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.

There is a worry that many have expressed that, on the naturalistic way of approaching philosophical questions, philosophy will somehow be co-opted by science. I'm not much worried about this.

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.

It started becoming clear to me how one might have views about the nature of mind and of knowledge which are empirically informed. This way of thinking about philosophical theorizing makes sense of how philosophy might be a legitimate intellectual activity, in a way that a good deal of the armchair philosophy, I believe, cannot.

What I argue is that talk of knowledge plays an important role in theories within cognitive ethology. The idea is this. First, one sees cognitive ethologists arguing that we need to attribute propositional attitudes to some animals in order to explain the sophistication of their cognitive achievements.

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.

I am concerned about epistemic normativity, and I don't think that it is just a hangover from a priori and armchair approaches. Some ways of forming beliefs are better than others, and epistemologists of all stripes, I believe, have a legitimate interest in addressing the issue of what makes some of these ways better than others.