1 Introduction

There is a curious ambivalence in current attitudes towards our epistemic relationship to consciousness. Some theorists hold an optimistic view of the powers of introspection, regarding judgments about one’s current experiences as epistemically secure—perhaps some of the most secure judgments that we make. Optimists rarely claim that we have exhaustive and infallible access to consciousness, but they do hold the epistemic credentials of introspection in high regard, at least when introspection is directed towards the phenomenal character of consciousness. Those inclined to optimism don’t doubt that it is possible to mis-remember or mis-report one’s experiences, but they tend to assume that one has some kind of epistemic access to one’s experiences simply by having them.[1]

Running alongside this vein of optimism is a rather more pessimistic strand of thought, according to which the epistemic credentials of introspection are chronically insecure. Far from regarding introspection as a light that illuminates every corner of consciousness, pessimists suspect that significant swathes of experience are accessible to introspection only with great difficulty if at all.[2] According to Dan Haybron,[…]even the gross qualitative character of our conscious experience can elude our introspective capacities” (Haybron 2007, p. 415). Sounding a similar note, Maja Spener has argued that “philosophers and psychologists routinely overestimate the epistemic credentials of introspection in their theorizing” (Spener unpublished; see also Spener 2011a, 2011b, and 2013). But perhaps the most thoroughgoing pessimist is Eric Schwitzgebel:

Most people are poor introspectors of their own ongoing conscious experience. We fail not just in assessing the causes of our mental states or the processes underwriting them; and not just in our judgments about nonphenomenal mental states like traits, motives and skills, and not only when we are distracted, or passionate or inattentive or self-deceived, or pathologically deluded or when we’re reflecting about minor matters, or about the past, or only for a moment, or when fine discrimination is required. We are both ignorant and prone to error. There are major lacunae in our self-knowledge that are not easily filled in, and we make gross, enduring mistakes about even the most basic features of our currently ongoing conscious experience (or “phenomenology”), even in favourable circumstances of careful reflection, with distressing regularity. (2008, p. 247)

Although Schwitzgebel’s pessimism is tempered by moments of optimism, the dominant theme in his work is that introspection cannot be trusted to reveal anything other than the most mundane features of consciousness. Descartes, Schwitzgebel argues, “had it quite backwards when he said the mind—including especially current conscious experience—was better known than the outside world” (2008, p. 267).

I feel the pull of both optimism and pessimism. In my optimistic moments I find it hard to take seriously the suggestion that I might be guilty of “gross and enduring mistakes” about the basic features of my current phenomenology. But the arguments for pessimism are powerful and not easily dismissed, and I worry that Schwitzgebel is right when he suggests that the allure of optimism might be due to nothing more than the fact that “no-one ever scolds us for getting it wrong” (2008, p. 260).

A central aim of this paper is to provide an overview of Schwitzgebel’s case for introspective pessimism, and to chart a number of ways in which the optimist might respond to it. But although this paper can be read as a defence of a kind of optimism, my central concern is not so much to take sides in this debate as to advance it by noting various complexities that have perhaps been overlooked. But before turning to the debate itself let me make a few comments about its importance. An account of the trustworthiness of introspection is likely to have a bearing on two important issues. Most obviously, it has implications for the use of introspection as a source of evidence regarding philosophical and scientific debates about consciousness. Whether or not introspection is our sole form of access to consciousness, there is no doubt that it is currently treated as a central form of such access, and thus doubts about the reliability of introspection engender doubts about the viability of the study of consciousness. A second issue on which the trustworthiness of introspection has an important bearing concerns debates about the nature of introspection, and in particular the relationship between introspection and consciousness. Some accounts of introspection take a person to be necessarily acquainted with his or her conscious states, where acquaintance is an epistemic relationship of a particularly intimate kind (Gertler 2012; Horgan et al. 2006; Smithies 2012). It is fair to say that such approaches are optimistic by nature, and although advocates of such accounts have attempted to accommodate the possibility of introspective ignorance and error (see e.g., Horgan 2012), the success of such attempts is very much an open question. Other accounts of “introspection”—such as those that deny that there are any distinctively first-personal modes of access to consciousness—can easily accommodate introspective ignorance and error, but they struggle to account for the epistemic security that often seems to characterize introspection. In short, an account of introspection’s epistemic profile would function as a useful constraint on accounts of its nature.