Also Philosphy students must register online for this seminar!
Higher cognitive states like emotions, perception, belief formation or mind-reading are of essential importance in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. It is quite controversial, though, to what extent these processes and particularly their subjective, phenomenal character can be captured adequately by means of extrospection which means: External access to higher cognitive states. The reason is that extrospective methods seem to be restricted to indirect external evidence. Introspection, by contrast, has long been treated as privileged, given its direct first-person access to these processes. Skepticism against extrospection persists although the epistemic credentials of introspection have been attacked, e.g., by behaviorists.
We will focus on philosophical papers by authors like Descartes, David Chalmers, Brie Gertler, Daniel Dennett, William Alston, or Eric Schwitzgebel, representing the most important contributions to this debate. In addition, empirical papers like Nisbett and Wilson’s seminal “Telling More than we can Know” will be discussed.
