Describing Inner Experience?

Can conscious experience be described accurately? Can we give reliable accounts ofour sensory experiences and pains, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotions? The question iscentral not only to our humanistic understanding of who we are but also to the burgeoning scientificfield of consciousness studies. The two authors of Describing Inner Experience disagree on theanswer: Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist, argues that improved methods of introspective reportingmake accurate accounts of inner experience possible; Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, believes thatany introspective reporting is inevitably prone to error. In this book the two discuss to whatextent it is possible to describe our inner experience accurately. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebelrecruited a subject, "Melanie," to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt'sDescriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe herconscious experience). The heart of the book is Melanie's accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel'sinterviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of theinterviews. In this way the authors' dispute about the general reliability of introspectivereporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie's particularreports are believable. Transcripts and audio files of the interviews will be available on the MITPress website. Describing Inner Experience? is not so much a debate as it is a collaboration, witheach author seeking to refine his position and to replace partisanship with balanced criticaljudgment. The result is an illumination of major issues in the study of consciousness--from twosides at once.Russell T. Hurlburt is Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.Eric Schwitzgebel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,Riverside.

Russell T. Hurlburt is Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.