Summary Of Arguing About The Mind By Alvin Goldman

Throughout the collection Arguing about the Mind, Alvin Goldman discusses science, publicity, and consciousness. However, his primary argument is that introspection can be used as a method for scientific evidence in psychology. Introspection is defined as the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes. Daniel Dennett agrees with Goldman in many ways except for two main arguments. Throughout this essay, I will discuss Goldman’s and Dennett’s individual point of views and which concept is superior in the world of science, psychology, and philosophy. Goldman discusses the lack of importance for publicity in scientific measures. Currently, psychology emphasizes statistical measures and public forms of measurements

Data can be reliable without being public as well as data can be public without being reliable. Therefore, publicity and reliability are not necessarily dependent. Finally, data retrieved from introspection is not necessarily unreliable simply because it is not public. Goldman declares that “A statement is an item of scientific evidence if and only if some investigator arrives at a belied in this statement by means of a method that is both public and reliable” (pg. 72). However, Goldman then argues that publicity may not even be need in order to prove reliability. Goldman’s ideas gained popularity over the years. Soon, a philosopher named Dennett contributed to Goldman’s argument but made it his own. However, these two philosophers have a dispute despite their similar ideas. Goldman believes that introspective claims can be used as factual evidence. While Dennett believes that one must stay neutral to these claims because they may or may not be true. Dennett claims that our subjective experiences may not be right according to the world. He also questions if we are right about our subjective experiences. When an individual expresses their claim(s), one should not assume that their claim is correct, rather than that is just what they

This is a third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. Dennett refers to heterophenomenology to "lone-wolf autophenomenology" as a way to emphasize the fact that traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. Heterophenomenology consists of four main points conscious experiences themselves, beliefs about these experiences, verbal judgements expressing those beliefs, and utterances of one sort or another.

Bothe Goldman and Dennett discuss change blindness, filling, and mental rotation. These three things that are listed are test of the conscious mind as a way to infer future predictions. However, Dennett argues if these actions, specifically mental rotation really exists or are necessary. “Subjects always say that they are rotating their mental images, so if agnosticism were not the tacit order of the day, Shepard and Kossyln would never have needed to do their experiments to support the subject’s claims that what they were doing really was a process of image manipulation” (Dennett, pg.