Collective writing: Introspective reflections on current experience

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar

Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical doubt. Introspective knowledge is also often held to be more immediate or direct than sensory knowledge. Both of these putative features of introspection have been cited in support of the idea that introspective knowledge can serve as a ground or foundation for other sorts of knowledge (Schwitzgebel, 2019).

In a time of world-wide insecurity on many issues, an inner security may be both desirable and necessary, for educational, philosophical and personal flourishing. This editorial arises from the authors’ participation in a collective writing project published in May, 2020 (Peters et al., 2020). The perspectives below respond to a provocation for a philosophical introspection as an ontological and epistemological practice. That is, the authors attempt to rehabilitate 'philosophical introspection' as a means for investigating subjective reports of individual experience as an index of consciousness and reflexive knowledge such as self-ascriptions. They indicate the potential for a philosophical introspection to point to potential expressivist views or self-transparency, possibly even self-knowledge. If ‘introspective knowledge can serve as a ground or foundation for other sorts of knowledge’, as Schwitzgebel (2019) suggests in the opening quote, the sections below offer potential insights, into conceptual connections accessed or emerging, between co-authors, within the self, writing as a conscious process, and as a process of working, crafting the possibilities emerging from such a collaborative energy. Introspective knowledge is contested by various claims involving access to consciousness, the nature of mood and emotion, the relationship of personal identity to systems of thought and belief, and also the all-important question of what counts as introspective verification. In this group exercise we asked a group of scholars who have been involved in collective writing over a period of several years to utilise an introspective process characterised by what Schwitzgebel (2019) regards as the necessary features of the process: 1. The mentality condition – beliefs and judgments about mental states or processes; 2. The first-person condition – beliefs and judgments about one’s own mind or subjectivity; 3. The temporal proximity condition – ‘beliefs, or judgments about one’s currently ongoing mental life’ (Abridged). What we were trying to ascertain is a condition of self-observation, asking our contributors to provide self-observation accounts of the belief and affective dimensions of being engaged in a collective writing process. The idea here being that without being too technical it is useful and helpful to others to hear what contributors experienced in the collective writing process.