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.

When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.

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 experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.

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.

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.