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I 8 Jean Piaget
by the object, and from two points of view: firstly, by his presuppositions about
the value of introspection, in that his own mental life persuades him that he has
an accurate vision of himself, whereas this vision in fact fulfils utilitarian rather
than strictly cognitive or disinterested functions. From the cognitive point of
view, it is centered on the external results of his action, and does not provide
adequate information about either the mechanisms of that action nor about the
internal mechanisms of his mental life in general. From the affective point of
view, the main function of this self-vision is to establish and maintain certain
self-assigned values which help to maintain the subject’s internal equilibrium
rather than to enlighten us on the laws of that equilibrium. Secondly, the in-
trospecting subject is modified by the object of his inquiry in that his entire
activity, introspection included, is influenced to varying degrees by his past
history, which is unknown to him because his memory of the past is the work of
a very biased historian who forgets certain sources and distorts others, again as
a result of arbitraryvalues which continually undermine the objectivity attributed
by the subject both to his knowledge of the past and to his introspection in the
present.
Conversely, introspection continually modifies the observed phenomena, at
every level. We know, for example, that periods of time are perceived as far
longer if the subject tries to evaluate them while they are running their course.
The r61e of mental images in thought used to give rise to all sorts of introspec-
tive errors until subjects were compared with one another and the difficulties of
the problem realized. A fortiori, from the affective point of view, it is obvious
that the introspection of feelings modifies them, either by giving them a cog-
nitive dimension or by subordinating them to the values which, unknown to
the subject, govern introspection itself. The reason why novelists and phi-
losophers can use introspection successfully is precisely that their analysis is
part of a certain vision of the world in which evaluation plays a central r61e.
But where the problem is to investigate mechanisms as such, introspection is
inadequate, because it both modifies the observed phenomena and is distorted
by them from the outset.
The immediate remedies, (leaving aside for the time being all general methods
and their various techniques) have been of three kinds. The first, of course, has
been to decenter introspection itself by comparing the subjects with one another
and confining the investigation to well defined problems; the questions put to
the subject then canalize the ‘simulated introspection’ and allow systematic
comparison to take place. This method has produced certain positive results,
for example as regards the dual nature of the judgement as an act and of the
mental image. Chiefly, however, it has revealed the limits of introspection,
whence Binet’s disillusioned quip that ‘thought is an unconscious activity
of the mind’.
The second solution has been to eliminate introspection and study only be-
haviour - a valuable step since it paved the way for a far more fertile psychology
of conduct than it was reasonable to expect. Many authors have found it too
cramping, however, for two related reasons. The first is that unless we adopt
Skinner’s view that the organism is a ‘black box’ described purely in terms of