Which philosopher stressed the importance of introspection?

Introspection is a relatively modern concept whose philosophical origins can be traced to the empiricist belief that self-knowledge is based on an internal observation conceived as analogous to observation of the external world. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century the reliability and even the possibility of such an internal observation had been seriously questioned by both idealist and positivist philosophers. As a result, the role of introspection in psychological experiments was controversial from the beginning. Some, like Wilhelm Wundt, regarded this role as limited to cases where laboratory controls did indeed allow the conditions of internal observation to approximate those of external observation. Others, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, were far more sanguine about the possibility of studying complex mental events introspectively. Behaviorism reacted against such introspective optimism by banishing introspective evidence from scientific psychology. Its place was taken by ‘verbal report’ which was regarded as an objective datum without any reference to mind or consciousness. The antecedents of such reports were speculatively assigned to physiological conditions or to unobserved ‘covert’ behavior. Introspection as a concept virtually disappeared from the psychological literature for many years. More recently, there has been recognition that the practice of introspection is always circumscribed by social and cultural factors.

Abstract

The concept of introspection, in the sense of a dispassionate observation of one's own mental states, first became prominent in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical empiricism. Although its practice was widely rejected as a basis for building a mental science, some late nineteenth century and early twentieth century psychologists advocated its limited use under laboratory conditions. Behaviorists rejected its use under any circumstances, though admitting verbal reports as sources of scientific data. More recent interest in the experimental study of consciousness and its neural basis has revived questions regarding verbal reports on experienced mental states.

What Is an Investment Philosophy?

In a sense, successful active management is simple. All one has to do is discount the cash flows of an asset by an appropriate discount rate, compare the resulting value to the asset’s price, buy if the price is below the value, and sell if the price is above the value. If the investors using this process produced reasonably consistent and positive results, investing wouldn’t need to be a philosophical endeavor.

But failure breeds introspection, and, it turns out, successful investment isn’t so simple after all. The following turns out to be important:

No one knows what the cash flows of a risky asset will be.

No one knows the right discount rate for a risky asset.

Market prices tend to reflect information and points of view as that information and those points of view are traded upon.

These facts reframe the problem of active management, and make central the following question: Why has the market not discounted the information or point of view on which cash flow projections and discount rates are based?3

Answering this question requires that a manager have points of view (implicit or explicit) on how the market prices – and sometimes misprices – securities, and on what the manager’s competitive advantage is in identifying and exploiting such mispricings. These points of view frame the problem of designing an investment process, and provide guiding principles for the execution of the investment process.

With this background, we can define an investment philosophy as follows:

A set of beliefs regarding the security pricing mechanism and what it is about that mechanism that sometimes causes securities to be mispriced.

A set of beliefs regarding the manager’s competitive advantage in exploiting these mispricings.

A thesis about how these beliefs can be exploited to generate alpha (an “alpha thesis”).

We might go further and define a sound investment philosophy as one that:

Knows where it stands with respect to capital market theory and evidence.

Is living; that is, it wrestles with confirmation and disconfirmation as it is used in practice, and adapts as necessary.

Has deep enough core principles that adaptation does not result in total change.

5 Conclusions

Like any psychological event accessible to introspection, images can be described by people in terms of their content, vividness, clarity, and degree of detail. Researchers obviously favor objective assessments of internal events, through the use of indicators expected to correlate with described images. Data that provide information about the neural structures that are involved when mental images are generated are even more valuable. A particular advantage of this approach in recent years is that it has allowed researchers to uncover the many similarities between imagery and perception. In this respect, behavioral and neuroimaging studies have progressed hand-in-hand in an especially productive manner.

An important objective of research on imagery is to account for the relationships between the structural properties of images and how they function when they are brought into play in cognitive activities. The assumption is that images draw their functional effectiveness from the properties that they share uniquely with perceptual events. Unlike other, more abstract, forms of representation, images contain information structured analogously to perceptual information, and this gives them particular adaptive value. Imagery provides representations that allow individuals to retrieve information in the absence of the objects that they evoke, and so to process objects that are temporarily or definitely out of sight. The fact that the processes that are applied to images exhibit similar patterns to those of the perceptual processes gives them an obvious cognitive advantage.

