The Disappearance of Introspection by William Lyons

Review by: D. W. M.
The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 302-305
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1422412 .
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302 BOOK REVIEWS
sistent and pervasive, and is rather a neglected topic by researchers. Second,
for those who are seeking more discussion and analysis of structured in-
equality as manifested in institutional processes of schools (e.g., school seg-
regation; curriculum differentiation), there is likely to be some disappoint-
ment. Although the stratifying function of schools is covered somewhat by
some authors (e.g., Boykin), a fuller treatment could have been offered of
those structural, exclusionary processes that have helped to serve as barriers
to equal educational opportunity and led to subsequent minority school
failure. Third, and my major criticism, is that I walked away from this book
with a need for tighter thematic and theoretical integration at the beginning
and end. My earlier criticism of lack of integration in chapter 1 is also
applicable to the issue of closure. Although the book, as a whole, is excellent
in presenting two major themes (i.e., an antideficit perspective and a firm
proclamation of the educability of minority children), these themes, in the
context of the various "new perspectives," need to be theoretically integrated
in a closing chapter. In short, a reader is likely to ask: "Taken altogether,
how can these new interpretations be merged systematically to form a co-
herent theoretical framework of minority school failure?" A chapter ad-
dressing this important question would have been valuable.
The issue of school failure among various minority populations is a most
worthy area of investigation. Work in theoretical development and reform
efforts is sorely needed, and needed now. On this issue of poor schooling
performance of minority children, Boykin notes cogently: "The question is
particularly crucial today, at a time of declining political interest in minority
affairs. Minority children no longer enjoy national attention, but their ed-
ucational problems exist" (p. 57). On that note, the present book is valuable
in that it is likely to bring attention, and more important, scholarly activity
to bear on the academic achievement problems experienced by minority
children.
Richard R. Valencia, Universityof California, Santa Cruz

The Disappearance of Introspection

By William Lyons. Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, MIT Press, 1986.
193 pp. $22.50.
Psychological inquiry had its origin in the introspective method, and every
psychology student soon learns that the introspective method was unreliable
and led to its downfall. As stated by Boring, the common answer to the
question "What became of introspection?" would be that introspection was
not viable so it gradually became extinct. Another answer, however, is that
introspection is still with us doing its business under various aliases, of which
verbal report is one. If what Boring said is still somewhat true today, then
psychologists should be more concerned with introspection in its various
guises. However, there have been few extended studies of the topic of in-
trospection, and it is seldom treated in psychology textbooks. Lyons takes
on the new task of tracing the concept of introspection from its philosophical

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BOOK REVIEWS 303

origins to its use by the introspectionists at the beginnings of psychology

and its role in present-day inquiry.
The author begins with the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of in-
trospection as an examination or observation of one's own mental processes.
The author makes an important distinction between inner observation versus
inner perception. Brentano made this distinction. In his view, inner obser-
vation was not possible, whereas one could perceive indirectly out of the
corner of one's mental eye. Wundt believed that he could mold inner per-
ception into a scientific method by training the observers and controlling
the conditions of their introspection. In Lyons's view, however, both models
of introspection, passive inner perception and active inner observation, were
believed to accurately picture or make available real psychological processes.
Titchener developed William James's idea of introspection as retrospection
and attempted to make it reliable and scientific.
Lyons provides a concise and lucid history of the dethronement of in-
trospection. Introspection reached its zenith early in psychological inquiry,
but soon developed the controversies that led to its downfall. Titchener and
his colleagues at Cornell believed that their results illustrated that nonsensory
conscious thought was impossible. All conscious thinking involves sensations,
images, or feelings. The Wurzburg School, on the other hand, interpreted
their introspective experiments as showing that there could be nonsensory
conscious thought. As Lyons observes, introspection could be rationalized
as a reasonable function. It proved to be an unreliable source of psychological
theory, however, and the stage was open for its overthrow and the acceptance
of behaviorism. Even William James in 1904 expressed his doubts about
consciousness and introspection. Thus, it is ironic that the psychologist who
glossed psychology as a science of mental life ended up rejecting his premise
that the science of psychology was the description and explanation of states
of consciousness, as such, and that introspective observation is what we have
to rely on first and foremost and always.
Students are better informed about Watson's definition of psychology as
a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Watson did not
claim that consciousness was a myth. He claimed only that it could play no
role in a genuinely scientific psychology, again, making his analogies with
the natural sciences such as physics and zoology. Lashly developed a classical
behaviorist account of introspection or consciousness. There is no need to
add some mysterious psychic stuff to machines to carry out human function.
Thinking to oneself or other internal conscious events are just the activation
of the mechanisms employed in actual perception and behavior. Ryle and
Skinner continued, more or less, Lashly's motor theory of consciousness,
believing that an alleged mental event is nothing but induced behavior. As
Lyons points out, however, the proposal that thinking in one's head, or that
talking to oneself is just subvocal speech, proves illusory. At this stage of
the game, the behaviorists had failed to show how one could explain, or
explain away, introspection in terms of either overt or covert behavior. Thus,
the stage turned to the actors in cognitive psychology and philosophy of
mind. The mechanization of introspection was not successful. There is little

