A cognitive reinterpretation of classical introspectionism
pp. 245-290
in: Leendert Mos (ed), Annals of theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
This paper is a step toward relinking the scattered subjectivist-phenomenological traditions in psychology to offer some balance for our current "extraverted" obsession with the experimental management of information and computation. Felt meaning, physiognomy, and metaphor are crucial to such a Fechnerian endeavor, because these most subjective aspects of symbolic cognition are also most strikingly attuned to the qualia afforded by the environment.Specifically, the striking overlap between the techniques and phenomena of altered states of consciousness and classical introspectionism, understood through a holistic cognitive perspective, exteriorizes normally masked aspects of metaphor—the synaesthetically mediated reorganization of microgenetic-iconic stages of perception. Titchener's sensory-affective core has the place in a psychology of metaphor that it so lacked in functional perception (Gibson), and the disparity between Würzburg "impalpables' of thought and Cornell imagery protocols can be resolved if we assume that all representational processes have a presentational aspect based on complex or geometric synesthesias. Support for this approach is drawn from Wittgenstein's later notebooks.
