Hurlburt R T., Heavey C L.
Dept of Psychology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 89154-5030, Las Vegas, NV, USA
Trends Cogn Sci. 2001 Sep 1;5(9):400-403. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01724-1.
It is claimed that psychological science can obtain accurate reports about people's inner experience. We reconsider three criticisms of introspection: Nisbett and Wilson's critical review of introspection, the failure of introspectionists to agree about imageless thought, and Skinner's behavioral position. We show that rather than dismissing introspection, these criticisms point the way towards technical improvements in the methods used to produce accurate descriptions of inner experience. One such method, Descriptive Experience Sampling, is described and used as an example to illustrate our conclusion that, although exploring inner experience is not trivially easy, it can provide important knowledge for many areas in cognitive science.
有人声称，心理科学能够获取有关人们内心体验的准确报告。我们重新审视了对内省的三种批评：尼斯比特和威尔逊对内省的批判性综述、内省主义者在无象思维问题上未能达成共识，以及斯金纳的行为主义立场。我们表明，这些批评并非要摒弃内省，而是为改进用于准确描述内心体验的方法指明了方向。一种这样的方法，即描述性经验抽样法，被加以描述并用作例证，以说明我们的结论：尽管探索内心体验并非轻而易举，但它可为认知科学的许多领域提供重要知识。
