1 D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 68.
2 There are many different versions of this metaphor of introspection as perception of an inner world. We examine our consciences; find (or lose) ourselves; try to learn who we really are, what we really believe or stand for.
3 Those sceptical of common-sense explanations of the mind who have particularly influenced my thinking include Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, Gilbert Ryle, Hugo Mercier, James A. Russell, Dan Sperber, among many others. A particularly influential study that cast doubt on the psychological coherence of common-sense explanations of all kinds is: L. Rozenblit and F. Keil (2002), ‘The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth’, Cognitive Science, 26(5): 521–62.
4 Experimental methods relying on introspection, for example those in which people describe their experiences of different perceptual stimuli, were a focus of the very first psychological laboratory, set up in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879. Philosophy and psychology continue to contain strands of phenomenology – where the goal is to try to understand and explore our minds and experience ‘from the inside’. These methods have been, in my view, notably unproductive – phenomenology draws us into the illusion of mental depth, rather than uncovering its existence.
5 Sceptics include behaviourists such as Gilbert Ryle and B. F. Skinner, theorists of direct perception such as J. J. Gibson and Michael Turvey, and philosophers influenced by phenomenology (Hubert Dreyfus). Paul and Patricia Churchland have long argued that everyday ‘folk’ psychology is no more scientifically viable than ‘folk’ physics or biology. Over the years I have argued both in favour of this view (see N. Chater and M. Oaksford (1996), ‘The falsity of folk theories: Implications for psychology and philosophy’, in W. O’Donaghue and R. F. Kitchener (eds),The Philosophy of Psychology (London: Sage), pp. 244–56) and (wrongly, I now feel) against it (see, for example, N. Chater (2000), ‘Contrary views: A review of “On the contrary” by Paul and Patricia Churchland’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 31: 615–27). The ideas in this book owe a lot to the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his discussion of an ‘instrumentalist’ view of everyday psychological explanation and the nature of conscious experience (D. C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) and D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993)).
6 Some of the ideas in Part Two of this book have close links to joint work with my close friend and colleague Morten Christiansen of Cornell University on how we use and learn language (e.g. Morten H. Christiansen and N. Chater, Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Morten H. Christiansen and N. Chater (2016), ‘The now-or-never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e62).