ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—People seem to know “immediately” much of what they are thinking and feeling at any particular time: they seem to be able to “see within” or introspect their own minds (→MIND). However, neither the nature nor the extent of this ability is well understood. Many philosophers (for example, René Descartes) have claimed that there is some sort of “logical” connection between a mental state and a person’s ability to introspect it. But others (for example, Gottfried Leibniz) have thought there were many reasons to believe that there were “unconscious” mental processes not accessible to introspection (→CONSCIOUSNESS). This latter hypothesis was made scientifically plausible in the work of Sigmund Freud and has become something of a commonplace in contemporary linguistics and cognitive psychology. The latter discipline presumes that most of the cognitive processes responsible for people’s intelligent behavior are not introspectible.
