1 Are empirical arguments acceptable in philosophical analyses of the mind?

Is it appropriate for philosophy to borrow from science theoretical concepts or to invoke experimental evidence in order to do its explanatory work? One central argument for a positive answer is that rational explanation in general has a holistic character. Such holism applies both to the inferential procedures taken to be valid and to the beliefs taken to be true. Discussions of the notion of reflective equilibrium have developed during the last decades these two central themes. 1) The principle of reflective equilibrium as described by Nelson Goodman (Goodman, 1965) shows that the process through which our forms of inference are justified is virtuously circular: particular deductive inferences are justified by valid general rules that are themselves justified by the fact that they allow valid inferences. 2) What holds for inference can be generalized to the whole explanatory process. John Rawls (1974) offered a wider picture of reflective equilibrium, including not only the inferential part of the justificatory process, but the substantial part as well: our inferences constrain and are constrained by all the semantic, epistemological, metaphysical and psychological knowledge available. What holds for justification in general seems to hold a fortiori fo