The concept 'Experiencing Level' points to the manner in which what a person says relates to felt experience. The manner is a first person process which is quantitatively measurable. Examples of low, middle and high Experiencing are given. In a high experiencing manner a person attends directly to a bodily sense of what is implicit and allows words to emerge from that sense. The Experiencing Scale which measures the manner of process is a third person rating of a first person (...) process, according to precise linguistic and somatic characteristics. A new rating method gives high reliability. I will briefly summarize several of the more than one hundred research studies which have used the EXP Scale or other measures of high EXP process. The high end of the EXP Scale describes what came to be called 'Focusing'. Because EXP level is a variable of the manner of process, it can be applied to almost any content area. Examples from tape-recorded psychotherapy sessions, creative writing, and theory-building will be analyzed in terms of experiencing level. Having defined the variable in observable terms makes it possible to formulate exact steps for teaching high Experiencing. Two practices -- Focusing and Thinking at the Edge -- have been developed, which can be taught in precise steps. This kind of third person variable can be found only from first person process. Its value for studying living will be shown. (shrink)

FOE, some time much has been said, in England and on the Continent, concerning " Positivism " and " the Positive Philosophy." Those phrases, which during ...

Dennett argues that we can be mistaken about our own conscious experience. Despite this, he repeatedly asserts that we can or do have unchallengeable authority of some sort in our reports about that experience. This assertion takes three forms. First, Dennett compares our authority to the authority of an author over his fictional world. Unfortunately, that appears to involve denying that there are actual facts about experience that subjects may be truly or falsely reporting. Second, Dennett sometimes seems to say (...) that even though we may be mistaken about what our conscious experience is, our reports about “what it’s like to be us” must be correct. That view unfortunately requires a nonstandard and unremarked distinction between facts about consciousness and facts about “what it’s like.” Third, Dennett says that reports about experience may be “incorrigible.” However, that claim stands in tension with evidence, highlighted by Dennett himself, that seems to suggest that people can be demonstrably mistaken about their own experience. Dennett needlessly muddies his case against infallibilism with these unsatisfactory compromises. (shrink)

This special issue commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within , where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experienced.

This article presents an interview method which enables us to bring a person, who may not even have been trained, to become aware of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision. It is focused on the difficulties of becoming aware of one’s subjective experience and describing it, and on the processes used by this interview technique to overcome each of these difficulties. The article ends with a discussion of the criteria governing the validity of the descriptions (...) obtained, and then with a brief review of the functions of these descriptions. (shrink)

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention and (...) outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

A fundamental assumption of theories of decision-making is that we detect mismatches between intention and outcome, adjust our behavior in the face of error, and adapt to changing circumstances. Is this always the case? We investigated the relation between intention, choice, and introspection. Participants made choices between presented face pairs on the basis of attractiveness, while we covertly manipulated the relationship between choice and outcome that they experienced. Participants failed to notice conspicuous mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome (...) they were presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. We call this effect choice blindness. (shrink)

In this paper we list the various criticisms that have been formulated against introspection, from Auguste Comte denying that consciousness can observe itself, to recent criticisms of the reliability of first person descriptions. We show that these criticisms rely on the one hand on poor knowledge of the introspective process, and on the other hand on a naïve conception of scientific objectivity. Two kinds of answers are offered: the first one is grounded on a refined description of the process of (...) becoming aware of one's experience and describing it, the second one relies on a comparison with the methods of the experimental sciences. We conclude the article by providing a renewed definition of 'the truth' of a first person description. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the description of the experience associated with listening to a sound. In the first part, we describe the method we used to gather descriptions of auditory experience and to analyse these descriptions. This work of explicitation and analysis has enabled us to identify a threefold generic structure of this experience, depending on whether the attention of the subject is directed towards the event which is at the source of the sound, the sound in itself, considered (...) independently from its source, the felt sound. In the second part of the article, we describe this structure. The third part is devoted to a discussion of these results and the paths they open up in various fields of theoretical and applied research. (shrink)

