Philosophy has never settled into a stable position in cognitive science and its role is not well understood. One reason for this is that the methods philosophers use to study cognition look quite peculiar to other cognitive scientists. This paper explores the methods of philosophy, laying out some of the main kinds and looking at some examples, and makes some remarks about their value to cognitive science.

A certain indecisiveness and lack of common purpose seems to be a feature of cognitive science at the moment. W e are in this paper that it can be explained in part by cognitive science's lack of success so far in connecting its scientific, computational image (better, images) of cognition to what we experience of people in ordinary life: in society, law, literature, etc. Following Sellars (1963), we call these two ways of representing cognizers the scientific image and the manifest image. The scientific image sees persons, and also artificial cognitive systems, as vast assem?blages of postulated units of some kind. In the manifest image by contrast, persons are seen as unified centre of representation, deliberation and action, able to reach focused, unified decisions and take focused, unified actions. Since the manifest image is the murkier of the two, more of the paper is devoted to it than to the scientific image. The manifest image is richer and more diverse than might at first be thought.

Some of Kant's ideas about the mind have had a huge influence on cognitive science, in particular his view that sensory input has to be worked up using concepts or concept-like states and his conception of the mind as a system of cognitive fubnctions. We explore these influences in the first part of the paper. Other ideas of Kant's about the mind have not been assimilated into cognitive science, including important ideas about processes of synthesis, mental unity, and consciousness and self-consciousness. They are the topic of the second part of the paper.