I illustrate how some inferentialist accounts of self-knowledge are best captured with this weak notion of privileged and peculiar access. I then argue that this weak notion can give us everything we want in a theory of self-knowledge and defend it against recent arguments.

The paper is a discussion of different ways of thinking about privileged and peculiar access.
I propose a very weak version of merely contingent privilege and peculiarity, rather than anything more demanding.

You can also find a final draft version on philpapers for easier access: philpapers.org/rec/SCHCPA-61

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In this paper, I suggest this works well for groups. However, it is worth exploring for self-knowledge in general. Individuals won't have an internal group discussion, but they can still predict what attitude they most likely form in a given situation based on their general belief-forming processes.

For instance, start with a group internal deliberation process - e.g. some sort of internal group discussion that leads to forming a group belief. The idea is that this internal discussion can be used as a basis to predict what belief the group most likely has after the discussion.

I suggest that the group case gives us reason to think about inferential self-knowledge much more like a prediction. Start out with members acting within the group and infer what attitude a group with that internal behaviour most likely forms. That prediction is then used to ascribe an attitude.

Commonly, inferential accounts of self-knowledge start out with some behaviour, inner speech or mental imagery (or more) and then ask what attitude is the most likely cause for that. It works backwards and infers the cause based on the effects.

I explore how groups can know their own attitudes by inferring them from their belief-formation processes. This isn't only interesting for looking at group self-knowledge, but I think the idea is a twist on inferential accounts of self-knowledge in general.