Introspectionist psychology and mindfulness meditation

person

In the very beginning of modern psychology there were 2 main camps one was behaviorism that most are familiar with. This is defined by observing the behavior of an organism to understand its psychology. The other camp, which eventually died out was called introspectionism, the idea here was to use one's own direct perception of our mind to understand the psychological make up.

Introspectionism's fatal flaw and why it quickly died out was that it lacked a proper tool for observing ones own mind. What they generally did was to make an intellectual hypothesis and then sort of train their minds to watch for that result, it was a highly biased and flawed method. Behaviorism won out, introspection as a means for understanding the mind lost and the mind became a black box to psychology.

With the development of cognitive psychology the mind once again became an object of inquiry from a third person perspective though. An individuals direct perception of their mind is still untouched.

What Buddhism has done is to actually investigate from a first person point of view what our mind is. The difference between them and the early introspectionists is that the Buddhists actually have a proper tool do so, namely meditation. Its possible to watch ones mind and understand what is happening in an unbiased way. Introspection can also improve and get more refined like going from looking at the mind with the naked eye, to looking with a magnifying glass to looking at it with a microscope. Subtler and subtler states of mind can be discerned. So when experienced meditators talk about subtle states of mind they are able to talk from actual observation not simply imagination or guesswork.

I guess I can't say that my own introspection is able to penetrate that far down but it has certainly become more refined over the years. I don't see any reason why it can't be further refined especially when people who have spent the time to do so claim it can be done.

Jeffrey

What was the evidence showing introspection was false? Any idea?

DairyLama

Introspectionism's fatal flaw and why it quickly died out was that it lacked a proper tool for observing ones own mind. What they generally did was to make an intellectual hypothesis and then sort of train their minds to watch for that result, it was a highly biased and flawed method. Behaviorism won out, introspection as a means for understanding the mind lost and the mind became a black box to psychology.
What Buddhism has done is to actually investigate from a first person point of view what our mind is.

Interesting. A modern development of introspectionism may be MBSR, which is based on the four foundations of mindfulness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduction

Zero

I don't see any reason why it can't be further refined especially when people who have spent the time to do so claim it can be done.

Perhaps this is part of the buddhist 'toolbox' not pursued by Introspectionists... 3rd person confirmation of the 1st person experience!!

person

What was the evidence showing introspection was false? Any idea?

I was intending to include a wiki page or something on introspectionism but surprisingly there isn't one. I just found out about it a few weeks ago. I think mainly the conclusions and methods were all over the board, it wasn't so much that it was proven false as it was ineffective.

I can type out a bit from the book I got it from.

...They had no method of meditation. What they did was decide in advance, on the basis ot their theories, what the mental elements of mind should be and then trained themselves and others to analyze their experience into those elements. This ttok place primarily in the sociocultural context of nineteenth-century German academia. Each powerful professor had his own theory and would train his students and the subjects in his laborator to introspect according to that theory. For example, in one laboratory it was considered that perception was ultimately composed of tiny patches of color, and so everyone was trained to describe their perceptions as tiny patches of color. In another laboratory it was considered that perception was a combination of sets of pre-intentions, and this is how subjects in that laboratory described their perceptions. In one laboratory it was believed that all thoughts were composed of mental images; another laboratory maintained the doctrine of imageless thought. The chaos that resulted was the very opposite of what is desired in science, namely, no laboratory could replicate what any other laboratory did. This was a much more fundamental problem than that of experiments not building on each other. The problem was that there was no way to establish agreement on any experiment at all. Each laboratory would work with its own trained subjects and would publish its results and would argue with the results of other laboratories. But there was no method for resolving any of the disputes. That was the undoing of the introspectionist method in Western psychology. It would seem that in the Buddhist sense, the introspectionists were not looking at mind at all. They were just thinking about their thoughts; they were tangled in their preconceptions about the mind.

To this day introspection is used as the model of how not to do scientific psychology...

Gentle Bridges p. 86

Jeffrey

person, what struck me was that those professors and groups were thinking along the lines of theory. I think some 'in actual practice' therapists do some therapy where mainly they just listen to the patient and 'are with them' in their problems. Taking an imaginary friend into the world of your problems?? I think there is a term, transpersonal psychology.

But thanks for typing that out I was floored by all of those theories. Science, haha!

person

person, what struck me was that those professors and groups were thinking along the lines of theory. I think some 'in actual practice' therapists do some therapy where mainly they just listen to the patient and 'are with them' in their problems. Taking an imaginary friend into the world of your problems?? I think there is a term, transpersonal psychology.

But thanks for typing that out I was floored by all of those theories. Science, haha!

Yeah, this was way back in the early days of psychological science. Things have certainly changed somewhat since.

I like your point about helping people with their inner world in therapy. Introspection does seem to be used somewhat there. I guess my overall point was in terms of using introspection,especially introspection refined through meditation, to understand the mind and how it works methodologically. To me this is why Buddhism often gets labeled as a science of mind.