L'introspezione tra psicologia del senso comune e psicologia scientifica.

[Autom. eng. transl.] The question of the epistemological status of introspection as a method of investigation is one of the most controversial in psychology. The greatest difficulty regarding the introspective method seems to lie in its unavoidable subjective character and 'in the first person', which makes it difficult to assess based on the same validity criteria used to consider other methods of psychological research such as, for example, the behavioral observation or neurophysiological indices. Starting from these considerations, the present work aims to address the question of the role of introspection in psychological research by inserting it into a broader (but no less controversial) problem, namely that of the relationship between common sense psychology and scientific psychology. In fact, if we assume that the subjectivity and the first-person perspective are the foundation of all the notions of common sense such as beliefs, desires or intentions but not those of the natural sciences, which aim at reducing or even eliminating them, it appears evident how introspection can have a methodological relevance only in the context of a psychology of common sense and not in the context of a psychology that aspires to define itself as scientific. To use Goldman's terminology, introspection seems able to shed light on conscious / subjective or macroscopic states but not on unconscious / objective or microscopic (computationally characterized) states that are considered the real determinant of our behaviors and therefore the object of study of a scientific psychology. The work concludes by questioning the validity of this proposal and therefore considering whether a rigorously defined common sense psychology is able to provide a plausible explanation of mental and behavior and thus to express an alternative and complementary form of scientificity to that of natural sciences that is a scientificity proper to the human sciences.