First-Person Experiments in Thinking

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renatus Ziegler ◽  
Ulrich Weger
Keyword(s):  
Physiological Parameters ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
Mental Contents

Abstract. In psychology, thinking is typically studied in terms of a range of behavioral or physiological parameters, focusing, for instance, on the mental contents or the neuronal correlates of the thinking process proper. In the current article, by contrast, we seek to complement this approach with an exploration into the experiential or inner dimensions of thinking. These are subtle and elusive and hence easily escape a mode of inquiry that focuses on externally measurable outcomes. We illustrate how a sufficiently trained introspective approach can become a radar for facets of thinking that have found hardly any recognition in the literature so far. We consider this an important complement to third-person research because these introspective observations not only allow for new insights into the nature of thinking proper but also cast other psychological phenomena in a new light, for instance, attention and the self. We outline and discuss our findings and also present a roadmap for the reader interested in studying these phenomena in detail.

Exploring the Behavioral, Experiential, and Conceptual Dimensions of the Self

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Weger ◽  
Andreas Meyer ◽  
Johannes Wagemann
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Core ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Behavioral Expression ◽  
Geometrical Shapes ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
Level Of Experience

Abstract. The self has become a prominent field of research in psychology but despite its eminent first-person character, it is typically studied from a third-person perspective. Such a third-person approach is well suited to enquire into the behavioral expression of the sense of selfhood but it does not capture the core experience – the so-called qualia nature – of the self. In the current article we illuminate the challenges that a predominant third-person approach poses to an understanding of the self. We outline two levels of analysis that can complement and enrich a third-person, behavior-focused view, namely the level of experience and the level of conceptual insight. Both these additional levels are accessible via a first-person mode of enquiry and can reveal a degree of richness about the self that reaches beyond a third-person approach. We here provide a methodological justification for such a qualitative mode of enquiry, as well as a synopsis of findings from our own first-person research which involved introspective reports of the authors’ experiences during meditation on geometrical shapes, words, and short phrases.

scholarly journals When the World Breaks Down: A 3-Stage Existential Model of Nihilism in Schizophrenia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philipp Klar ◽  
Georg Northoff
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Pathological Development ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Intentional Structure

The existential crisis of nihilism in schizophrenia has been reported since the early days of psychiatry. Taking first-person accounts concerning nihilistic experiences of both the self and the world as vantage point, we aim to develop a dynamic existential model of the pathological development of existential nihilism. Since the phenomenology of such a crisis is intrinsically subjective, we especially take the immediate and pre-reflective first-person perspective’s (FPP) experience (instead of objectified symptoms and diagnoses) of schizophrenia into consideration. The hereby developed existential model consists of 3 conceptualized stages that are nested into each other, which defines what we mean by existential. At the same time, the model intrinsically converges with the phenomenological concept of the self-world structure notable inside our existential framework. Regarding the 3 individual stages, we suggest that the onset or first stage of nihilistic pathogenesis is reflected by phenomenological solipsism, that is, a general disruption of the FPP experience. Paradigmatically, this initial disruption contains the well-known crisis of common sense in schizophrenia. The following second stage of epistemological solipsism negatively affects all possible perspectives of experience, that is, the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives of subjectivity. Therefore, within the second stage, solipsism expands from a disruption of immediate and pre-reflective experience (first stage) to a disruption of reflective experience and principal knowledge (second stage), as mirrored in abnormal epistemological limitations of principal knowledge. Finally, the experience of the annihilation of healthy self-consciousness into the ultimate collapse of the individual’s existence defines the third stage. The schizophrenic individual consequently loses her/his vital experience since the intentional structure of consciousness including any sense of reality breaks down. Such a descriptive-interpretative existential model of nihilism in schizophrenia may ultimately serve as input for future psychopathological investigations of nihilism in general, including, for instance, its manifestation in depression.

Blind Men Speaking of Colors: Paul's Recollection and the Self-Image of Early Thirteenth-Century Theologians

2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Third ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Third Person

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. (2 Cor 12:1–5 nkiv) This brief and enigmatic account is caught between multiple dialectics of power and infirmity, pride and humility, unveiling and secrecy. At this point in his letter Paul is turning to a new source of power in order to establish his authority against the crowd of boasting false apostles who populate the previous paragraphs. He wishes to divulge his intimate, occult knowledge of God, but at the same time keep his position as antihero that is prevalent throughout the epistle. These dialectics are enhanced by a sophisticated play of first and third person. The third person denotes the subject who experienced rapture fourteen years ago, while the first person denotes the narrator in the present. Only after several verses does the reader realize that these two are in fact the same person. This alienation allows Paul the intricate play of boasting, for “of such a one I will boast, yet of myself I will not boast.”

