The contemplation of your own thoughts and desires and conduct

Usage examples of introspection.

Indeed, after behaviorism, mainstream theoretical psychology and philosophy have had little to say about the nature of introspection.

Thus, insofar as behaviorist and neuroscientific models rely on firsthand accounts of experience, they continue to depend on introspection.

Moreover, with the perceived failure of introspection as a means of scientific inquiry, many behaviorists simply reduced all mental activity, including consciousness itself, to objective behavior.

From the margins of the story, she exposes the shortcomings of male textualization and even forces Havel to a higher level of introspection.

While untrained introspection is like unrefined gold ore, neuroscientific understanding of the origins, nature, and causal efficacy of consciousness is like an undated check.

Most of our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection and selfconsciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of the ideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simply of a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. Much of it is admirable in workmanship, and exhibits a cleverness in details and a subtlety in the observation of traits which many great novels lack.

In presenting his argument against the very existence of introspection, Lyons correctly asserts that we commonly have an unfounded certainty about the reliability of our internal observations.

As noted earlier, when introspection was engineered so as to conform as closely as possible to extraspective, scientific observation, it could no longer be used to inquire into any but the most primitive of human cognitions, while the higher functions of thought and feeling were ignored.

Moreover, the notion that introspection entails a split in the attention is not the only possible interpretation.

The state of passive hyperawareness made for a bad case of introspection.

Critics of the scientific use of introspection have raised the legitimate problem that when the introspecting subject is compelled to reply to the questions of the experimenter, this not only biases the observations and responses but also carries the implicit message to the subject that all the questions are answerable.

Their objective solution to the fallibility of introspection was to apply external, artificial constraints on their introspecting subjects, thereby reducing the sophisticated, human ability of introspection to a primitive, robotlike process of internal monitoring.

Scientific materialists commonly regard introspection as being inadequate to the task of providing reliable data that can generate anything approximating scientific consensus.

But while this dualistic construct of phenomena versus noumena has done little to hamper the physical sciences, it has contributed to the stifling of introspection as a means to exploring the mind.

Like the previous objections, this problem is not confined to introspection.