Naturalized epistemology

4. The autonomy of epistemology

All naturalists reject the Cartesian view that epistemology is entirely separable from and prior to other disciplines such as the sciences. But just how much autonomy epistemology retains is controversial. The most extreme view is that of Quine, who suggests that epistemology has no autonomy at all. Once we drop the idea that ‘the epistemologist’s goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science’ we can and should, he says, ‘surrender the epistemological burden to psychology’. We are to construe epistemology as the attempt to ‘understand the link between observation and science’, and consider ourselves ‘well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand’ (Quine 1969: 75–6). Hence epistemology collapses without residue into sciences such as biology and psychology. Its work is turned over to evolutionary epistemologists such as Campbell (1974) and genetic epistemologists such as Jean Piaget who attempt to explain the development of knowledge, the former explicitly in terms of the biological theory of evolution. But exactly how the sciences will distribute the work of studying knowledge is unclear. The scientific fields that study knowledge are somewhat fledgling and are not clearly differentiated. Nor is it clear how these fields are related to the sociology or sociobiology of knowledge, fields which also can be construed as part of naturalized epistemology (see Sociology of knowledge).

Some philosophers sympathetic to the naturalizing movement reject the claim that all legitimate epistemic issues can be investigated scientifically: (1) Alvin Goldman (1986) says that while epistemology and natural science are relevant to and continuous with each other, the former is not contained entirely in the latter. For example, the philosophy of logic is a branch of epistemology, but Goldman doubts that logic can be investigated scientifically. (2) Another argument is that epistemology progresses in part by studying the basic epistemic concepts, such as ‘justification’, ‘rationality’, ‘warrant’, ‘certainty’, ‘knowledge’ and so on. Such study is the basis for claims about what constitutes knowledge, yet philosophers, not scientists, undertake it. (3) Moreover, Goldman and many others would say, one task of epistemology is to settle normative questions such as that of how we ought to arrive at our conclusions, but science is unequipped to handle normative issues. It seems limited to telling us how we do arrive at our conclusions. Accordingly, epistemology might survive as an autonomous discipline in so far as it continues to deal with deductive logic and the normative issues involved in knowledge.

Quine would reject each of these attempts to preserve an autonomous form of epistemology. To deny the first two, he would use arguments developed in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953). (For a discussion of his approach to the third, see §5 below.) (1) That even claims of logic must face the tribunal of experience is suggested by the Quine-Duhem thesis: all statements face the ‘tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body’ (Quine: 1953: 41). Hence ‘no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics’ (Quine: 1953: 43) (see Quine, W.V. §3). (2) Progress in epistemology based on the analysis of terms is made very difficult, but is not ruled out, by Quine’s holism – his claim that the meanings of particular statements and a fortiori terms overlap with the meanings of other statements, so that describing the meaning of a particular term requires describing its role in a complex of theory (see Atomism, ancient; Holism: mental and semantic). Moreover, analysis merely clarifies the epistemic concepts we have been employing. It does not rule out the possibility that we ought to employ different concepts, such as ones suggested by an empirical study of the brain’s workings.