ABSTRACT
Early in the history of psychology, “subjects” in experiments were conceived in a vastly different manner. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, subjects were often “observers” examining and reporting on their experience and behavior. In fact, at that time, naive subjects were considered inappropriate; observers had to go through a considerable period of training before they could reliably examine their sensory experiences. Skeptics on self-knowledge fail to differentiate between its different forms partly because of traditional empiricist assumptions about the homogeneity of the mental; in particular, the traditional assimilation of cognition to sensation. The two main sources of empirical doubt about the accuracy and reliability of self-knowledge are the failure of introspective psychology, and the experimental studies documented by Nisbett and Wilson and Nisbett and Ross, which appear to demonstrate that agents regularly err with respect to their self-knowledge of psychological states.
