Privileged access naturalized

Abstract

I offer an account of subjects' privileged access to their own minds. The main tenet of my account is that one may have the very same grounds for both a given belief that p and a higher-order belief about this belief, a feature which separates the believer's epistemic situation from that of observers. My account appeals only to those conceptual elements that, arguably, we already use in order to account for perceptual knowledge. It constitutes a naturalizing account in that it does not posit any mysterious faculty of introspection or 'inner perception' mechanism.