To summarize, mental imagery is not unrelated to the other cognitive functions. In particular, it is intimately interconnected with perception, from which it derives its content, and for which it is a valuable functional substitute in many types of cognitive activity.

Personality

People who are more generally inclined to introspection, self-consciousness, and anxiety sensitivity are likely to value looking ‘normal’ and may not wish to disclose the circumstances that resulted in them having a changed appearance. Many talk of the desire to feel normal and ‘be complete’ again. Feeling incomplete is often a sign of increased distress and can indicate the presence of vulnerabilities to low self-esteem and appearance-related concerns that predate cancer experience. People who tend to be resilient in the face of challenges are significantly more likely to successfully meet the challenges of cancer-related appearance changes.

5.11 Concept of the Model

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The Past and Closure

Revisit the past and explore memories and flashbacks,

Introspection on childhood and adulthood,

Assessment of individual challenges and strengths,

Resolution of issues of psychological and emotional trauma, and related dysfunctions,

Spirituality as applicable,

Come to terms with ancestral issues,

Closure with deep understanding of all individual and group problems,

Enhance self-esteem: positive impact on parenting, relationships, ancestry (DNA) related to past and present medical history of addiction, mental illness with education on treatments,

The conversation about the past must be about both positive and difficult experiences and memories; this talk must be brief and resolved with closure.

The Present (Here and Now)

Reality of now—poverty, addiction, racism, disease, education,

Gang mentality, homelessness, violence,

Resolution of present problems and development of coping skills,

Socialization, attitude adjustment, anger management, and spirituality,

Resources and information provided to meet present needs and advancement toward a secured future,

Programs targeting self-care, treatments, individual responsibility,

Concept of addiction,

Treatment options best suited for effective recovery and maintenance of recovery.

The Future

Recovery/Sobriety as a continuum with coping skills, tools for maintaining recovery,

Spirituality as applicable to resolution.

The implementation of this model will need to be concurrent with other modalities of treatment as relevant to individual problems such as pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy that are evidence-based practices as specified in a treatment plan. The model could also be applied to other cultural groups in the community.

I facilitated an African-American group that appears to share my philosophy of a culture-centered treatment approach. Here is an interactive experience with case studies. Names are fictitious for confidentiality purposes.

Case Study: Leroy’s Lifetime Frustration (From Author’s Clinical Diary)

This was a group of African-American men and women, with mutual determination to a self-oriented, inward search. They strove to eliminate cultural and individual barriers against alcoholism and addiction treatment. This approach promotes a continuum of treatment to guarantee lifelong recovery. In prior sessions we guaranteed the presence of an unspoken but strong bond of trust, empathy, respect, un-alienated interaction, and commitment to the goals of the group.

It was Leroy’s turn to check in. The process involves addressing the group about his situation, problems, and strengths. A striking comment he made took everyone by surprise, “I hate white people.”

There was a brief period of introspective silence after which I responded, “It’s a good thing that you can share your feelings and frustrations. Our goal is to have an open conversation and come to a resolution beneficial to you and everyone else in the group. Are you comfortable receiving feedback from other members?”

“Yes,” he affirmed. Leroy was a 55-year-old man. He was, at the time, attending an anger-management program as well as an African-American group. He had spent over 20 years in incarceration for felonies that included recurrent use and peddling of illicit drugs. His goals were to complete anger control, achieve and maintain sobriety.

“Why do you hate white people?” I asked. And in response he delved into a litany of all the wrongs in his life that he claimed were caused by every Caucasian he had ever related with, from his nightmarish ex-wife who got him hooked on drugs to constant police harassment. The details of the conversation and closure were so protracted, they are worthy of another book.

I engaged him, however, with soul-searching questions. “Leroy, don’t you think that declaring yourself as a victim is like giving your power away?”

