[1]
Theorists inclined towards optimism include Chalmers (2003), Gertler (2012), Goldman (2004), Horgan et al. (2006), Horgan & Kriegel (2007), Siewert (2007), and Smithies (2012).
[2]
The contrast between “optimists” and “pessimists” is far from sharp, for optimists often grant that epistemic access to consciousness can be (very) challenging, and pessimists often allow that there are experiential domains with respect to which introspection is trustworthy. Nonetheless, these terms are useful insofar as they capture the overarching attitude that the two groups of theorists express with regard to introspection.
[3]
Introspection may involve direct access to consciousness at a personal level and yet also be inferential and indirect at sub-personal levels of description.
[4]
This claim would need to be tempered if as seems plausible discriminative access requires a minimal form of categorical access. Consider again the case of discriminating a bird but failing to recognize it as a bird. This counts as a failure of categorical access insofar as one fails to bring it under the concept <bird> (or related concepts such as <robin>), but it is arguable that in order to discriminate it from its perceptual background one (or one’s visual system) must bind the various visual features together as the features of a single object, which may require a minimal form of categorical access to the object.
[5]
There are echoes here of the claim that phenomenal consciousness entails a certain kind of “access consciousness”. For some relevant discussion see Church (1997) and Clark (2000).
[6]
For critical discussion of this argument see Goldman (1997, 2004) and Piccinini (2003, 2011). In my view the most plausible response to it involves denying that introspection is private in the sense required for the argument to go through. I touch briefly on this idea in section 4.
[7]
Schwitzgebel is clearly attracted to a fairly global form of introspective pessimism, but (to the best of my knowledge) he doesn’t distinguish between discriminative and categorical access, and thus it is unclear whether his version of pessimism is radical or merely moderate. Generally, however, he seems to have something akin to radical scepticism in mind.
[8]
Another reconstruction of Schwitzgebel’s overarching argumentative strategy proceeds as follows. Although the arguments from dumbfounding, dissociation, and variation establish only local forms of introspective pessimism when considered on their own, when taken collectively they provide a good case for a relatively global form of pessimism given that each of the three arguments concerns distinct (albeit, perhaps, overlapping) domains of phenomenology. Thus understood, Schwitzgebel does not need to appeal to a generalization from the “hard cases” to introspection in general. Although this construal provides an alternative route to pessimism, I regard it as less promising than the one outlined in the text—both as a reading of Schwitzgebel’s work and as an argument in its own right.
[9]
Following Hohwy (2011), Schwitzgebel (2011) calls this “the argument from uncertainty”.
[10]
This argument is closely related to an argument presented by Spener (2013) in defence of the idea that we can provide principled reasons for trusting introspection in certain contexts. Spener argues that certain everyday abilities, such as adjusting a pair of binoculars or ordering food in a restaurant, are introspection-reliant—that is, their successful execution requires that the subject have accurate introspective judgments. I find Spener’s argument plausible, but, as Schwitzgebel (2013) notes, it is something of an open question just how many of our everyday abilities are reliant on introspection. At any rate, the argument I have given here makes no appeal to that notion.
[11]
Other examples of recent introspective disagreement concern the apparent shape of the objects of visual experience (e.g., Siewert 2007; Schwitzgebel 2011, Ch. 2), the existence of high-level perceptual phenomenology (Siegel 2006; Bayne 2009), and the satisfaction conditions of the phenomenology of free will (e.g., Horgan 2012; Nahmias et al. 2004).
[12]
The conservative view is also known as the “restrictive” (Prinz 2011) or “exclusivist” (Siewert 2011) view, while the liberal view is also known as the “expansionist” (Prinz 2011) or “inclusivist” (Siewert 2011) view.
[13]
Of course, the pessimist might argue that, even if the disagreement surrounding the phenomenology of thought is fundamentally semantic, it doesn’t follow that the optimist is off the hook. After all, using introspection to ground a science of consciousness doesn’t merely require the reliability of introspection, it also requires intersubjective agreement about its deliverances. And—the pessimist might continue—dispute about how to apply the term “phenomenal consciousness” and its cognates threatens to undermine intersubjective disagreement about what introspection reveals just as surely as introspective unreliability does. This is a fair challenge, but in my view the prospects for securing a solution to the cognitive phenomenology dispute, should it turn out to be fundamentally semantic, are quite high. For further discussion of phenomenal disputes and introspective disagreement see Hohwy (2011) and Siewert (2007).
[14]
Phenomenal domains that are at least somewhat elusive include the phenomenology of agency (Metzinger 2006; Bayne 2008; Horgan et al. 2006) and high-level perceptual phenomenology (Siegel 2006; Bayne 2009).
[15]
An influential account of introspection holds that introspection involves a semantic ascent routine in which one redeploys rather than represents one’s introspective target (Byrne 2005; Evans 1982; Fernández 2013). Although I am not endorsing this account of introspection in general (or indeed of introspective access to perceptual phenomenology in particular), I am suggesting that such procedures might be implicated in introspective access to certain kinds of phenomenal states.