Conscious

In recent years, it has been an emerging view that if experimental psychology is to go further than to study mental states defined as single functional units and include conscious experience as its object of study, it is necessary to develop more elaborate “first person methods ” than what has been common in cognitive science the last fifty years. During this long period, there has been immense resistance among psychologists and neuroscientists against the use of first person methods, as it has been standard to think of first person reports as not intersubjectively accessible and thus not intersubjectively verifiable. It has recently been argued that 1) psychology has only abandoned first person methods rhet-orically – results of cognitive science have always been dependent on the validity of first per-son methods, and 2) the dominant view in psychology of objective and subjective data is con-fused. 1) Although cognitive scientists have claimed to conduct experiments regarding specifically mental states (often defined as inner states), the dominant argument has been that we should refine “indirect measures ” of mental states using behavioural data. With this paradigm, look-ing for the neural correlates to some or other mental state, we apply a model like this (adapte