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Can conscious experience be described accurately? Can we give reliable
accounts of our sensory experiences and pains, our inner speech and imagery,
our felt emotions? The question is central not only to our humanistic
understanding of who we are but also to the burgeoning scientific field
of consciousness studies. The two authors of Describing Inner Experience?
disagree on the answer: Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist, argues that
improved methods of introspective reporting make accurate accounts of inner
experience possible; Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, believes that any
introspective reporting is inevitably prone to error. In this book the two
discuss to what extent it is possible to describe our inner experience
accurately.
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