This paper provides a partial response to Schwitzgebel’s case for global pessimism with respect to introspection. I began by outlining two arguments for optimism; the first argument turned on an appeal to the phenomenology of introspection, while the second drew on a conceptual connection between the notions of introspective access and phenomenality. Neither argument comes close to being decisive, but taken together they provide some explanation for—and justification of—the widespread appeal of optimism. I then turned to a detailed examination of Schwitzgebel’s case for pessimism, arguing that although his arguments go some way towards justifying local pessimism (particularly with respect to imagery), there is little reason to generalize that pessimistic attitude to introspection more generally.
But perhaps the central lesson of this paper is that the epistemic landscape of introspection is far from flat but contains peaks of security alongside troughs of insecurity. Rather than asking whether or not introspective access to the phenomenal character of consciousness is trustworthy, we should perhaps focus on the task of identifying how secure our introspective access to various kinds of phenomenal states is, and why our access to some kinds of phenomenal states appears to be more secure than our access to other kinds of phenomenal states. I have suggested that the notion of introspective scaffolding might play a role in answering this second question, but that that proposal is at best only a very small part of a much larger account of introspective insecurity. There is certainly a lot more work to be done before we have a good grip on the epistemic structure of introspection.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a graduate workshop on perception at the City University of New York, and I am grateful to the members of the audience on that occasion for their comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of European Research Council Grant The Architecture of Consciousness (R115798).