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.
[1] This implies one has access to, and direct self-knowledge of, their own thoughts in such a way that others do not.
Descartes is the paradigmatic proponent of such kind of view (even though "privileged access" is an anachronic label for his thesis): While we thus reject all of which we can entertain the smallest doubt, and even imagine that it is false, we easily indeed suppose that there is neither God, nor sky, nor bodies, and that we ourselves even have neither hands nor feet, nor, finally, a body; but we cannot in the same way suppose that we are not while we doubt of the truth of these things; for there is a repugnance in conceiving that what thinks does not exist at the very time when it thinks.
That is, for him we would retain self-knowledge even in those extreme situations in which we can not have knowledge about anything else.
Gilbert Ryle, on the other hand, maintains a diametrically opposed view.