The Anatomy of Experience

Abstract A study is undertaken of folk-psychological language and concepts, the psychological concepts that have developed out of folk psychology and the relationship of this language and concepts to introspection and the cognitive sciences. The background questions explored in the book are: How much does introspection contribute to our understanding of ourselves? Can we rely on folk psychology or on the more sophisticated psychological concepts that have developed from folk psychology to successfully characterize who we really are, psychologically speaking? How much can the cognitive sciences and, specifically, neuroscience, contribute to our understanding of ourselves? The interlinked answers are argued for on the basis of an analysis of contemporary cognitive science and how it bears on our introspective self-image. Our deep-seated image of ourselves as beings who know which faculties we’re employing at a moment—our senses, our memory, our ability to reason—is jointly undercut by results from the cognitive sciences and by a careful characterization of our introspective powers. The latter are impoverished because they provide only cues correlated to introspective labels that we use, “I remember,” “I’ve inferred,” and so on, and because these psychological labels don’t correspond to mental natural kinds of any sort. In turn, however, neuroscience cannot provide a successor set of concepts, anchored in science—and independent of our psychological concepts—despite the latter not corresponding to anything real. The result is that we’re trapped in an indispensable folk-psychological self-image that’s useful for prediction but can’t be taken to describe who we really are.