Research Theme: Our Poor Knowledge of Our Own Conscious Experience

Eric Schwitzgebel

Philosophers since Descartes have been taken with the idea that we know our own conscious experiences or "phenomenology" directly and with a high level of certainty.  Although infallibilism in this regard has been under heavy attack since the 1960's, philosophers still generally assume that our knowledge of our own phenomenology is quite good and that, for example, we are extremely unlikely to be grossly mistaken about our own current phenomenology when we concentrate extended attention on it.  I argue against this claim.

In "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation", Michael S. Gordon and I argue that although there is something it is like for a human being to echolocate, we have very poor knowledge of the experience of echolocation.  In "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Imagery" I suggest that our knowledge of even something as basic and prevalent as our visual imagery is surprisingly poor.  In "Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?", I present the common 1950's opinion that we dream primarily in black and white as an example of a case in which people have been grossly mistaken about their own subjective experiences.  ("Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from 1942" provides empirical evidence that popular opinion about the presence of colors in our dreams has indeed changed since that period.)

"The Unreliability of Naive Introspection" provides a brief general overview of several domains in which introspection of conscious experience appears to be unreliable.  A more ambitious general paper on this topic is in the works.

"Introspective Training: Reflections on Titchener's Lab Manual" explores, through an examination of the historical case of E.B. Titchener, the prospects of training to improve the quality of introspective judgments.  "Difference Tone Training: A Demonstration Adapted from Titchener's Experimental Psychology" provides the reader the opportunity to train herself in a roughly Titchenerian way.

I am also working on a book manuscript with Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at UN Las Vegas and a leading proponent of experience sampling as a means of generating accurate descriptions of moments of conscious experience.  The book centers around an edited transcript of a series of interviews Russ and I jointly conducted with a subject who was wearing a random beeper and who was asked to take note of her experiences whenever the beeper went off.  In the course of the interview, Russ and I concretely confront the question of how much to believe the subject's reports of randomly selected moments of her experience.  If her reports are largely accurate, then the transcripts also provide, in unprecedented detail, a portrait of moments of an ordinary person's phenomenology.