When I saw me standing there: first-person and third-person memories and future projections, and how they relate to the self

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Verhaeghen ◽  
Shelley N. Aikman ◽  
Susann Doyle-Portillo ◽  
Christopher R. Bell ◽  
Nicole Simmons
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Future Projections ◽  
Third Person

Disrupting Vestibular Activity Disrupts Body Ownership

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 581-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adria E. N. Hoover ◽  
Laurence R. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Objective Measure ◽  
Vestibular Stimulation ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Minimum Delay

People are more sensitive at detecting asynchrony between a self-generated movement and visual feedback concerning that movement when the movement is viewed from a first-person perspective. We call this the ‘self-advantage’ and interpret it as an objective measure of self. Here we ask if disruption of the vestibular system in healthy individuals affects the self-advantage. Participants performed finger movements while viewing their hand in a first-person (‘self’) or third-person (‘other’) perspective and indicated which of two periods (one with minimum delay and the other with an added delay of 33–264 ms) was delayed. Their sensitivity to the delay was calculated from the psychometric functions obtained. During the testing, disruptive galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) was applied in five-minute blocks interleaved with five minutes of no stimulation for a total of 40 min. We confirmed the self-advantage under no stimulation (31 ms). In the presence of disruptive GVS this advantage disappeared and there was no longer a difference in performance between perspectives. The threshold delay for the ‘other’ perspective was not affected by the GVS. These results suggest that an intact vestibular signal is required to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ and to maintain a sense of body ownership.

Would I Bet on Beating You?

2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Pahl
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Directing Attention

Two studies investigated egocentrism in competitive situations. Specifically, the aim was to test novel subtle debiasing techniques for the shared-circumstance effect whereby people bet more money on winning in easy than difficult knowledge quizzes. In Study 1, participants took part in a quiz competition with a friend. Being asked to complete 10 sentence stems about the opponent eliminated the shared-circumstance effect, compared to completing 10 sentences about the self. In Study 2, circling third-person pronouns in an unrelated task eliminated the shared-circumstance effect compared to circling first-person pronouns. The research is the first to show that subtly directing attention to the opponent or to a generic third person can eliminate egocentrism effects.

scholarly journals “Chike’s School Days”: An Autrebiography Verbalizing Chinua Achebe’s Early Schooling

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Komenan Casimir
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Schooling ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

Todorov’s syntactic, verbal and semantic aspects of the literary text, onomastics and Mauron’s psychocriticism, underlie this paper whose goal is to show that Chinua Achebe’s “Chike’s School Days” is an autrebiography verbalizing Achebe’s early schooling. As two major thematic Ariadne’s threads, the religious, familial and onomastic connections between Chike and Achebe, as well as Achebe’s untimely love for Shakespeare’s language, have been used to compose an autrebiograhical short story, a shortened fiction about the self, which is narrated not in the first-person (“I”), but rather in the third-person (“He”). It is with such a detachment device that Achebe writes about Chike, a character who is nobody else but his double.

scholarly journals Interpretation Theory and the First Person

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Daniel Dennett ◽  
The Core ◽  
Third Person

The “rationalizing interpretation” view of psychological discourse, associated with Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, has been widely influential as a reconstruction of our practices of ascribing attitudes to others, and as an account of the meaning of psychological terms. This perspective has lent support to a wider assumption in philosophy of mind, that we should think of our ordinary use of psychological terms as part of a “theory” to explain the behavior of those around us. This paper argues that given the differences in application of psychological terms in their first-person and third-person uses, the “theory-theory” is a bad picture of what gives sense to our ascriptive practices. A proper understanding of the self/other asymmetries in psychological discourse shows that they follow quite naturally from the core truth of the “rationalizing” perspective, and that this shows the conflict between “rationalizing interpretation” and “simulation theory” to be less than it appears.

Will it be me? Identity, concern and perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense

Self-reflexive or egocentric concern has been taken to present a serious problem for reductionist and eliminativist metaphysical accounts of personal identity. Philosophers have tended to respond in one of three ways: by continuing the search for a metaphysical account of identity that (prudentially if not morally) justifies egocentric concern; by accepting that egocentric concern can hold between persons who are not numerically identical; or by advocating the abandonment of egocentric concern altogether. All these approaches, however, distinguish between metaphysical ‘facts’ and affective responses to them. Exploring a well-known example from Bernard Williams, I argue that egocentric concern presents itself as irreducibly first-personal and as making its own set of numerical personal identity claims on the phenomenal level. Williams' example also points to the need to complicate the first/third person schema by factoring in a further distinction between present-tense and implicitly atemporal perspectives on the self. Once this move is made, we can see that the identity claims figured in first-person present-tense experience and those arrived at through metaphysical deliberation need to be distinguished. We should resist the temptation to privilege one perspective over the other in all instances, or to collapse them into a unitary account of selfhood.

scholarly journals Looking from within: Comparing first-person approaches to studying experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Lena Lumma ◽  
Ulrich Weger
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Research ◽  
Self Report ◽  
First Person ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Fundamental Goal ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective

AbstractFostering our understanding of how humans behave, feel and think is a fundamental goal of psychological research. Widely used methods in psychological research are self-report and behavioral measures which require an experimenter to collect data from another person. By comparison, first-person measures that assess more subtle facets of subjective experiences, are less widely used. Without integrating such more subtle first-person measures, however, fundamental aspects of psychological phenomena remain inaccessible to psychological theorizing. To explore the value and potential contribution of first-person methods, the current article aims to provide an overview over already established first-person methods and compare them on relevant dimensions. Based on these results, researchers can select suitable first-person methods to study different facets of subjective experiences. Overall, the investigation of psychological phenomena from a first-person perspective can complement and enrich existing research from a third-person perspective.

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