Exploring Consciousness: Old Habits and New Horizons 55the two—specifically, first-person investigation—as well as a global,
integrative approach to psychology, are noticeably absent from
contemporary psychology textbooks, thereby painting a fairly opaque
picture of psychology and suppressing much of what makes it
extraordinary.
CRITIQUING THE WAY CONSCIOUSNESS IS PRESENTED IN
INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOKS
Defining Consciousness
The first significant challenge for any introductory psychology
textbook attempting to educate about consciousness is to adequately define
the term itself. But, as alluded to above, the ambiguity of the term
‘consciousness’ complicates such efforts and is frequently exploited by
philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. “It is common to see a paper on
consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of
consciousness”—or, the hard problem, writes Chalmers (2007, p. 226)—
only to find that the author’s own theory “turns out to be a theory of one of
the more straightforward phenomena,” such as the brain states that
correlate with wakefulness and sleep, for example. This bait-and-switch
approach is especially prominent in contemporary psychology textbooks,
perhaps in an effort to maintain a certain air of authority. In other words,
introductory psychology textbooks tend to be written matter-of-factly so as
to convey the impression that they are a definitive source on the subject.
To the critical eye, however, these texts fall prey to the same issue of
avoiding that which we do not know in favor of focusing exclusively on
that which we do know. This trend reinforces a particular worldview or
dominant paradigm Kuhn (1970) described as “normal science.” The crux
of this concept is the notion that scientists not only operate from their
preconceived biases and conditioned ideologies, as is demonstrated by the