CHAPTER

The view from within?

seVenteen

Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and

always. The word introspection need hardly be defined – it means, of course,

the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover.

(James, 1890, i, p. 185)

What do you discover when you look into your own mind? William James was

confident: ‘Every one agrees that we there discover states of consciousness’, he said.

But a hundred-odd years later we might be inclined to raise a few awkward ques-

tions. What does looking mean? Who is looking into what? Does the looking itself

change what is seen? Is there value in looking without reporting? Does report-

ing destroy what we are trying to describe? Can everything be reported when

some experiences are supposed to be ineffable? How reliable are our judgements

about our states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness even the kind of

thing that reliable judgements can be made about?

These are difficult questions. In the course of this book, we have found several

reasons to reject the metaphor of vision turned ‘inwards’: the more we learn

about how the brain and the rest of the body function in their physical and social

environments, the less space there seems to be for any inner/outer split, or any

interior space where consciousness is created. Nevertheless, we might agree that

looking into our own minds is an essential part of studying consciousness. We

cannot study consciousness in the abstract, because the what-it’s-like-to-be is

what we are trying to explain. So whether we follow the tradition of calling it

introspection (from the Latin spicere and intra, ‘look’ and ‘within’), or find some

more neutral term for it, we cannot run away from the exercise.