After a thoughtful moment, he agreed that it was. I sensed that some understanding about his situation was gradually and slowly creeping into his cognition.

“Do you like all black people, Leroy?”

Here I presume he was stunned as well as humored by my question. In my direction, he cast a serious contemplative look that grew into a smile. “Not all of them,” he confessed. “I love my mom, my uncles, and other relatives and friends that are always there for me.”

“What about the gang members in your community?” I asked.

He seemed uncomfortable and hurriedly responded in utter disgust, “I hate them. My favorite nephew was a gang member. He was killed by them. I’d tried to warn him about the evil of gangs.”

I expressed my condolences for his loss. I conducted a brief review of his current treatment regime, inclusive of anger management, psychotherapy, and present lifestyle choices.

I introduced a discussion on over-generalization as a distortion of thoughts and misperception of human behavior. It was the right moment to have a group discussion on prejudices and self-criticism which addresses bias and self-esteem respectively. It was a sincere and honest interaction, full of sharing of thoughts, beliefs, and misconceptions with revelation of individual bias or cognitive distortions that give rise to errors in judgment, behavior, and attitude. Also, over-generalization, mind reading, labeling of self-criticism according to D. D. Burns’ “Triple-Column Technique” was a subject of discussion. It teaches rational response to automatic thoughts, boosting self-esteem.

Their genuineness in accepting responsibility for wrong assumptions and willingness to make a positive change is a first remarkable step toward cognitive restructuring. A repeated session of this form of cognitive exercise, encouraging clients’ input from daily life experiences, enhances retention of behavior learning.

There was positive evidence of Leroy’s behavior adjustment and consequent movement toward sobriety and anger control through his therapy sessions with me. These changes in Leroy’s thought processes served to enhance rational cognition in his course of treatment, and had a positive impact on other members of the group.

This is the essence of this unique group. It provides a safe environment for clients’ disclosures, reality checks, and resolution of daily stressors of false beliefs and conflicts in a therapeutic forum.

2 Historical Background

Self-observation of thinking has a long history, which helps explain the controversies surrounding introspection, as well as the development of less controversial methods for eliciting verbalizations of thinking. The first systematic attempts to understand the structure of thinking by observing one's own spontaneous thoughts have been traced back at least as far as the Greeks. Based on observation of his thoughts, Aristotle argued that thinking corresponds to a sequence of thoughts (see Fig. 1), where the brief transition periods between consecutive thoughts (see the arrows in Fig. 1) do not contain any reportable information.

Aristotle's general account of thinking as a thought sequence has never been seriously challenged (Ericsson and Crutcher 1991). The controversies about introspection have all involved attempts to go beyond the immediately observable aspects. For example, Aristotle tried to infer the unobservable processes that control the thought sequence (see the arrows in Fig. 2). By examining his memory of which thoughts tended to follow each other, Aristotle concluded that previously experienced associations between thoughts were the primary determining factor. Philosophers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Ericsson and Crutcher 1991) asked questions that required more involved inferences and introspective analyses. For example, can every thought be described as an amalgam of memories? In order to evaluate these claims empirically, philosophers would typically relax and daydream, allowing their thoughts to wander. Once in a while they would try to freeze an image and inspect it carefully to assess its sensory modality and components. Based on such detailed observations, the famous British philosopher David Hume came to the surprising conclusion that thoughts were as detailed as original perceptions—we cannot have a visual image a printed page of text without imaging every letter on the page at the same time.