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304 BOOK REVIEWS

comfort in the idea that introspective utterances couched in mental ter-

minology are simply reports of brain states or processes. The author also
discusses and criticizes a functionalist account of introspection. In this ac-
count, the psychological or mental world would be an invented world more
or less wholly indifferent to the physical world. The functionalist's account
of introspection would be analogous to an account of a mechanistic routine
suggesting how a perceiving machine might monitor its own perceptual and
cognitive information.
After reviewing the illusive nature of introspection, the author proposes
that introspection conceptualized in any form of monitoring, inspecting,
scanning, or immediate retrieval of data with respect to cognitive processes,
is a myth of our culture, an invention of our folk psychology. Our alleged
introspective reports are highly interpretive versions of incoming sensory
signals; they are not immediate reports on those signals. The author's thesis
is to interpret introspection as the replay of perception. Although I have
privileged access to my introspection, a psychologist might provide a more
valid account than my private experience. Current examples exist in dem-
onstrations that people's rationalizations for decisions are incorrect. The
author makes a good point that thinking of introspection as a perceptual
replay in memory does not mean that it must be in a pictorial form, i.e., in
terms of visual perception. Perception is meant to cover all forms of per-
ception and has even been referred to more recently as amodal perception.
For example, when we watch a speaker's lips saying /ba/ while the speech
segment /da/ is presented auditorily, people tend to experience /bda/. Our
auditory perception is actually influenced by the visual information.
Although the author reduces introspection to simply the replay of per-
ceptual memory and imagination, he spends some time giving a function
for introspection. In his viewpoint, the point of introspection furnishes us
with the knowledge of other minds. One idea is that we generate an abstract,
sophisticated concept of mind under the pressure of the need to develop
explanations for our actions and the actions of others. So we ask our children,
"Why did you do that?" And we encourage answers that refer to introspective
beliefs, evaluations, wants, hopes, and so on. Children then learn to ask why
we did things, and we give them similar explanations.
At this stage, I am at a loss as to why the author claims, on the one hand,
that introspection is employed in the difficult process of gaining an insight
into the mind and behavior of others in the formation of our concept or
concepts of ourselves as persons and of our personality and in the precarious
business of maintaining our psychological health, and, on the other hand,
he argues that introspection should not be used in certain ways because it
cannot provide the information that it is supposed to provide. One example
is using introspection as a means of checking how the mind solves a certain
sort of problem. The author does not deny the existence of consciousness
or phenomenal qualia, although he does deny that there are qualia in con-
nection with any nonperception-based processes.
The author ends with stating three levels of information about our cog-
nitive and appetitive acts or, in general, our mental life. We have the brain

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BOOK REVIEWS 305

level; the functional level of the experimental psychologist; and the folk
psychology level of the lay person. The experimental psychologist explains
behavior in terms of the effects of the environment interacting with certain
psychological processes. The folk psychological account provides highly in-
terpreted and culture-tinged models.
In some ways, psychologists did not solve the mind-body problem by
discrediting the introspective method. We are dependent on introspection
at some level from the most rigorous psychophysical experiment to a situation
involving protocol analysis in problem solving. What psychologists should
perhaps learn from this exercise is that introspection may be nothing more
than the replay of perception in memory, and a possible distorted one at
that. That is to say introspection provides information about the contents
of our phenomenal experience. It does not provide information about the
processes that led up to that phenomenal experience. My favorite example
in this domain is that of categorical perception. We experience the perception
of speech as being categorical. The perception available to our introspective
reports seems to be discrete. We perceive word categories /ball/ and /doll/
and not much in between. From this, it might be believed to be appropriate
for the introspector and the experimenter to conclude that the processes
that led to this experience were also categorical. However, this is not the
case. Perception is clearly continuous and not categorical. Our experience,
especially when considered superficially, appears to be categorical. With
rigorous introspection, we can see that it is not necessarily categorical. Thus,
introspective reports lack face validity, and experimenters should simply try
to tap into perception and memory more directly. Of course, this has been
a tradition in psychological inquiry by using methods such as those developed
by the theory of signal detectability. Introspection is behavior, and psy-
chologists must uncover the processes governing this behavior as they do
for other forms of behavior.
D.W.M.

Altruistic Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior

By Nancy Eisenberg. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1986. 256 pp. $29.95.
This book is a scholarly review (705 references) and integration of the
published research on the role of emotion and cognition in altruistic be-
havior. It affords a readable, in-depth exposition of the issues and current
knowledge of the cognitive approach to the topic. Alternative explanations
of altruistic behavior, such as those focusing on cultural, situational, and
sociobiological factors, etc., are deliberately excluded, except in a brief
chapter in which the major perspectives on the development of moral be-
havior are summarized. Instead, the author concentrates on the intrapsychic
factors involved in prosocial behavior and how they differ in children and
adults.
Specifically, she discusses (a) the role of empathy, sympathy, pride, and
guilt in prosocial behavior of children and adults; (b) the attributions in-

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