Maja Spener (Birmingham) Subjective measures of consciousness, response bias, and introspection

I will discuss the main types of so-called ’subjective measures of consciousness’ used in current-day science of consciousness and explain the key worry about such measures, namely the problem of a putatively ever-present response bias. I then turn to the question of whether subjective measures of consciousness are introspective. I show that there is no clear answer to this question, as proponents of subjective measures do not employ a worked-out notion of subjective access. In turn, as I explain, this makes the problem of response bias less tractable than it might otherwise be. I contrast this problem with an older problem for introspective methods, raised by August Comte and discussed by the early experimental psychologists. I will outline some of their solutions, which in turn can be usefully applied to the problem of response bias for subjective measures.