Philosophy of mind in the twentieth and twenty first centuries the history of the philosophy of mind volume 6 ( PDFDrive ) (1) 181

M aja S pener as immediate retrospective awareness With that inclusion, the whole nature of the experimental method changed as well The method of systematic introspection (Ausfrageexperimente) became dominant Experiments designed to elicit immediate retrospective judgements about one’s conscious experiences moved away from use of objective, performance-related measures to a focus on subjective report and on qualitative description of experience In particular, we see a striking change in how the experimenter is involved in the experiment: eliciting qualitative data requires the experimenter to ask questions to which the subject responds One consequence was that certain theoretical differences were prone to show up in the introspective data itself, rather than in what was taken to be the scientific interpretation of the introspective data (Danziger 1980, 253) The infamous ‘imageless thought controversy’ between Titchener and the Würzburg school is a case in point Würzburgers like Külpe claimed that they could introspect nonimagistic and non-sensational awarenesses (unanschauliche Bewusstheiten) reflecting higher cognitive activity Titchener, on the other hand, argued that introspection did not reveal anything non-imagistic or non-sensational and hence that his opponents were simply confused in various ways, either mistaking sensational composites for putatively non-sensational elements of experience or letting their theoretical preferences infect their introspective data This episode thus also reflects another aspect of the state of play among experimental introspectionists in the early decades of the 1900s The debate had become one about competing pictures of the metaphysics of conscious experience, with Titchener defending a structuralist, bottom-up picture, and the Würzburg school defending a richer conception of conscious experience including complex and higher-level cognitive elements Titchener adhered to the doctrine of sensationalism, the view that conscious experience is composed of sensory elements that combine to produce the overall experience Sensationalism, endorsed already by Mill and earlier British empiricists (Mill 1843, ch 4), gives introspection a key role in analysing experience into its basic components and in discovering the rules of combination in terms of which complex conscious contents of ordinary experience can be explained In this capacity, the role of introspection was to overcome the naïve but misleading take on experience, and to discern the real conscious character with its basic sensational structure In Titchener’s hands, then, introspective investigation of conscious experience is a form of analysis, or, as it was sometimes called ‘reduction’, of experience into its basic sensory components (Titchener 1912c) Külpe and the Würzburgers endorsed a rather different picture of conscious experience Specifically, they held that, in addition to sensory aspects, conscious experiences included other fundamental aspects, in the form of mental activity The latter could not be analysed into combinations of the former This basic outlook drew on Brentano’s act psychology and Husserl’s phenomenological approach to investigating experience The Würzburg emphasis on investigating conscious thinking and activity in experience derived from these very different interests Both sides of the debate practiced systematic introspection, however Yet systematic introspection presented several methodological problems (some old, 162