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- Ram Neta (2008). The Nature and Reach of Privileged Access. In Anthony E. Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press.Many philosophers accept a “privileged access” thesis concerning our own present mental states and mental events. According to these philosophers, if I am in mental state (or undergoing mental event) M, then – at least in many cases – I have privileged access to the fact that I am in (or undergoing) M. For instance, if I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap, then (in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap. Similarly, if I now imagine a parade coming down Main Street, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I am now imagining a parade coming down Main Street. And again, if it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky. In each of these aforementioned cases, if circumstances are normal, then, these philosophers say, I have a distinctive kind of privileged epistemic access to facts about my own mental states or events. Of course, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to all facts about my own mental states or events. For instance, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to facts about which unconscious mental states or events I have. But I do have privileged epistemic access to many facts about my own mental states or events, and in particular to the various facts listed above.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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The purpose of this essay is to account for privileged access or, more precisely, the special kind of epistemic right that we have to some beliefs about our own mental states. My account will have the following two main virtues. First of all, it will only appeal to those conceptual elements that, arguably, we already use in order to account for perceptual knowledge. Secondly, it will constitute a naturalizing account of privileged access in that it does not posit any mysterious faculty of introspection or "inner perception" mechanism.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com hdl.handle.net link.library.adelaide.edu.au jstor.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com hdl.handle.net link.library.adelaide.edu.au jstor.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The question of whether externalism about mental content is compatible with privileged access is a question of ongoing concern within philosophy of mind. Some philosophers think that Tyler Burge's early work on what he calls "basic self-knowledge" shows that externalism and privileged access are compatible. I critically assess this claim, arguing that Burge's work does not establish the compatbility thesis.
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| | Other links: ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Externalists about mental content are supposed to face the following dilemma. Either they must give up the claim that we have privileged access to our own mental states or they must allow that we have privileged access to the world. The dilemma is posed in its most precise form through the McKinsey-Brown argument (McKinsey 1991; Brown 1995). Over the years since it was ?rst published in 1991, our understanding of the precise character of the premisses which constitute the argument has been re?ned. It is based on three claims (where A partially serves to characterise the content of some belief state for which Externalism is true and E is some proposition about the external world).
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com jstor.org analysis.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Do we have privileged access to what we’re intentionally doing? Well, that probably depends on what privileged access is. One way to think about privileged access is to try to identify a true formal principle. One thing you’ll need to do when identifying the formal principle is to specify the relevant range of propositions to which you have privileged access. These ranges are usually specified by subject matter: propositions about your own current, conscious propositional attitudes, propositions about your own sensations, or perhaps, propositions about what you’re currently, intentionally doing. In addition to specifying a range, you need to decide which way the arrow goes. Many formal principles are modeled on one of the following ...
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Reliabilism is invoked by a standard causal response to the slow switching argument for incompatibilism about mental content externalism and privileged access. Though the response in question is negative, in that it only establishes that, given such an epistemology, externalism does not rule privileged access out, the appeal to reliabilism involves an assumption about the reliability of introspection, an assumption that in turn grounds a simple argument for the positive conclusion that reliabilism itself implies privileged access. This paper offers a two-part defense of that conclusion: the reliabilist account of privileged access is defended both againstarguments in favor of the rival content inheritance strategy and against an argument turning on empirical considerations concerning the individuation of the belief-producing process of introspection.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... ism is compatible with privileged access. it is in some sense direct, or that it is non-.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... * Argument from authoritative self-knowledge ("privileged access" to one's own mental states) 1. We have a "privileged access" to our own mental states in the sense we have the authority on what mental states we are in. 2. Through introspection, we are aware of our mental states but not aware of them as physical states of any sort or as functional states. 3. Therefore, our mental states cannot be physical states.
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| | Other links: books.google.com faculty.fullerton.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Working from a naïve-realist perspective, I examine first-person knowledge of one's perceptual experience. I outline a naive-realist theory of how subjects acquire knowledge of the nature of their experiences, and I argue that naive realism is compatible with moderate, substantial forms of first-person privileged access. A more general moral of my paper is that treating “success” states like seeing as genuine mental states does not break up the dynamics that many philosophers expect from the phenomenon of knowledge of the mind.
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| | Other links: onlinelibrary.wiley.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... We often form beliefs about our own mental states. I believe that I have political beliefs of a certain kind. Perhaps you believe that you want to eat fish for lunch. Most of us have believed, at some moment or other, that we were in love. Let us call beliefs of this kind ‘self-ascriptions’ of mental states. Self- ascriptions normally enjoy a special kind of epistemic justification when the self-ascribed mental state is of a certain type, such as a belief or a desire. Our justification for self-ascriptions of those mental stases seems to be, in some way, privileged or authoritative. In the philosophical literature, this idea is often expressed by saying that we have privileged access to our own mental states, or that our self-ascriptions constitute self-knowledge. The goal of this discussion will be to account for that fact. I will concentrate on privileged access to our own desires.[ii].
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: hdl.handle.net link.library.adelaide.edu.au informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: hdl.handle.net link.library.adelaide.edu.au informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Here are some things that I know right now: that I’m feeling a bit hungry, that there’s a red cardinal on my bird feeder, that I’m sitting down, that I have a lot of grading to do today, that my daughter is mad at me, that I’ll be going for a run soon, that I’d like to go out to the movies tonight. As orthodoxy would have it, some among these represent things to which I have privileged epistemic access, namely: my present states of mind . I normally know these states directly, immediately, non-inferentially – I know them the way no one else can know them, and in a way I know nothing else. It’s the job of philosophers to tell us what the scope and source of this self-knowledge and to explain what renders it privileged.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Ram Neta, The nature and reach of privileged access
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