Abstract

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the 20^th century, however, this idea came under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology.¹ The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of work on