Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
We have already met many examples of people attending to their experience
and reporting what they find. These include the methods of trained introspection
developed by Wundt and Titchener, as well as James’s descriptions of the ‘flights
and perchings’ in the stream of consciousness, of getting up on a cold morning,
and of religious experiences. Then there are various introspections on the expe-
rience of self, Csikszentmihalyi’s studies of flow, and numerous adventures into
altered states. Clearly, this personal approach has a role to play in the study of
consciousness. But what sort of role?
The study of consciousness is sometimes divided into two fundamentally dif-
ferent approaches: the objective third-person approach and the subjective
first-person approach. Between these two there is sometimes added another:
the second-person, or inter-subjective, approach (Thompson, 2001). This is con-
cerned with, among other topics, the development of empathy between people,
the roles of mirror neurons, imitation, and joint attention in the relations between
two people, and theories of intersubjectivity and how self is constructed through
relationships with others.
There has been fierce argument over whether studying consciousness is funda-
mentally different from studying anything else, and whether it therefore requires
a completely different approach from the rest of science. At the extremes, some
people demand a complete revolution in science to take in the mysteries of con-
sciousness, while others insist that we need no new approaches at all. The argu-
ment takes two forms which are often confused but are worth distinguishing. One
concerns first-person versus third-person science; the other concerns first-person
versus third-person methods.
There are at least three problems with the notion of a first-person science. First,
although there are probably as many variations on scientific practice as there are
people who call themselves scientists, all are part of a collective activity in which
data are shared, ideas exchanged, theories argued over, and tests devised to find
out which works better. The results are then published for everyone else to see,
and to demolish or build upon further. Science, in this sense, is not something
you can do on your own, suggesting that there can be no privately first-person
science. But perhaps science then starts to look as much like second-person as
third-person practice.
Second, objectivity is valued in science because of the dangers of personal bias
obscuring the truth. So when one theory is easier or more comforting than another,
the scientist is trained to set aside prior beliefs and maintain an open mind in the
face of the evidence, suggesting that subjectivity might be damaging to science.
There are good reasons, however, for treating the goal of scientific objectivity with
some scepticism: perhaps we should be more honest with ourselves and admit
that the attempt to subtract our subjectivity can never entirely succeed, and that
trying to understand subjectivity better would be a worthwhile aim.
Third, as soon as inner explorations are described or spoken about, those descrip-
tions become data for a shared scientific enterprise. In this sense, there can be no
first-person data (Metzinger, 2003).
All these are arguments against a first-person science of consciousness, but none of
them necessarily rules out a role for subjectivity, experiential work, or first-person
methods in third-person science. For example, even on the strictest falsificationist