Epistemic privilege

Epistemic privilege or privileged access is the philosophical concept that certain knowledge, such as knowledge of one's own thoughts, can be apprehended directly by a given person and not by others. This implies one has access to, and direct self-knowledge of, their own thoughts in such a way that others do not. The concept can also refer to the notion of having privileged, non-perspectival access to knowledge of things about reality or things beyond one's own mind. Epistemic privilege can be characterized in two ways:

• Positive characterization: privileged access comes through introspection.
• Negative characterization: knowledge derived from privileged access is not based upon evidences.