Defining Justification and Naturalizing Epistemology

Abstract

The radical form of naturalized epistemology asserts that only legitimately answerable questions are those answerable by appeal to methods of natural sciences. This form has been dubbed the replacement because it seeks to supplant traditional epistemological view that some questions are legitimately answerable but not by appeal to methods of natural sciences. Various philosophers at different times have argued for replacement thesis, but perhaps none more visibly than Quine in his wellknown paper Epistemology Naturalized.' If replacement thesis is true, then of course traditional epistemology is dead. Although by no means only argument, one of more compelling arguments for replacement thesis (but one Quine does not explicitly offer) asserts that it is impossible to define successfully concept of epistemic justification, and since traditional epistemology must succeed in such a venture (because it must succeed in adjudicating between mutually exclusive definitions of justification), such a semantic limitation would spell doom for traditional epistemologist. It is, of course, quite possible, for traditional epistemology to fail without it forcing us to accept replacement thesis. We might, for example, go sceptical in grand style and argue by implication that we cannot under any circumstances (whether in or outside of science) non-arbitrarily determine whether anybody is justified in his or her belief that p. But asserting as much as a justified belief has awful ring of incoherence to it, whereas simply accepting current canons of justification in natural science because of general utility of such beliefs seems only logically viable alternative. Thus impossibility of defining justification, along with need to avoid incoherence of a global scepticism, strongly tips scales in direction of replacement thesis. In fact, failure of traditional epistemology and impossibility of accepting an incoherent