2. “Epistemology Naturalized”
Just as very few proponents of TE endorse Descartes’ own epistemological views, very few advocates of NE endorse the position presented—or seemingly presented—in the paper that is the starting point of contemporary discussions of NE, Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” (1969b). However, because of its undeniable historical importance, and because it will serve to introduce some of the principal objections to NE, it can hardly be ignored.
Like Descartes, Quine takes epistemology to be “concerned with the foundations of science” (1969b: 69). Addressing the logical empiricist project of rational reconstruction, he says that
[t]he Cartesian quest for certainty [is] the remote motivation of epistemology, both on its conceptual side and its doctrinal side. (1969b: 74)
About the epistemological project, so understood, Quine’s chief observation is hardly news: the Cartesian quest is “a lost cause” (ibid.). Whether in the form Descartes himself practiced, or in any subsequent form up to and including the logical empiricists’, work on both the conceptual and the doctrinal side is bound to fail: no strict translation of the notion of “body” in sensory terms is possible, and “the inferential steps between sensory evidence and scientific doctrine must fall short of certainty” (1969b: 74–75).
What is new in “Epistemology Naturalized” is what Quine recommends in the face of this result:
Why all this creative reconstruction, all this make-believe? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? (1969b: 75)
If all we hope for is a reconstruction that links science to experience in explicit ways short of translation, then it would seem more sensible to settle for psychology. Better to discover how science is in fact developed and learned than to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect. (1969b: 78)
Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. 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….But a conspicuous difference between old epistemology and the epistemological enterprise in this new psychological setting is that we can now make free use of empirical psychology. (1969b: 82–83)
Even if it would offend strong anti-psychologists, it is not the suggestion that epistemologists make “free use” of empirical psychology that is so radical; it is the suggestion that psychology can and should replace epistemology. (As we’ll see in Section 3.2 below, in later writings Quine cites other sciences as being relevant to epistemology naturalized as well. But that does not affect the present discussion.) In terms of the features of TE laid out above (Section 1.1), Quine appears here to be rejecting (a)–(c) altogether: epistemology—“or something like it”—is recast as wholly a posteriori, descriptive, and anything but autonomous. As to (d), the traditional concern with finding an adequate response to the skeptic, Quine, in later writings, responds with the claim that “skeptical doubts are scientific doubts” (1975: 68):
Scepticism is an offshoot of science. The basis for scepticism is the awareness of illusion, the discovery that we must not always believe our eyes.…But in what sense are they illusions? In the sense that they seem to be material objects which they in fact are not. Illusions are illusions only relative to prior acceptance of genuine bodies with which to contrast them….The positing of bodies is already rudimentary physical science; and it is only after that stage that the sceptic’s invidious distinctions make sense.…Rudimentary physical science, that is, common sense about bodies, is thus needed as a springboard for scepticism…. (1975: 67)
But if skepticism itself is born of science, we can appeal to science in answering its doubts. For instance, we can look to natural selection, and find “some encouragement in Darwin” in quelling doubts about the reliability of induction:
creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die out before reproducing more of their kind. (1969c: 126)
(For similar ideas, see Kornblith 1994a and Dretske 1989. For a discussion of “evolutionary epistemology”, a specific avenue of study that treats both aspects of human cognition and theory change in science in terms of selectional processes, see Bradie and Harms 2015.)
In thus deflating the skeptical problem, Quine turns his back on (d), the final characteristic feature of TE. In terms of the forms of NE discussed above (Section 1.2), Quine appears to be recommending replacement naturalism and, consequently, the elimination of terms of epistemic appraisal in favor of descriptions of psychological goings-on (eliminative NE).
3. Critical Reactions to Quine
Unsurprisingly, given the radical character of the view defended, Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” has been subjected to heavy criticism.[7] In this Section, we briefly consider a number of specific objections to it that have been presented. As we will see, some of these are more easily met, at least prima facie, than others. Others, geared as they are towards Quine’s arguments and position in particular, are of less general interest. Others still raise issues facing all versions of NE—they remain front and center in current discussions of NE and its prospects.
3.1 Five objections
(1) One natural response to Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” is to see it as involving, in one or another way, a gross non sequitur. On one version, this is because Quine equates TE with Cartesian epistemology; whereas, by the time of his writing, infallibilism had largely fallen out of fashion (e.g., Kim 1988: 386–388; Van Fraassen 1995: 82). So too for the project of “rational reconstruction”, “an epistemological program”, as Kelly puts it, “that had already been abandoned by the time [Quine] wrote” (2014: 24). Instead, by 1969 TE had largely turned to the now-familiar analytic program of suggesting definitions, or criteria for the application, of epistemic terms and concepts, revising these in light of often-imaginary counter-examples, and so on (Almeder 1990: 267). (A fair snapshot of the then-state of the art would be Knowing: Essays on the Analysis of Knowledge, edited by Roth & Galis 1970.) So, whatever the merits of Quine’s attack on the sort of strong foundationalist program practiced by Descartes and the logical empiricists, they fail to motivate any rejection of TE as such.
