she undergoes it. And let us call the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness “typicalism.” Recently, Guillot has offered a (...)
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  11. A New Perceptual Theory of Introspection.Uriah Kriegel - forthcoming - In Routledge Handbook of Introspection. London: Routledge.
    According to the perceptual theory of introspection, introspection is a kind of perception of our mental life. To evaluate the perceptual theory’s plausibility, we obviously need to know what entitles a mental phenomenon to the qualification “perceptual.” I start by arguing that this task is complicated by the fact that we really have two notions of the perceptual: a functional notion and a phenomenological notion. The heart of the chapter is an argument that even if we have no reason to (...)
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  12. Pain and Incorrigibility.Peter Langland-Hassan - forthcoming - In J. Corns (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain. Routledge.
    This chapter (from Routledge's forthcoming handbook on the philosophy of pain) considers the question of whether people are always correct when they judge themselves to be in pain, or not in pain. While I don't show sympathy for traditional routes to the conclusion that people are "incorrigible" in their pain judgments, I explore--and perhaps even advocate--a different route to such incorrigibility. On this low road to incorrigibility, a sensory state's being judged unpleasant is what makes it a pain (or not).
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  13. Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic?Preston Lennon - forthcoming - American Philosophical Quarterly.
    The phenomenal view of thought holds that thinking is an experience with phenomenal character that determines what the thought is about. This paper develops and responds to the objection that the phenomenal view is chauvinistic: it withholds thoughts from creatures that in fact have them. I develop four chauvinism objections to the phenomenal view—one from introspection, one from interpersonal differences, one from thought experiments, and one from the unconscious thought paradigm in psychology—and show that the phenomenal view can resist all (...)
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  14. Implicit Bias.Alex Madva - forthcoming - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (5th Edition).
    (This contribution is primarily based on "Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility," (2018) Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. This version has been shortened and significantly revised to be more accessible and student-oriented.) Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence (...)
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  15. Confidence in Consciousness Research.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science:e1628.
    To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, researchers need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not. This article is an introduction to a family of procedures called ‘confidence-based procedures’, which consist in interpreting metacognitive indicators as indicators of consciousness. I assess the validity and accuracy of these procedures, and answer a series of common objections to their use in consciousness research. I conclude that confidence-based procedures are valid for assessing consciousness, and, in most cases, accurate (...)
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  16. L'accointance entre omniscience et omnipotence.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - Klesis.
    Introspection is the capacity by which we know our own conscious mental states. Several theories aim to explain it. According to acquaintance theory, we know our experiences by being acquainted with them. Acquaintance is non-causal, non-inferential, and non-observational. I present a dilemma for the acquaintance theory of introspection. Either subjects are always acquainted with all their experiences; or some attentional mechanism selects the relevant experiences (or aspects of experiences) for introspection. The first option is implausible: it implies that subjects are (...)
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  17. Introspection Is Signal Detection.Jorge Morales - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Introspection is a fundamental part of our mental lives. Nevertheless, its reliability and its underlying cognitive architecture have been widely disputed. Here, I propose a principled way to model introspection. By using time-tested principles from signal detection theory (SDT) and extrapolating them from perception to introspection, I offer a new framework for an introspective signal detection theory (iSDT). In SDT, the reliability of perceptual judgments is a function of the strength of an internal perceptual response (signal- to-noise ratio) which is, (...)
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  18. Mental measurement and the introspective privilege.Michael Pauen - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-25.
    According to a long-standing belief, introspection provides privileged access to the mind, while objective methods, which we denote as “extrospection”, suffer from basic epistemic deficits. Here we will argue that neither an introspective privilege exists nor does extrospection suffer from such deficits.We will focus on two entailments of an introspective privilege: first, such a privilege would require that introspective evidence prevails in cases of conflict with extrospective information. However, we will show that this is not the case: extrospective claims can (...)
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  19. Author's summary, and replies to commentators. [REVIEW]Michael Pelczar - forthcoming - Analysis.
  20. Byrne on transparent introspection. [REVIEW]Michael Roche - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    This is a review of Transparency and Self-Knowledge, by Alex Byrne, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2018, xi+227 pp., £46.61 (Hardback), ISBN 9780198821618.