By the nineteenth century, philosophers generally rejected Hume's claim and agreed that the process of analyzing a visual image changes its original appearance. For example, when a person has an image of a rose and then decides to inspect its petals, the whole mental image changes. Consequently, the process of examining mental images is fundamentally different from observing solid objects in the real world. A real rose can be looked at repeatedly from different directions without being changed, even its petals can be inspected with a looking glass without any change. In contrast, extended introspective analysis of a mental image changes its content and structure and cannot therefore be used to study thoughts as they emerge during spontaneous thinking.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, psychologists at the University of Würzburg tried to minimize this form of reactivity by training introspective observers. These observers were given thought-provoking questions and asked to respond as fast as possible. Only after their answers had been given would the observers start to recall the thoughts that they had had while answering the questions. The observers were trying to recall the most basic elements of their thoughts and visual images. Most reported thoughts consisted of visual and auditory images, but some subjects claimed to have experienced thoughts without any corresponding imagery–imageless thoughts. The alleged existence of imageless thoughts had far-reaching theoretical implications and led to a heated exchange between the psychologists who claimed to have observed them and others who argued that these reports were artifacts of inappropriate reporting methods and theoretical bias of the observers. A devastating conclusion arose from this controversy: the existence of imageless thoughts could not be resolved empirically. This finding raised fundamental doubts about analytic introspection as a scientific method.

Reacting to the methodological and theoretical problems of the introspective method, psychologists redirected their research from conscious experience and thinking and towards observable behavior, and focused on basic learning processes shared by adults, children, and animals. For example, some of the tasks involved learning the path from a starting location to a goal location in an arbitrary maze, where the benefits of prior experience and knowledge would be minimal. Similar learning tasks required participants to memorize ‘meaningless’ materials, such as nonsense syllables like XOK and ZUT, where the memory performance was measured objectively by scoring the sequence of recalled syllables for accuracy. The hypothesis that memory for nonsense syllables was based only on basic associations, and was later rejected in studies by cognitive psychologists showing that during memorization subjects reported thinking of words that were similar to the studied nonsense syllable, such as ‘cozy’ for KOZ and ‘payment’ for PYM (Prytulak 1971). When subjects were able to associate the nonsense syllable with a word, the speed and accuracy of memorization improved (Montague 1972), which provides validation for the reported thoughts.

The cognitive revolution in the 1960s renewed interest in higher-level cognitive processes and how thinking allows individuals to generate solutions to novel tasks. Cognitive theories describe how individuals are able to apply acquired knowledge and procedures to novel problems, such as mental multiplication of any combination of two two-digit numbers.Information processing theories (Newell and Simon 1972) proposed computational models that could reproduce the observable aspects of human performance on well-defined tasks through the application of explicit procedures.

One of the principle methods of the information processing approach is task analysis. Task analysis specifies the range of alternative procedures that people could use, in light of their prior knowledge of facts and procedures, to generate correct answers to a task. Let me illustrate how task analysis can be applied to mental multiplication. Most adults have only limited mathematical knowledge: they know their multiplication table and only the standard ‘pencil and paper’ procedure taught in school for solving multiplication problems. Accordingly, one can predict that they will solve a specific problem such as 36×24 by first calculating 4×36=144 then adding 20×36=720. More sophisticated subjects may recognize that 24×36 is equivalent to (30+6)×(30−6) and use the formula (a+b)×(a−b)=a2−b2, thus calculating 36×24 as 302−62=900−36=864. The choice of alternative procedures participants use to generate the answer can be inferred by the time needed and verbal reports of their thoughts during problem solving.

In conclusion, the theoretical and methodological controversies about verbal reports have never cast doubt people's ability to recall part of their thought sequences. The controversies have centered around efforts to go beyond the sequence of thoughts (see Fig. 1), to analyze their detailed structure through introspection, and to infer the processes controlling the generation of new thoughts. In fact, all major theoretical frameworks concerned with thinking have advocated the use of verbally reported sequences of thoughts (Ericsson and Crutcher 1991). For example, the behaviorist John B. Watson pioneered the use of ‘think aloud,’ and the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker established it as a major method.

4.8 Summary

Collectively, these findings demonstrate how subtle shifts in the language people use to refer to themselves during introspection can influence their capacity to regulate how they think, feel, and behave under stress. It is important to emphasize, however, that all of the above work focuses on the role that non-first-person self-talk plays in enhancing self-regulation when people privately engage in this process (i.e., silently during introspection). There are, of course, times when people engage in non-first-person self-talk out loud. Whether engaging in that process is likewise helpful is unclear, and awaits future research.

