No Access for the Externalist: Discussion of Heil's ‘Privileged Access’

Abstract

In the opening paragraph of his provocative essay 'Privileged Access' (Mind, I988, pp. 238-51) John Heil maintains that any theory of intentionality that failed to 'square' with the fact that there is an asymmetry of access to mental states from the first and third person point of view 'must be regarded with suspicion' (p. 238). He exemplifies this asymmetry by means of two wonderfully illuminating cases (discussed below). While he holds this asymmetry, he emphatically disavows some key traditional properties of epistemically privileged access, namely, that such access is infallible and incorrigible. Nevertheless, an important prima facie feature of this asymmetry is that sometimes the content of a thought is known noninferentially by the subject. On this last point, as well as with Heil's departure from the tradition, I am in complete agreement with him. On externalist theories, the content of a subject's mental state is determined by some state of affairs outside of that mental state, in virtue of occurrences in the environment of the subject. Given that it is so determined, a question arises as to whether we could ever have privileged access to the content of any of our thoughts, since we certainly do not have privileged access to external states of affairs (pp. 244-5). Heil acknowledges there is a sceptical problem with selfawareness for the externalist;2 a sceptical problem that goes even deeper than traditional scepticism, for it questions'. .. the presumption that we think what we think we think' (p. 245). Nevertheless, he holds that, despite various sceptical reasons to think the contrary, we can '... accept a relational or externalist