She first describes what she takes to be the accepted philosophical view of man as a moral agent, referring mainly to Stuart Hampshire's "Disposition and Memory" and "Thought and Action". She concludes that the contemporary paradigm of "man" in both analytic and continental philosophy (which she characterizes as Kantian and surrealistic existentialism respectively) is "behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian". The behaviourism relates to this view's "connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable", existentialism to its "elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will", and utilitarianism to its "assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts". After remarking that she objects to this characterization on empirical, philosophical and moral grounds, she goes on to examine the philosophical basis for the dominant view. She locates the source of its fundamental claim that "mental concepts must be analyzed genetically and so the inner must be thought of a parasitic upon the outer", in an argument within the British empiricist tradition about the ontological status of private sense-data. She credits Wittgenstein with having effectively put an end to the question by showing that "no sense can be attached to the idea of an 'inner object' ", but notes that he did not draw any "moral or psychological" conclusions based on this observation. Others, however, including Hampshire, Ryle, Hare, and Ayer, have illegitimately extended Wittgenstein's argument into these areas. Murdoch then introduces, as an example of moral activity that has no outward manifestation, the changing attitude of a mother (M) toward her daughter-in-law (D). M at first dislikes D, but gives no outward hint of this and "behaves beautifully" toward her. Over the course of time, however, "by giving careful and just attention" to D, M comes to see her as "not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous ... and so on". Murdoch claims that while reflecting on D in this way, M has been engaging in moral activity, but the problem is that this cannot be said within the accepted paradigm. In the second stage of the argument Murdoch rejects the underlying conception of reality that excludes everything that is not publicly observable, and proposes a different one. She argues that philosophy's attachment to observability as a criterion of reality stems from its adoption of an "uncriticized conception of science". The result is that philosophy is incapable of accounting for the living person who changes inwardly over time.