Describing Inner Experience

A psychologist and a philosopher with opposing viewpoints discuss the extent to which it is possible to report accurately on our own conscious experience, considering both the reliability of introspection in general and the particular self-reported inner experiences of "Melanie," a subject interviewed using the Descriptive Experience Sampling method. Can conscious experience be described accurately? Can we give reliable accounts of our sensory experiences and pains, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotions? The question is central not only to our humanistic understanding of who we are but also to the burgeoning scientific field of consciousness studies. The two authors of Describing Inner Experience disagree on the answer: Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist, argues that improved methods of introspective reporting make accurate accounts of inner experience possible; Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, believes that any introspective reporting is inevitably prone to error. In this book the two discuss to what extent it is possible to describe our inner experience accurately. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, "Melanie," to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book is Melanie's accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel's interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors' dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie's particular reports are believable. Transcripts and audio files of the interviews will be available on the MIT Press website. Describing Inner Experience? is not so much a debate as it is a collaboration, with each author seeking to refine his position and to replace partisanship with balanced critical judgment. The result is an illumination of major issues in the study of consciousness—from two sides at once.

You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on) – private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably do not know the characteristics of your own inner phenomena; neither does psychology or consciousness science. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience explores how to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. This book will transform your view of your own inner experience, awaken you to experiential differences between people and thereby reframe your thinking about psychology and consciousness science, which banned the study of inner experience for most of a century and yet continued to recognize its fundamental importance. The author, a pioneer in using beepers to explore inner experience, draws on his 35 years of studies to provide fascinating and provocative views of everyday inner experience and experience in bulimia, adolescence, the elderly, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, virtuosity and more.

Written for the professional psychologist and philsopher, Exploring Inner Experience shows (a) how DES avoids the traps that destroyed the introspections of the previous century; (b) why DES reports of inner experience should be considered reliable and valid; (c) that DES reports of inner experience are the most accurate that have ever been produced by Western science; and (d) how to use the DES method. This book will be basic reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and students interested in consciousness, as well as anyone (professional or layperson) who is seriously concerned with understanding the human condition or any of its components.

What are the basic data of psychology? In the early years of experimental psychology, they were reports of ''brighter'' or "heavier" or other esti mates of the magnitude of differences between the sensory stimuli pre sented in psychophysical experiments. Introspective accounts of the ex perience of seeing colored lights or shapes were important sources of psychological data in the laboratories of Cornell, Harvard, Leipzig, or Wiirzburg around the tum of the century. In 1910, John B. Watson called for the objectification of psychological research, even parodying the typical subjective introspective reports that emerged from Edward Bradford Titchener's laboratory. For almost fifty years psychologists largely eschewed subjective information and turned their attention to observable behavior. Rats running mazes or pigeons pecking away on varied schedules of reinforcement became the scientific prototypes for those psychologists who viewed themselves as "doing science. " Psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists sustained interest in the personal reports of patients or clients as valuable sources of data for research. For the psychologists, questionnaires and projective tests that allowed for quantitative analysis and psychometrics seemed to circum vent the problem of subjectivity. Sigmund Freud's introduction of on going free association became the basis for psychoanalysis as a therapy and as a means of learning about human psychology. Slips-of-the tongue, thought intrusions, fantasies, hesitations, and sudden emo tional expressions became the data employed by psychoanalysts in for mulating hypotheses about resistance, memory, transference, and a host of presumed human wishes and conflicts.

Written for the psychologist, philosopher, and layperson interested in consciousness, Exploring Inner Experience provides a comprehensive introduction to the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method for obtaining accurate reports of inner experience. DES uses a beeper to cue participants to pay attention to their experience at precisely defined moments; participants are then interviewed to obtain high-fidelity accounts of their experience at those moments. Exploring Inner Experience shows (a) how DES uncovers previously unknown details of inner experience; (b) how the implications of this method affect our understanding of inner experience and the human condition more generally; (c) how DES avoids the traps that destroyed the introspections of the previous century; (d) why DES reports of inner experience should be considered reliable and valid; and (e) how to use the DES method. This book will be basic reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and students interested in consciousness, as well as anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding the human condition.(Series B)

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

Following up on his groundbreaking 1990 work Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience, Dr. Hurlburt delineates the development of his descriptive sampling method across numerous case studies of depressed, anxious, bulimic, and borderline personalities. Though controversial, the method effectively demonstrates that an `introspective' technique can provide compelling, vivid descriptions of patients, as well as make distinctions between diagnostic groups.