  A difficulty for the argument, however, is that it turns on a narrow conception of reasoning from experience. The argument assumes that reasoning from experience must begin with clear cases of knowledge, at least regarding the things observed in experience, and then infer more general knowledge. This way of thinking about empirical reasoning has a long tradition and was dominant among empiricist philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half, thinking about reasoning in science changed dramatically. One prominent alternative view is that general hypotheses offer explanations of experience, and that we reason from experience by inferring the best explanation of our data against a background of theoretical assumptions that are subject to tests on other occasions and in other contexts. Two important differences are that we don’t begin with firm knowledge and, second, that we rely on background information to determine the best explanation. The relevance for moral knowledge is clear enough. We can begin with mere moral beliefs and feelings (rather than moral knowledge) yet reason to a conclusion implying moral knowledge if the conclusion provides the best explanation of the beliefs and feelings (Sturgeon 1985). Since the starting points are not assumed to be cases of moral knowledge, the problem of circularity does not arise in the way implied by the above argument. Whether the background information contains moral knowledge is a further issue (to be taken up in section 5), but nothing in this alternative conception of reasoning from experience necessitates that the reasoning assumes moral knowledge. Unless this alternative conception can be eliminated, the Kantian argument is at best inconclusive.