 Because inner sense accounts construe introspection as a causal process, they are particularly well-suited to reliabilist (or, more broadly, epistemically externalist) approaches to self-knowledge. For example, Armstrong characterizes the introspective process as “a mere flow of information or beliefs” (Armstrong 1993: 326). The causal connections involved in self-monitoring need not be known by the subject in order to deliver self-knowledge, and inner sense accounts generally regard knowledge based in introspection as non-inferential. Inner sense is a first-personal method because the relevant scanners or monitoring mechanisms are directed only towards one’s own states. Strikingly, however, this asymmetry of access is merely contingent. It is possible, in principle, for one’s “inner sense” mechanism to be linked to someone else’s mental states, thereby allowing for “direct [read: non-inferential] awareness of the mental states of others”, through a kind of telepathic scanning (Armstrong 1993: 124).