The Elusiveness Thesis, Immunity to Error through Misidentification, and Privileged Access Chapter

Two ideas have played a prominent role in philosophical discussions of self-knowledge. The first is the idea that we enjoy introspective ways of finding out about ourselves are fundamentally different from our ways of finding out about ordinary physical objects and other psychological subjects. The second is the idea (Humes elusiveness thesis) that when we find out about our own properties through introspection we are not acquainted with any object whose properties they are. It is natural to think that these two ideas are related and, in particular, that it is (at least partly) because we do not encounter the self as an object in introspection that the knowledge of the self gained through introspection is epistemically privileged. This paper explores this idea in the context of awareness of ones own body in proprioception and in ordinary perceptual awareness.