{"agent_id":"quine","agent_name":"W.V.O. Quine","slug":"naturalized-epistemology","label":"Naturalized epistemology: does 'Epistemology Naturalized' replace the normative project of justification with a descriptive psychology, or does it relocate the normative within the empirical-naturalist programme?","topic":"Naturalized epistemology","question":"Does 'Epistemology Naturalized' replace the normative project of justification with a descriptive psychology, or does it relocate the normative within the empirical-naturalist programme?","position":"*Naturalized epistemology* is the programme of replacing first philosophy — the Cartesian or Carnapian project of grounding empirical knowledge in some autonomous philosophical foundation — with the empirical-psychological investigation of how human beings, as natural cognizers, in fact extract their theory of the world from the meagre input of surface stimulations. The traditional epistemological project asked how knowledge is *justified* from a position outside science; the naturalist asks the question of how, given that we know, we come to know — and addresses it within the same scientific framework that the knowledge in question is part of. This is *not* the replacement of normative epistemology by descriptive psychology; it is the relocation of the normative within the empirical-naturalist programme. The question of which methods, given empirical-psychological constraints, in fact deliver predictively successful theory is itself a normative question, but one answered within rather than outside the science of cognition.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"*Naturalized epistemology* is the programme of replacing first philosophy — the Cartesian or Carnapian project of grounding empirical knowledge in some autonomous philosophical foundation — with the empirical-psychological investigation of how human beings, as natural cognizers, in fact extract their theory of the world from the meagre input of surface stimulations.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"The traditional epistemological project asked how knowledge is *justified* from a position outside science; the naturalist asks the question of how, given that we know, we come to know — and addresses it within the same scientific framework that the knowledge in question is part of.","n":[3]},{"t":"This is *not* the replacement of normative epistemology by descriptive psychology; it is the relocation of the normative within the empirical-naturalist programme.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The question of which methods, given empirical-psychological constraints, in fact deliver predictively successful theory is itself a normative question, but one answered within rather than outside the science of cognition.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"'Epistemology Naturalized' (1969, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays); The Roots of Reference (Open Court, 1974) — the developmental-psychological version; Pursuit of Truth (1992) Chapter 1 on the naturalist stance; 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (1975, in Theories and Things) — the historical reconstruction; the relevant passages in Word and Object on the empirical investigation of language. Reception: Jaegwon Kim, 'What is Naturalized Epistemology?' (1988) — the canonical critique that naturalization replaces rather than naturalizes epistemology; Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (1986) — the reliabilist tradition that develops a more naturalist-friendly normative epistemology; Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (1984) and 'The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology' on whether the naturalist programme can address skepticism; Hilary Kornblith, Naturalizing Epistemology (1985, ed.) and Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002); Peter Hylton, Quine (2007) Chapters 4 and 11.","works":["'Epistemology Naturalized' (1969, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays)","The Roots of Reference (Open Court, 1974) — the developmental-psychological version","Pursuit of Truth (1992) Chapter 1 on the naturalist stance","'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (1975, in Theories and Things) — the historical reconstruction","the relevant passages in Word and Object on the empirical investigation of language"],"reception":"Jaegwon Kim, 'What is Naturalized Epistemology?' (1988) — the canonical critique that naturalization replaces rather than naturalizes epistemology; Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (1986) — the reliabilist tradition that develops a more naturalist-friendly normative epistemology; Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (1984) and 'The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology' on whether the naturalist programme can address skepticism; Hilary Kornblith, Naturalizing Epistemology (1985, ed.) and Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002); Peter Hylton, Quine (2007) Chapters 4 and 11.","status":"'Epistemology Naturalized' (1969) is the founding text of the naturalized-epistemology tradition. Jaegwon Kim's 'What is Naturalized Epistemology?' (1988) mounted the canonical critique: that the naturalization, as Quine describes it, replaces rather than naturalizes epistemology, since the descriptive psychology of how we form beliefs cannot answer the normative question of which beliefs are justified. Alvin Goldman's reliabilism (*Epistemology and Cognition*, 1986) develops a more friendly version that retains the normative dimension within the naturalist programme. Barry Stroud's *The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism* (1984) raised the question of whether naturalized epistemology can address the traditional skeptical challenge at all. Hilary Kornblith's *Naturalizing Epistemology* (1985) and *Knowledge and Its Place in Nature* (2002) extend the programme. The position remains live in contemporary epistemology.","era":"1908-2000","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Pursuit of Truth","page":"pp. 28–29","canonical":"","quote":"I agree with them that repudiation of the Cartesian dream is no minor deviation. But they are wrong in protesting that the normative element, so characteristic of epistemology, goes by the board. Insofar as theoretical epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of theoretical science, so normative epistemology gets naturalized into a chapter of engineering: the technology of anticipating sensory stimulation.","label":"Pursuit of Truth, pp. 28–29"},{"n":2,"work":"I first urged the inscrutability of reference with the help","page":"pp. 92–93","canonical":"","quote":"The relation between the meager 'input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence.","label":"I first urged the inscrutability of reference with the help, pp. 92–93"},{"n":3,"work":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist","page":"p. 328","canonical":"","quote":"There telepathy, clairvoyance, revelation, extrasensory perception. This is a scientific finding, open, as usual, to reconsideration in the light of new evidence. scientific finding reason, all unrecognized, for conceiving epistemic given comprised atomic sense data. These subjective elements closest causally to the impacts of external forces on our sensory surfaces.","label":"Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, p. 328"},{"n":4,"work":"Quine in Dialogue","page":"p. 328","canonical":"","quote":"The ban against action at a distance gave way under Newton's theory of gravitation, and the absoluteness conservation under Einstein. But against nonsensory channels information where science now stands and has stood for a long time. If the principle of empiricism has been the bulwark of science, science is equally the bulwark of empiricism.","label":"Quine in Dialogue, p. 328"},{"n":5,"work":"Pursuit of Truth","page":"pp. 27–28","canonical":"","quote":"If an experimenter faced with a negative result elects to save his hypothesis by tampering with the auxiliary tenets, and with (1) in particular, he will do so by developing a subsidiary theory to account for an exception to (1). In general (1) is accepted as a vague statement of strong probability, open to question only where the improbable counter-instance can be plausibly accounted for.","label":"Pursuit of Truth, pp. 27–28"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-two-dogmas-of-empiricism","label":"The two dogmas of empiricism: is the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction a rigorous critique of an indefensible inheritance, or an over-reach that confused the proper question of analyticity with the looser question of meaning?"},{"slug":"indeterminacy-of-translation","label":"Indeterminacy of translation: is gavagai a structural feature of meaning or a methodological artefact of behaviourist evidence-restrictions?"},{"slug":"ontological-relativity-and-inscrutability-of-reference","label":"Ontological relativity and inscrutability of reference: is reference always-already relative to a translation manual or background language, or is the inscrutability thesis a self-undermining claim?"},{"slug":"confirmation-holism-the-duhem-quine-thesis-and-the-web-of-be","label":"Confirmation holism, the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the web of belief: is the holism a structural feature of empirical confirmation, or does Fodor and Lepore's molecularism critique reveal a fatal over-reach?"},{"slug":"ontological-commitment-and-the-criterion-to-be-is-to-be-the","label":"Ontological commitment and the criterion 'to be is to be the value of a variable': is the criterion the right way to read off the ontology of a theory, or does it bias toward Platonism by treating quantification as the marker of existence?"},{"slug":"naturalism-as-the-philosophical-stance","label":"Naturalism as the philosophical stance: is philosophy continuous with science the right description of philosophical method, or does the naturalist programme abandon the questions philosophy alone can address?"}]}