ABSTRACT
Introspection is the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychology. In the case of introspection, that theory is folk psychology. The philosopher will entertain situations where a certain knowledge-acquisition process that resembles introspection will occur under circumstances that differ from the actual ones. Furthermore, there is a different contribution that psychology makes to the study of introspection. This is the identification of the property, process, or mechanism that, in humans, constitutes introspection. For the purposes of studying introspection, the following fact is particularly interesting about multiple-personality disorder(MPD) : usually, when a particular alter is controlling the MPD subject’s behavior that alter only has introspective access to her own mental states. In other cases, though, our reaction may be that no faculty matching the patient’s characterization could be introspection. The hope is that the philosophers of introspection will eventually be able to use this kind of input from psychology to clarify what counts as introspection.
