Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis.

The article focuses on the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis (MOH), which challenges the widely endorsed Transparency Thesis (TT) in philosophy. TT claims that introspection only reveals objects and their properties, preventing direct awareness of one's own experiential states as such, whereas MOH argues that mindfulness practice enables a form of introspection where phenomenal properties genuinely appear as non-object properties, thus making experience opaque rather than transparent. Drawing on clinical psychology and cognitive science research, the article elaborates MOH in terms of shifts in experiential perspective, scope of introspectable qualities, and skill level, and addresses objections related to the reliability of introspective reports and the mechanisms underlying mindfulness introspection. The authors conclude that MOH is both empirically and theoretically well supported, implying that if MOH holds, then the Transparency Thesis is false.