Introspection
This, as with all other things on this wiki, is a work in progress.
I'm generally not a fan of introspection. I prefer to observe my behavior as if I didn't have special access to the contents of my brain. Pretty much everyone I tell this to thinks it's really strange, so here's a quick explanation:
If you look at the problem of other minds from another angle, you might say that it's not the other minds that present an epistemic challenge, but instead it's your own that's the outlier. Which is to say, we have this special channel via which we can perceive the inner workings of precisely one mind, which happens to be our own.
So if we apply the self-sampling assumption (that "we should reason as if we are typical observers in a suitable reference class," to control for observer selection effects), we end up rejecting, or at least minimizing, our reliance on introspection as a means of self-knowledge.
If actions speak louder than words, externally-verifiable behavior (including speech acts, even if there were no others in the forest to hear them) speak louder than whatever it is that you do in your head.
Copyright © 2008, 2009 Edward O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0.