Self-Observation in the Social Sciences

Joshua W. Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138514478
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296786
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Notwithstanding the mythical demise of "introspection," self-observation has always been an integral aspect of the social sciences. In the century following the "behavioral revolution," psychology has seen a reduction not so much in the frequency as in the rigor with which self-observation is practiced. A great deal of self-observation has been renamed or obscured (as, for example, "self-report"), but this has served only to defer and impoverish important theoretical and technical work.

This volume, which contributes to the development of a rigorous theory of self-observation, is organized around three general objectives: to re-animate a discourse on self-observation through a historical analysis of various self-observation traditions; to outline and begin to address some of the unique theoretical challenges of self-observation; and to elaborate some of the technical and practical details necessary for realizing a program of research dedicated to self-observation.

In the first section of the book, three historians of psychology trace the evolution of self-observation. In the second, three scholars who are currently working in contemporary traditions of self-observation discuss the basic theoretical and practical challenges involved in conducting self-observation research. In the final two sections of the book, scholars from the phenomenological and narrative traditions trace the history, theory, and practice of self-observation in their respective traditions. Self-Observation in the Social Sciences continues the fine tradition set by Transaction's History and Theory of Psychology series edited by Jaan Valsiner. It is of interest to psychologists and to those who study methodology within the social sciences.

Part I
Introduction

1
Developing an Adequate Theory of Self-Observation

Joshua W. Clegg

The persistence of something like a “debate” over the status of self-observation is written deeply into the soul of psychology—in every generation, self-observation seems always to find its legions of detractors and yet always remains, in one form or another, at the heart of psychological research. The most basic points of debate have not changed a great deal—for example, the possibility of a divided consciousness (which pitted Comte against Mill), the comparative limitations of introspection and retrospection (as debated by James and the Wurzburgers), etc.—but the “official” history of the discipline often seems to imply that the debate ended in a decided loss for introspection. Most have argued, following Boring (1953), that the disciplinary struggles of the first few decades of the twentieth century exposed the fundamental unreliability of introspection and so led to its demise in the wake of a behaviorist revolution.

The assumption that introspection somehow vanished has issued in periodic calls to revisit some form of self-observation. In the 1920s and 1930s, we see many defenses of introspection against the various objectivist onslaughts (e.g., DeSilva 1930; Washburn 1922; Wheeler 1923) and as early as 1954 we see Bakan citing the “need for a psychology which is more appropriate to its problems” (Bakan 1954, 105) and so a return to introspective research practices. We see similar calls throughout the twentieth century—e.g., Lieberman (1979) advocating for “greater acceptance of introspection and the mind” (332), Grover (1982) defending the value of “introspective verbal reports” (211), and Gould (1995) advocating for introspection as a method in consumer research.

From the hindsight of history, however, we can see that the so-called “death” of introspection was greatly exaggerated. As Costall (2006) and others have shown, the rise and fall of introspection is more of a creation myth than a history—an oversimplification that served particular goals but did little to reflect the actual practices of psychologists. Even Boring, who contributed significantly to this creation myth, asserted in 1953 that “introspection is still with us, doing its business under various aliases, of which verbal report is one” (169). The social sciences have always relied on various forms of self-observation and so the periodic resurfacing of “introspection” in the literature has not been so much a call to resurrect introspection as to acknowledge the ongoing practice of self-observation and to more rigorously define its epistemological status (and, to a lesser degree, to define the proper forms for producing self-observation data).

The current volume, then, belongs to a long tradition of scholarship intended to bring the discipline of psychology back to a theoretical project that we have continually re-abandoned in the name of “objectivity”—namely, the development of robust and empirically adequate theories of self-observation. This volume begins from the assumption that this project cannot be avoided through the obvious self-deception that behavioral observations, fMRI scans, or scaled self-reports do not involve self-observation. The reality is that all of the psychological disciplines share a “reliance on introspection and subjective reports” (den Boer et al. 2008, 381) because, as Overgaard (2006) argues, “no physical phenomenon can be a more reliable indication of a given conscious state than the introspective report” (Overgaard 2006, 630-31). We cannot ignore the centrality of self-observation in the psychological disciplines and so there is a serious need for more adequate self-observation theories and practices. In the remainder of this introduction, I will outline what I consider to be the most basic questions that any theory of self-observation must address and I will then indicate how the subsequent chapters attempt to address those questions.

The Wrong Questions

Most theories of self-observation treat it as an ontologically and epistemologically special case—that is, they assume that the observation of “objects” is a fundamentally different kind of activity than is the observation of “consciousness.” This distinction derives from the assumption that self-observation cannot “be ‘consensually validated,’ as other people cannot observe anyone’s consciousness but their own” (Locke 2009, 24). “Objective” knowledge, it is assumed, is based on public, verifiable, external, and transparent entities while self-observation concerns only private, idiosyncratic, and internal experience. Objective analysis provides us with universal categories of meaning like length and not hopelessly idiosyncratic categories of meaning like imagination and, as such, the study of “objects” provides a different, and in fact more reliable, kind of knowledge than does the study of the “subjective.”

