Knowing Your Own Thoughts
Readers familiar with my research will know that I'm pretty pessimistic about the reliability of introspection, even of currently ongoing conscious experience -- e.g., ongoing visual experience, imagery, emotion. Regarding our own thoughts, though, you might think it's plausible to suppose that our introspection is excellent.
I'm not so sure.
It's not clear that, even if we reach accurate judgments about our on-going thoughts, the accuracy of those judgments is due to a genuinely introspective process -- if we take introspection essentially to involve something like detection. Rather, the accuracy may be more a matter of self-attributions of thoughts being self-fulfilling, as statements like "I'm saying 'blu-bob'" are self-fulfilling. Or, similarly, our self-knowledge of our thoughts might be like the driver's knowledge of whether he'll be going left or right at the coming intersection (to borrow an example from Tori McGeer) -- knowledge we have as a result of our capacity to shape our behavior, or thoughts, to accord with our judgments about what our behavior or thoughts will be. Or maybe (with Dorit Bar-On and others) the accuracy of our self-attribution of thoughts is due to the fact that our self-attributions are simply expressions of our thoughts (like "that hurts" is an expression of pain, no more introspective than "ow!"). What all these accounts have in common is that our accuracy in self-attribution is not due to accurate detection in an introspective sense.
But there's something left out here, too. For it seems that sometimes we have accurate knowledge of recently past thoughts. Because the purported thoughts are in the past, our accuracy can't be due to self-fulfillment or self-shaping or self-expression. Of course, it's not clear that it's due to introspection exactly, either -- since ordinarily we think of introspection as a means of detecting what's currently ongoing in our minds, not what happened in the past. But the fact remains, whether we call it introspective or not, we do seem to have some accurate knowledge of recently past thoughts.
But how accurate, I wonder? I'm feeling pretty confident that about a minute ago I was thinking about getting some tea. But should I trust this confidence? People are also pretty confident in their judgments about imagery, dreams, visual experience, etc., even when they are quite plausibly mistaken. We are never proven wrong in our self-attribution of past thoughts, and maybe that underwrites our confidence -- but we have no test for the accuracy of such self-attributions, so of course we won't be proven wrong, no matter how wrong we actually are! Is there really some basis for thinking that our memories of our recent thoughts do generally accord with the thoughts themselves?