What we need to do, however, is figure out what our best available theories of the mind suggest about epistemological issues, while we recognise that we may need to change our views on these questions as new evidence comes in.

The various processes of belief acquisition which are native to a species include ones which may allow for the reliable pick-up of information, which, in turn, allows individual members of the species to successfully negotiate their environment and satisfy their various desires.

I was often asked how one could even make sense of this. Isn't the category of knowledge something that we project upon the world, rather than something that we discover in it?

When I got to college, I planned to be a math major, and, in addition to signing up for some math courses, I decided to take some philosophy. Quite by chance, I took a philosophy of science course in which the entire semester was devoted to reading Locke's Essay. I was hooked. For the next few semesters, I took nothing but philosophy and math courses, and it wasn't long before I realised that it was the philosophy that really moved me.

I argue is that philosophers have had a tendency to present a kind of mystical view of the powers of reflection. Unreflective belief acquisition is seen in mechanistic terms, but when philosophers talk about reflection, it is as if reflective processes are not bound by the kinds of limitations which inevitably arise from being embedded within the same causal structure which governs unreflective belief acquisition.

So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.

I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.