The organ reporting that it is remarkable is the one under assessment, so introspective testimony about the mind cannot be independent of it.
Philips's line observes that his high opinion of the brain was arriving from the brain. The joke states a real constraint: self-report about cognition is generated by the system being reported on, so a person's confidence in their own reasoning is not evidence about that reasoning, and the research on confabulation shows the report is produced whether or not there is anything to report.
In practice
- A candidate's account of how they reach decisions is a decision-making product, not an observation of one.
- A team confident in its own objectivity has produced that judgement using the faculty in question.
- Standing
- A folk statement of the problem introspection faces as evidence; compare the illusion of explanatory depth and confabulation research.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Paradoxes in the data, and sayings about knowing