ABSTRACT
Most classic research in metacognitive psychology deals with subjective feelings, senses, and impressions, however fleeting and inchoate (e.g., Nelson, 1992). Such sensory data are largely the same as those that inspired phenomenological idealists in philosophy and in ordinary life to posit a fundamental distinction between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds (Rosenthal, 1991). Through experiential force alone, people often view their own mental states as more directly accessible and therefore more open to metacog-
nitive investigation than the mental states of others. Taken to its philosophical extreme, this position is known as solipsism and has been critiqued extensively by, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980) in his arguments against "private language" and his grounding of psychological ascription in social and cultural practices (see Jost, 1995).
