Abstract

When one knows one's own thoughts by privileged access, one knows one's thoughts a priori, that is, one can know one's thoughts even if everything one believes about the "external" world is in error. Recent work in the philosophy of mind, however, stresses the importance of relations between thoughts and the objects of those thoughts. Externalism insists that a thought's identity is partly determined by relations the thought bears to "external" objects. But a problem reveals itself. If I do have privileged access to my thoughts, then I am able to fully identify the thought I am having a priori. Yet if externalism is true, then the identity of my thought is partly determined by its relations to external objects, objects which, presumably, I could only know posteriori. If I can know a priori my own thoughts, and I know a priori that my thought is partly identified by its relation to an external object, then I am in a position to conclude that I can know a priori that that external objects exists; an absurd result. In the process of trying to eliminate the incompatibility between privileged access and externalism, I locate a hidden premise in the arguments for externalism: the Mental Predicate Assumption--that every de dicto cognitive attitude predicate identifies a specific mental state. If we reject this assumption, as I argue we must, then we can reconcile privileged access and externalism, but only at the cost of robbing externalism of its consequences for the philosophy of mind. I thereby meet the most significant modern challenge to privileged access. My solution has radical implications for philosophy of mind. It requires abandoning the most commonly accepted account of the nature of a thought, the Proposition Theory, according to which e.g., belief consists of a thinker standing in some relation to a proposition. I propose to replace it with my new theory, the Property Theory, where to have a belief is to self-ascribe a property. This, in turn, provides an elegant account of the metaphysics of privileged access