W.V.O. Quine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
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.12
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.3 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.45
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.Pursuit of Truth, pp. 28–29
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.I first urged the inscrutability of reference with the help, pp. 92–93
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.Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, p. 328
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.Quine in Dialogue, p. 328
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.Pursuit of Truth, pp. 27–28
'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.