WHAT KINDS OF DISAGREEMENT ARE INTROSPECTIVE DISPUTES?

• Author: Molder, Bruno

1. Introduction

   Consider a debate between two persons, who are looking at an apple tree, and who have, as a result, a given experience. They are arguing over the nature of the experience, or more exactly, what sort of properties are represented in the content of the experience. One person supports the 'smart experience' view, the view that high-level properties (such as kinds and semantic properties) are represented in the content of experience. According to this view, one has an experience as of an apple tree. The other person does not regard the experience itself as smart: its content represents only low-level properties (such as colours, shapes, location etc.). On this latter view, the ability to grasp higher-level properties is sub-served by a separate, non-experiential process of conceptualisation. The introspective claim of this latter person is "I experience it as a green thing with a characteristic shape and then conceive of this thing as an apple tree".

   This is one example of an introspective dispute. More generally, such disputes can be characterised as disputes about phenomenology, which stem from participants' introspective judgements. However, the term 'phenomenology' is ambiguous. It may mean either one's own experience or experiences as such. It should be stressed that the second notion is more appropriate here. Introspective disputes are not disputes about a single person's experiences or the content of the introspective judgments of a single person. Rather, these disputes are aimed at establishing some general points about the nature of experience on the basis of the disputants' introspection. It is normally assumed that the parties to the dispute have sufficiently similar experiences and introspective capacities. Otherwise, there would be no point in having the dispute. Charles Siewert (2007: 17) characterises introspective disputes in precisely this way (though he calls them 'phenomenological disputes'): '"phenomenological disputes' are disputes that arise in the context of attempts to do phenomenology--i.e., to rely on first-person reflection to arrive at a critically acceptable general framework for discussing mental phenomena." An introspective dispute has then a general aim. We saw this too in the above example. In that example, it was to establish whether experience represents high-level properties in addition to low-level properties.

   More specifically, Bayne and Spener (2010: 2) outline the structure of an introspective dispute in the following way. Assume both that the dispute is about some claim 'p', which concerns some phenomenal feature of experience, and that the parties of the dispute are persons A and B. An introspective dispute has then the following structure:

   Person A: It is the case that p, based on introspection. Person B: It is the case that not-p (or it is the case that q and q entails not-p), based on introspection. The claims made in such a dispute are based on introspection, but this should not be read as saying that the reliance on introspection must necessarily be included in the contents of the opposing claims. Some disputes may be introspective without explicitly mentioning the word 'introspection'. Note also that this way of construing introspective disputes is highly idealised. I will return to this point later.

   Introspective disputes are usually called 'disputes' in the literature, not 'introspective disagreements'. This is in order to stress the interactive nature of such debates. Introspective disputes involve active engagement between individuals, whereas two people can disagree without actually disputing with each other (cf. Cohnitz and Marques 2014, Fink 2018).

   Having provided a general characterisation of introspective disputes, I will now look more closely at their nature. The structure of the paper is as follows. In the next section, I will more specifically characterize the relevant notion of introspection and formulate the main question of the paper. I then consider various kinds of disagreements--verbal, metalinguistic, faultless, deep and genuine disagreements--and discuss introspective disputes vis-a-vis each kind of disagreement.

2. Introspection and introspective disputes

   What is introspection? Put briefly, introspection is first-person access to one's own mind, which is presumed to yield knowledge of one's own mental properties. Such a description does not commit one to a specific view of introspection. It is compatible with both a narrower and a wider understanding of introspection. One example of such a wider understanding is Jesse Butler's (2013) pluralism about introspection. He acknowledges that introspection can involve very different ways of gaining knowledge about aspects of one's mind. In particular, he claims that one can know one's own mind by having phenomenal knowledge, which is had only by having the respective experience or by getting propositional knowledge of one's propositional states through the application of the folk psychological framework. In addition, he argues that one could become aware of one's conscious propositional thoughts via inner speech and that introspection also has social aspects; that is, other people teach us about our social relationships and social characteristics.

   Although such a pluralist approach to introspection may be useful in drawing our attention to the variety of processes through which we can learn about our own minds, in the literature on introspective disputes, the notion of introspective knowledge is usually conceived of in a much narrower sense. Eric Schwitzgebel (2019) has listed three minimally necessary conditions for introspection: the mentality condition, the first-person condition, and the temporal proximity condition. This means, respectively, that introspective judgements must be about mental states and events, that such mental states must belong to the person herself and that they must be about one's current or immediately past states and events. He also mentions three additional conditions. However, these are controversial and not universally shared: that introspective judgements must be direct, effortless and detect independent mental states and events. Thus, minimally, introspection is restricted to judgements about one's own current (and immediately past) mental states and events. But this does not entail that all introspective processes exemplify a single kind of basic process. These minimal conditions on introspection are compatible with introspection being constituted by different kinds of process. Or as Schwitzgebel has vividly remarked elsewhere:

   What we have, or seem to have, is a cognitive confluence of crazy spaghetti, with aspects of self-detection, self-shaping, self- fulfillment, spontaneous expression, priming and association, categorical assumptions, outward perception, memory, inference, hypothesis testing, bodily activity, and who only knows what else, all feeding into our judgments about current states of mind (Schwitzgebel 2012: 41). If this is the case, and it is very likely that 'introspection', even in the narrow sense, labels a host of different self-directed processes, then introspective disagreements probably do not form a unitary kind either. They may vary depending upon the kind of introspective process involved as well as on the object of disagreement. This is something to keep in mind when discussing introspective disputes.

   Let us review some putative introspective disputes. I have already mentioned the dispute on the question of whether high- or low-level properties are represented in the content of experience. The following presents some additional paradigmatic examples (1):

   * Is there sui generis cognitive phenomenology? Do thoughts have their own phenomenal character, one that is distinct from their associated images? Or does the phenomenology of thought derive from the non-cognitive images and sensations that merely accompany thoughts?

   * Is consciousness rich or sparse? Are we aware of only what falls into the focus of our attention or are we simultaneously aware of many things? (Schwitzgebel's (2011) example of having "constant tactile experience of one's feet in one's shoes" is a striking example of the rich view on consciousness.)

   * Is the unity of consciousness itself something phenomenally given or is it a relationship that does not manifest itself as a phenomenal object?

   * Does perceptual experience appear phenomenally as purely representational or does it seem to have an intrinsic, non-representational character as well? This constitutes the main issue between pure and impure representationalism.

   * Do we experience the passage of time or is the passage of time not directly given in the experience? (2)

   As we can see from the examples, introspective disputes involve questions concerning the phenomenal character of experience or the lack thereof. It is assumed to be characteristic of such disputes that the conflicting answers to these questions are based on introspection. When I talk about introspective disputes in the rest of the paper, I bear these paradigmatic examples in mind.

   It is typical of introspective disputes that they are persistent and ongoing among philosophers. This makes one wonder about the nature of the disagreement that these debates exemplify. This, in turn, leads to the central question of the present paper: when philosophers disagree over such introspective claims, what kind of disagreement are they having?

   Identifying what kind of disagreement philosophers have (or kinds of disagreement as different introspective disputes may involve different types of disagreement) is important on various counts. First, their identification helps to clarify the status of introspection in general. Some philosophers use the existence of introspective debates to argue for a general scepticism about introspection. The concern is that persistent disagreements that are based on introspection raise serious doubts about the...