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  21. Consciousness, introspection, and subjective measures.Maja Spener - forthcoming - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter discusses the main types of so-called ’subjective measures of consciousness’ used in current-day science of consciousness. After explaining the key worry about such measures, namely the problem of an ever-present response bias, I discuss the question of whether subjective measures of consciousness are introspective. I show that there is no clear answer to this question, as proponents of subjective measures do not employ a worked-out notion of subjective access. In turn, this makes the problem of response bias less (...)
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  22. Introspecting in the 20th century.Maja Spener - forthcoming - In Amy Kind (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Routledge.
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  23. Armstrong's Just-so Story about Consciousness.Daniel Stoljar - forthcoming - In Peter Anstey & David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.), A Materialist Theory of the Mind: 50 Years On.
    Abstract: In chapter 15 of A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M.Armstrong offers an account of what he calls “the biological value of introspection”, namely, that “without information…about the current state of our minds, purposive trains mental activity would be impossible.” This paper examines and assesses Armstrong’s “Just-so story about introspective consciousness”—as W.G.Lycan later called it. One moral will be that appreciating this aspect of Armstrong’s view blurs the difference between his own perceptual model of introspection, and the anti-perceptual models (...)
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  24. Acquaintance, Attention, and Introspective Justification.Samuel A. Taylor - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-22.
    This paper develops a version of the acquaintance theory of introspective justification. In the process, it rejects the view that acquaintance is sui generic in favor of a view that identifies acquaintance with availability for selection by attention mechanisms. Moreover, unlike many recent accounts of knowledge by acquaintance, it explains the epistemic significance of acquaintance in terms of the epistemic basing relation without any need to appeal to the structure or existence of phenomenal concepts. Lastly, while in ideal cases acquaintance (...)
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  25. Introspection in Emotion Research: Challenges and Insights.Leiszle Lapping-Carr, Alek E. Krumm, Cody Kaneshiro & Christopher L. Heavey - 2024 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (1):76-109.
    Introspection, or looking inward to observe one's experience, is inherent in many methods used to study feelings, the experiential component of emotion. Challenges of introspection make faithful, high-fidelity descriptions of feelings difficult to attain. A method that (1) cleaves to a specific moment, (2) cleaves to pristine inner experience, (3) brackets presuppositions, and (4) utilizes an iterative process may be particularly well suited to this task. We review some contemporary introspective methods from the perspective of these four methodological constraints, finding (...)
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  26. The Nurturing Stance, Moral Responsibility, and the (Implicit) Bias Blind Spot.René Baston - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):1-20.
    Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible can help a subject develop an impaired (...)
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  27. Introspection in the Disordered Mind: And the Superintrospectionitis Thesis.Alexandre Billon - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):49-62.
    In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (K&F) wonder what forms introspection could take in non-human animals, enhanced humans, artificial intelligences, and aliens. In this short note, I focus on disordered or neurodiverse minds. More specifically, I assess a claim that has often been made more or less implicitly to the effect that, in virtue of their conditions, people with schizophrenia or depersonalization disorder have superior introspective abilities that allow them to discern some important but normally hidden characteristics of our (...)
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  28. Seeing through Transparency.Davide Bordini - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Volume 3. Oxford University Press.
    Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...)
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  29. From the Heterogeneity Problem to a Natural‐Kind Approach to Pleasure.Antonin Broi - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):274-300.
    The heterogeneity problem, which stems from the alleged difficulty of finding out what all pleasant experiences have in common, is largely considered as a substantial issue in the philosophy of pleasure, one that is usually taken as the starting point for theorizing about the essence of pleasure. The goal of this paper is to move the focus away from the heterogeneity problem and toward an alternative approach to pleasure. To do this, I first show that, although the approach stemming from (...)
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  30. Studying Introspection in Animals and AIs.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):63-74.
    The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to address this oversight by offering a non-anthropocentric framework for understanding introspection that could be used to address these questions. However, their discussions on introspection in animals and AIs were quite (...)
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  31. Tell Us What You Really Think: A think aloud protocol analysis of the verbal cognitive reflection test.Nick Byrd, Brianna Joseph, Gabriela Gongora & Miroslav Sirota - 2023 - Journal of Intelligence 11 (4).
    The standard interpretation of cognitive reflection tests assumes that correct responses are reflective and lured responses are unreflective. However, prior process-tracing of mathematical reflection tests has cast doubt on this interpretation. In two studies (N = 201), we deployed a validated think-aloud protocol in-person and online to test how this assumption is satisfied by the new, validated, less familiar, and less mathematical verbal Cognitive Reflection Test (vCRT). Importantly, thinking aloud did not disrupt test performance compared to a control group. Moreover, (...)
