A distinctive feature of recent philosophy of mind has been the repudiation of “Cartesianism.” With one part of this repudiation, namely the rejection of mind-body dualism, I am in complete agreement. But my concern in the present essay is with a different part of it, namely the rejection of the Cartesian conception of the minds epistemic access to itself – as a first approximation, the view that each of us has a logically “privileged access” to his or her own mental states, and that it is of the essence of mind that his should be so.

Like the repudiation of Cartesian dualism, the repudiation of the Cartesian privileged access thesis is nothing new, and stems at least as much from scientific as from philosophical considerations. An extreme version of the privileged access thesis is the “transparency thesis” – the view, apparently held by Descartes, that nothing can occur in a mind of which that mind is not conscious. It is not easy to see, now, how this ever could have been plausible. In any case, it is widely seen as having been refuted by Freud, as well as by recent psychological research of a distinctly non-Freudian character which seems to show both that a vast amount of what goes on in a person's mind is completely inaccessible to that person's introspective consciousness, and, what is equally shocking to Cartesian preconceptions, that when people do report on their own mental operations, these reports are often wrong.