I certainly don't pretend in this short book to have made sense of everything, but I have tried to
identify some connections among plausible answers to the most serious philosophical problems.
Questions about how to pursue knowledge and how to pursue morality require answers that are both
descriptive and normative. We want to know both how we do form beliefs and how we ought to form
beliefs, just as we want to know both how people behave and how they ought to behave. In both
epistemology and ethics, however, the descriptive and normative questions can be tied together by
considerations of past experience and coherence of different kinds of practice with different kinds of
goals, such as the most fundamental needs and interests. Such links between descriptive and
normative conclusions fit well with the naturalistic view of reality that minds are a complex, brain-
based part of an entirely physical universe.