About Us

- Research Project: Extrospection -

DFG Research Training Group / Graduiertenkolleg 2386 - DFG Förderkennzeichen 337619223

“Extrospection” is an independent research project attached to the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.

What is “Extrospection”?

While introspection means first-person access to one’s own conscious states, extrospection stands for third-person access to another person’s conscious experience, e.g. with scientific methods or by way of mind reading. Recognizing that another person feels pain, or investigating the conscious perceptual experience of an experimental subject with an fMRI scanner are typical cases of extrospection.

What are the research goals of the Research Training Group 2386 “Extrospection”?

Conscious processes like states of emotion, perception, belief formation, or mind-reading, are of essential importance in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. It is quite controversial, though, to what extent these processes can be captured adequately by means of extrospection. The reason for this controversy is that extrospective methods are restricted to indirect external evidence. Introspection, by contrast, has long been treated as privileged, given its direct first-person access to these processes.

Our research projects aim at a comprehensive epistemological, historical and empirical assessment of extrospection. As a working hypothesis, we assume that there is an epistemic symmetry between extrospection and introspection: What can be known by way of first-person methods can be known by way of third-person methods as well, at least in principle. While we do not deny the obvious insufficiencies of current extrospective methods, we hypothesize that they can be overcome by future scientific, methodological, and technological developments.

What is a Research Training Group?

Research Training Groups (RTG) are established by universities to promote young researchers. They are funded by the DFG for a period of up to nine years. Their key emphasis is on the qualification of doctoral researchers within the framework of a focused research programme and a structured training strategy. RTGs often have an interdisciplinary approach. The aim of RTGs is to prepare doctoral researchers for the complexities of the job market in science and academics and simultaneously encourage early scientific independence.

Contact

For more information on the Research Training Group and the individual research projects, please visit the website of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at http://www.mind-and-brain.de/rtg-2386/.

Feel free to contact us at mb-mind-perspectives@hu-berlin.de.