 The trouble then is that claims that people do have a capacity for a priori knowledge seem quite precarious. As we noted earlier  (footnote 7),  people are often unreliable at appreciating deductively valid arguments; and appreciating the standard rules even of natural deduction is for many people often a difficult intellectual achievement. Consequently, people’s general competence with logical notions may not in fact consist in any grip on valid logical rules; and so whatever rules do underlie that competence may well turn out not to be the kind of absolutely reliable guide to the world on which the above reliabilist defense of a priori analytic knowledge seems to depend. In any case, in view merely of the serious possibility that these pessimistic conclusions are true, it’s hard to see how any appeal to the analytic to establish the truth of any controversial claim in any mind-independent domain could have any special justificatory force without a sufficiently detailed, empirical psychological theory to back it up.