A Appendix: Introspection, Reasoning, and Explanations

Introspection was formalized by (51) as a field in psychology to understand the concepts of memory, feeling, and volition (52). The primary focus of introspection is in reflecting on oneself through directed questions. While the directed questions are an open field of study in psychology, we use reasoning as a means of questions in this paper. Abductive reasoning was introduced by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (53), who saw abduction as a reasoning process from effect to cause (54). An abductive reasoning framework creates a hypothesis and tests its validity without considering the cause. From the perspective of introspection, a hypothesis can be considered as an answer to one of the three following questions: a correlation'Why P?' question, a counterfactual'What if?' question, and a contrastive'Why P, rather than Q?' question. Here P is the prediction and Q is any contrast class. Both the correlation and counterfactual questions require active interventions for answers. These questions try to assess the causality of some endogenous or exogenous variable and require interventions that are long, complex, and sometimes incomplete (55). However, introspection is the assessment of ones own notions rather than an external variable. Hence, a contrastive question of the form'Why P, rather than Q?' lends itself as the directed question for introspection. Here Q is the introspective class. It has the additional advantage that the network f() serves as the knowledge base of notions. All reflection images from 1, Figure 1, and Figure 1 are contrastive.