An account of the source of first-person knowledge is essential not just for phenomenology, but for anyone who takes seriously the apparent evidence that we each have a distinctive access to knowing what we experience. One standard way to account for the source of first-person knowledge is by appeal to a kind of inner observation of the passing contents of one’s own mind, and phenomenology is often thought to rely on introspection. I argue, however, that Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction (...) was designed precisely to find a route to knowledge of the structures of consciousness that was independent of any appeal to observation of one’s own mental states. The goals of this essay are to explicate Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction in contemporary terms that (1) show its distance from all inner-observation accounts, (2) exhibit its kinship to and historical influence on outer-observation accounts of selfknowledge popularized by Sellars, and (3) demonstrate that a contemporary ‘cognitive transformation’ view based on Husserl’s method may provide a viable contribution to contemporary debates about the source of self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this text Wundt challenges associationist and rationalist psychology and suggests that what we need is a careful analysis of the more elementary psychical processes, of the facts of attention and of the wider scope of consciousness, as well as of the relations between them and of the manifold affective processes that intervene in all these cases. It is rejected the view that humans could be able to explain what happens when they are thinking by simply turning their attention directly (...) to their own consciousness. In Wundt’s view, nothing can be discovered of the most complicated psychical processes if they are investigated directly and without any further preparation. As a consequence, direct observation of internal mental states is not scientifically accomplishable, Wundt’s “introspection” being not a naïve operation as too often reported. (shrink)

The classical Brentano’s distinction between self-observation and inner perception is presented. In this text Brentano argues that the critics of self-observation are right when they attack self-observation, but that they are mistaken in concluding that as a consequence psychology cannot be based on the study of phenomena occurring in the internal sphere of consciousness. In his view their mistake is due to lack of conceptual clarity, in particular in the fact that they failed to distinguish self-observation from inner perception. In (...) characterizing inner perception the author establishes the foundations for the development of his famous concept of intentionality which is at the basis of subsequent reflection on both phenomenology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)