Were people utterly inaccurate at judging their body state and reporting on it, clinical medicine would be deprived of a critical tool. Evidence has accumulated that in certain circumstances, some people are evidently able to access information about the physiological processes inside of their bodies, and to report on it. Experiments seem to demonstrate that [...]
Mental models of health professionals about patient symptom reports and “subjectivity”
Medicine has developed a pragmatic way to represent the verbal reports of patients within the context of diagnoses: for instance, patients report something about their experience; this is represented as a “symptom” on a “SOAP note” (Cutler, 1997): an acronym for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. Health professionals duly record what a patient says about [...]
more on the status of introspection in psychology and in neuroscience
An index of the status of introspection within psychology comes from Medin, Markman, and Ross (2004) in the textbook Cognitive Psychology, which notes (pg.20) that:
“Although introspection is not an infallible window to the mind, psychological research is leading to principles that suggest when verbal reports are likely to accurately reflect thinking“
These perspectives all can be [...]
Jack and Roepstorff on introspection
From Trusting the Subject (2003), Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff write:
“The unique challenge facing a science of consciousness is that that the best instrument available for measuring experience depends on cognitive processes internal to the subject. So just how much faith can we place in the capacity of the mind to understand itself? In principle, [...]
