Failures of Introspective Belief Formation

This post is by Chiara Caporuscio (Berlin School of Mind and Brain). Here Chiara discussed some ideas from her paper Introspection and Belief, published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021).

Chiara Caporuscio

Are beliefs about the external world psychologically and epistemically different from beliefs about what is going on in our own mind? The belief that it’s a rainy day outside is formed by weighing different sources of evidence, such as the view from my window or the weather forecast. It might be influenced by motivational factors, such as my desire to have a picnic later in the day. It is prone to error - for example, my upstairs neighbour watering the plants on their balcony might have caused me to jump to conclusions - and it can be revised and updated when new evidence comes in. My belief that I’m feeling happy, on the other hand, has been regarded by a long philosophical tradition as being fundamentally different: direct, incorrigible, and protected from error. In my recent paper, I argue that the way we form most beliefs about our inner world is often not so different from the way we form beliefs about the external world - and, like the latter, it can go astray.

 

Some introspective beliefs can be plausibly defended as being highly protected from error because they are exclusive, i.e. they are only determined by their target mental state and nothing else. Judgements of this kind are “I am feeling this” (Gertler, 2012) or “This is R”, where R is a phenomenal concept purely constituted by the experience (Chalmers, 2003). However, this also makes them uninformative: their infallibility is not helpful for our everyday goals of communicating our mental states to others, guiding action or learning something about ourselves. The informative beliefs that better capture daily instances of introspection in practical use, like “I am feeling a throbbing pain” cannot be infallible in this way, as they require relating the phenomenal character of our mental state to other concepts and experiences.

 

In my paper, I compare informative introspection with regular belief formation. To do so, I employ a 5-stage cognitive account of belief formation put forward by Connors and Halligan (2015; 2020), according to which beliefs arise in response to a distal trigger, namely, a precursor (stage 1). Then, different hypotheses to explain the precursor are formulated in a search for meaning (stage 2) and evaluated (stage 3). The hypothesis that better explains the precursor given the rest of our beliefs becomes accepted as a new belief (stage 4) and affects new beliefs and lower-level processes (stage 5). In this process, non-pathological errors and delusions can arise when something goes wrong in stages 2 and 3: for example, when we lack the background knowledge that would help us formulate the right hypothesis, when our background beliefs are false and lead us astray, or when our biases or motivational factors lead us to favour the wrong hypothesis.

I argue that the same five stages are likely to be needed for the formation of informative introspective beliefs, meaning that false or missing background beliefs, biases or motivational factors can mess with stages 2 and 3 and lead them astray. For example, a psychiatric patient lacking the notion of intrusive thoughts might be unable to formulate the right hypothesis about their mental state, and thus mistake them for desires; someone angry at a friend for petty reasons might decide to favour the hypothesis that they are perfectly calm because they don’t want to be the kind of person that holds unmotivated grudges. Informative introspective beliefs have similar failure conditions as beliefs about the external world.

So far, I have referred to false introspective beliefs outside of the context of psychiatry. But what about pathological errors in introspective belief formation? According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a delusion is a pathological failure in belief formation “based on incorrect inference about external reality [...]”. A prima facie reason to maintain the external reality condition is the presumed infallibility of introspection. However, if my account is on the right track, we could be as dramatically wrong about our internal world as we are about our external world: our beliefs about our own experience could be not only false but delusional. The possibility of introspective delusion raises questions about the relationship between experience and belief in delusional belief formation and deserves further investigation.