It is a great pleasure to introduce this collection of papers on the use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. Our task as guest editors has been tremendously stimulating. We have received an outstanding number of contributions, in terms of quantity and quality, from academics across a wide disciplinary span, both from younger researchers and from the most experienced scholars in the field. We therefore had to redraw the plans for this project a number of times. It quickly became clear (...) to us that the collection would expand beyond the scheduled double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. A triple issue was then drafted, but the number of excellent contributions continued to grow. We therefore had to reconsider the publication plans again, and the decision was made to publish an extended collection of papers in discrete instalments. At present substantial progress has been made towards determining the content of a second double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, due summer 2004. A third instalment now appears to be a real possibility. We welcome enquiries from authors interested in submitting to later instalments, especially those offering a novel perspective that is not otherwise represented. However, we do not intend continue this collection indefinitely. In putting together the first major interdisciplinary collection on this topic, we view our task as that of providing a starting point. Sufficient outlets exist to support ongoing debate. (shrink)

In this article I am not going to try and define introspection. I am going to try to state as precisely as possible how the practice of introspection can be improved, starting from the principle that there exists a disjunction between the logic of action and of conceptualization and the practice of introspection does not require that one should already be in possession of an exhaustive scientific knowledge bearing upon it. . To make matters worse, innumerable commentators upon what passes (...) for introspection do not seem to have practised it and have certainly never contributed anything to its development. My aim is therefore to bring to light a procedure for progressive improvement in the practice of introspection when it is employed in a programme of research. (shrink)

This article summarily presents the explicitation interview with some examples of interviews. In the first part, referring to three excerpts from protocols, we consider some of the techniques used to guide a subject into an introspective posture. We show how these techniques create conditions conducive to access to pre-reflective knowledge, knowledge stemming from a moment of action experienced by the subject, of which the subject has no knowledge in the mode of reflective consciousness. Some of this knowledge is in fact (...) surprising both for the interviewer and for the interviewee. The experience or the expertise of the subject interviewed is invariably increased as a result. In the second part, we provide a brief insight into the fields of application of the explicitation interview, with reference to three case studies, which are presented in a vivid and detailed way . We conclude with a very brief panorama of the various known fields of application of the explicitation interview. (shrink)

My comments on this pioneering book by Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel do not focus on the descriptions of experiences that it includes, but on the very process of description, which seems to me insufficiently highlighted, described and called into question. First I will rely on a few indications given by Melanie herself, the subject interviewed by the authors, to highlight an essential difficulty which the authors only touch upon: the not immediately recognized charac-ter of lived experience. Then I will (...) look for clues about what Melanie does to come into contact with her experience and recognize it. These clues -- completed by elements of description of this act collected through explicitation interviews -- provide criteria enabling a more precise evaluation of what the authors do to guide Melanie in the real-ization of this act, and therefore the accuracy of Melanie's descrip-tions. I will defend the idea that the description of the very process of becoming aware and describing is an essential condition for the understanding, refinement, teaching, and evaluation of introspection methods, as well as for the reproducibility of their results. (shrink)

One of the striking, even amusing, spectacles to be enjoyed at the many workshops and conferences on consciousness these days is the breathtaking overconfidence with which laypeople hold forth about the nature of consciousness Btheir own in particular, but everybody =s by extrapolation. Everybody =s an expert on consciousness, it seems, and it doesn =t take any knowledge of experimental findings to secure the home truths these people enunciate with such conviction.

The main objective of this article is to capitalise on many years of research, and of practice, relating to the use of introspection in a research context, and thus to provide an initial outline description of introspection, while developing an introspection of introspection. After a description of the context of this research, I define the institutional conditions which would enable the renewal of introspection as a research methodology. Then I describe three aspects of introspective practice: 1) introspection as a process (...) of becoming aware, theorized through Husserl's model of consciousness modes; 2) introspection as recollection, through the model of retention and awakening in Husserl's theory of memory; 3) the use of universal descriptive categories for the description of all lived experiences, as a guide for skilled practice of introspection in research. Finally I examine the question of the validation of introspective data, suggesting a strong distinction between the ethical criterion and the epistemic criterion of truth. (shrink)