One of the views associated with Descartes is that it is of the essence of mind that each mind has a special, privileged access to its own contents. Recently, I think, this view has been very much out of favor. Those who have rejected it have not, in general, denied that there is something that might be called a “special access” to one's own mental states. Usually they have not denied that normally a person knows of his own beliefs, desires, sensations, thoughts, etc. in a way that is utterly different from that in which one person knows of such mental states in another person. And in the case of at least some mental phenomena, in particular sensations and occurrent thoughts, it would generally be allowed that a person's access to those phenomena in himself is both more comprehensive and less subject to error than his access to the same sorts of phenomena in other persons. What is denied, when this Cartesian doctrine is rejected, is, first, that the special access a person has to his own mental states is necessarily infallible or “incorrigible,” or at least yields knowledge having a kind of certainty which empirical knowledge about other matters cannot attain, and second, that it is in any way constitutive or definitive of mental states, or of minds, or of the concepts of these, that these states intimate their existence to their possessors in a special and direct way.