Anti-Individualism and Privileged Access

Abstract

IT has been a philosophical commonplace, at least since Descartes, to hold that each of us can know the existence and content of his own mental states in a privileged way that is available to no one else.This has at least seemed true with respect to those 'neutral' cognitive attitudes such as thought, belief, intention, and desire, whose propositional contents may be false.The crucial idea is not that one's knowledge of these states in oneself is incorrigible, for surely one can make mistakes about what one believes, intends, or desires.Rather the idea is that we can in principle find out about these states in ourselves just by thinking', without launching an empirical investigation or making any assumptions about the external physical world.I will call knowledge obtained independently of empirical investigation a priori knowledge.And I will call the principle that it is possible to have a priori knowledge of one's own neutral cognitive attitude states, the Principle of Privileged Access, or just 'privileged access' for short.Although many philosophers would insist that privileged access is undeniable, a series of recent discoveries and arguments in the philosophy of language has, I believe, convinced a perhaps equally large number of philosophers that privileged access is a complete illusion.One of the most persuasive of these arguments was proposed by Tyler Burge [1] as an application of Putnam's [9] famous Twin Earth case.Oscar, a resident of Earth, believes that water is wet.On Twin Earth, there is no water; rather there is a qualitatively similar liquid with a different chemical composition, a liquid that we may call 'twater'.Toscar, who is Oscar's identical twin and a denizen of Twin Earth, does not believe that water is wet.For Toscar has no beliefs about water at all; rather, he believes that twater is wet, that twater fills the oceans, etc.Yet Oscar and Toscar, being absolutely identical twins, would certainly seem to be internally the same.In Putnam's terminology, Oscar and 'I have elsewhere discussed at length the problems for particular forms of antiindividualism that arise from these theses' apparent incompatibility with privileged access.See McKinsey [5] and [7].