Abstract
Some contemporary philosophers, such as Feyerabend,1 Armstrong,2 and Rorty,3 speak as though any distinction between subjective processes and their objective manifestations depended upon the supposed ‘incorrigibility’ of the subjective processes, i.e., the thesis that I cannot think that I experience a pain and be mistaken. Actually, it is not necessary for this purpose that the subjective knowledge of mental states yield any such incorrigible information, but only that it yield different —though perhaps equally corrigible—information about the mental states. We shall attempt to demonstrate in this first chapter that direct phenomenological reflection upon mental states does yield different information from objective observation methods, and that the objectifying methods are incapable in principle of observing consciousness without being supplemented by and correlated with phenomenological data. This is true, we shall argue, in spite of the fact that phenomenological data are by no means incorrigible. In fact, many phenomenologists cheerfully grant that the notion of incorrigible access to one’s own subjective consciousness by means of a complete phenomenological reduction went out of style long ago, when the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Sartre (and many say Husserl himself in the Crisis and other posthumous papers) pronounced the idea of a complete phenomenological reduction impossible in principle. There are certain items of information about the nature of consciousness which even phenomenological psychology (not to mention objectivistic psychology) cannot ascertain, but for which it must have recourse to philosophy.
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Notes
Paul Feyerabend, “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem,” Review of Metaphysics, 17, 49–66.
D.M. Armstrong, “Is Introspective Knowledge Incorrigible?,” Philosophical Review, 72, 418–19.
Richard Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories.”
For example, Guy Lafrancois, Psychological Theories and Human Learning (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1972); F. Kanfer and A. Goldstein, Helping People Change (New York: Pergamon, 1980); Kiesler; it is also noteworthy that Melvin Marx, writing in Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1980 Science and the Future yearbook, cites the resurgence of introspective investigations as the year’s most important event in the field of psychology (382–85).
J.B. Watson, Behaviorism (2nd ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930); “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review (1913), 20, 157–158.
Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1962), passim., see especially pp. 35–41; Amedeo Giorgi, “Phenomenology and Experimental Psychology,” Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1971), I, 6–29; H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960); Needleman; D.P. Schultz, “The Human Subject in Psychological Research,” Psychological Bulletin,63, 358–72; Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception; The Primacy of Perception; The Structure of Behavior.
Carl Rogers, “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships as Developed in Client-centered Framework,” in S. Koch, ed., Psychology: A Study of a Science, III (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality ( New York: Harper and Row, 1954 ).
Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie,35–41.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,vii-xxi; Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego; see also infra., Chapter III.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,434–456; A. Manser, Sartre: A Philosophic Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 164, D. Tulloch, “Sartrian Existentialism,” Philosophical Quarterly,2, 31–52; M. Kaye, Morals and Commitment (London: Covent Garden, 1971), to mention only a few.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 ).
Kuhn.
Needleman, 9–46.
Hans J. Eysenck, The Dynamics of Anxiety and Hysteria ( New York: Praeger, 1957 ).
Henri Poincare, Mathematics and Science ( New York: Dover, 1963 ).
Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 10–93 and passim; Kurt Goldstein, The Organism (New York: American Books, 1938); Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness ( Pittsburgh; Duquesne University Press, 1964 ).
Maslow, 27–30, 35–38.
Carl Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science ( Princeton: Englewood Cliffs, 1966 ), 40–45.
Eysenck.
K.W. and J.T. Spence, “Relation of Eyelid Conditioning to Manifest Anxiety, Extraversion and Rigidity,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1964), 68, 144–49.
R.B. Catell, The 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, Inst. Pers. and Abil. Test, 1950.
Cattell.
Eysenck.
Spence.
Giorgi, 13–15.
Giorgi, 10.
Giorgi, 9.
Schultz, 227.
R.D. Laing, Self and Others ( New York: Pantheon, 1969 ).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Psychology of the Imagination ( New York: Washington Square Press, 1966 ).
Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations With Others,” The Primacy of Perception,96–155.
Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions ( London: Metheun, 1971 ).
See note 6.
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 75.
Laing, 32.
Eric Berne, Games People Play ( New York: Grove Press, 1967 ).
Georg Lukacs, “Existentialism or Marxism,” G. Novack, ed., Existentialism versus Marxism ( New York: Delta Press, 1966 ).
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Ellis, R. (1986). Psychological Methods of Observing Consciousness. In: An Ontology of Consciousness. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0715-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0715-2_2
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