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  32. Introspection and Belief: Failures of Introspective Belief Formation.Chiara Caporuscio - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (1):165-184.
    Introspection has traditionally been defined as a privileged way of obtaining beliefs about one’s occurrent mental states, and the idea that it is psychologically and epistemically different from non-introspective belief formation processes has been widely defended. At the same time, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have pointed out the unreliability of introspective reports in consciousness research. In this paper, I will argue that this dissonance in the literature can be explained by differentiating between infallible and informative introspective beliefs. I will (...)
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  33. Subpersonal Introspection.Peter Carruthers & Christopher F. Masciari - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):75-85.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) set up a broad tent, intended to encompass all forms of directly-useable self-awareness. But they omit an entire dimension of possibilities by restricting themselves to person-level self-awareness. Their account needs to be enriched to allow at least for model-free meta-representational signals that are not consciously available, but whose appraisal issues in action-tendencies and/or states of person-level emotion.
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  34. Models of Introspection vs. Introspective Devices Testing the Research Programme for Possible Forms of Introspection.Krzysztof Dołęga - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):86-101.
    The introspective devices framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) offers an attractive conceptual tool for evaluating and developing accounts of introspection. However, the framework assumes that different views about the nature of introspection can be easily evaluated against a set of common criteria. In this paper, I set out to test this assumption by analysing two formal models of introspection using the introspective device framework. The question I aim to answer is not only whether models developed outside of (...)
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  35. Studies of Primate Metacognition are Relevant to Determining What Form Introspection Could Take in Different Intelligent Systems.Maisy D. Englund & Michael J. Beran - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):102-112.
    Comparative research assessing metacognition in nonhuman animals contributes to the question of what form introspection could take in humans, non-humans, and other possibly conscious systems. We briefly review some major findings in comparative metacognition research, including some discoveries in areas looking at self-regulation and self-control. We discuss what data exist to address the three conditions for introspection defined by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) in their target article. We suggest that two of three conditions are met by existing data from (...)
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  36. Metacognitive Psychophysics in Humans, Animals, and AI: A Research Agenda for Mapping Introspective Systems.Stephen M. Fleming - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):113-128.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) propose an exciting new research programme on the computational form of introspective systems. Pursuing this goal requires measures that can isolate introspective capacity from response biases and first-order processes. I suggest that metacognitive psychophysics is well placed to meet this challenge, allowing the mapping of introspective architectures in humans, animals, and artificial systems.
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  37. Minds in Motion and Introspective Minds.Bryce Huebner & Sonam Kachru - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):129-142.
    Buddhist philosophers provide several toolkits for exploring the relationship between meditation and introspection. Drawing on some of their tools, we explore three models of mind, which offer different ways of thinking about the possibility of introspection: an entirely mindful observer, who introspectively experiences 'pure consciousness'; a thin mind, which avoids appealing to a witness or observer of mental episodes by positing a form of reflexive selfawareness; and a thicker mind, which is active, historically situated, and dependent upon an ecological and (...)
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  38. Certainty and Our Sense of Acquaintance with Experiences.François Kammerer - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):3015-3036.
    Why do we tend to think that phenomenal consciousness poses a hard problem? The answer seems to lie in part in the fact that we have the impression that phenomenal experiences are presented to us in a particularly immediate and revelatory way: we have a sense of acquaintance with our experiences. Recent views have offered resources to explain such persisting impression, by hypothesizing that the very design of our cognitive systems inevitably leads us to hold beliefs about our own experiences (...)
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  39. What Forms Could Introspective Systems Take? A Research Programme.François Kammerer & Keith Frankish - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):13-48.
    We propose a new approach to the study of introspection. Instead of asking what form introspection actually takes in humans or other animals, we ask what forms it could take, in natural or artificial minds. What are the dimensions along which forms of introspection could vary? This is a relatively unexplored question, but it is one that has the potential to open new avenues of study and reveal new connections between existing ones. It may, for example, focus attention on possible (...)
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  40. Introspective Capabilities in Large Language Models.Robert Long - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):143-153.
