If one's interest is not in some global question about the possibility of knowledge, but about some particular mechanism or inferential tendency, this fact about our evolutionary origin is of no use at all in addressing questions about reliability.
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.
If we want to make sense of the possibility of successful inductive inference, and if we want to explain the possibility of laws of nature, we will need to appeal to something like natural kinds. This is, to be sure, a metaphysical commitment, but it is a metaphysical commitment that is implicit in science, as I see it.
My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.
I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
The kinds of claims I make about knowledge are thus meant to be illustrative of a general argumentative strategy which might well bear fruit in areas of philosophy which I have not thus far explored.
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.
It's not just that there is a cooperative spirit of investigation there, where we all recognise that we are engaged in a common project of inquiry. It's also that the philosophers are well-versed in the relevant empirical data, and the scientists are well-versed in the more abstract issues which are typically the central focus of philosophical work.
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.
There has certainly been a great deal of work addressing the relationship between naturalism and the first-person perspective. Quite a number of philosophers have suggested that there are features of the first-person perspective that naturalism just cannot accommodate, whether it be qualitative character, or consciousness, or simply the ability we have to think of ourselves in a distinctively first-person manner.
In my view, philosophers have shown a great deal more respect for the first-person point of view than it deserves. There's a lot of empirical work on the various psychological mechanisms by way of which the first-person point of view is produced, and, when we understand this, I believe, we can stop romanticising and mythologising the first-person perspective.
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.
The fact that these scientific theories have a fine track record of successful prediction and explanation speaks for itself. (Which is not to say that I don't directly discuss the work of those philosophers who would disagree.) But even if we grant this, many will argue that scientific knowledge in humans, and, indeed, reflective knowledge in general, is quite different in kind from the knowledge we see in other animals.
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.
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.
I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds.
Chemists in earlier centuries were quite interested in the nature of acids. They had no interest in analysing their concept of acid. After all, they knew that their understanding of acids was at a fairly primitive level, and what they wanted to do was understand something about the world better - the nature of acidity - not something about their own concepts.
One of the goals of scientific theorising is to develop concepts which are adequate to the phenomena under study. In my view, things should work the same way in epistemology. We want to know what knowledge actually amounts to, not what our folk concept of knowledge is, since, just as with our pretheoretical concept of acidity, it might contain all sorts of misunderstandings and leave out all manner of important things.
I think that when I first suggested the idea that knowledge should be viewed as a natural kind, many people thought this was just crazy.
I was often asked how one could even make sense of this. Isn't the category of knowledge something that we project upon the world, rather than something that we discover in it?