4.3.1.4 Explaining to apply our selves

We previously described self-explanation as similar to elaborative interrogation, but with an element of introspection—of observing and commenting on our own thought processes. If what is to be learned is somehow procedural, say computing a confidence interval, then self-explanation simply means explaining to oneself the steps involved. If what is to be learned is more in the line of declarative knowledge, a set of facts or concepts, perhaps, then self-explanation could involve thinking about what comes to mind when studying or rehearsing said concepts. As in “this idea here of ______, reminds me of _____.”

While the application of elaborative interrogation to the process of research and source evaluation typically involved in larger student assignments is intuitive and seems natural, the possible role of self-explanation may be a bit harder to spot. Still, we think it may have some advantages, and thus, are prepared to make a few suggestions.

First, consider a couple of minor twists to the elaborative interrogation question (“Why is this true?”), e.g., “Do I trust the conclusions of this research report?” or “If I want to argue that […], what would make me confident that my readers will agree with me?” These questions are slightly more complex than the simple elaborative interrogation question, but in a particular manner: they focus our attention on our own thought processes, and the thought processes of our readers. Thus, these kinds of questions invite metacognition—thinking about thinking. This can sometimes help us see aspects of our own work, such as flaws in our reasoning, that we otherwise would not spot, and can provide new impetus if we are somehow stuck. It has the added advantage of switching focus a little bit, away from the mere logical and formal qualities of our argument, and onto our emotions and intuitions. This can infuse the sometimes hard and dry work of developing a tight, well-supported argument structure with a bit more life and engagement.

Second, and related to the previous point: asking questions to stimulate self-explanation is likely to help the processing and encoding of new information. Remember from Chapter 3, Things We Know About How Learning Happens, that a very important factor in learning is the influence of prior knowledge—of whether or not we can usefully and appropriately connect new information to the concepts and cognitive structures we already carry in our long-term memories. An important consequence of this principle for teaching, to be explored more fully in Chapter 6, Teaching It All, is that helping students activate prior, relevant knowledge, will help them learn new material. Now, a particularly well-established and often relevant concept is our concept of self. Prompting self-explanation helps activate this concept and hence make sense of what we are trying to learn. Personal relevance can be a powerful driver of understanding and learning, and questions that tend to induce self-explanation, like those above, are doubly useful. They can help students spot areas of improvement in their work with sources to support their argument, probably in part because it helps them make sense of, encode and internalize the information in their sources. Again, finding an opportunity to point out the relationship between this particular learning technique, and the work involved in a student project requiring IL skills, is relatively easy and need not take much time.

Third, when the actual steps involved in various behaviors that constitute information literate studying are unfamiliar, then using self-explanation (or even better: other-explanation—see the section on collaborative learning in Chapter 6, Teaching It All), is an excellent way to consolidate them and establish them as building blocks of more elaborate procedural schemas. For instance, an important component skill is to learn how to enter complete and correctly formatted references in a reference list. The steps involved may be obscure to the beginner student, and they frequently misstep, jumping straight into trying to enter the reference before having established which reference type they are dealing with, and which reference style (and style guide) to use. Clearly outlining the steps and then encouraging students to explain the process to themselves or to fellow students is a great use of the self-explanation technique. This provides an excellent opportunity to introduce self-explanation as an effective learning strategy in general and to scaffold its application to learning IL skills.

Task-negative and task-positive networks

When a subject is not focused on the outside world in a resting state or a state of introspection, some brain areas are highly active. These brain areas are characterized coherent by infralow oscillations of the BOLD signal. These coherently oscillating brain areas are labeled as the default mode network (DMN) (Fig. 1.3.3). The name was coined by neurologist Marcus E. Raichle and colleagues from Washington University School of Medicine in 2001. The DMN includes part of the medial temporal lobe, part of the medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex.

During a certain task (such as GO/NOGO) the DMN is deactivated and another network, the task-positive network is activated. Several task-positive networkshave been discovered (Fig. 1.3.3).