The Meaning of Introspection: Introspection, Scientific Psychology and Neuroscience H.G. Callaway HG1Callaway@gmail.com Abstract This paper examines the meaning and evidential role of reports of introspection in cognitive psychology. 1 A theory of scientific introspection aims to detail the nature, scope and limits of reports of subjective experience in science. Introspective reports best function as experimental data when combined with objective methods of stimulus control and the more recent, developing methods of brain scanning and brain imaging—which are having a invigorating effect on both theory and experimental practice. Intro- spection has been controversial and variously conceived in the history of psychology: sometimes endorsed as central and crucial to scientific psychology and sometimes rejected outright as subjective. Introspective methods were very prominent in the structuralist origins of experimental psychology, and also important in the origins of functional psychology; but it was subsequently rejected or minimized by the dominant behaviorism of the twentieth century. In common usage, “introspective” often means “reflective,” and related practices may take on broad significance in personal life. This popular (or philosophical) meaning occasionally intrudes problematically into scientific discourse. In particular it tends to license undue confidence in stand-alone introspection. In Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental psychology, emphasis was placed on “stimulus control.” Reports of introspection were regarded as scientifically useful only if the experimentalist could control the sensory stimulus. This effectively limited experimental introspection to situations corresponding to ordinary reports of perceptual observation (though it is reasonably, if carefully extended in particular experimental designs). On the other hand, competing conceptions of introspection extended it to include unchecked, unfalsifiable and poorly replicated results. There has been a modest return of introspection in recent cognitive psychology—chiefly supplemented by techniques of brain imaging and brain scanning. As will be argued, this combination with objective methods is needed; and it will be briefly argued that some account will also be needed of the semantics of the descriptions of conscious contents. 1. Introspection vs. “stand-alone” introspection As recently as Edelman and Tononi (2000), A Universe of Consciousness, one finds a dismissive attitude toward introspection in scientific psychology. Emphasizing biological conceptions of mind and psychol- ogy, and technological methods and instruments of neuroscience, the authors reject both behaviorism and “introspectionism;” holding that “subjectivism itself is no basis for a sound scientific understanding of the mind;” rejecting “phenomenology and introspectionism along with philosophical behaviorism” (with reference to W.V. Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized”); they hold “that the inner mechanisms of consciousness can be explored scientifically without exclusive resort to either simple behaviorism or introspection.” 2 1. This paper was accepted for presentation at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association held in Baltimore, MD in January 2022. 2. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi 2000, A Universe of Consciousness, How Matter Becomes Imagination, p. 217.