Alonso Molina
University of California, Los Angeles
Many philosophers (Armstrong, 1963, 1968, 1999; Lycan, 1995; Hill, 1988; Sosa, 1998; Prinz, 2004) have distinguished between two kinds of introspection. The first kind is described as automatic and fast, while the second kind is described as deliberate and effortful. Think about the difference between an agent stubbing her toe and shouting, “Oh! I am in such a pain,” in contrast to her assessment of her ongoing abdominal pain such as, “I have a radiating sharp pain at a 7 on the pain scale,” when asked by ER doctors. In the former case, there is no previous deliberation to reach the introspective judgment while in the second case there is an exploration of her current mental state. Now, despite the broad acknowledgement of two kinds of introspection by many philosophers, no one has given a clear answer as to how we should account for these two kinds.
In what follows, I aim to remedy this by providing an account of the two kinds of introspection in light of their attentional mechanisms. The automatic kind of introspection will be called spontaneous introspection, while the deliberate, effortful kind will be called voluntary introspection. I argue that we have both of these kinds of introspection – I call this the attentional account of introspection. I distinguish between the two kinds of introspection on the basis of the predominant attentional process behind each. My contribution lies in mapping two subcategories of internal attention (see Chun et al., 2011) with both the automatic and the deliberate kind of introspection identified by philosophers. These subcategories are internal bottom-up attention and internal top-down attention (see Legrain et al., 2009), respectively.
Although attention is understood to play a crucial role in introspection by many accounts the introspective literature has not always been explicit regarding what type of attention is involved in introspection. I think that dissecting introspection in this way will help elucidate its nature, its relation with attention, and answer some problems currently debated in the philosophical literature. Particularly, it will help us answer if introspection is effortful, explain why sometimes agents seem to introspect spontaneously, and provide us with significant insight concerning the relationship between self-knowledge and introspection.
Chair: Fabio Tollon
Time: September 8th, 11:20-11:50
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 