Knowledge of our Beliefs and Privileged Access

Abstract

A number of recent discussions of externalism have claimed that it undermines the traditional doctrine according to which cognizers enjoy some kind of privileged access to their own intentional states. There have been two lines of argument in support of this claim. The first, which is primarily an epistemic argument, exploits the so-called “slow switching” cases to argue that, if externalism is true, one could discover the contents of one’s thoughts only after investigating the physical and/or social environment in which one exists (Boghossian 1989). It is then concluded that externalism is not compatible with the doctrine of privileged access (call this “the incompatibility thesis”). The second line of argument, due to McKinsey, draws attention to the absurd consequence of there being a non-empirical route to knowledge of empirical facts that seems to follow from the combined theses of externalism and privileged access (McKinsey 1991).