Gilbert Ryle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Cartesian picture of the mind as a private inner theater inspected by privileged self-perception is part of the Official Doctrine the diagnosis was directed at. Self-knowledge is not introspective inner perception. We know our own minds the same way we know others' — through observable behavior in context, through what we say and do and how we respond.
The first-person privileged-access doctrine, on which the agent enjoys infallible knowledge of her own mental states by direct inner inspection, falls with the Official Doctrine that supplied its inner objects to be inspected. Avowals like "I am depressed" or "I want some tea" are not reports of inner states inspected by privileged self-perception.
They are voluntary nonconcealment — a kind of conduct akin to "groaning when in pain" or "frowning when puzzled," sometimes reflective and sometimes not, sometimes assessable as truth- evaluable and sometimes simply expressive.1 The agent has no special epistemic standing on her own mental states beyond what comes with being the one whose conduct it is; her self-ascriptions are subject to the same standards of assessment as third-person ascriptions, even where her authority over what she avows is, in the right circumstances, considerable.
The position is not that the agent has no authority over her own mind; it is that the authority is not the authority of inner inspection.2345
At first sight we are inclined to follow Descartes in saying that such 'avowals' express the highest level of knowledge and certainty. No other truth could be better known to me than the truth that I now have a pain or that I now feel depressed.Collected Papers Vol 1 - Critical Essays, p. 228
On the other hand, besides these differences between the different uses of 'I feel...' there are important analogies as well. If a person says that he has a tickle, we do not ask for his evidence, or require him to make quite sure. Announcing a tickle is not proclaiming the results of an THE CONCEPT OF MIND investigation.The Concept of Mind, pp. 149–150
My argument has been intended to have the predominantly negative point of exhibiting both why it is wrong, and why it is tempting, to postulate mysterious actions and reactions to correspond with certain familiar biographical episodic words.The Concept of Mind, pp. 199–200
In a sense I am the best possible authority on the question whether I have this capacity or not, in the sense that I'm calculating 'by myself and not aloud; I'm indeed in a privileged position, similar to that of the ever-present witness, as far as the calculation 'in my head' is concerned.Aspects of Mind, pp. 211–212
He heard no notes; but he 'heard' them vividly. He was non-sensuously so alive to how they would have sounded, that it was almost as if they had been sounding in his ears. It is for this concept of the quasi-sensuousness or vividness of, e.g., auditorily imagined notes that I feel sure that I failed to fix the bearings. (3) 'Cogito' The last specimen of my phenomenology that I want to mention is this.Collected Papers Vol 1 - Critical Essays, p. 227
The anti-introspectionist treatment of self-knowledge is one of the most contested positions in The Concept of Mind. The first-person privileged-access doctrine has substantial defenders (Shoemaker, Burge); the contemporary reception has moved toward neo-expressivism (Bar-On Speaking My Mind 2004), constitutivism (Wright on avowal), and constructivism (Tanney's Chapters 13-16 in Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge) as the major neo-Rylean-Wittgensteinian alternatives. Moran's Authority and Estrangement (2001) develops a related but distinct deliberative-rational account. The debate has not settled; the move away from straightforward introspectionism has been broad, but the question of what self-knowledge IS remains live.