privileged access special first-person awareness of the contents of one’s own mind. Since Descartes, many philosophers have held that persons are aware of the occurrent states of their own minds in a way distinct from both their mode of awareness of physical objects and their mode of awareness of the mental states of others.
Cartesians view such apprehension as privileged in several ways. First, it is held to be immediate, both causally and epistemically. While knowledge of physical objects and their properties is acquired via spatially intermediate causes, knowledge of one’s own mental states involves no such causal chains. And while beliefs about physical properties are justified by appeal to ways objects appear in sense experience, beliefs about the properties of one’s own mental states are not justified by appeal to properties of a different sort. I justify my belief that the paper on which I write is white by pointing out that it appears white in apparently normal light. By contrast, my belief that white appears in my visual experience seems to be self-justifying.
Second, Cartesians hold that first-person apprehension of occurrent mental contents is epistemically privileged in being absolutely certain. Absolute certainty includes infallibility, incorrigibility, and indubitability. That a judgment is infallible means that it cannot be mistaken; its being believed entails its being true (even though judgments regarding occurrent mental contents are not necessary truths). That it is incorrigible means that it cannot be overridden or corrected by others or by the subject himself at a later time. That it is indubitable means that a subject can never have grounds for doubting it. Philosophers sometimes claim also that a subject is omniscient with regard to her own occurrent mental states: if a property appears within her experience, then she knows this. Subjects’ privileged access to the immediate contents of their own minds can be held to be necessary or contingent. Regarding corrigibility, for example, proponents of the stronger view hold that first-person reports of occurrent mental states could never be overridden by conflicting evidence, such as conflicting readings of brain states presumed to be correlated with the mental states in question. They point out that knowledge of such correlations would itself depend on first-person reports of mental states. If a reading of my brain indicates that I am in pain, and I sincerely claim not to be, then the law linking brain states of that type with pains must be mistaken. Proponents of the weaker view hold that, while persons are currently the best authorities as to the occurrent contents of their own minds, evidence such as conflicting readings of brain states could eventually override such authority, despite the dependence of the evidence on earlier firstperson reports. Weaker views on privileged access may also deny infallibility on more general grounds. In judging anything, including an occurrent mental state, to have a particular property P, it seems that I must remember which property P is, and memory appears to be always fallible. Even if such judgments are always fallible, however, they may be more immediately justified than other sorts of judgments. Hence there may still be privileged access, but of a weaker sort. In the twentieth century, Ryle attacked the idea of privileged access by analyzing introspection, awareness of what one is thinking or doing, in terms of behavioral dispositions, e.g. dispositions to give memory reports of one’s mental states when asked to do so. But while behaviorist or functional analyses of some states of mind may be plausible, for instance analyses of cognitive states such as beliefs, accounts in these terms of occurrent states such as sensations or images are far less plausible. A more influential attack on stronger versions of privileged access was mounted by Wilfrid Sellars. According to him, we must be trained to report non-inferentially on properties of our sense experience by first learning to respond with whole systems of concepts to public, physical objects. Before I can learn to report a red sense impression, I must learn the system of color concepts and the logical relations among them by learning to respond to colored objects. Hence, knowledge of my own mental states cannot be the firm basis from which I progress to other knowledge.
Even if this order of concept acquisition is determined necessarily, it still may be that persons’ access to their own mental states is privileged in some of the ways indicated, once the requisite concepts have been acquired. Beliefs about one’s own occurrent states of mind may still be more immediately justified than beliefs about physical properties, for example.
See also CERTAINTY, FOUNDATIONALISM , IMMEDIACY , PERCEPTIO. A.H.G.