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‪Social scientists often appeal to subjective reports about subjects’ mental states. As such, introspection, which is the subjects’ capacities to know and report on their own mental states, plays a fundamental role in the social sciences. According to proponents of “introspectionnism”, although introspective knowledge is private, it can be used to justify scientific hypotheses. As such, the use of “subjective data” in the social sciences would make these disciplines fundamentally different from the natural sciences, where data is supposed to be publicly accessible. Against introspectionnism, we argue that the role of introspection is similar to that of a scientific apparatus allowing scientists to detect and measure subjects’ mental states. In our view, scientists do not justify their hypotheses by using private, subjective data. Instead, they use publicly available measurement outcomes, obtained by using subjects’ introspective capacities as measuring instruments.‪