So much, then, for the notion – in its most powerfully worked out form of Kantian philosophy – that the power of mind to make (at least partial) sense of the world is explicable because the world is in some, admittedly difficult to grasp sense, inside the mind. What of the opposite view, currently more fashionable, at least in anglophone philosophy, that the world is intelligible and the mind makes accurate and truthful sense of the world because it is shaped, even created, by the world of which it is making sense? Instead of the “outside world” being inside the mind, the mind itself is outside in sense of being part of nature.

It is difficult to grasp this directly as a metaphysical thesis. The troubling ambiguity of the relationship between “mind-in-general” and “individual minds” which we identified in Kant's transcendental idealism remains unresolved in the naturalization of the mind and its knowledge. “Mind-in-general” in “the world as a whole” sounds dangerously like panpsychism; and if we are talking about individual minds, they seem to be located in an outside that they have not themselves constructed. The problem of how their sense-making capacity exceeds their, presumably organic, basis, returns. Even so, it is instructive to examine the form the naturalizing thesis most commonly takes in contemporary philosophy: evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is anchored in the individual experience and needs of the living organism.

The central claim is that even the kind of high-level sense-making that we are concerned with boils down to a form of awareness that shapes and guides behaviour necessary for survival. What astonished Einstein, so the claim goes, is less astonishing because it is ultimately an expression of a necessary biological function of the organism. The world must make sense to sentient creatures like ourselves otherwise we would not survive. Getting things right is a matter of life and death; and creatures that did not get things right simply would not exist. If we did not make moment-to-moment sense of what was going on around us, there would be no “us”. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with life.