Alvin I. Goldman - Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public

end p.ii

end p.vi

introspection was often regarded as the prototype of a private process or method that should be forsworn, at least for scientific purposes. It fails to satisfy the requirement that scientific knowledgeand perhaps all knowledgeshould be based on public (intersubjective) data and public methods. Psychologists and philosophers of science are still queasy at the very mention of the word "introspection"; and many philosophers of mind, working in the long shadows of Wittgenstein and Ryle, favor functionalist accounts of mental states that try to avoid or minimize the role of "privileged access." There are two problems with the foregoing stricture against introspection. First, something like it (perhaps "internal monitoring") seems to be the way people normally determine their own conscious states. Second, the scientific study of consciousness currently enjoys not only renewed respectability but dramatically increased importance. The question then arises of how the scientific study of consciousness can proceed, or how its epistemology can be reconstructed. Does it relyperhaps implicitly and indirectlyon introspective methods, or can it do entirely without them? If it does rely on introspection, is the use of such a private method legitimate? Chapters explore this fundamental epistemological problem for the science of consciousness. I argue, first, that introspection is indeed required in the science of consciousness, because researchers must rely on the introspective reports of their subjects, and this reliance is in turn (tacitly) based on introspection of their own. Furthermore, introspection is indeed a private method, in a relevant sense of "private." Nonetheless, a private method can be a legitimate pathway to knowledge. The constraint of publicity, as a universal constraint on (scientific) method, should be rejected.