    This paper considers the kind of introspection that large language models (LLMs) might be able to have. It argues that LLMs, while currently limited in their introspective capabilities, are not inherently unable to have such capabilities: they already model the world, including mental concepts, and already have some introspection-like capabilities. With deliberate training, LLMs may develop introspective capabilities. The paper proposes a method for such training for introspection, situates possible LLM introspection in the 'possible forms of introspection' framework proposed by (...)
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  41. Sliders.Pete Mandik - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):154-163.
    'Sliders' are a speculative introspection-enhancing future technology allowing humans with cybernetic brain implants to precisely and voluntarily modulate moods and other mental states that vary along a one-dimensional scale. Such future humans may, for example, use the Sliders interface to temporarily present a COWARDLY–COURAGEOUS 'slider' in their visual field, and with a mere act of will change their level of courage from a 60 to a 65 on the 100-point scale. The present article discusses the implications of such a technology (...)
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  42. Can We Use the Study of Introspection to Assess Decision-Making and Understand Consciousness in Cephalopods? A Reply to Kammerer and Frankish.Jennifer Mather & Michaella P. Andrade - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):164-173.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) suggest we evaluate introspection of mental states to examine consciousness, but in cephalopods we can only judge internal actions by behaviour output. We can look for mental states — perceptions, beliefs, and intentions — where the tight input–action linkage that is true for reflexes, instincts, and well-learned actions is discontinuous. Here the animal is internally evaluating the sensory input from previous information and making a decision before acting. Perceptions: the octopus motion parallax head bob and (...)
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  43. The old and new criterion problems.Matthias Michel - 2023 - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomas Marvan & Michal Polak (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality. Routledge. pp. 130-154.
    Negative subjective reports such as “I didn’t see the stimulus” can be interpreted as indicating either that the subject didn’t see the stimulus, or as indicating that, while the subject did see the stimulus, the strength of sensory signals associated with the stimulus fell below a conservative criterion for answering “seen”. Determining which of these two interpretations is correct is the criterion problem. I present two ways in which researchers can solve this problem. But there’s more. What I call the (...)
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  44. A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind. [REVIEW]T. Parent - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3):887-889.
    In many respects, N.M.L. Nathan's latest book feels timeless. Its brevity and pithiness especially remind one of Descartes’ Meditations; it even has similar ove.
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  45. The Routes of Introspection.Adriana Renero - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):174-187.
    In 'What Forms Could Introspective Systems Take? A Research Programme', Kammerer and Frankish aim to map the space of 'possible forms of introspection' while lending themselves to questions about how different kinds of minds represent themselves. This paper aligns with their research programme in embracing other possible forms of introspection; it provides an outline of how, in representing its mental states, an introspective system could take a selective, cumulative, and/or predictive route while underscoring the importance of considering routes of introspection. (...)
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  46. Introspection, Transparency, and Desire.Michael Roche - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (3):132-154.
    The transparency approach to introspection has received much attention over the last few decades. It is inspired by some wellknown remarks from Gareth Evans (1982). Although this approach can seem quite plausible as applied to belief (and perhaps perception), philosophers tend to be sceptical that it can succeed for other mental kinds. This paper focuses on desire. It lays out in detail a transparency theory of desire introspection and addresses various concerns and objections to such a theory. The paper takes (...)
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  47. Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons.Eric Schwitzgebel & Sophie R. Nelson - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):188-203.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a grey zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or subject nor determinately many persons or subjects, (...)
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  48. How Not to Identify a Research Programme Concerning Introspection.Daniel Stoljar - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):215-222.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to set out a new research programme concerning introspection. I argue they have done no such thing, since the definition they are working with is too general. I further argue that, while it is possible to restrict the definition and so formulate a related research programme, this will have a different shape to the one they envisage.
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  49. On Possible and Actual Human Introspection.Wayne Wu - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):223-234.
    In this commentary, I take up Kammerer and Frankish's (this issue) project of exploring the space of possible and actual introspection. Focusing on human introspection where we lack concrete psychological models, I identify three types of introspection: (1) simple introspection of perceptual experience, (2) introspection of mental action, and (3) complex introspection of phenomenology. Drawing on psychological capacities which we empirically understand, I show how each type relies on various forms of attention to guide introspective response and raise questions about (...)
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  50. Extending Environments To Measure Self-Reflection In Reinforcement Learning.Samuel Allen Alexander, Michael Castaneda, Kevin Compher & Oscar Martinez - 2022 - Journal of Artificial General Intelligence 13 (1).
    We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent's hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment's outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered a (...)
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