The necessary consequence of this familiar distinction is a fundamental solipsism—that is, an a priori assumption that the consciousness of another is always a postulate and never a datum; something we infer but never really know:

This conception of behaviour not only entails the assumption that our understanding of other people’s intentions, feelings, and so forth, can only be based on inferences, but also—given the assumed logical disconnection between behaviour, and intentions, etc.—such inferences lack any premises. (Costall 2006, 638)

The inevitable ending for such a beginning is the denial of, or at least the permanent reservation of judgment concerning, the consciousness of another. The assumption that “the minds of others are closed territory” and that “all that I have experiential access to is their behavior” essentially “imprisons me within my own mind” (Zahavi 2008, 519). This sort of solipsism is where the behaviorists arrived and seems the logical destination for the various forms of physicalism.

And yet, nearly every human being experiences some others as conscious and can quite reliably distinguish the conscious from the nonconscious (as though these were “real,” i.e., consistent, categories). It is easy, and certainly fashionable, to reduce the experience of another’s consciousness to a sort of epiphenomenal fantasy; to face the “hard truth” that we can directly know only physically sensible traces and so must infer, perhaps wrongly, everything else we think we know of one another. If this is our starting place, however, then there is not much meaning to self-observation as a method for producing general knowledge. Indeed, the very idea of genuinely public knowledge becomes suspect. If what I know of others is only what I know of myself, then all knowledge becomes private knowledge and all observation becomes self-observation; the Cartesian anxiety presides over all of our reasoning. One of the most basic challenges in developing a theory of self-observation, then, is to find a better starting place, one where we can account for what is being observed such that meaningful intersubjectively validated inferences are possible. But this problem needs to be defined more precisely if it is to be addressed in any useful way.

First of all, the traditional distinction between external and internal objects of perception is surely a specious one and deserves to be abandoned. It is not, in fact, the case that experiences of length or EEG readings or key presses are the properties of an external world, while experiences of imagination, or anger, or daydreams are properties of the internal world. At the level of experience, in fact, there is no meaningful way to conceptualize an “external” perception. As Burt (1962) argues, “strictly speaking, every first-hand observation is necessarily ‘private’” (231). When a scientist records a reading from an instrument, she is recording her own experience, her own perception, and no quantity or sophistication of mechanical interface can change that fact. I can no more directly “feel” your perception of length than I can “feel” your experience of anger and, in this sense, both of these experiences can be called “private.” But we can both experience anger in response to the same state of affairs in precisely the same way that we can both experience length in response to the same state of affairs and, in this sense, both of these experiences can be called “public.”

The essential point here is that all experiences are private in the sense that they are “mine” and all can be made public in essentially the same way—i.e., through various forms of language—and so we cannot coherently maintain the hard distinction between subjective and objective:

We cannot ignore the epistemological tradition that since Kant demonstrates that we do not have access to the objects “in themselves” apart from the very accessing process. A scientific model is not the exact reproduction of an independent external reality, but a set of technological acts which highlight a set of invariants, acts which have stabilized, and which have obtained an intersubjective agreement. (Petitmengen and Bitbol 2011, 95)

If pushed, I suspect most of us would grant that the scientist possesses no special access to an independent and objective reality. The problem, however, is that though we may all agree that the experiential qualities of both length and anger are roughly equivalent elements of an interpreted human experience, yet we still talk about measuring length “as such”—instead, for example, of talking about the intersubjective variability in particular experiences of extension. We maintain this sloppy mental habit, presumably, because the variability between different visual experiences of extension is so small. It is this stability of interpretation which has allowed the natural sciences to reify and externalize sensory, interpretive qualities as independent of human experience and intrinsic to stable, external objects. But this distinction does not withstand scrutiny. Length and anger are both “private” and “public.” Both expressions of length and expressions of anger are intersubjective, both are born out of collisions between embodied conscious beings and their world; neither of them can be fully described as “inside” or “outside,” “private,” or “public.” Both are built and maintained in the intersubjective negotiation of symbolic meaning and to the extent that one can be public or verifiable, so can the other.

The Right Questions

The most basic theoretical problem, then, for any theory of self-observation is not to account for some special kind of nonpublic, purely subjective knowledge; the problem is the same one encountered by all kinds of scientific knowledge—namely, to define the conditions under which we can intersubjectively validate reports of individual experience. The physical sciences have approached this problem essentially by attempting to suppress and transform the languages and subjectivities of observers, stripping away culture, sociality, history, and personality, through discourses that imply an independent, uninterpreted object. This has been possible because of the relative simplicity of “natural” objects, but in the social sciences we cannot profitably labor under such simplistic philosophy of science. We must acknowledge, theorize, and work with the full complexity of the intersubjective negotiation if we are to ever account for how we build shared inferences.

