One of the robustly bright spots in Professor Alvin Goldman's philosophical vision has been his determination to explain why some specific cognitive representations should and do count as knowledge, in terms of the background reliability of whatever cognitive mechanisms or procedures actually produced those representations on the occasion in question. Beyond giving us some welcome and plausible relief from Gettier-type counterexamples to the original justified-true-belief accounts of knowledge, Goldman's vision here naturally directs our theoretical attention toward the mechanisms that, in living terrestrial creatures, actually give rise to our cognitive representations, and toward the profile of epistemic virtues and vices that those mechanisms may display.

These mechanisms of representation-fixation, and the character of the various representations to which they give rise, are the focus of this essay. But my purpose goes beyond merely plumbing the neural- or implementation-level hardware that serves to execute the molar-level cognitive activities as described by Goldman. In particular, it is not my aim to provide a neural-level account of the fixation of belief, for example, or an account of the fixation of any other propositional attitude, for that matter. For what motivates me here is the growing body of evidence that the overwhelming preponderance of human knowledge has nothing whatever to do with anything remotely like the propositional attitudes.

Twenty years of research in the several neurosciences, I shall argue later, indicates that the various forms of cognitive representation that dominate, and perhaps even exhaust, human cognition are not the classical propositional attitudes at all.