The definition of introspection :

the Introspector is a ModeofMind, a StateOfAwareness. the IntrospectorModeOfMind has a LearningAndInteractiveNature.

The Introspective mind is a read only mode at first, it allows you to see into yourself.

The issues of OntologicalStructure and SymbolicDefinition come ito play when you are Introspecting.

To introspect means literaly to look inside. To spect is to spy, to watch. To externalized your internal ideas into *more* internal forms, but for you mind to see.

This is the ExpansionPredicate, you expand on a symbol, and visualize it.

• • To project internal thoughts onto your visual imagination.

To project images inside the mind.

It is a result of adding one InfQuant to an InternalMentalEvent in the VisualSphere.

an InfQuant is a Quantity of Information

The InternalMentalSymbols, the SymbolDecls, the IconDecls, the GraphDecls that are visualized to the outside world are at first meaningless to a third party.

First via the assignment to a Meaning does a Symbol become valuable. First when they are assigned a meaning via semantics can the value of them be understood.

This process is a stepwise process that involves an human partner that takes part in the introspector use case. Via interfacing with a human, we are able, to extract "meaning" from them.

This meaning is into sentences, an human encoding, an understandable textual form. Sentences allow easy understanding, via direct expression of subject, predicate and object we can indicate the meaning.

Let us look to quotes

http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html

   When Descartes set about the reconstruction of philosophy, his first step was to 
   (theoretically) permit scepticism and to    
   discard the practice of the schoolmen of looking to authority as the ultimate 
   source of truth. That done, he sought a
   more natural fountain of true principles, and thought he found it in the human mind; 
   thus passing, in the directest way,
   from the method of authority to that of apriority, as described in my first paper. :

   * Self-consciousness was to furnish us with our fundamental truths, 
   and to decide what was agreeable to reason. 

   But since, evidently, not all ideas are true, he was led to note, as the 
   first condition of infallibility, that they must be clear. 
   The distinction between an idea seeming clear and really being so, 
   never occurred to him. 

   Trusting to introspection, as he did, even for a knowledge of external things, 
   why should he question its testimony in respect to the contents of our own minds? 

   But then, I suppose, seeing men, who seemed to be quite clear and positive, 
   holding opposite opinions upon fundamental principles, he was further led 
   to say that clearness of ideas is not sufficient, but that they need also 
   to be distinct, i.e., to have nothing unclear about them. 

   What he probably meant by this (for he did not explain himself with precision) was, 
   that they must sustain the test of dialectical examination; that they must not only 
   seem clear at the outset, but that discussion must never be able to bring to light points 
   of obscurity connected with them.

Here is an interesting api that I found into the introspector,it externalizes an model, allowing it to be inspected. http://jade.cselt.it/doc/api/jade/content/onto/Introspector.html#method_detail http://jade.cselt.it/doc/api/jade/content/schema/ObjectSchema.html

   Here in the jade object schema, you see that we can add slots
   to the objects, some manditory, some not, some with cardinality.

Quote from : http://www.quebecoislibre.org/030510-9.htm

   For Mises, economic behavior is a special case of human action.
   He contends that it is through the analysis of the idea
   of action that the principles of economics can be deduced. 
   Economic theorems are seen as connected to the foundation of 
   real human purposes. Economics is based on true and evident axioms, 
   arrived at by introspection, concerning the essence 
   of human action. 
   From these axioms, Mises derives logical implications or the truths of economics.

Quote from http://www.gazettenet.com/04222003/entertai/5279.htm

   While the spontaneity of these pieces - and others on view at Hampden Gallery 
   - links them to the abstract art created half a century ago, 
   they also are good examples of the lyrical introspection 
   that today's artists bring to their work.
   

Quote from http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030507/CASUCC/TPBusiness/General

   But in his recent book Growing People, Growing Companies 
   he warns that individual career "pathfinding" isn't easy.
   "Pursuing personal success requires reflection, self-awareness and courage.
   The path is difficult to identify, as it is unique to each individual 
   and has never been found or taken before," 
   he writes. 
   "You are constantly picking your way through virgin forest to create the 
   route with only the vague feeling that you are 
   heading in the right direction . . . [it] means 
   taking risks and experimenting with yourself."

From : http://electroniciraq.net/news/737.shtml

   This war (which never really ended – and perhaps has no solidly fixed 
   beginnings – as is the ephemeral nature of 
   slow-drip genocide) has shattered communities and served as 
   a grand example of a massive setback for humanity. 

   It has also highlighted a whole plethora of issues that the West tries 
   to ignore as we rush into condemnation of the more      
   blatantly visible players. 

   We – the alternative – in our finger pointing, our doling out of blame 
   to the figureheads, the passing array of
   politicians "responsible" for how far astray the human race has gone, 
   have somehow missed one of the lessons 
   so blatantly obvious in all of this: 

   that introspection and reflection, and admission of our own 
   complicity within this, is vitally important if we are to   
   move forward with any sort of cohesion as a movement. 

