Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Moments of Truth
- 2 Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa
- 3 Apprehending Pristine Experience
- 4 Everyday Experience
- 5 Moments Are Essential
- 6 Experience in Tourette's Syndrome
- 7 The Moment (Not): Happy and Sad
- 8 Subjunctification
- 9 Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age
- 10 Iteration Is Essential
- 11 Epistemological Q/A
- 12 A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject
- 13 Pristine Experience (Not): Emotion and Schizophrenia
- 14 Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician
- 15 Unsymbolized Thinking
- 16 Sensory Awareness
- 17 The Radical Non-subjectivity of Pristine Experience
- 18 Diamonds versus Glass
- 19 Into the Floor: A Right-or-Wrong-Answer Natural Experiment
- 20 The Emergence of Salient Characteristics
- 21 Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
- Appendix: List of Constraints
- References
- Index
4 - Everyday Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Moments of Truth
- 2 Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa
- 3 Apprehending Pristine Experience
- 4 Everyday Experience
- 5 Moments Are Essential
- 6 Experience in Tourette's Syndrome
- 7 The Moment (Not): Happy and Sad
- 8 Subjunctification
- 9 Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age
- 10 Iteration Is Essential
- 11 Epistemological Q/A
- 12 A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject
- 13 Pristine Experience (Not): Emotion and Schizophrenia
- 14 Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician
- 15 Unsymbolized Thinking
- 16 Sensory Awareness
- 17 The Radical Non-subjectivity of Pristine Experience
- 18 Diamonds versus Glass
- 19 Into the Floor: A Right-or-Wrong-Answer Natural Experiment
- 20 The Emergence of Salient Characteristics
- 21 Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
- Appendix: List of Constraints
- References
- Index
Summary
We have been discussing the co-determination of pristine experience ↔ moments ↔ genuinely submitting to the constraints that the exploration of experience imposes. Chapter 2's discussion of bulimia showed that submitting to those constraints may be worth the required effort and may provide outside-the-box perspectives on vitally important matters.
All that presumes that pristine experience exists. However, there are many who believe that inner experience doesn't exist, or if it does exist it can't be apprehended or described in any scientifically useful way. There is good reason to be wary of introspective methods; the introspections on which nascent psychology was founded were a spectacular failure, leading to nearly a century in which introspection was effectively banned from orthodox psychology (the term “introspection” rarely appears in modern textbooks on psychological method except in the history-of-psychology chapter where it is criticized). As I have explained elsewhere (Monson & Hurlburt, 1993; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel, 2007), I think the early introspections were interpreted incorrectly, so psychology's banning of introspective techniques was an over-generalization and an over-reaction. However, that history does suggest that skepticism about introspective techniques is justified, as long as by “skepticism” one means “suspending judgment” rather than being “unwilling to admit or accept what is offered as true.”
Chapter 3 sketched DES, a method (or approach, or instrument) for the exploration of pristine experience. The practitioner of DES, I claimed, can genuinely submit to the constraints that the endeavor to apprehend experience imposes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Investigating Pristine Inner ExperienceMoments of Truth, pp. 72 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011