I do think that an understanding of contemporary work in the cognitive sciences has a profound effect on how one views the workings of the mind. It doesn't work the way we pretheoretically think it does. Such an understanding, of course, should have a large effect on one's views in philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology.

No one worries terribly much about who the questions belong to, or whether a given contribution is really philosophy or, instead, properly nothing but science. Perhaps another way to put this is that, although I think that knowledge is a natural kind, I don't think that philosophy is.

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.

For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work

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.

Ethologists thus have an interest in looking at these capacities for the reliable acquisition of belief, and it is not surprising that they have a name for the true beliefs which are the typical product of these reliable capacities. They call them items of knowledge. So I argue that talk of knowledge may thereby be seen to be embedded within a successful empirical theory.

I believe, that empirically informed approaches to the question have issued in more illuminating answers than the old armchair approaches. But I think that it would be a terrible mistake to give up on addressing normative questions in epistemology.