A CLARIFICATION AND DEFENSE OF QUINE'S NATURALISM

Naturalism is the dominant characteristic of Quine's philosophy. This paper presents a more comprehensive and sympathetic clarification of Quine's naturalized epistemology (NE for short), and vindicates its main positions by critically responding to the three objections to it: replacement (Quine's NE is the replacement of traditional epistemology), circularity (Quine's NE is viciously circular), and non-normativity (Quine's NE is devoid of normative dimension), and to Williamson's three charges to naturalism (mainly Quine's brand), finally concludes that the three objections and Williamson's three charges are mainly due to misreading or misinterpretation, so all of them failed, and that there are quite many illuminating, reasonable, and valuable insights in Quine's NE, which are worthy of further development.

A Critical Reflection on W.V.O. Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology, 2019

W. V. O. Quine is the prominent advocate of naturalized epistemology, collection of philosophical views that employs scientific methods, results and practices to solve epistemological problems. In this paper, I explore whether Quine's argument to replace epistemology by science is convincing. In naturalized epistemology, Quine totally rejects the normative aspect of epistemology; he focuses on the descriptive part of epistemology. Other thinkers such as Kim, Stroud, Almedir, Rorty argues that epistemology without norm is epistemology in name only. Furthermore, all philosophical questions cannot be answered by applying scientific methods, because philosophy's scope is broader than science. Thus, Quine's attempt to scientized philosophy in general and epistemology in particular is unattainable.

2018

This paper is a critical scrutiny of Quine’s naturalized epistemology in order to determine whether it is a viable epistemological theory. They dissect Quine’s naturalized epistemology with the philosophical tools of critical analysis and in the process discover that Quine’s naturalized epistemology reduces epistemology to a purely descriptive science, a mere chapter of psychology. Owing to this reduction, the paper argues that Quine’s naturalized epistemology purges epistemology of its distinctive feature as a normative science that is fundamentally concerned with the justification of human knowledge. And as a result of this, Quine’s naturalized epistemology lacks an epistemological status. In addition to this, the paper maintains that Quine’s attempt to reduce epistemology to psychology was not a successful project. This is evident in the fact that the major claim of Quine that “epistemology is a chapter in psychological” is not a psychological construct but a philosophical constr...

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2002

In this paper, I review Quine's response to the normativity charge against naturalized epistemology. On this charge, Quine's naturalized epistemology neglects the essential normativity of the traditional theory of knowledge and hence cannot count as its successor. According to Quine, normativity is retained in naturalism as ‘the technology of truth-seeking’. I first disambiguate Quine's naturalism into three programs of increasing strength and clarify the strongest program by means of the so-called Epistemic Skinner Box. Then, I investigate two ways in which the appeal to technology as normative enterprise can be made good. I argue that neither coheres with other aspects of Quine's philosophy, most notably the elimination of intentionality. Finally, I briefly consider a third reconstruction of the response, which involves an extension of the web of “belief” to practical know-how. I conclude that the normativity of Quine's (strong) naturalism cannot be found in the technology of truth-seeking.

Theoria, Beograd , 2018

In this paper we will try to show the differences between Quine's and Gibson's interpretation of the naturalized epistemology project. Namely, although Gibson points out that the genetic approach advocated by Quine is the best strategy there is to investigate the relations between evidence and theory, and that externalizing of empiricism that it requires is one of Quine's major philosophical contributions, we argue that the assumptions on which Gibson's project is based, apart from the fact that they are in conflict with some strongly held intuitions, would have to be essentially different from Quine's. In other words, contrary to Quine's position within which we have the possibility of staying on more moderate, and in our opinion, more plausible behavioristic line of approach, we will try to show that one of the consequences of Gibson's interpretation is that this possibility is ruled out in Gibson's case. On the other hand, this should enable us to draw some more radical conclusions about the nature of Quine's epistemological project.

Philosophical Issues, 1993

This essay reconsiders Davidson's critical attribution of the schemecontent distinction to Quine's naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson's complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine's epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine's central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. Davidson's critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine's view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2007

This paper offers an interpretation of Quine's naturalized epistemology through the lens of Jaegwon Kim's influential critique of the same. Kim argues that Quine forces a false choice between traditional deductivist foundationalism and naturalized epistemology, and contends that there are viable alternative epistemological projects. However it is urged that Quine would reject these alternatives by reference to the same fundamental principles (underdetermination, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism) that led him to reject traditional epistemology and propose naturalism as an alternative. Given this interpretation of Quine, it is essential that a successful critic of naturalism also critique Quine's aforementioned principles. The divide between naturalist and non-naturalist epistemology turns out to be defined by the divide between more fundamental naturalist and non-naturalist approaches to semantics.

W. V. Quine is one of the most prominent advocates of the naturalistic approach to epistemology and he argues that epistemology should be naturalized and transformed into a sub-discipline of psychology and hence a chapter in science. In his famous paper "Epistemology Naturalized," Quine starts to compare epistemology with the logical and set-theoretical studies of the foundations of mathematics.