   That in the "shaming," in the blaming of the other 
   (who really aren’t like us at all, because we care), perhaps we should
   be saying shame, too, on us – for twelve years of not managing to 
   break the sound barrier; shame for the suffocating 
   silence surrounding genocidal sanctions; shame for every victim of Israeli 
   apartheid in occupied Palestine;shame for the 
   slow and painful or quick deaths and the lives never given voice, never 
   fought for, never honored; shame for every victim
   of state-sponsored terrorism; and shame for the memory of 
   every Iraqi man, woman and child who lived with a virtual gun 
   to their heads for far too long.

Quote from http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//articles/mach/mach.html

   But there is another, one might almost say phenomenological, aspect to his thinking. 
   All Mach's arguments, however they
   are to be classified, are rigorously subordinated by him to a single goal: the goal  
   of increasing knowledge.(19) He is
   quite prepared to renounce any claim to the epithets 'physicist' or 'philosopher' if  
   this contributes to the advancement 
   of our understanding of the world ((1910), p. 11). He thereby stands in marked  
   contrast to those philosophers and 
   scientists who are all too ready to impose in advance requirements that  
   enquiry has to satisfy if it is to be 
   'scientific', for example by foisting abstract 'criteria of rationality' 
    on live traditions of research.

   He shares with Husserl and others in the Brentano tradition the conviction that 
    theoretical enquiry cannot afford to lose
   sight of the origins of our ideas (scientific and otherwise). Scientific ideas, 
    as Mach conceives them, must have their 
   origins in concepts - called by him 'inaugurating concepts' - derived directly  
   from experience (and, like the 
   phenomenologists, Mach was prepared to acknowledge the role played by introspection  
   in the foundations of scientific 
   enquiry). The science of heat, he argues, is derived from the concept of felt 
    warmth, the science of light from the 
   concept of intensity of illumination, the science of acoustics from the  
   concept of frequency, and so on.(20)

   Mach shares with members of the phenomenological tradition a conception of the philosophy 
    of science as something that 
   must be tied to the actual practice of science. As Husserl puts it: 'A fruitful theory  
   of concept formation in the 
   natural sciences can...only be a theory "from below", a theory that has grown out of  
   the work of the natural sciences 
   themselves.' The passage occurs in the context of a discussion by Husserl of a  
   monograph by the Neo-Kantian Rickert in 
   which a conception of the philosophy of science is manifested 'which deals so 
    much in general constructions, is so much a
   theory "from above", that not a single example is to be found in the entire 
   monograph and nor does this absence make 
   itself felt' (1979, p. 147).

   It is a recurring feature of Mach's deservedly famous conceptual analyses of the  
   ontological commitments of scientists 
   e.g. to space and time, that he proceeds by gradually stripping away from these  
   all purely conceptual baggage, all 
   metaphysical free play not directly related to sense experience - and thereby arrives,  
   step by step, at certain (as Mach 
   conceives things) unambiguous and precise components, such as the inaugurating concepts  
   mentioned above:
   
   I see the expression of... economy clearly in the gradual reduction of the  
   statical laws of machines to a single one, 
   viz., the principle of virtual work: in the replacement of Kepler's laws by 
    Newton's single law... and in the 
   [subsequent] reduction, simplification and clarification of the laws of dynamics. 
    I see clearly the biologico-economical 
   adaptation of ideas, which takes place by the principles of continuity (permanence) 
    and of adequate definition and splits
   the concept 'heat' into the two concepts of 'temperature' and 'quantity of heat'; 
    and I see how the concept 'quantity of
   heat' leads on to 'latent heat', and to the concepts of 'energy' and 'entropy'. ((1910), p. 6f.) 

See also PrinciplesOfVirtualWork PrinciplesOfContinuity

Quote from http://www.acooke.org/andrew/writing/lang.html

   In many OO languages it is possible to find out what class an object is  
   (run time type information) and even what
   functions are connected with it (introspection / reflection). Others, 
    like C++ have little run time information 
   available (at least in the standard language - individual libraries  
   of objects can support RTTI  with their own
   conventions).

from : http://www.singinst.org/LOGI/seedAI.html

   Better support for introspective perception and manipulation.  
   The comparatively poor support of the human architecture for 
   low-level introspection is most apparent in the extreme case of modifying code; 
   we can think thoughts about thoughts, but not thoughts about individual neurons.  
   However, other cross-level introspections are also closed to us. 
   We lack the ability to introspect on :
    * concept kernels, 
    * focus-of-attention allocation, 
    * sequiturs in the thought process, 
    * memory formation, 
    * skill reinforcement, et cetera; 
   We lack the ability to :
    * introspectively notice, 
    * induce beliefs about, 
    * or take deliberate actions in these domains.

More to come.....