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.

Here, as in so many other cases, however, it turns out that a very commonsensical idea looks far less attractive when one examines some of the experimental work which is not available to us from the armchair.

If one's interest is not in some global question about the possibility of knowledge, but about some particular mechanism or inferential tendency, this fact about our evolutionary origin is of no use at all in addressing questions about reliability.

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?

Work on causal theories of knowledge - early work by Armstrong, and Dretske, and Goldman - seemed far more satisfying. As I started to see the ways in which work in the cognitive sciences could inform our understanding of central epistemological issues, my whole idea of what the philosophical enterprise is all about began to change. Quine certainly played a role here, as did Putnam's (pre-1975) work in philosophy of science, and the exciting developments that went on in that time in philosophy of mind.

In my view, since the case can be made that knowledge too is a natural kind, the role of pretheoretical intuitions is similarly diminished in epistemology.

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.