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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.