I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.

17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.

There is a worry that many have expressed that, on the naturalistic way of approaching philosophical questions, philosophy will somehow be co-opted by science. I'm not much worried about this.

My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.

The fact that we have been able to develop a successful science, which issues in ever more accurate predictions and broader explanations, is the real ground for confidence that we are in a position to gain knowledge of the world around us. At the same time, one might ask how it is that the cognitive equipment we have came about, and here, no doubt, our evolutionary origins are relevant.

I think that when I first suggested the idea that knowledge should be viewed as a natural kind, many people thought this was just crazy.

In my view, philosophers have shown a great deal more respect for the first-person point of view than it deserves. There's a lot of empirical work on the various psychological mechanisms by way of which the first-person point of view is produced, and, when we understand this, I believe, we can stop romanticising and mythologising the first-person perspective.