I am certainly open to the idea that this might be used to explain other philosophical categories besides knowledge. I have some real sympathy with the work of those moral realists who have tried to give naturalistic accounts of human flourishing, and who offer accounts of right action in such terms. (I suppose this is more evidence that I really do have deep affinities with Aristotle!)

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

By putting the first-person point of view in a naturalistic perspective, I believe that we may genuinely come to understand it for the first time.

Rather, although belief may be adequate for explaining the behavior of individual animals - an animal which believes that p will behave no differently from an animal which knows that p - talk of knowledge is necessary once one begins to look at explaining the cognitive capacities of a species.

I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.

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.

I don't know whether I can say that having a career in philosophy has turned out as I imagined, since in many ways I had little idea of what such a life would be like. But philosophy is still tremendously exciting to me, and the opportunity to think, and talk, and write about these issues has been wonderful.