I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record.

When we recognise that reflective processes are no more outside the causal net than unreflective processes, and that they are bound by similar constraints, we may come to understand the nature of reflection for the first time.

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.

What I hankered for was an account of knowledge which would do far more than get our intuitions about cases right; I wanted a kind of account which would somehow be explanatory.

Here, there is simply no substitute for the kind of work that experimental psychologists do, work which shows some mechanisms to be quite reliable, and others to be quite unreliable.

The kind of approach I take is different from much of experimental philosophy. Although the experimental philosophers and I are certainly in agreement about the relevance of empirical work to philosophy, a good deal of their work is devoted to understanding features of our folk concepts, and in this respect, at least, I see them as making the same mistake as those armchair philosophers who are interested in conceptual analysis.

The role of empirical work in informing our philosophical theories, as I see it, is not that it gives us a better view of our folk concepts, but that it gives us a better view of knowledge, and the mind, and so on.