Telling what we know: describing inner experience

It is claimed that psychological science can obtain accurate reports about people's inner experience. We reconsider three criticisms of introspection: Nisbett and Wilson's critical review of introspection, the failure of intr ospectionists to agree about imageless thought, and Skinner's behavioral po sition. We show that rather than dismissing introspection, these criticisms point the way towards technical improvements in the methods used to produc e accurate descriptions of inner experience. One such method, Descriptive E xperience Sampling, is described and used as an example to illustrate our c onclusion that, although exploring inner experience is not trivially easy, it can provide important knowledge for many areas in cognitive science.