(2) A second objection is that Quinean naturalism is viciously circular. Among the central tasks of epistemology, it’s said, is to establish that empirical knowledge is possible—that we may, for example, legitimately rely upon empirical science as a source of knowledge. However, Quine would have epistemologists make “free use” of the results of science from the start.
(3) A third, related objection is that Quine’s response to skepticism is unsatisfactory. Insofar as the challenge posed by skepticism is to establish the possibility of knowledge, making use of certain methods of belief-formation, common-sensical or otherwise, is hardly going to strike the skeptic as legitimate: “Such attempts to respond to the skeptic’s concerns involve blatant, indeed pathetic, circularity” (Fumerton 1994: 338). Granted, Quine claims that skeptical arguments inevitably trade on the fact of illusions, which would seem to make (other) appeals to common sense fair game. According to BonJour, however,
[t]he fundamental skeptical move is to challenge the adequacy of our reasons for accepting our beliefs, and such a challenge can be mounted without any appeal to illusion. (1994: 288)
And even in the case of illusions, skepticism requires only their possibility, not their reality (Stroud 1981, 1984: Ch. VI; compare Feldman 2012: Section 3).
(4) Fourth, and perhaps best known, is the objection that, in recasting epistemology as “a chapter of psychology”, Quine is stripping away any concern with epistemic normativity. (Hence, that his endorsement of replacement naturalism has eliminativism as a consequence.) The complaint here is not merely that normativity is a feature of TE (Section 1.1); it is that a concern with normative epistemic matters is essential to epistemology per se. Jaegwon Kim, the foremost author of this complaint, takes the abandonment of normativity to be what’s really distinctive about Quine’s proposal:
He is asking us to set aside the entire framework of justification-centered epistemology. That is what is new in Quine’s proposals. Quine is asking us to put in its place a purely descriptive, causal-nomological science of human cognition. (Kim 1988: 388)
Quine does, of course, speak of NE as investigating “how evidence relates to theory”, but this claim is misleading. Since “evidence” here is proxy for certain causal-nomological relations, the claim “suggests a conflation of causal and evidential relations” (Grandy 1994: 345; cf. Sellars 1956: Sec 32; Siegel 1980: 318–319; Lehrer 1990: 168–172). Evidence as it relates to justification is what concerns the epistemologist. Justification is the central epistemic notion—it makes up the difference between mere true belief and knowledge (modulo Gettier), and is the locus of specifically epistemic normativity. Thus, to jettison justification is to abandon any concern with normativity; and without such a concern, whatever we’re doing, it’s not deserving of the title “epistemology”:
…it is difficult to see how an “epistemology” that has been purged of normativity, one that lacks an appropriate normative concept of justification or evidence, can have anything to do with the concerns of traditional epistemology. And unless naturalized epistemology and classical epistemology share some of their central concerns, it’s difficult to see how one could replace the other, or be a way (a better way) of doing the other…. For epistemology to go out of the business of justification is for it to go out of business. (Kim 1988: 391)[8]
(5) A final objection that has been presented in various forms (e.g., Bealer 1992, Kaplan 1994, BonJour 1994, Siegel 1984, Brandom 1998) is that Quine’s position is self-defeating. For example, part of Quine’s argument for the idea that “the old epistemology” is doomed is his rejection of the a priori—feature (a) of TE (Section 1.1). However, as Mark Kaplan puts it, to convince of us this, and of the disreputability of “[t]he a priorism involved in the traditional sort of armchair methodological research”, “what the proponents of naturalism have offered us is a series of arguments” (1994: 359). But it seems that nothing in epistemology as Quine conceives of it affords us the resources for evaluating such arguments:
…are [naturalists’] arguments cogent? So long as the naturalists mean to be showing their audience in spoken word and in print that their doctrines are correct, this question will be an urgent one. But how are we supposed to go about trying to answer it? What are we to do—what can we do—to decide whether the naturalists’ arguments are cogent?
It is hard to see what we can do except evaluate these arguments by the light of the very sorts of epistemic intuitions which the naturalists are so eager to disparage. (Kaplan 1994: 360; cf. Almeder 1990: 266–267)
In this way, NE itself requires or presumes the legitimacy of appeals to a priori or “armchair” intuition, such appeals being a key element within what George Bealer has called “the standard justificatory procedure” in philosophy (Bealer 1992). So the position of the proponent of NE is self-defeating—“it seeks to justify naturalized epistemology in precisely the way in which, according to it, justification cannot be had” (Siegel 1984: 675).
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