Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence

Frith, CD

Lodahl, S

Zinck, A

English

UCL Discovery

Making a case for introspectiondoi:10.1017/S0140525X0900082XAlexandra Zinck,a Sanne Lodahl,b and Chris D. Frithb,caLWL-Universita ¨tsklinik Bochum der Ruhr-Universita ¨t Bochum, Psychiatrie–Psychotherapie–Psychosomatik–Pra ¨ventivmedizin, Institut fu ¨r Philosophie,Ruhr-Universita ¨t Bochum, 44791 Bochum, Germany;bCentre of FunctionallyIntegrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Danish National Research Foundation, andInstitute of Philosophy and History of Ideas (IFI), and Faculty of Humanities,Aarhus University, Aarhus University Hospital, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark;cWellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London,WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom.alexandra.zinck@rub.dehttp://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/staff/zinck/index.htmlsanne@pet.auh.dk www.cﬁn.au.dk/menu478-encfrith@ﬁl.ion.ucl.ac.uk http://www.ﬁl.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Frith/Abstract: Defending ﬁrst-person introspective access to own mentalstates, we argue against Carruthers’ claim of mindreading being priorto meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how weunderstand our own and others’ mental states. We conclude that amodel based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds ofaccess for self and other is sufﬁcient and more consistent with theevidence.Making a case for introspection. Comparing four differentaccounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading(meta-representing mental states of others) and ﬁrst-personmetacognition (meta-representing one’s own mental states),Carruthers concludes that the capacity to mindread is priorto metacognition. According to him, basic mindreading iseither turned upon others or turned upon ourselves, the latterconstituting metacognition. Mindreading is thus the capacity tointerpret the other or the self and therefore does not requireintrospection.This brings us to the core problem of our critique: Assumingthat there is one basic meta-representational mechanism thatunderlies both understanding the self and other, how can thismechanism be characterized?In what follows, our analysis hinges on the way Carruthers usesthe term introspection in relation to basic mindreading. Mostaccounts of mindreading use introspection to describe a specialkind of access that we have to ourselves that is not available forthird-person mindreading.Carruthers’ account dispenses with this difference of accessand the function of introspection. He gives a negative deﬁnitionof introspection as “any reliable method for forming beliefs aboutone’s own mental states that is not self-interpretative and thatdiffers in kind from the ways in which we form beliefs aboutthe mental states of other people” (sect. 1.4, para. 3, emphasisin original). Yet, in his architecture of the mind, there is noplace for an introspective capacity constituting an immediateand direct inner perception of a belief. This conclusion resultsfrom Carruthers’ extreme caution about the phenomenologythat characterizes introspection and his dismissal of it asmisleading.This thesis of the unreliability of introspection and the neces-sity to dismiss it as a mode of access to beliefs is supported bydata from confabulation and commissurotomy. However, thisdoes not show that one cannot know one’s beliefs to be true.We don’t necessarily have to concede that beliefs are – or canbecome – consciously uninterpreted; instead we can assume thatthere are unconscious belief attitudes that can give rise to a con-scious event whose content is a belief. In cases of confabulation,this doesn’t mean, however, that we are not introspecting thisevent; it simply means that there is a discrepancy with the under-lying belief attitudes.So, the data suggests that there are mental processes that weare not conscious of. This is not a principled argument againstintrospective access to our own mental states that is independentof lengthy interpretation. The scope and quality of self-knowledge is limited, whether it is gained by introspection orby self-interpretation. Commissurotomy patients mistake theirbeliefs for certain actions, yet they do so also under an accountof self-interpretation. Self-knowledge and its acquisition by intro-spection has certainly been overrated in philosophy, but thelimitations are equal for self-interpretation.Aside from this – although he claims that according to hisaccount of mindreading applied to the self, there is “no . . .awareness of one’s own propositional attitudes independentlyof any perceptually accessible cues that provide a basis forself-interpretation” (sect. 1.4, para. 2) – Carruthers does notcompletely differentiate introspection and self-interpretationaccording to his mindreading account and does concedethere sometimes seem to be introspective qualities duringself-interpretation, such as immediacy and effortlessness(sect. 8, para. 3).So the question still remains of how best to characterize theaccess we have to ourselves. Contrary to Carruthers, we wouldlike to argue that the immediacy and directness that characterizesCommentary/Carruthers: How we know our own mindsBEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2009) 32:2 163introspection is also present when mindreading others and thatthis is not a conscious interpretational endeavour. Just as withthe perception of the outside world, our brain makes “uncon-scious inferences” (von Helmholtz 1866) when perceiving our-selves. This is the basis for the experience that introspection isdirect and immediate. The same immediacy also occurs whenperceiving others(Frith 2007).Nevertheless, there is a differencebetween the way we meta-represent our own and the mentalstates of others. When thinking of ourselves, there are moredata available, that is, visceral and somaesthetic sensations inaddition to a richer knowledge of our own past history. Thus,we are dealing with the same mechanism but with two differentmodes, one for the self and one for the other. This corresponds toCarruthers’ model 2 account.It accordingly also does not matter whether the mechanismevolved ﬁrst for understanding others or for understandingoneself. We assume both involve the same underlying mechan-ism of meta-representation that, endowed with additionalsources of information, makes up the different modes of access.Another point of criticism against a mindreading is prior accountis that the mechanism of mindreading is third-person directed.Thus, when I direct my mindreading capacity upon myself,I should use a third-person stance. Apart from being an interpret-ativeprocess,thisisalsoanunnecessarilycomplexandcomputation-allyexpensivewayofaccessingtheself.Itcanbearguedthatthebestexplanation is to simply accept the immediate ﬁrst-person datainstead of adopting the complex third-person setup.A further argument for introspection as a speciﬁc mode ofaccess for the self comes from considering why it might be valu-able for survival: (1) we can inform others about our reasons foracting in a certain way; (2) we can gain high-level control of ouremotion and our behaviour (e.g., Zelazo 2004). Take, forexample, a simple learning process. We can learn associationsbetween stimuli even when the stimuli are presented sublimin-ally (i.e., not available to introspection). However, this learningis slow and gradual. If the stimuli are supraliminal, then insightfullearning becomes possible through introspection. At some pointsubjects notice the contingency and will immediately jump to100% performance (Pessiglione et al., in press).Contrary to Carruthers, we prefer his model 2 that makes use ofonemechanismbutinvolvestwodifferentkindsofaccess:onewhichis perception-based for interpreting others, and additional intro-spective access which is available when assessing one’s ownmental states. Altogether, model 2 is more consistent and parsimo-nious.Italsomakesbetterpredictionsforpathologiessuchasautismand schizophrenia in which both kinds of access are impaired.Insum,thisdiscussionexempliﬁesthatthe understandingofhowself and other are related is an important topic for research that isgenerating exciting new empirical and theoretical investigations.Author’s ResponseResponse/Carruthers: How we know our own minds164 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2009) 32:2

Making a case for introspection

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UCL Discovery