The essential implication of this line of argument is that the most basic unit of analysis in any self-report or self-observation context is not a narrative report, an fMRI scan, a survey score, or any other particular “data set.” The basic unit of analysis is always the relationship or context within which those data are produced—“the communication of experience involves an exchange” (Jack and Roepstorff 2002, 335) and so data only make sense in terms of the whole intra and interpersonal interplay that produced them: “scientific results are gained from and refer back to a life-world of shared intersubjectivity” (den Boer et al. 2008, 397). The point here is that when we attempt to interpret any form of self-observation, we are not interpreting the data point, but the data negotiation. Even the most basic forms of research interaction are “embedded in a second-person interaction which involves exchange of frames of reference and of attentional focus” (Roepstorff and Jack 2004, vi).

The minimal analytic case, then, for an inference based on self-observation (and, for that matter, any kind of observation) is what we might call the local inferential relationship—that is, the relationship between an interpreter who is embedded in and embodies the values, norms, and codes of a scientific tradition (as well as more idiosyncratic personal traditions) and a self-observer who expresses his or her experience from a particular sociohistorical location (which may also include a particular scientific tradition). This minimal case embraces “introspective” and “self-report” contexts, and other contemporary self-observation traditions, and dispenses with the untenable distinction between “internal” and “external” forms of observation. Even in this minimal case, the layered forms of interpersonal negotiation involved in “data production” are of daunting complexity—at the very least, a viable theory of self-observation would require an account¹ of how the intrapersonal and interpersonal negotiations involved in a particular reporting process produce “data” and related interpretive conclusions.

Inferential Negotiations

The intrapersonal negotiations of the self-observer—that is, the navigation within oneself of different recollections, interpretations, moral shadings, individual purposes or commitments, etc.—and the resulting ambiguity and indeterminacy of self-reports, are, of course, a notorious aspect of self-observation and one of the chief targets of critique. The source of so-called “error” in self-report has almost always been conceptualized in terms of the simplistic subjective/objective divide and so the various irregularities in the inferential context have been primarily localized “inside” the self-observer. The self-observer is essentially accused of: (1) unreliable memory, (2) limited self-knowledge, and (3) biased self-interpretations (and occasionally of outright deceit, but that is a problem not considered unique to self-observation). In the following discussion, however, it should become clear that all of the possible sources of inferential error involved in self-observation research can be more meaningfully conceptualized in terms of a relational negotiation, rather than in terms of a set of personal or internal “biases.”

Unreliable Memory

Error is ascribed to the self-observer, first, in terms of the transformation of memory across time: “one problem with retrospective recall of events as data concerning actual behavior stems from the well-substantiated finding that memory is reconstructive and degrades over time” (Wallendorf and Brucks 1993, 343). Of course, any report of a self-observation will, to some degree, be retrospective and so this critique is not reserved for experience-distant self-observations: “the absolute veracity of our immediate inner apprehension of a conscious state should be considered in the light of the fallibility of our memory a moment later” (den Boer et al. 2008, 385).

There are some obvious theoretical leaps in talking about “memory degradation” and so this assumption should be taken with some caution—the kinds of inferences that we can justifiably make on the basis of memory research all relate to how memory reporting is produced and negotiated among researchers and participants, and it is naive to assume that all of the irregularities in that process are purely a function of fallible participant memory. Speaking within the confines of empirical warrant, then, the sweeping ontological generalization of a fundamentally “fallible memory” can be more prudently expressed in terms of the modest assertion that there is greater inter and intra-subjective agreement about experience-near than about experience-distant self-reports. Stated in this way, adequate memory reporting becomes a meaningful boundary condition for any valid theory of self-observation but not an insurmountable barrier rooted in all of the ancient agonies of dualism.

Limited Self-knowledge

A second source of error commonly attributed to the self-observer is the assumption that he is perfectly willing to report on aspects of his experience about which he has no direct knowledge. Research participants regularly provide information on their motives and yet “lack of awareness of and inability to report on general principles that guide their behavior, or the relevant contextual contingencies that situate and modify these regularities, is a fundamental premise of social science research” (Wallendorf and Brucks 1993, 345). This assumption was most explicitly defended by Nisbett and Wilson (1977), who argued that research participants have “little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes” (231). Their principal contention was that, in laboratory research, participants provide explanations that do not coincide with what the researchers take to be demonstrable influences on participant behavior. They further argued that participants can be “shown” to respond to stimuli that they themselves do not acknowledge, and in ways that they themselves do not accurately rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. The History of Scientific Self-Observation
• Part III. Contemporary Self-Observation
• Part IV. Self-Observation in the Phenomenological Traditions
• Part V. Self-Observation in the Narrative Traditions
• Part VI. Conclusions
• Index